The rich are hoarding economic growth - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/piketty-saez-zucman-income-growth-inequality-stagnation-chart <comment><USER2> The title and the tone of the OP are a bit inflammatory for my taste, but the data and graphs from the research paper are eye-opening: most economic growth in the US over the past three decades has indeed gone to the top 1%, and particularly to the top 0.01%, leaving everyone else behind.[1]

Here's the money shot: [https://cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9013427/Sc...](https://cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9013427/Screenshot_2017_08_08_12.34.47.png)

However, rather than debate the causes of this divergence, or accuse "the rich" of anything, we should instead be coming up with WORKABLE SOLUTIONS for increasing the income -- and therefore the spending power -- of the masses in a sustainable manner.

I imagine a tremendous amount of pent-up consumer demand would be unleashed, because THE MORE THE MASSES EARN, THE MORE THEY SPEND ON PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, including those created by entrepreneurs.

[1] Here's the paper: [http://gabriel- zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf](http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf)

<comment><USER3> For every problem there is a solution which is simple, elegant, and completely wrong.

So here's my attempt:

1\. Remove subsidies including tax writeoffs like depreciation. Either an asset brings value or it doesn't.

2\. Tax revenue not profits. Either you make a profit selling a thing or you don't. Fancy tricks like buying an item from a fully owned subsidiary and selling it at a loss to compensate for profits from services is not realising the value your services and products bring to the economy

3\. Change the paradigm from employees serve the company to companies serve the employees. Companies are a way to insulate participants from economic risk of a capital-intensive activity, not a way to structure tax affairs.

Edited for formatting

<comment><USER4> Meat industry would collapse due to 1. Daily foods like steak, bacon, eggs, milk would get extremely expensive leaving the population to lousy unsatisfying vegetables.

Might solve the obesity epidemic :) Might also cause riots because people are not used to eating yucky foods like vegetabables.

<comment><USER5> Vegetables in the sense of wheat, peanuts, and such? Sure (but since these things will get processed, so I wouldn't hold out that it helps with our obesity).

Vegetables like kale and broccoli? No way. The ratio of labor and land required per produced calorie for these kinds vegetables is far too high. In addition to existing farmland, we would need to convert large amoutns of existing natural environments areas like forests into farms.

But back to your point, why would the industry collapse? Wouldn't prices just increase?

<comment><USER4> > _Wouldn 't prices just increase?_

Prices are already astronomically low given the subsidies. No one would pay for a $15-20 burger.

> _In addition to existing farmland, we would need to convert large amoutns of > existing natural environments areas like forests into farms._

[https://web.archive.org/web/20081216230507/https://www.ers.u...](https://web.archive.org/web/20081216230507/https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/sb973/sb973.pdf)

Well, given that the majority (more than 80%) of land is used for growing grass, wheat, soybean and corn for cattle there's no fear for vegetables.

Although soy grown for human consumption is not popular now, it's the most efficient legume there is. More protein than a steak.

This went a little bit off topic, although my point was that removing subsidies on food makes things tricky. Given that in some parts of US burger price is halved if not 20% of what it should be due to subsidies on water and corn and soybean etc.

<comment><USER5> > No one would pay for a $15-20 burger.

Why not? There are places in the world where burgers cost this much and people still buy them.

<comment><USER4> The average guy that was living on McDonalds menu won't do it every day as he does now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This quote by the fed chairman during the Great Depression, Marriner S. Eccles, seems apt

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants.In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped."

<comment><USER7> The GD was caused in large part by the Fed's poor understanding of economics. I wouldn't take what the chairman of the time said too seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is there no talk about the dramatic increase in the supply of workers over the last 40 years? Globalization has brought millions out of poverty and those people are now competing with Americans when they wouldn't before. It makes sense from an economic standpoint that the price of labor would not rise when the supply is increased and is likely the cause of income inequality in the US.

<comment><USER9> > It makes sense from an economic standpoint that the price of labor would not > rise when the supply is increased and is likely the cause of income > inequality in the US.

So why are CEO salaries still going up? Is there not increased competition for C-level positions in companies from globalization? If not, why not?

<comment><USER10> One explanation would be because of the cheaper labor and favorable legal frameworks the corporation can grow much larger today. Pushing the pay of the top level positions to rise even higher. You could look at C-level positions 50 years ago as a mid-level manager today in terms of managed organization size and economic impact.

<comment><USER9> > One explanation would be because of the cheaper labor and favorable legal > frameworks the corporation can grow much larger today.

But that means there are _fewer_ C-level positions/capita today. So:

* supply of C-level candidates has gone up (more MBA graduates, larger supply of candidates from overseas)

* demand for C-level candidates has gone down (fewer, larger corporations, so fewer C-level jobs overall)

And yet C-level compensation is going up. Doesn't this contradict all the supply/demand theories I keep hearing about lower/middle class employees?

<comment><USER11> In the big 5 that I work for, MBA's become product managers and make less than programmers (per years in industry). They then have to compete for more than a decade (with programmers going into management), for a shot at even VP level.

Guess what, there are some VP's that have 5 more layers of VP, Senior VP's... before C suite.

You want to incentive people to work hard at their jobs to get promoted to the next level so you need to constantly pay them more. When you have 10 layers in your company and people at the bottom are making 6 figures (for software engineers, easily the case), the top level employees are going to make a lot of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is why I appreciate the $15 an hour minimum wage movement. Paying people more is better then taxing the rich more. The super-rich own congress but at the city and State level there is depending upon the state some room to grow wages. Higher wages equals fewer people on public subsidies which is good for cities and states.

<comment><USER13> Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich!

Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life.

[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum- wage-h...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-hike- may-have-gone-too-far/)

Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results.

[http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/29/seattle- commissio...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/29/seattle-commissions- new-minimum-wage-study-after-dismissing-first-results.html)

<comment><USER14> _Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich!_

This argument -- "well, if you think a little increase in the minimum wage is good, then you must think _any_ increase in the minimum wage is good, or you're not being consistent!" \-- gets trotted out by somebody on HN every time the subject comes up. And c'mon. If I believe that San Francisco's minimum wage hikes to $14 and $15 an hour are _not_ going to cause undue economic collapse here, that does not somehow obligate me to believe "hey, if that works, we can raise the minimum wage to ELEVEN BILLIONTY DOLLARS AN HOUR with minimal impact, too!" Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but _only_ to a point.

 _Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don 't really work out in real life._

"Most past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs." That quote is...from the FiveThirtyEight article that you linked to. The evidence so far seems to be that some of the time, for some levels, minimum wage increases _do_ really work out in real life. The UW study criticizes the methodology of past studies, but it's at least worth acknowledging that there's criticisms of the UW study which are not, despite Fox's take, "this is not the result the socialists wanted." Notably, UW's study excludes businesses with multiple locations but only one account with Washington State's unemployment office, which eliminates _38% of the state 's workforce_ from consideration, including all chain fast food and retail workers. They exclude them specifically because they can't get "location-based" data for workers in those cases; while that may be true, being inconvenient to UW's methodology doesn't render that data irrelevant.

<comment><USER15> > Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, > where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only > to a point.

And somehow this point is lost on many proponents of raising the minimum wage, who find obvious that any increase in minimum wage can only be good and anyone saying otherwise is evil. Sometimes the soup would be better with less salt, minimum wages could be too high already!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1% real income growth per year is still fairly substantial IMO. Over a 41 year career, your purchasing power goes up by half, yet that's treated as "stagnating" which implies something far worse than 1% per year.

<comment><USER17> Not if inflation is 3-4% per year.

<comment><USER16> Real income growth is, by definition, after accounting for inflation.

The opposing term is "nominal income growth" which does not account for inflation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's important to note that the top 1% (pick whatever bracket you want) is not static. There is a lot of turnover.

 _According to research from Cornell University, over 50 percent of Americans find themselves among the top 10 percent of income-earners for at least one year during their working lives. Over 11 percent of Americans will be counted among the top 1 percent of income-earners (i.e., people making at minimum $332,000 per annum) for at least one year._

[1] [https://www.cato.org/blog/high-turnover-among-americas- rich](https://www.cato.org/blog/high-turnover-among-americas-rich)

</comment><comment><USER19> So what caused the change in 1973?

<comment><USER20> Financialization of the economy. The fall of Bretton-Woods. The fall of the gold standard. The repeal of Glass-Steagall.

<comment><USER21> >The fall of the gold standard.

>The fall of Bretton-Woods.

1971, not 1973

>The repeal of Glass-Steagall.

1999, not 1973

<comment><USER20> Macroeconomic changes take longer than just a few hours to have an impact. I included Glass-Steagall repeal because merely focusing on 1970's and nothing that happened there after is myopic

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can the stagnation be caused by the oversupply of the labor that has started about the 1965 (the pill?) [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor- force-parti...](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force- participation-rate)

</comment><comment><USER23> Nobody seems surprised when all wealth is accumulated by one player at the end of a game of Monopoly. The figures in the article should then also not surprise anyone. This is not some flow in our system, this is the natural progression of capitalism as designed.

<comment><USER24> Monopoly was actually originally designed to demonstrate the "surprising" effect of accumulation of wealth by a single player (via rents). With the implied moral judgment that this is unfair/unjust: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game)

edit: via rents, not property taxes

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't want obfuscate correlation and causality but over the same time period we have seen the greatest bond bull market in history.

The upshot is that the rich, more specifically the super rich, benefit disproportionately from lower/lowering interest rates.

</comment><comment><USER26> if your rich as hell, give it away. if your voting, vote for people who want to tax the higher earners more and lower earners less. seems pretty reasonable to me

</comment><comment><USER27> Forgive my ignorance, but why wouldnt we expect to see exponential growth in wealth, and as a result a greater discepency between the top 1% and everyone else?

<comment><USER28> Technically we would, but not at the cost of such discrepancy, as it usually had a violent ending in the past. Costing lives and entire countries social stabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> that's why a lot of people opt-out of working

people are not stupid if it's not worth their time they rather not do

</comment><comment><USER30> We know.

</comment><comment><USER31> We know there are serious problems. I think the general direction we are going to try to solve them is a good start, but without severely improving the current plans, will be completely inadequate and repeat history in some ways.

Many people have looked at the US' economic situation and compared it to China or other areas and predicted that the relatively high wealth and consumption in the US just cannot continue due to things like math (large deficits, low production of real goods, retired workers) and political pressure. The expectation for many is that there will eventually start to be a much more equitable distribution of resources and power towards places like China and/or Africa or India. This will mean there is significantly less real wealth for Americans. This, combined with the pressure to increase sustainability, means that the real world economy in the US is either not growing or growing very sluggishly.

When the economy is not really growing, our current systems don't function well, people start looking to conserve and cooperate rather than compete so much. A general trend of increasing socialism is good for the US to some degree I believe, but won't solve the problems.

What we have now are very large technopolies like Amazon, Google and Uber controlling large segments of our economy. Because the power is so concentrated, it is actually almost as bad as having government agencies control these things. Now people are talking about technocracy, which is essentially high-tech communism.

I used to advocate for a Resource Based Economy and all of that stuff, and I still think RBE and technocratic-type ideas are a good starting point to think about solutions, but it seems like the thought process is stuck in the 50s. Having very large organizations controlling everything is not going to work out,no matter how much technology you add to it.

The real problem for America is going to be less fossil fuels being able to be imported. Just because there is a big imbalance now, and unless we actually start nuking countries, within a few decades the demands will be such that those countries are forced to fight the US for those resources. In order to avoid WWII there has to be a plan that allows the US and other high- consumption countries to significantly reduce real-world consumption and still have functioning economies.

The problem is that we are looking at these giant tech companies just becoming more official and entrenched. This does give us platforms for efficiency, but the fact that these are centralized organizations means big problems in terms of power distribution and freedom as well as the evolvability of systems.

The solution is going to be technical upgrades to our social frameworks. A concrete example: Amazon has a streamlined website and logistic network. Instead of leaving this in the hands of one company, we need to come up with equivalent decentralized distributed protocols and systems that accomplish the same things without making Bezos the unofficial Minister of Distribution. I'm not saying it's easy, because we need systems with almost the same level of holistic integration and analysis on some levels that Amazon has, but still flexible enough to evolve and allow freedom.

We are also going to need these advanced distributed but holistic on some level evolvable systems to be properly integrated into societal structures in order to properly measure and plan if we want to have something like universal basic income. Although I must also say that we need also to facilitate free competition more at the same time otherwise the technopolies strangleholds prevent most from rising past the basic level and participating.

</comment><comment><USER32> People who buy this garbage have no perspective of how much the federal government taxes and spends. Everything discussed here is insignificant in the scope of the federal agencies spending $11 billion a day. Personal incomes are less than their rounding errors.

<comment><USER33> I'm curious, in what sense is it insignificant? Quoting from (likely faulty) memory, 30% of federal budget comes from income tax directly, and the another 20% or so is covered by employer associated employment taxes. So out of that $11bn a day, Americans pay in $6.5bn every day. If we were to adequately tax the 0.01%, the budget would feel the difference.</comment></comment>


Google Rolls Out Tool That Suggests Search Queries - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574B100555BF2.html <comment><USER2> "After more than four years in development, a new feature that suggests queries as letters and words are typed into Google Inc.'s"

This is kind of misleading introduction. Google Suggest was readily available as a labs feature and within other areas of Google but they did not push it to the main page until now, almost 4 years later.

They make it clearer later in the article, but still kind of nitpicking is all.</comment>


5 Things You Need to Know About Interviewing at a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-interviewing-at-a-startup-2013-4 <comment><USER2> Here is another for the list: the start-up you're being interviewed for might not exist next week due to the volatility and reliance of start-ups on investment capital that is becoming increasingly harder to obtain, companies that rely on third party investment to exist are vulnerable and so are you.</comment>


Google's ML Kit makes it easy to add AI smarts to iOS and Android apps - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/googles-ml-kit-makes-it-easy-to-add-ai-smart-to-ios-and-android-apps/ <comment><USER2> Can't stop thinking about the centralization going on here, even if you avoid using Google apps now any app could be feeding back your information to Google.

<comment><USER3> Too bad "Ingredients" labels like they have on food are impractical in the App space. But maybe Apple could highlight key APIs and net connections that it finds in use during app review. Something like, "WARNING: This app makes silent, background connections to [Google, Facebook, etc etc]"

Like In App Purchase warnings, but for background net connections.

<comment><USER4> I really like this idea, and while it seems like it would be a bit difficult for Apple to implement and the common consumer to understand, it would still further their goal of providing privacy to their users. Plus it would help consumers decide what services they want to give their information and analytics data to, which is pretty powerful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks awesome. Though, I'm disappointed the face tracking has pretty limited landmarks and no positional tracking, I'm sure they'll improve the models in the future. [https://firebase.google.com/docs/ml-kit/face-detection- conce...](https://firebase.google.com/docs/ml-kit/face-detection-concepts)

<comment><USER6> This landmark tracking on the mobile is new for tensorflow . The benchmark here is dlib which does an implementation of One Millisecond Face Alignment with an Ensemble of Regression Trees paper by Kazemi and Sullivan.

Anyone know comparison benchmarks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google are good at choosing names... [http://www.elsman.com/mlkit/](http://www.elsman.com/mlkit/)

<comment><USER8> Google: ARCore MLkit Apple: ARKit CoreML

<comment><USER9> Apple have been using (name)core and (name)kit for a lot longer.

As an aside, how do you escape a star character on HN without dropping to a code block?

<comment><USER10> nit: I think the apple naming convention has been (name)kit and core(name).

<comment><USER11> Apple seems to use both, but they've been leaning towards Core* rather than *Core recently. We have CoreAudio, CoreBluetooth, CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, CoreImage, CoreLocation, CoreText…but there's also WebCore, JavaScriptCore, QuartzCore, and ImageCaptureCore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do they provide _another_ API for offline face detection, when Google Play Services already comes with one?

It would be great if apps that use the existing offline face detection were just switched to the better model, without needing to change any app code.

And, if the problem is that some devices can't run the new models, it would better for that to be handled by the API provider, than by each app developer.

</comment><comment><USER13> Try again, please?

Almost by definition -- one does not simply "add smarts" (of any kind) to an app.

</comment><comment><USER14> For whose definition of "easy"?

Can we axe the marketing-speak here? It's just released; developers get to decide how easy it is, not Google PR / Techcrunch right?

<comment><USER15> Would it be a better page if it added footnotes to all adjectives "* For some definition of easy|some-adjective." :P

All joking aside, it's just a click bait title - that's how these things go. Try it out yourself and blog about your experiences with it!</comment></comment>


Tesla caused accident because "it didn't do what the driver requested" - <AUTHOR> https://nos.nl/artikel/2222541-ravage-in-wormerveer-door-op-hol-geslagen-tesla.html <comment><AUTHOR> The article basically states an accident happened with a Tesla, another car, bicyclist & scooter involved. The Tesla didn't respond to the driver and "went wild" because of a technical malfunction.

In general I'm curious how this plays out in the coming years when self driving vehicles cause accidents due to 'bugs'. The promise of self driving cars is much less accidents, but who can people blame if something goes wrong? Will these sort of accidents - as they build up in the coming years - lead to a slower adoption rate of the technology, thus potentially causing more accidents to keep happening than would have been the case if we would have adopted it faster? Or does it make sense to wait longer with allowing self- driving technology if it still causes unneeded accidents, regardless of the potential?

\</comment><comment>---- Full google translation ----

A runaway Tesla has caused havoc in Wormerveer. In the accident with the electric car, another car, a cyclist and a scooter driver were involved. According to the police, it was a technical defect.

The car crashed this afternoon at a schoolyard in a primary school, reports NH News. Due to a technical problem, the car did not do what the driver wanted anymore, the police say. It has not been announced whether the Tesla was on autopilot.

A wounded person fell in the accident. The victim has been treated by ambulance staff. Nothing is known yet about the nature of the injuries.

<comment><USER2> Has the article been updated? I used google translate on it and the last line is

>According to him, the accident is not caused by the autopilot system, with which the car can be controlled without the help of a person. "This system was not in this car."

Seems this is just a regular crash caused by a regular driver in a regular car.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it has been updated. "According to the police the woman behind the wheel wanted to slowly make a turn but according to her the car suddenly gave more gas." .. indeed could be just a normal crash with the driver blaming the tech.</comment></comment></comment>


So does Google Glass have a back door? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone pondered about Google Glass having a back door. <comment><USER2> In theory everything goes through the big G servers and might even be activated remotely as far as we know at the moment, anybody in the developer program cares to weigh in?</comment>


Paper Now: Create, edit and display a journal article entirely in GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PeerJ/paper-now

<comment><USER2> For people interested in collaboration on papers I strongly recommend Overleaf. It supports both Git and online in-browser editing of the Latex- Source with PDF-preview (which is sometimes a bit slow, but they are working on that).

[https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com)

Shameless plug: If you like the service and want to register anyways, you can use my reflink ;-) [https://www.overleaf.com/signup?ref=a6702e8ee331](https://www.overleaf.com/signup?ref=a6702e8ee331)

</comment><comment><USER3> The guys at substance.io have a fantastic editor in a similar vein, but they have been slow on opening it up, due to which it's probably seen a lot less traction than it should.

Here's a random example of what their reader can do: [http://lens.elifesciences.org/06351/](http://lens.elifesciences.org/06351/)

The cool thing is they've written a wysiwyg whose data format is json (across browsers).

<comment><USER4> That's pretty slick, though the right-hand column is too wide and it breaks the back button.

<comment><USER3> The right hand isn't a sidebar. The interface is a split-in-middle, with left being main content, and right providing ancillary data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Git is fantastic for dealing with text and code. Of course this sort of collaborative work would be very powerful with papers, with far reaching implications for our society. (Like the democratization of science.) Someone needs to do analogous things with sound and video, probably using a centralized repository. (I don't know if Soundcloud has that sort of thing now.)

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know much about PeerJ but I'm intrigued by their efforts as a publishing company to foster open collaborations like this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Github social authoring seems to be a thing at the moment. Airpair are doing something similar, and throwing money at it

[https://www.airpair.com/100k-writing- competition](https://www.airpair.com/100k-writing-competition)

For those who are interested

</comment><comment><USER8> There is significant friction from changing to anything that isn't Word (PDF/Latex to a lesser extent) in this space. I wonder what it is going to take for that monopoly to be broken

</comment><comment><USER9> Why GitHub Import instead of clonning?

<comment><USER10> Assuming you mean 'forking': my guess would be that if you fork it, it would look like you're making contributions that could be merged back into the original project. If you import it then it will appear as a completely separate project.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Daily Links for Future Founders – Ambition News - <AUTHOR> https://ambitionnews.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Mostly a compiled set of great tweets, blog posts, and books, that may be of interest to people interested in starting startups in the future. So, links for future founders.

Archives: [https://ambitionnews.com/posts/](https://ambitionnews.com/posts/)

As a side note, I really like the Show HN Guidelines - [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).</comment>


Alan Kay Thesis: The Reactive Engine (1969) - <AUTHOR> http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/pdfs/kay.htm <comment><USER2> > Babbage owned what was probably the first instance of computer graphics, a > woven portrait of Jacquard in silk done on the parametric loom whose > resolution (1000 threads to the linear inch) approached that of the very > best devices today.

The comparison still holds true. Plus I like the contrast with the modern analogy of a thread.

<comment><USER3> Then it may as well be first instance of 3d printing.

<comment><USER4> Embroidery machines and automated looms absolutely are the first instances of 3D printing; they just don't get a lot of credit for it because we've been doing it so long and textiles aren't an "exciting" field to a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that's a neat find, it's almost a book. FLEX was heavily influenced after Alan Kay saw 'The Mother of All Demos' and a lot of the elements in FLEX made it into Smalltalk.

[http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html](http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html)

<comment><USER2> I think it was more everything that Engelbart stood for together with his report on Augmenting Human Intellect rather than the demo alone.

> This was in early 1967, and while we were pondering the FLEX machine, Utah > was visited by Doug Engelbart.

> ...

> An entire conceptual world and world view [Engelbart 68]. The impact of this > vision was to produce in the minds of those who were "eager to be augmented" > a compelling metaphor of what interactive computing should be like, and I > immediately adopted many of the ideas for the FLEX machine.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it is possible to see the Mother Of All Demos in any way separate from the person of Doug Engelbart and what he stood for. Biggest regret of my professional life, I had the opportunity to meet him in 2000 or so and didn't.

<comment><USER2> For the rest of us I agree, but I think Alan Kay was much closer to his work. From the Smalltalk history he'd met Engelbart in 67 a year before the demo.

Probably my biggest regret is how long it took me until I realised how important Engelbart was. I'm reading through his report now.

<comment><USER5> A friend of mine was a friend of his, and gave Doug space to work. Both are dead now so it's never going to happen but spending time on reading up on Doug Engelbart is a very good investment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Douglas Engelbart was a giant amongst giants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great quotes, like I wish to God these calculations were executed by steam... C. Babbage, The Analytical Engine

</comment><comment><USER7> Where's the Reactivity? The thesis is entitled "The Reactive Engine", yet I don't see any reactivity in the system— at least not as I know the term now. What am I missing? Or has "Reactive" changed its meaning over the years?

<comment><USER8> If I understand correctly, the reactive part is the fact the user gets output after providing input

<comment><USER9> So what we would call interactive?

<comment><USER10> A bigger deal at the time than it is today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's amazing that such simple websites from 1969 survive modern browsers, yet Facebook cannot fix zoom on Safari...

<comment><USER12> The paper was written in 1969. HTML wasn't even conceived until the 1980s. The paper could have been digitized as recently as this morning.

<comment><USER13> Something to be said for digital text that will last vs what is lost due to evolving display standards</comment></comment></comment>


The illusion of progress lights a fire - <AUTHOR> http://mindhacks.com/2010/07/20/the-illusion-of-progress-lights-a-fire/ <comment><USER2> A variation of this hack which is used by my local car wash: Buy a booklet of 10 pre-paid vouchers for the car wash and get a free car wash ... right now.

According to the owners, moving the 'free' car wash to be immediately available rather than at the end of the voucher book say a significant increase in people who bought them - even though ultimately it made no difference financially to the customers.

<comment><USER3> Huh? Don't you get all the carwash vouchers when you pay? Which one is the "free" one?

<comment><USER4> It's exactly the same thing as selling someone 11 pre-paid car washes. But by making the 11th car wash "free" and available immediately people perceive that as a bigger boon than a 9% discount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another way to make the task seem less daunting is to make the card vertical, presenting four rows (of three stamps each) to complete instead of two rows of six.

Grouping focuses people on immediate completion (visually completing a line or block) and keeping the relevant numbers small (3 and 4 instead of 12), even if the groups have no nominal significance.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if actually making the rows early-redeemable, for less than the proportionate total reward, could also help.

For example, in a 4x3 card, maybe each row of 3 gets you 15% off if redeemed early. In this way, you're always close to something with provable value; you're more likely to value/carry/protect the partially-completed card; but you're also still likely to go for the 12-for-100%-off rather than stopping at 3-for-15% / 6-for-30% / 9-for-45% off.

(The various App punchcards bring the possibility of running many more incremental tests in this area, and novelties like 'awakening' dormant customers with a gifted stamp or two.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is also known as the Endowed Progress Effect. A paper from 2006 discusses it in a fairly easy to read format.

Extract: "This research documents a phenomenon we call the endowed progress effect whereby people provided with artificial advancement towards a goal exhibit greater persistence towards reaching the goal. By converting a task requiring eight steps into a task requiring 10 steps, but with two steps already complete, the task is reframed as one that has been undertaken and incomplete rather than not yet begun. This increases the likelihood of task completion and decreases completion time. The effect appears to depend on perceptions of task completion rather than a desire to avoid wasting the endowed progress. Moderators include the reason, if any, offered for the endowment, and the currency in which progress is recorded."

PDF is available here: [https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=publi...](https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.file&fileID=283)

</comment><comment><USER8> ah, the good ol' loyalty card.

I took a grad level marketing class as an undergrad in my time at my university and remember my professor mentioning this very same paper. Always found it fascinating, and at the time I was working at a bakery part time as well. Pitched the idea to them, they implemented, but the gains were marginal. Although, I suspect because business went down simultaneously during that period that no gain or no noticeable change could be seen as something of a positive, because everything else was in decline. So, yeah, I guess you would say it has real world application.

its also a really easy to demonstrate idea. I bring it up every time i encounter a loyalty card, just because I find it so damn interesting and remember the exact moment that my professor told us about this, eye opening example.

<comment><USER9> One thing that comes to mind- you would probably want a period of time where the 12-mark card has no prefilled marks, so that customers adjust. If you switch directly from 10-mark to 12-mark with two prefilled, the trick is a little more apparent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a limit to how steep on the gradient you can go with this? If you give someone 900 out of 1,000 will they be rushing to fill in that last 100 because they've only got ten percent left on the card? Or is it limited to easily foreseeable goals in the single digit or near to that range?

<comment><USER11> My guess would be that the 12 is already near the limit. The two "free" stars feel like a little personal gift, especially if they actually punch them out when they give them to you, with a sly wink or something. If it was 900/1000, it would feel confusing and dishonest.

You might also gain some actual loyalty if you give them the last one for free, since that would be an unexpected treat reserved for people who bought 9 cups of coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the evolutionary advantage to run slower when the goal is distant, in humans and rats?

Hacking yourself to run at maximum might be maladaptive (like coffee), unless you are aware of and manage the downsides.

<comment><USER13> It could be related to risk and energy expenditure. Moving faster requires more energy, and the farther away your piece of cheese is, the more likely it is that something unexpected might happen to take it away/stop you before you get to it.

Add to this that there can always be more pieces of cheese to find, and always running from one to the next one could not be your best course of action.

<comment><USER14> It's also that short distances are more accurately judged than long ones (ditto _endurance_ over short distances). There are often sprints to the finish in running races when there's a final surge of adrenaline, when you realise you can sustain an increased pace all the way to the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Personally I'm not sure how effective loyalty cards can be. I prefer to shop places where the perceived prices are reasonable over shops that offer big discounts through loyalty programs (e.g. Trader Joe's vs. just about any supermarket chain). The reasoning is that I prefer the freedom to do without mental calculations over rewards programs over actual dollar savings. That is, I'd rather pay more not to have to think about cards, stamps, rewards, etc.

<comment><USER16> This is why the price on the shelf at most supermarkets is the loyalty card price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how this be could be applied to customer service, queues and waiting lines outside of loyalty card programs.

<comment><USER18> "Your expected wait time is 45 minutes..." And then after a brief moment, the same voice comes on and says "We've cut your time in half. It's just 20 minutes now!"

<comment><USER19> IOW, as an earlier manager of mine would say, "Set low expectations, and exceed them."

I am still ambivalent about that, though.

<comment><USER20> My dad always says the way to make people happy is to under-promise and over- deliver.

<comment><USER3> and that's one of amazon.com's official mottos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've experienced this while running- on the last lap, I suddenly feel relief and a rush of energy (or lack of tiredness). I always attribute it to a desire to tough out the last bit so I can get to a greater relief.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was just thinking today my Starbucks card has buy however many cups of coffee to get to the gold level where you get a few free perks.

Then I realized how foolish I was to buy anything other than the smallest size since I would have made the same progress for far less money.

<comment><USER23> Starbucks cards are great. My JP card only gives me ANA miles (1/dollar spent, so pretty much nothing) but in NYC... there's one everywhere, so I'll get my tea to walk, get to the next store and get a croissant to eat in the park, then continue on to the next to buy the paper. Maybe another tea when I'm about to leave. That's 4 stars for $8. Then when you get your coupon, Trenta all the way. And don't forget the free refills on your smaller drinks (you get one refill per drink).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Apply this to programming, and it's easy to see why people using frameworks and libraries progress further faster: A number of of goals are reached by just spinning up the framework and installing a few gems.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe it is like sex - the closer to the end you get, the faster you tend to go.

</comment><comment><USER26> If a coffee shop is doing this deliberately to manipulate you, is it therefore ethical to give the illusion of progress to the coffee shop in turn, by stamping a couple yourself?

<comment><USER6> This is an interesting question, but I think a bright-line distinction is fairly easy to make.

It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") -- as long as there's no deception. Introducing deception crosses the ethical line. So faking a purchase that was never made to gain a benefit is unethical.

Perhaps there's a bit of grayness in that the 2/12 stamps makes people prone to underestimate the magnitude of the remaining effort ("5/6ths remaining") compared to an absolute measure ("10 of 10 purchases remaining"). But without there being a misrepresentation -- for example, a claim that the first 2 stamps are a special favor not usually granted -- all info for a proper evaluation is available and truthful. And it's even possible that such an influence is to the consumer's net benefit: maybe there's another cognitive bias against completely-unstarted efforts, causing people to overestimate effort required and never get started on things they'd actually enjoy. In any case, once the alternatives start requiring discussion or even controlled study to evaluate, it's harder to apply a stark label like 'unethical'. That label is more useful on easier-to-evaluate actions like prima facia deception.

(Still, the point is well taken that these are some sort of continuum, and it might be the case that a certain superficially-truthful offering is _so_ likely to be misinterpreted by an average reader/listener that it is still de facto deception. I don't think the reward-stamps case is anywhere near that line... but carefully-wordsmithed political ads, designed to create false impressions without being blatantly falsifiable, often go right up to and over the line.)

<comment><USER27> > It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by > the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") > -- as long as there's no deception

I feel your statement is too pat. Why is that not unethical? Based on what ethical pattern?

If the basis of ethics is being truthful, it would seem that ease of understanding is also an important part of ethics. Subconscious manipulation and influence seems to be at odds with that goal.

Perhaps such manipulations is inevitable in a marketplace where everyone engages in unethical mental manipulation, but that does not make it ethical.

<comment><USER6> But do we even know the 2/12 variant is worse on "ease of understanding"? Maybe it's more understandable, and congruent with the buyer's real best interest, because it's not subject to an endpoint/inertia-of-zero bias that depresses sales from the 0/10 case.

Note that these same sorts of perceptual influences are also the basis for all the do-gooder initiatives that get proposed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in _Nudge_. (So in fact I would grant there is at least one more dimension beyond deception: is the influence clearly against someone's interest? But there should be no presumption that whatever they would have done without the influence was the purest expression of their interests.)

Part of my ethical criteria is: what rules work? Part of 'work' is that they are evaluable. An accusation of undue influence, even though every observable aspect of a communication is true and fully disclosed, is very hard to evaluate. It's not very useful as a rule for deciding what one can do, or for assessing 'guilt' after the fact.

Using a bit of communication that is false on its face is easy to evaluate. It's fraud, and it's clearly unethical.

'Manipulation' is a loaded term. It just means "influence we don't like". In a commercial setting, reasonable people already assume a seller is crafting their communication to increase sales. Calling cleverly-crafted commercial influence 'unethical manipulation', even when it remains true in all observable aspects, overloads and dilutes the idea of what's ethical.

Is A/B testing that results in color, wording, and layout changes that increase sales 'unethical manipulation'? Perhaps if it goes so far, in total effect, as to create a tangibly false idea in the customer's minds. But not simply because it incrementally nudges someone towards a purchase.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Update to Quotebacks – Bookmarklet and Firefox - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
We launched Quotebacks just over a month ago and it had a good reception on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=234681750) so I'm posting here with a little update.
1) The #1 feature request is here: the Firefox extension!
2) We added a web-generator and bookmarklet for folks who want to use them without installing an extension.
Thanks for the support!
More here: https://quotebacks.net/ <comment><USER2> I missed it the first time around, this is really cool and has particularly great UX. I run notado.app which has a similar content-first focus, when I get a bit of time I'm going to see about putting together an import feature that allows users to import their Quotebacks JSON file.</comment>


Tao3D, a new open-source language for real-time 3D animations - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/projects/tao3d/

<comment><USER2> I would have suggested changing the link to the project site [1] instead of the download page since it has some sort of presentation that sort of details what it is about better, though it seems to be laggy or somewhat unresponsive --even though its transitions are very smooth.

[1]: [http://tao3d.sourceforge.net/#/1](http://tao3d.sourceforge.net/#/1)

<comment><AUTHOR> The main page has shaders in background. This works well if your machine is beefy enough. But it's apparently an issue with systems such as iPads. I've temporarily removed the shader backgrounds.

<comment><USER2> It is totally broken now on chrome (desktop)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The 3D engine behind this looks very flexible while being easy to use which is pretty hard to do.

The programming language looks very interesting, especially the if declaration. It seems like a macro/runtime hybrid. Is it based on another language?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's based on XL ([http://xlr.sf.net](http://xlr.sf.net)).</comment></comment>


Zimbra Releases Version 3 Of Open Source Email Client, And It's Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/zimbra-jumps-to-the-desktop-with-open-source-client/ <comment><USER2> I would use this on Windows, maybe, but never on Mac.

Mail.app along with the rest of the productivity iApps work well.</comment>


Do Tasks Quickly and Imperfectly - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karti/do-tasks-quickly-and-imperfectly-747b20f74f67 <comment><USER2> This article exactly summarises where I go wrong. My inherent desire is to think things through and do a good job the first time around. Recently I even been following the advice of ship it, ship it.. but I can see quality in our team suffering. How do I balance getting stuff out the door vs doing work we are proud of/can stand by?

If being a quality craft person is not the right mental model what is a better analogy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Thanks for weighing in.

Why don't you get stuff out, determine what needs to be improved (if any, as opposed to starting a new task) and improve that?

If you put out a marketing video for your app, and it drives 1000 purchases of your app, you should be proud of that. The video itself is irrelevant, so don't judge it, or yourself by it.

I think the craftsman analogy is misleading because physical objects can't be updated after selling. Maybe a better analogy is that of a chef, who doesn't measure himself by how it turned out when he tried a new dish for the first time. He measures himself by how it is after repeated iterations.

As Basecamp says, work should always be compared with what it was before, not a theoretical ideal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I enjoyed this. A quick read and a message I needed to hear today. Thanks!</comment>


Analyze a Python library's dependencies - <AUTHOR> http://orkohunter.net/depends/ <comment><USER2> It would probably help to add some text to the page saying what it is, e.g. "Check the dependency of a Python Library". For other people, a project is usually much less obvious than it is to its author to a surprising degree.

If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the suggestion.</comment></comment>


Hedge Fund Star: We Are 'Under Assault' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article_email/hedge-fund-star-we-are-under-assault-1463071444-lMyQjAxMTI2MDEzMzQxMTM2Wj <comment><USER2> From the article: "...since the start of the bull-market run in early 2009, a more traditional mix of stocks and bonds bested a broad hedge-fund index in 22 of 28 quarters, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from research firms HFR Inc. and Morningstar Inc."

The quote comes from "longtime hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman", who works for firm Omega Advisors, during the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (SALT).

For what it's worth, later: "Mr. Cooperman's Omega Advisors told investors in March that U.S. regulators intend to recommend civil charges against the firm for alleged violations of securities law. Mr. Cooperman has denied any wrongdoing and said he would defend himself and the firm."

No editorializing, from me. I think the article speaks for itself.</comment>


Gun violence has sharply declined in California's Bay Area. What happened? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/jun/03/gun-violence-bay-area-drop-30-percent-why-investigation <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that non-fatal shootings still make up a large part of gun violence, in addition to gun homicides.

From EveryTown: [https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence- cities/](https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-cities/)

> "In San Francisco, there are 165 nonfatal shootings, almost five for every > gun homicide."

Overall, the Bay Area of today is not the same Bay Area of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Times have changed, populations have changed, statistics have changed. There's tons of variables, causes, and effects in motion such that determining "The Reason" is like deciding if Sasquatch exists. Reducing gun-related crime is a big effort that takes a huge coordination of groups and circumstances.

The only reason this is worth mentioning is because addressing crime is more than just putting up a line chart of 'number of homicides' for a geographic region and then calling it a day as long as that metric is decreasing. It's easier for people (including local policymakers) to over-credit themselves with fixing problems, when the problems may not have gone away, only traveled somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER3> "the system, or public safety, cares more about the city, now that there's gentrification and you've got big businesses and you've got dollars and you've got white people moving in," Clarke said.

"White people"? That's racial discrimination. Why is that being printed with no consequences for the person who said it, why don't the rules of racial discrimination apply uniformly?

<comment><USER4> Oh gawd. Discrimination requires suffering. White folks don't do any suffering, ergo, no one gives a shit except for the most uneducated and ignorant of people.

<comment><USER5> People reading you're comment might assume that the words "white people" can never be racist. The words "white people" is not racist by itself just like the words "black people" isn't racist either. Context matters.

<comment><USER3> "White people" is very racist because it discriminates between humans. It's just as racist as "that Redskin" or "Black people". Humans are humans, levels of Melatonin shouldn't play a role.

The person who made the statement that it was "White people" was very much discriminating in that "us versus them" way: "White people" are causing gentrification, therefore it's their fault. Not their education, skills and work experience and therefore better paid jobs are causing it, but because they're White. It's that group. That's discrimination.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Docker 0.3 released: public index, data volumes and open-source registry - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/wiki/Docker-0.3.0-release-note,-May-6-2013

<comment><USER2> I thought I'd share a few cool hacks built on top of Docker:

Hipache: <https://index.docker.io/u/samalba/hipache/>

Heroku buildpacks on Docker: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/docker-c...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/docker- club/SBn9K160bs8)

Ready-to-use OpenCV build with python bindings: <https://index.docker.io/u/steeve/opencv/>

</comment><comment><USER2> In addition to the public search index and support for data volumes, this release also includes an open-source version of the registry. So anyone can host their containers privately without depending on the central registry.

<comment><USER3> How does one go about actually using a private registry? Is there a flag to push/pull?

<comment><USER2> Docker will support arbitrary URLs as argument to push/pull, in addition, eg.

        $ docker pull containers.mycompany.tld/postgres

This still requires some tweaking, but I expect it to get polished rapidly, now that organizations can play with the registry.

<comment><USER4> Is there a github branch?

<comment><USER2> Not yet! Actually we probably need a separate github issue to track this. Want to create it? :)

<comment><USER4> <https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues/540>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently asked for a recipe for running GUI apps e.g. browsers in dockers. Here's how:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run- gui-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16296753/can-you-run-gui-apps-in- a-docker)

(Yeah, it got closed. Oh well, Stackoverflow colour me surprised)

<comment><USER2> Oh yeah, I forgot that one - insanely cool hack by Guillaume Charmes: running firefox+vnc from any server with a single command:

        docker run creack/firefox-vnc

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad Docker is getting this level of attentions. I like that they have focused on making building and managing containers easy, and that this functionality stands alone. Compare this to, e.g. Red Hat's OpenShift, which implements a similar container system but bundles it as part of a larger PaaS platform.

<https://www.openshift.com/wiki/architecture-overview>

[https://www.openshift.com/wiki/introduction-to-cartridge- bui...](https://www.openshift.com/wiki/introduction-to-cartridge-building)

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the new description line of "Docker is an open-source engine which automates the deployment of applications as highly portable, self-sufficient containers" better than the old one: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5609995>. "Improved, as promised" seems to a major theme here. :)

<comment><USER2> I'm glad you noticed :) We're trying really hard to address problems and suggestions as they come up, and be quick about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the catch? Where can I read something about the limitations of Docker? Where will it leaking through that you're running in a shared container?

I can see some things; the containers will be sharing kernel resources (FS/IO buffers, kernel config etc) but is that all?

<comment><USER9> I don't know the specifics but it uses standard (if new) Linux kernel tech: LXC [1], namespaces [2], cgroups [3] and AUFS [4] to create something similar to a BSD or Solaris jail.

I would research issues with those systems.

1 - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC> 2 - [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.8#head- fc2604c967c200a26f33...](http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.8#head- fc2604c967c200a26f336942caee2440a2a4099c) 3 - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups> 4 - <http://aufs.sourceforge.net/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone have news on the progress of the Docker plugin for Vagrant?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find domain names that don't suck and are still available? - <AUTHOR>

For me, finding a good domain for my application is always the hardest part, at the moment I have 2 or 3 sitting on subdomains of my main site, waiting for something decent to be found.
A friend showed my makewords.com the other day which came up with some strong candidates, but they'd all gone (despite the fact makewords thought they hadn't)
How do you find your domain names? <comment><USER2> why not try <http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html> and <http://www.dotomator.com/>

<comment><USER3> Wow - some neat names popped up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Be creative, be flexible, be willing to seek out help from people more creative than yourself. If all that fails, spend money...

The past couple of years has made things a bit easier though. Drop a vowel or two, check out international domain registrations, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> "be willing to seek out help from people more creative than yourself", well I made a start by asking you guys :-)

The way I try and do it is write down the main subject, then words related to that subject and then feed those into something like bust-a-name or wordmaker.

However I'm fiding that this method produces less and less results, not helped by the fact my latest project is based in a popular area (Soccer)

<comment><USER4> :)

Soccer is indeed a rough area. Why not take a look through your elevator pitch and single out key words that describe your value proposition / problem that your product solves. Play with those for a while and concentrate on synonyms as well. You may find that takes you in some good directions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> kickscorner.com slidetackling.com forthekicks.com

These are available. Not sure if they're good or relevant.

<comment><AUTHOR> You definatly don't want to be slide tackling on an astroturf pitch :)

I found a domain in the end www.whos-playing.com (DNS changes trickling through now)

It's the name I wanted all along, but without the hyphen, I got so fed up of looking, I decided to take whatever hit the search engines dish out for using them (if any).</comment></comment>


Can AI save health care? Research shows lower costs, better outcomes - <AUTHOR> http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/23795.html

<comment><USER2> This change has been a long time coming. The first computer-aided diagnosis systems date back to the 1970s. They were evaluations, not real diagnostic tools, because no one was willing to risk relying on a computer for diagnoses. But that is all about to change -- among other projects, the "Watson" system, the clever system that won on Jeopardy, is now being programmed to come up with diagnoses and treatment plans.

AI won't "save health care" -- that's overhyped --but it will certainly create consistently high quality diagnoses and treatment plans.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone Successfully Read a Book on an iPad? - <AUTHOR>

I want the iPad to work for me as a book reading device. My aging eyes need the font boost. But every time I start a book, my eyes get sore and my arms get tired. Am I missing something? I keep seeing others tweet about their great reading experiences and pronouncements of the death of Kindle.<p>Are there tricks I should attempt? Or should I score a big sized Kindle? <comment><USER2> 1\. Use a folio style case so you can cradle the spine on one palm or two hands instead of needing to clamp down with thumb on top and fingers below. The aluminum/glass casing is slippery, and maintaining a vise-like grip tires out your muscles more quickly.

2\. Imagine you're holding a hardcover War and Peace or Lord of the Rings instead of a paperback novel. Read it propped against a desk or the covers.

3\. I find my eyes feel less strained if I'm reading in a shaded but not dark room. Try adjusting the ambient light?

Hope that helps some. I'm surprised how awkward it is to surf the web on the ipad, but for reading ebooks it's almost everthing I could have wished for.

</comment><comment><USER3> I read a lot of actual traditional books and have never found it a particularly comfortable experience. Holding pages open, turning the pages, trying to find a comfortable position, it's not ideal no matter how much you romanticize the smell or feel or cover design of real books. I've read a few books on the train via an iPhone and found it acceptable.

But what I'd quite like is a a clamp that attaches to the back of my chair or bed headboard and loops over my head to hold an iPad, Kindle, or generic unbranded alternative in position a reasonable distance from my eyes. Then to finish off I want it to flick onto the next page via some ingenious mechanism, maybe a keyword or eye tracking (even something geeky like a bluetooth clicker remote would be good) that doesn't require to me to lift my hands to the device.

I've seen similar in hospitals for TVs (which of course would be a second function for iPad like devices). Has anyone built something like this, either for sale or just jury-rigged for their own use?

</comment><comment><USER4> Yep, very happily. I've read a few books in the Kindle app on the iPad so far. I can't speak to the eye soreness issue, but I've mostly read in bed with the iPad on its side.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the iPhone is a better reading device than the ipad. It's smaller, easier to hold in various positions on the bed or slouching. For pure reading I see no advantage in the iPad's size.

IMO, read on the iPhone or a similarly sized device.</comment>


Pebble watches to live on through 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/12/pebble-watches-to-live-on-through-2017/ <comment><USER2> For someone who has a Pebble watch: are they so dependent on the external services that if they were to go down, the watch is essentially bricked?

If so, that's terrible, and it's a bad side-effect of everything being cloud- based. When you buy a piece of hardware, you don't really expect it to have an expiry date other than the if the device itself malfunctions, right?

For lawyers: is this legal?

<comment><USER3> I've personally never actually used any of the pebble cloud based services for mine, as I never trusted them with my data. I use GadgetBridge to pair it and manage the apps and update the time, etc.

It's been somewhat limiting (GB deliberately doesn't have feature parity with the cloud services), but I definitely wouldn't call it "bricked". That said, I do think I downloaded most of my apps from Pebble's store, so without a backup of the Pebble store, you might be severely limited in your choices.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My second startup; solving the problems from my first startup - <AUTHOR>

A little history first. Back in Jan 2011 I quit my day job after saving up my $ for a year and began my first startup, a hardware + SaaS business. It was exciting and at the end of 14 months I had a handful of customers but not enough incoming to keep me going so I went back into the workforce full time, running it on the side. Naturally my time is pretty limited. Users kept signing up and I had to constantly print and post them unique welcome forms, direct debit forms, post out monthly invoices etc, the list goes on. The paperwork alone took me hours. I'd have just coded up each form into a batch job if the content on them didn't change so drastically. I needed a mail merge system that worked.
So I checked out the offerings from MS and Libre Office much to my dismay. 36 steps, an excel file, stand on a sheet of alfoil and hit merge and you've got your mail merge done hopefully. Finding them not quite capable of doing what I needed I did what any coder with a few spare evenings does and I wrote my own that spat out PDFs from a csv file. I shot the idea past some business connections from startup 1 and got back a lot of positive feedback from. In fact so much feedback that the recurring theme was that they were shouting at me "How do I use this, my secretary/wife/monkey spends hours hand editing our invoices and still half of them are inconsistent. Sell me this now!". I realised hardly anyone except MS Word pro's and well trained office staff actually know how to do a mail merge. Usually not the kind of people you find in a small business. So why not make an app out of it.
The spare evenings turned into 6 months and a few banking headaches but finally it's ready for it's first release.
www.rocketmailmerge.com
Any and all constructive feedback is welcome. I've got plans to put an intro video on the front page when time permits and add some extra features, but I'll see how the feedback goes first before stretching the MVP boundaries too far. <comment><USER2> Your page looks great. Did you design this yourself or hire it out?

That said, unless it's a term widely understood by your audience and I'm just not part of that audience, you should ditch the word "mail merge". It may be hard to do, but I really had no clue what you were talking about til I saw your page. That may not be an issue for you right now if you plan to get your customers via direct sales but if you have any intention of scaling your customer acquisition by trying to get some search traffic etc, you'll want to make sure you find a way to describe what you do the way your non-technical customers would describe it. This may be difficult but I'm sure you'll figure it out. Seems like a great start!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I totally agree about the term Mail Merge being pretty unknown so I'll get some feedback from friends on what it could possibly be changed to.

I'll be trying direct marketing first to the businesses that already do mail merges so if that fails I'll fall back on search hits and make it more new user friendly.

<comment><USER3> I'd say that people who need mail merge know what it is. It was made most famous by Microsoft Office (at least thats where i heard it first). But, it'd be a good idea to have a simple description thats a natural search term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't really get what you are doing while browsing the start page. Digging deeper helped though. Not sure if you need a video, I think more people don't have the time to watch a video anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the problem with landing pages. They're always hard to design objectively when you've worked on the product for so long. I'll think of some optional wording for headings etc to better explain it.

<comment><USER4> Instead of the 3 points after the fold I would rather put up 3 easy steps. eg: 1\. create your mailing/printout/letter 2\. merge the data 3\. print and send pretty much like the "3 easy steps" you mention in the tour.

The current 3 points on the landing page sound rather empty to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link : <http://www.rocketmailmerge.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> seems like the page is not working? images are not showing,css not working too

<comment><AUTHOR> My server decided it would be a good time to do an update cycle, at 2am our local time; just bad timing unfortunately for users from the US.</comment></comment>


Zuckerberg Vs. D'Angelo, 'Before They Were Stars' And 'Where Are They Now?' - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/zuckerberg-d-angelo/

<comment><USER2> This is a much bigger deal than anyone will let on publicly. I suggest someone find the anonymous Quora answer for "why is Facebook working on a Questions service"</comment>


The Advantages and Difficulties of Primary Cells - <AUTHOR> https://www.creative-bioarray.com/products/primary-cells-14.htm <comment><AUTHOR> The Culture of Primary Cells In spite of the multiple advantages primay cells involved, it is still a difficult process to obtain a pure primary cell population. Comparing to cell lines, primary cells are very sensitive and require additional nutrients that are not included in the classical medium. In order to optimize the survival and growth of primary cells, they performed best in a specific medium tailored to each cell type. Such as, endothelial cells have very different nutritional needs than epithelial cells or neurons and therefore require a seperate culture medium.

Traditional cell culture media rely on serum to provide growth factors, hormones, lipids and other undefined components to support cell growth. However, for primary cells, high serum levels can result in differentiation or promote the growth of contaminating cells such as fibroblasts. In addition, the use of serum will also lead to the increase of cost and variations in different variations. These problems can be avoided through the application of a special formulation medium with little or no serum, while achieving greater customization to promote the growth of a single primary cell type. Other practices, such as inoculation of primary cells on more physiologically relevant substrates rather than synthetic polymers, can significantly improve cell attachment, growth and purity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Analysis of Gene Expression Gene expression analysis is critical for understanding the transcriptome profiles of primary cells and how they directly affect the function of cells. Traditional reporter gene assays and cDNA microarrays typically require transfection of foreign materials or large amounts of high quality RNA. However, it is well known that primary cells are difficult to transfect and the efficiency between cell types differs a lot. In addition, primary cells have a limited life span and limited amplification capabilities, making it difficult to obtain high yields of RNA.

All of which problems can be overcome using quantitative PCR (qPCR) arrays that have been validated and optimized using primary cell cDNA. qPCR arrays enable researchers to directly measure protein expression patterns in primary cells, stem cells, tissues and cell lines. Because of the high sensitivity and specificity of these assays, it is even possible to analyze genes with very low abundance.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Cell culture studies provide a valuable complement to in vivo experiments which allow for more controlled manipulation of cellular functions and processes. For decades, cell lines have played a vital role in the development of scientific advancement, researchers have become more cautious while interpreting data generated by cell lines, and factors such as misidentification and contaminated cell lines have spurred new interest in primary cells.

Another disadvantage of cell lines is that they are usually genetically and phenotypically different from the tissue from which they are derived. In contrast, primary cells maintain many important markers and functions that are visible in the body. For example, the 3,4-endothelial cell line is lack of various functional markers, while primary endothelial cells retain these key features.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The future application Gene expression analysis of primary cells will enable researchers to better understand biological pathways and disease processes such as cell cycle regulation, stem cell biology, cancer development, and neurological diseases. Primary cells are a primier tool which can be applied to the future scientific breakthroughs and disease treatments.</comment>


Facebook paid £2.9m tax on £840m profits made outside US - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/23/facebook-tax-profits-outside-us <comment><AUTHOR> How to win friends and influence people... or something like that. FB is already in hot water in the EU over its privacy policies (or lack thereof). One of these days they will pay the price for all this sleazy and greedy behaviour.</comment>