An array of eight SN76489 sound chips playable via USB MIDI - <AUTHOR> http://little-scale.blogspot.com/2018/01/oct-sn76489-midi-array.html <comment><USER2> If anybody wants to play an SN76489 in their favourite DAW, I found an open source emulation and turned it into a VST plugin. [https://github.com/FigBug/SN76489](https://github.com/FigBug/SN76489) Also did a SID (Commodore 64), PAPU (Gameboy) and RP2A03 (NES).

Windows / Linux users can get binaries from my website: www.socalabs.com Linux users can compile themselves.

<comment><USER3> That's extremely neat. I'd quite like to use it with Ableton. Can it be compiled for OSX?

EDIT: Ignore me, I'm an idiot - just seen you offer Mac binary downloads for all of them. Nice work.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, that was a typo on my part, I meant Windows / Mac users can get binaries -- Linux users can compile...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been a while since I've heard someone mention the Master System, and especially its sound. There's been a lot of work done to interface or use systems like the C64, the NES and the GameBoy for sound production. Adding a second SID to the C64 is somewhat common, there are several MIDI modules and even (contemporary) software for producing sound on the system. GameBoys seem more prone to be used as output devices, although there are some trackers available that run on it natively (better get some backlight if you want to use it in a DJ set).

I've been looking at this recently, as I thought about doing some computer music and the restraints of both the output and (if actually using such systems for the softwarwe) the input would seem like a good way to constrain the learning experience. Didn't encounter lots of references to the Sega side, though. It seems you can still buy that chip for cheap, as opposed to e.g. the SID or Pokey.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a few of these chips in my desk. I was building a slightly less ambitious 2 SN76489 synth using a Teensy LC as the brains.

Some kind of wiring/soldering snafu has me stymied though. Works fine on the breadboard but fails on the strip board

</comment><comment><USER6> Very inspiring!

I have 8 Oric Atmos machines which I've been collecting for just the purpose of having an 8-voice synth, based on the Orics' sound chip, the venerable General Instrument AY-3-8910 .. and now I've got even less excuses than usual not to get this project rolling. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm confused by this 'splitting the pitch-range' to create two channels idea. Does this mean that a given channel must stay within that range? (What happens when the playing track goes outside of it?) Is custom software required for this trick, or custom hardware?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure about that sequence but the sound of the chip is lovely... nice experiment!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is also really cool for eurorack and other modular synthesizers!</comment>


Ask HN: How many hours can you study in a single day? - <AUTHOR> I actually use pomodoro's sprints to quantify my study. But since most people do not use pomodoro I decided to ask HN community for the number of hours. If you do use pomodoro as a technique please say how many sprints you make in a day and what's the range of your pomodoro sprint (mine is 45 minutes focused with a 15 minutes break). <comment><USER2> I'm adding this because I and colleagues found it very applicable to what we do, which is not all IT. Dedication is engrossing.

No sprint, no timer, just time (for a Maker): [http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)</comment>


New deep learning course by Andrew Ng - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40449797/ai-superstar-andrew-ng-is-democratizing-deep-learning-with-a-new-online-course <comment><USER2> News discussion, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14958779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14958779)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm taking this class now. I've finished the first two weeks of the first course and am about to begin the first set of programming assignments.

Some initial impressions:

\- I really like Andrews teaching style, which is why I took the course. If you are familiar with his machine learning coursera class and enjoy it, you will enjoy this as well. It really feels like a seamless continuation of the ML course and the concepts taught there are helpful. You may want to go through that course first to learn the basics, but if your math is solid you can jump right in to this.

\- the course teaches python, numpy, and tensorflow. Some folks had trouble with Octave in the ML course, so many will appreciate the stack being taught here.

\- there is lots of foundational mathematics. Some like that (I do) and some don't. If you are not interested in core calculus or linear algebra details and just want to learn applied deep learning through code, you may enjoy the fast.ai courses more (which to me felt a bit cargo culty)

\- it's still early in the specialization for me so take the above with a grain of salt!

<comment><USER4> Do you know of any courses that will bring one up to speed on the math component?

I really love this format of learning, and I want to take this course as it's something I'm interested in and I like Andrew Ng, but the Week 2 content was a complete non-starter for me. I've been writing software professionally for a decade now, but because I have no mathematical background I'm very far from understanding even the first step of this course (which really is Week 2, Week 1 is just a formality).

<comment><USER5> Audit edx's Calculus sequence, taught by MIT. The courses are: Calculus 1A, 1B, 1C. You can watch MIT OCW's Linear Algebra course with Strang and/or enroll in: "Linear Algebra - Foundations to Frontiers" on edx. Use Khan academy for supplemental Calculus & Linear Algebra review. You can get Stewart's Calculus text and read through it/attempt the problem sets. Once you have a solid Calculus/Linear Algebra review you can take a look at: "Statistics 110: Probability" which is found free here: [https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/home](https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/stat110/home).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At first I could not find a way to sign up without paying - when I click enroll, I didn't see the audit link that Sjenk and others mention.

The trick is that the audit link only appears when you sign up for the individual course, not the entire sequence. So if you go to this link:

[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep- learning](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning)

... and click "Enroll", you can only proceed by supplying payment info. However, if you scroll down to that page to the box titled "Course 1", at the bottom of that box is a link "You can choose to take this course only. Learn More".

Click on THAT to go to the individual course page. Then, click Enroll, and in the first box that pops up, you'll see the link "Or audit this course" in the lower left.

This allowed me to sign up for all five without supplying payment info.

<comment><USER7> But you can't submit exercises.

[https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en- us/articles/209818613-En...](https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en- us/articles/209818613-Enrollment-options)

 _When you audit a course:

\- You'll be able to see most of the course materials for free, but you won't be able to submit certain assignments or get grades for your work.

\- You won't be able to submit assignments for feedback or a grade.

\- You won't get a Course Certificate._

<comment><USER8> Ugh, Coursera has gone way downhill.

<comment><USER9> Its a business, do you not expect them to somehow collect revenue on products they have created?

<comment><USER10> The basic problem is that Coursera wasn't successful in attaching some meaningful value to their certificates as credentials. And, if the credential isn't meaningful, why on earth would I want to pay a VC-funded company for a PDF that has zero value to me? Taking the course may be worthwhile but a certificate adds essentially nothing to that.

So now they've effectively eliminated just about the only thing that distinguishes them from some YouTube videos and a textbook.

<comment><USER11> _The basic problem is that Coursera wasn 't successful in attaching some meaningful value to their certificates as credentials._

The EdX solution to this is that their courses are all endorsed or run by brick-and-mortar universities with considerable investments in their brand that they won't want to tarnish by attaching it to any random certificate.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure to what degree EdX has really "solved" this. My impression is there's quite of range of quality and rigor on EdX as well. And, more centrally, most people still don't see EdX certificates as general substitutes for more conventional educational degrees.

<comment><USER11> Not a degree sure but many e.g. XSeries and MicroMasters are at the level of diplomas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are several courses in this specialization. Only 3 are currently available for enrollment right now.

You can get the course material for free, but won't be able to get assignments graded.

Below are links for all of the courses.

Course 1: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks-deep- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks-deep-learning)

Course 2: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/deep-neural- network](https://www.coursera.org/learn/deep-neural-network)

Course 3: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning- projects](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning-projects)

Course 4: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/convolutional-neural- networks](https://www.coursera.org/learn/convolutional-neural-networks)

Course 5: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/nlp-sequence- models](https://www.coursera.org/learn/nlp-sequence-models)

To get the course material, you go to each course link and click on "Enroll". Then look for the "Audit" link at the bottom left of the modal dialog that comes up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link to the coursera web-page: [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep- learning](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning)

In-short this specialization covers:

1.Neural Networks

2.Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization

3.Structuring Machine Learning Projects

4.Convolutional Neural Networks

5.Sequence Models

</comment><comment><USER13> It says it is free to audit the videos, but I can only find a button that lets me enroll for free for 7 days before paying $49 a month. Am I missing something?

EDIT: nevermind when you click enroll then there is a small text in the left bottom of the pop up thats says audit the course.

<comment><USER14> Did they remove that link? I can't find it anywhere.

<comment><USER15> Click enroll, then look in the bottom left corner of the popup modal.

<comment><USER16> There's only the "Start Free Trial" button for me

<comment><USER17> If you click the Enroll button on this link you will find the Audit link: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks-deep- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks-deep-learning)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there any past discussions whether these courses will actually get you a job doing deep learning? I am skeptical these courses would get you a job in deep learning.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now right it taking.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm pretty excited about this... at work, we are using machine learning to train models that allow us to automate the process of grading student essays. The product is called LightSide. I hope to apply my learning from the class to improving our models and our scoring accuracy. Woowhoo, thanks Dr. Ng!

<comment><USER21> I would be furious if my essay was graded by a computer. Is the model really good enough to account for all the variances in human language? Is the whole thing graded automatically or just the grammar?

<comment><USER22> I don't know about the specific project SoMisanthrope is talking about, but these types of tools are often used in conjunction with human graders. e.g. Instead of having 2 human graders, you automate the grading and have 1 human grader, and if the grades differ by some amount, only then do you bring in a secondary grader.

<comment><USER20> Good point DamVigilante. We trained the model using hundreds of human-scored essays. They were all double or triple scored, to validate IRR. I think that's why the model is performing so well. But, there is always room for improvement! :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Effects of Pervasive Encryption on Operators - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8404 <comment><USER2> So the same operators are now complaining about encryption that didn't consider the consequences of MiTM modifying the traffic, like adding elements on HTML pages or altering DNS NXDOMAIN to redirect to an advertisement portal?

Too late now. Encryption is here to stay.

[http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/redirectingdnsf...](http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/redirectingdnsforads11.pdf)

[https://www.wired.com/2014/11/att-hits-pause-privacy- busting...](https://www.wired.com/2014/11/att-hits-pause-privacy-busting- perma-cookie-test/)

[https://www.infoworld.com/article/2925839/net- neutrality/cod...](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2925839/net- neutrality/code-injection-new-low-isps.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is funny... if operators are crying now, I can just imagine what will happen with quantum based communications, where you can't even _look_ at the data without corrupting it!

<comment><USER4> Wasn't there some famous short story about a planet whose inhabitants jammed all frequencies as the final evolution of warfare? If quantum entanglement is the answer, others will work to just make communication impossible (if it can't be observed).</comment></comment>


Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation divests entire $187m holding in BP - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/12/bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-divests-entire-holding-in-bp <comment><USER2> Im sure BP being in the shitter had nothing to do with this decision.</comment>


The Problem with the Gig Economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/09/06/the-troublesome-kink-in-the-gig-economy/ <comment><USER2> In my opinion the bigger threat is "gig cancer", the largely-invisible creep of normal jobs turning into gig jobs on paper, when in reality the only thing that changes is workers losing benefits and worker protection regulations. Many of the jobs you think of as very traditional like hairdressers are now independent contractors.</comment>


Gruesome murder of a Mexican teenager is exposing the risks of ride-sharing apps - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1079516/mexican-authorities-say-a-cabify-driver-killed-mara-castilla-after-she-hailed-a-car-from-the-ride-sharing-app/ <comment><USER2> To summarize the entire article in one sentence: "Ride sharing is risky, but we decline to evaluate whether it's more or less risky than cabs."

This article misses an opportunity to explore the crime rate in Mexican cabs with the crime rate in Mexican ride-shares, and instead beats the same dead horse as every other "scary ride sharing headline to get people to click for ad revenue" writeup over the past few years.

Bad things happen. If you don't present how likely they are to happen — relative to a contextually appropriate baseline figure — when you report about them, you're just using scare tactics to drum up views to pay your bills.

"Uber rider is hit by lightning. Are ride-shares safe?" is an example of how NOT to report a lightning strike of a rideshare passenger, yet I guarantee you that's what every crappy press agency in the world will lead with given the chance.

"Passenger in car-for-hire hit by lightning." is much more accurate, contains no less relevant information — lightning doesn't care if it's Uber or Lyft or a Taxi — and is vastly less interesting for people to click on.

Don't get suckered in by these articles.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is my post invisible? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I posted earlier about my company shutdown but it's only visible to me.
Basically I just wanted a little discourse about failing whilst maintaining some anonymity and HN is where I hang out.
I used a throwaway because I want to remain anonymous at this point in time. I see throwaway's used for these types of posts so I'm guessing that that is not the reason. <comment><USER2> Hi, Your two posts were invisible for most other people because they are "dead" and "dead" posts are invisible in HN's default settings.

I think (not sure) that it is because it has been downvoted. I do not know why. Maybe because it is difficult to comment as there is no context.

I could see both posts because I like to watch dead posts (an option in HN's profile).

</comment><comment><USER3> If it matters, ask the moderators using the |Contact| link at the bottom of the page.</comment>


Beijing to Impose Encryption Disclosure Rules - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575211842948430882.html

<comment><USER2> For the full text, see [http://www.google.com/search?q=%22bidding+for+government+pur...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22bidding+for+government+purchases.+Such+encryption+information%22+site%3Awsj.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find this disturbing. Who knows what exactly they're looking for, but it sounds like some form of information gathering, which could potentially be very helpful when trying to break into foreign computer systems.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is HTML so complicated? - <AUTHOR>

In the 90s, the programming model for a graphics program was a simple 2D plane upon which one could paint anything. HTML started off as a way of putting documents on the web.
I have been struggling to digest why it uses DOM as a way of arranging elements on the page. Looking at what people are doing now on the browser (Real Time Search, 3D games, multi-modal communication) I feel that this architecture is not the best way to go ahead. Surprisingly, the basic painting canvas is great as it lets me bend things the way I want to.
I see that HTML5 has a canvas tool, but its just not enough (mainly because all my widgets on the canvas dissolve into images).
Any thoughts on this would be highly appreciated. <comment><USER2> There were so many thousands of micro-decisions along the way, in all three areas of HTML, JS (language and DOM) and CSS, that the result looks more like a random walk than a set of well-thought-out standards at any given point.

Still, they're what we have, and, like the gauge of railroad track in Europe based on the ruts originally made by Roman chariots (the width of two horses), we gotta build the trains to run on 'em.

And, unlike the physical case, we can widen the rails every so often when most trains have adapted to the new widths.

</comment><comment> j-g-faustus HTML is not complicated at all, that's why it became a success - pretty much anyone could learn to write a basic web page in a few weeks.

Web pages became complex over the years as people wanted do things that HTML was never meant to do. Like page layouts: Early on, people would use invisible images for spacing, humongous nested tables to "hack" a page layout in a language that didn't support page layouts, and pictures of text rather than actual text for example for non-standard fonts or text shadows.

The primary problem is that HTML was never designed for the kinds of things we use the web for today. See the Crockford Javascript presentation for a history of HTML and Javascript, I recommend Episode IV: <http://yuiblog.com/crockford/>

Designing an "HTML killer" is no simple task, all attempts so far have failed - from Java applets to XML.

But even today you can use applets or Flash to embed more complicated programs. The web protocols turned out to be eminently hackable, and with server-side page generation, forms, CSS, Javascript and now canvas it is "good enough" for more and more tasks, so I expect it is safe to say that HTML will be with us for quite a while longer.

</comment><comment><USER3> HTML started out as a simple language for formatting research papers. It is a tree of text nodes and elements, ie section 1, table 3. It was not and is not intended to be a 2D anything.

Over the last 20 years many people have layered on things for different reasons. The biggest, of course was the "style sheet" which came from the print world. Javascript poked its head in, which prompted an attempt to standardize the DOM without breaking backwards-compatibility. Then the Semantic folk tried to enforce a separation of "meaning" and "styling", which struggle continues to this day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! This backward compatibility is the devil. I feel that this is the time to flush everything down and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. We can provide support for existing features, but in the right way.

<comment><USER4> What's the right way? The appealing thing about HTML is that it's actually rather simple, and it works extremely well for most tasks. Some of the styling rules in CSS are a bit arcane and difficult to master, but in general the CSS box model still feels a lot more simpler than the TeX box model, or the layout model used in many UI toolkits.

You want a markup language that satisfies a few simple properties. It should be text-centric, to make it easily searchable, indexable, and accessible. It needs to be easy to write by hand, since people want to be able to write simple pages quickly without using heavy graphical tools. And it needs to be relatively simple to programatically generate, since programatically generated pages are an important part of the web (i.e. pretty much every non-static website).

If you think about it, HTML satisfies these requirements fairly well. The fact that some kinds of complex markup are difficult isn't really important enough to counteract the fact that it's structurally simple and really amenable to programmatic manipulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've often found myself just wanting to access a framebuffer as an array or pointer or whatever like in the "good ol' days", but the truth is that unless you are writing low level libraries, or bleeding edge special effects you shouldn't need to do this. Its not a nice way to work 99% of the time, when what you really want is to draw a whole polygon, or image or whatever.

Unfortunately the web is yet to catch up with hardware accelerated graphics, so we don't have shaders etc. yet. Stuff like WebGL are looking to solve this problem though, and soon you will have a similar level of low-level access to a framebuffer.

</comment><comment><USER6> Personally I've used it for so long that it's just become second nature. Can't even imagine anything else.

Still way excited about HTML5. I'd like to imagine how HTML6 will be like...

</comment><comment><USER7> It's complicated because it was created by physicists. :p

I believe Alan Kay mentioned during a recent talk that he thought a WYSIWYG interface would have been a much more suitable design for the web. I think HTML is ill-suited for many online documents, but I wonder if a WYSIWYG would have actually worked any better.

<comment><USER8> Don't blame physicists. We were just trying to organize and describe in a rational, rule-based language the sorts of document behavior humans find acceptable and useful. WYSIWYG would not have worked any better because deep inside the WYSIWYG system there would need to be some HTML like system to describe the document, its styles, its layout, etc.</comment></comment>


No one stays in the Top 1% for long - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.html <comment><USER2> 400 tax payers * 3% =12 people

here are 15 people that's net worth went up billions in the last 10 years and apparently didn't make the tax payer list... which is exactly what people are complaining about. The average person has to pay taxes on just about every $1 they earn and these people are shielding billions of dollars form taxes.

Bill Gates Warren Buffet Larry Ellison Jeff Bezos Charles Koch David Koch Michael Bloomberg Jim Walton Larry Page Sergey Brin Alice Walton S Robson Walton Christy Walton Sheldon Adelson George Soros</comment>


The Leaning Tower of Ping: How iTunes Could Be Apple's Undoing - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/national/2010/09/03/the-leaning-tower-of-ping-how-itunes-could-be-apples-undoing/

<comment><USER2> OK, firstly a nitpick - feature creep is not the same thing as cruft as Stephenson describes it. Cruft is specifically about the code, and how under the hood everything gets very messy. Feature creep (to continue the car metaphor) is more like having a very busy dashboard.

Secondly, the reason that iTunes has become this kind of catchall application is because Windows users do not like installing new software on their computers. Just about everyone has iTunes installed, so when Apple wants to add new functionality to the computer part of it's vertically integrated stack, it is easier to get users to adopt the software by inserting it into an already existing program than it is to get users to install a new program. In turn, it is easier for users as well - instead of having a myriad of different applications to manage on their computer, they only have one. This of course doesn't apply to Mac users, where Apple can push updates to as many apps as they want in a synchronised manner.

Thirdly, as anyone that uses Apple products knows, it is often possible to simplify a product so that the 90% use case is very simple, but at the expense of making the 10% use more difficult/impossible. No, I don't have to worry about how iTunes stores my files, the app does it for me, but if I'm a power user and I want to install my music library on a separate hard drive, or set it up to be shared between multiple computers, all of a sudden it's not so easy to use any more. That said, iTunes is easy to critique on this score - why all of those different views of your media, for starters. Or at least, I can understand your book collection looking different from the TV show colleaction, which looks different to the film collection, which in turn looks different to the music collection, but why allow the user to choose which view they want for which media type - this is a most un-Apple like way to do thigngs, and they really should think about cleaning out some of this extraneous stuff, to once again simplify the interface.</comment>


Show HN: DOI → PDF with a telegram bot - <AUTHOR> https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@f451bot <comment><USER2> Sweet! Would love to be able to do something like that on our site. For example: [https://skylab.io/Alessandro/EchoSure/references](https://skylab.io/Alessandro/EchoSure/references)

How do you deal with paywalls?</comment>


What's the best way to stay awake in meetings? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49050936 <comment><USER2> Fresh air.

Heat, CO2, and general stuffyness are massive attention killers.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/06/why- crowd...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/06/why-crowded- meetings-conference-rooms-make-you-so-so-tired/)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/health/conference-room- ai...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/health/conference-room-air.html) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19845029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19845029))

Leave.

If you don't need to be there, and are gaining/contributing nothing, bail.</comment>


The Use of Sub-Routines in Programmes (1951) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.laputan.org/pub/papers/wheeler.pdf <comment><USER2> More readable: [https://gist.github.com/kimsk/a8dc99eb9dd491152bcc9f4a58a33d...](https://gist.github.com/kimsk/a8dc99eb9dd491152bcc9f4a58a33d0e)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is by the D.J. Wheeler ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wheeler_(computer_scient...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wheeler_\(computer_scientist\))) of the Burrows–Wheeler transform ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows–Wheeler_transform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows–Wheeler_transform)).

</comment><comment><USER4> With the exception of the part about storage consideration (paper tape vs. internal storage), everything else still holds to this day.

<comment><USER5> Sure. I enjoyed even more when I discovered that the parallel adder, an important part of every CPU, also patented by IBM around 1960 was developed and implemented using the mechanical parts by Charles Babbage at least 120 year before (around 1840) and everybody can enjoy its 3D animated reconstruction today:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2EDE8Srdcw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2EDE8Srdcw)

So even the discoveries from 1840 still hold: without the parallel carry circuitry, an adder is simply too slow. Babbage was proud of his implementation, but not many were able to understand then what was that about.

I wouldn't be surprised that Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, also already thought about the subroutines in 19th century, when considering the programs for the Babbage's machine.</comment></comment>


Did Facebook "grow the beard" when they added Photos? - <AUTHOR> http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrowingTheBeard

<comment><USER2> This particular post was OK, but the site itself is amazing, it's got so much good TV writing info! I didn't know such a thing existed.</comment>


Amazon shows off Kindle app for iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/amazon-shows-off-kindle-for-ipad/

<comment><USER3> Looks great. I bought a lot of books on the Kindle for iPhone so I'm happy to see that they platform is alive and growing.

But I'd also like to see Amazon create apps for other devices. I can't change phones easily because too few of them have a Kindle app.

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't this "duplicate functionality of one of Apple's apps"?

I smell a storm coming.

<comment><USER5> Not a built-in app: iBooks is an App Store app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks good. Makes me wish even more that Amazon had been able to keep the $9.99 pricing on ebooks. At that price, I'd probably buy many ebooks. But for 50% more, the public library will still be my #1 choice.

<comment><USER7> I don't mind the higher prices, but they do need to add features to compensate.

$10 was a hard-sell because it was only available on platforms Amazon feels like supporting, only has the features Amazon feels like supporting (no search? no annotation?) can't be lent, can't be resold/gifted/donated, etc.

FairPlay is (slightly) more consumer-friendly as a DRM package, but I'm still bound to the 'blessed' apps of the service, the features and platforms they feel like supporting, still can't resell/gift/donate, etc.

Again, it's not price that keeps me away from most ebooks. It's price/performance. I still buy a few. Here and there. But I'm not building a library of the things the way I have with mp3 and h264.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let's see... I'm willing to bet that Apple will not approve the app for the iPad. After all, they now provide their own ebook reader and we all know their stance about third-party apps duplicating functionality that's already available on the device.

Maybe they'll even remove the existing iPhone app because that would run on the iPad too.

<comment><USER5> The stance about third-party apps duplicating functionality has always referred to functionality of the device's built-in software. iBooks is a (free) App Store app and does not come preloaded on the iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Kindle software is absolutely awful. It's slow - you can list 4 bookmarks and it takes 20 seconds, and the same goes for substring search (buggy AND slow). Also, the system has a 534MHZ CPU but because it's Java running on top of Linux, it's a dog. I only got one for the screen and because it lets you upload a book in open formats (unlike the Sony and Nook devices).

As a point of interest, I wrote a text ebook reader for my Psion 3/5 which was written in OPL and reformatted text automatically. Interesting, because it ran faster than the Kindle can on a 8 or 12 MHZ CPU with very little memory.

Kindle also extremely lacks options, like different fonts, text that goes to the edge (no border), no justify on/off (on by default), and so on.

My point is that _I_ can write a better ebook reader than Amazon, on a device with a tiny amount of CPU and memory, and it's shameful that the Kindle software is SO awful.

<comment><USER10> I think it's more to do with eInk than anything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been waiting for _precisely_ this application for about 12+ months (I'm a K1, K2, and Kindle-on-iPhone User).

The Kindle E-Ink is _the_ platform to read books outdoors, by the beach, anywhere it's really sunny - you just can't do better (it outperforms paper - less glare).

But, for anywhere you need backlighting (Bed, Dark Trains) - The Kindle is a less than exciting performer. Even my little book lights are problematic - <USER2> sun works fine, but the little LED lights tend to put point glare on the Kindle screen. I always end up reading books on my iPhone, which is _almost_ acceptable - iPad will blow it all away.

My hope now is that people like Oreilly will start offering their kindle books at a reasonable price. I _already_ have all their books on paper, paying $30+ dollars for the Kindle Version is painful)

<comment><USER12> I've heard a few people complain about the low-light scenarios and was worried about it. However when I got a good LED light with a long neck, I found it was trivial to position it far enough to the side so there'd be no glare.

<comment><USER11> Hallelujah - Even though I have my iPad on order (and reserved, just for good measure) - and will hopefully be in reading bliss in 12 days, I would _kill_ to get a decent book light for my Kindles. I've gone through three of them, and even with a difuser (which was a hack), I always ended up having to try and read _around_ that one stupid glare point on the screen. I finally gave up and switched to my iPhone for dark light reading.

So, share - which LED light are you using, and do you have a diffuser or any after-market modifications to it?

<comment><USER12> Wierd :\ I just got the first one I found: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002CMLDT6/ref=oss_product>

The neck is long enough that if I put it off to the left, I get nice solid illuminiation with no glare spots. (And I'm pretty sensitive to this kind of stuff.)

Note you do need to move the light far over to the left for it to be OK. In practise I've never found it to be a hindrance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whether or not it's approved, it seems this may well "pay" for itself in terms of PR.

The article notes:

 _You can adjust "paper" color_

I wish that Safari Online offered this feature. Reading extensively from a transmissive (or strongly lighted reflective) white background is tiring. I'd welcome the ability to tint the background to something more tolerable (preferably a user-defined setting).

<comment><USER14> On a Mac you can hit CTRL-OPTION-CMD 8 to invert your screen. I do this often when I want to read with a darker background. It inverts everything so images look awful, but it is a really easy way to make some things easier to read.

<comment><USER13> I spend a lot of my day on a Windows machine. There's an AutoHotKey script ("Ghoster") that tints (by default, with a medium gray) all but the focused window -- as a means of lessening distraction. I haven't tried writing any AHK scripting, but now that I think of it, it shouldn't be too hard (?) to adapt it to instead tint (with a lighter shade) the focused window. Since it paints over everything, it should affect the Safari Flash widget.

I supposed I could instead park the Safari browser window in the background, but that would be kind of a pain with regard to usability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The app looks amazing. However, I think this will be the Google Voice of the iPad. Under review ad infinitum, always possible never approved :-)

<comment><USER16> _Still, the effort Amazon seems to have put in show that it is clearly focused on selling books, not the hardware the books are read on. That the app is almost certain to make it into the App store shows that the reverse is true with Apple: it wants the iPad to be the go-to media device, whatever that media may be._

<comment><USER15> Yeah - but "almost certain to make it" is not the same as "made it", you know? Not being cynical, just basing my opinion on previous actions on Apple's part.

<comment><USER16> It's a completely different scenario from Google Voice. Apple's rejection of Google Voice has more to do with AT&T than anything. Google Voice was a substitute product for AT&T call plans, therefore not good for AT&T.

iPads and e-books are complementary products. Amazon doesn't care how many Kindles are sold, as long as they keep selling books. Apple doesn't care how many e-books are sold, as long as they keep selling iPads.

Want to take a bet that the Kindle App will be approved?

<comment><USER15> No bet really, don't have enough data to decide ;-)

Apple is building a bookstore, analogous to the iTunes music store. Google Voice was a poor analogy on my part, a better analogy would be an app that was rejected for trying to sell music or ape the iPod functionality on the iPhone. Sure, apple wants to sell more devices (razor/blade analogy) but they're also very anal about protecting their monopolies.

But anyway, at this point this debate is pure conjecture so we're gonna just have to hold out till the iPad comes out and the app gets approved :-)

<comment><USER17>
      Apple is building a bookstore, analogous to the iTunes
      music store.

Does not matter. Apple has ITMS bet they never did try to stop anyone loading iPods with the music no matter what source of that music was. Same will be true for iPad — it does not matter where content comes from, as long as it helps to sell more hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting how many articles have quotes like these

      but it also sends Amazon's own grayscale-only hardware to the back of the line

that lack any consideration for the positives of Amazon's decision to have an E-ink screen. For many people who bought the Kindle, the insanely good contrast, even in areas with direct sunlight, is a must have.

Also, I'd like to see an iPad last for a month without charging.

<comment><USER19> I think that the idea that Amazon is selling hardware is missing the point entirely. A lot of the time companies _lose_ money selling hardware (ex. the price to produce a PC is more than the selling price... they make up for it by being paid to put 'trial' software on the windows install).

So, in parallel, amazon doesn't really give a crap about whether they sell a ton of kindles. What they care about is that the amazon _kindle store_ makes a crap-ton of money. If everyone goes out and buys an ipad, and "kindle on ipad" is a killer app for ipad, amazon ends up making way more money than they would trying to match their own hardware against Apple's.

I'm an avid reader and I got the DX when it came out (it is freaking sweet). I'd probably be too distracted/eye-strained reading on a tablet PC for the number of hours that I do. (I realize that I am an outlier, however).

My one complaint is that there are actually a lot of books that I cannot get for the kindle, and it is hard to take notes in the margin so I end up reading certain books on dead trees. (Maybe the ipad touch screen will make it easier to do margin notes?)

<comment><USER20> Amazon looses if backlit screens beat the kindle and other e-ink screens. People don't read voluminous quantities on a backlit screen; it's hard on the eyes. Amazon will sell more books if the main platform has an e-ink screen, because people will read less if they are using a backlit screen- imho. (this is if we hold the user base constant across devices)

It's true, it's not a total loss if the iPad dominates yet the kindle app is popular, but it's not the ideal scenario.

<comment><USER21> Isn't this the same philosophy people had about the video games industry for a long time?

It's proven that "hardcore" gamers buy a lot more games than casual gamers, and that they are far easier to sell related merchandise and subscription to.

Yet, the success of the Wii has proven that the sheer _size_ of the casual demographic more than makes up for the fact that they buy fewer of your products.

There will always be the hardcore, voracious readers, but I'm not convinced that it's not worthwhile to go after the casual readers who might only read 2-3 books in a whole year.

<comment><USER20> First, I am aware of that and was not discussing that part- the holding user base equal bit

Second, I suspect even the casual readers would read less.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alpine Linux 3.4.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.4.0-released.html <comment><USER2> Awesome. I've been waiting for the DNS fix (along with everyone else) so I can run it on Kubernetes.

I don't see a new Docker tag yet: [https://hub.docker.com/r/library/alpine/tags/](https://hub.docker.com/r/library/alpine/tags/) Anyone know when it's expected to hit? Edit: here's the issue tracking it [https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker- alpine/issues/178](https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/issues/178)

<comment><USER2> Docker image is up! [https://hub.docker.com/r/library/alpine/tags/](https://hub.docker.com/r/library/alpine/tags/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know how things are panning out after the grsecurity stopped making their stable patch series freely available? There was a fourm post and message on the mailing list a while but I've not been able to find anything more recent.

<comment><USER4> How exactly are they doing this without either violating the GPL or failing to keep their patches secret?

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that they threaten to never give someone who distributes their patches any more updates. While the GPL does not forbid this (it's a contract you agreed to with the party), I'm fairly sure that such a contract would be considered acting in bad faith (you're adding additional restrictions through coercion rather than changing the license terms). I'm not a lawyer, but I'd be surprised if such sneakiness hasn't already been deemed illegal by the courts.

I'm also surprised nobody has asked the SFConservancy to take GRSecurity to court over it. You'd think even Linus (who doesn't agree with the underlying spirit of the GPL -- all software should be free) would have a problem with "not getting patches back".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > support for DNS search in /etc/resolv.conf

Big news. This was a huge blocker in containerized environments, now can't wait to try this out. Great work!

<comment><USER7> Yeah we could not use alpine based images on kubernetes all this time, should work just fine now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see it uses busybox. Does this mean it's for low-spec instances and embedded devices, or did they base it on busybox because shellshock only affected GNU Bash and they felt the GNU tools couldn't be trusted anymore?

<comment><USER9> It's used a lot as a guest os useland and init inside docker deployments, becuase it's very small. This means you can run a lot of docker images in one machine if you use alpine inside them, fully loaded alpine docker base is about 8mb.

<comment><USER10> The thing I've liked about this is that bloat isn't just about size.

If you have no reason to interact with the userland tools inside a Docker container, you similarly have no reason to introduce their complexity and attack surface in a container designed to run one service.

My current "minimal" installation shows 25 SUID binaries (a large amount of them being systemd related...) and my server services need very few of these.

<comment><USER5> If you're that concerned about bloat, you can use the scratch image to start from a completely empty rootfs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've dabbled with Alpine and been very impressed, but ultimately my team is using a debian base image because we ran into occasional difficulties linking against musl.

We still haven't hit any apparent bottlenecks using debian:jessie. Where are said bottlenecks? Where should I be paying attention?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there Alpine Linux AMIs for AWS and/or images for GCE?

<comment><USER13> Not yet unfortunately that I know of. There are some oldish instructions for AWS here [https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Install_Alpine_on_Amazon_E...](https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Install_Alpine_on_Amazon_EC2) and it was suggested that a community project might help build official cloud images.</comment></comment>


Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day - <AUTHOR> http://forum.swype.com/showthread.php?13052-Swype-makes-almost-4000-location-requests-every-day <comment><USER2> Actually, to me it sounds like a bug with Swype when location access is blocked. The users in the thread with the large amount of requests all have the location permission blocked.

Other users with Privacy Guard installed as well (so they can see the amount of location requests) who have _not_ blocked location access report that it only made the request once.

So it just sounds like if it fails the initial request it continues to retry every few minutes. In my opinion it seems like a bug rather then anything malicious.

However the posters in the thread do have a good point that there is really no reason for Swype to even need this permission.

<comment><USER3> possibly. but its every 20 seconds, not every few minutes…

4000 / 24 * 60 = 4000 / 1440 = 2.777 => 60 / 2.7 = 21 seconds

<comment><USER4> If Swype tried to get your location every 20 seconds on purpose, it would drain you battery within a few hours.

<comment><USER5> If it was successful it would drain your battery, failed attempts should cost almost nothing so this fits with the bug theory.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly the point I'm trying to make.

Accessing GPS every 20 secs just can't be what they had in mind when they implemented it. (not even in case it fails, because it would prevent the CPU from going into deep sleep, which saves battery)

What I believe is happening:

The developers of Swype didn't test for that error, because Google Play filters the app for all devices that don't have GPS, so the device is expected to have the hardware and to return some specific error in case it doesn't work (GPS turned off and so on)

And the CyanogenMod privacy feature interferes in a way, that causes an unexpected error that they didn't account for.

Combine that with the lack of an exponential backoff and you'll get this result.

<comment><USER6> This is a problem with a lot of the enhancements that custom ROMs provide on Android. They break the API contract a developer has with the SDK and unexpected things happen. It's the reason all these ROMs aren't allowed to ship with Google Apps installed -- they fail the compatibility test. Most developer don't bother to investigate these issues and work around it because they're rarely documented and hard to discover.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it.

Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this?

I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

<comment><USER8> Google seems to have no interest in protecting android users from this either.

There was an app called 'App Ops' that gave android users the ability to choose which permissions they wanted to grant applications. No root required.

Get too many notifications from an app, or don't need location functionality? You used to be able to turn these features off one-by-one for each app. You could also see the last time an app used location services. Android developers have a bad habit of requesting every permission under the sun, so I've gotten in the habit of disabling the permissions that don't add value for me.

Unfortunately, Google later removed this feature saying that its release was accidental. I thought it was a clean solution to a major problem.

Source: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/google-removes- vital-p...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/google-removes-vital- privacy-features-android-shortly-after-adding-them)

<comment><USER9> Why wouldn't Google want users to have such powerful control over their devices? It's always explained like this: Because it's "simpler." Because "things will break if the user does something wrong." Because "the average user won't need it."

Those same poor excuses have been responsible for so much loss of privacy and freedom elsewhere, not just by Google. To me, they're deliberately preventing users from having too much power to control their devices, so _they_ can better persuade them in the direction they want. Then they accidentally gave the users too much, so of course they would say it wasn't intended, but the reaction certainly says that it's precisely what the users want...

<comment><USER10> That's exactly the reason, and it's more legitimate than you give it credit for. I can foresee numerous situations where users disable location tracking (in the name of saving battery) without realising the effect it will have (rendering a location-based app useless).

A nice middle ground would be to keep App Ops, but hidden away somewhere, much like the Developer Tools are.

<comment><USER11> >users disable location tracking (in the name of saving battery) without realising the effect it will have (rendering a location-based app useless).

If you can assume that location data would be available, you can also assume that users will be sentient.

<comment><USER12> And random developers start getting one-star "Doesn't work!" reviews because our "sentient" user forgot to change their settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The official response is that location data is used for "regional dialects"... makes sense, but is IP geolocation not close enough? The screenshot there doesn't make it clear but is this coarse or fine location data? My keyboard, no matter how smart, shouldn't need to know where exactly it is on Earth to within a few meters. Within a state or town, fair enough.

<comment><USER13> I think this is poor user UI. I mean, in this day in age when so many people travel through different countries weekly on pleasure or business, their keyboard layout changes accordingly?

That doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER14> I don't think the keyboard changes UI - from the description it sounds like they augment the dictionary with words that other people near you are using in their vocabulary.

Still, it doesn't make a lot of sense that they need to do that many location requests. Why should where I'm standing _right now_ affect what words are in my dictionary? It's a poor proxy at best, the words that I use in my language are a product of both where I grew up and where I spend my time. Where I happen to be standing does not always matter that much.

I wonder if bucketing users into "these people use the same words" would give better results?

<comment><USER15> > Why should where I'm standing right now affect what words are in my > dictionary?

Since Swype has do to a lot of inference from your gestures, it seems reasonable that it may perform better when inferring proper names with some location awareness.

For example, if I am in a particular city, and wanted to type the name of a street where I am.

I am not saying that's a feature I find compelling; it does sound reasonable though. Letting the user chose this behavior (and the permission), would be best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could part of this be that "Privacy Guard" blocked the request, so Swype reissued requests?

</comment><comment><USER17> Boy, this may explain why Swype was bogging my phone down so much. Last couple months maybe it has been really slow, and I thought it was a couple large games being kept in RAM but at one point with only a couple things in the background my Swype trace was so slow I thought maybe I had a bugged version. Removed the app and the phone runs like butter. Like BUTTER. The Google glide keyboard or whatever isn't as good but brother it's better than dealing with a frozen phone.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Google keyboard supports swiping now, and if running 4.3, you can have the Dvorak layout as well.

<comment><USER19> Offtopic: is Dvorak layout really useful on small touchscreens?

I use it on hardware keyboard, where each finger has its place - and it's great. But all my attempts to use it on phone screen only led to increase of typos, because frequently used letters are too near to each other.

<comment><USER18> I love it. I find that a lot of the swiping motion stays on the home row. But, it is a lot of back-and-forth. It would be interesting to see a mobile keyboard designed with swiping such that frequently used letters are clustered together, and less frequently used letters further away.

Meh. Having the Dvorak keyboard on my phone is also an awesome conversation piece. To each their own. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey guys. Just thought I'd pop in here to mention an alternative to installing Cyanogenmod or blocking all internet activity with a firewall.

I found XPrivacy while looking for interesting xposed modules to install. It's like Privacy Guard but better:

[http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/mod- xprivacy-...](http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/mod- xprivacy-1-11-8-ultimate-privacy-t2320783)

All you need to do is root your phone and install the xposed framework on your existing ROM. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe this is caused by using Google Play Services to get the location.

The location tracking of Google Play Services is basically a black box, that tracks the users movement very accurately.

It could be that we don't see the count of location requests Swype made, but instead the count of location requests Google Play Services makes.

<comment><USER21> Its also incredibly buggy. I've had it drain my battery randomly.

On top of that, I noticed my maps application on my new N5 wasn't working correctly. It seemed to update once and then never again. I went into the location services and there was a EULA waiting for me to say yes to. Once I said yes, it worked, but wow, that's not how to do business. I should get that prompt in the maps app or when the phone boots up the first time. Digging through the menu system in settings is the only way I discovered this.

<comment><USER4> The update dialog should also be displayed upon opening the Play Store app, but yes I agree.

The user should be given the option to upgrade the moment an app requests a feature not provided by the current Google Play Services version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just about everything I install on my phone is suspect these days with respect to privacy and permissions. Why does BBC weather need to write to my USB storage for example and why do I have to let it?

The Nokia C2 I have floating around is starting to look interesting again. It has no idea where it is.

<comment><USER23> Every functional phone knows where it is, in the sense that it knows the signal strength of one or more nearby cell towers.

A java app on your Nokia C2 could probably determine its location like this: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11628648/how-to-find- use...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11628648/how-to-find-user- location-using-cell-tower-in-j2me)

<comment><USER22> Yeah but there is no possibility of running one of these on S40 platform as J2ME apps don't run in the background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does this mean we can't even trust the input options on a phone now? After blocking this, does it also mean I'm now going to have to change every password I've ever typed on my device? FFS.

<comment><USER25> In fact, when activating a different input method on Android 2.3, there is a warning specific in that direction, that it does read everything you type, and therefore should only be changed if you trust the other keyboard. It is a valid warning.

In fact, I don't think that we should trust our phones at all, not specifically but only including the input method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I found a similar issue with the Square Register app for Android. CyanogenMod's PrivacyGuard feature tells me it tried to access my location 22,000+ times in a 2-day period: [https://twitter.com/evanw/status/453576355284660224/photo/1/...](https://twitter.com/evanw/status/453576355284660224/photo/1/large)

I assumed this was a programming issue (perhaps unregulated retries) rather than the app legitimately trying to locate me 10,000 times per day.

<comment><USER27> That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable. Square needs location data because the Square Wallet auto-pay magic is geofenced with respect to the register.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm showing 0 kb for Swype for mobile data usage, and I believe that was before I put it into full restricted mode for cellular. It could be phoning home later.

Swype can toggle enabling/disabling cellular data, contribute usage data & "social integration".

Also you shouldn't set up "backup and sync".

My point is it looks like there is some setting where it is not phoning home all the time.

</comment><comment><USER29> I recently noticed swype was making my phone lag if I used it (I was using samsung's keyboard as an alternative, it has swype-like functionality), so I stopped using it, imagining something like this was the case. Couldn't understand why a typing app would every slow down -- glad my paranoia paid off

</comment><comment><USER30> I have a Droid Moto X. Swype was pre-installed, so I can't even uninstall it without rooting my phone.

I got an Android phone b/c I didn't want to be one of Steve's sheep, but given some of the comments here it's probably safer to be in his flock than not.

<comment><USER31> Perhaps you are thinking of Swiftkey. Swype is definitely not preinstalled on Moto X phones.

<comment><USER30> Maybe I misspoke, but are the Motorola Droid X and Moto X the same phone? If they are you may be mistaken per my experience (I cannot uninstall Swype, so I assume it was pre-installed) and per the wiki

On June 16, 2010, Swype opened a public beta for the Android operating system.[20] The Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Galaxy S II, Samsung Galaxy Note, ___Motorola Droid X_ __, Motorola i1, and Motorola Droid 2 Android-based smartphones come with Swype pre-installed.

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

<comment><USER31> I think you did misspeak. The Motorola Droid X is a phone that came out in 2010. The Motorola Moto X is a phone that came out in 2013. There is no such phone as the "Droid Moto X."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >On a side note, it has also read my contacts list 6 times, my call log 43 times and received 6 SMS/MMS messages.

That's pretty alarming and seems to imply that this is not one small keyboard- related bug but rather a larger problem.

</comment><comment><USER33> Pardon my unawareness, but why would Swype get my location again?

<comment><USER34> It's explained in the post. To figure out the regional dialect.

<comment><USER21> So if I'm on vacation in France, suddenly I get the French keyboard?

<comment><USER35> No, but it will be more likely to assume you are typing Rue Carnot rather than row boat if you are near that street, or the name of some nearby restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> At least Android provides the user the tools to audit this per app. Apple should follow suit.

</comment><comment><USER37> We, as customers, are being raped by the corporations.. No dinner, no movies, no candles, no Vaseline. The sad thing is, many of the people here are part of the problem.

<comment><USER38> A software bug is not on the same level as being violently sexually assaulted. You are part of a much larger problem.

<comment><USER37> Software bug? Do you really believe that this is software bug? It logs location many thousands of times every day and nobody noticed that?

<comment><USER39> Who says it logs them? And, someone did notice it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jamendo geeks solve the hidden Chrome OS equation (and win a Cr-48 netbook) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jamendo.com/2010/12/10/jamendo-geeks-solve-the-hidden-chrome-os-equation/

<comment><USER2> The original blog entry was submitted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1992804>

For thos who are interested in this item, there's _lots_ of discussion there already.</comment>


Hacker News RSS Feeds - <AUTHOR> https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ <comment><USER2> Hi all — hnrss creator here. I was wondering what caused the traffic spike today :)

If you have any feedback, questions, etc about hnrss please feel free to open a ticket: [https://github.com/edavis/hnrss/issues/new](https://github.com/edavis/hnrss/issues/new)

If you get a lot out of the project, anything you can spare to help with hosting and domain renewal is much appreciated: [https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/#support](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/#support)

Oh, and if you're using hnrss in interesting ways I'd love to hear about it! Reply below.

<comment><USER3> I've been using HNRSS for quite a while now.

It works so well that I thought it was the official feed.

Thank you.

<comment><USER2> > It works so well that I thought it was the official feed.

Reading this just made my day!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For HN's front page, I don't know why you'd use the hnrss feed rather than simply:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, /frontpage was mostly added for completeness but you can toss filters like `?points=50` or `?q=javascript` onto it which might be helpful.

<comment> Whil- Very useful I must say. I have a bunch of those with different filters on points. Means the same article will show up multiple times but in more and more exclusive feeds. This removed my FOMO quite nicely!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Activity Parameters are the best feature. I use [https://hnrss.org/newest?points=10](https://hnrss.org/newest?points=10) so you can catch a lot of flagged and removed posts too and tbh some of those are interesting that you would otherwise might not see.

<comment><USER6> I made [https://orangesite.sneak.cloud](https://orangesite.sneak.cloud) to detect those, because while offtopic for HN, some are interesting.

Source: [https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/orangesite](https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/orangesite)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use this url([https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=95&comments=20](https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=95&comments=20)) to get decent output in RSS feed but it's still not as good as the feeds that show up in the hackernewslive([https://t.me/hackernewslive](https://t.me/hackernewslive)) telegram channel.

I have been trying to figure out the filter whoever created the channel is using but no close to figuring it out. :(

It would be really awesome if people can share a filter they believe works better. :) I am trying to reduce the number of meh quality posts from HN in my freshrss(rss.ishanjain.me) instance.

</comment><comment><USER8> People, Any good free rss reader with a card like front end ? I want to show posts from my rss aggregated feed in a nice HTML card like page... Want to share with my team

<comment><USER9> Inoreader works well. It even snags pictures from a linked article in a hn rss feed to fill the card.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the suggestion! I love the interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using this for years, and it works great. The source can be found on Github:

[https://github.com/edavis/hnrss](https://github.com/edavis/hnrss)

<comment><USER12> I think that's the old repository. This is the Go version:

[https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss](https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss)

Here are binaries for x64 and ARMv8 (Raspberry Pi), if you trust Gitlab CI.

[https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/](https://gitlab.com/somini/go-hnrss/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would really love a feed of upvotes by a certain user. That way I could track my own upvotes via RSS, and then using IFTTT put those on Pinboard or Raindrop.io.

<comment><USER14> User upvotes are not publicly exposed AFAIK, though favourited comment/posts are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Under the details section, it says it's valid RSS with a link to a validator. However, if you click it the results come out as not valid...

Might be good to check that out!

<comment><USER2> Good catch. It seems to be coming out valid now but maybe there was something invalid in the feed earlier. I'll keep an eye on it and see if it pops up again.

Thanks for the report!

<comment><USER15> Dammit, I thought of screenshotting the error, but was too lazy. Now I gave an unreproducible bug report... Surely this is karma at work.

<comment><USER2> Ha, it's all good. FWIW, the validator is now giving me a "recommendation" on the feed that I haven't seen before.

I wouldn't have checked the validator without your comment so in the end it all worked out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hacker News Daily: _Daily top stories from Hacker News_

[http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/)

 _The 10 highest-rated articles on Hacker News [...] which have not appeared on any previous Hacker News Daily_

(With an RSS feed and daily email subscription, dating back to July 2010.)

<comment><USER17> I also provide

Ask HN Weekly: [http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly- ask/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/) Show HN Weekly: [http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-show/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn- weekly-show/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interested in how you get past the HN terms of use? Do they have a licensing program or something? Also wondering about similar products reusing Reddit content.

> Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, > you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, > duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, > exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the > Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. The buying, exchanging, > selling and/or promotion (commercial or otherwise) of upvotes, comments, > submissions, accounts (or any aspect of your account or any other account), > karma, and/or content is strictly prohibited, constitutes a material breach > of these Terms of Use, and could result in legal liability.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Replies[new] New comments in reply to a particular user or comment.

Woohoo!

> By default, feeds come back as RSS. But if you add ".atom" or ".jsonfeed" to > any endpoint you'll receive the contents in Atom or JSON Feed, respectively.

Did JSON Feed gain any traction? I think I haven't heard anything about it for 2 years.

<comment><USER20> I have one reader who uses it on my very unknown blog [0].

[0] [https://plurrrr.com/](https://plurrrr.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks pretty useful. Not sure how to use it though.

The best way would be if I could make a little html page that fetches and renders them. But they do not provide the appropriate cors headers so that fails:

[https://jsfiddle.net/nmvhuf4e/](https://jsfiddle.net/nmvhuf4e/)

So one would have to fetch them serverside and send it back to the frontend to read it.

Is there a rss reader which you can use without logging in? I don't keep cookies around, so logging in every time I want to look at one of these feeds would by annoying.

Ideally it would offer to put in the feed via a url like this:

coolreader.com/?url=hnrss.org/frontpage&fields=title,link

And then shows one row for each entry with title and link.

Or maybe there is a command line tool which will do this for the terminal?

<comment><USER22> Traditionally, RSS Readers are programs run on your computer and thus require no login.

The only variants are popular, because you get the same experience from every device to sync subscribed feeds, read/unread counts etc.

You could host such a service yourself with something like tinytinyrss for example[0].

But you can just as well use any feed reader available for your platform of choice. Thunderbird for example has provided this feature for ages besides email.

They do of course also exist as terminal applications. One example would be newsboat[1].

[0] [https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/) [1] [https://newsboat.org/](https://newsboat.org/)

<comment><USER21> Hmm... giving newsboat a try. A web solution would be better. As its kinda clunky to switch between a terminal and the web.

I don't want to host something myself.

If I have to, I would just make a service that reads and re-outputs the feed with appropriate cors headers so I can style it client side.

Maybe the author reads this and would consider adding the cors headers?

<comment><USER22> I am not sure I get the benefit of looking just at one rss feed at a time.

But that said, for the longest time, firefox did just style the feed directly and I am still sad they removed this. Maybe there is a browser plugin which just adds the style back?

<comment><USER21> A browser plugin is a pretty heavy weapon. It gives a lot of power over your browsing to whoever controls it. So I would not use one just to read rss feeds.

<comment><USER23> Greasemonkey is really great to customize websites for your [weird] usage pattern. (Tampermonkey[0] works in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Opera Next, and Firefox)

XHR is a pretty decent api that ignores CORS[1]

      GM.xmlHttpRequest({
        method: "GET",
        url: "http://www.example.com/",
        onload: function(response){alert(response.responseText)}
      });

[0] - [https://www.tampermonkey.net/](https://www.tampermonkey.net/) [1] - [https://wiki.greasespot.net/GM.xmlHttpRequest](https://wiki.greasespot.net/GM.xmlHttpRequest)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I found this post from my RSS feed, I didn't understand at first :/

<comment><USER25> Same here. My thoughts: but I am using RSS right now. Looked up my configuration and, yup, I am using OPs service:D

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a nice longed for feature. Thanks. But I noticed something that I immidiatly did not enjoy.

1\. I used the "Search" to create two feeds. The feedlist is good, brilliant. But it points directly to the linked item, not the Hackernews item. This is not what I want. It should point to the hackernews item, so I can read the comments. Because thats how I deside if I want to check out the item itself.

2\. One of the feeds I created is for C++, but this gives me the result for "C " which will include C. "C++" and C++ both gave me "C ".

<comment><USER2> 1) If you add `?link=comments` to any URL, that'll set the `<link>` element to point to the Hacker News item.

2) Good catch. I'll take a look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I use this to create alerts in a dedicated #social-watch Slack channel, it's great for topic discovery. I wish other social media had built-in RSS (similar to how Reddit does it).

</comment><comment><USER28> This is really useful stuff. I combined this with a side project of mine to get reply notifications from HN. IFTTT works great also if anyone wants to implement the same.

</comment><comment><USER29> I found their front-page feed a bit overwhelming. So for my usage, I created: [https://hnbest.pythonanywhere.com/](https://hnbest.pythonanywhere.com/). It curates from Hacker News' Best page ([https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)) and sends around 4-5 stories every day.

</comment><comment><USER30> What is the difference between the Algolia HN API vs the Hacker News API ([https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API))? The Hacker News API doesn't have any rate limits but appears to be similar to the Algolia API. Does Algolia have its own HN dataset?

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been using this for quite a while to get all posts with points >= 100. It's great.

</comment><comment><USER32> I really like these feeds, but because it uses the Algoria API, it can't expose the feed I _really_ want, which is a feed of flagged posts that got in the top N and/or a certain number of votes.

<comment><USER33> Also see [http://hnapp.com/](http://hnapp.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What tech or tech-stack goes behind building these custom RSS feed providers.. I like the idea.. This can be provided to some common corpus as well?

<comment><USER8> Reading further, I found it's built on top of Algolia's Service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's cool, thanks! Scrolling through HN lately, I'm getting the feeling that RSS is making a comeback and trustfully I've always liked the idea behind RSS. What worries me these days is how regulations might get twisted if it does indeed make a comeback.

<comment><USER35> Could you expand on that last sentence? I haven't had coffee yet, and I'm legitimately failing to grasp which regulations you're referring to.

<comment><USER36> Running a service aggregating feeds (something like Google Reader was, or a hosted tintinyrss) this can become complicated with the different link taxes (ancillary copyright for press publishers) being introduced in different countries.

From a technical perspective I would argue that RSS feeds are offered for that purpose, lawyers might still see it as an infringement of rights granted by those laws ...</comment></comment></comment>


Computing's new shape (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/1454436

<comment><AUTHOR> Very prescient, except for this bit, unfortunately: _But the direction of both computing and communications, on the Internet and in mobile telecoms, is towards open standards: communication devices are less useful if they cannot all talk to each other_</comment>


Let There Be Light: The Documentary the Army Suppressed - <AUTHOR> https://mises.org/wire/let-there-be-light-documentary-army-suppressed <comment><USER2> When you consider the impact war reportage had on the later conduct of the war in Vietnam, would you say that for the implied "they" here, (who refused to release hustons work), "they" may have been "right" in as much as support for war falls, when the damage war causes everyone is exposed?</comment>


How I started the Jacko flashmob by accident - <AUTHOR> http://www.robmanuel.com/2009/06/27/how-i-started-the-jacko-flashmob-by-accident/ <comment><USER2> Headline is wrong. It was not by "accident" but planned and executed.

Also I can only yawn over this because spawning a flashmob over MJ's death is about as hard spawning one by emptying a few bags of dollar bills onto the street...

</comment><comment><USER3> that was really well written.

Also, and this is becoming my favourite line sentence ever: its amazing what you can do _if you're already famous_ this dude created b3ta!</comment>


Lego to open 160 new stores as other toy retailers suffer - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/d2b7554e-ce18-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f <comment><USER2> IMO LEGO thrives thanks to their relentless focus on product quality. The phrase "det bedste ir ikke for godt" (roughly "only the best is good enough") has a long history in the company. The fact that they have been able to thrive like this in a market with many competitors cloning their product is a a testament to their product quality and related brand strength.

If you've used and compared the various brands in this space, you'll be familiar with the quality variations. LEGO has put immense engineering effort into having the best plastic and tightest tolerances in the industry, and I can really feel the difference when building.

Here's one example comparing some of the clone brands to LEGO's own products:

[https://uploads.brickset.com/docs/clonebrands_v1.7.pdf](https://uploads.brickset.com/docs/clonebrands_v1.7.pdf)

Other brands do continue to improve, and there are many companies out there that make very nice building toys, but LEGO has done a nice job making sure that everything they ship is of good quality.

<comment><USER3> > _IMO LEGO thrives thanks to their relentless focus on product quality._

I'm sure that doesn't hurt, but these days LEGO thrives because of their relentless promotional brand tie-ins. It's not just LEGO anymore. It's LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Batman, LEGO Harry Potter, LEGO Disney's Frozen, LEGO Toy Story 4, and so on.

<comment><USER2> You aren't wrong, but the two are tightly related. LEGO's competitors are also selling many licensed products, but LEGO's position as the best quality brand in the market has allowed them to secure contracts for the most popular IP (Star Wars, Marvel, Minecraft, etc). Their competitors are left with less popular or less family-friendly IP such as Halo or Star Trek.

Its also worth noting that some of LEGO's competitors don't worry too much about IP laws. You can buy a clone brand X-wing for 50% of the cost of the genuine set, but the quality is significantly lower in my experience.

<comment><USER4> Part of that is that LEGO has a policy against making any models including guns.

<comment><USER5> I read this, believed it, and repeated it to a friend in a Lego store. My friend then pointed out that there are tons of models with guns and many other weapons. I think the actual policy is that their original nonlicensed models don't feature modern day guns or military vehicles, but they are totally fine making models with guns and weapons of war so long as they are from the fantasy world or they are not modern.

<comment><USER6> pfft. Built any "City" theme sets lately? All the police minifigs pack pretty realistic-looking semi-autos.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's true at all. I looked at every police set Lego is selling currently and not a single one of them included even a suggestion of a gun.

Typical police equipment are handcuffs, megaphones, walkie-talkies, traffic paddles and coffee cups. The criminals might carry gold, banknotes, dynamite or crowbars and other tools.

The most gun-like thing in current sets is the huge net shooter (larger than a minifig and not portable at all) that really isn't very gun-like at all.

Not even the minifig prints include suggestions of guns.

<comment><USER8> At the other end of the spectrum, you have Playmobil's police sets which include sub machine guns, rifles with sniper-scopes and attack dogs eg [0]

0\. [https://www.amazon.com/PLAYMOBIL%C2%AE-6872-Police- Command-C...](https://www.amazon.com/PLAYMOBIL%C2%AE-6872-Police-Command- Center/dp/B01608LOHS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" Lego has become the world's largest toymaker by sales..."_

Had no idea they'd grown that much. Mattel used to be on top. Apparently Lego passed them around 2014.

The movie tie-ins seem to have done it. Even though Barbie had her screen moments in one of the Toy Story movies.

<comment><USER10> Lego is also widely (and IMHO not incorrectly) viewed as "educational" in a way that virtually all the branded crap sold by Mattel & co is not. And who buys most toys? Parents, not kids themselves.

<comment><USER11> Sad that legos were/are traditionally thought of as boy toys and a generation of women grew up without them. It's basically what happened with computers too. Many of the most important early computer pioneers were women

<comment><USER12> That's just bullshit, a narrative feminists peddled by posting selective pictures and ads of LEGO sets.

They even complain about modern "girl's Lego", instead of being happy that it brings girls to using Lego.

It also doesn't make sense to complain about a Lego car as enforcing gender stereotypes. Don't they want girls to build cars? It is so illogical. They claim girls are not interested in engineering (cars), because of Lego not catering to girls, and at the same time claim Lego cars don't appeal to girls.

As if company bosses would shun earning billions by refusing to market to girls, just to enforce gender stereotypes. Companies want to make money. That's it. The new "themed" sets apparently sell better than the "random box of colored bricks" from the past.

<comment><USER13> > The new "themed" sets apparently sell better than the "random box of colored > bricks" from the past.

In the 1990s, almost no sets were "random boxes of colored bricks" and they were all themed, but the themes weren't the commercialized junk they are today. You had Castle, Pirates and Space without any references to movie characters and the structures were rather harmonic without too many special or overly-sized parts. The minifigs had serious faces and were not cartoonish. A child would be able to invent its own story and get creative with those themes, rather than using the toy to play when it's not watching the movie.

<comment><USER12> Apparently the "commercialized junk" sells better, though. Lego was close to going bankrupt in the 90ies.

Apart from the price, I personally can't really complain about the modern Lego sets, either. They are nice puzzles, and my kids like to play with them. After a while they fall apart, and new things can be built.

I don't think Lego wants to pay for expensive Hollywood brands. They always try to establish their own brands, too, like Ninjago, Lego Movie, Nexo Knights. Often it seems the Hollywood stuff simply sells better.

<comment><USER13> Lego was actually flourishing in the early 90s particularly with Castle and Pirates. Each year brought new sub-themes and factions, and newer sets coexisted nicely with older ones. It started to go downhill with the advent of PC and PlayStation gaming in the late 90s. Kids suddenly had their attention elsewhere. Lego then changed the formula to launching short-lived flashy themes with spiced-up minifigs and unusual parts, and the old spirit of calm playfulness was largely gone.

<comment><USER12> I forgot to post the link: [https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/innovation- almos...](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/innovation-almost- bankrupted-lego-until-it-rebuilt-with-a-better-blueprint/)

Sales slump in 1993 - I don't think that agrees with your thesis. Maybe they put out so much stuff out of desperation, to find something that sticks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lego is becoming more and more of a scumbag company.

First hit this year was that they sued a small Lego shop in Frankfurt called "Held der Steine". His logo was a standing brick, but it could have been any brick, no Lego logo was seen or whatnot. They sued him for infringement of their trademarks anyway. That gave quite a huge media wave, I think the video of "Held der Steine" on YouTube where he lays out what happened has seven figure views.

The next big hit happened yesterday when bailiffs walked in another small shop that is selling brick construction sets. Lego found that some of the figures from some chinese vendors look somewhat like their mini figures and obtained a restraining order for that shop. Bailiffs took some sets with them, the business owner was quite shaken when stating on YouTube what happened and that they will check which sets they can still sell and which not and that Lego threatened him with something like half a million Euro fine if he would violate the restraining orders. His company is called "Bluebrixx".

Besides this behaviour Lego is getting more and more expensive, while the quality of the models and the part count go down. Just look at some of the regular Star Wars models for example. The "bang for the buck" is pretty bad on those.

<comment><USER15> Not only the model quality, but the Lego bricks themselves are pretty disappointing too.

If you drop a normal brick on a hard floor the brick is likely to shatter. More models have special parts with narrow waist sections that easily snap. The c-shaped grips that hold poles either warp or snap and become useless.

More and more sets come with stickers rather than printing the pattern onto the bricks like they used to do. Stickers are really lame. They never go on right and peel off at the corners easily, but if you pull them off they'll definitely leave goop behind.

My kids and I still enjoy Lego despite this, but we haven't bought a new set for a long time.

<comment><USER16> > _If you drop a normal brick on a hard floor the brick is likely to shatter._

Are they really like that nowadays?

When I was a child they were near indestructible.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, they are not nearly as good. I've had pieces snap just from having them in a box, rooting through to find other pieces, they must have snagged. And dropping regular pieces on a tiled floor from table height, had the side break! Maybe I was unlucky, but that would've been unheard of back in the 80s.

<comment><USER17> Uh, are you sure those were Legos? I have tens of thousands of loose pieces and exactly one has been damaged in use (a clip that broke after being walked on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> LEGO is doing very well and spending a lot: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/legoland-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/legoland- operator-merlin-to-be-acquired-in-6-1-billion-buyout)

As a parent I don't see many competition for LEGO: Duplo for toddlers, LEGO for kids, Mindstorms to teach kids programming, Technic for older kids. No soldering needed and can be used in relatively small apartments. And quality is a big topic here - LEGO uses molding equipment with pressure sensors, so they all bricks are the same. Cheap knockoffs frustrate kids, because every brick is different and sometimes one can't join them at all. And you can build anything you want with couple sets since LEGO provides all the instructions online!

</comment><comment><USER19> There's also a chain of _unofficial_ Lego-only stores, with new and used items, called "Bricks and Minifigs":

[https://bricksandminifigs.com/](https://bricksandminifigs.com/)

Noticed their Concord, CA (east Bay area) store from the highway a while back, and while I haven't been inside yet, was surprised to see they've got 20+ locations in the US and Canada.

<comment><USER20> Had no idea that was a chain. Saw one open up a few years ago in the somewhat small town of Monroe WA. It's far enough outside of Seattle that I wouldn't expect it to be thriving, but it's apparently still there.

The store was really cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They recently also bought back of the Legoland parks, which they have not owned since 2005 where they had to sell it because they were not doing so well doing that time.

[https://nypost.com/2019/06/28/lego-strikes-deal-to-buy- back-...](https://nypost.com/2019/06/28/lego-strikes-deal-to-buy-back- legoland-other-theme-parks/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Here in NZ we are about to get our very first Lego shop

[https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2019/07/lego-store- comi...](https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2019/07/lego-store-coming-to- new-zealand.html)

which luckily for me, is a 5 minute walk away from my work! Earlier this year my son (8) and I really enjoyed watching the Australian Lego Masters TV competition. [https://www.thebrickman.com/lego-masters- australia/](https://www.thebrickman.com/lego-masters-australia/)

<comment><USER23> That ability for adults and children to share in the fun has got to be part of their success; that and customers that potentially never grow out of the product.

<comment><USER24> I really look forward to taking my son and two daughters to our local store. All three kids are really different but they always find something that interests them. I love helping them put the sets together too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In my experience the actual Lego stores ... are terrible price wise. Everything is solidly MSRP, I've yet to see a good sale from them.

Sales online and local retail shops are far better pricing wise.

Although I've visited the local Lego store, I don't really need to visit to get a good feel for a given product, and the prices mean I don't buy anything.

<comment><USER26> This means though it is great for their margin. There is no distributor cut and usually no discounting. Thus they have likely identified that they make the most profit from their own stores rather than from other distributors (WalMart, ToysRUs) and thus they should increase flow in their own stores.

Also less competing products, distractions.

I think Lego stores are not for the price sensitive Lego buyer but for those buying for someone else. These are less informed buyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> [http://archive.is/sbaSP](http://archive.is/sbaSP)

</comment><comment><USER28> This is unrelated to the stores but related to Lego and the topic of knockoffs and product range. One market I've been seeing a niche level growth in is nano blocks. Lots of knock offs but nothing compares with the quality of the original nano block stuff. Has anyone else tried these out? I'd love for Lego to merge them in and create sets related to all the IP they seem to be building around these days. A nano block star wars ship set would be amazing.

Bringing me around to the reason I mentioned this. It's nice to see Lego spread further. It feels like it's been a while since I saw them introduce a new line of toys though (like the mindstorm range). Would love if miniature blocks could become a thing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Toys 'R Us used to sell Legos at a roughly 10% markup over MSRP. I always wondered how they got away with this.

And I am glad Toys 'R Us are gone.

<comment><USER30> Toys R Us charged higher prices because they were offering a shopping destination, something closer to Disneyland than Walmart. Their customers knew their prices were higher but shopped there for the experience. They didn't last forever, but they did last much longer than their competitors like KB and Playco that had lower prices but a more ordinary shopping experience.

<comment><USER31> _something closer to Disneyland than Walmart_

You must have had a different Toys R Us to the UK then because they were dismal places over here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Lego is a really cool company. One fun fact: At least the "techy" parts don't have assigned desks. They're also investing in cool new tech, like compostable lego (of course, no easy feat given the requirements on durability). It's also extremely test/research driven. (source: a friend who works there)

<comment><USER33> > At least the "techy" parts don't have assigned desks.

Can't tell if you think that's a good thing or you're being sarcastic?

<comment><USER20> I personally loved the office I worked in with no assigned desks. We didn't even do work on personal computers. (We had pair programming stations)

To each their own of course. Not everyone has to like working at every company. I've never been unhappier than when I was in my own personal office.

<comment><USER34> Pair programming stations? That actually sounds really cool if you're in the right frame of mind

<comment><USER20> Yup, we did all pair programming, all the time. Even mostly did test driven development. It was pretty awesome.

The room was set up like a computer lab, with a few rows of computers. Each was an iMac with an equal sized Apple Cinema Display that was mirrored, along with 2 keyboards and 2 mice.

The machines were reimaged occasionally to make sure everything was always the same and up to date. You never had to worry about setting up an environment or anything.

We all had personal laptops, but almost never used them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ah maybe the family business should have stuck with it's brick toy product. We had real mini bricks and cement [https://www.brightontoymuseum.co.uk/index/Category:Brickplay...](https://www.brightontoymuseum.co.uk/index/Category:Brickplayer)

</comment><comment><USER36> Most of the toy manufactures/retailers target only kids, while Lego sells also to a significant number of adults... they positioned themselves almost perfectly...

</comment><comment><USER37> Any of you LEGO fans have any tips for building up a lego collection for my kid on the cheap or at least cheaper?

<comment> em-bee get lego by the kilo on ebay or similar places. look for deals.

and (some will disagree with that) buy clone-brands that are cheaper. the quality of the clone brands is catching up. the only downside with clone- brands is that the often actually clone lego designed sets instead of designing their own which is not really ethical. but many brands also have their own sets.

<comment><USER38> Can anyone expand on this? Perhaps some alternative to ebay that sells by the kilo

<comment> em-bee lego by the kilo is effectively only had second hand, so any places where second hand stuff is sold.

local flea-markets for example, thrift stores, craigs list, other auctioning sites...

on craigs list and newspaper classifieds you could even ask. some people keep their old lego, waiting for an opportunity to give/sell it to someone who deserves/needs it instead of selling it to someone looking to make a profit.

it takes some searching, patience and good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> valiant-comma Behind a paywall, however in case it's helpful to anyone else, you should be able to Google the title of the article and access it from there. This often works for other publications, as well (e.g., WSJ).

<comment><USER39> That's exactly what the 'web' link under every article title here does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I practice scrum with legos.

</comment><comment><USER41> I predict they'll close 1/2 of those in five years time. There will eventually be a recession and I don't think they'll be able to support that many stores.

<comment><USER42> I don't know how many stores they currently have worldwide, but 160 new stores across the entire world is nothing.

That's less than one new store per country on average.

To put it in perspective there are 37,000 McDonald's and 11,766 Wal-Marts in the world. Even Levi's has 750 of their own stores worldwide.

<comment><USER41> They have 180 in the world and about 80 are in the United States. 160 more almost doubles their worldwide footprint.

<comment><USER43> China is becoming one of LEGO's biggest markets, but their store presence here is still minimal. According to the article, 140 of the new stores will be in China.

I'm sure there's plenty room for growth in a couple other markets as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Micro PaaS Nanobox – official launch today - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nanobox_io/status/829362867346485248 <comment><USER2> I'm part of the core team behind Nanobox and am more than willing to answer any questions. We're super excited to be out of beta. Feel free to check us out: [https://nanobox.io](https://nanobox.io)</comment>


Bugsnag, The Error Reporting Platform, Raises $1.4M Seed Round - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/20/bugsnag-the-error-reporting-platform-used-by-linkedin-and-others-raises-1-2m-seed-round/#038;utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> I've used Bugsnag primarily for Android development, and overall, it is such a plain bug reporting platform. It's nice that it has full stack bug tracking, but I find their website fairly annoying to use. I can't see how bugs have evolved over time, or drill down to specific users easily. I want more graphs of things like # of exceptions over time. I'd like to grab a batch of users affected by a specific bug, and email them saying "Hey I noticed that you're experiencing some crashes, update your app and they'll be all better!". I also want to be able to log that /something/ is happening, that might not be a bug, but isn't desirable either, and is something that should be looked into later. A list of exceptions isn't bad, but it could be so much better.

</comment><comment><USER3> we're hiring engineers right now, let me know if you want to know more!</comment>