Facial recognition database used by FBI is out of control - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/27/us-facial-recognition-database-fbi-drivers-licenses-passports <comment><USER2> > Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm > is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black people

I think technology is often a very effective way to describe what "systemic racism" is.

Racism propagates easily, and race-blind / race-agnostic / race-indifferent behavior does not combat it or counteract it.

Imagine a majority-white tech team, largely color-blind, yet still (by virtue of economic and geographic segregation) in a mostly white-centric bubble. The training set might be largely white. If some preprocessing or feature- detection is taking place on the raw images, it might be tracking features that could have higher variability among white people while overlooking other features.

If you don't know to go out of your way to check for, include tests, and give thought to mitigating imbalances caused by race (because you "see no race") then you allow this problem to propagate. In the case of computer vision, you will inherit the "racism" of every library you import from.

This reminds me of gender biased found in Word2vec[1]. It is hard to accuse the dataset of being sexist, especially when viewing it as a reflection of language in news article. Yet, people using Word2vec use it as a representative of language, not a representative of language in news, with all the baggage in today's (and past) culture. As a result, sexism can propagate, autocomplete and query suggestions might be biased. Then spending habits might be biased, etc.

      [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602025/how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language/

<comment><USER3> In my naive mind, I can't help but think it might simply be a case of the contrast ratio being greater in lighter skinned people - therefore making the hit ratios higher. Greater contrast ratios will make facial features stand out more.

<comment><USER4> Exactly my thinking. I worked with a company that developed on a medical device that took subcutaneous readings extracutaneously, and despite being developed almost entirely by Asian engineers, it got the best data quality from fair-skinned Caucasians, and the worst from dark-skinned Africans, as it totally relied on the transmission of light through skin tissue.

Claiming racism without understanding the problem is both unfair to the people involved, and an unwise undermining of one's own credibility for the times when people really are acting in bad faith. That may be in this case, but that may not be, and I don't like guilty-until-providen-innocent no matter whom it's leveled against (even a Federal agency of which I'm not the world's biggest fan, and a database the likes of which make me think we need a constitutional amendment to protect the privacy of the citizens).

<comment><USER5> Even if it was no-one's intent that the system is racially biased, allowing such a system to continue operate after learning of such a bias is a racist act.

<comment><USER4> Ignoring known technical deficiencies in the system and assigning the same confidence levels in the output regardless of race could work out to be pretty racist, but what are they supposed to do, manually cripple the accuracy of the system down to the lowest common denominator?

In the medical device I mentioned above, it was medically useful for caucasians and lighter-skinned Hispanics, so-so with Asians, and almost useless for Africans.

So, what–don't go to market until the technology has parity across all skin tones?

Not everything is about intent.

<comment><USER6> I hate to be a pedant here...

but I actually wrote a pretty successful 3d radiology/cardiology package. So I understand medical devices.

I just wanted to hop in here and say that there is NO WAY the FDA would give you clearance to use the device you describe on African Americans under the circumstances that your posts have postulated.

It seems a no brainer that the facial recognition software should not be used on African Americans either. At least, if it was MEDICAL software... it would DEFINITELY NOT be cleared with that kind of a failure rate. And any provider or delivery network using the facial recognition software on African Americans would be on his or her way to prison.

But the regulations on legal software may be more lackadaisical than the regulations on medical software. Getting things exactly right may not be as important. And the penalties for misuse of medical devices are, without question, far more draconian.

<comment><USER4> > I just wanted to hop in here and say that there is NO WAY the FDA would give > you clearance to use the device you describe on African Americans under the > circumstances that your posts have postulated.

The FDA has approved drugs that are specifically intended to target medical issues in specific ethnicities, so I'm not sure about your assessment. That said, this product's market was outside the scope of the FDA, so it's irrelevant.

> It seems a no brainer that the facial recognition software should not be > used on African Americans either.

Any data source which produces data that's better than a random guess should be considered when trying to solve a problem. That it offends some people's social sensibilities is a separate issue.

Look, I don't like the mere existence of the FBI's system, and I don't think the public's continued lack of concern for placing constitutional restraints on systems like it is a wise course forward, but to say it's a "no-brainer" when it might produce valuable leads is to focus on one aspect of the problem without considering the rest of it.

Just as it would _also_ be a mistake to consider it more accurate than it is when trying to identify dark-skinned suspects. Witness accuracy is not a new problem.

It's also worth noting that the human eye is just as bad at facial recognition when the light and/or contrast is lower.

<comment><USER6> Not a matter of social sensibilities man...

the system doesn't work. At least not for african americans. You can't "socialize" away the fact that it doesn't work.

Use it for the races that it works for. DON'T use it for the races it does NOT work for. That is common sense... also known as a "No Brainer".

<comment><USER4> If it's better than a random guess–which it is, majorly–then it could constitute a valid data point in narrowing a search. There's nothing racist about using it to the level of accuracy it has demonstrated. If the system worked to the same degree of accuracy on Caucasians as it does on Africans nobody would be calling it racist, they'd be calling it a tool that can help build a list of potential suspects to further investigate.

To argue anything else is making it a matter of social sensibilities.

<comment><USER6> Only it's not better than a random guess.

Because in Eyewitness identification, you're never truly dealing with "random" guesses. Again, my experience is on the medical side of this whole thing. I know, and understand, the rules as my company is obliged to play by them. And there is just no question that we would not be allowed to use that system on african americans. Review boards would look on it the same way you might look on someone using leeches in the middle ages.

Only worse... because we KNOW it doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a class paper about the threat to privacy/freedom from data mining and advanced algorithms in 2003.

Unfortunately the risks they highlight exist without facial recognition. It's interesting to see facial recognition as a point of debate because the battle has been largely lost.

The quantity and intimacy of personal data already captured is much more damaging. Amazon figured out a teen girl was pregnant in 2012 [0]. IMO face recognition isn't even the most invasive modern technology. Sure it helps close the loop on a few Luddites but most of us willingly handed over the keys to our lives long ago.

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how- targ...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target- figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#269d6b256668)

<comment><USER8> Appropriate username. Ditching credit cards and smartphones are the best ways of increasing privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, calling the system 'race-blind' is the stupidest thing I have heard in a while. Of course the computer has no conception of race, but that has no bearing on whether the system is accurate for all skin shades.

<comment><AUTHOR> Curious how advanced the system is too... Does it use deep learning ML like the current state of the art?

<comment><USER10> The article says 5 years old, so it's probably not deep learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Our privacy is under attack on all fronts by our own government. It seems hard to imagine a feasible way to defend against this. Even well thought out legislation will likely just be ignored with impunity. Is privacy of any sort a lost cause at this point?

Edit: forgot a word

<comment><USER12> Pretty much. There are things you can do, but the majority of people won't do them. Our political system is showing its age, being completely gerrymandered, bought by major corporations, and is incapable of changing unless it benefits the rich in some way.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do city police departments have access to the FBI facial database or do they have their own?

<comment><USER13> Many have had access since it's inception three years ago [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fbi-plans- have-52-mill...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fbi-plans- have-52-million-photos-its-ngi-face-recognition-database-next- year#footnote2_eur8305)

Section 4.1 of this [https://www.fbi.gov/services/records- management/foipa/privac...](https://www.fbi.gov/services/records- management/foipa/privacy-impact-assessments/interstate-photo-system) shows that state and local authorities are not the only ones with direct access.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for these links. Very interesting stuff. Curious how good these systems are compared to the latest visual machine learning tech...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is absolute madness.

Where this--and other troubling revelations from both the Surveillance State and the Deep State--leads us to is authoritarianism.

Once we're there, nothing will matter anymore. It will be the end of Western Civilization as we know it.

<comment><USER15> "Western Civilization" has operated as Imperialist and Totalitarian regimes for centuries. "Modern" democracy is the exception, not the default mode of our societies.

<comment><USER14> To be fair that is misleading. Even in the most extreme cases, Feudal Europe arguably struggled to maintain authoritarianism as it was often government and military power was decentralized. Let's be honest though, I was never talking about feudal Europe. We're talking about America, and yes, modern democracy that built the Western world. Your characterization of it as always authoritarian is plainly erroneous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why are these representatives so upset about this when they just passed resolution 34?

<comment><USER17> Maybe because the privacy rules don't make as much sense anymore? [http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits- blog/technology/325708-sena...](http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits- blog/technology/325708-senate-was-right-to-block-fccs-broadband-privacy-rules)

I don't feel strongly either way, I just think that there is more nuance around the issues of privacy.

<comment><USER18> I don't have a choice of ISP.

I can (trivially!) choose not to use Google's services, including their DNS servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yeah, imagine your Trumpista ICE agrent walking down the street with a camera that flags people who aren't in the database (ie, no valid driver's license or passport). Welcome to 2017

<comment><USER20> This doesn't mean much. They can flag you for whatever, but not having ID isn't a crime, so a flag is the most they can do. Let's say they think that not having an ID means you're an illegal immigrant. They have to prove that in court, while you don't have to prove that you aren't.

<comment><USER21> Police can do whatever they want. Here's an article about several people who were arrested (and booked into custody) for "failure to identify" themselves[0]

[0][http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/02/yes-police-can- arrest-y...](http://www.citylab.com/crime/2014/02/yes-police-can-arrest-you- refusing-identify-yourself/8485/)

<comment><USER22> As noted in the article, its only a violation if you fail to identify yourself after being arrested. What is not clear to me is whether it is sufficient to just give your name? I often go out without my wallet and I'm not sure why there would be any legal presumption that a citzen would produce some type of government document to serve as "ID".

<comment><USER23> "Prove that you're a citizen!, I suspect you of entering the country without state approval!"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thailand Floods : World Supply Chains impacted - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/business/global/07iht-floods07.html?hp

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't help but think how prophetic several chapters in "The Windup Girl" (<http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/the-windup-girl-2010.html>) where when it came to how climate change might impact Bangkok.

From the article:

"Last week, Thailand's science and technology minister, Plodprasop Surasawadi, told a Thai newspaper that he was "one million percent sure" there would be flooding again next year.

"This is a natural phenomenon that you cannot escape," he said. "We are living in a period of climate change.""</comment>


Overcoming and preventing front end legacy lockdown [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/168543655 <comment><AUTHOR> Case study of overcoming and preventing frontend technical debt at a late stage startup.</comment>


I'm So Ashamed Of TechCrunch Today  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/im-so-ashamed-of-techcrunch-today/ <comment><USER2> _"I'm so ashamed. This would have never happened in the old days."_

Says the man who traded the dignity of the company he founded for $25 million dollars.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised that they still publish what he writes on TechCrunch. It's an odd relationship.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, can anyone explain why this prick is still writing on TechCrunch? Wasn't he booted out at some point?

<comment><USER5> Arrington and MG Siegler returned in October.

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/getting-the-band-back- toget...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/getting-the-band-back-together/)

<comment><USER6> I found that somewhat interesting since as far as I know Michael hasn't given up being an investor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was surprised the other day by this tweet from a TC editor signaling which PR firms are favored if you want to get your stories published.

<https://twitter.com/alexia/status/279307448479776768>

I honestly think PRWeb is a more trustworthy source of industry news than TC.

<comment><USER8> I remember being shocked by pg's post on this. <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

Also, on the subject of news sites with no credibility, most of Forbes's online content is from "contributors" (pretty much anyone) who don't really have any oversight. So if you see something there, think of it like someone's blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this really front page worthy? When will people stop up-voting arrington/techcrunch psychodrama?

</comment><comment><USER10> Just today? Talk about linkbait.

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought their article on the NRA was pretty poorly done too today: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/the-nra-blames-video- games-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/the-nra-blames-video-games-for- school-shootings-sigh/)

Among many issues I had with the article, they link to a guy making a joke tweet saying: "Sorry guys, but I just played Mortal Kombat and I've already ripped out two hearts, harpooned somebody, and turned a ninja into a baby." I always found those kinds of tweets in very poor taste after a little girl was killed by two teens imitating mortal kombat.

Lines like "Maybe more guns would help, maybe they wouldn't. But, the NRA wasn't exactly a pillar of thoughtfulness today." don't exactly make for great journalism either.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why this is published _on_ Techcrunch. Maybe I don't understand the Arrington relationship though.

<comment><USER13> I believe the relationship is drama->pageviews->revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If they can just switch the design back to the old, I would start reading again. They can take the design back from tcfast.com</comment>


Is EA Going to Buy Zynga or Playfish in Social Gaming Bid? - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/10/13/is-ea-going-to-buy-zynga-or-playfish-in-social-gaming-bid/

<comment><USER2> The better question is when will Zynga buy Facebook as Markus Pincus understands how to generate revenue much better than Mark Zuckerberg.

<comment><USER3> Over/under on the point at which Zynga's revenues surpass Facebook's?

Honestly, Zynga's success reveals a long-term strategic risk for Facebook. Zynga is supposedly spending $50MM/year on Facebook advertising (or maybe just advertising in general, but a large percentage of that is on Facebook).

I see a Zynga ad on every single pageview. Sometimes even all three ad slots are Zynga ads.

These are ads _on Facebook_ to direct people to _other places on Facebook._ At first blush that seems brilliant, but how dependent is Facebook on these ads? How tightly is their success tied to Zynga's?

That is dangerous for a business. IMO Facebook is still obsessed with advertising (and with Google). This only works because Facebook has such a huge audience in the English-speaking world.

Will they ever make the advertising breakthrough they're clearly looking for? Beacon failed miserably and generated more than a few lawsuits.

Companies like hi5, with large audiences in Asia and South America, can't sustain an ad business and have switched over entirely to virtual currency and goods.

Facebook has showed some signs that they're interested in this, too. They've been "working on" a payments platform for almost two years now, and they just announced their Gift application will feature real-world gifts from third- parties.

But all their "bold moves" have been in advertising, not virtual goods.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't matter how big a game dev gets: Facebook makes it possible; appdevs are wondering when the "tax" will start. Well, a de facto tax has already has started, and forcing devs to use less viral channels is when it started. The "tax" is for devs to pay in advertising to ensure their apps continue to grow and competitors don't overtake them. Zynga understands this, perhaps better than anyone.

I predict that later, facebook will add more "taxes" by squeezing out the offerpals and superrewards of their world with Credits (and charging more than them for "added value"), and, as the bar for quality gets raised for games (by the big three), they will even become a broker for in-game advertising.

And thats how the platform cookie crumbles. Its just one piece to facebook's overall puzzle though.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if there will be a tax revolt at some point, and a company like Zynga builds the social network around the games. Getting games right seems a lot harder than adding in some photo sharing and feed features.

I think social networks are a lot like IM clients. I switched from AIM>Skype>Gtalk because at each step someone offered a new tool that integrated chat. Zynga has found the special sauce for addictive games. I'm sure most of their players would create a new Zynga social network profile if it got them $10 in free poker chips.

The hardest thing about creating a new soc net is getting a critical mass of people. Zynga has that all tied up.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FAQ: Compromised Commenting Accounts on Gawker Media - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5712785/faq-compromised-commenting-accounts-on-gawker-media

<comment><AUTHOR> _Q: 8) Who was responsible for the security breach? How did it happen? //Answer: A group calling itself Gnosis has claimed credit for hacking our servers._

I would say _Gawker_ is responsible for the security breach.

<comment><USER2> Gawker is responsible in the same way that you're responsible that your house got robbed because someone found your hidden door key under a rock in front of your house.

Ethically, it's clear that the hackers are wrong.

Should Gawker have had better security? No doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a duplicate of an earlier submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1999727>

However, no comments there, one comment here.</comment>


Ask HN: Should URLs in browsers be displayed in fixed-width font? - cool-RR

I was just making some presentation in Powerpoint, and I was writing down a URL in it. Instinctively I set it to be in a fixed-width font, because it seemed to make sense that this is how URLs should be displayed.
Then I realized that browsers display URLs in a variable-width font.
Do you think this convention makes sense? Unless someone here raises some issue that I missed, we can suggest to the Chrome and Firefox people to consider using a fixed-width font instead. <comment><AUTHOR> You have a point when it comes to the proportions of dots and such, but I'm not sure if it'd be a fix to a problem which doesn't exist. I don't think it'd effect phishing much either, since that kind of user wouldn't understand that dots are important, et cetera.

But anyhow, here's a quick mockup: <http://grab.by/11oz>

</comment><comment><USER2> Not all code is in fixed font. Most older Pascal and Algol texts put their code in variable width, sans-serif fonts to set them apart from the text. For many texts, just changing the font is the solution.

URLs look bad in PowerPoint, but sometimes they need to be there.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Unless someone here raises some issue that I missed

That you haven't explained any benefit of doing so?

<comment> cool-RR I'm sorry, I haven't explained my motivation well enough:

URLs are "machine text", not "human text".

Practical examples would be: Easier to spot phishing URLs, easier to mark and edit parts of the URLs.

In fixed-width font every character has the same width. Useful in coding mostly because succeeding lines are aligned precisely to each other. But, to get a little more philosophical, it also gives the message of: "Every character is equally important". For example, a dot is very important in code, and it has the same width as other characters in a fixed-width font. But in "human text" dots, while still important, have a tiny width.

In a URL a dot is very important, and thus shouldn't have a tiny width. It often happens to me that I want to select text before/after the dot in a URL but it's so hard to do it precisely because the dot is so small.

<comment><USER4> > URLs are "machine text", not "human text".

This is no longer true. Partly as a consequence of SEO concerns, most URLs are now extremely descriptive of the resources to which they point.

<comment> cool-RR Interesting. But even if they are descriptive, I don't think this will mean they're now human-text instead of machine-text. After all, code is ideally descriptive as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> why does it make sense that a url be set in fixed width?</comment>


Google Keep now live - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/keep/u/0/

<comment><USER2> Looks like another basic todo list / short notes app. I was picturing something more like Evernote when I first heard of this.

Also, anyone else see the irony in Google naming this "Keep" after killing Reader and other products? How long is this product going to last before it gets axed (with all my todos and notes) like so many other Google services?

</comment><comment><USER3> Android app is here:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.keep)

The servers seem to be getting hammered from all the people trying it out now, though.</comment>


Ask HN: Personal websites with bold design? - <AUTHOR> I'm building my personal website [1] and I'm looking for inspiration. Do you know of any bold, memorable, modern, "designer" site? Not really the "fun 90s throwback" nor the "html purist" types, more like modern landing pages, only for a person instead of a startup. Thanks!<p>[1]: (WIP) https://evzen.dev <comment><USER2> Huh, I like your design - it feels like something that's simultaneously a throwback to the mid-2000s while also feeling modern. Hard to explain but fun when I load it.

My site ([https://rymc.io/](https://rymc.io/)) is my take on the same concept. It's HTML-purist, but not in the sense you see elsewhere.</comment>


John P Barlow is unwell, help? - <AUTHOR> http://www.johnperrybarlow-wellnesstrust.com/ <comment><USER2> Whether you give or don't give - ask yourself how you can help create a society where this sort of charity is unnecessary. John is privileged with semi celebrity - think of all those in his position who are anonymous.

<comment><USER3> Society has basically two choices: charity, or have the state confiscate by force. I prefer charity. ;-)

<comment><USER4> You would as you probably aren't dependent on charity.

<comment><USER3> One reason people aren't charitable anymore is because the government has muscled itself into that role.

It also doesn't help matters when it shuts down people's soup kitchens for bureaucratic "violations", threatening them with prosecution, and makes laws banning "public food sharing".

<comment><USER4> Yep, because 19th century London/New York was a paradise for the poor.

It's all pretty good in the slums of Delhi right now I guess.

I'd have more respect for the "We shouldn't collect taxes some of which help poor people" if people objecting just straight out said "I don't want to help poor people".

Part of living in a society is that it _is_ a society, I grew up in the UK, my parents paid taxes, those taxes went towards an orderly society, good policing, reasonable education provision, health care provision and a social safety net for personal disasters (injured, ill, someone dying etc).

Relying solely on peoples charity would be terrible, people are fickle, look at the ALS challenge, it raised a lot of money (a good thing) but I bet they don't raise anywhere near as much the following year.

How do you plan any kind of useful service from year to year when you have no idea what your budget will be.

Also if you want good services and don't want to pay more tax lean on your politicians to support policies that tighten the tax code for medium/large orgaisations (basically if they can afford to hire a full time tax accountant they should be watched more closely).

<comment><USER3> I respect your position. Thank you for taking the time to elaborate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the second page:

      Your donations go directly into the John Perry Barlow
      Wellness Trust and will be applied to the following
      expenses:

      - Concierge physicians – the complexity of his condition
        demands a level of attentiveness that traditional primary
        care doctors are unable to provide

      - <...>

      - ... & dedicated medical advocacy in the hospital – with
        extremely compromised mobility and unpredictable shifts
        in health status, it is vital that he has the consistent
        support of skilled caregivers

</comment><comment><USER6> Just gave. John has given so much to all of us, good to give a bit back to him.

</comment><comment><USER7> More information:

[https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2016/10/sort/time...](https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2016/10/sort/time_rev/page/1/entry/1:34/20161011141743:FEE1CE0E-8FDE-11E6-A093-F9A0F3FF4E57/)

[http://boingboing.net/2016/10/11/to-do-in-san-francisco-a- co...](http://boingboing.net/2016/10/11/to-do-in-san-francisco-a-conc.html)</comment>


Show HN: Pale Blue Dot – ISS Earth live stream paired with relaxing music - <AUTHOR> http://palebluedot.io/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting. One suggestion would be the ability to collapse the side- menu and just see the live stream.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll work on adding that :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pale Blue Dot is based on Hyperlax (hyperlax.tv). Huge thanks to Taylor Crane ([https://twitter.com/taykcrane](https://twitter.com/taykcrane)) for letting me modify it for this purpose!</comment>


The thing I remember most about the Apple ][ was the sound of the disk drive - <AUTHOR> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/08/22/c600g

<comment><USER2> Aha! He forgot 6^P as the original way to boot the disk. Newbie.

The funny thing about the Apple ][ disk was that homing sequence itself. It was aligning the head to track 0 by SLAMMING it against a metal backstop. Primitive, but took very few opcodes to make it happen, especially since the apple disk format had no encoding in the tracks to tell the head where it was.

One of my first forays into 6502 assembly was copying that home routine off the card and changing the delay between pulses to the servo. You could actually make music with that metal backstop if you made the delay small enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> I once found out on a BBC Master (which we borrowed from school) you can control the relay that controls the tape interface. A relay clicks on or off. So we had a BASIC program which clicked it at random, and it made a lovely clattering noise.

Can't emulate that!

</comment><comment><USER4> This needs to have a recording of the Apple II disk drive at the beginning of the video.

<comment><USER5> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQoA9Ul-YS0>

You might think the scraping sound the floppy drive makes is due to it being in an attic for 15 years. No. They always sounded like that.

The program that runs (from the bootable floppy in the drive) is an introduction to Apple computers. Note how the whole thing is designed to relax the user by showing the Apple's similarity to a typewriter.

<comment><USER6> Actually that video makes it sound worse. The "real" sound has a lot more dynamics and details in it. I love it, it was my first computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The beep comes first though! "Beep" + whrrrr + chackachacka...

I'm driving up to my parents' place in a few weeks so I can pick up my old Apple //e from their garage.

</comment><comment><USER8> When my drive got busted, I went to the monitor (CALL -151 was it?) and typed in assembly something that me and a buddy of mine come - basically changing the speed of the disk, based on the key you pressed - something like a piano.

But the sound was important. Normal DOS directory track was number 11, so it sounded one way, while the cool stuff sounded differently - games, apps, etc.

It was awesome time, back then, before teh internet...

</comment><comment><USER9> Taipan. Yes, that was the game that started me on Apple ][. I started programming after discovering Beagle Bros. Oh the pokes and the peeks.

</comment><comment><USER10> The thing I remember most about Apple ][ is the friendly manual and the shiny,shiny hardware. Wide open, waiting for you to do your mods with a smile... the Woz way.</comment>


Project Management Disasters - <AUTHOR> http://angryaussie.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/project-management-disasters/

<comment><USER2> Wow this is so brutal, but so true. In far too many software houses, scheduling and planning is completely disconnected from real development-based estimates.</comment>


Show HN: Homing Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.homing.space <comment><AUTHOR> Hi

I wrote Homing Space -- an identity, authentication, authorization system and would like to showcase here. A minimum viable product is at www.homing.space. I think it could tackle the problem of a centrally stored account registry.

In my system, when you go to a website; say [https://test.simplysign.in/enter.php](https://test.simplysign.in/enter.php), you would be asked just your Homing Space Name -- the one you got as a subdomain at www.homing.space

The request goes to the Homing Space registry and then locates the localhost where your own server is running -- and you are authenticated there -- and once you agree then it goes back to the originating merchant

In short it is a distributed membership system -- where each member stores his/her own key part in the authentication process. My hope is to act as deterrent to hackers at both ends: merchants as well as users. As this is a distributed system it is difficult to get all the accounts together. Also since merchant has no input field in which a password is written, hacking through there is also dif

The client code is a bundle of open-source stuff along with my own open-source scripts (Artistic License 2.0) It can be installed on a USB/Flash drive

(And if you want to host it on your own server, that's also possible)

It also solves the problem of releasing your identity attributes (birthday, first name, last name) from your own central Homing Space (i.e you don't have to figure out where all you placed your data -- because all merchants would pick up your identity attribs from you)

It is a bit like openID I think, but I wrote this entirely from scratch in as a simple manner. I had found both openID and OAuth quite hairy to implement

You don't need an email address to join up (Hopefully the captcha will prevent too many hits) and merchants that allow homing space users as their members also can get people to enter the site without the usual email confirmation loop

You can get an account there, and test the way to "enter" a site as shown in [https://test.simplysign.in/enter.php](https://test.simplysign.in/enter.php)

It would be nice if I get feedback on this. There are docs and there is an FAQ

Thanks in advance!</comment>


Why DNS-based Global Server Load Balancing does not work [2004] - <AUTHOR> http://www.tenereillo.com/GSLBPageOfShame.htm <comment><USER2> If memory serves, Netflix users discovered that Akamai is using this strategy and everyone coming in from Google's DNS or OpenDNS was getting put into the same 'pool', and overloading the pipes in that pool. The recommendation was to use your ISP's DNS at least for your Netflix devices.

Or have I misunderstood?

(Post should probably have had the date listed; just realized this article is 7 years old. That doesn't make it wrong or bad, mind you...)

<comment><USER3> This isn't true for Google. Akamai has all kinds of archaic network issues that cause problems, but it isn't often OpenDNS related. They certainly do their best, and know our network map well as we send it to them whenever it changes.

For Google -- If you use OpenDNS, you will always go to the most appropriate Google datacenter to you (not OpenDNS).

<comment><USER4> THIS. Akamai is using technology designed in 1998. I wish they would work with opendns to fix it.

<comment><USER5> Akamai's not doing anything wrong.

OpenDNS is a broken concept.

<comment><USER2> How so? DNS was never designed to be used as a geolocation vector, as far as I have ever heard, so relying on it to be one does seem "wrong".

<comment><AUTHOR> OpenDNS defaults to resolving non-existant domains as search results, bereaking DNS. You can turn it off, if you have a static IP.

<comment><USER2> I see. That doesn't seem to me to be a "broken concept", however, but a rather minor misfeature. I may have misread the poster to which I was responding, but his assertion seems to read to me that OpenDNS as a whole is fundamentally wrong or broken, and that Akamai is using the idea of DNS for something it was never intended to be is "correct". Both of those statements do not ring true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's worth pointing out that this article is a bit long in the tooth. Although perhaps biased responses, it's worth looking at some other thoughts on the subject:

[http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2011/03/2...](http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2011/03/21/the- skeleton-in-the-global-server-load-balancing-closet.aspx)

[http://dev.robertmao.com/2007/06/30/global-dns-load- balancin...](http://dev.robertmao.com/2007/06/30/global-dns-load-balancing- for-free/) (towards the end, and yes, the grammar is bad)

[http://blogs.sun.com/davew/entry/thoughts_on_global_server_l...](http://blogs.sun.com/davew/entry/thoughts_on_global_server_load)

</comment><comment><USER7> The main reason seems to be clients caching DNS lookups for a period of time longer than what they should have, as indicated by the TTL field in the DNS response. If this behaviour changes across all browsers, wouldn't that solve this problem?

Another "hack" to solve the caching problem would be to have multiple random lookup records (say server-$random.hostname.com) all result in multiple lookups that cannot be cached? The tradeoff here is latency vs availability.

As mentioned in the article, triangulation and backup redirection would work as long as "Site A" can be up serving requests labeled (1).

</comment><comment><USER8> What about using Anycast IPs? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast>

<comment><USER9> Routing changes break the network connection. If it's buffered and you can reconnect transparently, it might work, but for unbuffered connections (like most web connections are) you'll see increased error rates.

<comment><USER3> This has been proven to not happen often in the real world.

[http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/matt.lev...](http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/matt.levine.pdf)

<comment><USER9> My experience indicates otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Who are you? We thought we knew most folks who run TCP Anycast... Anyways, I've run multi-day long TCP streams without issue. Like any sort of anycast, there is a lot of finesse, but if you are logical in your network architecture you will have no issues. In fact, you can re-establish TCP connections across datacenters if desired using tools like pfsync.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think one solution to this is to add a DNS record that says how to set the connection timeout for a given port for this IP before trying the next one. As is, there is no control over that and each browser implements it differently.

<comment><USER3> SRV records could do this, but most browsers can't do DNS. Only Chrome can.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean by this? Chrome doesnt support SRV for http <http://code.google.com./p/chromium/issues/detail?id=22423> but all browsers do dns... No mainstream ones support srv for http.

<comment><USER3> Chrome resolves its own DNS. Therefore it can support any DNS record type (even if it doesn't have hooks for one today).

No other browser does. All other browsers rely on the system's stub resolver which means you can't even open a bug for them, because the bug would require you to speak DNS first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since the Amazon outage, I've been wondering about the best way to quickly switch to another host. Having multiple A records is so obvious I can't believe I have neither thought about it nor heard of it before (I've seen it implemented, but never thought about as a failover). I didn't know the browser would switch to the next IP. Interesting!

That said, can you control which host the browser will try first? I.e. can I have 18.104.22.168 as my main host and trust that all clients will connect to that as long as it's up, and only connecting to my backup 126.96.36.199 when 188.8.131.52 doesn't respond?

<comment><USER12> _Since the Amazon outage, I've been wondering about the best way to quickly switch to another host._

This is exact problem we (Cedexis) solve.

Assume your site is www.website.com, in general points to an A record or a CNAME to a datacenter/ cloud/ CDN.

We add an intermediate hostname, low TTL (20 seconds), global anycast network, which can be scripted (write your load-balancing logic in php) to handout a CNAME (one of many) based on performance (RTT), load, cost, anything else you can think of, etc.

Re.: AWS's recent outage, assuming you are running your apps in multiple zones/ regions/ clouds, we would have noticed the latency and automatically routed away to a different zone/ region/ cloud.

We collect hundreds of millions of performance measurements daily: [http://gigaom.com/cloud/heres-what-amazon-outage-looked- like...](http://gigaom.com/cloud/heres-what-amazon-outage-looked-like/)

Drop an email and I am happy to explain more and setup folks from HN with a free account: prakash at cedexis.com

<comment><USER11> Thanks Prakash, I'll definitely check your offering and reach out when we have the need! It sounds cool even though I can't help but feel I would like really tight control over that part - basically we would be dependant on your service instead.</comment></comment></comment>


Uber Is Testing a Massive Merchant Delivery Program - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/uber-is-quietly-testing-a-massive-merchant-delivery-program/#.up0lhs:ihj8 <comment><USER2> It's probably worth noting that--primarily in denser locations--the rapid delivery of goods is already a thing. Delivery of papers by bicycle messenger (although that has declined), takeout delivery, grocery delivery (which has been around for a long time in many cities but has been getting more systematic with services like Instacart). Of course, there have also been massive failures trying this in the past like Kozmo.

I suspect there's a complicated relationship between density, profit margins and overall cart value of what's being delivered, price sensitivity, and other factors. It obviously does work in some domains and those who already have established something that could form the basis of a delivery infrastructure may be in the best position to experiment further. It won't work for everything or everyone but if fast delivery works for food for example, there's no inherent reason it shouldn't work for a lot of other goods that people can't get easily delivered today.

<comment><USER3> It's also about division of labor and specialization. Grocery stores don't have thousands of vendors showing up at stores, they have long delivery chains that consolidate and redistribute... On the last mile for home delivery it makes sense for one service to act as a delivery agent for multiple stores, when a pizza shop doesn't have many orders from 1pm-5pm, they are paying employee(s)... with a service based delivery, the throughput is more optimal.

Not to mention the time this will save... I hate going to the store, which kills at _least_ two hours a couple times a week. I'd pay $20-30 to have that time back. It won't reduce traffic either, but at least the uber drivers are more likely in economy/subcompact cars (a lot of prii) which would displace the SUV behemoths that would otherwise be used by those most likely to be ordering.

<comment><USER2> You could presumably try something like TaskRabbit although I have no personal experience and it would presumably cost more than $20-30 for the length of time you cite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Canada, today only, Uber is delivering puppies for 15 minutes of playtime cuteness: [http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/uber-to-offer-puppies-on- dema...](http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/uber-to-offer-puppies-on-demand- thursday-in-four-canadian-cities-1.2350822)

<comment><USER5> And then what do they do with the puppies after the 15 minutes are up?

<comment><USER6> [http://www.willitblend.com](http://www.willitblend.com)

<comment><USER7> Normally, I would just upvote and go on but that was actually hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uber is in a inherently interesting space, directing large numbers of people using software for stuff that happens outside of the computer.

That means that instead of solving problems that are sticky enough in the lab never-mind in the world, they can solve them with a market. For problems like who should deliver what package and how to optimize that, they can offload a lot of the intelligence to drivers.

This might have interesting implications for other products.

<comment><USER9> It's nice that, with this approach, individuals can make some money besides a regular job. But what's not so nice, is that the level of the work is quite low. And what's also not nice, is that Uber is a regulator of that market (having strong financial interests themselves).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quietly is a funny way to put it since I've heard it in the news three or four times lately.

Each time I hear about it I think of a hollywood heist movie that starts and finishes quickly when the robbers simply figure out how to manipulate things so they're the uber driver delivering the package they want.

</comment><comment><USER11> How does insurance work with this? What if my driver is robbed, gets in a crash or decides to pocket my stuff? Do Uber insure the contents or the retailer (or neither)?

</comment><comment><USER12> After appearing in TC & on HN, the "quietly" attribute may be removed from the testing. It has become quite loud now.

<comment><USER13> I believe this is the essay you're looking for: [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A major threat to Uber's profitability is its inability, thus far, to monopolize drivers. If it expands successfully in moving goods, it might be able to consolidate enough demand to make sure every available driver is always working for Uber.

It'll be interesting to see if its able to drag Lyft, Instacart, Shyp under the water as it puts its very large oxygen tank to use.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm just thinking of SimCopter, where as a copter pilot you could get missions of all kinds popping up on the screen, and you could choose to take a delivery, passenger, fight a fire, and more stuff I can't remember.

Not a bad model really. Uber is a distributed worker service.

</comment><comment><USER16> The taxi companies in my town have always offered package delivery (though I've never seen it used much). The idea isn't new, though the technology could help out with the practicality of it.

<comment><USER17> Yep. I drove a cab for about a year (2003ish, college town of ~200,000 people), and the company I drove for did this. It wasn't a big business, but there were a few substantial accounts, notably the local university hospital system, which sent around a lot of specimens in very serious-looking containers. Pre-ubiquitous GPS, shared taxi dispatching and routing involved a lot of yelling and guessing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://www.uship.com/](https://www.uship.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Right now Uber is trying a food delivery scheme in Barcelona [https://hbr.org/2015/02/ubers-food-delivery-experiment-in- ba...](https://hbr.org/2015/02/ubers-food-delivery-experiment-in-barcelona)

</comment><comment><USER20> Uber's selection of businesses for delivery is strange. Hugo Boss? Louis Vuitton? _Tiffany 's?_ Those are all stores for which the shopping experience is paramount.

</comment><comment><USER21> Bezos was an early invester in Uber, ([http://www.geekwire.com/2011/jeff- bezos-hops-uber-invests-pr...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/jeff-bezos-hops- uber-invests-private-car-service/)) so until the drones darken the sky hauling Amazon boxes this makes some sense.

</comment><comment><USER22> The brands mentioned seem like an implicit admission that this will be an expensive service. Is there actually demand for same day delivery of Tiffany's? Who buys stuff from Tiffany's but can't be bothered to go to the store and also needs it for tonight?

<comment><USER23> I think they are trying to just punch up the status of the service, making those be the first brands people associate with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This will be an ideal service that many are looking forward to. Fast and convenient.

<comment><USER25> On the backs of 1099 workers. Uber needs to be work on some social responsibility. Do we really want a country where the majority are struggling to serve the few?

<comment><USER26> They're free to work for whoever they want. No one is forcing anyone to drive for Uber, they're doing it voluntarily. Why forcibly stop consensual behaviour?

<comment><USER27> Freedom of choice comes in degrees, with no sharp divide between free and not free.

The freedom of an individual to negotiate with employers exists in a context of wild inequality in negotiating position, information asymmetry, and coordination problems among workers that lead to a race to the bottom (absent collective bargaining or government intervention).

I don't know enough about Uber and their workers to comment on that in particular, but I don't think that "they could have _not_ signed on, so it's OK" is necessarily a strong position from which to oppose collective intervention, governmental or otherwise, without qualification of the degree to which participants in an agreement were free to make their decisions, and what the consequences of thier decisions will be on the choices available to others. Since we're talking about low-wage workers and a giant company, my _guess_ is that closer examination of those considerations won't aid an anti- intervention or pro-market (for common definitions of pro-market) argument.

<comment><USER28> It doesn't seem an issue of workers negotiating with the individual business. You're redefining "freedom of choice" to mean freedom to negotiate with a company. It's clear that the parent meant freedom to choose when/where they work. If there were better alternatives, people would chose that over Uber.

The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an informed decision that they believe is best for them given their alternatives. We're free to wonder about if things could be even better for the people who made the choice to work for Uber, which is where some kind of negotiation between workers and Uber would come in, but that seems to miss the point completely. If there were better alternatives provided by any other company, most of the workers would go there.

<comment><USER27> > You're redefining "freedom of choice" to mean freedom to negotiate with a > company. It's clear that the parent meant freedom to choose when/where they > work.

Can't it be both? Really, I don't see how the two can be considered separately. The individual negotiation occurs in the context of the broader field of choices and consequences available, and of the relative power of the participants (which may, perhaps most relevantly, be considered as their ability to cope with any harm that results from saying "no" to a given offer).

> The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an > informed decision that they believe is best for them given their > alternatives.

I don't agree that the fact of a choice having been made gives us any insight in to the degree to which it was "informed" but otherwise, sure.

My point is: that someone said "yes" and that it was within their power to say "no", is a pretty poor metric for freedom _per se_ , and a bit more than that is going to be needed to demonstrate that (say) government intervention would necessarily be inappropriate or harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be smart for Uber to acquire Instacart. Instacart has the knowhow and Uber has the network and technology. It seems like a smart business decision that will lead to world domination.

</comment><comment><USER30> Kind of the same thing, but in the opposite direction: This morning my girlfriend got a notification that some day next week Uber drivers will pick up donations and transport them to Goodwill.

</comment><comment><USER16> I seem to recall WalMart looking into the idea of having customers deliver goods to others "on their way home." Don't know if that was successful anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER31> Uber is becoming like Google but for the physical world. There are so many parallels -- the omnipresence for starters.

<comment><USER32> You registered 4 hours ago just to make this comment?

<comment><USER31> Of course not, but everyone has to have a "first" comment on here, right? What a ludicrous reply for you to make, I mean really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This company is in a inherently interesting space, directing large numbers of people using software for stuff that happens outside of the computer and also offer lots of jobs for people

<comment><USER34> Did you copy the other comment, or is there a bot writing pro-Uber comments in here?

<comment><USER32> It's interesting, netcan has been here "forever" and has a ton of karma but "richwalinsky" has been here for 171 days and has 1 karma.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which company has the best devTools? Why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It just occurred to me that some companies may dictate devtools which would make this question make more sense, as well as reinforce my negative opinion of business decisions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've heard stripe is good. I've been told google is like working in a different world. But what makes them good? What principles were important as they invested in them?

</comment><comment><USER2> There are rarely if ever any "best" dev tools, there are plenty of terrible ones though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll settle for better than most. Have any experiences here?

<comment><USER2> Git for source control, jira for issue tracking, everything else nothing stands out.</comment></comment></comment>


IBM Calling Remote Workers Back to the Office - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-calls-workers-back-to-the-office-1495108802?mod=djcm_OBV1_092216 <comment><USER2> Pulling in remote workers is a last ditch effort that admits a) they don't know what they (Management) are doing b) they don't know what workers or teams are doing c) they don't mind losing people that don't office. They must like the attrition. Workers that are good will leave. I'd take it as a RIF to get rid of their best people.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Relocating offices or asking employees to move can sometimes be read as > layoffs in disguise, since a certain percentage of workers won't be able to > relocate.

I think this is definitely true. I also expected this was the case for Yahoo. In general, perks and management philosophies only change when things aren't going well. From what I can observe, IBM has been on a decade long crash course of cutting and squeezing to show increasing profits.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would _hate_ this.

Working from home is great. You get more time in your day, you don't burn any fuel getting back and forth to work, everything costs you less, etc. It's win- win-win-everything.

If IBM can't measure productivity and/or motivate people, I'd say that's a symptom of poor management.

</comment><comment><USER5> IBM's been on this destructive kick for almost a year now. I was considering interviewing with them as my last company shut down, and then this news broke; that was in spring.

</comment><comment><USER6> Assuming this does nothing to change the trend of whatever executive decided this was how to turn around some metric. Most likely profit, we can start calling it officially a leading indicator of a march towards irrelevance. See Yahoo! I've always wondered if IBMs largely touted shift to consulting to maintain profits was just putting off the inevitable. Does anyone see IBM as cutting edge technologists?

<comment><USER7> I work at IBM.

In terms of technical leadership, what you are interested in? IBM invests enormous amounts of money in open source projects and IBM Research. And for the last 24 years straight, IBM has earned more patents than any other company (it's not even close).

<comment><USER8> > And for the last 24 years straight, IBM has earned more patents than any > other company (it's not even close)

That's not a great measure of technical leadership. Shows they have good lawyers though!

<comment><USER7> Why isn't that a good measure of technical leadership?

<comment><USER9> Because any old chump can file a patent request and get it approved. There's a reason patent trolls exist.

<comment><USER7> Restating your argument: there have been cases in which patents of questionable quality have been granted which recognize questionable rights; there exist entities who act in bad faith to acquire patents for the purpose enforcing those questionable rights; therefore, all patents are of questionable quality in the possession of entities who act in bad faith to enforce questionable rights.

This is self-evidently fallacious reasoning. It also drops the context that tech companies in aggregate spend tens of billions of dollars per year on R&D, creating the incredible world of technology, industry, and human flourishing in which we live.

<comment><USER8> The point is more that creating patents doesn't add value whatsoever, nor is it representative of adding value in some other way.

The only people that see a net gain on patents are lawyers, and big corps- that's why they spend billions on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article was published several months ago: May 18, 2017.

</comment><comment><USER7> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14367304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14367304)

</comment><comment><USER11> Dupe also paywall.</comment>


Quantcast File System - <AUTHOR> http://quantcast.github.com/qfs/

<comment><USER2> Any idea if HBase can work with this? Looks like there are patches for hadoop- core, a quick skim didn't reveal if HBase changes are needed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! It's a metric shitload faster than HDFS.

Has anyone gotten it running on EC2 yet at scalee?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not as far as I know, but please feel free to give it a try and report back.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: CSS Interfaces - <AUTHOR> With components, how do you prefer to style your (and 3rd party) components?
It seems a logical path would be to start defining CSS Interfaces, so 3rd party widgets will seamlessly style themselves based on a website's "theme".
Are there any projects out there on this path?  That have gained traction? <comment><USER2> see [https://github.com/styled-components/styled- components](https://github.com/styled-components/styled-components) \- it provides a nice theme interface

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I have come across this in the past, and I think it's great, except it appears that it still deals directly with CSS primitives.

I'm thinking more in terms of: I have a data structure for my "theme", which styled components has, but this data structure requires no knowledge of the inner structure of the component in order to style it properly.

What I'm thinking is, if there were some common interface, there wouldn't be any need to know anything about the structure of the component.

It definitely seems like it would be a difficult problem to solve. I think one of the first steps toward something like this would be to build up a vocabulary that represents slightly more generic, composable concepts than what the CSS primitives represent.</comment></comment>


Running the numbers on an insane scheme to save Antarctic ice - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/running-the-numbers-on-an-insane-scheme-to-save-antarctic-ice/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations regarding sulfur dioxide injection into the stratosphere: [http://curtisb.posthaven.com/someday-soon-chemtrails-may- be-...](http://curtisb.posthaven.com/someday-soon-chemtrails-may-be-real).

The proposal for saving Antarctic ice in the submitted article may be just too big for humans to do. Sulfur dioxide injection, however, is dirt cheap, and we could definitely do that. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but we can do it.

<comment><USER3> You do know that sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere causes acid rain, right?

<comment><USER2> This paper considers that very question: [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2009...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2009JD011918)

From the "Conclusions" section:

> _Analysis of our results and comparison to the results of Kuylenstierna et > al.[2001] and Skeffington[2006] lead to the conclusion that the additional > sulfate deposition that would result from geoengineering will not be > sufficient to negatively impact most ecosystems, even under the assumption > that all deposited sulfate will be in the form of sulfuric acid. However, > although these model results are feasible, should geoengineering with > sulfate aerosols actually be conducted, local results due to weather > variability may differ from the results presented here. With the exception > of terrestrial waterways, every region has a critical loading value a full > order of magnitude above the largest potential total amount of acid > deposition that would occur under the geoengineering scenarios presented in > this paper. Furthermore, our results show that additional sulfate deposition > tends to preferentially occur over oceans, meaning the chance of such a > sensitive ecosystem receiving enough additional sulfate deposition to suffer > negative consequences is very small._

Also note that I did not say that sulfur dioxide injection was a good idea, only that we could afford to do it.

<comment><USER4> At the very least it would provide incontrovertible evidence that humans can effect the climate. As if there wasn't enough evidence already :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Iron fertilization seems like a much more reasonable approach:

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

Each kilogram of iron can fix 83000 kg of carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass.

<comment><USER6> How much of that is permanently fixed, and how much of it goes right back when those organisms die?

<comment><USER7> From linked article:

"Of the carbon-rich biomass generated by plankton blooms, half (or more) is generally consumed by grazing organisms (zooplankton, krill, small fish, etc.) but 20 to 30% sinks below 200 meters (660 ft) into the colder water strata below the thermocline. Much of this fixed carbon continues into the abyss, but a substantial percentage is redissolved and remineralized. At this depth, however, this carbon is now suspended in deep currents and effectively isolated from the atmosphere for centuries. (The surface to benthic cycling time for the ocean is approximately 4,000 years.)"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds insurmountable. That said, in the context of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, this feels like there are far more knowns than unknowns.

Think of it this way. JFK laid out a challenge that in retrospect amounted to "Here's a iPhone. Go put us on the moon. Soon!"

THAT was madness. Redistribution of some water* - even at this scale - is more Mercury than Apollo. It seems it might be us who now knows too much to be crazy enough to try. That's a shame.

* On a daily basis we redistribute a massive amount of oil. So there is a reference point in terms of volume / scale.

<comment><USER9> The are talking about moving over 100x times as much water per year as we move oil. Further, it's only going to freeze during winter adding even more time constraints.

Just desalination of this much water would cost ~5 trillion dollars in the US. Doing this in the Antarctic winter would probably double that if not more.

<comment><USER8> "The are talking about moving over 100x times as much water per year as we move oil." > Fair enough. But 100x still isn't a moon shot.

"Just desalination of this much water would cost ~5 trillion dollars in the US." > Perhaps. But what is the cost of NOT doing it? 2x? 3x? 5x? 10x?

Long to short. if it were easy we would have done it already. Therefore, I have to believe the next steps are going to be hard, harder, and perhaps hardest (i.e., greater than going to the moon on the back of an iPhone).

<comment><USER9> The only impact of not doing this is less sea level rise. The ocean is still going to rise significantly, thus the savings is likely less than the 10++ trillion this would cost.

Remember, this is also not a long term solution, it would need to be repeated over time.

<comment><USER10> How do you figure that _not_ doing this would cause _less_ sea level rise? The article states that proceeding with this plan might slow sea level rise to nearly one-third of its current rate:

> To put that into context, removing that much seawater from the ocean would > lower global sea level by about 2 millimeters per year. Current total sea > level rise is a little over 3 millimeters per year, so it would be like > nearly halting sea level rise… by bailing water out of the ocean. We can > call that a bonus positive.

On what grounds do you dispute this? I'm not saying you're wrong (I'm too uneducated in the relevant fields to know that), I'd just like to know your rationale?

<comment><USER9> Poor use of double negative.

I mean you are not going actually fix global temperate, weather patterns, ocean acidification etc. It's benefits are simply going to be limited to stuff very near the ocean, and when you start talking trillions of dollars that builds a lot of structures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw4132](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw4132) \- original article

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup) \- unit of flow for ocean currents

145GW of power needed to raise water up 640m. Desalination not included, may be necessary. Would require 12k high-end wind turbines given local wind conditions. This is around 25% of current global wind capacity.

[https://wwindea.org/information-2/information/](https://wwindea.org/information-2/information/) \- "UPDATED: 4 June 2019 Wind Power Capacity Worldwide Reaches 597 GW, 50,1 GW added in 2018 China with more than 200 GW, USA close to 100 GW, Europe in decline Bonn, 25 February 2019 (WWEA) – The overall capacity of all wind turbines installed worldwide by the end of 2018 reached 597 Gigawatt"

<comment><USER12> Does 12000 windmills sound like a lot? Consider that we have 1.7 million oil wells in the USA alone.

<comment><USER13> When you consider that's 12,000 for the least energy intensive part, _just pumping the water,_ yes. A hell of a lot.

How many extra windmills for desalination and freezing to produce snow? How many acres or square miles of desalination plant? How to dispose of the few(!) tonnes of salt? How much of the world's shipping, construction and engineering requires commandeering, WW2 style to ensure it's a ten year not fifty year project?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Many recent discussions around the unfolding global warming catastrophe have asked, "What can we do?" Besides the obvious, Climeworks now has a scheme to let average people pay to bury carbon: [https://www.climeworks.com/](https://www.climeworks.com/). I've signed up but have no information beyond the articles I've read about the company: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks- busin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-business- climate-change.html).

It seems we're past the point where reducing emissions will be enough, and to the point where we need to reverse atmospheric CO2, now.

<comment><USER14> I agree, I think geoengineering is unavoidable. As far as geoengineering projects go, this one looks like the most feasible and safe so far:

[https://projectvesta.org/](https://projectvesta.org/)

<comment><USER15> Could you elaborate? Enhanced Weathering is questionable on many levels. Have you compared it to other approaches?

<comment><USER16> Why is enhanced weathering questionable? I don't really know much about it, but I was under the impression that carbon absorption by weathered silicates will have a dramatic impact on the planet over the very long term[1]. Is enhanced weathering just too slow, or is there more to it than that?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How about using planks of cooling wood[0] to cover parts of the sea instead?

It should float and perhaps can create a cooling effect large enough to make ice out of already freezing seawater?

[0] [https://www.coolingpost.com/features/cool-wood-could-take- th...](https://www.coolingpost.com/features/cool-wood-could-take-the-heat-out- of-buildings/)</comment>


Don't Ask Me to Turn on My Camera for Work Calls - <AUTHOR> https://level.medium.com/dont-ask-me-to-turn-on-my-camera-for-work-calls-dc3322dc32b9 <comment><USER2> Here is an idea. Make a video of yourself wearing a face-mask with a simple single color background and no distracting objects. Have a little bit of head movement. 60 seconds should suffice. Convert that into a looping animated gif. Set that gif as your video conference background. Put tape over your camera so that all people see is the background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone on my team _actually_ did that, so far I'm the only one who noticed. I privately asked him about it, we shared a laugh.

I'm no narc, tho :P

He's also got an animated background that appears from time to time of himself walking into the room, seeing himself on a call, and slowly backing back out of the room and closing the door back behind him. That one always gets a chuckle from attendants who notice it and realize it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://archive.is/4V45U](http://archive.is/4V45U)</comment>


Show HN: Check the probability you win tonight in Fantasy Football - <AUTHOR> http://fantasymonday.com <comment><AUTHOR> Made this in React with framework Grommet (which I really like). Backend is in Google App, which I also like. Subset of fantasymath.com, which does the same thing, but for the whole week and costs money. Only really relevant 17 days out of the year (including today), but good response so far.</comment>


I want a text editor that is a pain in the ass - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/a15593f2dcbf

<comment><USER2> I started programming when 'ed' was the editor of choice, then vi (not vim or even elvis, but plain old vi).

It did not work out the way the author thinks it would.

You _don 't_ refactor. Because refactoring is a pain in the ass with a terrible editor.

You use terrible variables like r, rr, a, t, ... because typing is a chore and typos are frustratingly hard to fix. With autocompletion those nice, descriptive variable names are just a few keystrokes.

The better my editor, the more likely I am to refactor. If my IDE allows me to update a method name everwhere at once, I'll update it as soon as the old name doesn't make sense.

Modern IDE's are a boon, but bad programmers are bad; blaming it on their editor doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER3> I started programming when the editor wars were between vi and Emacs. Somehow we've ended up on the same side.

Good programmers did, in fact, refactor even with simpler tools. They did use descriptive names. They wrote tight code because they were good programmers, not because they weren't perfectly capable of generating reams of boilerplate.

I'm seeing a lot of negative comments in this thread that miss the core points made in the blog post. Boilerplate is a code smell. The need for broad refactorings is another. Not being able to understand where methods are used is yet another. A good programmer will use tools that help him or her identify and fix those issues. IDEs allow bad programmers to create the smells far too easily.

<comment><USER4> I'm one of the people that thinks that IDEs are a language smell. And yeah, boilerplate smells too.

But keeping the language constant, I agree with the GP. Yeah, good programmers refactor code on any environment (grep is great), but when it's easier, a good coder has more time to think about what he's writing, instead of wondering if he let any instance of a variable pass with the wrong name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you write bad code because your editor makes it easy for you to write code fast, then it is not your editor that is at fault.

<comment><USER6> Can't agree more. I have yet seen a good programmer who complained about their tool making them write fast. When you write shitty code you don't blame it on the good IDE.

<comment><USER7> I don't buy the point about forcing programmers to refactor either. Vim gives me access to commands that make text manipulation faster, which often means I can refactor faster.

In fact, I'd say that a slower refactor process would almost certainly discourage me from refactoring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor. It's like saying you want to do rocket science while doing all the math by hand. Why drive a car. Why not walk to grocery so you could reflect carefully on what you want to buy and feel your muscle twitching after carrying 30 pounds of grocery back. Tools are there to help out with the labor and free up your mind for the more important. There is nothing wrong with understanding all the details, but there is no point repeating it all the time once you do.

Edit: That post also mentioned the fear of exploding complexity. The whole point of abstraction is to manage complexity. The fact that you have a function being called at a hundred places and you don't keep track of them all in your mind is not something to fear, if you do the abstraction right. The fact that the previous fact makes you feel unsettling, should make you feel doubly unsettling.

<comment><USER8> > Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor. It's like saying you > want to do rocket science while doing all the math by hand.

Whenever I try Java, I don't want a smarter editor. I want a smarter language.

<comment><USER9> That's true of most people, but in some situations Java's unavoidable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A good programmer will contribute to writing good code. A bad programmer will not.

A good editor will help a programmer do what the are going to do already, quicker and more accurately. A bad editor will slow progress and amplify error.

If you think that you need a barrier to impede your ability to get things out of your head and into reality to prevent you from slipping out garbage then I think you are just a bad programmer.And not just because you cant pound out the correct solution on the first try but because you think you can if you just think about it long enough. Any writer will tell you the key to writing is just write. Get yiur ideas out and on to paper. Fix them later during editing and revisons. And coding is just like writing in that sense. Get your code into the editor then revise, improve and optimize. Most of all let your editor help you do these things.

</comment><comment><USER11> Programmers already have a ridiculous number of constraints to juggle. Every constraint you add reduces your ability to optimize for the others.

Potentially, using a low-feature editor could arguably be like jogging with weights. It could teach you good habits that then make you more effective once you switch back to a powerful editor. But you don't bring your weights on race day.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting points, but I'd argue my IDE should make refactoring so easy I do it all the time. Since, I don't write perfect software the first time, I have to iterate. That iterative process shouldn't be a punishment.

Also I don't want to have to think about code formatting. It's a necessary piece of writing but it only gets in the way of logic flow.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the most ridiculous post I've read in a while. It's written by someone who's never used a proper IDE. The IDE makes you write bad code ? This must have been written by someone who's a complete noob, honestly. What a rubbish. "You should only be writing a couple of lines of code per day" ... Really ?

<comment><USER14> Well, you called him a noob, so I guess personal attacks are fair-play.

Let me guess: You're the kind of programmer who immediately invokes a debugger when something unexpected happens.

<comment><USER13> No I actually rely on my unit tests and very rarely I'm using the debugger (which is awesome by the way). In my book any "programmer" who say's "You shouldn't be writing more than a couple of lines of code a day" is a ... not even noob, dunno what to call him. If your opinion is that IDE makes you a shitty programmer than I honestly don't think you know what you're talking about. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think one of the tensions underlying this article and responses is a quite longstanding debate over the relative strengths of writing text and interactive editing for specifying and editing computations. Smalltalk was perhaps the first to take a strong position against writing text as the best way to do things, and instead pushed for an interactive system that just happened to have text as one component. A certain style of macro/DSL-oriented Lisp is perhaps the other end of the spectrum, which aims at coming up with expressive code interfaces to a problem (though there are also very interactive approaches to developing Lisp, going all the way to the extreme of image-based development where there actually is no easy way to recover the running image's source code). The Lisp impulse (in one flavor of Lisp dev) is to find a way to write a macro as a new interface to common patterns, while the tool approach is to find a way to write refactoring/manipulation/codegen interfaces to deal with common patterns.

Maybe some defenders of XML are one extreme in the tool-oriented direction; some explicitly argue that human-editable syntax doesn't matter, because concrete syntax is for machines, and how a human should input it is an interface-design question. I'm tempted to think some C++ advocates also have views along those lines.

Anyway I think a lot of these debates are about where exactly on that spectrum constitutes a sweet spot, so point to some fairly deep splits. I personally lean towards wanting expressive source code, and start getting suspicious when I'm shoveling around huge amounts of boilerplate with an IDE; I start thinking, why is this something I'm manipulating in an editor, rather than something that gets abstracted by a macro or language feature? But I still use a number of semi-automated things in vim, certainly the low-level stuff like variable-name completion and folding.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Writing lots of code quickly is not a good thing. You shouldn't be writing > more than a few lines of code per day.

Some studies says that on average a programmer writes a few lines per day. So OK.

> And if your editor is helping you write a lot of code really quickly, it's > encouraging you to write bad code.

Are you implying that being able to write faster results in more code produced ergo lower quality code? Usually being able to write/refactor/replace/etc faster means you have less friction between the code and your thoughts. You can more easily express what you have in your mind, in the code.

> Why? Because it puts pressure on me to refactor.

Make a refactoring without the right tools can be counter productive. Try to refactor a 400 lines of code of Python with Notepad. You will only detect the errors on run time, I promise.

> I don't want my editor to refactor my code.

As far as I know, you editor does NOT refactor you code. YOU are the one who does it. The editor is just a tool that allows you to do it without pain, preventing common errors and helping you to do your jobs, no the other way round.

And not just that. Any good editor should do syntax highlight for you (you are more productive, but this does not imply to write more code). And automatically indenting. And maybe balancing the braces. And a long etc.

The editor is a tool. Any professional should use the right tools for doing its job. Is your best tool a pain-in-the-ass editor and you can do a good refactor as fast as your team mates? Good for you! :D

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the point of this article, things that make me sigh while writing code are often the things I need to learn to do a new way.

Before I started using multiple cursors in sublime text, I would invent interesting function patterns to avoid having to copy paste sets of stuff in the editor.

Now I'll rely on my editor, because it's easier to write and easier to change in the future.

I guess whatever keeps me productive is what's important. It could be better patterns in my code, or it could be better tools to write it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't really agree with this. I get the point, obviously - sometimes, IDE or text editor features end up curing the symptoms rather than the disease. That's valid, insofar as it's probably a bad sign when a coder has to enter loads of boilerplate, or struggles to remember the correct method to call from a sprawling API.

But good coders solve these issues regardless of having tools that make them easier to ignore - and I don't think that making it more time-consuming to write code, for the 99% of the time I'm _not_ doing that, is worthwhile.

I want to enter a few lines of messy code, and have my editor automatically format it; I want to be able to find all uses of a particular function across my codebase; I want my linter to pick up syntax errors or unidiomatic code before I get to the point of running it; I want to be able to autocomplete tokens; I want to easily select and move blocks of code without fiddling with a mouse. These are all features which make it _easier_ to refactor, and not more difficult.

Perhaps this is more valid in the context of people using IDEs rather than text editors, and I'd argue that when working with a new stack it's always worth having a crack at using a text editor/command line environment over an IDE to get a better feel for the environment. Whatever works most effectively for you, at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER19> I disagree with pretty much every assertion in this article's rant. Advanced visual editors like Visual Studio make the syntax irrelevant and the architecture easy to focus on. Now I can keep my brain focused on separation of concerns with relative ease. Re factoring is also ALMOST irrelevant if you are adhering to a good MVC or MVVM pattern. Granted, if you are a genuine hacker and not interested in building mainstream web apps, then what the author is saying may be true. I wouldn't know.

<comment><USER20> > Advanced visual editors like Visual Studio make the syntax irrelevant and > the architecture easy to focus on

I disagree. If they made the syntax irrelevant, there wouldn't be a need for the source code window at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is not wise in my opnion. You do not have to go to the other extreme because some programmers do mistakes when using IDEs. What CAN be done is keep improving IDEs and make the autocomplete features, for instance, smarter and more interactive. One idea related to that, for example, that I've always had in mind but was always lazy to implement is a smarter contextual Copy and Paste feature (i.e. "hey, this variable is already in this context, do you wanna rename this and declare another variable instead?" in a visual way).

Let's be honest, who here never had a "copy'n paste" bug. I always kid around the office that developers should not have CTRL+V.

Also, one might argue that by his point of view you could just program in assembly, or in XKCD butterfly style.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hilarious. I stopped taking this post seriously at "You shouldn't write more than a few lines of code a day".

I wonder what substantial project this person has worked on in the past, and if they kept metrics of how many lines of code they actually wrote day to day.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe if our keyboards had sharp pins sticking out of the keys we'd refactor earlier, too.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you write too much code because your editor makes it easy, you're a bad programmer. Period.

Good programmers detest redundant code and seek to reduce it regardless.

Maybe this guy used too many code generators or something. Regardless he is way off.

Good editors make refactoring easy, which encourages refactoring. And what's wrong with calling a method from lots of places? That's what methods are for.

Good editors also reduce typos and cognitive load, both of which contribute to faster, higher quality development.

</comment><comment><USER25> I can only agree with this, having spent my first 6 months of C#/.Net programming with only a highlighting text editor and the command-line compiler. And a browser window open to read the official .Net reference.

Now that I have been using Visual Studio with Resharper for much longer, I understand how unbelievable that setup was to those who followed the Visual Studio path. But if it were my own dime, and still constrained by having to use C#/.Net, I would go back to the text editor + command-line compiler.

</comment><comment><USER26> _I don't want to be able to easily rename a hundred method calls, because why the hell am I calling a method from a hundred different places?_

So if I don't have a tool that lets me rename a method everywhere it's called, then the guy who left the company two years ago won't have called it a hundred times from poorly-factored code? Sweet! I'll uninstall my IDE first thing Monday morning and let you know how it goes.

</comment><comment><USER27> While I understand where you are coming from, a pain in the ass text editor or a built up IDE won't make a difference. Your IDE does not manipulate and refactor your thought process in solving a problem. Good programmers know how to solve problems efficiently regardless of how many keystrokes it takes.

</comment><comment><USER28> He'll be happy with something like mg, acme or even sam.

<comment><USER29> Acme would give him an easy interface to sed/awk for search and replace, and any command-line tools to refactor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If all of humanity thought this way we'd still living in log cabins, hewn by hand, or worse

</comment><comment><USER31> > implying that Vim is an IDE

<comment><USER32> It's certainly capable of being one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >Writing lots of code quickly is not a good thing. You shouldn't be writing more than a few lines of code per day. And if your editor is helping you write a lot of code really quickly, it's encouraging you to write bad code.

Here speaks a man who has never worked on a green field project, never built something from start to finish, never _had_ to write more than a few lines of code a day.

How many programmers would it take to build a new version 1 product if they're all writing just a few lines of code a day? Would 10,000 do the trick, with six months to finish? There's a time to talk, discuss, prepare, plan, draw stuff on whiteboards, etc. And then there's the other time, when you sit down and build the product, which means writing all the code.

I'm not talking about an app that displays a random number, in which case, fire away with your few lines a day, and you'll be up and running in a few days. I'm talking about products with a capital P.

I'm starting the coding work on a new version of an existing product the week after next, and I'll be spending 15 solid 8 hour days writing code. I've made the plans, sat in the meetings, tossed more than half the features over board. And now comes the time to actually build it -- or at least, a first iteration of _it_ before I get hit with user feedback.

<comment><USER13> This, a million times !</comment></comment>


TUAW Gave My App a Positive Review - How Do I keep the momentum going? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2013/11/18/daily-iphone-app-pxture-will-put-your-photos-inside-text/

<comment><USER2> launch an android version</comment>


A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2017/09/21/a-high-end-mover-dishes-on-truckstop-hierarchy-rich-people-and-moby-dick/ <comment><USER2> really fine, fine writing. Eg:

>I'm not from the South and don't talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I'm a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.</comment>


Show HN: Doing a Startup is hard, here is Our Story - <AUTHOR> http://supadupa.me/our-story

<comment><USER2> Congrats on everything you've accomplished over the last two years. I'd love to read a blog post (or more) dedicated to this topic:

"Through our members' generous feedback and often tyrannical suggestions for improvements they gave us the ability to see the software we embarked on through their critical eyes. Boy, they kept pushing the boundaries by redefining our quest for simplicity and user empowerment but it's a relationship that continues to work and we value it immensely."

<comment><USER3> I agree... that should make for a very interesting read.</comment></comment>