How do I startup if I don't own the code? - <AUTHOR>

I was recently approached about commercializing some software I created while working at an academic research lab.  I was paid with research grants so I'd assume the school owns the code.<p>I'd love to turn this into a startup... What's the best way to do it considering I don't know who owns the source? <comment><USER2> If you can rewrite it from scratch, that may be the safest plan. You'll probably need to anyway. You can also go talk to the university about it, but many (perhaps most) universities are cluelessly overreaching about this sort of thing, and take forever as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid of the overreaching part... I'd love to rewrite, but i'm having trouble justifying a rewrite of something that works really well as-is. Translating it to another language doesn't seem like enough.

<comment><USER3> Just translating would probably leave it as a "derivative work". However, note that licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses came specifically from universities releasing their code under very permissive terms. Perhaps your university can be convinced to do the same.

<comment><USER2> How many universities have ever given a startup trouble for making software that was a "derivative work," though? Not one that I know of. In practice it's enough to rewrite under conditions where no one has claim to your IP.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't make sense to sue a startup--it's just not profitable. However, there are instances where universities have appeared to wait for the company or technology to mature before taking legal action. Two examples of this:

University of Wisconsin sues Intel for Core 2 Duo patent infringement: [http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/07/intel-sued-for- core-2-duo...](http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/07/intel-sued-for-core-2-duo- patent-infringement-by-the-universi/)

Northeastern University sues Google over Database Architecture: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/10/google-being-sued- over-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/10/google-being-sued-over- database-architecture/)

This goes to show that universities aren't always benevolent when it comes to IP. Even if the software is rewritten, there's no guarantee that university lawyers won't accuse you of infringement down the line.

Isn't licensing specifically designed to address this issue of IP? What would be a reason not to license the software from the university?

<comment><USER2> Neither of these were universities suing their own students.

 _What would be a reason not to license the software from the university?_

(a) That the university might have insanely unrealistic ideas about terms, because they're so inexperienced, and (b) that it could take so long to arrange the deal that it would literally be faster to rewrite it.

<comment><USER4> _Neither of these were universities suing their own students._

That's an interesting point, but 1) would the university not have sued if it were a student (or professor) that provided the IP? and 2) then why shouldn't he just use the code outright, especially since he claims to have written it and the university is not likely to care?

 _(a) That the university might have insanely unrealistic ideas about terms, because they're so inexperienced, and (b) that it could take so long to arrange the deal that it would literally be faster to rewrite it._

Licensing is there for a purpose--someone paid for him to develop this software, so he has an obligation to that employer to at least ask permission before using the software.

Imagine if a startup took seed money from you to develop their software, then turned around to rewrite it for use in another project and thereby sidestepping your 2-10% share. Wouldn't that be unethical? They could even claim both (a) and (b) above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some schools are really good about this. CMU for example is extremely flexible, even with patents.

But I'd also recommend looking at the terms of the contract that gave you funding.

Government funded projects usually include government purpose rights. It depends on the contract how bad the rights are for a company.

In most cases, government funding means that in a pinch, they can take all your tech and give it to another company to mass produce. The reason would probably be some wartime situation where you needed to produce a million X to fight. I think this happened to B52s in WWII.

Other recommendations about tech transfer are spot on.

You should also take this as an opportunity to network with potential investors. Go to your school's entrepreneurship center (if they have one), and talk to people there about your plans.

I know for CMU, you can meet lots of Angels that way. Lots of the associated companies have probably gone through the same process.

</comment><comment><USER6> _I was paid with research grants so I'd assume the school owns the code._

I don't know what school you went to, but many (most?) large engineering/research institutions have a technology licensing office (e.g. <http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/>) that can check that assumption definitively for you.

</comment><comment><USER7> I checked this out since I wanted to release code I wrote for my research under the GPL: Where I work (UCSC), the employee owns the copyright to code he writes, unless the code was part of a deliverable for some grant (in which case it generally belongs to the grant-awarding institution). For general research grants, that's not the case. If there are potential patents, the university does claim right to those, but if there aren't, there was no problem.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I worked for a university, I asked my boss if I could open-source my code, which was largely funded by NSF. I showed him a license, and summarized it for him. His response surprised me:

"By all means -- anything 'open' is music to NSF's ears, because it means they don't have to pay for several labs to do the same work. I'll mention that in our annual report."

</comment><comment><USER9> Talk to the University's tech transfer office.

<comment><USER10> But don't tell them that someone is interested in your technology. If I were you, I would find out about the status of the IP (who owns, how old it is, etc.) and try to find out if the university is interested in it or not. If they are not interested in it, ask them to sign over the IP to you outright. After you personally own the IP, you can do whatever you want with it, and it will be the universities tough luck that they weren't able to capitalise on the IP when they had it - they've had their chance.

I know of three university spin-out companies that have had IP they developed assigned over to them because the university wasn't interested, upon which successful companies have been formed.

Also, I don't know about tech transfer offices in the states, but in the UK, they are completely incompetent. I wouldn't waste my time or effort in trying to negotiate a licensing deal. You probably could have re-written it by then!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It depends on the school policies. You'll need to just find out what they are. We can't tell you that.

Some schools are quite friendly to business arrangements, while others are grabby. There are plenty of products on the market that were developed at universities and later commercialized.

</comment><comment><USER12> Talk to your universities office of technology licensing, and ask them to give you an exclusive license to your software. That's what Google did with Stanford.

</comment><comment><USER13> How long would it take you to redo what you did at the research lab?

<comment><AUTHOR> not too long, but the concepts would be exactly the same... wouldn't it then become, "who owns the idea?"

<comment><USER6> There is no such legal concept, at least not in the United States. One can own an implementation of an idea, but not an idea. If you can implement the concepts in a novel way, you're fine.

<comment><USER14> (In agreement, just to express it another way): Patents on implementations can and do effectively limit idea reuse.

E.g. if the idea is "a web 2.0 flower box" making a second implementation is fine.

If the idea is a "web 2.0 flower box using this specific patented method of procedural generation" then you won't be able to recreate the same product again - at least not without moving to Europe where there are no software patents :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> have someone else write the code then buy it from them.</comment>


Unix tricks - Useful but unusual - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/65588/useful-unix-tricks Here are a few Unix tricks you might not have seen before. <comment><USER2> This article added nothing to my *Nix knowledge. It even gave bad advice to 'cat' a file and pipe it to 'grep' (which was also mentioned in the comments).</comment>


Quit Your Job Right Now - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/jamesaltucher/2011/04/04/10-reasons-you-need-to-quit-your-job-right-now/ <comment><USER2> The author sounds like he's fighting depression.

<comment><USER3> I don't think he's winning, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All I learned is that the author of this article is insane and should give up on having a job.

<comment><USER5> FYI: The author is a member here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jaltucher>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article reminded me of "Catcher in the Rye"</comment>


How to Create a Private Ethereum Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://medium.facilelogin.com/build-your-own-blockchain-b8eaeea2f891 <comment><USER2> What's the point of a private blockchain? Couldn't you just use a more traditional consensus algorithm when you have a closed network?

<comment><USER3> Total shot in the dark, but could there be a use case in Software Licensing? Your customer agrees to host a node in your distributed network, and all clients are able to view a digest of licenses in a format that is not solely owned by the publisher?

Oh, and development instances, of course.

<comment><USER4> Assuming that your customers don't have more nodes than you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note for anyone wanting to try this out on trial account of GCP: Your instance will be halted with a scary sounding warning email (even if you are just running a benchmark).

<comment><USER6> Why so? Can't you run any software on GCP as long as you're within the usage limits?

<comment><USER7> Evidently for their trials, they have bots that scan the VMs and kill machines running cryptocurrency software. Just read a bit of threads on google, reddit about this.

Possibly, you can run it on paid machines - but why would you? They charge you more for a machine/hour than you can make cryptocurrency/hr.

<comment><USER8> If the free tier isn't funded by conversions, then it's only really valuable as a marketing tool.

This is why hosts are often judicious with the free hosting tier - even with address verification and capchas, 60% of the free tier is phishing hosts using a stolen identity and credit card. About 20% are Ebay snipers running shoe- bots, or crypto-miners, begging for bare metal for the response times or hardware, respectively. Another 18% are technology generalists who might cobble together a 2004-era blog hosting service, to engorge their inner nerd - mostly harmless, might not patch something, but will never convert.

For the first 2 groups - once the credit is up (or gets flagged for spam/phishing), the account gets flipped. The scammer uses new email and maybe a new credit card, and migrates their activities. Darknet forums (and probably some subreddits) have lists of providers and how to work the free tier. I expect software to auto-balance between multiple free-tier accounts on multiple cloud providers exists; I've debated scripting the API calls in Powershell in a few weekends.

<comment><USER9> What's a shoe-bot?

<comment><USER8> It's an eBay bidding bot - bid on a popular product faster than humans. For some reason, shoes were extremely popular, and I have only ever seen this type of user target shoes, and not other products such as handbags or hats.

<comment><USER10> Actually it's mostly on niche stores that sell limited edition items like Yeezy Boosts, Supreme, BAPE. They even do it for clothes now. They have a release date and time and sell out within seconds

<comment><USER8> How is Etherium's latency? Would it be at all worthwhile to pursue building a shoe-bot (or other HFT/bidding bot) on an Etherium platform? Is there a future where users could pay more Gas to get a low-latency response?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For beginners I recommend truffle + testrpc as it handles everything for you out of the box.

<comment><USER12> I also recommend to look at Embark. I find it more mature and well-designed than truffle.

<comment><USER11> Thanks I'll need to check it out for my next project

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is an additional important change you need to do in order to speed up transactions for testing [https://blog.coinfabrik.com/fast-smart-contracts- execution-e...](https://blog.coinfabrik.com/fast-smart-contracts-execution- ethereum-private-blockchain-development-environment/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone explain a few practical reasons why someone would want to build their own. Other than to learn or to do an ICO

<comment><USER15> I'm investigating this at my company so I can share a couple of ideas.

Our system is used by a series of companies to manage the performance of their supply chain (keeping this very vague to avoid breaching NDAs).

We generate reports which show the performance. as our system sees it. However, what if a supplier were to bribe us to change the report? I have heard third-hand of this happening before in our industry so that's not as crazy as it sounds.

And what if the client were to change performance criteria mid-way through a contract? The supplier might now be showing poor performance where this is totally unfair.

This is where a blockchain might be helpful. If we publish these reports to the private blockchain shared between us, the customer and the supplier, the customer can verify the blockchain at any time to prove that this has not happen. Finally, the supplier can see if terms are updated and this is permanently stored in the chain.

Effectively, if three parties might not trust each other, then blockchain might be a good option to keep people honest.

<comment><USER16> That is given that the data remains true at the point of data entry into the network. If the data entering the chain is bogus due to bribery, blockchain won't solve the problem.

<comment><USER17> I think that's addressing a different problem. There are two distinct issues:

1\. Is the data correct?

2\. Has the data been changed?

For many cases, 1) is not solvable in software.

I'm not sure I really understand why 2. is something best solved with a blockchain with a private group, but given people who have actually looked into this when I haven't think it's relevant means I'm probably missing something either on the requirements, difficulty to implement or features.

<comment><USER18> You're correct that #1 isn't solvable in software, but I have doubts that #2 is best solved with a blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My post on a similar topic: [http://blog.zhenzhang.me/2017/09/12/eth-priv- net.html](http://blog.zhenzhang.me/2017/09/12/eth-priv-net.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice one. Have been looking everywhere for a block explorer that could be used on local instances.

Still pretty dissapointed that etherscan isn't open source, would make local development a hell of a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yeah my startup is working to help devs test/deploy dApps on private blockchains. [https://loomx.io](https://loomx.io)

</comment><comment><USER22> The title should be "Run your own local Ethereum instance"

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the subtitle of the blog says that - How to Create a Private Ethereum Blockchain from Ground-up?'

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh, hey, I have a way to make private smart contracts as well.

It is called having a database and server that runs code!

<comment><USER24> Yes, except you are 100% in control of what goes on on your server and could easily falsify data. The _whole_ point of cryptocurrencies is to avoid that.

<comment><USER23> Same with a private blockchain....

You are right. That's dumb. That's my entire point!

<comment><USER25> A private blockchain spread across for example, several organizations, may be a good vehicle for sharing a database in such a way that all parties know it can't be falsified.

For example, you could use a different consensus algo and enable each organization to have one vote, one mine and this would enable sharing of data that you want to ensure hasn't been modified.

This model could connect possibly thousands of different organizations together with a trustless setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How many more of these posts (or knockoff cryto scam coins) do we need?</comment>


A Note on SIMON-32/64 Security - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/474 <comment><USER3> I posted this on HN yesterday, with a comment saying I was skeptical. Then we talked about it on Slack and Thomas Pornin utterly debunked it, so I deleted it. Pornin posted his analysis this morning:

[https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/70467/what-are- th...](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/70467/what-are-the- implications-of-the-new-alleged-key-recovery-attack-preprint-on- sim/70471#70471)

The cryptanalysis (really, "proof of zero knowledge", if I might clarify and shoplift someone else's zinger at the same time) they claim to have performed is slower than brute force.

Long story short: this is almost certainly just a troll.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this, I came here to post the same thread.

For those who are unaware: Thomas Pornin is a professional cryptographer. He's a member of the NCC Crypto Services team and one of the authors of the Sosemanuk stream cipher, which was part of the final portfolio for eSTREAM. He's also involved in the development of one of the cryptosystems which has made it to round 2 of the ongoing NIST PQCRYPTO standardization process.

His writing on crypto.stackexchange is prolific and highly informative, and this is a strong rebuttal in particular.

<comment><USER5> He is also the author of [https://www.bearssl.org/](https://www.bearssl.org/)

<comment><USER4> Nice, I forgot that one. BearSSL is one of only two TLS implementations (if I recall correctly) that wasn't vulnerable to the most recent Bleichenbacher attack variant.

<comment><USER3> That's correct, BearSSL and BoringSSL (Google's OpenSSL fork). Pornin is a bad-ass. But keep in mind that they were targeting C/C++ libraries, so we don't have telemetry on (for instance) Go's crypto/tls or whatever Rust is doing with _ring_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The paper looks suspicious to me.

\- Novel crypto analysis technique which can't be revealed because "a lot of work to be done to obtain an optimized, more efficient and industry-level version".

\- Claim that success probability is low, but "we have a 2nd algorithm": "To date the probability of success is still very low (p = 0.025) but we are optimistic about the possibility of significantly increasing it in the upcoming months. Indeed we have a second algorithm, which is theoretically proven, with a success rate of 0.25. It is not yet fully tested and executed because it requires a higher computing power, although it is still reasonable for operational cryptanalysis (which can be repeated over time)."

\- Claim that SIMON algorithm had been introduced in the Linux 4.16 kernel (it was Speck, not Simon). May be an honest typo.

\- Testing on Odroid cluster.

\- Can't find anything on "Alba3 Group" or the authors (who have @protonmail.com address -- also suspicious).

\- "The only reference for this magnitude of cryptanalysis is [9]. In 2002, a 64-bit RC4 key was obtained in 1,754 days (300,000 participants). Today, to keep up with the evolution of computing power since 2002, it is necessary to divide by 2^10, or about 3 days with the same number of participants." It was RC5, not RC4 (it's even in the title of reference -- again, may be a typo), and how did they come up with 2^10 number?

I don't math, but it also looks suspicious: [https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1127100892883312640](https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1127100892883312640)

See also:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/bn5hds/crikey_key_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/bn5hds/crikey_key_recovery_attack_on_simon_3264/en37dh0/)

<comment><USER7> The math isn't too suspicious from what I can read, though I'm by no means an expert - it's just set stuff, from what I can tell. I think that Twitter post is just confusing the different fonts for the sets vs the scalars. "The cardinality of the set of keys is equal to two to the power of the length of the key" is a pretty sensible statement. The Yi is probably a typo, considering the `Xi = Xi` on the prior line is a bit redundant (and this is preprint, so I'd forgive it).

In any case, my real takeaway:

> Our main result is that we can find a 64-bit key in about three days > (average time) on two Odroid MC1 clusters (8 Gb) [18] from two pairs of > plaintext/ciphertext.

The algorithm isn't strong vs key reuse. I'm unsure if it actually claimed to be so - key reuse is almost always a big problem, though, and in this case they're exploiting the birthday paradox to make the search for the key more efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are really good reasons to be suspicious of short block length ciphers, but there's nothing in this paper besides a dire warning and hint of future results. Contrary the authors' plea at the end, I think this proves exactly why cryptanalytic results _must_ be published.

</comment><comment><USER9> >We have discovered this great thing

>But we are not going to publish how

>Trust us

Yeaaaaah, no.

As highlighted by dchest and that twitter thread, highly improbably anything real comes out of this.

</comment><comment><USER10> I tried to verify "table 5", but while the "YHWH" keys all worked, only 2 of the 5 " " keys did.

[https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/474.py](https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/474.py)

(Table 5 isn't "important", it's just a justification of why their algorithm 1 skips analyzing pairs where the plaintext in each pair is identical; and finding such keys doesn't seem TOO hard to do in the obvious way, you can get one such key every 4 billion trials or so)

PS The authors thank an Oleg Ivanovich Popov. I found one such person who is a researcher ... with publications such as "Thermodynamics of Hydrogen-Sulfide Conversion in a Claus Reactor in Coke-Oven Gas Desulfurization Circuit of MMK"

<comment><USER10> I also tried to verify "table 6", which appears to be correct except for the second row, where the hex value shown for "C" is accidentally the same as "E". Correcting it to 0x7761792c20666f72 causes all the "test cases" to come out as claimed.

[https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/474bis.py](https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/474bis.py)

It does seem like there has to be some interesting cryptanalysis going on to produce this many interesting pairs, particularly when they're (claimed to be) drawn from a relatively short corpus.

However, when considering how you would generate such pairs, you need not actually do "Algorithm 1" (in which step 6 is "do the secret magic"); you can select your block Pi and key Ki, then see if the result happens to be a block Ci that you can claim you picked first. In "pg10.txt" there are 53103 distinct 4-byte blocks, or about 2^32 pairs of blocks, so if you work in this way you only have to do around 2^33 SIMON-64/32 block encryptions to be able to produce a new row of "table 6".

Also, some of the C/E values are not actually present in "pg10.txt", their supposed restricted corpus. For instance, "{" is a character in several of them, but appears nowhere at all in my copy downloaded from the URL they gave. So they have somehow failed to accurately describe the corpus they actually used.

<comment><USER10> Here are 100 more items just like table 6, generated in, oh, about 2 seconds on an i7-4790k.

[https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/trolled.txt](https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/trolled.txt)

Here's the search program (built with g++ -O3 -fopenmp -fno-strict-aliasing on debian stretch)

[https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/search.c](https://emergent.unpythonic.net/files/sandbox/search.c)

Just put the corpus "pg10.txt" in the current directory and run.

Newlines in the corpus are turned to spaces; carriage returns are deleted.

I back-checked just a few using the same Python SIMON implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was about to read it, and then saw they were citing Filliol, which put me off to say the list (the dude is completely discredited since he "broke" AES).

Also, interestingly, none of the authors seem to have left much footprints on the Internet, which is extremely odd at best, the sign of some kind of fraud at worst...

</comment><comment><USER12> Surprise! Cryptography designed by the NSA is tailor-made to be easily cracked considering the computing resources they command.

<comment><USER13> The surprise is that they may have proven that a weakness exists. To date, it's merely been a suspicion. It will be interesting to see whether the weakness is deemed plausible or not by security researchers - and whether it can be applied to non-NSA systems.

<comment><USER14> > The surprise is that they may have proven that a weakness exists.

A 64-bit keyspace is small enough that I don't think it's reasonable to take their paper as proof.

It would be fairly straight forward to use a FPGA farm (or potentially GPU farm) to search the entire keyspace. The fringes of the cryptocurrency altcoin ecosystem have caused the creation of some pretty impressive FPGA and GPU farms...

Additionally since they equate two pieces of text from the document via a key, they can get a massive speedup if they don't actually fix them. On this basis their proof mechanism seems highly suspect to me, unless I'm misreading it.

To be more clear of about I'm suggesting: pick a piece of text from the source, pick a key, encrypt or decrypt, then check if the result is anywhere in the text. Assuming the lookups are free this gets you a 4.2 million fold speedup (the corpus they're using is about 4.2MB). I'm not familiar with the structure of the cipher but there may be a meet in the middle that dramatically improves this approach.

It's completely reasonable that someone might search a 64-bit keyspace as a prank, ... I factored a 100-digit semiprime last night for a prank. My prank was not anywhere near as "cool" as convincing a lot of people that an NSA cipher was backdoored.

<comment><USER3> Forget the FPGA farm. The actual task the authors have set out for themselves to "prove" SIMON weak, you could complete on a laptop. The problem is, you can complete it on a laptop for _any_ cipher with the same block and key size parameters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the NSA responded, is there a response which could both command respect, and be truthful? it feels like the only one would be to acknowledge this team found a flaw. The secondary questions would be to ask if the flaw was inserted, or happenstance (which implies the NSA is incompetent at maths, distinct from politics: we already know they blotted their copybook politically)

<comment><USER7> The construction is at least at face value a pretty simple ARX cipher - <USER2> only real questions being why choose the specific rotation constants they do for each round (ciphers developed in the open usually do things like key off digits of pi) and why compose specifically via xor, then add, then rotate in each round, rather than more of a blend.

If this style algorithm does indeed have an intentional backdoor: That's some crazy mathematic chops and I'd love to read the theory behind how it (the intentionally weak algorithm) was found (since hopefully that leads to a natural way to generate stronger algorithms, or at least check for weak ones). That'd be a valuable takeaway for the security community once the secret's spoiled, if it is the case.

<comment><USER16> > ciphers developed in the open usually do things like key off digits of pi

It should be noted that we should be very wary of these types of "nothing up my sleeve" numbers. djb showed[1] that with enough effort you could come up with more than a million "obviously not backdoored" numbers (this was done in the context of elliptic curves) -- enough to exploit a million-to-one unknown- by-the-public vulnerability.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/Cj3PN5-n108](https://youtu.be/Cj3PN5-n108)

<comment><USER4> The context Bernstein is talking about is very meaningful here. The mathematics of public-key cryptography provides a rich tapestry for covering up hidden backdoors. ARX ciphers are very simple compared to elliptic curves, and the complexity of round constants isn't really comparable to that of curves.

<comment><USER16> Right, I should've added I agree with GP that ARX ciphers are incredibly simple and the ability to backdoor them would be a very novel (and concerning) discovery.

My point is that "the values come from pi" is not necessarily proof that the constants really are "nothing up my sleeve". Bernstein was discussing this in the context of NIST curves (which could be backdoored), but the same one-in-a- million maths works for any constants (so long as you happen to know a weak- constants vulnerability that isn't known by the public).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I get a 16 year old started with programming? - <AUTHOR> My girlfriend's sister just graduated Grade 10, and is confused about career choices.
I'd like to give her an introduction to CS over the next two months. I've already impressed her with the skills and applications that CS brings along from ML to AI. I was personally going to start her off with App Inventor since she has no programming background whatsoever and has a smartphone. Any help? <comment><USER2> Have a look at Datacamp's Intro to Python for Data Science? I think its a good introduction to programming

[https://www.datacamp.com/courses/intro-to-python-for-data- sc...](https://www.datacamp.com/courses/intro-to-python-for-data-science)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you heard of the Raspberry Pi Foundation?

Pretty hard to do better than this:

[https://www.raspberrypi.org](https://www.raspberrypi.org)

</comment><comment><USER4> The Alice project from CMU may be worth a look:

[http://www.alice.org/](http://www.alice.org/)</comment>


Ask HN: What was your best career decision? - <AUTHOR> I saw this thread on r/cscareerquestions and I thought it would be interesting to hear the HN experiences.<p>Thank you. <comment><USER2> Two things:

1) Getting out of my comfort zone:

Changed job position 6 times in the last 6 years, including 2 company changes and one country change. Moved place 5 times, too.

It keeps me motivated to learn, but it also bears some frustration the first weeks after starting on a new position, so be careful with this strategy. Also, make sure the changes are promotions and/or general improvements, otherwise you might fail at job interviews due to the short time you stay at a given position. Sell it as "you'll hire me for this position and you'll be so happy with me, that you'll want to me to take on bigger challenges, creating more revenue and/or profit for your company".

2) Understand the business:

No one owes you anything, not even the company that you've worked for the last years and gave all those extra hours of work. You have to change mentality and think about how can you increase profit and/or revenue for your company. Can you improve processes? can you work smarter? Why don't you tell your boss or some other decision maker?

If you analyse your situation and you can't see how you're making money for the company, you better get ready for the worst case scenario. Some departments are seen as a cost, so the company will always be willing to reduce that cost. Can you change that perception? If you can't, again get ready for the worst case scenario.

<comment><USER3> I second knowing how what you do impacts the company.

If, by changing a process you reduce a vendor's cost for 3 years consecutively, while at the same time improving throughput and make sure they realize it - that does more for you than just working and hoping they realize it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two fold:

1\. Putting aside friends, family, and religion to focus on the task(s) at hand.

2\. Saving enough "fuck you" money to be able to do whatever I want.

Both are related and the former is pointless unless it's going to lead to the latter.

<comment><USER5> Good sir, please riddle us with tales of how you have discovered the serenity of "f-u" money.

The foundation of this community rests on lore of "f-u" money and we simply ask that you contribute to the lore that keeps this place alive....and that keeps this place....human.

<comment><USER6> Check out Mr. Money Mustache, /r/financialindependence, etc. Essentially, you save as aggressively as possible until you have at least 25x your living expenses saved and invested (and with compounding returns, this can be done relatively quickly with an aggressive savings rate). The rule of thumb is yoi can safely withdraw 4% of your savings a year, so at this point you are now financially independent. Of course, getting there requires some tough decisions about how you spend your money and time, and what tradeoffs are worth an earlier retirement date.

<comment><USER7> you can also invest in 2-3 rental properties, and use the monthly payments of your tenants as passive income

<comment><USER8> I am doing this. I save up my money and keep it invested in some ETFs until I have enough for the 25% DP on an investment property.

I'm currently in the process of saving for my second property.

My advice to anyone who's considering getting into the landlord business:

1\. Buy properties in (up and coming) college towns. Many people advise against this, but it's very hard to beat the returns. This is especially true in towns where the housing values haven't caught up to the situation yet. I am getting more than double the rent that I would be able to get if my house was in a "normal" town. A typical dorm room costs $800/month for each student at my local state university, so students would much rather live off campus in an actual house for the same price (or less). You can get 5 students to share the house and charge $2600/month (for a house that costs under $160k). It's a win- win honestly. You may have to deal with typical college issues, but it's really not as bad as it sounds. I would rather deal with some holes in the wall than a family of 4 who just doesn't have the money to pay the rent, forcing you to go through the eviction process. College students typically have access to "unlimited" money in the form of student loans or their parents, so you're less likely to have to chase your money down. I've yet to receive a payment more than one month late. Just keep in mind that students typically receive their refund checks two times per year, so you may have to be patient. Also, it wouldn't hurt to have their parents sign the lease in case the student decides to blow the refund check or something.

2\. Learn how to do home maintenance tasks on your own. Plumbing, painting, etc. You will save large amounts of money this way. Just be sure to reduce liabilities by not doing something that could endanger the tenants. In other words, don't do your own electrical work unless you know what you're doing.

3\. Don't underestimate the work required. There will be issues. It's not a truly passive investment in that sense, but this is why the returns are better than many other investments. For example, I've had to unclog the shower drain three times, and it always seems to be at inconvenient times. But when they call about something like that, you're obligated to provide a fix ASAP. Other minor issues can wait a little longer of course.

4\. Reward good tenants. If your tenants have not given you any problems, it's worth giving them a little incentive to stick around.

5\. Take everything I just said with a grain of salt. I've only been in the game for two years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quitting my job. On average I see a 51% pay bump each time. Plus there is the catharsis of quitting the job, and that "yay, I'm a human being again!" feeling.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not going to college right away after high school.

I wanted to be a trombone player in a major US symphony but realized that while I could be accepted by many good schools, I wasn't good enough to get accepted into the "greats" (e.g. Julliard, Curtis, etc). I decided instead to join the Marines and became a Marine musician (the military is one of the largest employers of musicians in the US). I am very lucky to have made that choice for a number of reasons, but ultimately it made me realize that I didn't love music as much as I thought.

The military isn't for everyone, but I recommend everyone give it some serious consideration. In addition to the altruistic reasons to join there many great benefits for when you get out. Mine include

       1) Learning my original life-plan for after high school wasn't a good fit for me (while getting paid to make that realization).

       2) Getting college paid for (with some scholarships I was able to stretch the GI bill into nearly 5 years and got a Math/CS double major.

       3) This is the big one: I live in San Diego (a "military friendly town") and having military experience won't guarantee you a job, but many employers here will at least talk to you and give you a chance to make an impression beyond your resume.

A big negative (besides the possibility of risk to life/limb/mental health) is that you give up the "traditional" college experience. It may take some extra time to find where you fit in when/if you do decide to go back to school. However, that's probably true for anybody who delays college for more than a year or two.

</comment><comment><USER11> Accepting a full time job into my heart and quitting the startup dream!

</comment><comment><USER12> With one year left to graduate as an telecom engineer, I decided to move to computer engineering. That meant 2 more years in university, so it wasn't an easy decision. Today all my friends from telecom work in soul-sucking corporate jobs, while I moved to another country and run my own SaaS company.

</comment><comment><USER13> Deciding to always work on projects I didn't know how to do but thought would be interesting. This starting me down the path of statistical analysis and machine learning, and I can't imagine what my career would be like without taking that risk.

<comment><USER14> Agreed 1000%, ABG: Always Be Growing!

<comment><USER15> I'm from Kernighan & Ritchie and I'm on a mission of mercy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At the age of 45, and with 20 years of software development under my belt, moving to London from the backwaters of Croatia.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a intern, taking the time to master one of the most complex systems the company uses - ended up greatly contributing to the permanent hire of myself (which the company created a new position for).

Related: Reinvesting a lot of the money I made as a intern into books and training so I could keep up with the discussions at work.

Was hired for general front end work (mostly HTML / CSS) now a few years later do advanced JS work on Personalization, Web Analytics and AB testing.

</comment><comment><USER17> Turning down a job at a startup and not moving to London, UK.

I successfully interviewed at a startup in London who made me an offer. I miscalculated how expensive London was going to be, which led us into strange negotiations were a recruiter thought I'd expect a certain salary but I turned it down after running the numbers. They started 'nickel and diming' over 5k which at first they said was no problem at all and the next day it apparently was.

I had to turn it down as it would have left me worse off than staying on 2/3s the salary in a smaller city.

The stock options were also really bad. Stay for 4 years and get max 120k GBP. This was at < 20 employees.

Anyway I turned it down and took a much safer job and at a much bigger company in Canada. The tech stack isn't quite what I'd like but there are a lot of passionate and motivated people here making strides in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER18> Quitting my soul-sucking job and starting my own company. Been going strong for almost a decade.

</comment><comment><USER19> Getting out of SEO and moving to web development

<comment><USER20> This is something I'm currently working on doing. How did you get started on that move?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Quitting my job way too early to work on my super hip and cool startup.

Then running out of money and started freelancing for a local small business for < 1k a month.

Three years later the business has grown and I'm the Director of Technology (fancy title ooo) managing a team of seven.

We are hiring three more this month.

Worked out.

</comment><comment><USER22> Bluffing about an offer from another company during my first real interview / negotiation. It paid off and I started my professional life at a really good salary level and now each increase (mostly from job hopping) has been actually substantial. Not that I recommend everyone do this, but it basically gave me a ~30k boost starting out so I would say objectively the best decision career- wise.

The other decision is to not work any job that requires on-call support or pager duty. I'm finally at a place where I can leave work at work and focus on things that actually matter to me.

<comment><USER15> Never tried it, but I figure bluffing is very easy to do. It is not like they will ask for a pay stub for "proof" and if they do ... run ... fast! Only thing that might hurt you is if you throw out some extremely unrealistic figures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Quitting and focusing on real life, finding parts that you really enjoy and doing those instead.

</comment><comment><USER24> Getting un-stuck from working for a single employer for 5+ years and moving into consulting/contract work.

I work fewer hours for more money, and have a very flexible schedule which lets me work on my own company and side projects.

I feel like a human being with control over my life again.

<comment><USER8> I always wondered how software contractors actually found work (though I'm not particularly interested in becoming a consultant myself).

Do they search for companies who are hiring and offer to do the work as a consultant instead?

Or do the companies find you?

Could you provide just a very general outline of the process?

<comment><USER24> I've found work from both friends and recruiters.

People love to hate on recruiters, and for good reason. If you can find a handful that are not terrible though, they can send along 3-6 month contracts. I've also been connected with businesses through recruiters that were very much in need of developers, with which it was easy to negotiate part-time remote work, at a good hourly rate.

Through friends, I've been pulled into their own contract work where they need an extra hand. I've also been introduced to business owners who need part-time developers as well, who in turn send multiple jobs over time.

Best advice though is just to talk to recruiters, be explicit about what you are looking for (not contract-to-hire, preferably short term remote jobs), and see what comes your way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I answered this there and will offer the same here as well:

Applying for jobs just outside of my comfort zone. It has taught me that I can learn quickly and stretch my capabilities to get the job done and has helped me progress in my career, as well as ending up in jobs that are never boring as there is always more to learn.

</comment><comment><USER26> 1\. Focusing on my hobby which was programming while in school and skipping a lot of classes.

2\. Invested a lot of my time in learning more(Data structures/algorithms, advanced JavaScript) which gave me the courage to quit my soul sucking job and helped me land a much b€tt€r one.

I'm still very young so I'm actively saving up my "F-u" money.

</comment><comment><USER27> Went to a startup at lower pay, for the new technology of workstation based CAD rather than Mainframe. Years later, took the lead to Web based applications, then to Internet connected devices, and now into massive event analytics real-time processing.

Shifting gears and constantly learning new things. It's been rewarding in so many ways.

</comment><comment><USER28> Proactively seeking out ways to help peers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't let school get in the way of your education.

<comment><USER26> This is so true right now especially for me. You sir, have a wealth of experience. I actually focused on teaching my self programming while in school and skipped a lot of classes and it paid off in the end $o much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Moving from Embedded systems to Web development.

Moving from my country to other countries.

</comment><comment><USER31> Taking a year long sabbatical, when I could live off for 2 years without working. Writing a 3D sport simulation game. Leads to me being a scientific software developer now, another application of 3D graphics!

</comment><comment><USER32> I resigned after 1 month. It was my first job after graduation. I realize that I don't like embedded systems. I continue my career with JavaEE and I am so happy now.

<comment><USER15> What about it didn't you like? JavaEE pays well, but it can be soul sucking in its own way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Quitting my high paying job. Man that felt good and going decent so far doing my own stuff for 1.5 years since then.

</comment><comment><USER34> Stop working for other people and open my own business.

</comment><comment><USER35> Getting work experience as early as possible - it really opens up opportunities.</comment>


Ask HN: What benefits can I provide to improve employee's sleeping habits? - <AUTHOR> I've had a bit of time to reflect on the industry recently, and this has nicely coincided with being in the running for a leadership position at a company bigger than I would have expected.
Part of my job role will be to help develop employee benefits packages and I'd like to make sure that quality of sleep is high up on that list. (Why aren't more companies prioritising this?)
There are some obvious ones I can think of;
- Yearly bedding allowance
- Curtains/shade allowance
- Sleep cycle app subscriptions
Alongside 'softer' workflow choices;
- Ensuring no standard work emails/slack sent after 8pm. Would like to go further with this, but it'll be in a developing economy so expectations will be less favourable. We're not yet France.
For what it's worth, I'd also appreciate validation (or dissent) to the idea in general. It's not something I've heard of happening anywhere and having not been through a typical path to leadership I might just be missing something obvious on why this isn't standard. <comment><USER2> Assuming you're in the software industry or some other technical profession, provide a nap room at the office, at least one per 50 people. If you don't like the term, call it a wellness room. Design it properly (ability to dim or turn off lights, away from heavily trafficked areas and other noise sources, etc.) Discourage your staff and management from penalizing or gossiping about people who use it.

Employees who had a bad night of sleep, employees with newborns that kept them up at night, employees with migraines or are just feeling ill, employees with sleep disorders (increasingly common), etc. will thank you and the company will be compensated by productivity recovered from these people not being tired. It's not exactly a radical or untested idea either; a quick googling for "nap room at office" finds plenty of companies that implement this benefit, e.g.: [https://blog.kickresume.com/2018/09/10/these-7-companies- enc...](https://blog.kickresume.com/2018/09/10/these-7-companies-encourage- sleeping-on-the-job-but-why/)

<comment><USER3> Wellness room for migraines. Mind blown. That would be so helpful when I've gotten them at work (fortunately, a very minor occurrence for me).

<comment><USER4> I get migraines when I have the sun on my head and bright lights around and where I work has recently moved offices. Now next to a river in an office seemingly made entirely of glass. It's impossible to see anything so now everyone just shuts the blinds.

I now spend about an hour a week with a crazy swirly pattern obscuring most of my vision. A dark room where I could sit and recover when this happens would be incredibly helpful.

The architect seems to have tried to create an Ikea showroom rather than an office where people will be staring at screens all day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reasonable expectations for hours worked. Flexible work hours.

Develop good relationships with people. Talk to them about what interferes with getting a good nights sleep. It'll be different for everyone (screen time, family commitments, partying, stress-induced insomnia, long commutes, etc.) Figure out ways to alleviate the impact of each one without asking people to give up things they value.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe deemphasize free coffee at work, or at least limit it to mornings. Caffeine dependency can be a vicious cycle that interferes with sleep and that sleep deprived people use as a crutch.

(I'm caffeine dependent because it helps with respiratory problems. But it's pretty well established this contributes to sleep issues and is a hallmark of a workaholic culture that respects people for pulling all nighters and the like.)

Give an adequately long lunch.

I used to nap in my car sometimes at my corporate job. But you can't do that if there's no time available in your schedule.

Do your best to not impose sudden and unnecessary shift changes for bullshit reasons.

My corporate job would have everyone come in early the Wednesday before Thanksgiving -- a major US holiday -- so they could close down early. I worked the evening shift normally from 3pm to 11pm and had to be in at like 6am to noon that day. I didn't have enough seniority to blow it off by scheduling it as time off.

They could have found some other way to handle that. I absolutely hated having a gun to my head in that way. It was awful.

I feel like giving benefits designed to dictate sleep hygiene is a bit draconian, but you can certainly work on staying the hell out of their way if good sleep habits is a thing they value.

Young, healthy people often don't care and don't really need to. But if there's a baby at home, if they are older or have health issues, they will appreciate you getting your boot off their neck and staying out of their way in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER7> Things like app subscriptions and so on are just distracting gimmicks that companies provide to tick the box without taking the real actions that takes guts to take.

\- Pay them good money, they are adults, this replaces all your "allowances"

\- Give them flexible work hours

\- Ensure no work, sms, email, slack, etc is expected implicitly or explicitly after work hours

None of this is hard except companies don't genuinely want to commit to these benefits. They want the benefit to come to them for free. So instead they go chasing gimmicks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't have an issue committing to those benefits you've listed. Agreed, app is a gimmick although I'm not too sure the other two are quite as far into the gimmick category.

It seems like you've taken it as either/or rather than 'and'. I want to offer all of the above things AND offer any specific benefits that also offer sleep enhancement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good on you for considering this. I had one job where the company owner loved his naps, so napping was tolerated at the company. Half the people would have a 30 minute nap after lunch. Heaven! Made the afternoons so much more pleasant, and more productive. I'd just set my watch alarm and put my head on my desk (with proper drool precautions).

<comment><USER9> Did you work in an open office?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like your intentions here, but sleep is one of those things that I don't think an employer is really going to make much of an impact on. The biggest thing you could probably do is push for later morning start times and more remote work so employees can sleep in longer. Getting people to bed at more reasonable times and eschewing quality of sleep impactors (blue light, eating late, noise, etc.) often comes down to lifestyle choices and living conditions pretty far outside work.

</comment><comment><USER11> Many people have never received any sort of education or training on the importance of sleep habits in person. It's easy to disregard an article. I'd look into hiring a sleep specialist to do a QA session with your company, and also consult you on the benefits question.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't care about new bedding or subscription app, I just wish there's an employer who'd let me take a good 15-30min nap during lunch, without being judged. I secretly sneak into my car to nap and it makes a huge difference in my afternoon productivity.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why are you prioritizing sleep? What data supports this prioritization?

I've had companies offer wellness benefits for fitness classes, massages, etc. Sleep benefit sounds nice, but it seems a bit too encroaching into my literal personal space.

If you want people to sleep more, give them less work. Disconnect them from Slack and email, as you've proposed.

The sleep benefit doesn't quite sit well with me.

P.S. Just because the company offers the benefit doesn't mean people will make use of the new bedding, app, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken - this is as valuable an opinion as any other. I'd love for an empoloyer to care about it enough to 'put their money where their mouth' is when it comes to making sure I'm looking out for myself sleep wise, but I wholeheartedly accept this stance.

ref:

[0] Sleep deprivation: Impact on cognitive performance [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2656292/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2656292/)

[1] Need for Sleep: the Impact of a Night of SleepDeprivation on Novice Developers'Performance [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.02544.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.02544.pdf)

[2] Personal anecdata

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some mild to severe big brother-esque connotations to this - ie. "your sleep is to benefit the company." Just pay the employees better and/or reduce hours and stress.

</comment><comment><USER15> Give everyone a copy of why we sleep, and then have a chapter by chapter book club over a couple of weeks?

I applaud you for helping people with their sleep.

</comment><comment><USER16> Literature recommendations on good sleep hygiene, including no screens 1 hour before bed to sleep meditation would be helpful.</comment>


Appeals Court Overturns Sales Ban on Samsung Galaxy Nexus - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/11/appeals-court-overturns-ban-on-samsung-galaxy-nexus/

<comment><AUTHOR> A preliminary injunction requires the fulfillment of 4 requirements: 1) the plaintiff will likely succeed in proving infringement, 2) the plaintiff will likely suffer irreparable harm without an injunction, 3) "the balance of equities tips in his favor", and 4) an injunction is in the public interest.

The point on which the injunction was overturned was 2); The court found that there was no causal connection between the alleged infringement and alleged harm.

In this case, Apple was seeking an injunction based on alleged infringement of a "unified search" patent, in other words, the technology that supports Siri.</comment>


Invest in Things That Matter – Please Stop Funding Social Media Apps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@javier_noris/invest-in-things-that-matter-61a08d03bd2a#.thqjviwe8 <comment><USER2> At the risk of sounding obvious, social media "matters" too, or at least billions of people think so.</comment>


RISC-V: An Open Standard for SoCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1323406&print=yes <comment><USER2> The widening gap between memory and core speeds suggests to me that traditional RISC philosophy is not the way forward for performance and efficiency; fixed-length instructions, load-store restrictions, and delay slots may make implementation easier and faster at a time when memory could keep up with the CPU and instruction decoding was the bottleneck, but now that memory is often the bottleneck, it makes sense to have more complex, dense instruction encoding and the other features that are usually left out of RISCs, but improve code density.

Variable-length instructions are especially beneficial to code density, since often-used instructions can be encoded in fewer bytes, leaving rarer ones to longer sequences. It also allows for easy extension. Relaxing the restriction on only load/store instructions being able to access memory can reduce code size by eliminating many instructions whose sole purpose is to move data between memory and registers; this also leads to requiring fewer explicitly named registers (since instructions reading memory will implicitly name an internal temporary register(s) the CPU can use), reducing the number of bits needed to specify registers.

Other considerations like number of operands and how many of them can be memory references also contribute to code density - 0- and 1-operand ISAs require far more instructions for data movement, while 3-operand ISAs may waste encoding space if much of the time, one source operand does not need to be preserved. 2 operands is a natural compromise, and this is what e.g. ARM Thumb does.

This is why I find the description of "compressed RISC-V" linked in the article ( [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~waterman/papers/ms- thesis.pdf](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~waterman/papers/ms-thesis.pdf) ) interesting - benchmark analysis shows that 8 registers are used 60% of the time, and 2-operand instructions are encountered 36/31% statically/dynamically. These characteristics are not so far from those of an ISA that has remained one of the most performant for over 2 decades: x86. It's a denser ISA than regular RISCs, and requires more complex decoding, but not as complex as e.g. VAX. I think the decision to have 8 architectural registers and a 2-operand/1-memory format put x86 in an interesting middle-ground where it wasn't too CISC to implement efficiently, but also wasn't RISC enough to suffer its drawbacks. I'd certainly like to see how an open-source x86 implementation could perform in comparison.

<comment><USER3> > Variable-length instructions are especially beneficial to code density, > since often-used instructions can be encoded in fewer bytes,

Speaking of this, I find it interesting that ARM went back to a fixed 32-bit instruction width for ARMv8 (from 16/32 in Thumb-2). Any idea why they chose to do this?

<comment><USER4> ARMv8 is targeted at very high end phones but mainly at servers (of course it will creep down into cheap feature phones eventually). My server has 16 GB of RAM which is small for an ARMv8 server. So memory pressure may be not such a problem.

However it's also worth saying that Cortex-A53 can run Thumb-2 instructions. Not sure about Cortex-A57.

<comment><USER5> According to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A57](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A57) the Cortex-A57 supports Thumb-2 instructions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can understand RISC-V's use in academic settings or if you truly want open hardware.

But what's the commercial benefit? Its an open core, its lacking patents because the performance critical aspects have been patented by others in their designs, so how does this stack up in terms of performance? Can you make a processor design as fast as proprietary ones like the Linux effort?

Second comes the issue of fabrication, is there somebody ready to fab this? Or are you just going to throw this on a large FPGA? If you're throwing it on a FPGA, then why take jabs at the other ISA's when you'll be running this on non-open proprietary sillicon anyways.

Lastly, who cares? I'm guessing embedded is out as they care out the cost of each chip, the cheaper and more performant the better. Perhaps you're running something mission critical or are totally tied to a architecture, but then you're a dinosaur, the industry's trending towards abstracting the hardware away anyways. Do you really care which piece of sillicon your app runs on?

All of the above's probably really biased, misguided and wrong, but I'd like to hear what other HN'ers have to say.

<comment><USER7> their F.A.Q. states that they expect performance not worse than ARM, which sounds like a dealbreaker (there wasn't anything similar in OpenCore movement like… ever!).

Fabrication: these guys do it [http://www.lowrisc.org/](http://www.lowrisc.org/) and don't forget about chinese production companies who use custom MIPS now — this is a great altarnative for them. Actually, this applies to any government which needs verifiable hardware non-tampered by NATO

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related recent discussion about an in-progress implementation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8137521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8137521)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks cool! Disappointed that there's no option to trap on integer overflow. Languages don't support it because processors don't support it, and processors don't support it because languages don't require it; a vicious cycle that someone needs to break.

<comment><USER10> Most of the time you don't need integer overflow. When you need it, you can insert a check.

I consider integer addition commands in MIPS a mistake. They take up CPU real estate, they slow down design and in the end they are not even used!

The handling of division overflow in MIPS is more fair. If you can have a division that may iverflow, compiler inserts a check. Resources are wasted only here, not everywhere.

<comment><USER9> I'm going to assume you meant "most of the time you don't need integer overflow _checks_ ", because that makes more sense with the rest of your comment.

I couldn't disagree more. If you look at real programs, overflow would be a bug for the _vast_ majority of the integer arithmetic instructions. Therefore overflow checking should be the default. Wraparound overflow is sometimes useful and should be available but it should _not_ be the default.

For example, [http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/overflow12.pdf](http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/overflow12.pdf) finds that there are ~200 instances of overflowing integer arithmetic instructions in all of SPEC CINT2000 (many of which are bugs). Every other integer arithmetic instruction in SPEC CINT2000 (orders of magnitude more than 200, of course) should _never_ overflow; overflow would _definitely_ be a bug and overflow checks would be useful in catching such bugs.

See [http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1154](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1154) for a more complete argument. I really hope that if an ISA really does become "the standard ISA for all computing devices" as RISC-V aspires to, that it supports integer overflow traps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The dirty secret is: nobody cares because the ISA doesn't matter.

When programming a modern microcontroller, I regularly think: "Gee, I wish I had more pins." "Gee, I wish I had documentation on that peripheral." "Gee, I wish I had better tool support." or "Gee, I wish I had more RAM/Flash/MHz."

I _never_ think "Gee, I wish I had a better ISA".

I applaud the effort to make an open microprocessor especially in light of the increasing efforts to put trusted module crap in our computers. However, this has no commercial advantage in any way other than that.

<comment><USER12> > The dirty secret is: nobody cares because the ISA doesn't matter.

I disagree!! While normal operations don't matter, think about features like 'trap on integer overflow', if it was widespread in the popular ISAs we would have language which would use this semantic and as a result less bugs.

Another interesting feature could be Azul's Vega realtime GC support but I don't know if this requires a change of the ISA, or if it's just a MMU feature..

Hardware capabilities/segmentation would also require support in the ISA.

That said I agree with you that the RISC-V is just 'yet another ISA' which doesn't have interesting technical features, it's main feature is that it is open and you can implement it without paying someone for the privilege.

<comment><USER11> > While normal operations don't matter, think about features like 'trap on > integer overflow', if it was widespread in the popular ISAs we would have > language which would use this semantic and as a result less bugs.

You need to study history, son. :)

All of the ISA's from the 70's and early 80's _HAD_ an overflow feature. It was wiped out when we jumped to 32-bit architectures because overflow was so much less common.

GC at the hardware level was, I believe, done by the Lisp Machine. However, standard RISC chips could run rings around it.

Modern ISA's aren't simply a bug in amber that solidified the mistakes of yesteryear never to be rectified. Modern ISA's have many features precisely to correct the mistakes made in the past.

<comment><USER12> > All of the ISA's from the 70's and early 80's HAD an overflow feature.

Really? The first ISA I learned was the 6809 ISA, my memory is a bit fuzzy but I don't remember any 'trap on overflow' feature in the ISA.. Does the x86 has this?

Plus, if you believe that new language are always better than old language, it is you who need to better study history.

About GC at the hardware level: Lisp machine failed so what? There are different many ways to help supporting GCs.. Plus hardware GC wasn't the only feature of Lisp machines..

I don't get your point about "modern ISA" plus I'm not sure that you can lump x86-64 and ARMv8 ISAs in the same category even though both are 'modern ISAs'.

<comment><USER11> BVS/BVC -- same as the PDP11

Well, the concept of condition type "trap" didn't appear until deep pipelining. However, hardware very much supported condition codes. In fact, the reason why condition codes disappeared was _because_ of deep pipelining-- you had to wait for the full result in order to compute carry, overflow, etc.

However, I can tell you from painful personal experience that the 6809 ISA had an overflow condition code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> RISC-V is looking very hopeful, I hope I can get in on some chips soon.

</comment><comment><USER14> If there were a fully open hardware/software machine, I would give it all of my money.*

*Of budget allocated for purchasing computing devices.</comment>


Americans don't trust each other anymore - <AUTHOR> http://apnews.myway.com/article/20131130/DAACV0QO2.html <comment><USER2> A lot of this is covered in the excellent book "The Cheating Culture", which I recommend. "Bowling Alone", as the article mentions, covers the "stay home and do your own thing" part of it, but the economic system we've set up, I believe, is far a far stronger influence. We've set up a system that's dog- eat-dog, every man for himself, "everything that happens to you is your own fault", "lift yourself up by your bootstraps" and approaching hypercompetition. When it feels like you're one medical emergency, job loss, or bad debt away from homelessness, and have only pathetic (and painted as only for life's losers) safety nets there for you, you're out of necessity going to have to trust less. Add in the fact that many areas in this country have to deal with the daily threat of violence, and you get a toxic brew of distrust.

This is sad for more than sentimental reasons, as the article mentions. The "Economics of Trust" is important for easy dealmaking, credit, and other things. More here:

[http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software- programming-...](http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-programming- and-the-economics-of-trust-vs-transactions)

</comment><comment><USER3> And who could blame them. As an outsider who didn't grow up in the U.S. but has spent the past year living here, people are generally amiable and friendly but will take advantage of you for a mile if you give an inch. Rabid consumerism, shows of status, workaholism and an overwhelming feeling of fuck you got mine seems to pervade the collective psyche because you can't really lean on others (save for a few nonconformists).

<comment><USER4> You can't generalize across 300 million people based on one year of personal experiences.

<comment><USER5> Sure you can. You may not be entirely correct, but there is nothing wrong with stating an opinion based on personal experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Americans also live in a much more diverse and accepting society than they did 40 years ago. Let's give it some time, hmmm?

Articles like this make me peevish. I really dislike articles that glorify the 1950s-1990s, in anyway, without acknowledging what a strange time it was. Post-war America deserves far more criticism than it ever receives; I often think this is because boomers have a hard time criticizing the era they grew up in.

Citing a similar poll from the 1970s is a brief glimmer into a period that wasn't actually that long ago. Did people from the 1970s actually trust each other more, or did they just say that they did? What about the 1920s? The 1870s? The 1840s? Did Americans trust each other more then?

Ecclesiastes 7:10

<comment><USER7> Yes, it seems weirdly PC to leave the changing demographic situation out of the picture.

The Extraordinary 30-Year Growth of the U.S. Hispanic Population [http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/08/extra...](http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/08/extraordinary- growth-americas-hispanic-population/6733/)

US ethnic minorities make up 49.9 per cent of under-fives [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10117951/US- ethnic-minorities-make-up-49.9-per-cent-of-under-fives.html)

<comment><USER8> It's strange...

because traditional minorities, ie - slave descended blacks and native americans, make up a smaller portion of the population today than they did in 1960. But the explosive growth in the non-traditional minorities MORE than makes up for the decline. Add in the fact that many of the new arrivals speak english only as a second language... and you would think some degree of mistrust would not be a surprise considering our history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my opinion, decades of corporatist conditioning and manufacturing consent are at least partially responsible for this situation. The corporate mass media has induced distrust in Americans with one another in many ways. One of which is all those articles portraying average Americans as extremely litigious and corrupt with bunk stories on hot McDonald's coffee, etc.

[http://boingboing.net/2013/10/21/the-true-story-about-the- wo...](http://boingboing.net/2013/10/21/the-true-story-about-the-woman.html)

The media focuses much more on crime and how we hurt each other than on the many more cases in which we cooperate and help one another.

In more recent years, corporations and parts of the military-industrial complex have been poisoning Americans against each other via the Internet by astroturfing comment threads, etc. and spreading general fear, uncertainty and doubt with a nice sprinkling of intolerance and hatred.

The mass media glosses over corporate welfare while focusing like a laser on welfare fraud by the poor, etc. They want us to despise each other to gain by the oldest tactic in the book - divide and conquer.

It's been working.

<comment><USER10> I think it is more subtle than conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER9> How about you actually try to debunk the facts I present instead of inanely and pompously labeling them a "conspiracy theory"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There has been over a decade of propaganda telling people not to trust each other... all post-9/11 messaging intended to create insecurity in the population.

<comment><USER12> WW2 had a ton of propaganda about distrusting people, yet according to this article that was a very trusting time.

<comment><USER9> >WW2 had a ton of propaganda about distrusting people

Yes, but that propaganda was nothing compared to the much more advanced and sophisticated level of indoctrination techniques we have in more modern history via mainstream television and radio.

And, don't forget WWII had wonderful internment camps and plenty of racism towards blacks in America. So it wasn't the most trusting place for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _" Americans have abandoned their bowling leagues and Elks lodges to stay > home and watch TV. Less socializing and fewer community meetings"_

Americans have just as many social and community interactions as ever -- but a much higher percentage are semi-broadcasts through social media.

Hanging out with your friends at the bowling league, you might be a little bit cautious about expressing political views, and when there is disagreement it will be set aside by the tenth frame. As a result, people learned to trust each other in spite of disagreement. Online, certain views tend to be broadcast, and when there is disagreement it often turns into a quick unfriending and behind-the-back trash talking about what an intolerant jerk the ex-friend is. As a result, people learn that outsiders are bad people who should never ever be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER14> This article, if not the study itself, is a hash of influences and results.

It seems as if the government makes larger, and riskier mistakes, but it's not as if Vietnam wasn't a similarly large disaster for its time.

The large prison population makes this _" African-Americans consistently have expressed far less faith in 'most people' than the white majority does. Racism, discrimination and a high rate of poverty destroy trust."_ no surprise. But it seems like discrimination and institutionalized hostility toward blacks was at least as bad in the past.

So is it distrust of government? Commerce? One's neighbors? Hard to tell from the article. Some parts of society deserve less trust and we are more aware why this is so.

</comment><comment><USER15> The stuff we are going through right now might seem scary, but McCarthyism was not exactly the golden age of trust. It was not so long ago that "mainstream" society did not trust blacks, working women, the japanese, or jews. We (royal "we" here, emphasis on the royalty) still don't seem to trust gays, atheists, or many other groups. Mistrust is what keeps humanity sharp, but it is also what has been holding us since the beginning.

<comment><USER16> Mistrust or suspicion of different-looking people and/or foreigners is most likely an evolutionary survival instinct: trust the tribe, fear invaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'll note for other readers of Hacker News who don't know (and thus don't trust) the domain of this submitted article that it is actually a syndicated news story from the Associated Press, and I would have to say that I think the article is well reported. (In other words, I trust the statistics behind the article, which come from the federal government's National Social Survey.)

The article includes some dire warnings about decline of social trust in the United States during the last forty years, and also some ideas about how social trust can increase. "People do get a little more trusting as they age. But beginning with the baby boomers, each generation has started off adulthood less trusting than those who came before them." I daresay it is correct that MOST Americans become more trusting as they age. In my middle age, I feel very comfortable both in the community I live in and as I travel about the United States. (I have been to all of the fifty United States, and to other territories of my country.)

To take the article seriously, and to suggest a possible help that was not suggested in the article, I will propose for your thoughtful discussion (I trust you here on Hacker News) one policy that might help. Let's take care of the economic gap problem mentioned in the article and some other factors that harm social trust by building all of the public school systems in the United States on the foundational principle of family choice. I have seen an example of how this policy could help where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. That reduces the effect of family income differences on the availability of adequately funded schools. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[1] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[2]

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[3] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[4] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[5]

Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices. And I think that builds social trust by making school communities more nearly communities of choice than communities of compulsion.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. And the social trust level in Minnesota seems to be above the United States national average, although I'd have to check the National Social Survey data to be sure about that. A good country to compare in this regard to the United States would be the Netherlands, which by its constitution has had pervasive school choice for the last century.

[1] [http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...](http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.html)

[2] [http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf](http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf)

[http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html)

[3] [http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.html)

[4] [http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index.html)

[5] [http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering- Charter...](http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering- Charter/dp/1592984762/)

<comment><USER18> I trust the reports, and I trust the data, but the trend has been pretty obvious, I'd wager, and predictable for some time now.

People in the suburbs increasingly migrate to cul-de-sac communities, which isolate them from the rest of the world, to make them feel safer, depriving their children of the much-needed contact with a diverse population that builds trust.

Beyond that, the news is more and more pervasive, and more and more sensationalist than it's ever been. Every tragedy is made public, and the more grave and more egregious, the more media coverage it gets. People grow up believing that child abductions are the norm, and even likely, when the reality is that stranger abductions are less likely than they've ever been -- but the Amber Alert system (at least in the DC area here) broadcasts on highways, making it impossible to believe that a kid isn't abducted every two seconds.

Humans are built to be paranoid. Historically, the person who heard a strange noise outside their shelter and didn't react was mauled by a bear, or lion, or what have you, while the more alert human that took to defensive measures was more likely to survive. Having established our positions as apex predators, in cities this is far less likely to be needed, but our brains still seek danger patterns, cling to them, and those instincts aren't able to be quashed by rationality or statistics. We see something like the Newtown shooting and instinctively feel that all our children are in immediate danger, despite its actual unlikeliness. The media catches another school shooting and reinforces it even more in our brains that there is a very real danger, and breeds distrust and paranoia, triggering an instinct to be even more isolationist, and more paranoid, breeding more and more distrust, which further fuels the cycle for the next news article we see reinforcing our beliefs.

This isn't meant to blame the news, or humans, or any particular person at all, but the idea is that we should all at least attempt to be more data- driven, more pragmatic, and to try and find data that doesn't agree with our assumptions. It's harder than it sounds. In most humans, the brain simply rejects data that doesn't agree with its pre-formed hypotheses, but scientists are better equipped here than the average human, as we revel in data, enjoy being proven wrong, and strive towards better results, not just a reinforcement of the bad data we already believe.

<comment><USER19> I have to disagree with your characterization of people in suburbs. The only anecdote of trusting behavior given in the article was of a rural farmer in an isolated area - and it was given in contrast to people from urban New York or New Jersey coming up and being amazed about it.

Here's another hypothesis - tribal or rural cultures will be more trusting by nature. Human beings are naturally paranoid but NOT of each other. If you are competing with other species and the environment for survival, it doesn't make sense to view your own species as a threat. Indeed, it benefits your family or tribe if you all cooperate. However, in densely populated urban environments, your competition is all human beings. If you are metaphorically eaten or taken advantage of, it will be by another human. It's much less likely in a city that you will die because of exposure, or weather or a wild animal. Thus, because the threat is from people, you must be more wary of people.

I'm not super confident about this of course - it's probably both simplistic and wrong on a few levels, but I think whatever the answer is, it's not just that urban people are trusting and rural people are paranoid.

<comment><USER18> I may have overcharacterized, but I was specifically referring to those in cul-de-sac neighborhoods, not all suburbanites in general.

More traditional gridded suburbs, especially those with large communal parks, probably bely the behavior I described, but I'm mostly speaking intuitively on the matter, as I'm not aware of any studies.

In short, I think we're probably both right. ;-)

<comment><USER10> Oh yes, cul-de-sacs have a mind destroying force ... Really, is this what science is giving us?

<comment><USER18> There is existing data that strongly suggests corroboration here. Isolationist and/or segregated communities breed distrust of those outside the community. Cul de sacs are but a softer implementation of that segregation. Buying trends indicate that in most cases, cul de sac purchases are done with less diversity in mind -- whites buy in predominately white cul de sacs, minorities do the same; which just compounds the self-reinforcing price strata already existing within neighborhood communities.

That said, despite your low-brow dismissal, I'm not suggesting that cul de sacs are evil. They are very good at building close-knit, but very small communities. Kids that play in cul de sacs generally do so in plain view of everybody else, and with less traffic interruption, encouraging play and discouraging deviant behavior.

Cul de sac kids have a greater sense of trust with those within the immediate community, but at the expense of less trust for those outside that community -- just as isolated communities tend to do.

[1] - [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1523709](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1523709) [2] - [http://chd.sagepub.com/content/20/2/229.full.pdf+html](http://chd.sagepub.com/content/20/2/229.full.pdf+html)

<comment><USER10> It is not a low brow dismissal, appealing to a HN meme doesn't save your position. :) A cul-de-sac is hardly an isolationist community. If anything you could probably go find data these people are more naive or trusting than the norm. Your position is just a rehash of the unquestioned assumptions of "suburbanites" that I think probably have a little but more to do, ironically, with "media conditioning" than even you might think.

<comment><USER18> My position doesn't apply to all, or even most suburbanites, nor is it entirely critical. I don't know why you're taking offense to it, especially offense that you haven't bothered to refute.

Cul de sacs are insular, and that's considered a selling point of them. I'll grant that they're not quite as extreme as gated communities, but that they exist for the purposes of insulating one from traffic otherwise associated with more frequented byways. That isn't a contrivance, it's their stated purpose. It shouldn't come as a shock that insulation from use as a thoroughfare would extend to insulation from outside contact, as that's the obvious result.

<comment><USER10> They are "insular" in a far less dramatic and hyperbolic sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm amazed this made it onto and off the front page with 50+ comments and not a single mention of a startup or tech startup ideas on how to solve this growing problem.

I'm most interested in how you can offer people the potential for trust (or to put it in terms of michaelochurch's comment, reduction of "mistrust.") I believe the establishment of reputation around a useful and flexible digital identity will be _the_ way that people combat distrust among each other. Social proof will come in the form of reviews based on past behavior.

There has been such a tiny amount of innovation or success in reputation systems, I believe this is a massive open opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interestingly enough, in the developer community we fork and clone each others' repos like never before; I bet most people don't check the source code, unless they need to make changes. I believe there's still some trust left.

<comment><USER22> I think the keywords are "developer community". People aren't going to trust each other if there's no sense of community. Are the people around you friends you haven't met or just plain strangers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We don't even trust co-workers anymore.

<comment><USER24> I'm not even sure about myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Rapacious systems can only last so long before collective trust dissipates.

<comment><USER26> Also, collective systems can only last so long before they become rapacious. :)

<comment><USER27> Individuals can only last so long before they join collectives.

<comment><USER4> Collectives can only divide so long before they become indivisibles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Trust is a decision: A society, that does not have trust in each other, will fail, sooner or later.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sorry to do this, but it has to be done. Mistrust != distrust.

Distrust is when you don't trust someone. Mistrust is when you trust someone you should not.

For a more serious note, I've noticed this trend as well. One of the reasons I expect Silicon Valley's decline into irrelevance to be even faster than it looks is that it really was the pay-it-forward culture that made something of the place. That's what built it, in the 1970s. Now that it has been replaced by Sean Parker and Snapchat and "fuck you, I've got mine", it has no locational advantage other than history.

<comment><USER30> Great comment.

I think it's interesting that the word "trustworthy" doesn't appear in the article.

And it only appears in these HN comments once. (well, twice now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does this spill over into our trust of digital currencies like bitcoin, litecoin, and others?

<comment><USER32> Probably makes it worse. If you tell people the currency doesn't leave a paper trail then they'll worry about people scamming them or screwing them over in some way, shape, or form.

<comment><USER33> No paper trail? But that's what the Bitcoin mechanism _is_ \-- a way of publicly recording all transactions!

<comment><USER34> I've never understood the whole "Bitcoin transactions are anonymous" theory. If anything, the Bitcoin model promotes a sort of hyper-transparency. The anonymity today lies in the fact that no one knows what wallet is linked to what person/business. If it becomes a widely-accepted currency among retailers, it would eventually become trivial to look at any given wallet and see that $x was spent at Amazon on this day, $x was spent on groceries, so- and-so filled up their gas tank at this particular station, etc. You can shuffle coins between wallets to obscure your tracks somewhat, but you're still broadcasting every transaction you make to the world.

I think this is horrible for the average person, but would be a great thing to implement for transactions where you would want some form of accountability, like political donations, charities, investments, taxes, etc. If I give my money to some organization, I can use the block chain to see that they're using the money they receive for exactly the purposes I expect them to be using it for.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon sellers say online retail giant is trying to help itself, not consumers - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/01/amazon-sellers-say-online-retail-giant-is-trying-help-itself-not-consumers/ <comment><USER2> I used to sell products on Amazon a decade ago and they were still pulling the same tricks.

I would sell products that had absolutely no listings in for months (I was the first one). Within a week or two, a listing would popup for Amazon at a cheaper cost and I would instantly lose sales...until they were gone for good.

I also still can't figure out why I was banned forever (I still can't create a seller account to this day and nobody at Amazon will help me) because of one customer complaint (I had 100% feedback before this). Yet, there are counterfeiters from China and India that continue to sell their goods on Amazon with impunity.

It's also pretty scary that as a seller, Amazon can and just use your selling data to compete against you and most likely always get a cheaper rate than you because they have deeper pockets.

Selling on Amazon may bring you some temporary cash, but will destroy your business in the long-run.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon is a profit driven business beholden to investors. Is this something that is not fully understood by people in general?

<comment><USER4> Bewilderingly, many people believe in and have expectations of genuine corporate social responsibility, and view profit-incentive interpretations of public relations as cynical. Arguably, if this were not the case, much of PR as practised would be ineffective.</comment></comment>


Natural Language Processing in the kitchen - <AUTHOR> http://datadesk.latimes.com/posts/2013/12/natural-language-processing-in-the-kitchen/

<comment><USER2> I'm sure that it's just due to my ignorance, but this is the first newspaper column I've seen with code in it. Have there been others?

The other nice part about this is that parsing recipes is an approachable problem and worth tackling.

<comment><AUTHOR> There probably have been, but not that I can recall. And not in a (very) popular and mainstream newspaper.</comment></comment>


What's Wrong with Saved Messages on Telegram? - <AUTHOR> https://utopia.fans/security/whats-wrong-with-saved-messages-on-telegram/ <comment><AUTHOR> I thought it must be secured,but it's not so clear</comment>


First-Ever Porsche Rediscovered: Electric Power from 1898 - <AUTHOR> http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/first-ever-porsche-rediscovered-electric-power-1898-200915772.html <comment><USER2> > Ferdinand Porsche debuted the vehicle, dubbed the Egger-Lohner C.2 Phaeton, > on the streets of Vienna in 1989. It was one of the first vehicles of its > kind on the Austrian streets– or anywhere else in the world, for that > matter.

Like I always say, you gotta watch out for those off-by-a-hundred errors.

</comment><comment><USER3> What amazing time the brink of the XX century might have been to inventors. Not only one of the first automobiles, but sporting an electric engine, a technology invented some 30 years before.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice find... F Porsche was certainly ahead of the curve even before the VW.

I saw this earlier today on the Porsche forums and it created quite a buzz. This car is worth magnitudes more than an original 356.

<comment><USER5> As a child, he wired his house for electricity. He was ahead of the curve before he himself was producing cars, no matter the badge.

<comment><USER6> That sounds incredibly dangerous.

<comment><USER7> Maybe a bit of recklessness is a good thing once in a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is the factory vid of the new Porsche 918 Spyder Electric Hybrid.

Go from 600/hp to Electric Drive silence with a push of a button.

This car also owns the current lap time record on the Nürburgring (Nordschleife)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Qs-B5gTmE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Qs-B5gTmE)

<comment><USER8> Geeze, that's some truly awful CGI in the first section of that video. You can tell the director is well aware, too, cutting away at every opportunity - quite a contrast to the loving treatment the camera later gives the 918.

You'd think Porsche, of all companies, would spend a little more and get something that looks the part.

<comment><USER4> You think the director was trying to emulate the vid quality from that place and time in the video?

<comment><USER8> Hadn't thought of that. Even if so, I'd say they still failed - the car doesn't look like an old film, it looks like crappy CGI, with a lazy "blur shadow" underneath and wooden-doll driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The funny thing is, batteries still suck. Motors, on the other hand, have gotten awesome: [http://teslamotors.com/](http://teslamotors.com/)

<comment><USER3> [http://www.teslamotors.com](http://www.teslamotors.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Its amazing how far the automotive industry has come in a mere 110 years since then. This year the 918 Spyder, McLaren P1 and Ferrari LaFerrari hybrid supercars will fight for the crown of the most advanced sportscar and their tech is simply astonishing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not really HN material.

<comment><USER4> Why not? Ferdinand was a visionary that followed his intuition against all odds and produced an iconic product.

<comment><USER12> Visionary, yes. There are some pretty serious question marks over his character however. [http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-652371.html#spRe...](http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-652371.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=https://www.google.co.nz/)

<comment><USER13> I don't think these are just 'question marks'. It's pretty clear that Ferdinand Porsche was a Nazi and he supported the German war machine in a big way.

<comment><USER14> "Morally suspect" also fits the HN community pretty well. Plenty of terrible people are celebrated for their non- terrible contributions.

<comment><USER15> I'll just leave this[1] here as evidence. I still celebrate his work, just not his character.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134774#up_7135480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134774#up_7135480)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I can't even parse that discussion. Jumping in mid-thread didn't help.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>