Why Apple shares are dirt cheap  - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/19/why-apple-shares-are-dirt-cheap/

<comment><USER2> Answerers on Quora seem to agree that Apple is undervalued by the market based on a fundamental analysis: <http://www.quora.com/Is-Apple-AAPL-a-value-stock- now>

Seems like the point of the article is sound, though did anyone else find it muddled in the middle? Seemed like there was some circular or backwards reasoning, like that Apple's potential future growth makes its past growth likely to continue, or that Apple's cash increases the stock's value even if you ignore its cash.

My own take on investing in "growth" stocks is generally that I'm not going to bank on already-hyped companies being under-hyped, like betting that while everyone thinks Google will grow X big amount forever, it's actually even bigger amount Y! Not very contrarian. However, it's possible the market doesn't quite realize just how successful Apple is being right now.

<comment><USER3> > Seemed like there was some circular or backwards reasoning, like that > Apple's potential future growth makes its past growth likely to continue, or > that Apple's cash increases the stock's value even if you ignore its cash.

Apple's cash position projects power.

This is what fundie investors who subtract cash aren't factoring in. The ability to make strategic buying purchases which constrain supply for competitors is not easily calculated.

Here is their latest (publicly known) deal with Samsung: <http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110213-704284.html>

Now think about the "ability to make such deals" with valuations 10x that... Can Dell, HTC or RIM do this? If not, then they are at a disadvantage, as Apple could massively out-bid them on volume with key suppliers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fair disclosure?

I looked all over the page and didn't see the "full disclosure" notice that should be there regarding the author's ownership (or lack of ownership) of AAPL stock. We get that the "contributor" is touting himself as an analyst, but even in that case, it's still just opinion.

[edit]: Unless this is it? (From the very end of the article)

 _Given the recent rare opportunity to buy Apple at an extremely cheap valuation, I've been betting on some 2011 Apple leaps over the past few weeks and plan to remain long Apple for an extended period of time._ \-----

He should tell us that first.

<comment><USER5> Andy Zaky is a well known AAPL Bull and he has a track record of being far more accurate than almost every Wall Street analyst.

He generally does not hold AAPL or any stock he comments on however. See his seekingalpha bio page.

Fortune really should provides a mandatory disclosure though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's significant risk (the potential permanent departure of an iconoclastic chief executive) that is being incorporated into their stock price.

Also, analysis of the cash per share at a large technology company should generally be viewed differently than it might be at a manufacturing company or somewhere else. Tech companies are subject to violent earnings fluctuations based on changes in consumer demand. Cash stockpiles are a hedge against that eventuality in addition to an asset.

</comment><comment><USER7> One theory I've seen for tech firms building up vast cash stockpiles is that for many shareholders, dividends are not what they want. They want share price growth, because of the relative tax treatments of dividend income and capital gains.

Of course this will vary from country to country etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> AAPL will keep going up because it always goes up, like home prices! You'd be a fool not to buy shares.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe they plan to quit hating developers with violent-to-use dev tools soon! :) That would be a plus!

<comment><USER10> They're showing the love to my bank account monthly. No complaints about violent tools, either. Can you elaborate?</comment></comment>


Working from home - <AUTHOR> http://mattgemmell.com/working-from-home/ <comment><USER2> Just to note that I've been working from home for nearly 14 years now, and I have _always_ broken _almost all_ of these rules. Except the one about loving what I do. Because I do love it: if I didn't, I'd get a different job.

I don't have a set routine. I don't avoid the sofa. If I want a mid-afternoon nap, I have one. If I don't get up until noon, that's fine. I monitor my outputs, not my inputs -- which is why you'll sometimes find me working at 5am on a Sunday morning, or over a public holiday, and why you'll sometimes find me shopping or in the pub during office hours. (Not to mention the gym: I try to schedule my exercise for times when everyone with an office job is at their desk.)

Outputs. As long as the work gets done, you're good to go. And apart from that, make sure you still have a social life.

Drawbacks: it's easy to vanish down the rabbit hole: working in an office is an oft-unacknowledged social experience, and even though your co-workers may not be people who'd hang out with otherwise, human contact is important.

<comment><USER3> Just a question, are you married/have kids? I feel like that can be an important part of the schedule question. With a family, you can't work all those extra hours; or at least it would be much more difficult. These rules would help enforce a normal running of the household. Any thoughts from other at-home workers with families?

<comment><USER4> Having kids (especially small ones) makes all the difference: I can't use my wonderful home office any more because of the all noise in the house: my kids, friends of my kids visiting, dog barking at all of them and etc.

Walking around with earplugs/headphones all day is too painful and not an option, so now if I really want to get anything done I leave the house.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious, how do you mean painful? I work in an office cube farm, and it's often noisy/chatty enough that I find it hard to concentrate without headphones or something. But I find most earbuds and cheap headphones uncomfortable to wear for more than half an hour or so, so I bought a big set of over-the-ear Bluetooth headphones that are great to wear all day long. Might be worth a try if that's your problem.

<comment><USER6> There is more attention given to the sounds of your family than your work colleagues. It's a completely different kind of distraction. And it's a little bit heartbreaking every time to say to a kid that you are busy right now.

<comment><USER7> That last part. It's why I can't work at home. It's INCREDIBLY difficult for me to ignore my children when in close proximity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I slack off way more when I am in the office because I view it as killing time till I leave. I browse reddit, hacker news, techmeme, sometimes I even just pull up an eBook and read.

When I'm at home I will sit in front of my computer for less time and it will appear that I am slacking off a lot more if someone were watching me, but my time in front of the computer is way more productive because I don't have to pretend to be busy for 8 hours but rather just have to do 4 really productive hours of work.

I rarely work from home though, so I'm sure my work habits might be different if I were working from home for an extended period of time.

edit: while it may not seem like it, I feel like I need these breaks in the office to "slack". I can't stay focused for 8 hours every day, but I do have to be in the office for 8 hours straight so... that's what the company gets.

<comment><USER9> The key to this was mentioned early in the article. You have to really like your work for it to work.

<comment><USER8> Ah, yes. Key point. While I don't dislike my work now, it isn't exactly exciting either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These are all great points. However, he doesn't mention something I have dealt with after a decade of freelancing: isolation.

I was always an extrovert before I started freelancing, and enjoyed meeting people and going to events/parties. Unfortunately, after a decade of working alone from my home office, I've slowly become an introvert, and am decidedly uncomfortable in social situations. I'm attempting to change this by forcing myself to go to various meetups, but it's hard.

Working from home has been a great benefit, and has helped my wife and I raise our children in the manner we had hoped. But I've definitely paid a price for 10 years of freelancing from home, by myself.

I'd recommend scheduling frequent social events on your calendar from the very start.

<comment><USER11> A good antidote to this is to live in a neighborhood where people are nothing but a short walk away.

Obviously, this isn't feasible for everyone. But if I'm feeling isolated, I have about 10 cafes that are a 5 minute walk away, and crowded streets where I can see human faces. Really helps to relieve isolation.

<comment><USER12> Note that if you're working remotely anyway, there are many cities in the US where walkable neighborhoods with lovely cafes are nowhere near as overpriced as in NYC/coastal CA/etc.

Pittsburgh and Milwaukee are two where I've lived; Chicago is quite affordable for a major metropolis with 24/7 rail service; there are also many lovely college towns out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been working from home for 10 years now and love it. It's not for everybody, though. To add to the points from the article, here are a few things I've learned over the years:

\- Your office chair is the most important piece of equipment in your office. You're in contact with it most of the day. Buy a good one and it will last you for years. Buy a bad one and it will give you back problems for years.

\- If you can, join a CrossFit (or similar) gym. Not only will you get in great shape, they become a social outlet and because they're time boxed, you're in and out in an hour.

\- Whether you like it or not, your spouse/significant other's days off become your days off so plan accordingly.

\- Enjoy the flexibility of working from home. While you don't want to plunk down and watch TV when you should be working, you can do things like meet a plumber at your house without taking time off.

\- Build in a hard stop at the end of your day so you don't blur lines between the workday and personal time. For me, I have a rule that I never work while the kids are home and awake. My wife texts me when they're leaving daycare and that gives me about 15 minutes to save what I'm working on and shift from work mode to home mode.

We're moving from Seattle to the Tokyo suburbs next month. The time zone shift + foreign country are going to add a new layer of complexity to working from home. At least I get to bring my chair.

</comment><comment><USER14> What I never read in these things, but what is not a small aspect, is office politics.

I've only, a few months ago, realized how much time I used to spend manipulating my managers, bosses and coworkers' behavior. And how much time they used to spend manipulating mine. It's such an exhausting time consuming thing that is now gone entirely.

Every now and then I join a meeting at the office of a client and right away you feel the tugging, pulling and pushing taking place. A laugh to encourage behavior, a verbal stab to discourage it.

Such a waste.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure how often this actually gets mentioned, but a huge problem is dealing with your spouse. "Oh, you're at home? Can you run these errands for me, and also clean, vacuum, and take the leftovers to my parent's place for me?"

It's extremely difficult getting your spouse to respect the "working" part of working from home.

<comment><USER16> "It's extremely difficult getting your spouse to respect the "working" part of working from home."

No, I used to believe so, but it is actually very easy. You tell her you are working and no you can't, and you actually mean it, you have to be really convinced inside.

My advice is that you look yourself in the mirror, you are probably projecting insecurity in your body language.

You don't need to get angry, quite the contrary , you need to control the situation in a calm assertive way.

Women are like dogs, they feel insecurity(they are much better at body language than men) y and try to get advantage of it in a subconcious way, watch "Dog Whisperer" to understand what I mean. The worst thing is that they disrespect those that are easy to control.

We are animals after all, and our inner chimpanzee is controlling most of what we do, the different is that we use reason to justify what our chimpanzee wanted afterwards.

<comment><USER17>
        > Women are like dogs

Fuck off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a comfortable workspace and all I need to work. The problem from Working Home is when you are stressed and have a heavy workload, you will do more than 8 hours, you will shower at 12pm, you will lunch at 4pm, breakfast at noon, and if you can't interact with someone you can easily get depressed or more stressed out.

When I worked in an office, when the clock hit the 6pm there was nothing I can do to keep working, it was not possible, I miss that mindset despite I hate the idea to come back working in an office again.

That is my problem, working from home is great but is an awful experience when you are stressed.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been working from home for about ten years now, and I agree with the author's points. I will also note something the younger readers here might not be thinking about yet: kids and pets. If you think your XBox is a distraction, you have an education coming on the what a real distraction is.

<comment><USER20> I can't speak about kids but having a dog is a big part of what makes working from home work for me. She forces me to take regular breaks to go for a walk. Without her I would likely work for much longer stretches and get much less exercise.

<comment><USER19> Yes, well kids are a whole 'nother level, of course. I have two dogs, and while I pretty much owe my life to them and their, umm, dogged instance on long walks every night, I would probably weight them a net negative in terms of workday productivity.

<comment><USER21> Oh, come on. There's really nothing like being on a phone conference with the rest of your team and a couple of important customers and having a dog run through your office with a squeaky toy and the other dog in hot pursuit.

"Squeaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueak...."

"Uh, excuse me. No, I'm ok. I feel better now."

<comment><USER19> Or having them go into full-throttle alert mode because a leaf blew through the yard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My routine is similar, but includes taking a 35min nap everyday. I found that napping has improved my wellbeing and productivity by a factor of 2.

<comment><USER23> This has worked for me too. I take a 45 min nap everyday after lunch. It helps split the day up into two parts where I am fully refreshed for both. Some of my friends find it odd that a grown man takes a nap during the day but it works great for me.

<comment><USER22> Couldn't agree more

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to work from home. I have no problems with discipline, distractions etc.

The problem is: I don't know what to do. Making webapps in PHP, creating web design, drawing, writing - I can imagine doing these things at home.

But I am a Java developer. Who would hire a freelancer to write a server-side code?

How to start?

<comment><USER11> One way to get an idea of the landscape would be to browse Java projects on Elance and Odesk. Not necessarily hire yourself there, but just get a sense of what people are contracting for.

Then maybe contact some business that use the kind of code you make, and ask if you can chat over coffee about whether and how they use contractors.

Doing those two things will give you some idea of the landscape. I'm sure there are contractors doing what you do – there are in almost all fields.

<comment><USER25> I'm in the same boat. I currently work for a bigco and am frankly tired of it. I have no idea where to start. How do freelancers bootstrap?

<comment><USER11>
      * Save as much money as you possible can, and lower your expenses
      * Start looking for a client or two on the side
      * Think about what skills you can productize (e.g. an e-book guide to some sub speciality you're good at, in a niche who use that speciality to make money, and for which no good guide exists)

<comment><USER25> I'm interested in this second point. In your previous post you mention "Then maybe contact some business that use the kind of code you make, and ask if you can chat over coffee about whether and how they use contractors.". Sorry for being... naive about this, but I frankly don't know how this is done. Would you mind if I ask you a few more questions over email?

<comment><USER11> Sure. My email's in my profile.

The gist is that people love to talk, and will rarely turn down a sincere request to give information. As I'm doing right now.

My brother got a job this way, and build a professional network at the same time. And almost everything I started in business came from a (well-targeted) cold email or phone call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Working from home for 11 years. Never followed strict routine like this. I work when I have work to do (which is all the time) and usually stop after dinner, and I take rest when I feel tired. Often having long lunch with beer / wine and sometimes have rest after it. Sometimes working in the midnight.

I don't need predefined time for exercise - our homestead keeps me busy with physical work like gardening and woodworking all the time. We live in a hilly rural area with no car, so going to buy groceries is a good exercise as well.

All due respect to the author but routine like this scream "boring to death" for me. I can't imagine committing to such way of living unless I had no other choice. Like cstross said above, the output / result of your work is far more important. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER27> Some great tips, as someone who has dealt with the issues of at-home work.

Some nitpicks:

> _It's not possible to spend too much money on a chair and desk that prevent > repetitive strain injury._

If that photo is of the author's office, I _think_ I recognize that chair as a very inexpensive, mass market chair.

> _As I mentioned, I have an exercise bike in my office that I can use whilst > working on my MacBook Air_

Exercise is about energy output. If you can type emails while you workout, you are likely not working hard enough, and would probably be better served, efficiency-wise, by working harder for a shorter period of time.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been working from home for a few months now, and have found articles like these very valuable and adjusting to the lifestyle change (previously I was a traveling consultant living in a hotel ~5 nights a week, so it's a major change for me). Setting up an office and using that space for work and work only has been very helpful. The email/distraction stuff never really bit me, but maybe I've always been a bit distracted.

Having my spouse adjust has been a challenge. Being asked to feed the cat etc. while 12 frames deep debugging is very frustrating.

I was initially concerned about discipline, but found rather that I now end up overworking - it's deceptively easy to work 10 or 11 hours a day when at home, as you tend to micro-scrutinize the time you spend not actually typing code. If I'm at the office and I spend 15 minutes chatting with a coworker, I don't feel guilty about those 15 minutes. If I'm at home and I read Facebook for 5 minutes I probably work another half an hour. Something I need to get better on, at any rate.

I love reading these submissions though, as they have already given me enough good ideas to make working from home work for me. I'm curious to see, as more and more people start adopting this lifestyle, what other tricks and strategies will emerge. (For me, a pre-dawn winter hike and a bit of skiing at first light is worth whatever other lifestyle changes I have to make to adopt to working from home!)

</comment><comment><USER29> My personal advice, as a freelancer who worked from home for almost two years, is to use a time boxing technique such as the pomodoro technique (this is the reason why I also built [http://tomato.es](http://tomato.es) time tracker) or just find a nice coworking near your place (this is the reasong why I founded [http://memecoworking.com](http://memecoworking.com)).

<comment><USER30> I stuck to pomodoro years ago while working for myself, and found it to be incredibly effective. One caveat: it doesn't work very well for more free form aspects of projects, the creative phase, etc.

I no longer follow it, but the rhythm is somewhat ingrained, and I take regular breaks for context switching, etc. biggest difference is that I allow for longer stretches of productivity while being more conscious of passing the burnout point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a wonderful article that reflects my experience of around ~5 noncontinuous years of working from home.

I'm also finding that it helps to vary what work that you do rather than attempting to crunch out just one kind of work endlessly (spend x hours on sales, spend y hours on the project, spend z hours on marketing, spend xx hours learning new skill, spend yy on email/news/social media).

I have also tried co-working and hated it because it's like an open plan office except with strangers. Coffee shops are even worse, although they can be OK for a context switch with white noise playing on headphones. I think the best compromise is probably either a small office outbuilding on your own property or an affordable office nearby.

Another key: wake up super early in the morning every day. Becoming a morning person has made a big difference for me. Wouldn't be able to do it without eating melatonin, but it gets the job done.

</comment><comment><USER16> More than 10 years working from home.

I really enjoy it. My advice is: find someone-partner with someone else that loves to do and is good at what you hate, and vive versa.

If you find yourself procrastinating in some area of your work, you need to do this. Is usually means finding the opposite personality of you.

E.g I love creative work but hate so much constant work doing the same thing over and over. Solution: There is people out there that loves to do the same thing over and over but hates getting out of their comfort zone.

So this way I explore a new problem, I digest it, plan it with detail, then I give this to the other person to complete the job. She loves it, because something impossible becomes very easy to do once I told her all the steps.

You can't do anything alone, you need a team. Study personality types, then go hunting for help.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have great respect for Matt but I am very cautious about accepting articles like this as they are.

Main problem is what do we count as work? High quality output or do we count research phases too?

In my experience, working at home and honestly measuring productive time can surprise menu. While I can pull more than four hours of productive work (daily total), it is _very_ unusual to see more than four. Comparing with other professionals, when I could ask them (and I have asked menu), shows similar results. At least on realms I could check, four hours per day seems like magic boundary.

Is this unusual? Do others manage to pull six, eight or more quality work hours? Looking at Matt schedule it seems he should be publishing several books by now?

</comment><comment><USER33> I think the main part of what it comes down to is that people are generally their own worst boss. Which makes sense, because when we are employees who work in the same office as our boss, we have become accustomed to delegating the management of our time, priorities, etc. to them. For me, the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" has been a primary source for better self-management. While I don't currently work from home (often), I want to get to the point where I can be independent: whether that means working from home, being self- employed, or just having my employer trust me enough to let choose my own work.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been doing it for about four years now, and highly prefer it. I agree with everything that's here, I've made most of these discoveries myself. However, while I do have a dedicated office, I found it more comfortable to work in the living room because there's more light and a better view.

But yes, do act like a professional. I guess if you can actually do a full day's work in a bathrobe then good for you, but I find the daily routine provides valuable structure to the day. I also Skype with my coworkers at least once a day so if I look like hell all the time that would probably not look great.

</comment><comment><USER35> I guess many folks here work from home too. It's actually hard not having many people to talk to about your experience, but we are not social pariahs; freelancing is becoming more common.

A musical instrument is a great addition to the office, but i would go to a gym instead of exercising at home, it's a good excuse to get out of the house regularly. Ditto for walking, or getting a bike.

I wonder if there are forums where home-workers hang out to talk about their days and experiences.

</comment><comment><USER36> Excellent piece. I have been working from home roughly for the past 4 years. Have worked on my own product alongside working on client projects.

I am not very disciplined by nature. If I am able to put in 4-5 hours of concentrated code in a day, then I am extremely satisfied.

Below are some highlights of my experience.

Exercise replaces commute:

In Indian metros these days, commute to work is a curse. And people suffer from it. On an average (anecdotal) people commute 1.5 hours a day. I am really really thankful, I don't have to do that. Rather I use that time for exercise, alternating between Cardio and Strength exercises on adjacent days.

Routine:

Wake up at 7:30. Go for exercise at 8:30. Breakfast at 10/10:30. Start work by 11/11:30 AM. But once I start work (which includes communication, sysadmin work, tax etc. work and of course coding), I am at it till roughly around 6 or 7 PM.

Distractions:

Social media is a modern day curse. And people who are able to conquer it, will rule the world. I have had my weak phases. But I have mastered it to a reasonable extent.

A simple rule 'No Facebook till 5 PM' has served me very well. I may check twitter some times during the day, but unless there is some true breaking news, or I am in my weak-easy-to-get-distracted phase, I am not much affected by it. One reason could be I post less on twitter. So have less post posting anxiety of counting RTs and reactions to it :-)

And BTW the rule for FB applies to HN as well. But somehow HN is far less addictive (and not at all in that bad way) than FB. Typically my evenings are for HN. And of course, I am so thankful I have it. As it offsets the effects of not being in the know of the tech Industry, because of not going to a place to work.

Family:

I don't have a very strict rules. So my family keeps on walking in all the time. Particulatly its summer now and kids have vacations. I don't mind it, if I am doing some communication kind of work, or (ironically) if I am too deep into my code. The way, I interact with family, does not put any pressure on me, when compared to say communicating very formally. So I could be answering them, while I am in the deepest recesses inside my mind, solving a coding problem.

On the other hand, If I am frustrated, by failed efforts of not being able to concentrate hard enough then that's another matter. Then I am quite irritable, and I share that with my family as well, and ask them not to disturb me.

I am very thankful to my wife here. Who has almost mastered the art of communicating with me during work with minimal impact :-)

Advantages:

Advantages are many. Main thing is that, your time is yours. You love the freedom. And would never want to trade it with commute-to-work if possible. All the ones which the Matt's essay mentions apply, e.g. afternoon show movies, kids can walk in with their codecademy.com doubts (that's one of their summer tasks BTW :-)), easily able to attend to a need by a family person (e.g. medical need, which happened last month).

Also the main thing i.e. work, also gets done very well. And if you can focus, you will be very very productive. As I said above, I am very satisfied if I have had a day of 4-5 hours of coding.

Disadvantages:

Self doubt - Occasionally I have doubts, if I am missing on something by not _going_ to work. Especially was a bit concerned about my business communication skills suffering because of it. Written word over emails is fine. But was worried about the verbal discussions part. This was true for the initial year of working from home.

But now with the passage of time, I am more assured. I do have once in a few months face to face meeting with my co-founder. Also there are other business face to face meetings, with an approximate average of once a month.

I do socialize with people in the park, where I go for my runs. And I discovered some of them, also work in the same mode.

So if you can manage to be productive and are able to _work_ , the disadvantages are not many. Even philosophically speaking, why should the information age workers work in the same way as that of industrial age workers?

Edit: Format. HN text area input does not deal with new-lines in an intuitive way - some times you have to give two.

<comment><USER37> How is work-from-home scenario in India? Are there Indian companies that make you do interesting work and allow you to work from home? Or do you work for western companies? Or is it more like freelancing? If yes, how is freelancing working for you in India.

<comment><USER36> If I look at some of the people I know and my own experience, can say that consulting folks get a better deal, when working for Western companies. Also it works out better, from a work from home perspective. As local companies, even if pay as well, have the the mindset of asking you to work from their facilities.

But local Startups typically are more flexible, with sites like HasGeek[1] showcasing some of the more suitable jobs from a work-from-home/free lancing perspective.

Now to answer the question of interesting work. That depends of course. One tends to pick up consulting work on some overall factors like rate etc. In my case consulting work was mainly to support my product. (Thankfully now product is in a shape, that it can support itself. So past few months I've had the luxury of working on my own stuff). And so the work I do, thankfully, looks very interesting to me.

Thanks for asking.

[1] [https://hasjob.co/](https://hasjob.co/)

edit: minor

<comment><USER37> If someone were looking into freelancer/indie-developer/consulting work in India, where do you think one might find such culture in India. Where do these folks hang out online?

<comment><USER36> I have noticed some good postings on that hasgeek link I gave in the above comment.

Also I think, HN itself draws a lot of India based programmers.

At college level you also have things like topcoder.com and hackerrank.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> While working for my previous employer I always ended up working more hours when I worked from home. I just don't know why ? In office, I at least get up for lunch, coffee but when worked from home I developed habit of working while having lunch and not putting away laptop. I guess it requires a lot of discipline to work from home and manage yourself as if its actual office.

</comment><comment><USER39> Author mentions SelfControl [1], which is great, but a bit rough.

I'd recommend Focus [2] instead -- much nicer experience, and I believe it's made by a fellow HNer.

[1] [http://selfcontrolapp.com/](http://selfcontrolapp.com/) [2] [http://heyfocus.com/](http://heyfocus.com/)

<comment><USER40> I don't think it needs to be anything that complicated.

[https://github.com/taylorlapeyre/gsd](https://github.com/taylorlapeyre/gsd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I both work from home and keep (almost) the same guitar next to my desk. ^5

Distractions are everywhere, but overall more work gets done over the open- office environment I was coming from. I don't really have too much ADD during work hours anyway, I can focus in. Probably not for everyone, but definitely is for me.

</comment><comment><USER42> > I [...] find my Twitter app mysteriously appearing in front of me, having > been launched by my treacherous hands during a moment of thought

This is pure gold. I was beginning to think I had a pretty serious concentration problem, but it seems it's actually more normal. Good to know.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think commute time is another important consideration here. For me, the commute some days can be 3 hours round trip. Which means that by working from home, I can afford distractions, and being a little less disciplined, and still being overall much more productive!

</comment><comment><USER44> I've been a full time dev from home for 6 years. I leave the house and go to the gym or meet with friends for a few hours every day. If I don't, I get stir crazy.

</comment><comment><USER45> i work better after i shower. so, showering is important.

<comment><USER21> Food can substitute for sleep. A shower can substitute for sleep. But food cannot substitute for a shower.</comment></comment>


Google expected to achieve quantum supremacy in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/science/2019/07/19/google-expected-to-achieve-quantum-supremacy-in-2019-heres-what-that-means/ <comment><USER2> I used to do ion-trap based quantum computing research but I've been out of the field since 2009. It's great there's multiple large entities investing in quantum computing. Honestly I had been getting pretty skeptical on any of the approaches (ion tap, superconducting, neutral atom traps etc...) because it seemed like little progress was being made.

I wish I wish there was more here to go on. There's nothing 'new' here in the actual article I can see, except an extrapolation from a trend observed for VERY low #'s of qubits forward; seems like the shakiest kind of speculation.

Quantum simulations see like the lowest hanging fruit for useful computation out of these low-qubit systems; I look forward to seeing if they can use their system to solve some currently intractable problems!

<comment><USER3> I took some courses on quantum computing in college, and my takeaway at the time was all modern approaches to quantum computing are slower (effectively, and worse in almost every case in terms of algorithmic complexity) than their classical counterparts. Are we any closer to getting a quantum implementation of Shor's algorithm? My understanding is that none of D-wave's systems for instance are anywhere close to implementing Shor, and I treat that as my "are we there yet" test. I really enjoyed the classes, but haven't kept up with advancements in the space in really any way.

<comment><USER4> > My understanding is that none of D-wave's systems for instance are anywhere > close to implementing Shor, and I treat that as my "are we there yet" test.

Do you care about the algorithm, or the result? Currently we can factor 11-bit semiprimes fairly reliably, and our hardware is capable of running 16-bit problems. But no, it's not Shor's algorithm. It's conceptually much simpler: implement a multiplication circuit, clamp the output, anneal to find the inputs. Despite not being Shor's algorithm, we've yet to see a competitor demonstrate anything close on the factoring problem.

There's a strange thing in quantum computing happening right now. Certain people believe that there's only one kind of quantum computing, because it's got a provable speedup under yet-unobtainable assumptions. Adiabatic quantum computing, under a similarly unobtainable set of assumptions, can run the same algorithms, polynomially equivalent in time and space. But gate-model gets all the hype.

And speaking of hype, 2017 just called. [https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/google-plans- to...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/google-plans-to- demonstrate-the-supremacy-of-quantum-computing)

<comment><USER5> I mostly care about the available time for Bitcoin to switch to quantum secure cryptography. It's scary that people wouldn't accept a 10x fee increase which would be necessary for the switch.

<comment><USER6> It's already too late. Even if they switched now it wouldn't save all the coins stored in older addresses.

They need to choose between removing a large part of the coins from the blockchain or accepting that those coins will be taken by whoever has the technology first. Both options are bad for bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> It'a not that bad, it's easy to add a new digital signature to Bitcoin (the hard part is developing one that's accepted by the community). Most of the money can be consolidated to less UTXOs. The problem will still be that we have no idea when the current signatures get unsecure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading the current Science article on this topic I got the impression that 'quantum advantage' might be a more reasonable first goal. that is we are still waiting for a quantum computer which can perform better than an ordinary computer in a single __restricted setting __. Also I was a little bit shocked that even with 16 Qbit those systems already show a significant error rate (I think up to 50%)

My skepticism was confirmed by estimates in the same article of the Quantum supremacy still being decades away. So I'm a little bit confused about the current announcement but fortunately it is easily falsifiable... let's wait for 2020

</comment><comment><USER8> Let's say I'm not Google or IBM. Once the seal breaks, so speak, what type of resources will I need to get involved in quantum computing? And what are some of the possible nefarious things I might dabble in?

Is quantum computing going to replace nuclear weapons as an uncontainable force to be feared?

<comment><USER9> > what are some of the possible nefarious things I might dabble in?

My concern is breaking today's crypto so only the big kids can have it. I've no idea if this is a real worry -- lot's of smart people here could probably address that....

<comment><USER10> Being quantum-safe is mostly a matter of switching to hash functions and doubling the sizes. A total reworking but not a permanent break.

<comment><USER11> But all your old stuff will be basically public.

As someone I knew pit it: no one cares about financial stuff from two years ago. Or even last year. But all your healthcare and private data is very very interesting!

<comment><USER12> It's not that interesting though. I mean, it's not 100% worthless information, but it's not as valuable as people pretend. Especially if the legal environment continues in the direction it is going today, private data (especially medical data) becomes pretty devoid of monetary value if not legally obtained, and even becomes a liability. The threat of Big Companies spending billions on cracking your encryption for filthy lucre is pretty much an unrealistic fantasy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe I'm missing something, but it appears to me quantum supremacy cannot be proven empirically, only theoretically. Quantum supremacy means you can prove that a quantum computer performs task A faster than any classical computer _could_ do it. Not faster than a classical computer currently _does_ it. For example, Schor's algorithm can factorize in polynomial time and classical factorization takes superpolynomial time. The problem is that it's not easy at all to show classical factorization is superpolynomial, and some people actually think there's a high likelihood it's actually polynomial. So, quantum supremacy is pretty much theoretical CS in the area of lower bounds for _classical_ algorithmic problems.

</comment><comment><USER14> If that's true then why not keep it secret for a few more months until you are confident to release it outright? This is definitively going to be underwhelming.

</comment><comment><USER15> Supremacy is the word that seems awkward here. "We might have something to show by the end of the year" seems to fall a little short of supremacy.

And there is something about a double exponential rate? It still seems like we have a double exponential rate of "might show something".

Of course I do look forward to seeing the quantum computer playing chess or something.

<comment><USER16> There is such a thing as a double exponential rate:

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

If their claims are correct, using the Wikipedia example, if they are as fast as a cell phone in year one, then they should be faster than something like a million of the biggest super computer in year two.

In year three, the incremental improvement will be incomprehensibly faster.

So, they are making some pretty strong claims. Their current claims are definitely stronger than the ones that led to the AI winter.

(edit: and, if it could do physical simulation poorly in year one, by year four or five, it would be simulating an incalculable number of universes starting from the Big Bang, at much faster than real-time. I guess they could then recursively contain comparable quantum computers, which would progress even faster than the host machine?)

<comment><USER17> As shown in the graph in your link, the double exponential has a sharper "elbow" and therefore it seems to me that if you start at the same y-value, then the double exponential will lag behind the single one for a period of time, which in practice might be any length.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Somewhere out there... Skynet is gestating. What an exciting time to be alive.</comment>


Rent a White Guy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/rent-a-white-guy/8119 <comment><USER2> Heh, yeah, this is nothing new. There is more than one investment bank in London that hires professional actors to deliver presentations, then the real bankers take the stage at Q&A time. If someone says "now I'll hand you over to my colleague..." that's a dead giveaway. In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either... There are people employed full time to do just that.

We're all human, appearance matters, you can either take advantage of this or get out-competed.

<comment><USER3> _If someone says "now I'll hand you over to my colleague..." that's a dead giveaway. In other shocking news, bankers don't do their own PowerPoint slides either_

Yeah ok that just plain isn't true. I worked at Goldman Sachs in FIG investment banking, and now at McKinsey and Co in New York as a consultant. While we do have a graphics department that we can call on to help spruce things up, as well as workers in India to help with tasks such as following simple instructions to translate spreadsheets into charts, 95% of the work is done by the bankers/consultants themselves (i.e., me).

In fact, the reason I left Goldman is because as an analyst 80% of your time is spent line editing charts, checking footnotes, and making sure everything is aligned. We even used MS Word with built in macros because Power Point wasn't precise enough. When you're working 110 hrs/week, that's not fun. McKinsey is better but not much different - which is why I'm moving back to SF in 4 weeks to be an entrepreneur.

Same goes for the "I'll hand you over to my colleague" statement. Often times an Engagement Manager who is well versed in the overall project presents for continuity sake (so the audience doesn't get confused by 5 people all chiming in), and questions are directed to the analyst in charge of the section.

<comment><USER2> 1 bank out of the 700-odd in London? YMMV, clearly.

<comment><USER4> Still, his viewpoint is hands-on. What's your story?

<comment><USER2> See above. Working for a consulting firm that was involved with this kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ahh, this brings back memories.

Japan has a tradition called "sakura" -- bringing in non-essential people for the sake of keeping up appearances. I've been a sakura, quite frequently. For example, at my ex-ex-job at the technology incubator, one of our incubated companies started selling their technology abroad. They were very happy and even got local press coverage -- a photo on page one. But what can you use as a photo?

Enter the sakura! The incubator told myself and our black Australian translator to suit up, and we took a few photos of us looking like we were in Serious Discussions with the CEO and general manager of the (two-man) company. They ran in the newspaper, next to a headline similar to "Startup X In Discussion With Y Firms; Exports Expected This Year".

<comment><USER6> Isn't 'sakura' also the Japanese name for the cherry blossom tree? What's the connection?

<comment><USER5> Sakura are beautiful and wilt quickly.

(My dictionary reports that the usage is originally from the theater, where folks would be allowed to attend for free if they audibly demonstrated approval when required. That is the classic usage of sakura -- planted questions in an audience, etc -- but our little photo-op was referred to as sakura as well.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like they weren't hiring white guys because the Chinese have an 'inferiority complex', but because the Chinese economy is export driven and successful companies sell stuff to Americans and they wanted to imply to potential investors and officials that they were already working on deals with American companies.

In short, they were committing fraud, but because their lie involved fictitious American customers, they needed some white faces to pull it off.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't the investors be able to see through the smoke, though? I mean, if a phony starts getting peppered with technical questions, and he balks, shouldn't that be a giveaway?

<comment><USER9> If the "phony" peppered with tech questions was patio11, I'm sure he could handle the questions well enough. :)

<comment><USER10> In Chinese at a carpet convention? ;)

<comment><USER9> Never underestimate the power of A/B testing :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These jobs are more prevalent and easier to snag than you think. I lived in Beijing when I was 21 and after 2 months and with the Chinese proficiency of a 2 year-old, I was working directly with the president of what is now a publicly-traded (NASDAQ) company as a "consultant". Paid my rent for a year.

<comment><USER12> A Malaysian coworker of mine told me about this sort of phenomenon years ago. (Something like 2002?) He was working for Compaq in the Asia-Pacific region, and noted that his group would often send in someone with asian features someplace with a proposal, which would get rejected. They'd later send a white American to give the same presentation, and it would win.

<comment><USER13> In Providence Rhode Island, the city paper submitted dozens of résumé pairs to jobs, differing only by obviously-classed name (like William Strathmore vs Tyrone Jackson), no cover letters. The Tyrone Jackson ones got no calls back, whereas the Thomas Strathmore ones got about a 50% callback rate.

<comment><USER14> Citation needed! If this is the study you refer to, you got the general idea right, but just about every detail wrong.

[http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...](http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In Japan there is a similar phenomenon for couples about to get married; it's called "Rent a White Minister." Japanese couples who want a fancy wedding often rent a white guy to perform the ceremony. Very often, probably most of the time, said white guy isn't even an ordained minister in any Church.

<comment><USER5> Someone tried to recruit me for this at the church I used to attend in Kyoto. (Not anybody we knew -- they just walked in after Mass and came up to speak to me.)

My priest responded on my behalf with all the moneychangers-in-the-temple enthusiasm you would expect.

<comment><USER15> Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was an article in [can't remember] (something good like the NYT) recently that talked about the phenomenon of black guys being hired as security guards in Arabic countries under similar intentions. The choice wasn't for negative reasons (e.g. cheaper labor or to "scare" criminals), but because they were seen to be exotic (a good trait for the high end boutiques being guarded). I seem to recall the black guys who were interviewed were bemused by the idea but appreciated the work nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER17> In 2002 a good friend of mine moved to Shanghai after graduating from college to do an internship for a chinese carpet company.

In his first month there he'd given a speech - in English - to 500 of China's most influential carpet executives, all of whom clearly knew more about the carpet business than he did. His boss played translator.

I thought it was ridiculous, but clearly there's a worthwhile return on investment or the practice wouldn't still be happening.

</comment><comment><USER18> 2040: "Rent a Chinese Guy"

<comment><USER19> Maybe. If they're really that fake and superficial maybe it will trip them up in the long run.

Even when everything is documented, there are still gaps in communication, and trust fills them.

<comment><USER20> Ha! Read up the history of the start of Kingston memory, a little RAM manufacturer that I am pretty sure you've heard of, given its massive visibility in US retail.

Many many very successful and "respected" companies start out with a big gamble that is used to fund the creation of a legitimate business. This is a huge gamble, but the market market calls the losers of these gambles "scam artists" and the winners "captains of industry".

How many startups have given presentations about their amazing technology, using demos that mislead the potential investors about how far along the tech really is, only to turn around and use the investment money to actually pay for the real hard part?

Personally I prefer the complete lack of stress associated with just being honest: you never have to care who learns any particular details about your behavior, because there's nothing to worry about defending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good article, but it never addressed the question I had: who is this posturing for?

If this is for people external to the company -- the press, potential customers, or fake-it-till-you-make-it, then that's great. If this is for investors -- people who have put money in the company -- then that would be fraud, at least over here.

One of these can be really cool and show a lot of chutzpah. The other can be a sign that the investment-structuring process has serious flaws.

Kind of a key question.

</comment><comment><USER22> You know, if we would prefer that people not judge presentations/companies/etc. according to the race of the person they see (or anything else in the category of "outward appearances easily faked by bringing someone in"), then this sort of thing is really _good._ It _confounds_ people who do make judgments based on outward appearances; it fools them out of their money, punishes them for their prejudices and induces them to change.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this much different from the advantage that those with a British accent used to enjoy in America?

</comment><comment><USER24> They have this in America too -- it's called a CEO.

<comment><USER25> This has been down voted. But there is a grain of truth. I have worked in several american companies and often the directors were tall, white, gray hair, and good looking. In one case the director was like that and he had a guy (brasilian born japanese) who was really sharp and handled all the operations. When they moved to other positions they moved together. Clearly they were a team. One was the PR guy and the other one was the one making sure everything ran smoothly. Edit: added a coma

<comment><USER26> Doesn't that sound like a perfect pair for startup founders?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If the tradition is well-known among Chinese, what's the point anyway? (Or is it dirty secret of business people only?)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> friend of mine went to china on vacation and after a dinner with some acquaintances was asked by someone he met there to serve as an expert on an alternative energy panel at a conference.

he's the sort of person who find that amusing, so with no experience, he was a wind energy expert for a night.

</comment><comment><USER28> Do you think they just do this only for business purposes? How about rent a mourner? Very prevalent. You can be more creative but I will not go there.

</comment><comment><USER29> This presents a good opportunity. Why watch movies for the day while getting paid, when you can work on your startup instead?!

</comment><comment><USER30> I thought this was some kind of a web based service where you could hire White Guys to do jobs for you. Bummer.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm reminded of the Republican Party's recent chairman Michael Steele. One of the microscopically few black men, percentage-wise, in a party of almost entirely white people, and he suddenly becomes Chairman, and the timing happened to be just before or just after (I forget which) the election of Obama, a black man, to the Presidency. Coincidence? I think not.

<comment><USER31> Which is worse? A party with few minorities but many at the top, or a party with lots of minorities and relatively few at the top?

<comment><USER32> Where I live (in America), the party with lots of minorities is the Democratic party.

I'm pretty sure the functional head of the Democratic party is black. If something happens to him, the second and fourth people in line to replace him are women. Oh, and there's another black guy at number seven. And three asian guys in the list. And a half-Lebanese guy. And a few more women. And a couple Latinos. Huh. The Democrats seem to have a fair number of women and minorities at the top...

What country and party were you talking about?

P.S. At least one of the asian guys is a huge nerd, which is another under- represented minority, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That's another proof that China is on on the rise. I'm sure pretty soon "Rent a White Guy" practice would cease to exist, because being a Chinese businessmen would be as reputable as being an American.

<comment><USER34> How is the fact that Chinese businesses want the chinese people to think that they're american businesses a proof that china is on the rise?

All it shows, is that China thinks the west is better. A point in time of china's opinion, not even a view of a changing opinion.

<comment><USER35> It shows that China cares more about image than function. That suggests, to me, that they have more money to invest than time to vet applicants.

<comment><USER36> That's what marketing is all about, creating the image and perception. It only shows that they've learned very well from us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Congratulations, HN! In (at this point) 15 comments, you've managed to give more context, analysis, and insight than conveyed by the entire article.</comment>


Show HN: Animated Progress Bar on Favicon - <AUTHOR> https://foreseaz.github.io/react-loadcon/ <comment><USER2> This is great. I'm putting it on my todo list.

When I hit refresh in cliperado, it takes a couple minutes to refresh all screenshots. Playing a finished loading sound, is too intrusive though.

One feature request. Add an option to keep the finished loading state, until the the tab is focussed again.</comment>


Show HN: Quik – Internet Explorer as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.quik.dev <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, Joel here (creator of Quik + browserless.io). Quik came about as an attempt to stop spending time on IE support... but still support it when you have to. A vast amount of my "frustration" time as a developer was getting VM's to run IE to even test the site, let alone do the required repairs. Huge time-sink.

Anyways, happy to answer questions or talk more about it. Pretty fun/novel way of solving this problem!

</comment><comment><USER2> Huge fan of Quik. I build [https://terusama.com](https://terusama.com) using modern development practices, and hit the point where _not_ supporting internet explorer was _not_ an option. We build software for the logistics industry, so freight brokers can schedule trucks at warehouses. Some people who need access to my scheduling website, were accessing our site through ancient Citrix VM's. "Just install chrome", wasn't even in the realm of possibility. If I make concessions to manually schedule appointments for these people, it's an incredibly slippery slope of making other concessions. Our value proposition of being entirely automated and saving people time also starts to lose its value.

Quik is insane, because I don't have to do anything, and am now compatible with Internet Explorer, in a secure way. Being able to take a modern web stack, and have, "IE compatibility" as a feature, is totally attractive to old-school enterprises, when that's your target clientele.

</comment><comment><USER3> The is the simultaneously the silliest and best solution to the problem I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would've called it: Nearly headless quik

<comment><USER5> Support the Browser That Must Not Be Named

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the one hand, this looks like an amazing solution. But because there's a VM on the other side, I'm worried about pricing. If my site becomes popular, won't this become expensive?

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it like GeForce now but for webpages?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, you can definitely think of it like that

<comment><USER7> I tried browserless.io, it sends every frame as picture from the backend to the browser. I suppose quik will use the same technology?

While supporting IE without any developer work is very impressive, I think quik has some limitions: 1. requres a lot of bandwidth, a place using IE has a high chance don't have a modern internet infrastructure, thus limiting concurrent users. 2. Playing video is basically impossible because intraframe compression is just not efficient enough even on a good network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> o-__-o Hey it's looking good! I wonder how much of my idea was used in the final product :)</comment>


iPhone 5 Keynote Predictions: Mainstreaming AI? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/111121259089480098657/posts/NGvHrVZdtg1

<comment><USER2> The demo isn't a virtual assistant. Its a glorified search engine with API integration and voice recognition.

My vision of a virtual assistant is that you would be able to say: "Book dinner with Ross and David next week", and the only other interactions you have with the agent are "You're going to that Indian you and Ross like on Tuesday at 7" or "Can't be done, how about Monday the week after?", and possibly a message when you use your calendar "Trying to book David and Ross for dinner this evening" on some days the assistant has picked out. Meanwhile, Ross and David get e-mails that appear to be from you in address, tone and content, suggesting dates and places. If they have assistants too, maybe they don't see them; if they don't, then they can reply and the assistant understands them.

That's the sort of thing a PA actually does; they don't Google the flights for you, they know your diary, your preferences and your needs and they book the right damn flight. Your phone should be saying "Walk out of your office at 2pm and get into the cab that'll be waiting. At the airport, walk to check-in desk 301 and hand me over. I'll take it from there."

The predictions, especially with regard to leveraging data in Facebook sound closer, so I'm waiting eagerly.

<comment><USER3> I'm waiting for the day when young people are non-functional in real world without their virtual assistants. :)

<comment><USER4> I'm waiting for the day when I can focus on more interesting problems than reserving hotel rooms in 10 cities, going back and forth with booking agents trying to figure out when I need to be in each city, or having to micromanage the fluctuating schedules of my band just to organize a rehearsal.

I'd rather be playing music.

<comment><USER5> But what is to keep the virtual assistant from playing music in your stead?

Doesn't get tired, doesn't get drunk, doesn't ask for money...

<comment><USER6> Lots of people currently tour the world performing music that is partly algorithmic, where aspects of the performance are determined by (usually simple) AI algorithms. This is normal. The crowd doesn't know, and those that do know think it's cool.

When we get to the point where AI can make good music on its own without direction, we will have a lot bigger questions to worry about than the fate of musicians. It won't be a pressing issue.

<comment><USER7> Can you expand on this? Are you referring to something more complex than lights that flash with the beat of the music?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone upvoting this please explain what objective information they got out of this post? All I read was marketing speak in bold and caps, with no new information on why people might actually use this.

I'm obviously not doubting the potential, since I haven't seen the app yet, but this article is terribly low on substance.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote the post, so I should probably answer you. :)

Honestly, after watching the 45 minute presentation, there were a ton of interesting tid bits I transcribed word for word (that's what you see in all the quotes and the video is embedded if you prefer that).

For skimming purposes, I tried to bold the most important bits in the quotes, so it was straight from Siri's Co-Founder, CTO and VP of Design, Tom Gruber's mouth.

Honestly, skimming through the article quickly myself (it took me 3 hours total to write including watching the 45 minute keynote and transcribing the important bits) I can't see how you think it is low on substance, because there is a ton of it in there.

I'm honestly fascinated to see if Apple open's up the Assistant API to 3rd party developers as the Siri team clearly planned to pre-acquisition. In my mind it makes a lot of sense given the new "verb" world Facebook introduced, and I think developers would have a ball with it.

<comment><USER8> I don't mean to belittle anyone's achievements, but this is what I got from the bold parts of your article:

The technology came out of a government funded project on which hundreds of people worked.

It's iterations ahead of the market and so it's real AI with real use.

It will be useful to most people most of the time.

It can't understand languages other than English.

It can't answer relationship questions.

It may have an open API, in the future.

It may allow you to pay for things, in the future.

It may use social data, in the future.

I guess I'll just wait for the actual release to see why and how this is world-changing. If the product is truly world-changing, I don't think anyone can do justice to it with a blog post. Imagine if people tried to explain Google the search engine like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> My goal with this post was simply to raise interesting questions based on what the Siri team saw as the future of the product back in 2008, so it could frame all of our discussion and analysis when you watch the keynote with Apple tomorrow.

I think it will be fascinating to see what, if any, of these questions Apple has decided was worth tackling since they acquired the product, and which in the eyes of Jobs, were important and useful enough for the masses.

It's going to be a fun keynote tomorrow.

<comment><USER8> It will certainly be fascinating. I'm just amused that you're so fascinated before the questions have been answered :-)

The problem with voice recognition apps is that Google has taught us to get, literally, instant results. Waiting even a second seems way too slow now. That's a very high bar to live up to.

<comment><AUTHOR> On desktops, maybe. But on mobile devices, Google is just as slow as your connection.

Imagine if Apple built in some Amazon Silk-like ties between Assistant and iCloud? Or if they do some local caching or if Sprint really does have this exclusively and its on 4G?

<comment><USER8> If I have a slow connection, it'll be equally slow regardless of the app. So the speed comparison is on top of that.

Amazon Silk-like technology may make sense for ecommerce content (yet to be seen), but it doesn't make sense for complex search queries. The longest time is probably spent in understanding the query and ranking results, not in downloading the content of the results. For the same reason, local caching makes no sense, except for some personal data, which Google also has access to (openly or secretly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll admit straight-up that I haven't looked at any of the Siri presentations, so I don't know what is and isn't possible with it, but the simple fact of the matter is that AI like it's being pitched ("reasoning", ever-learning, fast and flexible to respond to natural language input) takes an _obscene_ amount of RAM, computing power, and persistent storage to be any good. There's not a chance that this is going to be an inherent feature of the iPhone 5 - it might be a "cloud" feature that the iPhone uses, but if it's as good as the rumormongers are making it out to be, we're talking datacenters worth of hardware, not one phone's worth.

It'll be interesting to see what's actually announced, but I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that Apple's putting a Star Trek AI on a phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Norman Winarsky, the man who put together the original Siri team, was asked what kind of power the Siri AI takes and if it could have delayed the iPhone today on 9to5mac.com, saying:

Norm: I'm not familiar with Apple's roadmap and any delays but I can say that AI takes a lot of computing power. The Siri software needs to cache data, needs to access a big dataset at wide bandwidth and needs a big processor to crunch all of the numbers. When we originally released Siri for the iPhone 3GS, we had to perform all kinds of optimizations and shortcuts to get it to work efficiently. All I can say is that it will likely run much better on a faster phone. (Source: [http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/03/co-founder-of-siri- assistant-i...](http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/03/co-founder-of-siri-assistant-is- a-world-changing-event-interview/))

There is a big jump in performance from 3GS to even iPhone 4, let alone iPhone 5 with possible A5 processor (dual core), 1GB RAM, iOS optimization, cloud performance, and network performance--and that's not even considering if the Sprint iPhone 5 exclusive is true which would mean the device runs on a 4G network that would make this type of interaction even more interesting if interacting with the cloud in some way.

<comment><USER10> I'm with you -

This could be why it would be available only on the newest, 4G-enabled iPhone. If this was all handled in the cloud and delivered at 4G speeds, it could be compelling.

<comment><AUTHOR> And you could totally see Apple pitching this to AT&T and Verizon and they're going "Crap, people already hate our data caps, and we already hate all the data iPhones use..." and then Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse comes running over to Jobs "Steve! We'd LOVE to handle that! We can do it! I swear, trust me. We have 4G! It's blazing fast...give us a shot...please?" Hands over $20.5 billion dollars...

Source: [http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/03/sprint-guarantees-to-buy- over-...](http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/03/sprint-guarantees-to-buy- over-20-billion-in-iphones-from-apple-launching-the-iphone-5-exclusively/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of pie in the sky speculation based off a three year old talk there. Especially since I am sure an Apple acquisition wasn't on the road map at the time. But my answers to his questions would be:

* Will Assistant be world-changing?*

No. But it will probably be a damn good feature.

 _Will it address foreign languages/cultures_

Probably, since Nuance can do a fairly impressive number of languages and all signs is Apple is partnering with them.

 _relationship questions_

No. God no.

 _open task API_

Maybe, but I would be a little surprised.

 _payments_

Now we are just throwing buzz words together. Want to know why the "speech to text world" is "untapped"? Cause it is made up. Plus it would essentially be either a search ad or affiliate marketing situation, neither of which seem very Apple-like.

 _Facebook social knowledge_

Again, doubtful. I mean, they've gone out of their way to integrate Twitter in iOS 5, which reeks of Facebook and Apple not coming to terms. But maybe they banged out a last minute deal.

I am sure Assistant be like most Apple features. Fairly impressive, a bit more detail oriented than the competition, but ultimately not that much better. If anything, I think it will be the new Facetime. Good demo, good for ads, some people will use it a bunch, but mostly a showy feature that will get used once and then ignored by the vast majority of users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the analysis on my analysis. :)

I can definitely see why you'd think this could go the way of Facetime, but its completely different. Why? Because while Facetime seemed to solve a problem we all wanted solved, in reality its simply not practical to video call someone with a mobile phone a lot of the time. If I'm on the go, walking a city or driving in the suburbs, Facetime is a terrible idea.

Assistant is exactly the opposite. It's almost essential in those situations and extremely practical. I can pretty much see Oprah endorsing this feature alone in her anti-texting-while-driving campaign now.

And YOU get an iPhone Assistant, and YOU get an iPhone Assistant...

<comment><USER9> The voice recognition on my Android phone is marvelously useful while driving; I hold my search button, say "navigate to Schlotzsky's", and it pops up a map, finds the nearest Schlotzsky's, plots directions to it, and I'm off. No hunt- and-pecking on a keyboard without tactile feedback, no navigating through twelve menus or trying to remember how to spell "Schlotzsky's". It's an awesome feature, and it's something that the iPhone needs to at least match.

What's Apple going to do beyond that, though? They can't build a keynote on "Hey, now we have this feature that our competitor has". It has to be something bigger and better. Android exposes speech input backed by Google's unfathomable processing power and recognition dataset to every application that wants to use it; what can Apple put on a phone that will be significant enough to not be a "me too"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wouldn't be so sure about state-of-the-art natural lang processing & speech recognition systems being good enough, for Apple (given their track record) to pitch a complete virtual assistant as a software service (VAAS?).

The ideal AI assistant would be entangled with copious amounts of machine learning algorithms. And it'd have to be plugged into my email, sms's, phone convos, facebook, twitter etc. The AI would have to evolve not just from my experiences, but the collective experiences of the ecosystem (privacy alert!).

There's way too many dangling variables here -- privacy implications, govt. regulation, software error (30%+ for state of the art natural language processing) etc.

Yet, I've gotta say I'm stupidly giddy about today's keynote.

</comment><comment><USER13> > So its an architecture thats end-to-end that handles natural language > modeling all the way through the service flows in a declarative way.

Can anyone elaborate on this?

</comment><comment><USER14> What I find hard to understand is that Google who has been working on the voice recognition for ages and has actual products out there and enormous data, still struggles with quality in this area. How can everyone put so much trust on Siri that it would change the paradigm when it's hardly tested in the market.

In my opinion it all stems from the trust on Apple. Apple has the reputation that they don't ship half-products and with the rumours going strong that Siri would be part of iPhone 5, everybody is simply jumping on the bandwagon and _assuming_ that Apple has solved the voice recognition problem.

As much as awesome Apple is, I still find it hard to believe that they have figured out voice-recognition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually Siri is based off arguably more time, research and possibly funding than Google may have thrown at this particular problem.

As I quoted from 9to5mac in my post:

"In 2003, the US Government began the most ambitious Artificial Intelligence program in its history called the "Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes" or CALO program. The name was inspired by the Latin word "calonis", which means "soldier's servant". Funded by DARPA as part of its Personal Assistant that Learns project, the program ran for five years and brought together more than 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions, with the goal of "building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.

The program was coordinated through SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. As the program ended in 2007, SRI took the knowledge gained by the CALO and some of its key players and formed Siri."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Siri has been out on the iPhone for at least a year and while impressive, I don't believe qualifies as game-changing (it couldn't, for example, tell me what the average velocity of an unladen swallow was). I'm wondering if there've been any breakthrough(s) after they were acquired?

<comment><AUTHOR> The talk is that they have deeply integrated Wolfram Alpha to automatically pull and handle queries like the one you mentioned.

Source: [http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/30/mockups_demons...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/30/mockups_demonstrate_apples_anticipated_iphone_5_assistant_feature.html)

<comment><USER10> I knew Wolfram would be involved with handling these queries - especially when that demo had the "How many calories are in a banana?" line !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 2\. Will Assistant handle the "Should I dump my boyfriend or girlfriend" > question?

Well, if your boyfriend/girlfriend also has an iphone, this service might well be privy to some information that would be relevant to this question...

</comment><comment><USER17> There's a demo of Siri in the linked Vimeo presentation that starts around 8:00. It's pretty impressive

<http://vimeo.com/5424527>

</comment><comment><USER18> Get yourself a real human assistant from this startup: <http://zirtual.com/> (founded by "maren" here on HN)

</comment><comment><USER19> I just can't see how this would be anything other than very annoying to use. It would have to work flawlessly to not be.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel like you could have made the same statement about the CRAZY idea of a touchscreen smart phone back in 2007...and then Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone and everyone went...well I guess that does work flawlessly.

Not trying to sound like a fanboy, but simply saying I think Apple's recent track record has proven they're pretty good at releasing products that work flawlessly.

Heck, this could have been the simple reason Siri (now Assistant) was acquired way back in 2008 and is only now coming to light in an iPhone. Jobs may have simply held it back to meet your expectations of him.

<comment><USER19> Straw Man argument, fanboy.

I thought that Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> iPhone 5 Keynote Predictions: Unicorns and Ponies. Scoop 100%!

</comment><comment><USER21> Typing on tiny keyboards is so early 21st century.

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, I guess this didn't happen.

<comment><USER22> Never mind, I guess I just missed in the Engadget stream. Shame on me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like Dr. Smile</comment>


Tell HN: Why I'm ecstatic at Apple's subscription model. - <AUTHOR>

The AppStore is not an easy-money kind of environment. It rewards hard work and quality, and consequently we've been able to do relatively well there. But as it has evolved it has become clear that low app prices are a permanent fixture.
So, for the past several months I've been working on moving our bread and butter app from a "Pay us $4 and use it forever" to a SaaS model.  We'll make the app free, and give people 3-4 months of cloud service to go with the app. (This cloud service is a genuine value add for the app, so we're shifting models by adding a fundamental new feature. Anyone who doesn't want it will have the functionality they have now.)
Then for the ones that like our App and stick with it-- and we get about %20 retention with some really fanatical users now-- the cloud service is eventually a $1 a month subscription.
So, instead of making $3 per customer, we'll be making $8.40 per year for customers we retain.
Further, as a free app we'll get at least an order of magnitude more customers, which means if the retention rate drops by half we'll have 5 times as many long term users as we're getting now. Many people don't try our app because we're forced to collect the entire lifetime customer revenue before they even get a chance to use the app.
This is a much better model for apps where it makes sense.
Why are so many people complaining?  Generally, it seems those who are complaining are not making their own product.  I can understand how reselling something another person has made means tough margins.  (Which makes me wonder how these book publishers are doing on Amazon where they take %70 in many cases, and only go down to %30 if they get to set the price.)
I looked at the Amazon Android Store terms the other day.  They are similarly bad.  The wording is vague but it looks like Amazon will pay you between %20 and %70, and they get to set the price. Which means if Amazon wants to do a $1 sale on your app to promote their store, tough for you.
But I also think the publisher model is on the way out- and I say good riddance!  These are essentially middle-men and they don't make sense in the age of digital distribution, in most cases.
I used to work in the game industry for a studio with a deal with the largest independent games publisher in the country.  If I make an iOS game, I don't need to find a publisher, I don't need to appease the publisher producer, or any of that crap.  I've been down that road. The game industry is broken because of the power that publishers have. (Or it was broken when I left.)
I am very happy that all I have to do is just upload my product to Apple and they take care of the rest.  Apple takes %30, but handles distribution, updates, customer service, taking credit cards, does a decent cross sell and will send me good marketing if I happen to get featured.   That's worth %30 to me.
This is a new model for iOS apps, and it is great news for iOS developers. <comment><USER2> I agree with you 100% that allowing recurring subscriptions is great news for iOS developers developing applications with certain usage profiles.

The people who are complaining are people with low margin businesses, for whom giving up 30% of a sale will put them at a loss on every sale. EBook sales, music sales/subscriptions, and video streaming don't operate on huge margins like Saas does, they operate on tiny margins. Apple is also prohibiting people from raising the price of their products to account for the tax, so for anyone whose margins are less then 30%, the app store will basically be closed in a month or two.

In short, app store subscriptions are great for your business - good for you! Use it and get rich. The terms are lousy for other businesses, who are going to have to pull their apps from the app store.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Why are so many people complaining? Generally, it seems those who are complaining are not making their own product. I can understand how reselling something another person has made means tough margins."

Look at Mog. They are making a quality product and also providing aggregation of others' products. Having a subscription to each musician's content would be pointless. It's the search, the ability to make a playlist of music from all sorts of areas that makes the product worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER4> what is your app ?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry, it's not clear to me why you're "ecstatic".

Are you thinking that your SaaS strategy won't work without the Apple tax?

Second, a lot of people have pointed out that taking 30% of _ALL_ subscription revenue just sounds unconscionable. Computers/Internet were supposed to reduce friction in commerce, not add a 30% tax.

It seems to me that you're OK leaving a huge amount of your fruit of your labour on the table. I hope there aren't too many people like you. Many won't be "ecstatic" at this offer.

And for the record, I think Amazon terms are just as bad, if not worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no mechanism currently on the AppStore for doing a SaaS strategy for Apps. In app purchase is set up for one time purchases, not for recurring subscriptions. This is a brand new feature, and it dovetails right in with the SaaS business model.

Apple doesn't take %30 of "ALL subscription revenue" though people seem to keep saying this because it plays into the "apple is taxing us arbitrarily" meme.

IF I wanted to, I could set up a webpage with paypal, and charge people directly, and save %30, minus paypals fees. However, paypal has proven itself to not be a trustworthy company in the past so there's an additional cost there, but that involves a lot of setting up servers, dealing with customers, etc. There really is a lot of effort required to sell things directly to the customer, there are liability issues, and if I were to outsource all that work I'd be buying several services that ultimately would take around the same total cut.... and I'd be more stressed on top of that.

All that stress and time is energy that would be better spent on additional features or products. In fact, it would produce much higher returns because it is more highly leveraged. The effort that requires on the current app is just maintaining the status quo (I think there are zero customers who would rather pay by paypal than iTunes).

I find it interesting that you say I'm leaving "a huge amount of the fruit of [my] labor on the table", as Apple is freeing up a huge amount of time and energy to improve the app or do new products.

Look at the alternatives- I could give the app away free on android and let google advertise on it. How much would I be giving up in "google tax?" %60. And they only revealed that it was %60 _after_ Apple made it public that they give developers %70. Who knows what it has been for the past decade before google had to be public about it. Plus, I _know_ how many copies of my app are sold, I don't know how many clicks google disallows. Sure there are competing models, or I could do paypal with an android app (this would at least have the advantage of selling into all the countries paypal supports but not google checkout.) but again, that is time I have better use for.

OR Amazon which will make me give up price control and possibly %80 of my revenue. These terms are not "just as bad" they are far far worse.

And finally, before this, I was paying %30 on the initial sale in the Appstore. Nobody seemed to be complaining when Apple originally introduced that model-- and for good reason-- before that Carriers controlled app sales on phones and were much worse than publishers, taking %90 in many cases.

Apple has greatly reduced the friction, and has added a new feature that lets me offer a better, more profitable model while simultaneously capturing many more customers.

It's a no brainer.

<comment><USER4> "ot of effort required to sell things directly to the customer"

I think its a misconception that having an app on the app store is automatic success. The difference is that if you app doesn't go viral (or apple never puts your product in a curated list) on the app store, then what other channels do you have. Selling things directly for a lot of apps also has to be done as well or figuring out different marketing strategies and to me this is no different than selling directly to the customer.</comment></comment></comment>


In this sports betting company, the winners are called 'problem customers' - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/bet365-whistleblower-says-winners-given-delays/11768486 <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem any different to what most businesses do. If a particular customer is losing you money, why would you continue to do business with them?

The only difference here is, it's algorithmic.

And really, given the reputation of many bookmakers - not a surprise at all.</comment>


Microsoft responds to IE mouse tracking vulnerability - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/12/13/update-to-alleged-information-and-security-issue-with-mouse-position-behavior.aspx

<comment><USER2> _Getting all the pieces to line up in order to take advantage of this behavior – serving an ad to a site that asks for a logon, the user using an on screen (or virtual) keyboard, knowing how that onscreen keyboard works – is hard to imagine._

ORLY? The imagination of a Microsoft engineer quite clearly is no equal to the imagination of a creative exploiter. After all, nobody could imagine the Morris Worm, or Word Macro viruses, or even SQL Slammer.

Attacks come through exploitable vectors. Lining up those exploitable vectors may _seem_ tricky, but that hasn't stopped this from happening. And frankly, this particular attack vector seems to be one of the more exploitable ones.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree at all.

It's an x, y position, what possible use is it? Two integers.

MS are right about this, this is just spider.io being alarmist for free publicity.

<comment><USER4> So you're saying if you were given a mouse movement trace on top of a virtual keyboard, you couldn't possibly deduce what was typed?

Someone should just make a program that does that, and this will all be settled. Maybe even make it guess what kind of virtual keyboard was used.

<comment><USER5> A better question is what degree of danger this information actually poses. It is _possible_ to reverse a password hash created by bcrypt regardless of what settings you used. The question is HOW LONG would it take, and whether the cost makes the value of any potential exploit less than zero. If the value is less than zero, the risk is effectively minimal - at least for now.

Panic and tarring and feathering of Microsoft's security team is only justified if the risk is severe.

<comment><USER6> A security issue is a security issue, regardless of how severe it is.

If MS had come out and said "We're working on fixing it, but we don't think it's a critical vulnerability" - that would be understandable. What needs to be called out is if they come and say "This isn't an issue at all".

If some website was leaking password hashes, would "well the hashes are so strong that this isn't really an issue" be an acceptable response?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing to see here; move along...

Interesting wording of the message. Microsoft tries to lead the attention from the real problem to an analytics company that can't stand the heat of competition.

We learn something new every day.

</comment><comment><USER8> Those pesky spokespeople. Microsoft should fire them all, they're damaging the already damaged Microsoft image. Just take a look at this statement:

"There are similar capabilities available in other browsers. Analytics firms can expect to do viewpoint detection in IE similarly to how they do this in other browsers."

Aren't they just throwing their hands up in defense and telling us "We're not the only ones! Everyone else is doing it too!" That's slimy.

<comment><USER9> > damaged Microsoft image

I think you are stuck in the past. Microsoft has _dramatically_ improved the security of their system. I've been using Windows as my primary OS since 3.11 days, and I hated Microsoft guts for cutting corners and shipping crap. Not anymore. They really pulled their act together in last couple of years. From Windows Updates, to mitigation tools like EMET, to _much_ improved MSDN documentation - I really can't be believe that I'm saying this - they did a great job. So please if you feel like bashing M$, there's a dedicated website for that... it's called Slashdot :)

<comment><USER10> > dramatically improved the security of their system

yes they did, but their perceived _image_ is still badly damaged

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To highlight the ridiculousness of this vulnerability: you don't even need to use `fireEvent("onmousemove")` to gain access to this information. You can use events that have _absolutely nothing to do with the mouse_ , such as onbounce* on a hidden <marquee> element (seriously).

* "Fires when the behavior property of the marquee object is set to "alternate" and the contents of the marquee reach one side of the window." -- [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms536910(v=vs.85)...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms536910\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

</comment><comment><USER12> Whoever Gillian is, she just rocked my world with that comment.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why the hell they issue statements instead of patches? Is it hard to fix? If yes, let us know. If no, just fix it.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft cannot issue patches instantly. They have to go through testing.

<comment><USER13> The issue was reported in October.

"Whilst the Microsoft Security Research Center has acknowledged the vulnerability in Internet Explorer, they have also stated that there are no immediate plans to patch this vulnerability in existing versions of the browser."

[http://spider.io/blog/2012/12/internet-explorer-data- leakage...](http://spider.io/blog/2012/12/internet-explorer-data-leakage/)

So, instead of fixing it:

\- receive vulnerability report

\- don't fix it and wait until there's PR disaster

\- issue statement that now "we're working actively to fix it"

\- [future] fix the issue

My question, again -- why the hell they didn't fix it in the first place? Why go though this? Do you have to be a psychic to figure out that any Microsoft's non-response to vulnerability (even if its effect is overblown) is a PR disaster?

<comment><USER5> If Microsoft does not consider it to be a critical vulnerability, their behavior is entirely consistent with the issue being a task on a task list somewhere - possibly already fixed on the development branch for the next release (or service pack) of Internet Explorer 10. It is simply not possible to declare at this point that Microsoft decided not to fix it. Internet Explorer is a tremendously large piece of software used by millions of customers; do you think this is the only bug with potential security consequences in their bug database?

More concretely: If, hypothetically, on October 1 2012, two security issues were reported, and this is one of them, which one do you think they should have fixed first and rushed an out-of-band patch for? Do you think it should have been this one specifically because it's a PR disaster?

I agree that faster action is always better, and that better communication is always better. But you have to understand that teams working on products this large do not move quickly. In the time since this issue was reported to Microsoft, we have only passed through roughly one release cycle of Firefox and Chrome. So, assuming an identical issue was found and reported in Firefox or Chrome on the same date, would the fix even be in customers' hands? Most likely only if it were considered important enough to rush a fix.

<comment><USER13> Your reply makes a lot of sense, much more sense than the linked post. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Heh, happy to note that "There are similar capabilities available in other browsers" - but then nicely ignores the fact that the crux of this issue is mouse position can be read even when mouse is out of browser window focus.

<comment><USER5> It has yet to be conclusively proven that this information presents a real risk to anyone's privacy. It would certainly be nice to fix (and you can observe from the post that MS is not opposed to fixing it) but it is hardly a crisis.

<comment><USER2> I'm hoping it won't be conclusively proven, because by definition the proof will be an exploit in the wild.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find Microsoft's explanation of the facts to be quite logical. How many users are actually going to interact with an onscreen keyboard using the mouse cursor? It's already been stated that the supposed exploit doesn't affect the touch keyboard on Win8.

<comment><USER2> As has been pointed out, at least one bank has a mouse controlled pin keyboard.

<comment><USER5> Are you seriously suggesting that given nothing other than a small window into mouse position and modifier keys (the latter would be useless for a mouse controlled pin keyboard), an attacker would be able to not only identify when the user clicks, but when they're visiting the bank and the alignment of the pin keyboard? And then somehow leverage this information by itself to attack someone without having any of their other personal information?

It is certainly information that COULD be useful as part of an attack, but it seems utterly ridiculous that just mouse information would somehow enable you to compromise the security of someone's bank account.

Private information should certainly remain private, and I don't doubt that this leakage will be fixed one way or another, but this really seems more like paranoia than anything else unless there's at least a concrete description of how the data provided is enough to actually inflict harm. Lots of potentially useful data is exposed by browsers (and browser plugins) every day; this isn't the only bit.

<comment><USER15> As previously stated.

This could be used to potentially track entropy of encryption key generation(such as trucrypt or, the new MEGA sites implementation, any site or program that employs mouse-movement/key binding for entropy.)

Mega Screenshot: [http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/...](http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/12/A9h3qnnCQAEhJUc.jpg)

Security Thread on Bank Login virtual keyboard: [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/22774/my-bank- ma...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/22774/my-bank-makes-me- enter-my-password-using-the-mouse-whats-up-with-that)

Just something an idiot can think of so, any black-hat is just having fun @ this point.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for a more concrete justification. I think I agree that the two links you provided are examples of use cases that could actually be exploited just using the position of the mouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have the feeling Windows 8 will become a better attack target than Windows 7 was, because of all the new (and exploitable) stuff Microsoft introduced through the Metro stuff and through the Windows store, that are still very much untested.

</comment><comment><USER17> 'Redmond is (still) evil' it seems :-)</comment>


How foreigners Register USA company and USA local business account - <AUTHOR> I'm a Chinese businessman, mainly exporting raw materials from China to overseas market. Is it possible for me to register a US company and open business account in US. I will manage the company in China. Does anyone know this? Thank you very much. <comment><USER2> Yes you can own a US company and manage it from China.

Creating a company is easy. But there are two problems to solve that are not so easy.

— Banking. You can open a bank account for your US company even if you are a nonresident, but you will need to go to the bank in person.

— Tax. You will want to understand how your US company's profits will be taxed in the US and make this as efficient as possible. This requires talking to someone with some skill and experience: someone who knows cross-border tax rules.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your help. A chinese register agent contacted me, informing they can register US company for me and open East West Bank.To open the account, I should go to their china branches and do necessary, and they can make USA account.Frankly, i don't know if they can manage the account 100% successfully, as i had bad experience in opening offshore account for my island company in mainland China. A very bad condition is China policy changes from time to time, making businessman insane... That's why I want to make a US company with US account.

<comment><USER2> East West is a good bank for you. Another bank is cathaybank.com — also good for people in your position.

Email me. My address is in my user information here on HN. A Mandarin-speaking lawyer works for me. He may be able to help you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes - many ways to do this without even visiting the USA.

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/032615...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/032615/starting-your-own-us-business-foreigner.asp)

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm checking it, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stripe Atlas does this. Geared towards internet businesses but still could be useful - [https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas)</comment>