OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo - <AUTHOR> http://www.gisdoctor.com/site/2015/10/12/reasons-openstreetmap/ <comment><USER4> I'm developing a transit mapping application for Android. OpenStreetMap in place of the standard Google Maps components has been far easier, much more hackable, more flexible, and overall much more fun to work with than Google's MapView. As an added bonus the libraries for Android (OSMDroid in particular) have total interop with the Google Maps API. It really has been a pleasure to dev against.

I think OSM is an accomplishment on the significance level of Wikipedia and I'm glad it exists.

<comment><USER5> Android developer here as well. Have found the same. It has saved the day before where the only other option would have been licensing commercial options like skobbler.

I don't think Google actually dog foods their Android Google Maps API, so it tends to be pretty limited.

<comment><USER6> Google Maps is just too expensive and its pricing model isn't exponential at all, it's not even quadratic.

Very common operation is looking for pairwise distance matrix. Pricing and limits are totally irrational.

100,000 daily limit is totally impossible for an app with 10 users. 100x100 = 10,000 :D

Given that Google probably has all of the distances cached somewhere on their servers, I see no technical reason why this limit can't easily be increased. My app can have millions of shortest paths requests per day, and I certainly do not have Google's infrastructure.

I get incomparable functionality using OSM.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be talking about the HTTP web service Distance Matrix API, but why would you call that from an app? The JavaScript Distance Matrix API scales to essentially unlimited users for free:

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/distancematrix)

I'm also not aware of OSM offering anything comparable out of the box, although there are some commercial providers who offers similar paid services based on OSM data.

Also, if you think "all of the distances" are cached, I invite you to estimate how many places there are in the world and how big a matrix of every distance from every point to every other point would be.

(Disclaimer: Used to work on Geo at Google. Opinions mine only, etc.)

<comment><USER6> It's a mobile app primarily.

OSRM is a nice project - out of the box. The lead went to some giant - <USER2> project is currently a bit stray but there are also some other alternatives on github which work well but might not be as mature as OSRM.

Google caches insane amounts of things. What one might think is insane algorithms, it's probably just Googles multimillion cluster memory.

Google is also lucky that no one needs the whole matrix, I'm sure that distance matrix is insanely sparse and can be stored in not that large amount of memory.

I understand completely that Google offers these APIs completely for free and they can shut them down easily. I'm willing to pay for more but my quadratic needs aren't met with root pricing.

So, to waste sub-linearly I can easily setup OSRM for my needs :D

<comment><USER7> Assume there are a billion places on Earth. (As there are ~7B people, each of whom lives in a "place", this is already an underestimate.) If it takes a single byte to store the distance between each of these places, you would need an exabyte of storage just for this single byte.

<comment><USER6> You are really arguing that?

What system would calculate a shortest path between Sydney and London? There's an incredible amount of sparseness in the matrix.

OSRM builts a hierarchy that allows fast computation of shortest paths for the whole world map. It takes about 4 hours on my server, fills around 40GB of RAM, and then after that I can magically do insane amounts of shortest path queries.

Paper below has an even faster algorithm that has an operation of finding shortest paths equivalent to just several reads in memory (according to experimental results in the paper, it's roughly equal to 5 reads, meaning it's just 5 times slower than that 1E18 table we'd have). It works on a single workstation.

It might not be a pairwise cache but man, this is some advanced stuff and I'm sure Google's engineers wouldn't think of having 1E18 elements matrix.

That's why I'm a bit surprised by the pricing and the limits. I guess network traffic bandwidth costs.

[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1456...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=145689)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I was traveling overland in central Asia, everybody I met was using maps.me with OSM. The maps were of surprisingly good quality and maps.me is superb, allowing the maps for whole countries to be downloaded (ideal if you don't have a data plan) and the route calculation is quick as long as the road grid isn't too dense.

<comment><USER9> I was amazed recently. About 3 years ago, my town in Japan had no maps on OSM at all. I set about adding in the routes that I rode on my bicycle, but it was pretty pathetic. I went to the UK for two years and when I came back somebody had finished everything. All the public paths and everything are clearly marked. I think the only thing left is to tag the stores.

The really nice thing about OSM is how easy it is to contribute. There is a famous bicycle route that goes through my town, but it is also famous because it is non-contiguous and completely unmarked on any map. The only way to find it is to ride on the roads and follow the signs (some of which are hand written by residents who live in the area). With OSM it was easy to mark the part of the route that I knew about and now I see a lot of touring cyclists coming through. It's incredibly empowering.

<comment><USER10> Tht old wiki magic :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do a lot of mountain bike trail mapping work using OpenStreetMap, and it's really bugged me that more public-service mapping projects (eg: MTB Project) don't build on OSM. They all tend to instead build their own mapping set which requires stuff to be re-entered... It's kind of a pain.

<comment><USER12> Similarly, a lot of charitable organizations that could be releasing data to build on top of the OSM dataset and the tooling that exists, instead create their own data silos. For instance, Sustrans (the cycling charity in the UK), and the Ramblers (the walking/hiking charity in the UK). I get the impression that managers are coming up with ideas for their digital projects without any reference to the technical landscape outside their organization.

I don't know whether there's anything which could be done to help these more corporate charities get on board (for instance to make it easy for them to set up and maintain an official database using OSM tooling, on the basis that the data they gather is publicly available and licensed as open data).

<comment><USER13> I've been trying to learn the world of GIS for a cycling/pedestrian project I've been working on over the last few months. I'm also working with the local Open Data/Open Government groups. As I've gotten to know the communities I've seen this over and over...even in the Open Data groups.

I've come to the conclusion that it's not malicious (or even 'Not Invented Here' syndrome), but ignorance and a complete misunderstanding of the FOSS world. It seems that a lot of the people and groups involved come from a corporate background where they had to build and keep everything in house. Whenever I mention not reinventing the wheel, building on others work, collaborating with other groups, or opening up our the data I'm met with mostly blank stares. (I could go on and on about this disconnect and why I think it's happening, but it's not directly relevant to your comment.)

I think the major issue is that non-developers (and even some developers) have no idea how to work with others. It isn't that they don't want to or are refusing to, they fundamentally just don't know how to. The idea of working with more than the fifteen people that are present in the room is mind- boggling, let alone the idea of working with people all around they world they may never meet. On top of that simple issue you have the same concerns you do with any person outside the Open* communities: security, trust, liability, etc. Have you ever seen a layperson look at a software/data license? It's beyond overwhelming, so they all go back to whats safe, even if it's not the right thing for their goals or the community as a whole.

To begin to remedy this I think we have a lot of work ahead of us...starting with making the ideas and principles of Openness more accessible to those outside our community.

TL;DR: I believe that silos are a symptom of being ignorant and/or overwhelmed by the Open-anything world.

<comment><USER14> GIS Manager here. The reason silos happen in the GIS world is because of trust. Every organization has different priorities and standards when it comes to data. The accuracy you need for your building footprints might be (and probably is) unusable for someone else. Data sharing between entities is common but even then oftentimes a great deal of finesse is needed to make another organization's data work in your dataset. In the government sector there is mistrust of data requests from those who would use data for commercial interests so the default option is to charge for it or just make it unavailable.

<comment><USER15> Another challenge has been that GIS data is historically expensive to acquire. As consumer grade spatial applications have become more popular there has been a noticeable shift to release data for the common good rather than trying to recover the cost of acquisition. Of course there are still plenty of silos out there. The push towards regional datasets for public infrastructure also seems to be gaining momentum but these projects often go nowhere unless they are mandated by a Federal or State agency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm a big fan of OSM, but I have to say that for my purposes (more geological than anthropocentric), QGIS becoming more functional over the past 5 years has been more important, especially after going independent. Similar to Python overtaking MATLAB in utility and likely eventual adoption, I think QGIS (esp. with improving OSM/python/JS support) will become the new standard for GIS outside of the mega-enterprise/private data world where ESRI is focusing.

It's really nice watching the confluence of open source technologies making a bigger and more powerful wave.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I recently had to use some basic GIS to implement custom reverse geocoding functionality for my college senior project. My workflow looked like this:

\- Get map data from OSM

\- Use QGIS for analysis, feature extraction -> export as GeoJSON

\- Write GeoJSON to MongoDB instance

Geolocation "works" out of the box thanks to Mongo's geospatial queries and the MongoDB client for Node. Overall, it was an extremely smooth experience, and involved the use of open-source tools from start to finish. This would have probably been impossible to do for free even just a few years back.

<comment><USER18> You might like [https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/QuickOSM/](https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/QuickOSM/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a regular data contributor for Openstreetmap: Openstreetmap is terribly broken in many many ways.

There's no regular checkup of the data if it's still valid. Reverting is extremely hard and there are no checks for changing the data. The multipolygon model for areas can be extremely complex and is the cause that many regions aren't touched at all anymore. In many regions it's just an import desert where already open data gets relicensed under the more restrictive OdBL license. Those areas also only rarely get touched by mappers.

<comment><USER20> That's harsh, but in the spirit of being constructive, here's a project for someone reading this.

Let's take the first identified weakness: regular checkup of the data.

The easiest way to check this for highways is to run distance matrix calculations. Take 500 points in a given area, and calculate a distance matrix from them (OSRM makes this trivial: [https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm- backend/](https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/)). Store the result.

The next day, rerun the same matrix on the latest data. Compare the result against yesterday. If anything has changed significantly, the data has either been broken or improved. Flag this up so that it can be reviewed.

Repeat ad infinitum.

A really simple task for someone with the time and hardware, and it'd make a big difference to OSM. I don't got the time myself, but am happy to help/advise anyone who'd like to take it on.

<comment><USER21> Is there a specific place where I would go to flag things like this? Sounds like an interesting little project to build.

<comment><USER22> I guess you would do something similar to this:

[http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/](http://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/)

There isn't really a "central" place to flag such errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I contribute from time to time to OSM. What bothers me a bit is my productivity when doing surveys with my phone and OSMTracker. The GPS is not precise enough to record doors locations precisely, and taking photos is time consuming (I feel quite productive when tracing roads against satellite views using JOSM, though). I can imagine that Google's stack (with their Google cars and adapted home-grown software) must be something like 100 or 1000 times more productive.

Also, OpenStreetMap provides the data, but Google aggregates the data, which makes very cheap to add/search a lot of information (ex: shops) available from on-line sources (such as web sites). I don't expect OSM to have the same amount of information any time soon.

<comment><USER24> There was a video Google made recently about some maps-related thing, and they had a brief clip of the software their map curators use.

It looked extremely good. For example they automatically extract signs from streetview and overlay them on the map. They also had a kind of fast streetview fisheye thing. Hard to describe but it looked excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The only drawback I see with OSM that none of the apps I have tried has good search capability. I would like to be able to enter "11077 Wilshire, Los Angeles", instead I have to click through state. city and then street which is tedious and sometimes impossible.

The maps themselves are very good.

<comment><USER26> What kind of work has been done publicly on a data model for resolving this kind of query? I was just wondering about that because I was noticing a little of how Google Maps responds in terms of different language names for places and features.

Could this model be built automatically from existing OSM data, or would someone else have to manually add some kind of additional hierarchy information? Has this been studied from the computational linguistics side as well as the geospatial information side?

<comment><USER27> The short answer is yes: OSMand (note, not OSM - but a fairly popular mapping/nav android app using its data) has users who build "full address maps" for entire countries, but it has to be put together as a downloadable bundle and mostly hasn't.

The other problem is OSM tends to have good street maps, but very limited door-to-door coverage.

<comment><USER26> I'm just curious about how this works with some things that seem to add complexity (I haven't worked in this area at all):

\- Different names for things in different parts of the address because of different languages? (What if two different parts are in different language, e.g. giving a Belgian city name in Flemish but the street name in French? Giving a Swiss address with a street name in French, city name in German, and canton name in French+? Giving a Russian address with the street name in Russian but the city and oblast name in English, possibly using different scripts?)

\- Landmarks and points of interest, maybe with separate colloquial and official names? (Tower of St. Vincent? Torre de São Vincente? Torre de Belém? Tower of Belém? Tower of Belem?)

\- How do you search if an address component is omitted (like leaving out a city in a U.S. address but including a state or a postal code)?

\- How do you handle free-form text searches that might omit address delimiters, or include postal codes in a locally nonstandard order, or omit or include official postal designators for the components of the address (for example, Brazilian addresses might include the word "CEP" before the postal code but could be given without explicitly mentioning that the postal code is a postal code)?

Is there a good book or web site or FAQ about geographic name matching that I could look at to get a sense of what standard answers to these sorts of questions are?

\+ In Switzerland, the same city could theoretically be referred to as "Fribourg, [Staat ]Freiburg" or "Freiburg, [État de ]Fribourg". Well, of course a human user might always search using _any_ combination of languages with which they're familiar, or even ones they're not familiar with that they just copied and pasted from somewhere.

<comment><USER28> OSM nominally assigns the "name" tag to the name locally used, and there are also "name:en", "name:fr" tags, etc. Presumably you could search through all of them, using an inverted index and a Bayesian prior for how likely words like "CEP" are to occur in addresses. Bag-of-words should do just about everything except distinguish ZIP codes from street numbers, and possibly distinguish between street and city.

OsmAnd~'s interface for this is absolutely terrible.

A corpus of address searches to test against would be really helpful for this kind of development.

I suspect there _is_ a good book or web site or FAQ about geographic name matching, but you have to be a Googler to see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I recently used maps.me while in Europe (Germany and Poland), with no data plan and only GPS on Airplane mode. With the downloaded maps, it was great. It even included entertainment, restaurants and some transportation options.

<comment><USER30> I was actually surprised recently to find out that GPS works in airplane mode. Really fun to see what landmarks you're flying over when you see something cool out the airplane window.

<comment><USER31> Wi-Fi also does works in airplane mode, on Android at least...

<comment><USER32> Your phone is not in airplane mode if it's making any kind of signal. You're just using Wi-Fi with the cellular modem disabled. Since GPS is only reading the satellite signals, it works fine.

<comment><USER31> Maybe not from a legal standpoint, but you can put your phone in airplane mode and then re-activate Wi-Fi and it will still be in airplane mode... unless they changed the behavior on newer Android OS

<comment><USER33> I was skeptical so I just attempted this on my Galaxy S5 and it turns out you're right! Very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It is awesome. Here's a docker image that'll serve as a tile server. Add a JS library (I use d3) and a OSM snapshot and go.

[https://github.com/geo-data/openstreetmap-tiles- docker](https://github.com/geo-data/openstreetmap-tiles-docker)

Note: a bit finicky.

<comment><USER35> I was going to post a comment how I would like to have a local instance of OSM for my state/region.

Is it possible to calculate directions/routing locally too?

<comment><USER36> try out maps.me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> OSM is great of course, but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's more important in geo than GPS.

<comment><USER38> If I had to pick one or the other, I'd pick OSM. Given a map, I can figure out my location, but the reverse is not true. (Of course, this is ignoring the fact that a lot of OSM data is likely generated using GPS.)

<comment><USER10> Knowing where you are is truly disruptive. Having better maps is just having better maps. GPS has been so incorporated into daily life that we don't appreciate it any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Google maps on the web and on mobile has become such a miserably bad experience that I hope OSM wins big. Google's data is not bad, but the apps are awful.

<comment><USER40> Just noticed OSM has overhead power lines on their maps. A quick search reveals GM either doesn't have that data or doesn't have any way of displaying it. +1 for OSM in my book.

<comment><USER41> You can add just about anything on OSM ([http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:En_key_descripti...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:En_key_descriptions)), so the only limit is what people actually map :)

(and sometimes what the community decides, e.g. adding things that can't be seen anymore, like old tram lines, is generally frowned upon in main OSM and requested for something like Open Historical Map instead)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> We've been navigating on top of OSM for about 18 months now (Scout in the US, Scout/Skobbler in the EU/RoW) and it's pretty amazing how far it has come.

From a navigation standpoint the devil is in the details, like flow speeds and turn restrictions, which is where we see the majority of our issues (flow speeds significantly impact how you treat traffic and turn restrictions of course impact routing).

</comment><comment><USER43> The only thing OSM is missing is a good open places database

<comment><USER44> If this is what you're referring to, we're getting there: [http://openaddresses.io/](http://openaddresses.io/)

<comment><USER45> Wow, they've really got Japan covered

<comment><USER22> OpenAddresses is a separate project from OSM that is aggregating publicly available address data. Japan has a national entity that makes the data available. The sources are all here:

[https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses](https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses)

<comment><USER9> Out of interest, people may not realize that Japan has a very different addressing system than in the west. Streets do no generally have names (though there are a few that do). Instead a city is divided up into areas. I won't try to explain it (for fear of getting it wrong ;-) ): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system)

Often foreigners get confused and see things that look like street signs, but which are actually signs for the chome (kind of a big block). They get very confused when they see another such sign on a different street going in a completely different direction :-)

Anyway, Japanese people generally don't put address numbers on their houses. Instead they will put their name. So if you want to find an address for someone you don't know (or a business) it is really hard. For businesses that have to deliver things, it's really important to be able to find the address. So the public database is really useful. These days everybody generally navigates by GPS. You put the address in and the GPS unit will take you to the right place. Most navigation units will even be able to navigate from a land line phone number (as the phone numbers are pre-assigned to the address).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> From programmer's point of view working with OSM is quite annoying. OSM is being considered more as database than drawn map. But that database is inconsistent, contains many errors and its data structures are not good to represent non geographical items. On top of that mechanical edits of map are very discouraged. I think that OSM would only be good for simple stuff like showing on your website where's your business located. Anything more advanced like address searching or routing would never work reliably.

<comment><USER47> I think you'll find that there are plenty of companies making lots of money selling services on top of OSM's "inconsistent" data. Mapbox sells an extremely powerful map styling system, geocoding/searching, and routing. Mapzen sells similar services. MapQuest offers services using OSM data. Apple Maps uses OSM data in areas where commercial data isn't available.

I think you'll find that OSM is great for more than just simple stuff. In fact using and contributing to it is a million dollar industry.

<comment><USER48> Mapzen isn't selling anything.

<comment><USER47> True 'nuf. I suppose I meant "selling" in terms of promoting, not dollar bills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> We at hammerhead.io have been using OSM to its full potential. It is been very helpful in navigation and tiles.

</comment><comment><USER50> I wish it didn't show Philadelphia as Trenton/Camden. That is so incorrect.

<comment><USER51> I'm not being facetious, don't take it the wrong way, but you could fix it. It's surprisingly easy.

I fixed a bunch of stuff wrong with my home town and found it pretty gratifying

<comment><USER22> Prominence is hard to do automatically, so it may not be trivial to get the system that renders the osm.org tiles to prefer Philadelphia (it does things like look at population, but that data is present for Philadelphia).

<comment><USER51> Very true!

I also took a look at it to figure out why it was showing up that way. They look like they are the same magnitude of thing (city) and they both have population. I'm wondering if it's actually showing Camden county?

<comment><USER22> No, it's not the county. I think what is happening is that the renderer decides there is no room to draw the Philadelphia label once the New Jersey label is in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Somewhat unrelated, but any OpenWebSearch exist?

<comment><USER52> Sort of. If you wanted to make one you could probably get started with the Common Crawl dataset:

[http://commoncrawl.org/](http://commoncrawl.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> IMHO Leaflet/OSM dev experience is so much better than Google maps - <USER3> glad to have this option.</comment>


Grabr launches peer-to-peer marketplace for international shopping and delivery - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/19/grabr-launches-peer-to-peer-marketplace-for-international-shipping/ <comment><USER2> Customs are going to love this, seems like it's going to be an easy way of attempting to bypass import duties until people would start getting caught and fined heavily.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always been interested in a service like this but whenever I discuss it with anyone it's always felt hard to get past the "but what about someone using it for drug muling" issue...

(There's similar service in Australia called Meemeep if anyone's interested.)

<comment><USER4> On grabr, Bruce, the "mule" receives the link and himself have to buy the product... So he knows where the product is comming from (eBay, Amazon...)

Soo, you are going to be a "mule" only if you wants to buy a product comming from deepweb links, lol.

<comment><USER4> Hummm...

I was wrong. There is a biiiig risk, yes!

Let's say John is a drug dealer from Miami. Pedro is a addicted guy from Brazil. They are Friends already.

1\. John adds a fake GoPro to sell on eBay, inside it, there is LSD drugs.

2\. Pedro asks someone on Grabr to Bring this awesome GoPro.

3\. The inoccent Mule visit Grabr, see the offer and accept it, thinking it is a real GoPro camera, but inside of it, there is a lot of LSD druuugs.

4\. The inoccent Goes to jail. Nothing happens with Pedro, John or with Grabr's CEO.

Yeah, that is not going to work on eBay products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something like this would be a candidate for smart contracts.</comment>


America, Let's Face It: China Owns Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/america-lets-face-it-china-owns-us/

<comment><USER2> Wait its a surprise to you? What about... surprise your house is owned by the bank until you pay it off. Is that really a shock to people?

If america stops buying from china, trust me china will be hit hard. These relationships are pretty symbiotic. On the flip side: Did you know the very tycoons we are righting in iraq and the middle east own a big chunk of our debt as well?</comment>


How HN Readers Treat Risk, Results from Last Week's Test - <AUTHOR> http://siglesias.squarespace.com/journal/2010/11/17/entrepreneurs-and-risk-a-test-of-hacker-news-readers-results.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing! I wasn't aware of the test or I would have taken it.

<comment><AUTHOR> No prob! It was fun preparing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> nice! i forgot about taking this survey and the results until today. thanks!</comment>


Show HN: Meteor-Now – Deploy MeteorJS (YC S11) Apps with 1 Line - <AUTHOR> https://www.meteor-now.com <comment><USER2> We were missing the good old `meteor deploy` days so we decided to create `meteor-now`. Should be the easiest way to deploy your Meteor app!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Loren! Any chance of it being included it in the Meteor documentation?</comment></comment>


Prototype and script.aculo.us - <AUTHOR> http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/cppsu/ <comment><USER2> It's about time someone put together good documentation for those two. I wonder if it will be more of a detailed reference book or a book of examples.</comment>


Ping Now Works With Your Actual iTunes Library. This Is A Thousand Times Better - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/25/ping-itunes/

<comment><USER2> I don't think Ping is quite as stillborn as the tech media seems to think. I'm seeing lots of bands I like with 40-50K followers already. This isn't exactly mainstream Top 40 stuff either. If someone is taking the time to go find bands to follow they're at least somewhat engaged in the service. For example Band of Horses has ~316,000 followers on FaceBook -- they have ~30,000 on Ping in less than a month. Considering FaceBook has 5x as many users as registered iTunes users this is an impressive start.

<comment><USER3> Couple things:

1) Ping is only available in the US, so a straight comparison of user numbers to FB isn't necessarily valid. You have take the number of US users of both iTunes and FB, and I don't think that breakdown is readily available.

2) Non-mainstream stuff is likely to be overrepresented in these sorts of things, since people who are into to music are more likely to use such new music services and are also likely to have more varied tastes.

<comment><USER4> Ping is not US only. I have a Canadian iTunes account and had no problem creating a ping account.

<comment><USER3> Oops. I seem to remember reading comments from the original Ping announcement story that it was. I stand corrected.

My point is still valid though. To do proper comparison for Band of Horses, you have to take # of users in native English speaking markets. For FB, that is not the majority, though it is a large plurality; for iTunes, it may very well be the majority. Apple products aren't a significant part of the market in SE Asia, but FB is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe this was intentional? If Apple had opened with a functional last.fm competitor, the discussion would have been about all the privacy concerns and _do I really want to share every song I listen to with the world?_

This way the focus is on, _look Apple fixed their mistake and it actually serves a purpose now._

<comment><USER6> Ping doesn't actually publish any kind of information about your listening habits like last.fm does. All you can do is like music or comment on music. The only thing Ping publishes automatically (which is creepy enough if you buy a lot of music) is what you bought in the iTunes Store and who you followed.

This button is just a little shortcut for functionality that already existed but was ridiculously inaccessible before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't signed up for Ping yet but does this mean it works for music I imported to iTunes but did not buy through the iTunes store?

<comment><USER8> You always could. It's just that you had to hunt down the album in the iTunes Store in order to "Like" something. And it was not "laughably tedious", as suggested in the article; you just click the little arrow next to the track name in your Library.

Now you can "Like" stuff directly from your Library.

All they've done is replace that little arrow-button with a pop-up menu. It's a pretty small change, overall, it just makes things more obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I still have no idea how to find my personal URL to add my friends on Ping.</comment>


Reducing churn with Econometrics - <AUTHOR> http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/23942657106/reducing-churn-with-econometrics

<comment><USER2> From the title I was hoping this would talk a little more about the model used. At 45 minutes runtime, I'm guessing it's something more interesting than a basic linear model.

<comment><USER3> After taking the Stanford online machine learning course last Fall, I was very interested to hear the details about the model they used. Magic statistics apparently.

While it is good to identify users that might be leaving, it does not do any good if the intervention strategy doesn't impact overall churn.

There is also the other side of the coin. Let's say your model predicts a user as "extremely unlikely" to quit the site. If that user attempts to leave the site you may be more inclined to offer them incentives to stay, knowing they will accept a one-month 50% discount or something like that. Or perhaps their usage indicates the level of value they derive from the site, and so you can offer targeted pricing based on what you believe that class of user is willing to accept. If they user doesn't use the site as much, then maybe you could offer them an unlisted pricing tier that fits their usage profile.

And this is why I am not a business executive, it just feels like throwing spaghetti at a wall.

<comment><USER4> They probably just used a logit model, as Stata doesn't support fancy ML algorithms.

What puzzles me though, is that I don't see ANY reason for using alal of these tools together (Stata, R, SAS, etc.) and the code taking one hour to run in a big computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice, I presume the dependent variable is binary, implying a logit/probit model? I don't really get why 3 different stat tools were used, ie Stata, R and SAS... R seems indeed plenty sufficient, or even Stata.

</comment><comment><USER6> A side comment: My current company sells to enterprises. Out of curiosity, last year I tried to look at the usage patterns of customers who left (and stayed). I had a simple hypothesis: those who didn't use the software regularly were the most likely to leave. Surprisingly, this had no correlation. It was another reminder, that in enterprise sales, low or high usage patterns are sometimes not a predictor of customer retention. It obviously depends on the industry, but sometimes it has as much to do with internal politics, salesmanship, and other things that are simply outside the scope of your code.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ryan, Just a note but I'm assuming you're going to take action on the emails you send to users that are likely to cancel rather than just having the act of the email be the deterrent to cancel.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the parolhar verb?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pardon?</comment></comment>


Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) - <AUTHOR> https://bombmagazine.org/articles/kazuo-ishiguro/ <comment><USER2> The Remains of the Day might be my favorite book. It does have my favorite quote, which I won't spoil for anyone who hasn't read the book as I think the emotional impact is lessened out of context.

This book gave me the sense that the author once felt an emotion so deeply that he needed to write an entire novel in order to convey it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been on my list for years now. I just haven't got around to reading it. Once I have I'll have to ask you about the quote.

<comment><USER3> I think you should drop everything else and run to the bookstore, buy the book and read it. Come to think of it, I'm going to do it myself right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No one has talked about An Artist of the Floating World here. I'll try without giving too much away and taking away the potential enjoyment of someone who could read it in future.

So much of what we read, fact and fiction, stands on the foundation of an omniscient first- or third-person narrator. We do not even think of questioning what the narrator tells us. Even mystery or suspense stories only hide a secret with the protagonist "peeling an onion" to find answers progressively. Deceptive incidents, the doubts of the detective, inconsequential objects, descriptions of crime scenes serve to distract us and we know we are being distracted and it is part of the game.

But unreliable narrators are a different beast altogether. As the story progresses, there are hints of doubt created in our minds regarding description of events, feelings of characters, gaps in some story lines which we hope will be reconciled later (and which are). A great author can do this so subtly that if you do not follow along closely it is easy to miss or, worse, mistake this to be a problem with the author's storytelling.

Fight Club is one such story. It is non-linear which serves to disorient the reader and at the end we realize the narrator was also unreliable. There are sentences like "Today I almost ate Marla's mother" and we are left wondering what that means until a few paragraphs later it is revealed. The non-linearity masks the narrator's reliability. The book is well-done even though the story- telling is . But you have to read An Artist of the Floating World to see what a master can do with ordinary events, conversations, descriptions of places by (someone who we will later in the story consider as) an unreliable narrator. Stories like these serve as a reminder that every one sees the world differently. We consider others unreliable while forgetting that everyone sees what they want to.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a huge fan of Ishiguro. I find it fascinating that through most if his books he stays very close to his main themes – memory, introspection, self- deception – while playing with and exploring various different genres: historical, dystopia, detective, fantasy... The Buried Giant for example is a quite unsual fantasy novel, one that really moved me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you read _A Sense of an Ending_ , by Julian Barnes? It's a stunning exploration of those same themes: memory, introspection, self-deception.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I have, and I enjoyed it! Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If curious see also these threads from 2017:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428846)

cool article, not much discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408463)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, dang. I've been checking for reposts, before posting lately, but forgot with this one.

<comment><USER6> Reposts aren't a problem after a year or so! See [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). The reason I post links to previous discussions is just because they're interesting sometimes.

<comment><USER7> I think it would be an interesting feature of HN to allow you to see some reports when you are actually posting something; it is just quite time- consuming to do that check manually every single time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've heard that "Remains of the day" is Jeff Bezos' favorite book of all time. Some reference here: [0].

[0]: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-jeff-bezos-was- ecstati...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-jeff-bezos-was-ecstatic- over-todays-nobel-prize-announcement-2017-10-05)

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to go off on a tangent but this really struck me:

" KI

There is a big difference between someone in my position and someone who has come from one of the countries that belonged to the British Empire. There is a very special and very potent relationship between someone brought up in India, with a very powerful notion of Britain as the mother country, and the source of modernity and culture and education."

Perhaps someone from India could give their opinion but as someone from another country that was made part of the British empire this strikes me as nonsense - of course there are some small circles in my country where the idea might persist in some attenuated form but in general the above would considered utterly offensive and - more importantly - just plain wrong.

<comment><USER9> Definitely so. Indian children are always taught about our glorious freedom movement in detail, glorifying leaders like Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. There are sadly still remnants of British culture throughout, like statues or names of streets or buildings, but I don't think anyone looks at British rule as anything but a dark age where India went from one of the most prosperous nations in the world to.. very much not so.

<comment><USER10> Well, there really wasn't an Indian nation before the Brits sailed in and did their thing; India was a loosely-knit (if at all) bunch of "kingdoms". In addition, you don't have to look further than the transformer at the end of your street, or the nearest Railway line, (or the language in which you wrote your post) for a remnant of British culture.

<comment><USER10> BTW -- being a fully resident citizen of said nation who was born a few decades after 1947 -- I personally do have an ambivalent attitude towards the British Raj. I guess not all of the administrators were merciless tyrants and scoundrels, and neither were all of them benevolent angels. I don't subscribe to Ishiguro's views expressed in the quote under discussion, either.

That said, one cannot wish the facts away, which is what I was trying to put across, albeit ham-handedly, in my earlier comment.

<comment><USER9> Any development which the British did was purely to serve their own purposes and improve the efficiency and speed of their looting the country. Why should we be grateful for that? The opportunity cost there for the Indian subcontinent (if not India as a nation) was massive, and the British took it from us.

I'm proud to say I'm not ambivalent about it in the least.

<comment><USER10> I think what you're missing is that the distribution of wealth was probably just as uneven - if not worse than it is now. Most of it was concentrated in the hands of a few. So what was looted wasn't going to be used for the good of the common folk anyway. The ruling royals (most of them; there were a few exceptions like Mysore and a few of the Holkars) were worse governments than the Brits ever were.

You're free to believe whatever you want to, and feel pride in whatever makes you feel good. That is your prerogative - but do mind the facts!

Edit: To be clear, I'm _not_ trying to justify what the Brits did. Bear in mind though, the royals that they replaced were in many cases much worse administrators - so the argument about the opportunity cost holds little water.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple is reportedly giving the Chinese government access for "security checks" - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-government-access-to-its-devices-for-a-security-assessment/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Apple hasn't commented, but they're probably giving access to iOS source code to China. Would that enable the Chinese govt. to better spy on iPhone users? I think Apple knows what they're doing here, and accepting the FBI order would actually put them in a bad situation with China, but I'd be glad to understand more of what's really going on...</comment>


MAPI is an API to access data about all pharmaceutical products available in USA - <AUTHOR> http://mapi-us.iterar.co

<comment><AUTHOR> MAPI US is an API that provides an easy access to organized and updated data about all pharmaceutical products available in USA, certified by FDA. This API aims to make things easier for developers that are some how connected to the Healthcare environment, such as Pharmaceutical companies and Researchers. This is a Beta version, however we are working on new features to release soon.

<comment><USER2> A great API for healthcare related solutions.</comment></comment>


Your Company Is Not a Family  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/your-company-is-not-a-family/ <comment><USER2> It's certainly not a family, but a "team" probably isn't right, either.

If you company wants to use a sports team metaphor, that's fine, but just remember that many professional sports have _players unions_ and _guaranteed contracts_.

Oh, what's that? Not such a big fan of the sports team metaphor now?

<comment><USER3> They also tend to make tradition-based rather than evidence-based decisions. How many times have you heard, "hiring so-and-so just (made|didn't make) good football-sense"? Superstition is extremely strong in sports franchises.

<comment><USER2> I think you could successfully make the argument that most hiring decisions are probably done like that.

Of course, I would imagine there's a lot fewer metrics available for hiring for most non-athlete positions, so "moneyball" might be a bit tougher for off- the-field jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want every one of your employees to be a "superstar", just pay them millions a year, and the sports metaphor is a great fit.

Otherwise, sometimes you gotta work with what you've got. In real life, you can't just let everyone go who isn't a superstar, unless people are tripping over themselves to get a spot at your company.

</comment><comment><USER5> Using sports metaphors is a particularly bad way to go about it in this instance. The average young NFL player is only expecting a career lasting about 5 years, maybe 10 for exceptional guys; The average young office worker is looking for 40 years.

If you were fired as frequently as players get traded in NFL, we'd be living hellish careers!

<comment><USER6> But isn't that the point they are trying to make - that sports teams can be effective despite have very high rates of staff turnover because everyone has realistic expectations of the employer-employee relationship?

<comment><USER7> In careers which last, at most, 5-10 years. Not 40.

<comment><USER6> I'd actually be interested to see the stats for developers and how long the average career is. Now obviously some people make it to their 40s, 50s and later but I suspect most don't.

<comment><USER8> What do you think they do when they get to that age? Where do they go?

My observation is that age discrimination isn't a brick wall, so much as an increased difficulty in doing things a person should be able to do. It's not like you can't get a programming job after 40, because obviously people do. It's just that job searches are no longer completed in 2 weeks; it's closer to 4 months.

What no one told us in school was that getting better at our jobs, past a certain point, makes job searches harder and more complex, especially because HR drones don't understand our specialties and tend to use them against us. ("Doesn't have 3 years of Swift experience? No hire.") Structuring a society as a pyramid actually works when it is in transition from poverty to industrial wealth, but it's a disaster in a stable state.

<comment><USER9> In my experience, I've never seen people over 40 have any more issues than younger folks getting programming jobs.

However, the reason you don't see many, is that most don't want that job by the time they are that age. For most programmers, they will hit a glass ceiling on salary somewhere in their 30s. If they want to make more money, and most people do, they transition into management.

The answer to the question, "where did they go?" is pretty simple. Management.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, that's been my experience as well. I'm 38, and I get pinged for a job about 2-3 times a week, but basically I don't want to work at any of them (ask me again in 6 months).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A typical company is no more a professional sports team than it's Ward, Wally, June, and the Beaver. More likely it's the sports team equivalent of a 2am domestic dispute call to the trailer park on _Cops_ \- leadership is running a win at all costs T-ball team.

The sports metaphor doesn't change the fact theyre cutting people for their obsession with ponies.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra These comparsions are meaningless. Your real family might not be a family in the rainbows and unicorns sense.

On the other hand, your company might be quite like a family in Lannister sense.

<comment><USER12> In general, your company should _not_ be a family in the sense that they have the right to demand your help whenever and wherever. With a company, there is a contract and limits.

Besides which, you're lucky if you have a tiny handful of people in the entire world with whom things are "in the rainbows and unicorns sense". Rainbows and unicorns actually takes a whole lot of hard work at making interpersonal relations work well.

<comment><USER13> > With a company, there is a contract and limits.

To be fair, this is true for people, too, they're just unwritten. Family to me is kinda like a very very close friend; I might expect more support, and give more support, but there is still no outright demanding stuff, and there are limits.

But I still don't think a company should be like a family, because I think the whole human race should be like a family :P We can still rib on each other, and compete, but to outright snatch up as much as we can to the detriment of everybody else, results in a swift but friendly smack by grandma. I wish I could coat it in academic enough words though so such a proposal might fly here; I know it's not realistic in the short and medium term, but I would consider it a worthwhile long term ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about we just stop saying a company is like-a-family or like-a-team or like-a-band or like-an-anything-that-isn't-a-company? Companies are companies. They are their own distinct thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> While the article tries it really only manages to scratch the surface of the iceberg when it comes to the, generally epic, failure of company structures to provide a meaningful environment in which human beings can thrive as whole beings.

The idea of the "sports team" is not functional - the limited human interactions necessary within an artificially established playing field will NEVER mirror the real world challenges a company, and the people within it, faces. Sure that artificial playing field allows an easy "team" mentality but this "team" will never work against real-life challenges.

<comment><USER15> Limited human interaction?

Team sports primarily consists of human interaction. You practice with your team, have meetings with the coaching staff, film sessions, team meals, travel together, team training sessions, and that's before you even set foot on the field or court.

And the leadership and communication skills are directly transferable and valuable to a business setting. The business unit as a sports team idea is a bit tired and cliche at this point because it's been a comparison made for at least 50 years.

But that speaks to the cliche's validity. David Foster Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest "cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are analogies and then there are analogies.

One very common type is of the talk is cheap variety. Management can declare their company to be a team or a family or an enchanted kingdom. They read about it in Harvard Review. Like a mission statement or a slogan , these thing only mean something when you put your money (literally and figuratively) where your mouth is. Most don't.

The second type is a half hearted analogy. The company really intends to be like a team, a family or a special forces unit. But, the cost to really making that mean a lot is high. You can make the business somewhat family like or team like relatively cheaply and inform your company culture, but there are going to be countess cases where the cost is high. FO employees to really buy into it, they need to accept this costs. Most don't. What they have is rhetoric and a certain amount of investment into team building. Fair enough, but not what this article is decribing

The type of team like environment the article is describing doesn't come cheap? You need to have good feedback & measurement mechanisms for performance on the team level. You need success and failure to be very well compensated for and it needs to be based on team performance. Are you compensating success well enough that members of the team will want to see the poorest performers periodically replaced?

A professional sports team is an exceptional environment. The people there are high achievers and they are ambitious. They are the 1%, most hardworking _and_ talented. They get a lot of money and a lot of glory. They're in 'once in a hundred lifetimes' state of mind. Can your company offer that? Is 5 years of success on you "team" the pinnacle of a career? Are they making more now than they ever will be? Will these be the glory years they relive?

Functions with very straightforward feedback, like sales tend to develop these dynamics with the right compensation structure. A small startup with only a handful of high equity employees can develop this culture naturally. Trying to artificially create it elsewhere is hard. I also suspect it's near impossible a group with over 50 or so people.

It's easy to say this stuff. Does Netflix really put this into practice? Does anyone?

</comment><comment><USER17> Lots of companies are different. There are some that are more like sports teams, and some that are like families, and heck, some actually are families.

This article does nothing but debate semantics. Every metaphor breaks down at some point, so I don't see the need to debate which works the best.

</comment><comment><USER9> #1 reason a company is not a family. You do (or don't do things) for your family despite personal loss because it is good for the whole. That is something most people do not do for their company, nor should they.

</comment><comment><USER18> So just because it's not exactly 100% like a family you're not allowed to draw a comparison?

<comment><USER19> The problem is that the way family relationships are different from all other relationships (namely that they are lifelong) is the exact way in which a business is unlike a family.

<comment><USER20> Familial relationships are also unchosen, unlike relationships in companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Aaaaa full-screen popup! Can we start adding popup warnings to submissions like this?

</comment><comment><USER22> The fact that they didn't include a quote or captioned photo from Michael Scott is a missed opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER23> I know business schools are looked down on by the "proper" parts of the Host UNI but winningest FFS this is the HBR not the back page of the Sun.

Doesn't exactly show Harvard in a good light that one of their publications uses such god awful English.

</comment><comment><USER24> > _Your Company Is Not a Family_

Really? But I want to believe the paternalistic BS by my bosses (who'd fire me at the first chance of reduced profit margins without a second thought), and fill the empty whole in the center of my life with some purpose based on my job.</comment>


IBM And The Limits of Transferable Tech Expertise - <AUTHOR> http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/04/23/ibm_and_the_limits_of_transferable_tech_expertise.php

<comment><USER2> Problems are forbiddingly hard until they aren't.</comment>


First look at Shell's new electric car charging stations - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/09/27/shell-new-electric-car-charging-gas-stations/ <comment><USER2> > Shell and Allego are talking about increasing the rate to £0.49p next year. > If they do, it would render the station completely useless.

umm... that's a bit hyperbolic. It would render the station "premium priced vs. home charging" or even vs. the Tesla charging stations at £0.20p.

It would still recharge the drivers car. That's the part that is useful. "Giving away electricity for slightly more than cost" isn't the useful bit.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever seen an electric car driver a few seconds after learning that a charging station costs half a pound per kwh (that's US$0.66/kwh)?

They'll be hyperbolic all right :-)

<comment><USER2> Ha ha - OK that's funny. But realistically it changes the value proposition for owning your own charger at home, or going to a Tesla charging station where the cost is 20p.

I mean when I lived in the UK Gas was something over a pound per liter (roughly $5 USD/gallon)

So on a typical mid sized car with a 15 gallon tank we're looking at about a $75 fillup.

Compare to the cost of a full charge electric with an 85kwh battery. $58 USD to fill (at 50p ) $23 USD to fill at a tesla charger and $10 to fill up at home.</comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk: A thermostat-sized box may one day power your house - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-a-thermostat-sized-box-may-one-day-power-your-house-2014-09-17 <comment><AUTHOR> That seems like a bizarre statement. I think that would have a higher energy density than gasoline, perhaps higher than a rocket, no?

I'm thinking powering a house = 20KWH per day? So he's saying something the size of two decks of cards can hold 20KWH?

<comment><USER2> I wonder if it is just the press mangling him talking about just needing a place to plug your electric vehicle into your house.

edit: This article (at least from the same promotional tour, if not the same closed door meeting) doesn't mention the thermostat, but talks about a 4" thick battery mounted on a wall:

[http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-musk-family-plan-for- tran...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-musk-family-plan-for-transforming- the-worlds-energy-1411055676)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some similar to Hacker News websites? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN community, what are some similar to HackerNews websites? Obviously, no website can ever replace HN - but its useful to know more good websites. Please post any website similar to HackerNews (HN) only please. Name/Link/Description. Thank you for your help! <comment><USER2> Ars Technica

[http://arstechnica.com/](http://arstechnica.com/)

Slashdot

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


Anyone doing a funded (or fund-able) startup in Cincinnati? - <AUTHOR>

The overlap between HN users and startup folks in Cincy seems to be vanishingly small. Prove me wrong. <comment><USER2> You might find someone interesting here: <http://cincinnatiinnovates.com/>

Also, I know I met someone who was a VC at an event last year, but I lost his business card :( He probably worked for one of these groups: [http://www.libraries.uc.edu/research/subject_resources/busin...](http://www.libraries.uc.edu/research/subject_resources/business/research_res/Venture_Capital.html#cinci) \- they would likely know of any funded startups in the area.

[edit] I wouldn't be surprised if some of the local 2600 guys read HN occasionally: <http://cinci2600.com/></comment>


Human DNA enlarges mouse brains - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/02/human-dna-enlarges-mouse-brains <comment><USER2> I was just thinking about this topic the other day -- how hard was it to develop the genes that separate human intelligence from other primates? In other words, if all humans disappeared from earth, then given another couple dozen million years or so, what is the likelihood of another intelligent species coming about?

Of course, human intelligence is hard to pin down -- for my personal definition, it is the ability to specifically communicate new ideas to other members (i.e., not other members just picking up a skill from observation only, but for one to be a teacher), and to be able to (as a group) remember and pass down history. Oh, and the ability to develop a space program.

<comment><USER3> My bet is that, if we did disappear and another species "caught up" so to speak, the descendants of modern chimps would take the crown, with the right evolutionary pressures, in 5 million years at the earliest. That's about how long ago we forked:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_common_ancestor)

Of course I wouldn't bet too much, because it's really a bet on many, many events occurring together, and we're all familiar with the product law.

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

If we started a human-directed breeding program to develop chimps capable of language (arbitrarily chosen marker of intelligence) right now, I would guess we might be able to cut that time down to merely hundreds of thousands of years.

<comment><USER4> > If we started a human-directed breeding program to develop chimps capable of > language (arbitrarily chosen marker of intelligence) right now, I would > guess we might be able to cut that time down to merely hundreds of thousands > of years.

Another option is to pick a collection of human genes that seem like they may be relevant, and just insert them into chimp genomes. Followed by something like your selective breeding program. I would be fairly surprised if it still takes 100k years.

<comment><USER3> >Another option is to pick a collection of human genes that seem like they may be relevant,

Hey, that would be cheating!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gee, I wonder what those mice will be doing tonight.

<comment><USER6> Pinky and the Brain reference.

"Pinky: Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight? Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take over the world"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mPrhwpZ-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_mPrhwpZ-8)

Pinky and Brain are genetically enhanced laboratory mice. In each episode, Brain devises a new plan to take over the world which ultimately ends in failure

<comment><USER7> It may sound weird to some, but this is the first time I learned about those characters. I wanted to point this out in oder to stress the usefulness of the comment I am replying to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this basically the plot of the movie Deep Blue Sea?

<comment><USER9> Or this classic from my childhood [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIM...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIMH)

<comment><USER10> curious, how does this compare to the film?

<comment><USER11> The book is better, more so than is normally the case. Much more depth and nuance to the characters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are we trying to do tonight? Same thing we try and do every night Pinky… Try to take over the world!

<comment><USER13> Came to this thread looking for insightful, lengthy comments by people with expertise in DNA and/or the human brain adding information to the original article, found only references to Pinky and the brain. What is the world coming to :)

<comment><USER14> To be fair, it is one of the most intelligent cartoons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> typical inflammatory response trolling posted in 3, 2, 1...

<comment><USER15> Ok, Maybe not just inflammation or hydrocephalous. I hate when the answers are not so simple but I must admit that those bulging embryo eyes were freaky.

A better picture:

[http://today.duke.edu/2015/02/bigbrain](http://today.duke.edu/2015/02/bigbrain)

So a mouse injected with chimp DNA seems thinking about bananas and party in the beach and a mouse injected with a similar gen in the homer DNA looks pensative... interesting</comment></comment>


Hackers Are Breaking into Websites and Adding Links to Game Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/hackers-website-links-backlinks-seo-spam <comment><AUTHOR> Good piece on website security albeit a bit inconsistent. At some point it's not hackers anymore but SEO consultants:

"SEO consultants ... offer customers the ability to have links placed on compromised websites."

I guess BuzzFeed News needs to fire their SEO team, don't they?

"Customer websites" get quickly banned for such things.

This only works for PPP (poker, pills, porn) sites that have a new domain over night when one gets burned.</comment>


Burned After Reading: Endless Mayfly's Ephemeral Disinformation Campaign - <AUTHOR> https://citizenlab.ca/2019/05/burned-after-reading-endless-mayflys-ephemeral-disinformation-campaign/ <comment><USER2> "don't expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth." \- RAND Corporation [https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf)</comment>


Man dupes CIA of $21 million with hoax software - <AUTHOR> http://ibnlive.in.com/news/man-dupes-cia-of-21-mn-with-hoax-software/143963-11.html

<comment><USER2> More troubling than the $21 million loss is that they did things like rerouting planes based on such faulty intelligence.</comment>


Lyft Is Hiring Mechanics - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/events/408298556382122/ <comment><USER2> Uber and Lyft compete for drivers using a rewards system based on ratings and number of rides completed. If I look at my own dashboard right now (I drive for Lyft) I see a small fuel subsidy from Shell ($0.05/gallon), discounted roadside assistance from Allstate, a discounted Turbotax subscription, and a handful of other discounted services.

I'm only at Silver, the first tier. Rewards improve slightly at Gold and Platinum tiers but honestly they're so insubstantial that I don't think I would redeem any of them except maybe the Turbotax discount because I was already going to use it.

If Lyft started offering heavily discounted auto maintenance, however, I would 100% redeem those rewards. And I have a strong feeling other drivers would switch from Uber in order to redeem them, too.

Smart move.

<comment><USER3> Depends on the maintenance they offer and the quality of the mechanic. SF proper mechanics will be hard to poach unless they offer quite a bit more in pay or benefits. Convincing someone to drive in from Vallejo or Antioch to work in a shop in SF and not where they live will also require a bit more pay or benefits. Good idea but interested to see how they make this work.

<comment><USER2> Fair point. Then again maybe half of the Uber and Lyft drivers plying San Francisco's streets on a given day are from Stockton, Modesto, Fresno, etc. The same or a similar principle may apply to auto mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not that I'd apply. But, why does one need facebook to apply?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, so I guess if you drive for lyft you'll get some complementary auto repair service?

<comment><USER6> "complimentary" might be a little to optimistic. I suspect they're looking to in-house collision repair since frankly they've been big enough to self insure for quite awhile now.

<comment><USER7> I think they meant "complementary" \- that it pairs well, rather than being free (as in beer)</comment></comment></comment>


Polarr v2 – free web-based photo editor - <AUTHOR> https://v2.polarr.co

<comment><USER2> V2 is still under lots of work but it is getting close to a reliable editor now. IndexedDB and WebSQL really helped.

</comment><comment><USER3> We spent a lot of time making the editor feel fast. It even runs well on pretty low-end hardware, like Chromebooks.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, I feel like a pro (think filters but to make like, real art).

</comment><comment><USER5> Really looking forward to it!!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is incredibly useful

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow!

</comment><comment><USER9> cool</comment>


'Fortnite' hosted an in-game event to teach players about racism - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/fortnite-we-the-people-anti-racism-in-game-event/ <comment><USER2> > ...a 29-year-old mother who plays Fortnite every day, says she tuned into > "We the People" because she was called the N-word by another player > recently.

In her Twitter feed, she even calls for a ban on the N-word in the game. While it's a step forward and it sounds fair enough, It's difficult to stop them from using it and all you can do is report the account and that's that.

But remember that there's another variant of the N-word which is still prevalent in music videos and lots of artists still use it which has influenced their followers to use the term. Interesting how there are some are still comfortable using it given its connections.

If they are serious in stamping out the N-word, they should also take responsibility in refraining all versions of the N-word; culture, music and games.

There is no other race that has variants of a similar racial-word as a double standard.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the N-word as a socio-linguistic phenomenon has parallels in other words used in identity politics. Reclaiming a word may be some mind of a double standard but, it's also a way of dealing with set of sound that are loaded with all kinds of negative meanings, and has been embedded in a groups identity. It's no so simple to make such a word just go away.</comment></comment>


The shaky foundation of world economics - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Currencies/What-is-the-economics-behind-printing-of-currency/answer/Nitin-Gupta-14

<comment><AUTHOR> Related youtube video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP7L8bw5QF4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP7L8bw5QF4)</comment>


Cook Your Meat in a Beer Cooler: The World's Best Sous-Vide Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html

<comment><USER2> I have made a modified sous-vide setup based on the following excellent instructions which I have not seen mentioned here. Total cost was under $75 for me since I simplified the setup a bit. Temperature accuracy is excellent.

[http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2010/02/diy-sous-vide-heating- imm...](http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2010/02/diy-sous-vide-heating-immersion- circulator-for-about-75/)

Quick overview of my modifications. I used a 6" deep full size hotel pan I got in chinatown as my water bath and a standard $9 1500 watt water heater element instead of the set of immersion heaters.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link! I've been looking for plans to build a mash heater for home-brewing, and that looks like it will fit the bill nicely.

<comment><USER2> Actually, what gave me the confidence to use the 1500 watt heating element was when I searched for the PID I was buying on google, I found a lot of links to home-brewers who used these heating elements drilled into the side of big aluminum/stainless steel pots. They were using even higher wattage units to get quicker boil times.

<comment><USER3> It's great that we can so easily share information between different hobbies, isn't it? :-)

Oh, I also ought to mention one thing regarding the heating element for those who might not be familiar. If I remember correctly the National Electric Code indicates that a constant load (such as a heating element) cannot be more than 80% of the peak load rating for the circuit - which (I think) ends up being 1440 watts on a 15 amp branch.

It's almost certainly safe to operate on a 15-amp circuit, but if one is particularly worried about the letter of the law or insurance coverage if anything unfortunate happens, be sure to run on a 20-amp circuit.

<comment><USER4> In general, if it has a plug on it, it's considered a "demand load" not a "continuous load" as far as the NEC is concerned.

Hair dryer, slow cooker, electric space heater, etc are all demand loads and can use 100% of the rated ampacity.

Edit: Source: Article 100 of NEC

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I wonder if this is a new development (can't find that in my 2005 NEC codebook). I did run across something else, though, 200.21B2 states that the total load on a single 15-amp receptacle cannot exceed 12 amps, which might also apply.

I guess I'm going to have to go back and re-read the whole section. This concludes the thread-jack. We now return you to the regular discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an awesome hack, but I gotta point out that the price point on "real" SV he's using is off. It's $400+ if you buy a Sous Vide Supreme. But you can also buy a $40 rice cooker (which is a multitasker) and a $130 PID controller from Auber Instruments.

The only downside to the beer cooler hack, besides the fact that it's not precise enough to do eggs, is that it won't work over very long cook times. It looks like it'll kill on steaks, but it isn't going to work for medium rare short ribs.

More Hacker News on Sous Vide, another topic I seriously will not shut up about, is here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093433>

<comment><USER6> Auber has great customer service too - the sensor on my PID went bad and when I emailed Auber about it, they FedExed a new sensor to me within minutes.

<comment><USER7> Do you live between the Auber factory and a FedEx office?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did this last weekend, it made one of the best steaks that I have ever had in my life.

I used a cheap cooler, so I cranked up the temp by 10 degrees above what I wanted the steak to be at when it finished.

One thing that isn't brought up on the page, you probably want to use a rapid digital thermometer rather than your standard analog meat thermometer, I probably let out too much heat when I checked the temp halfway though.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of a staple of my Boy Scout cooking: eggs in a bag. Just crack your eggs into a zip top bag (it must be a freezer bag to handle the temperature), add cheese, or peppers, or whatever you like in an omelet, suck out the air, and put it in boiling water until it's done. Then, if you eat your omelet straight out of the bag, you have no clean up!

It had never occurred to me then to try to cook anything else in bags, but I'm certainly going to try this out.

<comment><USER5> Just remember that there's a huge difference between boiling and SV'ing eggs. Boiled eggs sound gross. Boiled steak _is_ gross. You don't want to let the eggs get over 150. Eggs cook _fast_. Water boils at 212f.

<comment><USER9> Ah yes, I forgot to mention: watch your eggs very closely, or they turn slimy (which is as gross as it sounds, yes). If you get them out in time though, they taste basically like an omelet cooked in a pan. Then again, I was a teenager last time I did that, so maybe I'd have a different opinion if I tasted them now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any consideration for toxicity? I can't imagine plastic baggies are designed to keep food safe for human consumption when you heat them enough to cook meat.

<comment><USER5> Cheap bags start breaking down around 190f. You wouldn't want to eat anything that came out of a 190f bag anyways. It's a valid concern though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ziplock's may be toxic:

[http://camping.about.com/od/campingrecipes/a/ziplocbaggies.h...](http://camping.about.com/od/campingrecipes/a/ziplocbaggies.htm)

<comment><USER12> This is talking about a completely different temperature range. What you meant is "cooking your Ziplock at > 195°F may make it melt, and the effects thereof have not been adequately studied"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Home brewers have a very similar problem. When you make beer from all grain, you need to stop the heating at certain temperatures and stay at that temperature for some amount of time to let certain enzymes activate. Using a cooler to maintain heat is fairly standard in home brewing. Very neat.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's cool! I'm going to try an omaha steak in my cooler, it is already vacuum sealed so as far as I can see I just throw the steak in the hot water and go have a few cold beverages while it cooks. Mmmmmh.

<comment><USER15> I don't want to burst your bubble or anything, but you should call omaha steaks and ask them what the USDA grade of their steaks would be if they paid for them to be graded. Combine that with the fact that they are usually frozen and you're not getting a good deal on their meat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminded me of something my friend sent me: cooking salmon in a dishwasher.

<http://www.salon.com/nov96/salmon961118.html>

</comment><comment><USER17> I would be at least a little worried about food poisoning. Cooking salmon at 115 deg F, or beef at 125 deg F or even chicken at 140 deg F is not a high enough temperature to kill off many harmful bacteria and parasites. In normal cooking, the external surfaces of the meat, where most contamination occurs, reach much higher temperatures.

<comment><USER15> Killing most bacteria is a function of temperature and time. The higher the heat, the less time it has to be at that temperature. The lower the heat, the longer it has to be at that temperature. It's all a numbers game. Nothing is completely safe.

<comment><USER17> That's not entirely true. If you for instance "cook" meat at 100 degrees you'd end up with more bacteria than you started with. You do need to cook at a temperature that is hot enough to actually kill the bacteria. It's not a numbers game at all, it's understanding a little microbiology.

Nothing is completely safe, but food poisoning is also not fun.

<comment><USER15> I highly recommend that anyone read this information before attempting sous vide. It outlines the various bacteria involved and the time/temp calculations for various items:

<http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems like there are a decent amount of misconceptions people have about sous vide cooking. Everyone should have a look at the sous vide primer here <http://www.cookingissues.com/primers/></comment>


Multilabel time series classification with LSTM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aqibsaeed/Multilabel-timeseries-classification-with-LSTM <comment><USER2> When looking at the performance, it doesn't seem like the LSTM adds very much compared to simpler multi-layer perceptrons. I wonder if that is because temporal information isn't very useful or because the LSTM wasn't capable of learning some of the more complicated temporal patterns.

I would love to play around with the data, unfortunately, I assume it's private (for good reason) due to potentially sensitive patient data.

If anyone is interested in related methods for time series, I just put up code for our recent action segmentation paper using Temporal Convolutional Networks ([https://github.com/colincsl/TemporalConvolutionalNetworks](https://github.com/colincsl/TemporalConvolutionalNetworks)). I would be very interested in trying this model on the ICU data. In my experience, TCNs are much better at learning complex temporal pattern than LSTMs.

<comment><USER3> That's true, according to the paper improvement over MLP is negligible. It looks like the model is very small and that might be a reason for relatively low performance.

<comment><USER4> The performance of multilayer perceptrons and linear models is significant. The paper additionally allows the MLP and linear models to "cheat" by giving them heavily hand-engineered features incorporating extensive prior knowledge. Even with this benefit, the LSTM outperforms the baselines, but the improvement is considerably smaller.

<comment><USER4> _The performance improvement over_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not OP, but for reader convenience, the paper linked to by the github repo is entitled "Learning to Diagnose with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks"

And the abstract is: "Clinical medical data, especially in the intensive care unit (ICU), consist of multivariate time series of observations. For each patient visit (or episode), sensor data and lab test results are recorded in the patient's Electronic Health Record (EHR). While potentially containing a wealth of insights, the data is difficult to mine effectively, owing to varying length, irregular sampling and missing data. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), particularly those using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) hidden units, are powerful and increasingly popular models for learning from sequence data. They effectively model varying length sequences and capture long range dependencies. We present the first study to empirically evaluate the ability of LSTMs to recognize patterns in multivariate time series of clinical measurements. Specifically, we consider multilabel classification of diagnoses, training a model to classify 128 diagnoses given 13 frequently but irregularly sampled clinical measurements. First, we establish the effectiveness of a simple LSTM network for modeling clinical data. Then we demonstrate a straightforward and effective training strategy in which we replicate targets at each sequence step. Trained only on raw time series, our models outperform several strong baselines, including a multilayer perceptron trained on hand-engineered features."

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is an online ipynb viewer to view the code[0].

[0] - [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/aqibsaeed/Multilabel- time...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/aqibsaeed/Multilabel-timeseries- classification-with-LSTM/blob/master/RNN%20-%20Multilabel.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER7> What is the format of data.csv? An example would be easier to understand the inputs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check this data set ([http://mimic.mit.edu/about/mimic/](http://mimic.mit.edu/about/mimic/)) and extract relevant features as discussed in the paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> what is the format of data.csv</comment>


Why Michael Arrington Is The Real Winner In The CrunchPad Ordeal - <AUTHOR> http://www.ihany.com/2009/12/07/michael-arrington-is-the-winner-with-this-crunchpad-situation/ <comment><USER2> "If you look at the blogosphere, there's wide support for Mike. No one believes Chandra's story nor does it sound very plausible"

I don't really see any evidence to support this statement. At best it's 50/50 and at worst Mr. Arrington's reputation is possibly tipping it in FG's favor. Personally I think it's pretty obvious that a blogger/business man had little or nothing to do with the actual nuts & bolts development of the product. Entirely possible his money was involved but we don't know yet.

"If I were @arrington I'd be breathing a big sigh of relief. A $500 tablet is NOT what he envisioned."

He started at $300, then it was $400. Now it's $500. It doesn't seem while he was involved pricing was working out exactly as he had envisioned. Perhaps this disparity alone explains the true situation. FG doesn't seem to be equipped to puke out millions of CrunchPads selling for a tiny margin. They can however sell a product with a higher margin to a smaller tablet loving audience. It's a much more realistic business model for FG. Once you hit $400 another $100 really doesn't really matter that much. As Apple said the iPod Touch and iPhone took off at $199. That's the price point a mainstream audience will pay. Arrington's business model for the CrunchPad was probably a little too pie-in-the-sky for FG.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this guy is apparently not reading the same blogosphere as I am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the device succeeds Arrington can brag about how it was his vision and was ripped out from under him. Also how it succeeded despite not being something as good or as cheap as he imagined.

If the device fails he will claim it was a result of price point and not falling in line with what he originally envisioned.

There we have a win-win situation, kudos for Arrington getting to it so publicly.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry but I really don't get the logic of how Arrington won? He may not have lost, but nowhere do I see him "winning".

If the logic is that he "won" because otherwise he would have lost bigger, relatively speaking, maybe, but that is some twisted logic and seems like sour grapes.

</comment><comment><USER6> My vision for the future involves ending world hunger, a Mars base, and an alternative energy source to power everything in the world. To accomplish these things I will set a budget of $5 dollars. Because I _see_ it's the right amount of money to charge for all that.

I'm going to call my plan "The Future." Since I just wrote about it online, in a comment, any time any one reference The Future, or even mention the future, and it includes some aspect of my plan I demand you credit me and attribute me as being involved. Because I _wrote_ about the idea first.

Also, the _blogosphere_ agrees with me about ending world hunger, having a Mars base, and the need for an alternative fuel source so I'm right. Because we all know if it's popular then it's more important than the truth and popular people are always the best judges of plausibilities in an intellectual property legal dispute where there are no legal documents.

This is why Michael Arrington won.

<comment><USER7> your analogy would be really cool and interesting if it applied in this case, but it doesn't.

I was involved in the Crunchpad from day 1 and we actually built a lot of things - long before anybody else came along.

You might have a different viewpoint if you have ever had anything you built or were involved with stolen from you. It sucks.

Not just from an IP perspective, but from a 'lets ride this wave while it suits us' perspective as well.

<comment><USER8> What exactly did you work on? Not to be rude, but there was nothing original about the crunchpad except for the estimated price.

<comment><USER9> Really? Can you point me to a link where I can buy one?

<comment><USER8> Sure thing!

<http://www.google.com/products?q=touchscreen+tablet+pc>

<comment><USER9> Cute. Can you point me to a slim touchscreen tablet that boots directly into the browser?

<comment><USER10> I believe you specify that in your start up options- even in Windows!

How thin is thin? How thin do you really need it to be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A working, shipping $499 tablet is a more important step on the path to a $199 tablet than just wishing for a $199 tablet.

<comment><USER12> But Arrington's competitors beat him to this. And the competition are full computers running Windows 7, not just glorified web browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I chuckle at people who scoff at the price and in the next breath say Apple will own the tablet market. If Apple makes a tablet it will almost certainly be the most expensive product in its category. It will be killer, but priced accordingly. They charge $179 for a WiFi router for goodness sake--there is no way they're coming to market with a 12" tablet for $200.

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree that Arrington got kicked off what is essentially a sinking ship and that he should count his blessings. But he doesn't seem to know that. He admits he was willing to go ahead with supporting this product until a week ago.

Also there's no doubt he got played and on his own blog to boot.

The fact that anyone even covered "The JooJoo" shows that. Always Innovating Touch Book is a cheaper product that appears superior in just about every way and it never made it to the top of Techmeme. Arrington got strung along and then cut loose after he'd outlived his usefulness and that's got to p*ss him off

</comment><comment><USER15> "Who's the big winner here tonight? Mikey! Mikey's the big winnerrr!" -- I tried to find the clip from Swingers, but Youtube has eradicated it :(

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess it doesn't occur to the author that one typically introduces new electronic devices at a higher price so that early adopters buy them at high margins to cover R&D? At least that is how Apple does it, right?

If they have a $500 tablet now, and are first to market... they can probably have a $300, and then $200 tablet sooner than anyone.

</comment><comment><USER17> The CrunchPad was a cool idea, what would make it a real winner for hackers is if the hardware and software were open sourced. I know hardware is a bit more difficult to open source, especially if you are purchasing necessary components from other vendors, but it's still a fun idea. esp. for something like the CrunchPad :)

</comment><comment><USER18> if it was more than a toy, 499 would be fine with me. the atom processor (if its the dual core) is okay. the hard drive space, memory, and overall os just aren't appealing. at 499 I want a real computer, not a toy. that's my problem with things like chromeos- they're gravitating us towards a lower common denominator of computing. were conditioning people to go for cheap toys, that don't really do much. i'd rather go for things that don't cost a ton, but cost something and act like a real computer.

<comment><USER19> The thing would be vastly more powerful than an Apple II. The Apple II wasn't a "real computer?" Maybe we need to clarification on definitions?

My point: what's most salient for how useful a processor or any piece of hardware, is _to what purpose_ that hardware is going to be put. If the thing is _just for browsing_ then it probably has enough. Whether _just browsing_ fits a lot of people's use of the web is another matter. (If it's just an adjunct to another machine, why not have it map the user's Downloads directory?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So Arrington's contribution is the price point and because Garage is selling it at a higher price point and cutting Arrington out leads to the conclusion that Arrington won?

Not quite following that logic.

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree. $499 is a deal-breaker for me. I will happily wait for Apple's device now.

<comment><USER22> $499 is a dealbreaker? How much do you expect the (imaginary) Apple Tablet to cost?

<comment><USER23> It will be $599 and only come in white, but it won't matter. Everyone will buy it anyway.

<comment><USER24> Why would it be cheaper than an iphone?

<comment><USER23> It won't make phonecalls so you still have to buy the improved 2010 iPhone too of course.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In China, toddler left for dead sparks debate about society's moral health - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/1019/In-China-toddler-left-for-dead-sparks-heated-debate-about-society-s-moral-health <comment><USER2> Concern about liability wouldn't prevent anyone I know from helping a 2 year old. This story is mindbendingly alienating.

<comment><USER3> When I was in China I saw a cyclist go head first through the windshield of a van. While their driving probably isn't the worst of any country, the cars are horrifically unsafe and traffic patterns are erratic at best. I think what it comes down to is that seeing a kid get run over isn't especially surprising to anyone, and since the kid was already almost certainly dead or about to die no one really cared. I don't think it's just an issue of the liability.

A good analogy would be in NYC the reason they built the high line was that in the 1820s literally at least a dozen kids were getting run over by the train every single week. No one cared because everyone was poor and life was cheap, and a good day was one where the local neighborhood gang didn't try to douse you in gasoline and light you on fire for entertainment.

<comment><USER4> "...everyone was poor and life was cheap..."

There are still many places in the world where this is still the case.

However on the positive side, (if that's not too crass) everywhere is getting better. Someday all places will be as safe as we have come to expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> China Daily reported yesterday that the toddler died. [http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-10/21/content_139486...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-10/21/content_13948602.htm)

At least it's encouraging that many Chinese are horrified. And it's also encouraging that the Internet and other modern communications are helping to speed up cultural evolution.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would like to know more about the ragpicker who did help her.</comment>


The startups and services behind Close.io - <AUTHOR> http://blog.close.io/post/43503191746/the-startups-and-services-behind-close-io

<comment><USER2> Great post - i've been playing with your product and the integration of telephony is really smart, it's one of the areas salespeople spend a lot of time manually typing in calls into their CRM.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find it interesting to look at how many of the startups/services we build upon weren't around 5 or even 2 years ago. Makes me wonder what will I be using in another few years to make the development process even better.</comment>