Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop the Snooper's Charter - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org//deeplinks/2015/01/britons-you-have-72-hours-stop-snoopers-charter <comment><USER2> Strong guarantees of privacy are essential to enable political dissent. Without it, opinions opposed to the prevailing majority view point are not only side-lined, but the very expression of an interest in them becomes a cause for controversy and social rebuke.

Without privacy individuals are unable to explore, consider and evaluate diverging ideals, and eventually reach new personal convictions which may in time turn the tide against the status quo. Instead, the fermentation of ideas is cut short, as most people are unable to stand the push-back inflicted on them by society at an early stage in their thought-process, leading to self- censorship and group-think.

Society incurs much more damage from so many angles, ranging from murders to car accidents to diseases, that it does not need to jump in such abject terror at the thought of political violence - still a comparatively rare occurence in most places on this earth - so as to trample on the very foundation of every democracy:

Which is the freedom of the individual in his own thoughts, to form his own personal opinions unimpeded by institutionalised social pressure.

The mass-scale erosion of privacy must be stopped before it is too late to reverse the trend.

<comment><USER3> _Without it, opinions opposed to the prevailing majority view point are not only side-lined, but the very expression of an interest in them becomes a cause for controversy and social rebuke._

I think in many ways we're already there, but it's society as a whole causing this rather than government(s) specifically.

Heaven forbid you have an opinion on (for example) gay marriage if that opinion is anything BUT full throated support. Look at what happened to Brendan Eich.

We definitely need to resist government oversight, but the problem is much bigger than that IMHO.

<comment><USER4> While you should be allowed to express whatever viewpoint you have regarding gay marriage, I have yet to see an argument against which is not rooted in bigotry.

Is your argument that people should be allowed to spew bigoted and hateful nonsense without facing any social repercussion whatsoever?

<comment><USER5> Many (non-religious) gay people don't like gay marriage. I agree with the previous comment that the level of social pressure on the issue has reached ridiculous levels.

You can't have a conversation about it without one of those awful social disclaimers "now I support gay marriage but..." tacked on to your opinion.

<comment><USER6> I don't like any form of marriage, gay or otherwise, but I like discrimination even less. There should be a heavy social cost associated with wearing certain opinions on one's sleeve... and there is, as Brendan Eich discovered.

In short, this is exactly what social behavior is _for_ : moving civilization forward as a whole. If people like Eich insist on being left behind, they have that right, but they don't have the right to drag the rest of us down with them.

<comment><USER5> In most parts of the world there would be a heavy social cost to supporting gay marriage.

The costs of cracking down on undesirable opinions greatly exceed the risks of allowing people to voice them.

Not that it makes much of a difference. People will continue to be closed- minded, whether I like it or not.

<comment><USER6> Who said you weren't "allowed to voice" your opinion? Only the government (or terrorists) can stop you.

That's very different from social pressure. You have a right to speak, and to not be physically restrained from doing so, but you don't have a right to be free of any social consequences that follow. You're free to talk your way into a job, or out of one.

<comment><USER7> Right. You are free to have your opinions. But if you offend the wrong person, you will most likely get fired from your job, shunned completely from your community, or bullied online.

It's not even about the truth anymore. Even mainstream news organizations spin and lie about what actually happened, with real-world consequences (and no consequences for the news orgs or the reporters). Every news outlet spread lies about the Ferguson incident, before we even had any credible witnesses or facts. When the facts finally came out, they continued to spread the same lies (and many continued to believe them).

In the past couple of years, there have been dozens of reporters that have gotten fired for an obvious mistake that was deemed 'offensive' by the likes of political activist groups and used as fuel to fire them. It's just another form of bullying.

Many people don't even know that Al Sharpton will threaten companies and demand money or work in exchange for not going after them publicly. Pepsi paid him thousands per year in the 90s and XM radio actually gave him his own show for a couple of years to get him to stop talking about the "homeless charlie" incident that happened a few years back. A quick Google search will show you many companies that essentially pay him hush money. It tells me that when he cries racism, it's not about bettering society, but lining his pockets. It seems this is public knowledge now. Why isn't he in jail?

I don't really use Facebook besides some simple private messaging between friends. Why? I can predict the coming storm that many people don't seem to see. Anything online can and will be used to instantly form an opinion about you and your life style. Not having the right "culture fit" might just mean someone in management doesn't agree with your political opinions.

The ex-Mozilla CEO is another good example of the problem with today's society. He donated a small amount of money to a cause he believed in and was bullied and ridiculed online until he quit.

If it had been the reverse (he supported gay-marriage and was bullied until he quit) many of those same people would be crying out about how we need to stop online bullying and probably demand the government step in. If I were the Mozilla CEO, I would have set an example and found the people that worked for the company that spewed the most hate against me and fired them on the spot.

As I've gotten older, I have found that most people are the same: they preach open and honesty..until it's for a cause that they disagree with. Then, they just want to silence and discredit the opposition.

Few are for actual freedom, which is sad.

<comment><USER8> > As I've gotten older, I have found that most people are the same: they > preach open and honesty..until it's for a cause that they disagree with. > Then, they just want to silence and discredit the opposition.

This is depressingly true. Tolerance of only the ideas that the group agrees with, otherwise it's [insert something dumb here] and it needs to be stopped!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well I am drunk, so my ex Deputy PM gets the alcohol version of constituency letters

Attn: Lord Prescott House of Lords

Saturday 24 January 2015

Paul R Brian 18 Regent Way Kings Hill Kent ME19 4EB

email@example.com 07540456115

Dear Lord Prescott,

On Monday you have the opportunity to oppose a bill forcing ISPs to hold excessive amounts of private information in the hope some will be useful in the fight against crime and political crime.

This information may indeed be useful, but allowing only police and intelligence services to access it steps down the wrong path.

Please consider opposing this bill until sufficient steps can be put in place to allow full and unfettered access to everyone's data - by everyone.

A kingdom of the blind policed by the sighted is not free. A kingdom where all have eyes is equal, and can strive towards free.

Yours sincerely,

Paul R Brian

<comment><USER10> Assume I live in a rather secure hole underground, by myself. There are very few things I can do, short of connecting to the outside world and interacting with _something_ in an illegal manner, that can constitute a crime. Maybe I build something that can harm someone remotely, but that requires intent to do something to interact with the outside world, so I'm discounting that here. I'm talking about doing something in my own hole, by myself, with no intent of leaving or interacting with anyone else.

Should the data that constitutes my actions be available to 'everyone'? I argue it does not. It's not your data. It's my data.

Now if I decide to leave my hole and go out into the world and interact with others, things get more complicated. If there is an opportunity where my information becomes entangled with others, I'm all for sharing it with everyone, with one caveat. I'd like to know who accessed my data, and if they accessed it simultaneously with other people's data, I'd like to know their data as well. I'm down with charging for it as well. Keeps the costs of doing surveillance on everyone high.

BTW, I'm well aware of the dilemma you are attempting to put your Lord into here. I just don't think it's that easy to dispel.

<comment><USER9> I'm up for charging for personal data, for making entangled data available and many other options - what I don't see is a binary choice between "we need access to everyone's data to catch the bad guys" and "liberty means anonymity"

Neither seem correct in our new world, and one of the many problems with this salvo in the "2nd crypto war" is it assumes the fight is on those grounds.

I think that means I am agreeing with you.

Do you get cable in your hole? It sounds like a nice place to retreat to :-)

<comment><USER10> If you consider personal data as unknown to everyone and public data known, it sorta ends up looking like randomness and order, with the opportunity for chaos to exist in between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to Lord Bassam, Monday is the committee stage and they won't be voting...

[https://twitter.com/SteveTheQuip/status/558951743913226240](https://twitter.com/SteveTheQuip/status/558951743913226240)

<comment><USER12> It does mean they can take the amendments back out.

Parliament previously rejected this after debate, so it's simply improper for it to be added to something else in the Lords. This "riders" trick is _highly_ frowned upon here as an abuse of protocol.

If it's ever to be raised again like the highly controversial zombie legislation it is, it needs to be raised in the next session of the Commons, after the next General Election (e.g. Cameron probably would, along with his "let's ban encryption" muppetry). And the Lib Dems will _probably_ oppose it again, as would the Greens and Pirate Party, should they hold any sway.

Even the Information Commissioner has strongly warned against the consequences of knee-jerk reactions in surveillance/privacy-impacting legislation like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't use twitter, its easily dismissed. Use [https://www.writetothem.com/](https://www.writetothem.com/) its far more effective to express reasoned though in a message >140 chars.

</comment><comment><USER14> And all of the MySociety sites appear to be down! For "maintenance". Coincidence? Conspiracy? How do I talk to my (elected or otherwise) representatives now?

(Yes, it was planned: [https://twitter.com/mysociety/status/558591332374310913](https://twitter.com/mysociety/status/558591332374310913))

<comment><USER15> You can tweet them.

[https://act.eff.org/action/tell-britain-s-lords-don-t-let- th...](https://act.eff.org/action/tell-britain-s-lords-don-t-let-the-snooper- s-charter-sneak-past-you)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did Lord Prescott, who used to be deputy prime minister and was a union activist, get behind this?

<comment><USER17> Lord Prescott did nothing as deputy PM to prevent New Labour from introducing authoritan legislation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So why the eff does not employ a person that talks to a camera and makes a video over this?

Most people don't read(0). So your message is not heard.

(0)No judging about it, just stating a fact.

<comment><USER19> Outrageous claim(0)

(0)This is a fact

<comment><USER20> _Outrageous claim(0)_

Outrageous it may be, but is it true?

<comment><USER21> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this in any way clash with EU law?

<comment><USER23> The ECJ ruled the Data Retention Directive unlawful recently. However even if this is an article 8 violation that may take a while to have an effect (see the prisoner votes fiasco)

<comment><USER24> The prisoner votes situation is completely different - that's nothing to do with EU law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There is sadly a much bigger problem when people can not stop widely unpopular legislation from coming to fruition.

Representative democracy is not always democracy... even with an election looming.

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems, in some countries, people are just waiting for the next terrorist act to bring out new ways to undermine the principles of democracy.

Without privacy and the possibility to express one self without fear, democracy is not possible. We create monstrous systems that become bigger and bigger and destroy democracy from within.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not my post, but a comment that potentially explains what's happening here and provides an interesting viewpoint:

"I am a former parliamentary assistant with experience working on complex and controversial legislation. I do not think this is a bona fide attempt to pass the amendments.

1\. Generally, the government lays amendments it actually wants to pass in the name of the minister leading on the bill. In this instance that's Lord Bates. He's put lots of other amendments on the list[1] but not this one.

2\. In bill committees, MPs and peers often table amendments that they are not trying to pass. They do this to secure debating time, argue about the principles, and occasionally extract commitments from the government. They get the chance to make speeches and then withdraw the amendments without them ever going to a vote. I suspect the four peers who tabled this are trying to kick start a cross-bench movement in favour of stronger security laws. They'll use their chance to make speeches and then withdraw their amendment. (EDIT: They have since made clear that this is an earnest attempt to legalise the powers but as noted above, they are raising this without any co-operation with the government. Source[2].)

3\. Even if this is a genuine attempt to insert this language, it is a highly irregular way to go about it and I would bet against it surviving a vote. Peers are very aware of the role they play in making legislation and they know they aren't supposed to ram in controversial language like this. It's for the elected members in the Commons, who have the democratic mandate, to make the crucial decisions and for the Lords to focus on technical elements. This would not go down well. In the Lords, the whole House votes at Committee stage. This means hundreds of peers, who are independently minded and relatively difficult to whip, would get to express their view. I would not expect them to let this by.

4\. Even if it survived the committee, the Bill needs to go back to the Commons, in a process known as "ping pong". The new clauses would almost certainly be defeated by MPs because the Lib Dems would be whipped against it[3], depriving the government of its majority, and Labour has already said it won't support it either[4]. The numbers just aren't there. I am not close to this issue and could not tell you what they are trying to do. This is all guess work. But it really does not look like a genuine attempt by the government, and I wouldn't say it stands much of a chance."

Sources:

Post: [http://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/2te41m/lords_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/2te41m/lords_sneak_uk_internet_snooping_law_into_bill/cnyixgp)

[1] - [http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2014-20...](http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2014-2015/0075/amend/ml075-II.htm)

[2] - [http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/22/snoopers- char...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/22/snoopers-charter- changed-version-pass-before-election)

[3] - [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- politics-30870442](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30870442)

[4] - [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/11/ed-miliband- sno...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/11/ed-miliband-snoopers- charter-paris-attacks)

<comment><USER28> (I also replied to this on Reddit -- essentially, I agree that this isn't a government-sponsored amendment, but would argue that it _is_ a sincere attempt to pass the amendments, conducted in the hope that the post-Charlie Hebdo atmosphere was sufficient to wave through the Comms Data Bill. I don't think the government wanted their fingers on it, but if it had received no reaction or support, they wouldn't have fought it hard either.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The use of "Britons" sounds tone deaf to me, and hence a rather bad choice given that they presumably actually want to stop this (British, but more confused than anything).

[http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/engl...](http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/briton)

<comment><USER28> I wrote the headline; I'm British. It's always a little awkward to pick a term here, as we don't usually like to refer to ourselves at all much. "Brits" was too informal for this. UK citizens would have sounded a bit too Airstrip One. Britons has a nice newspaperly ring, but I agree with you that it is potentially a little corny, so I believe we only use it for this particular page.

I also have to deal with the trickiness that the text has to simultaneously address UK people wanting to take action, and explain the action to curious people outside of the UK.

For instance, the main action uses different language:

[https://act.eff.org/action/tell-britain-s-lords-don-t-let- th...](https://act.eff.org/action/tell-britain-s-lords-don-t-let-the-snooper- s-charter-sneak-past-you)

<comment><USER30> I'm nitpicking, I know, but "act" ought to be amended "bill" in the third paragraph. Apologies for being such a pedant.

<comment><USER28> Fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What a ridiculous clickbait headline from the EFF. The truth is buried 7 paragraphs down:

The amendments announced on Thursday will be formally included into the bill on Monday, in a committee meeting that was not planned to include a vote. The Lords will then have two more minor opportunities to debate the content of the bill before it is passed onto the elected House of Commons in its entirety for what is expected to be a simple up/down vote. Britain's members of parliament are currently distracted as they prepare for nationwide elections in May, which means it is highly likely that a major anti-terrorism bill like this will collect enough votes to pass.

<comment><USER32> Your cited "buried truth" is more alarming than the headline.

<comment><USER33> Why's that more alarming? "72 hours to stop the bill" is pretty alarming, but with the bill still in committee, there's still a a little longer for it to go yet. The third reading is scheduled in a fortnight.

<comment><USER28> Hi, Danny O'Brien from EFF, and the person who wrote the headline and the paragraph.

I'd say the headline is actually in this case more accurate, but I didn't really want to add another six paragraphs of insider politics to the blog post to explain why. Long-form HN comment readers are a different matter, of course, so here goes:

It's true there are three more readings in the Lords, but my understanding (and recollection from when I worked more on HoP issues) is that the majority of these are pretty perfunctory, especially with a bill like this which has a high government priority to get through before the end of the current Parliament. Essentially, once these amendments hitch a ride on the process, it will get steadily more difficult to unmoor them. They will cease to become amendments, and more a small part of a very important bill.

Rejecting amendments like this at any step is an unusual act, especially when they are promoted by peers with apparent strong domain knowledge. It's absolutely impossible if you don't actually have _time_ to debate the details.

So what you have to do is to alert politicians to a procedural violation instead. Few politicians are experts on Internet surveillance, so wil not feel confident to go up against domain experts; all of them are experts, however, on the exact moments they might be being bypassed or steamrollered over. That's because they're politicians and human beings, and being sensitive to possible cheating among your peers (pun not intended) is built into their psychology.

That moment of steamrollering is on Monday. If the amendments go through on the nod on Monday without a fuss, then the moment will be lost where we can argue about a violation of procedure. After that, we will have to argue about the substance of the bill. And there is no parliamentary time allotted for arguments of substance, because the whole _point_ of inserting these 18 pages of amendments so quickly is to bypass that debate.

TLDR; yes, there are other opportunities. No, we're really not confident at all that we could stop the bill at those points. The best and possibly only probable chance to stop the Snooper's Charter is on Monday.

(For those wondering how you even begin to make these calculations: EFF works with the Open Rights Group, Britain's own awesome digital rights group. ORG's advisory bench includes MPs and peers, so they walk us both through the probabilities. [https://www.openrightsgroup.org/people/advisory](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/people/advisory) )

Hope this helps.

<comment><USER31> After reading your explanation the headline seems a lot better, sorry for my ill informed remarks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Looking for a biz/marketing Co-Founder, equal partnership - <AUTHOR>

I have a website that needs help getting to the next level. At the moment it's ground solid MVP, maybe a bit more.
I don't have any customers yet, though I've met a bunch of business owners that were interested in the idea. I had biz adviser for a short period of time, and got some useful feedback, but definitely the project needs experienced biz dev guy for at least part time.
I'm really good at technical side of things, mostly back-end, but as I had no other options I had to work on the site UI as well. The site itself is built in Rails.
As of the legal side of the project I haven't formed legal company yet, and I believe that's the right time to do this is when you have understanding that it's going to work out or at least you should have non-paying customers.
Project:
Located at http://www.qreadive.com Demo account: http://www.qreadive.com/users/sign_in Email: firstname.lastname@example.com Pass: altidag
Who I'm looking for:
- A hustler. Someone to go out and talk to small/med business owners to get their attention and eventually make some of them paying customers
- A one to work on legal sides of the project
- A one to do some marketing work, and researches
- A one able to raise money, find investors(this is actually not needed at the moment)
- Located at preferably US or any EU country (I'm residing in Israel)
- A one to tell me to stop, when it's clear that nobody wants to use the project
To be clear:
- I'm working full time, Sun. - Thurs., about 35-40hrs a week. So it gives me about 10-20 hrs a week to spend on this project and still keep a sharp mind
- I might ask you to explain and clarify me some business terms which I might not get
- I can't spend a lot of personal money on this. Not more than 200$ a month at the moment (currently it takes my time + 6$ for hosting)
For all this I am offering 40-60% equity in the company (terms to be discussed).
Interested in talking more? Contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com
Thanks <comment><USER2> Is this basically strikingly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically it was, though it never meant to be only for static pages. Instead of offering only products/services pages, I decided on adding contacts and events, with more types to come.</comment></comment>


What Do You Consider the Most Interesting Recent News? What Makes It Important? - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/annual-question/what-do-you-consider-the-most-interesting-recent-scientific-news-what-makes-it <comment><USER2> Scott Aaronson summarizes a number of the responses: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2612](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2612)</comment>


7 year old Interview of Nassim Taleb (author of Black Swan) - <AUTHOR> http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=0YaUIPbw-5w

<comment><USER2> This is good so far, but it is really irking me that the interviewer keeps sticking in words edge-wise. "uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh", constantly interrupting Taleb.

edit: The more i watch, the more this interviewer is annoying me. It's like he's trying to divert the conversation to irrelevance and annoy Taleb.</comment>


Chrome is silently performing antivirus scans on Windows - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/swagitda_/status/979477998142476289?s=19 <comment><USER2> I guess that means I'll have to purge Chrome from my disk. I have an AV preinstalled by MS I don't need another program shitting all over disk I/O.</comment>


The Rise of the WeWorking Class - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/wework-coworking-office-space.html <comment><USER2> What a long winded article.

I don't really understand the fascination/surprise at wework and similar. It's just office space, packaged in a way that suits a few underserved markets.

Flexibility is valuable, and was previously underavailable. It also turned out that a lot of the "work-from-home" people would like office space, if it's nice and they can afford it.

What is so surprising or notable here? A slightly quirky aesthetic? Espresso?

<comment><USER3> I ran a competing CoWorking space in Los Angeles. WeWork is the opposite of the no-frills aesthetic: they have lots of perks, fun perks, they are not cheap, and having any one perk is conspicuous. WeWork is how people not in larger youth communities meet to get laid. That is it. WeWork is a youth community of people spending mom & dad money, conspicuously in a play-like- work space, not really working, and being super irritating to those trying to work.

<comment><USER4> > WeWork is how people not in larger youth communities meet to get laid

I never knew, maybe they should advertise this more.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what that line is supposed to mean. I work in a WeWork as well and everyone seems to be working. Maybe some are worse than others...

<comment><USER6> I met my wife at work while we seemed to be working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _A recent executive mandate declared the company a "meat-free" organization. When I interviewed McKelvey not long after the Summit, he had a very fuzzy time trying to explain the meaning of the "eight pillars" of its CultureOS and the relationships among them. But when he noticed that the P.R. representative happened to be carrying a single-use plastic water bottle, he admonished her to be mindful of her own consumption._

Wow.

<comment><USER8> When did it become acceptable to straight up disrespect someone to their face for their personal choices? Although I'm 29, I still remember a time where there was at least the pretense of civility. Civility was the oil that kept this machine running smoothly, now it's sputtering left and right. We don't even use formal names like Mr./Ms. as much as we once did, if at all. I felt that was an important part of creating a barrier of civil respect, distinguishing personal relationships from civil relationships. We threw a lot of cultural things away that were actually pretty damn important.

Edit: Also, my karma is now a binary number. Please don't up vote.

<comment><USER9> People used to be polite to each other as long as they were the right people, but being polite to the wrong people became a sin called "political correctness".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently moved to WeWork after nearly half a decade of working in plainly inferior coworking spaces.

It's early days, but I wouldn't be wrong to say that this is probably the first time in my career that I haven't felt, well, "unmoored".

I freelanced through college, then through grad school, then I worked for a couple of years from home before moving to coworking spaces.

At all these coworking spaces, despite their regular events, I never really felt like I was a part of a broader culture. I don't know how, but WeWork manages to do that. Maybe it's because the people around me there look and act and work like me.

Whereas the average coworking space worker felt like he was struggling (heck, even drowning), the people at WeWork feel like they have more time, that they've done the battle, and if they haven't won, they've at least fought enough to win some peace. I don't know if I'm there yet, but I would like to imagine I'm getting there.

WeWork, with its pricing and positioning (it's 2x the rate of my last office) seems to attract people who want to buy into the vision of success, who don't want to see themselves as just "digital labor".

<comment><USER11> So would it be fair to say it's like freelancing but you feel like you're part of a corporation? Like freelancing with the social and motivational aspects of working at say Google or whoever?

<comment><USER12> Presumably without the politics and bullshit you get in a corporation.

<comment><USER11> Or the actual barrels of cash

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The dot-com bubble tells us that when company leadership appears more concerned with meat consumption on premises or water bottle choices of employees vs say addressing actual business issues like losing money hand over fist despite being in business for many years then the future may be a wee bit bumpy for said company...

</comment><comment><USER14> Every time I see articles of these places there are pics of people with laptops, in rows, on narrow tables, almost elbow to elbow, sometimes sitting on high chairs or stools.

Is that what these places are all like? It looks uncomfortable. It's like doing all your work in a high-end cafeteria.

<comment><USER15> In my experience, yes. As an individual at the lowest price point you're paying $450 a month to sit a table in a cafeteria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if WeWork has already started an espionage (excuse me, business intelligence) program or whether that's a future development.

Consider: an ordinary landlord knows how many desks you have, how many people show up on an average day, and how much garbage/recycling you put out. WeWork has operatives who can measure what percentage of your employees' days are spent at their desks, what they like to do for fun, when they are taking trips, where they are going, all their internet usage, how much they print (and if they cared, the contents of all print jobs), what they underline or circle on whiteboards. And of course, they can cross-correlate that across thousands of tenant companies, some of whom are certainly in competition with each other, and some of whom are listed on the stock markets already. Some of whom are no doubt conducting mergers, talks to be acquired... there's a wealth of non-public information that WeWork has access to. How long until they start to take advantage from it?

<comment><USER16> Sounds like a good way to create an opening for a WeWork competitor to swoop in and eat their lunch. Companies get a whiff of that kind of level of tech monitoring even being a _possibility_ and any CSO will have them scrambling for the door.

<comment><USER9> Since that didn't happen with Facebook, Google or Amazon, why would you think it would happen with WeWork?

(WeWork is valued around $22,000,000,000, about the same as GOOG's IPO.)

<comment><USER16> WeWork is basically a real estate business, not a tech company. The barrier to entry to create a competitor is not exceptionally high, technology-wise. Not so with the companies you mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> WeWork is absurdly expensive.

IDK, or I'm absurdly cheap (or am not the target audience)

In London you pay £450-850(!) per month for wework space, from a hotdesk (aka "go to a cafe / library") to a private office.

Instead, I just moved from a one bedroom flat to a two bedroom flat, increasing my rent by about £250 per month, and now have both a private office _and_ a place for guests / co-workers to stay when they come to town.

</comment><comment><USER18> In a WeWork currently. It's fine. Better than the last coworking space I was in but I still don't understand why any company would stay in a WeWork for longer than a year unless they only need 1 or 2 desks. The price is just not worth it. Offices are small and loud (glass boxes).

But hey I didnt have to buy a fridge or desks when I opened this office so that's nice.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like the ability to optionally participate in a work culture, in fact, looks like you could pick and choose between a few. The forced culture of most companies is pretty tiring.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody else feel that ads like this in the NYT should clearly be marked as such?

<comment><USER21> What is it advertising?

<comment><USER20> The article is one giant ad for WeWork.

<comment><USER21> On first read it totally didn't come across that way, but on second look I might just be too far out of the target group to recognize as positive what it advertises...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone else find they can't tell if things are an intentional design decision or an implementation bug anymore? case-in-point: the rendering of the title of this piece.

<comment><USER23> The steelmanned version of your comment might be something like "graphic designers these days really seem to have abandoned every recognizable principle of 'good' design". That would be a claim that design quality is deteriorating, like a lot of other aspects of civilization. There's a case to be made for that perspective.

But I'm guessing you just meant that hip graphic design/typography often confounds your own expectations. If you aren't a design practitioner/enthusiast, I don't know why you would expect your preconceptions of what design should look like to be validated.

<comment><USER24> Do designers design for laypeople (=i.e. supposedly the audience of most designs) or for other designers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's like no one's ever heard of Regus.

<comment><USER26> that's because i think regus is a real place for people who want a small office and who don't want to pay for extra frills.

i was very pleased renting from regus, and i got an entire small office to myself and my friend for the price of membership with no dedicated space that you'd be paying at wework or similar

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Toggle Reader View (Ctrl+Alt+R)

<comment><USER28> Please don't assume people's browsers. For example in Firefox reading view is toggled by F9, and in Microsoft Edge it's toggled by Ctrl+Shift+R.

<comment><USER29> I am on mobile and these keyboard-centric comments are exclusionary.</comment></comment></comment>


KitKat will make your SD Card useless - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+TodLiebeck/posts/gjnmuaDM8sn <comment><USER2> The sky is not falling: [External Blues: Google Has Brought Big Changes To SD Cards In KitKat, And Even Samsung Is Implementing Them]: [http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/17/external-blues- googl...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/02/17/external-blues-google-has- brought-big-changes-to-sd-cards-in-kitkat-and-even-samsung-may-be- implementing-them/)

Summary:

All apps (even ones without external storage permissions) can now read and write from a designated private folder on external storage.

There's a new sharing framework called the Storage Access Framework that can be used to request access to other folders, which treats external storage in a manner similar to cloud storage.

It might be a harsh transition, but not completely surprising since it's been quite a while since Nexus devices have had external storage slots, and it's been quite obvious for a while that Google has been discouraging external storage.

The hopeful takeaway is that Google will be relaxing this discouragement now that they've figured out a strategy for external storage moving forward.

<comment><USER3> 1\. launch all flagship phones without sd slot to force use of gdrive

2\. everyone buys other companies (budget?) phones because they have more features (eg sd card slot)

3\. break that in software (because they can) so that feature is not "missing" on the flagships anymore.

4\. instead of just removing, make the functionality be yet another entry point to gdrive by making the sd write api be analogous to the cloud write one.

google only fear to not fuck up like that was something like cyanogenmod, but, well...

<comment><USER4> At this point in my life; I am ready to challenge any design team of any mobile device which decides to leave out expandable [micro]SD storage to a bout of the fisticuffs.

There is absolutely NO reason any mobile device should lack this. [This is ___ESPECIALLY_ __aimed at Mr. Smug; Ive]

<comment><USER5> How else would they up sell to the 64GB model? What if a device I bought 3 years ago could be still relevant by just upgrading an inexpensive flash card?

Not only is so restrictive as to be insulting, it harms the environment by forcing devices to die a premature death, I know my iPad 1 would be a whole lot more useful with a 64GB SDHC card in it.

I was super stoked to buy a Google Nexus tablet, after finding out there was no SD card slot, I forever declined that purchase.

<comment><USER6> I have a Galaxy Nexus that is barely supported by Google now, and its just a little over 2 years old. Going to recycle it and buy a Nexus 5.

I'm just a bit too old (31) to care anymore. No SD card? Whatevs. I'll use Dropbox/Evernote/Amazon's MP3 Player with wifi to get whatever I need onto the phone.

<comment><USER3> sadly, you are probably the norm nowadays. a shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like a right idiot for championing Google as an open alternative to Apple for so many years. It now appears that they were operating a giant bait and switch. Now that they are the incumbents they no longer benfit from openness, so say goodbye to writeable SD cards, XMPP federation, RSS support, Google Reader ...

Each change is defensible if viewed in isolation, but when seen as an whole it is obvious what the overall plan is.

I think our only hope might be Ubuntu.

<comment><USER8> This is a good switch. Apps can still read and write to external storage, just in an application specific directory. Look at it like this. If you are setting up a Linux server you don't run all your apps as root, you run them as non- privileged users. Why? Because an app misbehaving as root is a scary thing. But you also don't run all your non-privileged apps under the same user because if one of those apps starts misbehaving and you ran everything as the same user then its almost as bad as running everything as root - one bad app can trash all your data. Android had the same problem with external storage and the android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission - one bad app can trash all your external data. This update will make me much more comfortable installing apps that write to external storage because they can only write to their own external storage as it should be. If an app needs the ability to modify everybodies external storage data doesn't that sound like something that would need root permissions on a properly secured Linux system? Why should Android be any different?

<comment><USER9> If an mp3 player (A) imports some files and stores them on external storage, can mp3 player (B) read the mp3s and write meta-data to those files? What about different text editors?

I am a little confused about using root in the example as on a PC a user can have an external storage device with music and all apps can find and play and write to it.

<comment><USER8> If application A has private files (regardless of the type) then no, no other (non-root) application can access them. There is a content provider framework that an application can use to register files that it would like to allow other applications to access.

Look at where things are in the PC world, viruses, malware, keyloggers, etc. The android permission model is the alternative. Allowing any application access to the entire external storage if it needed to write one single directory was a bad thing. If you want android to continue to allow random apk installation from different sources they needed to patch this hole. The other option to keep your phone safe is a completely walled garden approach (Apple) that polices apps a lot more than Google seems to want to.

<comment><USER7> What if I _want_ to grant an application access to the SD card? Surely I should have that option?

<comment><USER9> Apparently, it is a zero tolerance policy except for the provided apps even if you trust the app developer.. Which basically means you cannot truly replace the provided apps without rooting the phone.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. Which is why I say this represents another component of a strategy away from open systems, and towards the sort of proprietary walled-garden experience offered by Apple.

Not only is this a betrayal of many early Google evangelists - myself included - it's a fairly cynical exercise to build such a system on the Linux kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The plan here is quite simply that any memory in your device becomes a cache of some cloud storage somewhere.

SD cards have the problem that they can be removed, and thus easily inspected, so cloud services wanting to keep their data locked up when it's cached have to resort to measures such as Facebook's Conceal library, which is more to do with preventing users from getting their own info out of Facebook than it is preventing any actual malicious activity.

<comment><USER8> Why not just an app that registered a service that was basically a cloud provider for your SD card? Any apps wanting to access the _shared_ storage would use the service's API to request access to a content. The shared storage would really be the private storage for the storage app.

Seems like this would be the best of both worlds, no crazy free-for-all external storage but shared data with some type of prompting to grant an app access to a particular path of shared storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Remember how outraged people were when the iPhone didn't have SD card slot, and how people here on HN used that as a selling point for android?

Remember how outraged people were when the iPhone didn't support flash, and how people here on HN used that as a selling point for android?

How things change.

<comment><USER12> You sure seem to be implying the lack of an updated flash APK is anything other than Adobe's failure. Please don't imply that.

<comment><USER13> But it is? Even on older devices that can still use flash, chrome refuses to utilize it. You could make a reasonable counter-argument and say that the AOSP browser can still access it, but seeing as the stock browser hasn't seen any interfaces updates since ICS, I'd say that the stock browser is as outdated as flash itself.

Its becoming clear that two distinct androids are forming: the ghettoized one that is AOSP with its outdated/feature stripped version of apps and the first class versions that require the Google play service.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't firefox use flash fine? Most android browsers support plugins. The main problem is the awkwardness of getting flash in the first place, and that's entirely on adobe.

<comment><USER14> Yes, Firefox for Android still actively supports the Flash plugin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I sympathise with the pain this is going to cause, I have an sdcard that I've been using since I got my Nexus One. It's a horrible mess because apps create things and then never delete them (etc).

Having a much more organised system for storing data (and removing it if the app is removed) makes a lot of sense.

</comment><comment><USER16> SD cards were such a terrible mess on Android. This is excellent news from a developers POV.

<comment><USER17> _SD cards were such a terrible mess on Android._

How so?

<comment><USER18> They're removable, so any call to the filesystem could potentially fail at any given time. They're mountable over UMS, meaning an external system can remove the volume you're currently attempting to write, and delete or modify your data by the time you get it back. They're slow, which is hell on a game's startup time, for instance.

The permissions change doesn't really fix any of these problems, but the sugary API they've written to support it certainly makes it a lot nicer to work with. Dealing with all these cases using the File API is not an enjoyable task.

<comment><USER19> Every single android phone I've owned had the SD card under the battery. That's not going to get removed too often. My current phone (Kyocera Torque) is essentially unusable without an SD Card.

P.S. If there is a setting to tell google play to install to SD card, let me know. I keep running out of internal space because I forget to move new apps.

<comment><USER18> When you mount an SD card over UMS, it is functionally identical to "removing" the card from an application's perspective.

<comment><USER19> I would trade the ability to mount an SD card over UMS for the changes in kitkat in a heartbeat. MTP sucks, but this change sucks more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Restricting writes in this way ensures the system can clean up files when applications are uninstalled."

Isn't this backward? Controlling clutter is more important on the internal storage that can't be replaced. If some apps write a bunch of crap to my external SD card I can clean it up myself or swap out a larger capacity.

<comment><USER21> AFAIK Android has always advised against storing anything on external storage, because you're not promised that it's going to be available, and Android can't full manage it (has no idea who/what wrote which files, especially since it can be written by other devices).

You can still delete files from your internal storage, but now Android can help you manage it as well.

<comment><USER20> I don't see unmanaged files on a removable SD card as a problem. That's the point, the SD card is for data that can be removed and handled outside the Android operating system. I want apps to be able to write things to my SD card that will remain when I uninstall them. I can do things like save a backup of my app settings then restore on a different device.

The internal storage should have restrictions on managed data because if you have untracked files that get left behind when an app is uninstalled, you may not notice and they'll just be cruft. That's where I think the restrictions should be placed, not on the SD cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I made a feature request to allow users the option to give apps write access. Google has already "declined" this feature request, but I encourage you to comment and star this issue, if you'd like the option to delete songs in your music player.

[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=65974](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=65974)

</comment><comment><USER23> Gah, as if the terrible Android File Transfer weren't bad enough now we're all forced to use MTP instead of mounting as USB drive...

...now we don't even get to use an on-device file manager to clean up the stupid mess the Android File Transfer app leaves behind?

-__-

</comment><comment><USER24> Just another it's-not-DRM restriction from your freedom-loving watchers at the Googleplex. Redefining 'open source' with lawyers and shady trips to North Korea since god knows when. Now, unit, return to your regularly scheduled email/phone/SMS control feed, keyed to your IMEI/ISIN/email/phone number/credit card/API keys/web properties/contacts/GPS/nearby wifi SSIDs, and proceed to be monitored.

</comment><comment><USER25> There seems to be little comment about actual "choice". A lot of comments on this site and the original news site seem to be either "I hate SD cards because..." or "I love SD cards because...".

The question to ask is: What about the consumer in general? Does this decision limit choice?

The answer is: Yes, it does, and that's a bad thing.

I now cannot use an app that I paid for to copy MY files to an arbitrary folder on MY device and use a different program I also paid for to view/manipulate them.

This is one of the key reasons I prefer my Galaxy Note 2 over my previous 3 iPhones. Anyone here who _loves_ working with iTunes? Crickets...

Making specious arguments about the coding difficulty involved with SD cards suddenly being removed is just inane. Are these people going to be arguing for PCs that prevent you working with external hard drives? No? I thought not. Are these people not bothered with having to pay an "Apple-like tax" on internal storage at 2-3x markup?

People have been using memory cards in their cameras, mp3 players etc and there's been no backlash about hard that is to manage. It's a non-issue.

Google, don't eff this up. Prefer choice over restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER26> But google music just updated and now can save music to my external SD. and I'm latest kit Kat!

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd switch away from Android for this, but to what?

<comment><USER24> Firefox OS is functional already, devices are available, and it is improving.

<comment><USER28> Has anyone seriously though about continuing where Palm left off with WebOS? It seems that at this point, WebOS would run just as well on the hardware that Mozilla is targeting with FirefoxOS, since the last WebOS phones came out what... 3 years ago?

From what I heard WebOS was awesome. It's surprising that nobody has picked up where Palm left off.

<comment><USER29> > From what I heard WebOS was awesome. It's surprising that nobody has picked > up where Palm left off.

LG turned it into a TV [http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5279220/rebooting- webos-how...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5279220/rebooting-webos-how-lg- rethought-the-smart-tv)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand. Don't Android apps have unique users? Like app_xxx? Why couldn't the fuse filesystem just set the /mnt/sdcard to be owned by root (chmod 644), and app directories owned by app_xxx (chmod 660)? That would fix whatever read permissions on apps could be leveraged from being in the sdcard_rw group. Access to read sdcard files has never been an issue, sdcard permissions have been granted. Anything that didn't require sdcard permissions would be in the /data/ directory. Someone please explain this?

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder what percentage of android users even uses SD cards?

My guess: pretty small.

<comment><AUTHOR> You think Samsung outsells Nexus 100 to 1 because of the great UI? It's all about storage.

<comment><USER32> WHAT?

Seriously, Nexus are not even marketed or sold retail or with contracts in most countries, and the list of countries in where they can even be bought online is a _very_ small list of countries. Samsung outsells Nexus 100 to 1 because they phones actually exist as a product someone looking for a phone can choose.

Motorola offers more storage than Samsung and almost all of their phones come with SD slots and is also outsold by Samsung 5 to 1.

<comment><USER33> Wut? Neither the Moto G nor Moto X has an SD card slot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> An Android fan plugs their SD card into their camera while on a Safari. They get back to their hut and plug the SD card into their Android devcie. The camera put pictures in the folder "Camera".

These users will be able to see the photos on their Android tablet, but they won't be able to free up space or modify any of these photos until they get to a computer. Or iPhone with an SD card accessory.

</comment><comment><USER34> Great, nice to see Android finally pulling bolder moves for greater user experience. SD cards are the floppy disks of 2014.

<comment><USER35> It's a crap addition that cheap people demand instead of buying phones that can hold more on flash. At least, that's the only argument I've ever heard for SD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This really sucks. The only hope to get rid of android/ios apps' dominance is probably on browser/html5 apps, I hope it comes sooner and our need for native apps can thus be minimized(especially its underlying forthcoming-more- proprietary environment).

</comment><comment><USER9> Say what you want about the Newton, but it probably had the most elegant way to deal with external storage.

I keep wondering how far the lock-down on new computing devices will go. I really wish someone would build an open device even if it isn't a phone (e.g. iPod Touch).

<comment><USER18> Can you describe the Newton's solution for those of us who have never seen one in person?

<comment><USER9> I'll point you to some experts:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_\(Apple\))

[http://www.canicula.com/newton/prog/soups.htm](http://www.canicula.com/newton/prog/soups.htm)

[http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/600D65E6-A31E-45CA- AF...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/600D65E6-A31E-45CA- AFC5-42BC253F5337.html) (read the Technical Innovations section)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does cyanogenmod have this limit?

I have not seen that complaint from people fiddling with the cm11 4.4.2 build

<comment><USER3> do not restrict android mods to cyanogenmod. it is like saying "can i start apache on my system boot on debian like i did on slackware?"

what you are looking for is how to format you sd card in Ext so it can a 1st party partition. breaths new life to old phones. like the intentionally storage crippled samsung nexus

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Google getting ever more evil. Their system apps can write to the external SD, but all the great 3rd party apps are screwed and constrained to the internal SD.

</comment><comment><USER39> I edit a lot files that are synced by Dropbox, so can I do this in KitKat? They all edited in external applications, not in Dropbox.

<comment><USER40> One Dropbox supports the API, you can open your files directly from external applications. Box.net already has support out.

<comment><USER39> But can I save those files?

<comment><USER40> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This makes sense to me from a privacy standpoint. Your SD card can be easily removed, and if there is sensitive data there that's bad.

<comment><USER22> How does this help privacy? The data is still on the SD card, unencrypted. All apps have to store data at "/Android/Data/<Package Name>". No apps can delete data anywhere else.

This helps with unwanted orphaned files when uninstalling an app. That is pretty much it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Someone buried the lede. The real story here is that someone posted to Google+.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google+ is essentially Google forums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Holy shit. Fuck this.

Back to laptops.

Apple products are bullshit because obvious planned obsolescence is obvious. No removable storage, and no removable battery makes Jack a dull boy.

Now Google too?

Vote with your feet.

<comment><USER43> Resist if you like, but what are your options if not iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone? It's clear these distinct developer teams have decided direct access to removable storage is some kind of risk (whether to security, usability, or ubiquity). We're not going to reach a truly post-PC era without addressing and moving on from some of the core issues at the heart of it, one of which is the folder/file hierarchy.

I'm sorry for your loss, but it's time to adapt my friend.

<comment><USER44> > It's clear these distinct developer teams have decided direct access to > removable storage is some kind of risk (whether to security, usability, or > ubiquity)

I would argue usability. Having removable storage causes you to have to handle quite a few additional issues:

* Storage is removed (while app is off/in background)

* Storage is removed (while app is active)

* Users have to understand there are _two_ places to put things (may still exist with this)

* Users have to understand the filesystem (decades of experience says... they don't)

Let's not forget that there are tons of 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x devices that probably won't get this update. This is only going to effect devices being actively updated and new ones.

As for new ones, Flash is getting cheaper and networks are getting faster. The fact is cloud storage is getting more and more practical (assuming carriers don't ruin it). This may be a bit early, but it would have been impossible a few years ago.

All in all it seems like a relatively sane decision to move the platform further. They could have just _dropped_ SD card support. That would have also fixed the issues.

<comment><USER17> _I would argue usability_

I would argue that usability is in the eye of the user. I don't care if most users don't understand what removable storage is and won't notice or care about this change. _I_ know what it is and how to use it, so making it effectively useless impairs _my_ usability.

 _The fact is cloud storage is getting more and more practical (assuming carriers don 't ruin it)_

Big assumption. Also not the only one: you're assuming cloud providers can keep your data private.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nothing Focuses The Mind Like The Ultimate Deadline: Death - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/12/31/256596253/nothing-focuses-the-mind-like-the-ultimate-deadline-death <comment><USER2> This reminds me of the Hagakure:

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one's aim is to die a dog's death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one's aim. We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like. But not having attained our aim and continuing to live is cowardice. This is a thin dangerous line. To die without gaining one's aim is a dog's death and fanaticism. But there is no shame in this. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes I trick my mind into thinking I will die if I don't do a certain thing. This can be a good motivator, but can lead to unnecessary anxiety if not used in moderation. Also, it only works as well as you trick yourself into believing it. I've noticed a marked increase in my abilities to focus and in my quickness when I use this method during a game or something similar. I figure I am leveraging the high value placed on survival which has been cultivated via evolution, using it to enhance my mental acuity and awareness such that I might 'survive'.

<comment><USER4> _Sometimes I trick my mind into thinking I will die if I don 't do a certain thing._

It's different since you do it voluntarily but this is a very common symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder so.. just be careful, especially if you catch yourself doing it for something that's not productive or positive.

That aside, it's not too difficult to build up a _general_ sense of mortality that we seem to naturally avoid, by studying history, lurking in some of the more depressing sub-Reddits, etc ;-)

<comment><USER3> Mild OCD has been something that has given me undue stress in my life at times; thankfully, it's not very prevalent in my life these days (intentional exposure to the anxieties seems to have worked for me). But, I most certainly agree; which is why I included, "This can be a good motivator, but can lead to unnecessary anxiety if not used in moderation."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> workhere-io Always being anxious about living life to the fullest can be stressful and thus counterproductive to the idea of living a happy life. I find that people are often happier when they aren't afraid to "waste time" doing simple things like sitting on a bench and talking to friends while life goes by.

</comment><comment><USER5> I made something very similar to this watch a while back for the homepage of my website ([http://kronopath.net/](http://kronopath.net/)). It's a seven- handed clock, with the longest three hands being your typical second, minute, and hour hands, but with each of the shorter hands taking longer to make a full cycle than the last. The shortest hand will finish its rotation when I turn 80, which is a (very loose) estimate for how long I have to live.

The fact that someone took this same idea and made it into a commercial product is interesting and a bit disconcerting, if only because I wish I'd thought of doing that first. But it's good to have a reminder that you have a very limited time to do whatever it is you want to do. It helps maintain a sense of forward pressure.

And if you need any more motivation, remember that 83 years is only roughly 1000 months long. What are you planning to do this month?

</comment><comment><USER6> Memento mori — remember that you wil die ⌘ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori)

<comment><USER7> Look at the evidence, only around 93.5% of people who have ever lived have died [0]. With a sample size of 108 billion, I think we can say the data is quite accurate. Therefore I think your chance of living for ever is more like 1 in 20.

[0] - [http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleH...](http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx)

<comment><USER6> That's correct. However, many people live their life as if they have an eternity to waste. Truth is that life is very short, and a technique like memento mori can help us focus on the essential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lost a hacker artist friend this last year to cancer.

Whatever you want to say to someone, experience or build, get to it right now. And repeat every single day.

Also: [http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_d...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Sitting around thinking about kicking the bucket is just setting expectations. Live in the moment - it's what we all have right this second. This night may be your last. Make the most of it.

<comment><USER10> ^ coping mechanisms. Learn some biology and stop aging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of successful people and a number of religions place high value on our ephemerality as a way of focusing on the important things.

In practice, I've found this rather hard to do and a lot of times a putdown as well. I think the concept of your own death is hard to truly fathom. It's the same reason generally heart patients ignore doctor's advice of stop eating crap and exercising more or face death.

A much better workaround I've found was after watching Groundhog Day [1]. In the movie, Bill Murray is stuck in a day where, no matter what he does, the next morning the day starts exactly the same. In that day, it doesn't matter if he dies, kills someone, makes someone fall in love with him, robs a bank; the next day, its the same old day. _spoilers_ The movie then becomes about what if you had just one day (the exact same day) in your life, how would you live that day? A perfect day. One where you do as much good as you can.

I think the movie tries to tackle the same issue of our limited time on earth by taking a rather interesting angle.

By thinking of your day as a groundhog day and wondering, if this day is going to be the same day forever; how best can I live it? For me, this has been a better approach to how I should spend my day rather than waking up and focusing upon my death.

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/)

</comment><comment><USER12> My only concern is this... If you've convinced yourself your whole life that you're going to die at a certain date will the placebo effect come into play and actually make you die prematurely around that date?

Other than that it works and it works well. I'm 27, the average male lives to age 72, which means I've got 45 years of life left. It's boosted my productivity, helped me focus on the things that matter, helped me manage my fear of what others think of me (I don't care anymore).

My next experiment is to have a countdown timer on my desktop that counts down to my demise. A bit morbid but I've accepted things like this long ago so it's not depressing.

<comment><USER6> I bet the mean years left for a 27 y.o. man is greater than 72-27, but i don't know if there are any public statistics to back up the claim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And then I look at my Tikker and see that I've got... like... a $h!tton of numbers left! Yeah, I'm OK, I can do all that stuff later :-)

Seriously, even if it displayed the time left in years, seeing 40 years on the screen will make most people go "Eh, that's enough time for everything".

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Fixation on death is pathetic. This infatuation our society has on the inevitable end of life is ridiculous. It obviously makes for great artistic themes, but death does not concern me whatsoever.

I live here and now. Whenever I die, that will be the end of that. But I don't care for it. If you're so obsessive about marking and reminding people about the end of their days, then I advise that you be the first to go.

</comment><comment><USER14> Worst product idea ever.</comment>


Valve's OpenGL debugger open-sourced - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl <comment><USER2> Well, now people can sure stop complaining that Valve is only using GitHub for the issue tracker. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone doing GLSL work, here's a shader debugger that is quite useful: [http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/glsldevil/](http://www.vis.uni- stuttgart.de/glsldevil/)

Would love to see someone with resources (i.e. Valve) somehow maintain it (or do something similar).

Here's an open source fork: [http://glsl-debugger.github.io/](http://glsl- debugger.github.io/)

<comment><USER4> There's a built-in WebGL shader editor in Aurora that's very slick: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/live-editing-webgl- shaders...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/live-editing-webgl-shaders-with- firefox-developer-tools/)

Nice to be able to alter your GLSL and see the results on the web page immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow- Valve's on a roll! I wonder what else we will see open sourced from them in the next couple of weeks.

They're probably talk more about whatever they're up to at GDC this year.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not just open source, but free under the MIT licence.

[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/vogl/blob/master/LICENSE)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a good sign that companies like Valve and Sony are releasing some of their tools to the public.

Perhaps they're feeling the pressure of more open/accessible tools like unity or unreal engine.

<comment><USER8> "Valve and Sony" are apples and oranges. Valve hasn't been a publisher (in the usual sense) or a platform creator until very recently. They've been a retailer and a developer. As a retailer, Valve has an incentive to grow the industry as a whole, and as a developer, they have an incentive to get people onto platforms that are easy for them to develop and sell products for.

They've chosen to tackle these interests by deliberately doing things "wrong" right from the beginning. SteamOS/Steambox is all about having an open, accessible platform, and the release of development tools is all about getting people to develop for this platform so that users will adopt it.

<comment><USER9> I'd be willing to generalize that it's nice to see fruits available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hopefully they'll use it to make Dota 2 for Linux comparable to Dota 2 for Windows :)

Right now it doesn't perform well at all (using 2x more memory and being significantly slower on Intel GPUs) , and still comes with an annoying sound bug ([https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2/issues/770](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2/issues/770))

<comment><USER11> It may be related to Intel's drivers, as I am playing Team Fortress 2 on Linux, which is I believe native OpenGL, and it is significantly slower than on Windows with an intel GPU.

<comment><USER12> I think it is since I get a higher frame rate for Team Fortress 2 under Linux than under windows. I use the nvidia blob.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A presentation from the developers about vogl and ToGL [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O7WTc6k2Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O7WTc6k2Y)

The part about vogl starts at around 33 minutes and a demo at 40 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER14> Now how about that cool drill-down tool I've been hearing about :D

Edit: I'm... I'm an idiot! Apparently this is the tool I'm thinking of, or at least something similar.

</comment><comment><USER15> Note that they have a listserv website setup, but the top level domain doesn't seen to host anything yet.

[http://lists.voglproj.com/listinfo.cgi/dev- voglproj.com](http://lists.voglproj.com/listinfo.cgi/dev-voglproj.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> For someone not familiar with the Valve stack, does this work with any OpenGL application? Or is it only for those using Valve's SDK?

<comment><USER17> This replaces the opengl dynamic library, similar to apitrace. It should work for any opengl app (the example they use is a simple gl app that draws some spheres). When the app makes an opengl call, it logs it to tmp before forwarding it on to the real opengl library. It's kind of like strace for graphics...

Then, there are tools to analyze and inspect those logs. You can presumably replay a frame, and step through each GL call and inspect the data it is sending. I haven't tried building this yet, but it looks like it includes a tool to replay the GL calls, and some kind of interactive GUI.

<comment><USER18> I have been checking the code for the generation of the spheres. I never developed C++ professionally. Is this code considered good C++ practice? I mean I saw "using namespace std", and exceptions using cout.

<comment><USER19> If it's just a simple demo app, I probably wouldn't use it as a example of good C++ practice.

Many C++ devs have a different idea on what idiomatic C++ should look like. C++11 really shakes things up as well.

There's no reason a "using namespace std;" is bad, as long as it isn't in the header. If it's in the header file, every file that includes that header will have it's namespace polluted with std declarations, and this leads to a big nasty chain of potential name conflicts (one header file includes another and so on and so forth).

<comment><USER18> Right, it makes perfect sense. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a system on which vsnprintf doesn't NUL-terminate the string after a successful non-zero return?

<comment><USER21> VC++, if the number of characters to write is exactly equal to count, will return count without inserting a null:

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/1kt27hek.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/1kt27hek.aspx)

<comment><USER20> Incredible.. thanks.

For longer strings, it also seems to return -1 instead of doing what the standard says.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Really love what Valve is doing here. Game development needs some awesome opensource love.

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER24> Can someone explain what is the significance of this and the applications? What does it mean by opengl capture and playback debugger?

<comment><USER25> opengl [1] is the graphics library that underpins most of the animation and rendering that games ( and your browser ) do.

This app allows you to trace and capture events in code that calls openGL and to follow what's actually happening.

1\. [http://www.opengl.org/](http://www.opengl.org/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Curratd read the news without distractions - <AUTHOR>

Here is a small project I have been working on for a week or two. Basic concept is that wading through all the random tweets on a twitter timeline is time expensive, so let this site collect the most important news for you and don't worry about missing important news.<p>http://alpha.n.myrpi.org/index.php <comment><USER2> Pretty cool. Good job man. Are you planning on working on this a little more? I'd definitely use this for sports if it updated more often.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I plan on doing a ton more work, currently I am trying to get past Twitter's API limits but once I solve that it can refresh every page load.

<comment><USER3> Cache it to a json file?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats practically what I am doing right now, if it has been 15 mins, I pull in new tweets, if it hasn't i read from the cache.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting POC, surely there should be a lot more stories though. i can only see 7 stories and a few are about the same thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> The whole idea is that it collects the top ten news stories of the day and presents them to the user.</comment></comment>


The Definitive Guide to WordPress Squeeze Pages - <AUTHOR> http://sitespex.com/the-definitive-guide-to-wordpress-squeeze-pages/

<comment><USER2> Wow, a lot of detail here! Very good. I have to say the initial images of squeeze pages put me off. They look about 10 years old.</comment>


Imaginative play makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-serious-need-for-play&print=true

<comment><USER2> I fondly recall playing in the dirt under a bush with my Star Wars action figures for hours and days in aggregate, lost in an environment of my creation. I observe my over-stimulated (as in classes for music/art and prior to that, Baby Einstein) nephew and wonder if he's missing out on the pleasures of just unscheduled, imaginative play. I think he is; however, I don't think he knows that. I wonder if parents who grew up playing on their own, with their own imaginations have been peer-pressured into the Baby Einstein way of child attention occupation.

<comment><USER3> Generationally-speaking, I think the role of TV in children's lives has increased greatly since I was young (I am 27 now, with a 1 yr old son and 4 yr old daughter). So many people are growing up now believing that TV is the nanny, educator, entertainer, informer, you name it. Sesame Street was just being invented during the Gen-X days of growing up. There weren't as many options. Now, new parents are bombarded with media, and most of them believe what they're told.

Take away the TV and see what the child does. And see what the parents do. Fascinating.

<comment><USER2> My friend who works at Comcast said the perennial top _late night/wee hours of morning_ Video-on-Demand requests are modern Nickelodeon-era, child pleasing staples like "The Wiggles"

I've watched "The Wiggles" several times. How can a tired, full-time parent ever compete (in the entertain-my-kid realm) with the hyper-naturally perky, fun, safe, singing and dancing former punk rock band called "The Wiggles"

<comment><USER3> That is a really sad factoid.

Oh man. Don't get me started. But if you insist, a few high-level thoughts: real life isn't about being entertained, the parent has the advantage of being _the parent_ \--wow, a relationship possibility, right before your eyes! Why are you wasting the 12 years you have before adolescence on mindless drivel instead of winning your child's affection? Agh! OK, I'll stop.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, I think all child raising theory and advice is theoretical until you get to practice it on your _own_ children.

"I really didn't like TV-Turnoff Week except that I did notice that my grades went up and I was in a good mood all week." - Second grader Drew Henderson, Donora, PA

<http://tvturnoff.org/>

"In a recent study, two economists at the University of Chicago, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, came up with a different way to test the long-run impact of television on kids." Yes, but sometimes test scores aren't the defacto measurement of impact on kids..

<http://www.slate.com/id/2136372/>

<comment><USER3> _Unfortunately, I think all child raising theory and advice is theoretical until you get to practice it on your own children._

I know you don't mean to imply otherwise, but that is what I'm doing right now. And I will tell you that I love hearing my daughter say "Anyway, I'm going to go to the couch and read a book now." instead of "Daddy can I watch Wiggles?!?!" :-)

Not that my wife and I don't have a long, long way to go.

Awesome quotes, by the way. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER2> I think you're on the right track. My sister (of the overactive nephew) has a set of favorite childhood books that she wants to pass her love of reading, when the time comes.

And, of course, I was unable to parse whether you were a parent based on the 3rd person subjects you were using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> From the article:

 _"Children learn to be fair and take turns—they cannot always demand to be the fairy queen, or soon they have no playmates. "They want this thing to keep going, so they're willing to go the extra mile" to accommodate others' desires, he explains._

HA! As the father of two children under five years of age, I reject the idea that children will teach themselves how to share or play fair. Perhaps if I let her, my four year old would eventually feel sorry for bullying her brother away from her keyboard, but I am not going to wait on some evolutionary time scale for that to happen (I personally don't think it will).

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes! I'm glad someone did the research to write this.</comment>


Spectrum Next: The Evolution of the Speccy - <AUTHOR> https://www.specnext.com/about/ <comment><USER2> This is a great project. Retro with the addition of reasonable expansions.

Watching with interest.</comment>


D3 and React Video - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to find a good way to combine D3 and React for a long time. Thanks to improvements in D3 and React (hooks) it finally seems possible. I found this series of videos to be outstanding, especially #11 about force layouts.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDZ4p-ENjbiPo4WH7KdHjh_EMI7Ic8b2B
Are there other good resources for D3/React?
Disclaimer: I've only watched videos #1, #2, #3 and  #11 <comment><USER2> I've found VX to be great

[https://vx-demo.now.sh/](https://vx-demo.now.sh/)</comment>


Show HN: My first mac app hits the app store (quick url shortener) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-url-shortener/id417599309

<comment><USER2> Nice & simple - good luck with the sales!

What marketing have you done / plan to do? If you're willing to share, would love to hear how your sales proceed.

Notes:

\- the product name says "Quick URL Shortener", but the (preferences?) screenshot shows both "menuBitly" & "bitlyMenu"!

\- screenshots critique: for the window, use shift-command-4 > spacebar > click - gives a nice transparency fading border. for the menu bar screenshot, trim more carefully e.g the 100% is cutoff. also any reason the app icon is not highlighted?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I will try to get that stuff revved and submit for a update asap.

As for marketing this post is all I have done so far, and I do plan to do a follow up post when I have a little data.</comment></comment>


Why customers leave: the breakdown - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2010/10/04/fastest-way-to-lose-customers/?view=socialstudies

<comment><USER2> Would have been nice to have just seen these as normal graphs; the "infographic" style feels a bit OTT for this kind of (very important) data, and almost trivializes it.

I do question, though, where the "A company's following count should not [be] higher than 10% of their follower count" comes from? That sounds like utter rubbish. Why 10%? And why shouldn't a company follow back every one of their followers (rather than just an elite 10%), so that, for example, they can exchange private DMs with more-sensitive information? There's no direct source for this incredibly arbitrary number. (or, put another way, "[citation needed]"...)

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I never understood the use of a company Twitter account following people. Why do you need to read other people's statuses on your company account?

The historious Twitter account, for example, only follows the parent company's account, just to show that it's a Stochastic project, and nobody else. If we need DMs, we email people or urge them to email us, as we'll probably need a larger space to write in anyway.

Is there a benefit I'm missing?

<comment><USER4> Depends what you mean by 'people'. It's useful where you are building an interest group of people from the same domain. If those people are 'mavens' it can be a useful to see their thoughts and engage them in discussion.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I see what you mean now... I prefer not to spam my followers with semi- irrelevant discussion, the stream is mostly used for updates or customer support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Without a link describing the methods used to garner this information and the raw data itself, these conclusions are, at best, suspect.

<comment><USER6> ... especially since using getsatisfaction is supposed to improve a company's customer service.

Their decision to create lots of "unofficial" support sites (e.g. <http://getsatisfaction.com/gm> \- note that the "unofficial" is easy to miss) was also... controversial. Especially since companies had to pay quite a bit to take over this "support" forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Erm, that wasn't even a very good infographic. Usually there's some sort of theme or agenda. These are just a bunch of factoids and numbers strung together.

Unsatisfied!

</comment><comment><USER8> -150 infographic blogspam.</comment>


A look at darktable 2.2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/710496/ <comment><USER2> > The page you have tried to view (A look at darktable 2.2.0) is currently > available to LWN subscribers only.</comment>


Your Git Log Should Tell a Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.mokacoding.com/blog/your-git-log-should-tell-a-story <comment><USER2> Don't say what you did commit in the commit message, say why you did it. The diff should give you the what.</comment>


A Lingua Latina per se illustrata for Japanese - <AUTHOR> https://drdru.github.io/ <comment><USER2> _Lingua Latina per se Illustrata_ has the advantage that most people learning Latin will already be familiar with the Latin script, and probably don't care that much about the pronunciation anyway. Whereas for Japanese, you'd need to at least teach hiragana and katakana first, possibly with recordings for everything.</comment>


Bacon: Rebasing Ubuntu on Android? - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/648722/rss <comment><USER2> I'm not too experienced with Android development, but wouldn't it be possible to use the Android kernel and driver stack with Ubuntu or whatever other OS?

This would allow Android alternatives compatible with lots of existing devices.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gonk FirefoxOS linux kernel is based on Android ([https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/B2G#linux](https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/B2G#linux)).</comment>


To make smarter systems, it's all about the data - <AUTHOR> http://www.cdixon.org/?p=340 <comment><USER2> If you are interested in the topic, I highly recommend "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of data" by Norvig et al. [1]

[1] [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/03/unreasonable- effe...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/03/unreasonable- effectiveness-of-data.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the next big advance in search AI won't happen until we figure out a better way of organizing data.

I had an idea in 2000 for a new kind of GPS. The technology existed back then, but until now the data is missing (we're gradually getting there). If every brick and mortar store fed an XML feed of inventory and prices to a central service (probably Google), you could tie that to location data and have a GPS that let you search by product and price rather than store name or address.

Let's say you're looking for a charging cable for an iPod. Instead of navigating to the nearest Fry's Electronics, you would type in "iPod charger" and sort by price or distance. The results might surprise you...it turns out TJ Maxx has them for $0.99.

Now, if we could just get the stores to give up that data!

<comment><USER4> I'd think it'd be the losinger stores that do that at first (I'm thinking Borders), since maybe that wouldn't be the first store you'd go to. If/when that kicked up sales, other stores would have to follow. What a utopia that'd be though. But, eg Borders can't tell you for sure that something _is_ in the store, from their own system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> aka The importance of context. (Not just in valuing ideas, but also in generating them.)

As an aside, this is the second time this morning that this concept has come up, in my persona communications. (Dare I note some context in this, itself?)

</comment><comment><USER6> I found the article self-contradictory.

In case of Google, he actually makes a pretty strong case for the algorithm, not "data". The data (the links) were always there. It was precisely the algorithm that _generated information_ from that data.

And a Bayesian Net itself is clearly the by product of applying an algorithm to a data space.

The NetFlix case is anecdotal, but consider the following (equally anecdotal) counter example: The (massive) increase in the available data to humans since the advent of the networks have not contributed to any significant increase in the general intelligence of the population.

Unless by AI he is referring to the highly narrow case of machine creativity given little to no input (of data), then (obviously) algorithms do require data sources.

<comment><USER7> I think you're right that the post is slightly contradictory, but his premise I believe is correct. In all that I have studied on machine learning in both academia and start-up land, I have observed that you consistently pick algorithms to glean out the information you need from a particular dataset.

In many cases you can do what my graduate advisor recommends "keep it simple stupid" meaning that perhaps all that is needed is a k-nn approach and euclidean distance. But sometimes the data is highly overlapped and complex, so you have to go with a more rigorous means of classification or whatnot.

Finally it should be noted that machine learning techniques are relatively new. Neural networks have been around for quite some time and have well documented advantages. ML by contrast is still a lot of black magic (tweaking of various magic parameters and such) so the benefits of various algorithms are somewhat subjective.</comment></comment>


Cancer Cells Use Fructose to Grow: Don't Blame Us, Says Corn Lobby - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20012601-10391704.html

<comment><USER2> I want to see a study that tracks cancer rates per capita over time. It seems like if there were enough analytics done on cancer you could look for rate jumps and use that as a starting point to an investigation.

There is an issue in Carlsbad right now where a bunch of kids have gotten cancer. It is getting a lot of press and a lot of people are trying to say that it has something to do with the Carlsbad soil. But that just seems like a guess.

If there were a lot of raw data out there a researcher could compare Carlsbad cancer rate with other locations. He could compare soil contamination rates with other areas too, and if there was a correlation that would be a good starting place for an investigation. If there were other types of correlations, maybe there is a better place for an investigation.

The point... I think it would be wise to use some of the Cancer research money in this way to look for patterns that cause cancer. I find it frustrating that will all the money behind cancer research, nobody knows what causes cancer.</comment>


Too old - <AUTHOR>

I've turned 50 this year.  I need a full career, that I can be vested at or start a consultant business at, and work for 25 years or so.  I have studied programming ever since January of 1990 and at 12 hours plus every day writing programs. I haven't ever been hired as a programmer.  I studied many programming languages, Java included, and want to certify in C# and .NET and become a consultant and buy my first house.  Am I stuck in dream world forever, or is there a path I can take there?  I'm not a greybeard.  I have little color change and don't look over 30.  Can I make it and make good of it for however long I want or am I stuck with less than efficient years? <comment><USER2> Where are you? Why not apply for a position as a programmer? If you want to certify in C# and .NET, how do you see that happening?

How have you been earning money? What programs have you written? What sort of programming do you want to do? Why do you not become a consultant?

It seems like English is not your first language. "Greybeard" is not talking about the color of your hair, it's talking about the technology you grew up with. Looking 30 is irrelevant - programming like you're 30 is. What ever that means.

Do you have a code base you can demonstrate? Have you contributed to Open Source projects? Do you have code on github?

Have you actually read anything here about the questions you're asking?

The smart way to ask questions include demonstrating that you've done your homework and are ready to benefit from answers people give. You haven't done that - you might think about how to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have thought about the Open Source track of project contributions. In fact, I found Mozilla to have sites for that purpose. Do you know of Mozilla.org? What do you think of that site for contributing? Any other sites you could suggest to me would be appreciated...Thanks.</comment></comment>


Nexus 7 available in India for Rs. 15,999 - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_16gb&feature=home-mt-0#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDcwMywiZGV2aWNlLW5leHVzXzdfMTZnYiJd

<comment><AUTHOR> Nexus 7 available in India for Rs. 15,999. Shipping starts on April 5, 2013!</comment>