Famous Unsolved Math Problems as Homework - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2015/05/01/famous-unsolved-math-problems-as-homework/ <comment><USER2> As a student in 1939, the mathematician George Dantzig once arrived late to a lecture. He mistook the unsolved problems on the blackboard for homework, and solved two of them.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig)

<comment><USER3> I imagine being told that a problem is unsolved changes the way you approach it. You'll assume that 'obvious' things have been tried before. Without that psychological barrier you can try out ideas that are obvious _to you_ that might not have occurred to anyone yet. Telling someone that a problem is unsolved implies they won't be able to solve it unless they're better than all the people who've approached it before in some way. That isn't necessarily true; "better" doesn't really apply at the level of people attempting these problems.

<comment><USER4> relevant:

> When asked, "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics > program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object > oriented software system, all in one year?" Ivan [0] replied: "Well, I > didn't know it was hard."

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland)

<comment><USER5> Or to quote Beyer's Grace Hopper and the invention of the information age:

>Common sense would dictate that the most experienced programmers should have been assigned to these difficult tasks, but, as Hopper glibly explained, young people did not know that they were supposed to fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of my favorite C.S. professors, in a first-year grad class, gave out 3 of these problems as homework, including the first one, without indicating whether it was easy or hard.

The problem was posed as a while loop, and the question was, does the loop terminate for arbitrary n>0, so it seemed very tractable:

      given: n > 0.
      while n != 1:
        if n is odd:
          n = 3n + 1
        else:
          n = n/2

It was a tease. I tried a couple of different ways to prove it, but of course nothing worked. Then I tried to find a counter-example. The numbers get pretty big, in some cases, because applying

      n = 3n + 1

several times in a row will blow "n" up, despite the intervening n = n/2\. This was before arbitrary-precision arithmetic was a thing, so the only tool I knew that could do this was the Unix "dc". I think I was able to get up to n=10K or 50K on our campus VAX.

That was about 30 years ago. I still remember it fondly.

<comment><USER7> Now I'm curious, is it guaranteed to terminate? Is there a name for this problem?

It needs to land on a power of 2 at some point.

<comment><USER8> > Now I'm curious, is it guaranteed to terminate?

No one knows.

> Is there a name for this problem?

The statement that it always terminates is the _Collatz Conjecture_. It's the first problem in the posted article.

<comment><USER9> Just to clarify why, if the result is ever one (the loop's exit condition), then it would be about to get stuck repeating 1,4,2 forever if it didn't exit. If you can prove the loop does not exit (i.e., never reaches one) for some n, then you just proved that, for that n, it would never reach the 1,4,2 repetition pattern even without the stop condition.

It's a clever way to re-state the problem to look more computer-science-y.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the first exercises in The Art of Computer Programming is Fermat's last theorem. Don Knuth rates it as 95/100 in terms of difficulty.

<comment><USER11> It's rated HM45 (higher mathematics required, 45 out of 50) on a 'logarithmic' difficulty scale. Previous editions used to rate it M50 (mathematics, unsolved research problem).

<comment><USER10> I knew I should have checked my facts before I posted. Still, it gave me a good chuckle when I saw it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is great in class and for homework, but it can be taken too far. UChicago professors like to put open problems (without any indication that they are unsolved) on final exams. Half the battles is identifying which problems are unsolved to avoid wasting time on them.

</comment><comment><USER13> In grad school, I had a graph theory professor who assigned a research problem he was stuck on as homework. He didn't tell us that until later, after I had a wasted a lot of time trying to solve it. It wasn't very cool.

<comment><USER14> What, you call that a waste of time?

<comment><USER13> I did feel like it has been a waste of time. He just mixed it in with a bunch of textbook problems. It wasn't a particularly elegant or insightful, just something technical he wanted the answer to. I don't think anyone in the class got it right, as we didn't really have the tools to make progress on it. It was a first year grad class.

It was one of the only times I had a really bad professor in grad school. He was visiting for six months, and you could really tell he didn't want to be teaching. He used an out of print book (Graph Theory With Applications by Bondy and Murty), which meant I had to go to the library to even read it. He lectured at a level that was beyond us, and he literally wouldn't tell us where his office was, so he wouldn't have to answer questions. Maybe with a different teacher I would have been less annoyed about the research problem.

<comment><USER15> Was it Jonathan Farley?

<comment><USER13> Nope. Although I'd rather not say exactly who.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y5sD7Mx...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y5sD7Mxe0BQJ:blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2015/05/01/famous- unsolved-math-problems-as-homework/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=0)

</comment><comment><USER17> These are great problems the first two seem to have obvious modes of proof at first sight ...

What I particularly like is that the Erdos-Strauss problem is one that's accessible to a junior schooler - once you know fractions you can investigate. I could see it forming part of a project like the graph theory investigations posted formerly, [http://jdh.hamkins.org/math-for-eight-year- olds/](http://jdh.hamkins.org/math-for-eight-year-olds/).

</comment><comment><USER18> The most important part of this was, "When I use these problems for in-class work, I will typically pose the problem to the students without telling them it is unsolved, and then _reveal the full truth after they have been working for fifteen minutes_ or so."

Any professor who handed out that assignment to an undergraduate class without fair warning, would likely face a full scale revolt, possible threats of violence, and almost certainly a significant portion of the class immediately dropping him.

[Edit - to be clear, I'm _commending_ the instructor for not hanging their students out to dry by giving a mission impossible homework assignment]

<comment><USER19> Seriously? You think students would revolt after being given an interesting problem to think about for 15 minutes?

<comment><USER20> I'm guessing you've never taught math to undergraduates. Unless they are math majors, for the most part they really don't like being given harder-than- average questions, let alone open problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are there any unsolved math problems that aren't proving things?

<comment><USER22> This isn't a meaningful question. There isn't a distinction between what is mathematics with a proof and what is mathematics without a proof. The examples that others have given about Ramsey numbers are, in fact, a proof. The proof could consist of a gigantic computation or it could be some other deep insight. But in the end, saying the Ramsey number R(5,5) is, say, 47, is not very meaningful without a convincing argument that establishes why it's that number. And those convincing arguments are a proof.

<comment><USER21> That's not true. There is a whole class of problems that are trivial to prove an answer is correct, but very difficult to find the answer. Like factoring the RSA numbers, or finding a large prime number, etc.

<comment><USER22> You're thinking of computer things like P vs NP. Any mathematician who develops some sort of algorithm for factoring large numbers would announce this algorithm and a proof of its correctness as the interesting thing to announce, not merely that some large number was factored, without disclosing how.

Or perhaps they would keep it secret, but it would be a huge cultural faux pas to have a method to factor large numbers without also explaining (and thus proving) how it works.

<comment><USER21> It was just an example of a problem where the hard part is finding an actual answer, not just proving that the answer is correct.

Proving things seems really boring and uninteresting to me, and there is no guarantee the task is even possible.

<comment><USER22> There is no guarantee it's possible to factor large numbers quickly either.

"Proving" isn't distinct from "mathematics". That's what I'm trying to get at. In a sense, a proof is equivalent to a computation (and it's possible to make this precisely true in some contexts).

The public at large has gotten some impression that proofs are something only some kind of mathematics needs, probably after being traumatised by high school geometry classes. Proofs are all that mathematics is.

<comment><USER21> You can model many problems as proofs, but not all, and it's not usually a useful observation. Most interesting math problems have nothing to do with proving things. The problem is people have already solved all the interesting problems. Proofs are just what's left.

One interesting math problem someone told me just the other day was to come up with a series of forward and backward steps that would keep you from falling off a cliff, if a malicious person only chose each 2nd, 3rd or 4th step. Or to find the resistance between two points on an infinite grid of resistors. Or to find a series of bridges to get between several island without ever crossing a bridge twice. Or coloring a map with only 4 colors. Or in machine learning, tons of unsolved problems involving approximating intractable inference problems.

That's a pretty wide variety of problems just off the top of my head, none of which are proving things.

Sure some of the problems might not have a solution, but at least I'm not asking people to solve the halting problem, which is what half of those "unsolved math proofs" require.

Even if you do solve them, the result is uninteresting. You could, at least in theory, quickly explain fermats last theorem to almost anyone. Or the four color theorem, or most of the problems I mentioned. But only a few mathematicians understand the proofs, and sometimes no one understands them (the ones proved computers.)

<comment><USER22> Finding that resistance in the grid of resistors involves performing a computation. That computation is a proof.

You have it in your mind that proofs are something that you don't like and completely distinct from computations. You don't have a clear distinction in your mind between what you like and you don't. It seems to me that some mathematics is just unfamiliar to you, and when that happens, you call it "proofs".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> While these problems are interesting, it would be nice to have a little background on them. Where did they come from? What other problems would be solved by solving these problems?

<comment><USER24> The post links to the wikipedia pages for two of the problms, so it is pretty easy to get the background on them. At any rate, the point of the post was not those particular problems, but how the instructor uses them to challenge the students. I think digressions into why those problems are mathematically or practically interesting would distract from the main theme of the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the Database error is HN math homework..

got any clues?

</comment><comment><USER14> Getting a database connection error...

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like homework I would ignore in favor of getting all of the more solvable homework finished :)

<comment><USER27> That's missing the point. The journey is often more important than the destination (i.e., learning how to explore a problem space, learning how to deal with failure, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> nowadays students will just google it and see that is unsolved

<comment><USER29> Can you Google an equation?

<comment><USER30> You can to a degree. I've done it a bunch for my math classes. :)

EDIT: Also wolfram alpha

<comment><USER29> So how does it look? Lots of parentheses? Are the special characters replaced with something?

<comment><USER31> Write it in TeX, then search for that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Horst Faas defined a new breed of war photographer - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/the-man-who-shot-vietnam.html <comment><AUTHOR> I liked the original title, personally.

</comment><comment><USER2> Did anyone else wonder what kind of Lambda job a Horst Faas would be?</comment>


Finding surprising moves in chess games - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/CYHSM/chess-surprise-analysis <comment><USER3> If I understand your code correctly in analyse_evaluations, you're defining a "surprising move" as a move that has a large change in valuation when it's considered at a higher depth. So if a "human" (really Stockfish at depth 5) evaluates a move as +1 and a "computer" (Stockfish now at depth 11) evaluates the move as +5, the move is surprising.

This is pretty interesting, but I'm not sure if it fully captures all the nuances of what a surprising move is. You might be able to classify a move as tactically surprising if it becomes clear after depth 7 that the ending position is favorable. However, in my opinion truly surprising moves are ones that carry plans that I haven't even considered. Hence, this methodology doesn't capture moves that are positionally surprising as there wouldn't be such a drastic change in evaluation at different depths. I'm not sure where you would start to figure that one out though :)

That being said this is really cool work!

<comment><USER4> You can filter for this:

Take a database of games from pro players; Take the set of all moves where Stockfish-5 agrees that the move actually played is the optimum. Filter for all the moves where Stockfish-11 has a different opinion that results in a big gain in position. What you get is a list of moves that would surprise pro- players under time pressure.

I wouldn't be surprised if professional chess players are all running a version of this against individual known opponents before a tournament to probe for weaknesses.

A harder problem would be to cross-reference this final list with the post- game opinions published by professional commentators and identify major discrepancies. This would be the "wouldn't have thought of it in a million years" list.

<comment><USER3> The list that's returned still contains mainly tactical surprises where Stockfish inaccurately evaluated the position at the end of depth 5. I think what I'm trying to say is there are some moves in a position that aren't tactically surprising (a piece sacrifice, a crazy attacking move, etc.) but positionally surprising (a long maneuver to get a piece to a certain square that I didn't think of). These positionally surprising moves aren't captured by this methodology because they don't involve large fluctuations in valuation when the depth changes.

As to your second point, an issue with how computer chess affects the modern scene is how playing the "best" move in any given position isn't representative of how humans play. Humans carry out plans and evaluate positions to the best of their ability, but the heuristics and procedure they use aren't the same as a computer's. For example, Karjakin didn't prepare for his match against Carlsen last month by playing a bunch of games against Stockfish. Rather he probably analyzed Carlsen's past games and opening choices to come up with a strategy.

I do think you can come up with a way to prepare against individually known opponents by identifying weaknesses programmatically. You can model a human's approach to playing chess as a distribution of parameters (material, king safety, pawn structure, etc.) that take in the current position and return the best move. You also have Stockfish's evaluation which returns the "best" move. With this, it's possible that you could use build a neural network that learns to play very similarly to a certain player by using their past games as a training set and comparing the chosen move to Stockfish's move. The network could learn to mimic the heuristics that the human individual uses to make decisions and playing against this new AI would be great practice for preparing against specific opponents.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I follow your point about tactical vs positional surprise. Surely the ultimate goal of the positional surprise is the same as the tactical surprise - you get an advantage at the end of an expected series of moves. Otherwise what's the point of getting into a surprising position that's not better than the conventional one?

My question is, is there any difference here that can't be solved by, say, upping the ply-number?

On humanlike chess-AI: have an adversarial network that works to classify human vs machine players, and optimize for humanness * strength-of-play in the AI?

<comment><USER5> The difference is that the positional sacrifice is less tangible. A space advantage, a tempo advantage, more mobile pieces, improved cohesion/coordination of pieces (Kasparov was legendary for taking this last kind of advantage and turning it into a lethal attack). It's a dynamic advantage rather than a static/permanent advantage, which also means there's a risk of that advantage dissipating as the game drags on.

These advantages aren't the kind where you can sit back and let the game play out confident of winning. It's a deliberate unbalancing of the equilibrium of the position, and one where this temporary dynamic advantage needs to be used to create a longer-lasting and static advantage.

<comment><USER4> Would it be fair to say you are trying to optimize for future positions where you aren't sure you will win, but the positions resemble certain archetypal positions/ share certain features that are advantageous (i.e. has a high probability of transforming into conventionally advantageous situations)?

I'm sure the chess AIs are full of this sort of knowledge internally, though, in the form of computation optimization algorithms. Perhaps the issue is to translate it to a human-usable format.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, chess engines do have heuristics to include positional advantage in their evaluation of a board, so they "know" in some way that a doubled pawn is disadvantageous or that development of pieces or attacking central squares is beneficial, much as humans know these things.

I've never heard experts discuss this, but I bet it's true that human beings still succeed in appreciating many of these benefits at a higher level of abstraction than machines do. An argument for this is that computers needed an _extremely_ large advantage in explicit search depth to be able to beat human grandmasters. So the humans had other kinds of advantages going for them and most likely still do. One of those advantages that seems plausible is more sophisticated evaluation of why a position is strong or weak, without explicit game tree searches.

I looked at the Stockfish code very briefly during TCEC and it looks like a number of the evaluation heuristics that are not based on material (captures) are manually coded based on human reasoning about chess positions. But if I understood correctly, they are also running machine learning with huge numbers of simulated games in order to empirically reweight these heuristics, so if a particular heuristic turns out to help win games, it can be assessed as more valid/higher priority.

You could imagine that there are some things that human players know tacitly or explicitly that Stockfish or other engines still have no representation of at all, and they might contribute quite a bit to the humans' strength.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems a perfect candidate to test with some well known test games.

Fischer's 17 ... Be6, for example in the Game of the Century

Or 15 ...Nf2 (again Fischer and Byrne) [http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008419&kpage=1](http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008419&kpage=1)

It might be interesting to see how many blunders this identifies compared with traditional analysis. (Looking at the "surprising bad move" vs "surprising good move")

In any case, very interesting work. Others have some good ideas for additional checks/considerations, and it would be interesting to see how this evolves!

<comment><USER8> A good game to test this on is [http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1139126](http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1139126) .

Tal played the move 19. Rf6!!, which instantly wins the game. However, (at least when I tested this a few months ago), Stockfish takes a fairly long time to recognize this-- it prefers the more conservative 19. c4 instead.

<comment><USER9> I just went through the game and man 19. Rf6!! Took me by surprise! What an amazing move!

I also would love to see some chess engine that plays ridiculous moves in the beginning to throw people off guard (i.e. increase greatly increase the variance in possible evaluations) and then crushes the opponent by playing all the computer moves while the human players have to walk on their toes in a minefield of possible blunders because the position is so wacky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note that Stockfish, which this project uses, just won the TCEC computer chess championship.

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

There are other championships out there, but this is an indication that Stockfish is among the very strongest chess-playing entities in the world.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hi! I'm the author of this little library. Somebody apparently took it from my reddit thread ([https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5i54lu/how_to_quanti...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5i54lu/how_to_quantify_surprising_chess_moves/)) and linked it here. Thank you for doing that, i haven't thought this would interest so many people!

I hope i can answer some of your questions given more time but I have to say there are some very cool suggestions here and in the reddit thread which i have to keep in mind.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been thinking about adding a game-analyse feature to my Tarrasch Chess GUI [https://triplehappy.com](https://triplehappy.com). I was toying with the idea of using stockfish plus a poor engine as opposed to stockfish deep plus stockfish shallow. I was actually going to use my own Tarrasch Toy engine (about 1500 elo) as a reasonable proxy of a poor human player. My engine has fixed depth, so when set to very low depth will routinely just do the obvious thing and fall into simple fork traps etc., which would make it possible to auto generate simple explanatory variations like "Not $bad_move_played_by_my_engine because of $refutation_variation_pointed_out_by_stockfish."

Like you I've noticed that often when looking at Engine Analysis the obvious human move doesn't appear as one of the first choices, which usually means there is an opportunity to get the machine to show you some tactics.

So essentially your idea modulated by my assumption it would be difficult to get Stockfish to play sufficiently badly for stockfish deep plus stockfish shallow.

But anyway, congrats to you for actually getting there first and making the idea work.

</comment><comment><USER12> Really cool idea and interesting visualization! I am working on similar / related stuff if you'd like to collaborate further. dsjoerg at gmail.com. I participated in [https://www.kaggle.com/c/finding- elo](https://www.kaggle.com/c/finding-elo)

</comment><comment><USER13> You might also add the condition that best-move(deep-search) != best- move(shallow-search). IMO this is what really makes a move surprising - <USER2> looks bad, but is good.

Btw, I've never seen Rxd4!! from Kasparov-Topalov described as a "natural" move. I'm guessing the author meant "unnatural". :)

<comment><USER14> I read <irony>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish it had examples! I'd be more interested in a move that complicates the game. In fact, what is the most complicated position in chess? (Legal or not)

<comment><USER16> The "Legal or not" part of your question is interesting. I am guessing you mean a "legal" board is one which was derived from the starting position following the legal moves. How could this be determined, short of doing a brute force search from the starting position?

This is something I've thought about when looking at chess problems, whether such problems could actually occur in a real game.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if existing computer chess engines can be modified to do retrograde analysis, and then find some heuristic for positions that are "obviously" possible via legal moves, and then see if the retrograde analysis can reach one of those.

I have a feeling this is often tractable, because we could probably construct a cooperative scenario involving sacrifice of arbitrary pieces at the beginning of the game (maybe via a series of knight captures?), and then the main question is confirming how particular pawns moved past each other, and finding a way of ensuring that no stalemates occurred while positioning the kings.

<comment><USER15> Sounds computationally intensive. It reminds me of an experiment I read about some time ago, tangentially: [http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/blog/2012/02/15/how- experts-r...](http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/blog/2012/02/15/how-experts- recall-chess-positions/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link! That in turn reminds me of how Fischer advocated randomizing starting positions in order to eliminate the role of opening theory.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960)

(because apart from the structure part that the link you gave mentions, experts seem to know a huge amount of explicit opening theory, in terms of memorized opening lines and particular chess masters' view of their tactical consequences)

I'm getting more curious about the reachability question.

There are some discussions at

[https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/4830/how-many- lega...](https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/4830/how-many-legal-but- unreachable-positions-exist)

[https://mathoverflow.net/questions/138133/what-proportion- of...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/138133/what-proportion-of-chess- positions-that-one-can-set-up-on-the-board-using-a-leg)

[https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-many- different-...](https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-many-different- chess-positions-are-there?page=1)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Combinatorics_of_chess_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Combinatorics_of_chess_and_chess_puzzles)

Also related:

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

That includes a retrograde solver for openings, but that's not exactly what I was envisioning -- I was thinking of a retrograde solver for _endgames_ , which then needs something kind of akin to an inverse tablebase ("yes, this family of positions is known to be legal!" instead of "this position is a win for black").</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favourite Emacs hack? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Do you mean clever thing to do with it, or literal hacks?

For the later the the movemail exploit, as documented in Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg book was pretty good.

I reported a couple of trivial predictable-filename issues with bundled lisp too - including one that was related to Mosaic which dates pretty badly:

[https://bugs.debian.org/747100](https://bugs.debian.org/747100)

I guess "neat elisp" is such a wide topic people can and do write lots on the topic. I'll just say "org-mode is awesome".

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant productivity enhancers, but your contribution is also very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just in general, Emacs first class treatment of the "old school" IDE features. Wiring up with grep output and ctags files. It's nice to be able to jump right into any project, any language, with minimal setup and get cracking.

M-x compile is nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> C-h C-t</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use G Keep and Evernote together in your note taking workflow? - <AUTHOR> In fact, this is a problem that I have. I started using Evernote years ago for virtually everything, a true swiss knife. One day I learned about G Keep and decided to give it try. I loved it. So simple and lean, but powerful.
So now I have this personal organization, PKO, dilema in my life. I want to keep using both apps, but for the right thing.
Please share your thoughts, experience or advice. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I use both daily. I use G Keep for temporary notes of any kind, and Evernote for posting on my blog (via Postach.io) and anything I'll want to keep long- term.

So G Keep for short term, Evernote for long term.</comment>


Apple's Launch Event Was Creepy as Hell - <AUTHOR> http://www.thealphapages.com/content/apples-launch-event-was-creepy-as-hell <comment><AUTHOR> Entertaining commentary:

You cannot squeeze out some kind of imprimatur of good citizenship by holding a product launch in a "civic" center.

...

We all knew that Jobs' refusal to dress 'appropriately' was the flipside of a loner genius with a unique vision who wasn't going to conform. He was half- crazy but headed to unexplored territory. The first guy who does that is authentic; the second guy is not. CEO Tim Cook is the second guy.

Cook's persona is creepy, almost mortician-esque. He has an unconvincing forced jubilance, wedded to a lurking, hunchbacked rigidity. His body seems superfluous, a nuisance. The white hair and nerdy glasses round out a kind of depthless, mealy look that betrays a measure of cruelty. His arms hang useless, as if he has to exert every ounce of willpower to raise them when the script calls for mock exultation.

...

As an illustration of how the Apple Watch changed people's lives, he tells us how the watch helped a man keep to an exercise schedule. Does he think we're so dumb we believe this was never possible until the invention of this watch? Also he showed how a doctor could tilt the watch forward and check his daily schedule of rounds; ironically, this task was something that my own father could handle with a small notebook and a pencil in the 1960s, as a doctor at San Francisco General Hospital no less.

The Apple Launch soon became a drone-fest, with Cook introducing another man who was dressed virtually identically to Cook, who introduced another guy dressed the same, and then a woman dressed similarly, then again another guy, like Russian matryorska dolls popping out of each other. They were all in the same uniform, or rather anti-uniform, in some kind of California-forced- conformity/anti-conformity. The last time I saw so many people looking like that, it was the mass suicide at Heaven's Gate.

...

Mercifully, it ended with Cook giving a shout out to the Apple workers in the audience, who responded like cult members fed sugar and gumballs all week. And then, in a fawning introduction, he introduced the band One Republic, who gave a kind of generic performance that would offend nobody, in a hall that hosted revolutionary bands like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead.

Lest I be called a killjoy, let it be noted that I am typing this on a MacBook Air. I have an iPhone 6, and an iPad Mini. I am an Apple person, as it were. But just because I buy the products doesn't mean that I buy the mythology surrounding them.

...

The Apple Launch is a closed circle of fawning sycophants, thrilled with gimmicks, adapted to computers, programmed, a throng of identical authentic individuals chained to their machines and congratulating themselves on being 'connected,' led by a human that resembles a robot.

Two hours of watching the Apple Launch actually made the Manson Family seem homey.</comment>


Germany to restrict Facebook's data gathering activities - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It shouldn't just be Germany to do this, every country should do so.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, Facebook has to learn one way or another.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I didn't like complicated. This is what I use for monitoring my servers - <AUTHOR> http://pingmonitorapp.michael-kuck.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, this app is a side project of mine. Originally I developed this app just for myself, I wanted a super simple solution to keep an eye on my servers and backends. I was tired of all the other complicated apps, some of which even require signing up for some services. Now I have released a new v2 version rebuilt from scratch which addresses lots of the feedback I got.

I am sorry about the free/pro thing. I would love to hand out free promo codes for you guys to try, but unfortunately Apple still doesn't support promo codes for in-app purchases. I you have any feedback, I would love to hear it.</comment>


Beyond E=MC^2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chaoscollective.org/post/42835468168/an-open-letter-to-the-speed-of-light <comment><USER2> Also submitted just over an hour ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5200309>

That has no comments as yet, nor upvotes. I reference it here in case one of them starts to get some comments, and in the hope of avoiding any conversation getting split across the two submissions.</comment>


Quantum mechanics enable pressure sensitive mobile devices - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8504373.stm

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool but they can't say who it is licensed to.

"In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.

"However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices."

Anyone know? Smells of Apple to me.</comment>


Microsoft axes Nokia for HTC - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/19/3356676/htc-microsoft-windows-phone-8-marketing-partnership

<comment><USER2> False. Click bait title. Nokia is not going anywhere. While we are glad to see HTC step up to the podium, we're still extremely good friends with Nokia.</comment>


What Open Source Can Do for Music Making - <AUTHOR> https://futurice.com/blog/what-open-source-can-do-for-music-making <comment><USER2> I think artists are more interested in safe keeping their techniques from copycats. People put in a lot of effort to stand out in a over-saturated market so of course they won't share their tricks.</comment>


Setting up online business in US - <AUTHOR> Hi! Hope everyone is safe & sound.
I'm setting up an online business in the US. I'm however based in the UK. I do not need to have a physical office space to run my business. Is there any service I can use as a proxy for physical address? Does Y-Combinator recommend any service for this? I need a correspondence address in the US in order to open a business bank account. <comment><USER2> A UPS store mailbox is one way.

Also [https://www.virtualpostmail.com/](https://www.virtualpostmail.com/) though it requires some forms

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out [https://Blook.io](https://Blook.io). They can help with the address and bank account

</comment><comment><USER4> \- Stripe Atlas

\- Mercury bank for bank accounts and other legal stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> You should probably check out stripes atlas program

</comment><comment><USER6> Pay attention to sales tax laws too.

<comment><USER7> I also recommend OP to look into this. It can be pretty confusing for someone not from the US.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you write unit testing when creating a new product? - <AUTHOR>

When you're working on a new product, you want to move fast and release an MVP as soon as you can. This contradicts with the practice to create unit tests for all your code, since unit test code can easily take up 50% of your code base. So my question is: do you write unit tests for your new products? And if not, do you take test-ability into account (i.e. by using dependency injection)? <comment><USER2> I don't write the tests. It takes to long when I'm exploring a problem space, but I do write or at least think about test conditions and what it would take to satisfy them.

I find that if I can't easily imagine how I would create a test for the code I'm currently banging on, I don't have enough encapsulation yet to arrive at a workable solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> The testing rules I code by:

\- will someone else be touching the code? If yes then I TDD

\- Am I likely to be touching the code six months from now? If yes then I at least document with tests.

\- Is it a crucial piece of code who's specs I want documented? If yes then I document with tests.

</comment><comment><USER4> only in job interviews, in blog posts, when commenting in HN or answering stackoverflow questions, and only when I have a budget to do so. In other cases, I just try to write self debugging code (assert things, think of edge cases, good logging, never take anything for granted). e.g. I test the code within the code. instead of writing an external test, my test code is within the code, not sure if it makes sense, but that's how I get to do things both fast, and keep quality.

HOWEVER, if I have unit tests available, this is priceless, so if I can have the budget and time to write them, I would, but if writing tests would mean you avoid writing code, just write code (unless you work for SpaceX or NASA)

And to your point, if it's an MVP? I would say ditch the tests at first, it's better to test your idea and market, than test code that might be thrown away. and you should plan to throw away your MVP. you won't be able to live with yourself if you don't. just call it garbage code, and if you get traction, just rewrite the whole thing. it might be a lie your are telling yourself, but if you over engineer your startup, you might end up not knowing if it's true or not.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to start with the discussion: I don't. I feel like it takes up too much of my valuable time (I'm working on my own, so I need all the time I can get). I do however build my software with test-ability in mind (more or less, I probably have to change multiple things if I really want to unit test my code).

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has bootstrapped themselves to a basic level of coding knowledge thanks to Google, I'll ask the potentially stupid question: How do I learn how to do unit testing? I know what it is but I have no idea how to go about it. Resources?

<comment><USER4> What is your language? the answer can be rspec, junit, selenium, etc based on the language and framework.

basically unit testing is on the function/class/module basis.

you break your design into modules, each having a clear role, and make them plug into each other in a way that you can "mock" the "rest of the world" (e.g. other objects) and test only that part.

to give an example, let's say you create a car, the unit test is to take a wheel, and spin it as if it's on the road, but without a car. take the lights, and plug them in as if they are in the car, take the engine and run it as if it's connected to the transmission, etc. in a car it's a bit more difficult, but in code, if your view needs a model, it doesn't matter if it was created from a database, a text file, or coded, as long as the interface fits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most will tell you they test. Few do.</comment>


Bing adds tweets from prominent tweeters to its results - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/bing-keeps-its-foot-on-the-gas-adds-tweets-to-results/?awesm=tcrn.ch_52I&utm_campaign=techcrunch&utm_content=techcrunch-autopost&utm_medium=tcrn.ch-twitter&utm_source=twitter.com

<comment><USER2> Brilliant. Whenever you're willing to do something your competitors won't there's a huge opportunity.

Maybe I just read too much Seth Godin, but I think this is huge.

<comment><USER3> That's a brilliant quote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So perhaps it's a prototype, or somehow due to api limits, but why can't they add all tweets to their results? Number of followers provides a natural ranking mechanism.

<comment><USER5> I think you put a little too much weight in follower count. There are a lot of methods to drive up your follower count (following big names, finding accounts that auto follow back, etc). If your followers aren't people that actually chose to follow you because you provide some value, what good is your number in determining importance?

<comment><USER6> Follower count is the only mechanism that Twitter provides for determining worth -- misguided or not. With some sort of tweet-ranking (everyone's doing it these days), perhaps there would be a better way to determine "prominence". -m

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe I misunderstood, but Google _is_ indexing tweets.

</comment><comment><USER8> This almost feels "desparate" by Microsoft. Keep throwing stuff at Bing until it ... what, hits some magic "we love it!" threshold?

<comment><USER9> Out of curiosity, I've been trying Bing out for a few weeks. It doesn't feel desperate at all; incredibly, it's actually good. And I've been surprised at how much I enjoy its well-chosen and often beautiful pictures of the day---as with (restricted) Twitter results, a tiny differentiator vs. Google, but I suspect an important one.

MSFT might, just _might_ , not be quite as dead as we thought.

<comment><USER10> I second that. I've had bing on my work computer for the last several weeks, and google at home. I haven't missed google on my work computer. And I think the UI for bing is pretty slick; you hover over a link and see a preview.

A couple of times, I didn't find something in bing, switched back to google.... and couldn't find it either. So I guess you could say that, provisionally, I'm sold.

<comment><USER9> _A couple of times, I didn't find something in bing, switched back to google.... and couldn't find it either._

That matches my experience as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Apps Services Were Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/appsstatus

<comment><USER2> This is the message:

"Sorry, there seems to be a problem. The service you're looking for is temporarily unavailable. We're working hard to restore your access as soon as possible. Please try again in a few hours. Thanks for your patience."

0900 CDT edit: works for me now.

<comment><USER3> Getting the same message. However, this is happening to some of my logins only. Same with e-mails, some of them are working fine and some of them are timing out or asking for passwords. For a second I thought someone hacked my e-mail. :>

<comment> g-garron Me too, I was really scared. Now I know is Google's problem I am breading again.

<comment><USER4> > Me too, I was really scared. Now I know is Google's problem I am _breading_ > again.

I hate it when Google get in the way of my sandwich making ;-)

<comment><USER5> Given the naming scheme of Android releases, it seems like Google would let you eat cake instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google Apps status page: <http://www.google.com/appsstatus>

</comment><comment><USER7> The Register reports that GMail went down exactly a year ago:

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/google_gmail_outage/>

<comment><USER8> Huffington Post reports that Gmail also went offline on April 29th of 2010.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/gmail-down-check- gm...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/gmail-down-check-gmail- ou_n_557351.html)

Google reports that Gmail also went offline on April 24th of 2009.

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/current-gmail- outage....](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/current-gmail-outage.html)

(Sadly, the partial Gmail outage of 2011 seemed to be February 27th, or this would be an epic pattern of "don't trust Gmail during the end of April" ;P.)

[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and- Collaboration/Google-...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and- Collaboration/Google-Suffers-First-Gmail-Outage-of-2011-850632/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a Google Apps reseller and thought, oh no, I should call all my clients and let them know about this outage before they call me! Where can I get a full customer list.. the admin panel.. oh.

<comment><USER10> Your only copy of your customers, is in a third party reseller control panel?

<comment><USER9> Of course not. Just the fastest way to get them! Fortunately, Confluence, Autotask, and my memory are all still intact!

<comment><USER11> "and my memory"

When all else fails, this is the true old school solution. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nearly 30 minutes since it started and the status page is it's customary blank screen.

<http://imgur.com/OLyGf0O>

Almost as bad as AWS at getting notices up.

<comment><USER13> Odd, "Admin control panel/API" is marked as disrupted for me.

<comment><USER12> Yeah it is now, only took 30 minutes :-)

The outage is affecting IMAP/POP/HTTP for email plus Gchat, the admin control panel/API is probably the least impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, their email services are still working, because I got a message about our trial ending today and that we need to start paying. I hope this comes up before we get automatically cut off..

</comment><comment><USER15> Getting IMAP rejections, and Google Docs doesn't seem to be working: <http://cl.ly/image/3W2e0X1O1i0o>

<comment><USER16> smtp.googlemail.com also failing

(edit: intermittently)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oddly enough, gmail itself works on my Google Apps domain. But accessing my account page does not work. As well, I can't log into Gchat using one of the generated passwords (says password rejected). I'm guessing this is the same reason IMAP is failing for others.

</comment><comment><USER18> Already discussed here <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5563949>

Service disruption

[http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1366217999000&iid=bb886daf880ab16f9a8b5f8bbe2f34b0)

</comment><comment><USER19> At least Google Reader still works :-)

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't get why apps and all sorts of other google sites go down a lot, but search never has in my experience. Why is that? Is search just simpler? Does it fail in non-obvious ways? Enormous redundancy/fail-over on search?

<comment><USER21> Search is (mostly) stateless. They can copy the search database to hundreds of DCs around the world, and each can operate independently - so if one of them has a problem, it's not likely to affect the others (unless it's bad data, but that's why you shouldn't deploy index updates to all DCs simultaneously). There's some personalization, sure, but you can just fall back to non- personalized search if that breaks.

Things like gmail, on the other hand, are inherently stateful. When you log into gmail, you have to eventually connect to one system that maintains your mailbox. Sure, there might be replication - but the replicas are all talking to each other. It's surprisingly easy to have a cascade failure in a system like this, where one of the replicas going down triggers (directly or indirectly) all the others failing as well. Or you can have some bad data that gets replicated out, and then proceeds to confuse everything that's looking at it - unlike search, you have to replicate that data immediately, and don't get to enjoy the benefits of a staged deployment.

This also explains why not all users were affected - I'd guess that their system is divided into some number of shards, and users are assigned to a particular shard. That 0.07% of users affected probably represents a single unhealthy shard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm wondering if this is related to the new update they did to the admin control panel.

[http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/04/make-g...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/04/make-google-chrome-do-your-bidding-with-new-google-apps- control-panel/)

<comment><USER23> There is a massively linked Boston bomber Google Docs spreadsheet making the rounds -- the last time a viral Google doc saw that sort of exposure, the service went down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Since you always worry you are going crazy when a high-uptime site is down: mine too

FWIW: I was able to log in by going to www.gmail.com and logging in suing firstname.lastname@example.com as the username.

<comment><USER25> Tried this -- didn't work for me unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm getting IMAP logins rejected as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm also getting errors when trying to retrieve Gmail messages in IOS Mail. "Wrong username or password", but it works in a browser.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's intermittent for me. I first noticed trouble when the Android gmail app said it couldn't connect for one of my accounts. I cannot login to my apps domain control panel right now, but I can access its email via both IMAP and the web interface. However, another account on that same domain cannot access via IMAP.

</comment><comment><USER29> This explains the SMTP problems I was having, I was worried someone had hacked my account or something...

</comment><comment><USER30> It's interesting that I kind find news for this on google itself, but Hacker News already has two posts.

</comment><comment><USER31> The dashboard hasn't caught up. Admin Control Panel is one thing, but GMail/Apps has a huge impact!

</comment><comment><USER32> As I said in the other google apps thread on hackernews..

I thought I'd give them a call to find out whats going on, however to call them I need my support/admin pin - which is only accessible from the admin portal and without it they won't answer the phone. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER33> Appears Groups is down also.

</comment><comment><USER34> Still getting errors sending transactional messages to users on gmail

Apr 17 10:23:30 postfix/smtp: connect to gmail-smtp- in.l.google.com[2607:f8b0:4002:c02::1a]:25: Network is unreachable

</comment><comment><USER35> I did wonder about this. My phone said my username or password was wrong for my email, got a bit worried, so I tried with their webmail and it worked there.

</comment><comment><USER36> Was having problems with play developers console yesterday, suddenly it was a 404. Seems like they're planning something in my opinion.

</comment><comment> X-Istence That explains why I can't get my email =).

</comment><comment><USER37> This is happening for gmail for some accounts, but mine seem to be running. Seems the outage is per user account.

</comment><comment><USER38> I got a 500 when I try to access our Drive too. It's been an hour now. Using the business google services.

</comment><comment><USER39> I also can't authorize an app to have access to a Gmail account. Google's auth page presents an error.

<comment><USER40> Same here. Intermittent though. I'm like 2 for 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Faaack. I thought I was just having a local connection issue. Same problem here.

</comment><comment><USER42> digitalpbk$ nslookup smtp.google.com Server: 188.8.131.52 Address: 188.8.131.52#53

 __server can't find smtp.google.com: NXDOMAIN

SMTP servers are down for me. Anyone else?

<comment><USER34> NXDOMAIN wouldn't be server down, that's no DNS record. Still won't work, but different (much bigger) issue.

<comment><USER43> I'm pretty sure the 'bigger' issue here is that it's smtp.gmail.com - smtp.google.com is, I believe, _always_ down on account of not existing. :P

<comment><USER44> Works fine for me:

        > dig +short @188.8.131.52 smtp.gmail.com
        gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com.
        126.96.36.199
        18.104.22.168

[http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/nsl...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/nslookup- flaws.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Down here. Additionally, my iCal won't sync with goocal.

</comment><comment><USER45> I cannot access my email from Sparrow app too.

</comment><comment><USER46> Webmaster tools also down with auth failure.

</comment><comment><USER47> Google Drive is down for me on Apps too.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yeah.. my pop mail stopped working too

</comment><comment><USER49> The provision api is still fine doh.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why do people report this kind of stuff on hacker news. I am sure everyone knows how to google for a site's status page.

</comment><comment><USER51> SAML logons are failing, too.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's back.

</comment><comment><USER53> not only that, seems like pop3 is also facing issues ..

</comment><comment><USER54> Now its working..

</comment><comment><USER55> And We're up.

</comment><comment><USER56> down for me too</comment>


Ask HN: How to Convert HTML to PNG on a Serverside? - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone!
I need an advice. I work on a web app, that needs to send PNG images to users based on their achievements. The easiest way to do that is to construct an HTML that contains all the information, make a screenshot of it and finally upload it to the server. But this solution is extremely not optimal.
So I'm curious how to implement the same logic, but without frontend involvement in terms of image generation. I know that there are many commercial libs and services for that, but maybe there is some open-source more or less good libs for that.
I'm fine to work with Java, Scala, NodeJS or Golang.
Any advice is welcome! <comment><USER2> Not quite HTML, another way to similar output:

Both of the below should have a library you can use to generate the text into an image, if you don't want to work with them directly.

[http://www.graphicsmagick.org](http://www.graphicsmagick.org)

[https://imagemagick.org/index.php](https://imagemagick.org/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://wkhtmltopdf.org/](https://wkhtmltopdf.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! That's something what I'll try to use today Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm currently bootstrapping an api/sass that takes any url and converts it to an image. It runs on top of chromium and uses the CDP protocol to do cool things like automate basic auth, custom http headers, injected js, mock mobile templates and device emulation, custom interactions with the webpage, it can also return json or upload the results to dropbox, s3, or google cloud storage. I'm looking to chat with people interested in this kind of technology as I polish off the final touches on the API and get the product live!

What kind of features would be useful to you if you were to go the API route for something like this?

</comment><comment><USER5> This arrived in my RSS feed today. Seems to fit the bill.

[https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/2019/12/generate- images...](https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/2019/12/generate-images-from- html-with-gulp-and-puppeteer/)

</comment><comment><USER6> There are libraries for converting HTML to PNG. Why would you need the frontend for anything?

Grab the users' achievement from the database(I could only assume user data is stored here). Format it however you want it to look in an HTML file then convert said HTML to a PNG. Its dead simple.

I did the equivalent but with PDF's for customer bills for a past job.

<comment><AUTHOR> the main point here — I can not find any good lib with good community on GitHub I know there is html2image-java, but it's not maintained for a while :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does it need to be HTML? SVG is easy to generate programmatically, and doesn't need to be converted.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was considering HTML, since I know that it's pretty easy to represent with help of it what I need :) Haven't worked with SVG before, but apparently I have to look on it closer Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Headless chrome/puppeteer...

<comment><AUTHOR> No-no Headless chrome / firefox doesn't work here, since I need to run Selenium on the server and that's the most obvious overhead because any browser, even in a headless mode consumes RAM. This becomes even more critical if you need to process more than 100 images per minute :|

<comment><USER9> From experience 100 images / min with chrome and puppeteer (you don't need Selenium) is more than doable with less than 1gb ram.</comment></comment></comment>


The hotness-IQ tradeoff in academia - <AUTHOR> https://hardsci.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/the-hotness-iq-tradeoff-in-academia/ <comment><USER2> This post reads like a niceguy meme. However, I strongly suspect the correlation is real based on my own experience. The softer the science, the more it needs to be sold it seems.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish him well getting that fit through peer review.</comment>


Facebook hated as much as airlines, cable companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38324957/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

<comment><USER2> If the data is indeed valid, it might have less to do with the privacy concerns and the ads, I don't think mainstream users care about either that much. The site is designed such as to exploit some of the weaknesses of people, such as the fear of missing out or the compulsive hoarding (of friends).. As such, many users might feel addicted to it, but at the same time feel miserable for wasting time on it. That might show up on the survey as a vague negative feeling. Kindly argue why I am wrong before downvoting, please.

<comment><USER3> Adding to your comment, it's my understanding that many people feel the site is poorly designed. I've often heard "I wish there were an easier way to..." in relation to facebook.

<comment><USER4> And its so very buggy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would bet this has nothing to do with Facebook itself. Look at the other things people hate: Airlines, insurance, the cable and fone companies. Like it or not these companies are infrastructure, basically things people are forced to use to function well in society. This breeds resentment, people hate the things they have to do whether that hatred is fair or not.

I don't like phones, and I hate that I have to pay to have a phone to maintain a large chunk of social interaction (there are alternatives, but they suck). This means I am far more demanding of what I want from the phone company, and far less tolerant when they do things I dislike. Yet I keep giving them money.

Facebook reaching this point means that facebook will be harder to unseat, due to it having "but whatcha gonna do about it" status, not easier because people hate them.

<comment><USER6> >function well in society

You are giving undeserved credit to Facebook by equating it to infrastructure. If facebook disappears tomorrow, people may miss it but they are not going to stop functioning well in society.

<comment><USER7> I'm not entirely convinced. I have a number of actual, real-life friends who I communicate with almost exclusively via Facebook. I don't know their email address, and in some cases I don't know their phone numbers. If Facebook went _poof_ tomorrow, I would be able to get new contact information via other mutual friends, but it would be a major pain.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Not to mention planning events and sharing pictures (the second one being significantly less important, but still useful). Sure there are alternatives, but they are far less convenient for everyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is absolutely nothing about methodology on the ASCI site. Here is their official commentary on the results: [http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task...](http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=220&Itemid=236) The MSNBC pretty much lifts sentences from there.

This is a bigger picture summary of how other industries fare to give some perspective: <http://www.theacsi.org/images/stories/ACSI_TREE_07_10.pdf>

It's hard to tell if these findings really mean anything, since this is social media's first year on the survey. And without more information, it's hard to say if a direct comparison across industries even makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you look at the survey closely, you'll see that FoxNews has the highest satisfaction among all of the other brands that were analyzed.

I would take this data with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER11> Their methodology is a great mystery, but I think they poll people who hit the websites in question. In which case Fox News' score is no surprise. It's the most polarizing news source out there, and the other pole isn't part of the poll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to know exactly what group was surveyed and how the score is put together. Was it an opt-in kind of thing, so only passionate/angry people would chime in. What were the questions phrased as? etc...

Traditional questions like "How much value would you say Facebook brings you?", "How valuable is FB to you?", "If Facebook were to stop existing, how bad would that be for you?" etc..

Those are the kind of questions even your average airliner or insurance company would have at least somewhat positive responses from, but since people feel like they're possibly wasting their time, the score might seem low.

btw. more info and stats: [http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task...](http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=212&Itemid=220)

</comment><comment><USER13> > _"Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score > so poorly with consumers"_

What, do they not _talk_ to people? 9/10ths of the people I encounter / talk to / overhear (friends or not) on campus & otherwise house quite a bit of dislike for Facebook, "but all [their] friends are on there", so they feel obligated to stay. About 9/10ths of the remaining people have no strong feelings either way, and the left-over 1/10th actually _like_ it.

edit: And yes, I do actually mean those ratios. In the past year or two, I have heard _only a couple people_ say they like FB, and quite literally _hundreds_ of dislikes. Nearly everyone on campus has an account, and that means you can sometimes catch a dozen or two (or more) remarks daily out of several thousand students if you listen for it.

<comment><USER14> I think most people will _say_ they dislike Facebook, mainly due to the time commitment involved, but they would feel quite disconnected if they were suddenly unable to use it to keep up with their friends.

It's not that people are using Facebook "because everybody else uses it" (that is, because of peer pressure), but because people have come to _need_ a service that "everybody else uses."

<comment><USER13> Isn't that kind of the _definition_ of peer pressure? You _need_ to do something to stay in group A. Do it or be removed.

Or maybe an addiction? One can dislike what they're addicted to, and still be strongly pressured to use it.

Except this group A is the biggest & most connected group the world has ever seen => potentially the biggest & most powerful peer pressure the world has ever seen (depends on what value you assign to those connections, and what value they assign, and the availability of other options (i.e.: none, for most people, however incorrect that belief is)).

What people _want_ is something _like_ Facebook. Clearly. But that doesn't mean they _have_ to like Facebook to keep using it; it's just the only real option.

<comment><USER14> Almost all of the complaints I've heard about Facebook from college students stem from the amount of time "wasted" on it. However, all of this time is spent interacting with other people on the service, actively or not. So, it is hard to see how one could make a Facebook-esque service where the problem of time being "wasted" is solved without destroying the very point of the service.

<comment><USER13> Oh certainly, I'm not claiming it's an easy fix. It's kind of an inherent quality/flaw of social tools.

That said, Facebook has aimed 180 degrees away from productivity. The whole site is designed to be addictive and encourage more pages / more time. (I mean, duh. That's how they make their money. It just ends up sucking for users.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds about right, in all three cases there's essentially no competition. Airlines are uniformly awful (with the partial exception of Southwest), cable companies have a combination of natural and government-granted monopolies, and Facebook is the poster child of dominance via network effects. Satisfying customers doesn't have to be a high priority for any of them.

<comment><USER16> I actually don't hate on airlines, even though I used to be a frequent flyer in what is still one of the most one-company airline markets in the United States. The only dealing I have with cable companies is letting my Internet signal come into my house on a TV cable that has never been used for TV. I'm not sure the comparison in the article fits me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This isn't really a fair comparison. More people use Facebook than they do any _individual_ cable company.

I don't have an opinion on airlines that I've never flown or cable companies that only exist on the west coast. It would be more interesting to take a sample who use both Facebook and, say, Comcast, and see which was more hated.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ryanair is the classic example of a company that is supposedly "hated" yet people use en masse nonetheless because it provides a service that people want.

</comment><comment><USER19> I really just think hating Facebook is in vogue and the fad will pass. It's the best way to keep in touch with people you don't see that often, bar none, and people will continue to use it because that's where everyone is.

</comment><comment><USER20> Right, but people aren't switching to Greyhound or going back to broadcast only.

</comment><comment><USER21> told you so. you fags negged me for calling it before it happened.</comment>


Get ready lots of stories about Myspace - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2007/07/11/myspace-dont-you-forget-about-me/

<comment><AUTHOR> right on schedule:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33960></comment>


Honda Needs a Tune-Up (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://davidsd.org/2008/12/honda-needs-a-tune-up/ <comment><USER2> Tom Scott made a short video a few months ago discussing this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef93WmlEho0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef93WmlEho0)

<comment><USER3> He actually cites the above website in the video, a fact which I hadn't noticed until just rewatching it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A long road close by my old University had a set of regular undulations from medieval farm works. I had a Mathematics Lecturer who boasted that he had worked out the speed he had to travel down it to hit the resonant frequency for his car when he was having to drive his Mother-in-Law. Apparently they didn't get on.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if it's still the case, but I remember a few years ago how commercials would get shorter over time. Take a single commercial, and start off showing all N seconds of it. Then, later, just show a brief section of it, and let the person's brain do the rest.

That, and I've read somewhere that people tend to remember the beginning and the end, but not the middle for a given thing. Edit the end because that's what people will remember, but it also won't stand out as being fully edited.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fun article.. From the title it sounded like something about their business model or kaizen related stuff

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I thought so too.

I don't think it was their best engineers that worked on this. Just some guys to spare for the marketing dept.</comment></comment>


Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/an_antitrust_app_buvCWcJdjFoLD5vBSkguGO <comment><USER2> Genuine question: How are the restrictions placed by Apple on what's allowed in the App Store any different then the restrictions placed by console owners on what's published for the XBox or PS3? For example, the XBox XNA community games system requires people to use .Net - there's no technical reason for this (the XBox is clearly capable of running native code). However, Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo still seem to be allowed to place pretty heavy licensing requirements on game publishers (so strict you can't actually know them without handing over a lot of cash).

I tend to agree with antitrust action most of the time, but it seems that platform owners should be able to have some say over their platform direction, if they honestly think that doing so is good for their business. Whilst they don't have a monopoly in the market, and there is plenty of choice for consumers, what benefit does the public get from forcing people trying the "Closed is better" business model to open up to direct competitors (who, depending on what you believe, might seriously damage the experience for end users)? If the market dislikes the closed system, it will fail. If it grows to be dominant, then sure - anti-trust seems reasonable. But whilst competition is thriving, it seems heavy handed to rule out certain business models.

<comment><USER3> >How are the restrictions placed by Apple on what's allowed in the App Store any different then the restrictions placed by console owners on what's published for the XBox or PS3?

>For example, the XBox XNA community games system requires people to use .Net - there's no technical reason for this (the XBox is clearly capable of running native code)

XNA requires you to target the .NET runtime. It does not dictate what tools you use to generate the assemblies. If Microsoft had a clause saying that you had to use Visual Studio Ultimate on Windows 7, they would get demolished.

And you can target native, but you have to buy the expensive SDK and sign a revenue sharing agreement. That's the financial model behind consoles (where they are generally sold at a loss). Again, though, how you develop is not Microsoft's concern, and you have no limits on that, so long as you fall within the bounds of the runtime.

Apple's restrictions are not at all comparable.

If Apple implemented 3.3.1 as a clause that Apple will impose minimum quality levels, feature completeness (e.g. "you must use the current available features of the platform"), etc, that would be one thing and they would have been entirely within their rights to do that. That is _not_ what they did, but instead they are saying that a super shitty, super inefficient crapshoot of an app that misuses and underuses the platform is okay, but one that is developed in a different manner is not just because.

<comment><USER2> The specifics are different, no doubt - but the ethos is the same. Microsoft force you to use .Net (of some form) and their APIs because that fits their business model (i.e. ties you to the XBox). They're restricting me from using my platform portable pure C code, which is their choice. I obviously don't know, but suspect if large amounts of code started targeting XNA in a cross platform way, they'd come down on that too. I also don't know what the requirements of their commercial licence are (and unless you're an XBox developer, neither do you), but it's almost certainly more than just revenue sharing (they would never allow the publication of a "Crash a plane into the twin towers" game, for example). Moreover, I do know that Nintendo certain did (and I think still do) have strict policies on types of violence in games for their platforms.

Regardless, the general point stands. They're making choices based on what they think is best for their platform, and letting the market chose. This is how the free market is supposed to work. It breaks down when there are entrenched monopolies, or when other external factors prevent people from exercising their right to buy an alternative, or start a competitor - but that is demonstrably not the case here. So why not let the market decide?

<comment><USER3> "They're making choices based on what they think is best for their platform, and letting the market chose."

The former is absolutely true. The latter is absolutely not. Hence why the government is looking into it.

Apple's actions are completely inexcusable and borderline illegal. It is only by incredible bravado and arrogance that they could have ever thought that 3.3.1 would be acceptable. They could have accomplished the same goal more subtly, but, probably due to Jobs universe-sized ego, they had to bring this upon themselves.

"This is how the free market is supposed to work."

No, it isn't at all how the free market is supposed to work. 3.3.1 is the exact opposite of a free market.

<comment><USER4> You're missing the bit where Apple isn't by any means the only phone manufacturer around.

<comment><USER5> See the Eastman Kodak case: [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US...](http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=504&invol=451)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is absolutely retarded.

a) The market will figure this out. If developers don't want to code in just Cocoa touch or make apps for other platforms a priority because the language is easier, they will.

b) Things are in such a nascent stage. Android is growing like a weed. A suit like this might make some partial sense a few years down the road if there was enough data there.

c) The department of justice will probably hire a bunch of people with no real domain expertise to look into the subject.

d) The potential precedent set could be scary. @archgrove mentioned the xbox example. So now, microsoft might HAVE to allow us to build XBLA games using any tools out there. If I were microsoft, I wouldn't want sub standard crap getting in there.

<comment><USER7> How do you know something is substandard just because it's made with some other library / language ? Especially with an "yet to be created" library / language ?

If you think "the market will figure this out" (which I think in itself is wrong) why don't we let the market figure out which language is better ? If the users don't like some products, they won't buy them. If all Cocoa touch apps make money and all the Flash apps lose money the market will fix itself, no ?

<comment><USER6> I think there's certainly a certain bar of quality apple has in terms of the human interface guidelines / look+feel of the app. The fart apps might be crap, but they still look like iPhone apps. I have no desire and i can understand apple's desire to not want apps that have that shitty flash/flex look on the iphone. Now... if the apps look the same, I don't think this matters.

Is it a valid theory to say: this is less about the back end/performance issues and more about the front end/look+feel of apps?

<comment><USER8> They can enforce this by rejecting ugly apps (I hope they don't). These definitely don't look like iPhone apps, even though they are native: <http://nativegui.posterous.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd rather see the market handle it. We have plenty of competition and choice.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since Apple doesn't have anything resembling a monopoly in any market it operates in, and since all DoJ can do is file a suit that is predicated on them having one, this is unlikely to go anywhere.

<comment><USER11> I don't think tying claims need to prove an actual monopoly, just the somewhat lower standard that the seller has sufficient market power in the tying product's market for the tying arrangement to restrain trade in the tied product's market. It's been applied in the past to car manufacturers who tried to corner their own cars' replacement-parts market, even though the manufacturers didn't actually have a monopoly in the car market.

It's hard to prove, though, because it tends to require showing that the company did the tying solely or mainly for the purpose of restraining trade, as opposed to for some legitimate purpose. The car manufacturers lost because the courts didn't buy their argument that their attempts to limit the replacement-parts market were for quality-assurance reasons. Apple would have to argue that section 3.3.1 isn't intended mainly or solely to stop cross- platform compatibility, but has some legitimate, non-trade-restraining purpose, like improving the reliability or quality of iPhone apps. Probably even just "it makes it easier for us to review apps if they're all in the same languages" would be a good enough explanation. A bad result would be a leaked smoking-gun email saying "hey we should institute this policy to stop people from porting our apps to Android".

Monopoly leveraging is a separate (but related) concept, as far as I understand it, and a bit easier to prove, because there's a much stronger presumption that if it's happening, it's bad, regardless of the reasons.

(Edit: edited/expanded a bit for clarity)

<comment><USER12> 3.3.1 is a section of the Terms of Use of developers seeking to use Apple's distribution channel. Apple isn't trying to make middle-ware-built iPhone apps _illegal_. It just doesn't want them on the app store. An important distinction between the car/part and printer/ink analogies.

Forcing Apple to repeal 3.3.1 doesn't allow offending software to be _built_ and _sold_ (as it already can be), it forces Apple to _stock its shelves_ with it and thus take on users' expectations that Apple will _support_ it (by making sure an OS update doesn't break hundreds of apps by running afoul of a popular middleware package).

<comment><USER13> >> It just doesn't want them on the app store.

Where else exactly could they go?

>> Forcing Apple to repeal 3.3.1 doesn't allow offending software to be built and sold (as it already can be), it forces Apple to stock its shelves with it

Those two things are the same, by Apple's design.

<comment><USER12> Cydia or the other jailbreak market (can't recall the name).

Those certainly aren't remotely equivalent options, but my point was just that 3.3.1 is about Terms of Use for the App Store, not an attempt to _legally_ stifle an existing secondary market as with car parts and ink cartridges.

It's thus a qualitatively different situation.

More relevant precedent might be found by looking at other situations where service providers have added terms to limit allowed devices/tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think an intervention would be a disaster.

If Steve Jobs is right, and the progress of the platform is really slowed by cross platform toolkits, then intervention would literally slow down the progress of computing, and possibly set a precedent that slows progress indefinitely. If by being right, Apple ends up in a more dominant position, that won't prevent Google and Microsoft from altering their own strategies to compete. Both of them still have massive market power they can leverage.

If he's wrong, then surely he's handing a serious competitive advantage to Google, Microsoft, RIM, Nokia etc, and as all the cool apps start to appear on all of these platforms along with a plethora of interesting and cool devices, Apple will shrink back to a minority player differentiated only by style.

I think it would be a terrible for both sides of this debate if the outcome is determined by judges and Apple is not allowed to take this risk.

<comment><USER15> Your comment is an example of a false dichotomy. We do not have precisely two options:

A) He's right and forcing them to allow frameworks will slow computing as a whole B) He's wrong and cool apps will start to appear on all the competing platforms

There's also, just as one example:

C) He's wrong but large numbers of cool apps will not start to appear only on competing platforms (perhaps because the app markets on all those platforms combined are dwarfed by Apple's App Store)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "[O]nly Apple's programming tools." This is completely wrong. Apple isn't restricting anyone from using, e.g., Textmate, they are requiring use of c/c++ and objective-c. These languages run on many other platforms, obviously.

</comment><comment><USER17> The antitrust issue should really be about how apple is selectively enforcing this issue. I think the market can flush out the root issue in 3.3.1, but apple picking and choosing which companies can break the rule is really where the DOJ should come into play.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if we'll also see an inquiry into 3.3.9, which is about data collection and impacts mobile ad networks. If Apple's own mobile ad network can leverage data for targeting that other ad networks can't, I really can't see those ad networks just acquiescing without exploring their legal options.

</comment><comment><USER19> Prediction: this will be a complete farce and probably even impede market correction of the problem.

Also; I thought 3.3.1 wasn't in force yet? We _still_ have no practical examples of where Apple will enforce this. Surely that is important before talking about action?

</comment><comment><USER20> Link to printable format, no ads: [http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/business/an_antitrust_app...](http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/business/an_antitrust_app_buvCWcJdjFoLD5vBSkguGO)

</comment><comment><USER21> Also it's unclear what is getting approved, and what not. And for what time.

This can totally destroy small companies that have invested heavily, and are still waiting to be approved.

In a sense it reminds of the XBLA slots (commercial Arcade).

</comment><comment><USER22> Does using vi to edit my program comply with 3.3.1 ?

</comment><comment><USER23> Hasn't seemed to hit the stock price.

</comment><comment><USER24> As much as I would like to protect the world from Apple with law... I don't think Section 3.3.1/Anti-trust are the way to go.

I just don't see the connection... Apple aren't encouraging programmers to choose between Apple or other platforms - just the ones inept enough to need the crutch of Flash (or similar) to call themselves programmers to start with. Writing cross platform code is precisely as possible as it was before 3.3.1 - its just not so easy that every idiot can do it and submit their rubbish to the App store.</comment>


Ventures that require large upfront investments - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@adamzerner/profitable-ventures-that-require-large-upfront-investments-7d9d1728684a

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a big belief of mine, so I'd love to get anyones thoughts on why it's wrong.</comment>