The most flexible synthesizer is DIY, Raspberry PI - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2016/11/26/the-most-flexible-synthesizer-is-diy-raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> The interesting thing here isn't that it's "the most flexible", but rather that it has a genuinely interesting new user interface, with the finger- pressure thing. On the other hand, what does that do that can't be done with a regular midi keyboard with velocity and aftertouch (which is much more flexible in its own way)?

Synthesizers that can do "anything" are not a good target. They wind up with no distinctive voice of their own, and a muddled user interface. Brian Eno has spoken to that extensively, and it's one of the drivers of the modern modular movement - the desire to have an instrument that has its own voice, its own way of speaking, its own gestures to summon the sounds.

So anyway, this synth looks interesting, not because it's "the most flexible", but because it has its own way of doing things.

<comment><USER3> >n the other hand, what does that do that can't be done with a regular midi keyboard with velocity and aftertouch (which is much more flexible in its own way)?

do you need PMC ( Polyphonic Multidimensional Controllers ) to play stuff like P'ungnyu Strings (Komungo)[1] ? Seems like this controller is more amenable to that.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkHmUaGv8JM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkHmUaGv8JM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a question - if I think about flexibility, I think about composing harmonic functions directly in the code. I understand that historically synth music was based on analog components, and as people got used to these even virtual analog was born to mimic old analog stuff. Did anyone think about switching to a higher gear and just do pure math by composing functions directly without specials like "oscillator", "LFO", "envelope", "filter" etc.? Main issue/difference between synths is how they enable to compose these operators/components together and that's where we talk about how easy is it to program a synth, with implementation of individual components giving it sonic signature. If I look e.g. at Max4Live, this helps the compositing process, yet it doesn't help much with the use of completely arbitrary functions in your digital synth. So I am feeling we are missing out on a vast ocean of sounds never heard before.

<comment><USER5> The subtractive synthesis model which you describe, now done digitally, may be the most widely implemented model, but there are several other models that at least approximate what you are describing. For example Csound [1], which allows for lower level functions to be used in synthesis. However, there is a leap required to go from low level math to a functioning instrument that a composer or performer can use. [1] [http://csound.github.io/](http://csound.github.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My last experience with the Raspberry Pi's built-in analog audio output was with the model B+ in late 2014, and it left a lot to be desired. It had noticeable background noise, and relatively weak maximum volume. Is this still the case with the latest model? If so, can anyone recommend another ARM-based board with a good audio DAC?

<comment><USER7> The Pi3 has an improved audio output . A cheap $5 usb audio interface from amazon will bring the quality up for older Pis to a normal computers audio output. If you're looking for higher fidelity than that you can use lots of the usual prosumer/pro usb interfaces. If you're trying to keep it small something like a HifiBerry board or similar addon will work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Audio Latency is an issue with RPi, so impractical if need quick response.

I've been instead using the mod duo custom arm board stomp box, which works great.

</comment><comment><USER9> A tangent, but keep in mind that every Raspberry Pi comes with Sam Aaron's incredible Sonic Pi software already loaded.

</comment><comment><USER10> I want this for my flight simulators...</comment>


A collection of various lists for hackers, pentesters and security researchers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Hack-with-Github/Awesome-Hacking <comment><USER2> Lists don't make great HN submissions because there's little to discuss about them. People might point out something that should or shouldn't be on the list, but otherwise the thread (if there is one) will just focus on the things the elements on the list all have in common, which is a lowest common denominator sort of discussion. We've learned over the years that specific topics are much more intellectually interesting than generic ones, so generally it's better to select the most interesting item on a list and submit that instead. You can always add a comment that points to the list it came from.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20lists%20denominator&sort=byDate&type=comment)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you stay focused? - <AUTHOR> I have a lot of ideas and there are many things that interest me, but I end up working on one thing for a few weeks and then move on to the next idea.<p>What advice do you have for ignoring the noise and staying focused? <comment><USER2> \- The first thing you need to do is prioritise what you want to do. Remove trivial ideas or ideas with the least ROI for your efforts. If you can't remove items, create a second 'backlog' list and keep your main list as small as possible, maybe 2 or three projects you can get done in the time you have (think Agile).

This is the hardest I find as there are so many things I want to get done NOW and even when I do concentrate on one project I'm easily distracted by new "shiny objects" while researching the current task :) When I do get distracted, I write down the idea and I look to the next point:

\- Do everything for the long term and remember that you have plenty of time to do it, be disciplined, there really is no rush.

So, take your time with what you are doing, do everything properly and remember why you are doing it in the first place - you decided it was worthwhile! You can't rush it just because you have other ideas, there really is plenty of time to do it properly AND to do the next idea on your list.

\- Set aside chunks of time to work on your project and time to surf the web and check emails etc. Don't mix the 2!

This one is hard as you almost always need to search for some documentation on the web at some stage but be diligent knowing you have set aside time to do your leisure activities. If you think of some idea in these spare blocks of time just add the idea to the backlog and prioritise it when you renew your main list. If you're getting itchy feet about your new idea then you can prioritise your backlog but don't touch your current task list!

Lastly, if you can't maintain the effort to stick to a project after a week or two, make sure you break down your project into manageable chunks that you can call 'done' when finished. Do these parts as modules perhaps, again, think Agile programming and call these chunks 'sprints' if you like but make sure you finish and test your 'chunk' before starting the next task or project. Doing this will allow you to move from project to project and know where you are up to and if you followed the advice above you can be confident the earlier work you did is top notch and ready to build upon :)

good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Vyvanse

</comment><comment><USER4> Coffee.</comment>


Pixels and voxels, the long answer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/retronator-magazine/pixels-and-voxels-the-long-answer-5889ecc18190 <comment><USER3> A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! (And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube) [1]

[1] [http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf](http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Honest question: If a pixel is a point sample, why do all the down-sampling algorithms that look good involve some form of averaging the values of neighboring pixels? Wouldn't it be more accurate to pick one sample and throw away the rest?

<comment><USER5> It's a good question. The name for that - pick one sample, toss the rest - <USER2> "nearest neighbor sampling". Whether it's accurate depends on what you are trying to achieve, but the short answer is that in general it is not the most accurate, and it can cause a lot of problems.

But your intuition isn't wrong. Nearest neighbor can be a bit more "crisp" feeling on certain images, especially natural photos. A lot of photos have enough blurriness in the 1-3 pixels range that nearest neighbor sampling is a good choice if you're just resizing an image by a factor of 2.

But to see why nearest neighbor isn't the best in general, imagine down- sampling a checkboard and what happens as individual checkers become smaller than a pixel. You'll get moire patterns if you don't filter. You'd also expect pixels to turn grey as multiple checkers land there, and maybe not stick to only black or white.

Interestingly, some "sharpening" and up-sampling algorithms do the opposite - they subtract the value of surrounding pixels, rather than add. Those are assuming that some averaging already took place, and trying to un-average, if you will, to restore the original point sample.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple years ago I went to a small demo of a hologram machine called the Voxiebox[1] at a bar in Brooklyn. One of the prototype demos[2] was a voxel game called Voxatron[3] in real 3D. I was in an audience of maybe 5-10 people and the prototype machine was a little crude, but it felt like I was getting an early glimpse into the future of computers and gaming. The applications for this kind of tech are exciting to think about.

Until that night I hadn't even imagined that holograms would ever become a reality, and I had also never heard of voxels. It really made an impression on me. I hope they succeed in making their machine viable for consumers because I could tell how passionate they are about it, and how hard they've been working.

[1] [http://www.voxiebox.com](http://www.voxiebox.com)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs09W0FMQEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs09W0FMQEo)

[3] [http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php](http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php)

<comment><USER7> How does it work? That website is... light on information.

<comment><USER8> It's a swept-surface display, which is what you can see as arms blurring at the edge of the display volume.

Essentially, the object to display is sliced up like you do for 3D printing, and a screen of some sort is moved to the lowest Z position, and the bottom slice is projected up onto it.

Then, the screen increments it's Z position, and the next slice is displayed, repeating until the entire object has been displayed.

Thanks to persistence of vision, it appears as though the image is 3D and floating.

<comment><USER6> Good explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, that is a very long answer to the original question of pixels vs voxels. A pixel is a picture element (2d) and a voxel is a volume element (3d).

Also, it's not necessary to take the displayed path, i.e., triangulate a voxel-based representation then use vector-oriented rendering methods to get the displayed image. There have been lots of work rendering a 2d display by ray tracing through voxel space or even directly splatting voxels into display space.

A lot of research has been directed into efficient representations for large collections of voxels. One really cool sparse volume system, OpenVDB, was open sourced by DreamWorks: [http://www.openvdb.org/](http://www.openvdb.org/). Nvidia has papers on sparse voxel octrees that work very well on GPUs: [https://research.nvidia.com/publication/efficient-sparse- vox...](https://research.nvidia.com/publication/efficient-sparse-voxel- octrees)

</comment><comment><USER10> As a software engineer, voxel engine development has unique appeals to me over traditional 3D game engines. It's something about the power you have to define the entire game environment so simply but precisely I guess. Shameless plug - I released a game called Voxelvoid last year which uses a voxel engine (Voxatron was a significant inspiration). I've been developing the engine a lot since then, maybe I'll blog about it at some point. It's still a side project for now though.

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't you have more precision by defining triangles by hand?

For example, voxels can't represent non-right-angle surfaces without adding jagginess, while a triangle can.

<comment><USER12> Voxels can be volumetric, ie. each voxel have physical properties. Also, your models are full of voxels, inside, each with its own properties. Mesh based models are empty.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but then you could accomplish the exact same thing with volumetric polygons, with the added benefit that arbitrary polygons better approximate any 3D shape.

<comment><USER5> What are volumetric polygons? And do they better approximate cubes? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't take my eyes off of that "3D low-poly" racetrack thingy. So pretty.

I wonder how far someone could get with that artstyle in general, I haven't seen it that often. There was that RTS game that used it, forgot the name..

<comment><USER14> > I can't take my eyes off of that "3D low-poly" racetrack thingy.

Which one?

<comment><USER15> [https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/2000/1*MPsZ2w3Ms4i...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/2000/1*MPsZ2w3Ms4iSsxxXeFaTNA.jpeg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pixels and voxels are just coordinates in 2d and 3d space.

They can also contain meta information, like color and transparency.

To represent pixels or voxels on a screen you need to to render and interpolate them. Because, if you have an image of 4 pixels that you would like to show on a screen with 1080 leds, you need to interpolate the meta data between those pixels.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great article and nicely selected illustrations, super glad I read this. Nice trip down memory lane (Delta Force!), and also looking forward to some of these upcoming games.

</comment><comment><USER18> In my younger days, I used to play around with software like maya.

The best thing about voxels is what you can do with fluid simulations.

In Maya you could create a cube made up of voxels, each voxel had a fuel, temperature etc variables.

You could start a fire from a single voxel, and watch is spread ! Changing the values could make the fire behave differently.

I wish front-end javascript was that cool :( fire simulation on a computer is so much more fun.

<comment><USER19> Hey, Fire Engineer turned Software Engineer here, check this out. [https://pages.nist.gov/fds-smv/](https://pages.nist.gov/fds-smv/)

FDS and SmokeView, are the defacto fire simulator tools used by fire protection researchers/engineers around the world. Not only can you manipulate the fuel sources, you can manipulate the environments and rooms and watch the fluid and thermodynamics dynamics happen. Radiation, convection, conduction, flow gradiants, for you to see and play around with.

[http://www.thunderheadeng.com/pyrosim/](http://www.thunderheadeng.com/pyrosim/)

Is a nice gui layer for FDS allowing you to import CAD files for your simulations and gives you some visual control rather than programming in Fortan for FDS.

<comment><USER18> Fire Engineer sounds way cooler than software engineer !

<comment><USER19> Well I hope to swing back into it in a decade or 2 after learning the software buisness. The goal is to modernize the current tools and leverage advancements in machine learning to help the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would say the only thing this slightly misses is the pseudo-3d models that Wolfenstein/Doom used. It got the terrain part, but not the somewhat clever thing where the characters were a series of 8 or so sprites that changed which one it displayed based on orientation.

<comment><USER21> If you want a neat / more advanced version of that technique, check out an old game by looking glass software called terra nova, it uses a skeletal animation system but with sprites for each bone in the skeleton.

<comment><USER22> Damn i played a demo of that game to death back in the day. Was never able to get a copy of the full game.

The control scheme was a weird mix of simulator and shooter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, would you say Minecraft is a Polygon based game or a Voxel based game?

<comment><USER15> The map data is voxel based, but it's transformed to polygons when rendering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great post! Clear, thorough explanation and fun read.

</comment><comment><USER25> They mentioned Vangers!

</comment><comment><USER26> Why did I stop pursuing game dev?

<comment><USER27> Yeah, as a side project it's fun! As a job for some AAA title ... not so much ... (crunch,crunch,crunch)

<comment><USER26> Ah, right.</comment></comment></comment>


The Furby Organ, a Musical Instrument Made from Furbies [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLBjScgb7o <comment><USER2> Reminds me of something seen in Terry Gilliam's "The adventures of Baron Munchausen":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sLNOhA7C2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sLNOhA7C2Q)

(Warning: simulated torture instrument).

Seems to be an evolution of a previous Monty Python's sketch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saY10AWXLIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saY10AWXLIY)

<comment><AUTHOR> This, in turn, reminds me of the Cat Organ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_organ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_organ)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty awesome. I sent the link around to my co-workers the other day but didn't think it was on topic for HN.

This guy spent seven years thinking about this this idea and then made it a reality.

We should all be so lucky (and so motivated and willing to put in a lot of work.... I mean look at all those solder points!!). I'm a little jealous. I have so many fun projects I've been thinking of for 7 years and never gotten to.

</comment><comment><USER4> The timbre of the singing isn't instantly audible from the normal Furby gibbering, but it has a unique and haunting beauty.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's what happens when you give kids a set of tools, a garage and permission to cut their own hair.

</comment><comment><USER6> The amount of effort.. Good job!</comment>


Goodbye, shitty Car extends Vehicle object-orientation tutorial (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20140416021831/http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000937.html <comment><USER2> _> In good OO programming, we don't make class hierarchies in order to satisfy our inner Linnaeus._

This correctly identifies one of the worst problems with how people construct OO programs when they get out of college. They are infected with the idiotic desire to make neat taxonomies. They don't know why. They can't even explain the rules that make one taxonomy good and another one bad. They just feel some immense pressure to arrange things in trees. I've been like that when initially learning Java and it took a while to recover from it. It's like fucking brain damage from bad examples.

Inheritance is not about creating taxonomies.

Namespaces are not about creating taxonomies.

Both are practical solutions to practical problems that occur when writing code.

Inheritance is a result of several insights:

1\. It's convenient to be able to sketch out a protocol which a set of objects will follow - without having to work out every damn detail about its implementation.

2\. Most of the protocol can be implemented once and then reused.

3\. Often you want to use the default protocol implementation _with some changes_. Instead of re-implementing the rest of the protocol, it's highly convenient to be able to specify only the differences.

#3 is the core reason why inheritance was developed.

<comment><USER3> Well said.

And #3 is also an area where Functional Programming falls completely flat.

There is simply no easy way in any FP language that I know to capture such a simple mechanism as: "Reuse 90% of this piece of code but alter just this 10%".

Specialization is a very, very powerful aspect of OOP, one that's extremely easy to explain and which comes in handy to model a surprisingly wide variety of problems.

<comment><USER2> Functional programmers will reply that you can use partial evaluation and higher-order functions to do that.

The sad reality is that since so many people are only familiar with the strawman version of OOP rather than the real thing intelligently discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these paradigms is very hard.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I've heard them say that indeed. They often gloss over a lot of issues about these.

For example, partial evaluation is limited by the fact that parameters need to be ordered a certain way and you can't realistically cover all combinations.

Higher order functions don't enable any kind of useful specialization at all. And of course, all modern OOP languages also support higher order functions, so they are the ones giving you more tools.

<comment><USER4> Do any functional languages support partial evaluation using named parameters? That would solve the parameter ordering complaint.

As for higher order functions you would write a function that does the 90% and accepts a function parameter for the other 10%.

<comment><USER3> > As for higher order functions you would write a function that does the 90% > and accepts a function parameter for the other 10%.

Surely you see how this doesn't scale, right?

You would need to first write your code, then abstract every single piece of it as a call to a function passed in parameters. Now your function is accepting five different functions in parameters, and calls them.

This is a terrible and impossible to scale way to emulate class specialization.

<comment><USER5> So put those parameters in a single record type and just override the 10% of them that you need to.

<comment><USER6> Abadi and Cardelli identified some ways that this solution falls short—in particular, the self parameter isn't covariant—and how to fix them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > You can't add code to ducks.

> You can't refactor ducks.

> Ducks don't implement protocols.

> You can't create a new species in order to separate some concerns (e.g. file > I/O and word splitting).

It's odd he makes these complaints, because the comment he's responding has this caveat:

> unless they are talking about writing a clone of The Sims or something

In the context of a game or simulation, such classes can absolutely do all these things. And those seem entirely reasonable ways to teach someone about programming, while being more accessible and engaging than "let's talk about how to write an IO stack." *

> Penguins don't implement the "fly" method that can be found in birds.

That's an important issue, though, which an OO tutorial needs to deal with. It points at two major problems:

1\. The circle-ellipse problem[1].

2\. That nominative types have all the inherent problems that taxonomy has.

And since one solution is "duck typing"[2] it's worth noting that it's entirely clear what it means, despite being named after ducks.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle- ellipse_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle-ellipse_problem)

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

* IO stacks are good to learn, but to do them in OO you have to understand IO first, and though it's very satisfying when you get tricky IO code right, it's not really something you can show to your friends.

<comment><USER8> Experienced modern game programmers would never write a "Duck" class though. For instance, in Unity, it would be a set of small components representing narrow behaviors attached to a generic scene graph object. So the "Duck" would only exist as a data object that happens to have maybe a unique Quack component, along with a lot of common non-duck components like MeshRenderer, AudioSource, Collider, RigidBody, etc. You would see similar things in something like Unreal, or even in-house engines. The implementation is likely also to be way more interested in acting on aggregate data streams rather than enforcing strict encapsulation and object boundaries and such.

It's still very OOP, but not in the sense of representing real-world taxonomies.

I know there's an argument that this real-world metaphor is good for beginners, but at least in my personal experience I don't think that's the case. I remember when I was a kid, my dad tried to teach me coding with a lot of object oriented examples with like Cats and Dogs and stuff. He was really well meaning, but it never really made sense to me. I only kind of "got it" when I did something nobody would recommend anymore, and learned QBasic, and wrote a bunch of ghastly code with goto's all over the place and practically everything being a global. Awful code, but 10 year old me was able to reason about that a lot easier than polymorphism/encapsulation/scoping/etc.

<comment><USER9> > I only kind of "got it" when I did something nobody would recommend anymore, > and learned QBasic, and wrote a bunch of ghastly code with goto's all over > the place and practically everything being a global.

An aside: It's okay to learn that way, when you're 10.

A lot of my own big programming revelations have come from ignoring best practices and accidentally trying to implement or construct them from first principles once my problem becomes unmanageable.

"Doing it wrong" is an even better teacher than "doing it right all of the time", because the mistakes you make can lead you to a deeper understanding of why things are done a certain way.

<comment><USER8> Totally agree. I think we make a mistake trying to harp on doing things "right" too much for new programmers, because they end up with analysis paralysis.

<comment><USER10> That's my current approach to teaching people programming concepts. I try to provide an example of _not_ using that concept, point out the quickly growing complexity of the code, and then show how that complexity can be reduced with the new concept I'm introducing.

(And yes, as a kid, I was hurt by all those "Cat : public Animal" examples too. It took me many years before I figured out _why_ they didn't work in practice for me.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article completely misses the point because it sets up a large amount of straw men that are completely unrelated to the point

The fact that "Car extends Vehicle" is sometimes a subpar modelization has nothing to do with OOP or inheritance and everything to do with the fact that the English language is not specific enough to describe what a Vehicle is well.

Same goes with "Duck extends Bird". Yes, there are a few birds that don't fly. This problem has nothing to do with programming languages, inheritance, or OOP.

I still find these two examples, "Duck extends Bird" and "Car extends Vehicle" as extremely powerful to teach beginners what OOP is about.

Like all metaphors, they tend to leak if you push them too far, but they do a splendid job at introducing beginners to the concept of OOP, which is going to serve them well for probably most of their professional life.

</comment><comment><USER11> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2914405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2914405)

</comment><comment><USER12> Oh my god, not all birds fly, it ruins the whole thing!!!!!

No, it's a perfectly fine place in the analogy, to have a teachable moment. Since not all birds fly, just don't make flight part of your base class. I mean? Or get clever and have flighted and flightless bird classes inherit from Bird? If you want to be that much of a pain about it, you can; the paradigm supports it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I tend to agree. The "duck extends bird" examples sound good at first but they have done a lot of damage to OOP.

<comment><USER3> I find this a largely unsubstantiated claim, much like the "Once you learn BASIC, your brain is damaged beyond repair" from Dijkstra that is so depressingly repeated over and over, and which is complete nonsense.

These are introductory metaphors that help people get up to speed with a complex concept. You refine your understanding of these as you become more expert on the subject.

<comment><USER8> I definitely agree that like these things aren't going to cause any sort of lasting brain damage or something. It gets overwrought.

I think that the taxonomy thing is kind of harmful though in that, as far as I can tell anyway, it only seems to be now that a lot of programmers are coming around to the idea that modelling things are taxonomies is less useful than other techniques.

Some code sins are pretty easy to cleanup: if someone writes a function that's doing too many things, it's not too hard to break it up, or if someone names things badly, usually it's enough just to rename it to better concepts. But deep inheritance hierarchies are often a massive pain to clean up, if you can even clean it up at all (outside packages might come to depend on your weird structure for instance).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is good.

I've even seen OO tutorials which make it explicit to give the bad advice that all your objects should match real world _things_.

This does not match my experience of OO programming or what the actual challenges or rewards are:

> We make class hierarchies in order to simplify the code by allowing > different parts of it to be changed independently of each other, and to > eliminate duplication (which comes to the same thing). Without any context > as to what the code needs to accomplish, you can't make a judgment about > whether a particular design decision is good or bad.

YES.

</comment><comment><USER15> i sat down with tech yourself java in n-days (forget the exact title) around 1998/99 and promptly returned the book because of my frustration with the `vehicle->wheeled vehicle->engine powered vehicle->motorcycle` explanation of OOP. i had been using a niche OOP lang (lpc) for quite a while and the examples in that book felt oddly ridiculous. just my opinion (at the time), but it certainly did not resonate with me

</comment><comment><USER16> Geez, chill out. I can't stand profanity.

<comment><USER17> Pot, kettle, black. Blasphemy is a subclass of profanity.

<comment><USER6> "Geez" is a minced oath designed specifically to avoid blasphemy—avoiding it by a millimeter, to be sure. Even some devout Christians say things like "gosh", "darn", and "geez".

<comment><USER17> _" Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out"_

I once knew a baptist preacher who was a serious student of theology and moral philosophy. He liked to discuss the distinction between theology and law, particularly when framing behaviour as the imperative expression of faith, and not faith as the expression itself. Needless to say, the parishioners loathed him and he was hounded out for exposing their constant hypocrisy. Also possibly for declaiming in classical Greek on a Sunday morning; he was truly a latter-day Socrates.

My wife and I recently re-watched that unfortunately truncated classic, HBO/BBC/Rai's _Rome_ , and were once again thoroughly entertained by the multitude of colourful epithets. Sadly, exclaiming "by Juno's cunt!" during a contentious meeting of the audit sub-committee or weekly retro would require more explanation than I'd care to give in context. And yet, a devout Christian should have no problem with this, at least on a theological level, since no scripture is violated.

<comment><USER6> Landīca!

Some Christians aren't in favor of cursing in general, even if it's not blasphemous. My best understanding is that they feel that it expresses a lack of gratitude for the blessings they have—that, at least for a moment, you are forgetting that every moment of life is a miracle, allowing yourself to become enslaved to your wrath, which is of course a sin in standard versions of Christianity. (This does of course pose some difficulties to reconcile with the stories of cursing the fig tree and the money changers, which the Christians resolve in various creative ways.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zero to a Million Users in 15 Days - <AUTHOR> http://www.kik.com/blog/2010/11/zero-to-a-million-in-15-days/ <comment><USER3> Hi All,

Ted from Kik. Just wanted to jump in and answer a few questions:

On October 21, 2010 we launched a completely new service. The only thing that was the same between new Kik and old Kik was the name and the app store accounts. Users from the old system (about 55K active in the last week before the hard switch over) were notified that the new service was available and that the old one would soon be shut down. About 23K did get the upgrade, but almost all of them dropped it immediately due to losing all of their contacts from the old system, and the now lack of built in SMS texting. You can see this in the graphs - a brief peak, followed by a multi day flat line. I really apologize if this is misleading, it was not intentional.

The numbers. They are real. We can hardly believe it ourselves. The app is built to be incredibly viral (more on that later), but we _never_ spam any of your contacts. All that happens is on registration, we do a quick one time, secure scan to let you know who on Kik you might know. That's it. Nothing is ever stored or shared, and nobody outside Kik will ever hear even a peep that you have joined Kik (unless, of course, you tell them, which a lot of people seem to be doing!) From there, people keep using it because they really like it. It is a bit hard to understand or explain (well, not as hard as Twitter I guess, but still) so it is probably best to just use the app for a bit. You will see why people like it.

We are moving as fast as possible to scale the servers, and add features. As noted below, we've been working on our vision for almost two years now, and this is just the first step. Expect some pretty cool things to come, and until then, thank you for letting us share in this incredible ride.

Ted

<comment><USER4> I have a quick suggestion for blog posts like this: don't assume that readers have any idea what it is you do. Take the opportunity in the first paragraph to describe what your product is and why people use it. That way, people coming to your post who aren't already users will be oriented immediately. They will, I suspect, also be more likely to use your product.

<comment><USER5> I concur. I spent 5 minutes reading through the site and I have zero idea what this Kik thing really is. If it's yet another closed service I'm expected to sign up for, no thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This story is completely mis-leading. They certainly had users before 15 days ago [1]. The product was developed in an incubator in the Winter 2009 class [2]. They have relaunched and revamped it, but to start from a clean slate and say you had zero users with no disclosure or information about your past makes this story blatantly false. It's a shame because it still would have been a good story without the reset.

[1] [http://www.startupnorth.ca/2010/11/03/has-kik-finally- arrive...](http://www.startupnorth.ca/2010/11/03/has-kik-finally-arrived/)

[2] <http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/alumni/kik-at-blackberry-devcon>

<comment><USER7> From what I understand, there is no connection between the old application and the new one. So it's not as misleading as you portray.

<comment><USER6> The application is actually just revamped as I understand it (based on the above review by Startup North); maybe in a major way but still based on a previous product. As Ted from Kik has responded below, they e-mailed nearly all of their 55K previous users, though very very few of them converted.

Their history deserves mentioning and is likely what put them in a position to be able to launch, market and scale effectively. The users may not be the same, but the strategies and the tactics used to get there are likely based on previous experiences as well as having some great people get them this far.

Obviously this community isn't the target of their post, but I would be even more interested in hearing the whole story: how they went from zero to 55K customers in 7 months, lost almost all of them, and then scaled it back up to a million users in two weeks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My girlfriend and I use Kik, for us it was a BBM alternative after I got an Android phone.

And we've been using it longer than 15 days, so to me the headline/graph is misleading. They just released a complete overhaul so they reached a million users on v2 of their software, but how many did v1 have?

<comment><AUTHOR> strange

quoting the blog post "We re-launched Kik Messenger 15 days ago with 0 users"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How much did you pay for the domain name? Afaik a 3 letters .com is really really expensive...

</comment><comment><USER10> Wait, what? How did yet another instant messenger client get a million users in 2 weeks?

<comment><USER11> Bot-generated accounts?

<comment><USER12> I would suspect that as well or by counting relationships instead of actual accounts. Let's ask them: [http://www.kik.com/blog/2010/11/zero-to-a-million- in-15-days...](http://www.kik.com/blog/2010/11/zero-to-a-million- in-15-days/#comment-255)

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont think so, my facebook feed is currently assaulted by friends asking and sharing their KIK ID (and none of them is a geek or an early adopter usually)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wait, a site got to a million users without being featured on Techcrunch?

</comment><comment><USER14> Ok so I just read every article I could find about these guys online - <USER2> somebody explain why a user would install kik over standard text messaging or IM?

There must be something to it, I just don't know what.

If it wasn't for the buzz, it is a product website I would just brush past without a second glance

<comment><USER15> Because it is essentially Blackberry Messenger for all smartphones.

Many people only use Blackberry because of the speed and D/R status of BBM regardless of how they feel about the device.

<comment><USER16> I'm not familiar with BBM , but it appears Kik works for Iphone, Android and Blackberry. The only significance I can see between using something like IM client, available on all these clients, is letting you know if message was read or not. Is there anything else, significant about BBM ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congratulation to Kik. Great!

But I'm concern about this service and privacy. It uses same tactic as Buzz (which tactic I didn't like).

Here is my understanding - please correct me if I'm wrong:

First, Kik ties in a person's username with their email address. Kik then sorts through the person's addressbook to find potential friends. This is kinda privacy issue because a user may not want someone that is in their addressbook to know they have a Kik account. But other people (my stock broker, tax consultant) will because if they have your email address then they also have your Kik username without authorization or adding that person to your friends list.

Is there a way to disable the above approach - maybe to ask which people will see you on Kik?

</comment><comment><USER18> Hey Guys,

Those are actually real accounts backed by unique emails. We haven't expected such a viral growth ourselves but.. we don't complain :) Other than complete lack of sleep due to the scaling needs.

Hence my question: are there any brilliant server developers looking for a job with Kik? :)

<comment><USER19> You should really define "server developer", otherwise you'll end-up with offers ranging from "bash scripting" through "rails backend developers" to "C developers".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool they did it. I was expecting an article on HOW they did it!

<comment><USER21> Build an awesome product that everyone wants?

<comment><USER22> [http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build- it-...](http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-they-wont- come/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Congrats to the Kik team!

When I first heard of Kik, I thought it to be somewhat repetitive. There are tons of apps just like it. But, the viral nature of the app sold me. The fact that contacts are automatically added allow me to use the app immediately.

The next steps for Kik are crucial. People are going to have a problem with being so accessible to people they don't know. The ability to block users might arise conflict with "Why did you block me on Kik?" I'm interested to see how they handle these issues. On top of that, they're adding image support, which I think is a pretty hefty dent on their servers.

Again, congrats on the growth, but good luck with keeping your users! As of right now, it took me a whole minute to send a Kik message out. I'm sticking to Blackberry Messenger for now, which by the way is an amazing client minus lack of cross-mobile platform availability.

</comment><comment><USER24> A name is really important for a startup to take off.

Kik.com kicks ass, instead of 'socialmsgr.im'

My only advice to entrepreneurs is: pick a great name.

Delivering a great product is just mandatory.

<comment><USER25> Not really that a great product is mandatory, but simple, easy to pronounce names when combined with simple and easy to use apps usually equals success. It's also important that the name can be attributed to the people using the app (Kiksters, Tweeters, Googler etc), and the actions can come from the name as well (Kiks, Tweets, Google it). Also leave room for apps using your api (if you have one) to take advantage of your name, (Twitpic, etc). Combining all that when picking a name really helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My startup was in the same incubator space as Kik up until 3 weeks ago (we just moved out,) and it's really amazing to see these guys finally take off. They have some amazing stuff in the pipeline that's going to blow everyone away.

Funny thing is, they are literally across the hall from Enflick, which is another IM startup that's wildly successful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know what was their marketing plan to launch Kik?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> One small request. On iphone signup, don't have the password field in visible text.

<comment><USER28> I actually wish password fields would ALWAYS be visible by default on all mobile apps.

<comment><USER29> You're not concerned about people looking over your shoulder?

<comment><USER28> I am pretty sure all the apps I have on my phone require login only once and never again. I'd just avoid to login that one time in a crowded place and the risk is gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can really see why you'd use this, except for being able to see when somebody has read your message - which personally I hate because then people will be on my back wondering why I didn't reply right away. That's a reason I wouldn't use it.

I use a multi-protocol IM client on my phone, which has a constant link in the background to my GTalk, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Skype, etc. - That way people can IM me any time from whatever platform they're currently on, whether it be computer, phone, browser, etc. But with Kik they have to be on a phone as well? That's really a step backwards, if they're sitting at their computer, logged into 5 separate IM clients already, and then have to pick up their phone to IM me. But it has obvious solutions.

<comment><USER31> It's a big problem for me that there are no good multi-protocol IM apps for iOS. To say nothing of the general horridness of all single-protocoll IM apps (Sykpe excluded).

I could understand that a great IM app could have some draw.

<comment><USER32> meebo does multi-protocol, they support most protocols except for skype.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Firstly, this is awfully impressive. Kudos to the Kik team!

I'd love to know more here. Out of these 1,000,000 users, how many of these are actual activated users? After 15 days, what's the retention like? Where are all of these users coming from, and how does the origin of the user affect activation and retention?

One lesson that we've been learning the hard way is that it's one thing to acquire users, and it's another thing entirely to convert a new user into a long-term, engaged customer. I'd love to hear how Kik is approaching that, given their success in acquisition.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Do you keep a record of messages sent between accounts? Do you keep a record of the actual message content? If so, how long do you keep it for, and why?

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder why Ping or WhatsApp wasn't able to get this viral. The only viral feature I saw is when I installed it, it went through my contact list (I'm assuming) and found all my friends that already have it installed. Others were able to find me even though I didn't enter my phone number when signing up. Weird.

<comment><USER35> Have either of them published subscriber numbers or growth rates?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Having just read the book Influence by Cialdini, this strikes me as perfect use of the social proof principle, regardless of if the numbers are real of not. "Hey, this app has a million users, it must be pretty good".

Personally, I couldn't register. Keeps saying I have no network yet other apps work fine.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm impressed with the product and it's a great idea. But I find it hard to believe that privacy issues on social networks are so difficult to solve. Upon sign-up with Kik, your contact address list is mined and those contacts are then e-mailed. C'mon developers, I know the idea is to make it as easy as possible for monetization with advertisers later but how about putting some more effort into respecting my wishes not to get me into hot water with the real people I know.

You help me and I'll help you but leave it up to me to tell my friends about it.

I'm sure I read the following on HN just a few days ago talking about similar privacy concerns with social platforms:

"If your privacy practices aren't transparent, then you introduce doubt. Doubt leads to lower usage."

<comment><USER3> Can you please forward us an email one of your contacts received, and post it up here? We'd be interested to see what it says :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> One thing about social apps is that once your friends all are signed up to a new product and settled in there, there is no purpose for you alone to different be in a different app. You wont' have the social part in it. Kik, with it's whatever marketing seems to be got popular with many people and it might become defacto for them for near future. And it will get tough for everyone to move to an alternate app. As many of your friends start using Kik, you will start using Kik, Facebook/Twitter anyone?

<comment><USER16> I believe on the smart mobile apps area it works a little differently. I've seen apps like Fring, Tango, and Textplus.. all appear on the top of the apps market, and what appears to be significant downloads. I think in general people will download apps just for the sake of trying and use it, but apps that get any long term usage is far and few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Great job guys. This one nails the point that if you make an awesome service, people _will_ flock to it. Who expected an IM service to become a verb so soon? (Reference: I am just reading few Twitter messages <http://twitter.com/search?q=kik> and they all typing in - 'kik, IM, DM or email me'). This is fantastic. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm really afraid this type of user sign up is going to begin taking a hold of new apps on mobile devices.

It's one thing for me to receive emails from friends inviting me to try a new service they're using, but it's really intrusive to receive txts from kik telling me to sign up every time someone I know installs the app.

</comment><comment><USER41> I got a txt from a friend about kik signup yesterday. Not sure if he knew that was sent or not.

<comment><USER42> Agreed. I am a little concerned that as soon as I signed up, it sent messages to everyone I might know. The key word being "might". I didn't know too many of their suggestions.

<comment><USER43> This is the kind of marketing strategy that turns me off to a service. Linked- in does it too. I get invite invitations from people that I am already linked with, but where they have another of my email addresses in their address book that is different than my Linked-in email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> How is this different or better than other instant messaging apps for smartphones?

<comment><USER45> I have the same question. It's not actually clear from the website what they are offering.

Who knows, since I'm curious I could perhaps download the app and make an account and then find out that it's not what I thought it was, but I would be counted as +1 users in this million... Wonder how many people did that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> On the App Store page Kik notes:

"This is just the start. The next step is adding free (legal) music sharing, and it will be sweet. Really sweet."

Curious. I guess they aren't happy with sticking to messaging and will keep adding social features.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm curious why the Kik team decided to create 3 mobile clients before a Windows or web client. Is Kik aimed at children and teens with parents that access their kids' online accounts?

</comment><comment><USER48> My friends are pimping this on facebook hardcore right now. Non-tech people, especially. Strong work, ladies and gentlemen. I call it "crackberry for the iPhone."

<comment><USER49> How does this compare to whatsapp messenger? My wife spends half her life on it and it seems pretty identical.

<comment><USER48> Hmm, not sure. I hadn't heard of whatsapp before your comment.</comment></comment></comment>


A merge tool that understands your source code... join beta - <AUTHOR> http://plasticscm.com/sm/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> We're starting the close beta. You can surely guess what the tool is about: merging files but understanding the code :O. We can't unveil more yet.</comment>


Game of Genomes part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/feature/game-of-genomes/season-two/ <comment><USER2> This series is geeky and great.

</comment><comment><USER3> interesting about genetic variants actually protecting us</comment>


Everyday.me (YC S12) - an "Evernote for Your Life" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/09/y-combinator-backed-noodle-labs-launches-everyday-me-an-evernote-for-your-life/

<comment><USER2> As an introvert who is in the process of deleting their facebook account for privacy reasons, I see real value in this. I'd like to keep a private journal more in line path/instagram/twitter - just for me. That being said I have a couple pieces of advice:

Make sure I can export ALL of the data, anytime. Make sure you securely backup all of my data. CHARGE ME for this service, so I know you won't sell my data. Only way I'll do this is if you address my privacy concerns.

<comment><USER3> The only way you will _know_ they won't sell your data is if those terms are clearly stated in a contract between you and the vendor. Otherwise, you won't have any way to know they won't sell your data in the future.

Imagine if you are the owner of Everyday.me and Facebook comes calling, flashing a huge check. They want your data and are willing to pay big bucks for it. If there's nothing in customers' contracts stating you _can't_ sell their data... cha-ching!

<comment><USER4> But if it's in the contract, then you _know_? That seems naive, you can't possibly _know_ that they won't sell your data, but you can make an educated guess.

<comment><USER3> The point is, a user has recourse in that event. Without those contract terms, they don't.

<comment><USER4> I agree, but my point still stands. You don't know anything, but as you said, you get more "power"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every comment so far (except for developer responses) is negative. Sad state of affairs.

With that said I would like to congratulate the developers. Good work. More choice is good for everybody.

</comment><comment><USER6> > An iPhone and web app called Everyday.me

Right, so I get into the "private beta" and go to the link in the email. It gives me a popup saying, "Please use an iPhone to install this app."

Meanwhile, on their homepage: > Access from anywhere - on mobile, email, or the web

If having an iPhone is a requirement of using your website (which I assume functions perfectly well on its own), you're doing it wrong. If the website is merely a way to view (but not edit) your content, then you're REALLY doing it wrong.

Also, why are people still developing exclusively for iPhone? Last quarter there were four times as many Android phones sold as iPhones.

<comment><USER7> >> Also, why are people still developing exclusively for iPhone? Last quarter there were four times as many Android phones sold as iPhones.

I can only speak for myself, but developing for Android is a nightmare compared to developing software for iOS. Different behaviour amongst different Android devices makes it really hard to provide a consistent user experience.

<comment><USER8> I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, but is "consistent user experience" necessarily something that should be a goal?

There's more to it, but when I hear that I'm reminded of web site "designers" that only use photoshop and focus/obsess over pixel-perfect layouts and font- sizings, to get everything to match exactly what their original photoshop 'design' looks like on their monitor, ignoring the variety of browsers/devices that may also visit the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice App. I worked on this Idea for quite long time and discussed with many web developers as I am not into web development.Many suggested me to learn and develop but I couldn't. That is a different story. My perspective was different and it was not just simple Private Journal of your personal life.It meant to improve your way of life. I thought of many features which can do so. For example: Capture moment and also mark some as milestones along with its type as good/bad or traits like new learning's/adventurous etc etc. Thus at any point of time if you look back, how your time period(last year lets say) had been. you will know if it was insipid or adventurous or had any new learnings etc and where you need to improve. Pls feel free to discuss with me if you need more feature ideas.

<comment><USER10> Yes! I'm really into self-learning and improvement as well, both in athletics and music. We're hoping with with this v1 of Everyday.me we first lay the groundwork for self-chronicling, then there's _so_ much we can do around goal setting, tracking, and helping people achieve their goals. That's what gets me really excited about working on this.

<comment><USER9> Email me at techynirvana[at]gmail[dot]com. I can share some more inputs for the betterment of the app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading this, I still don't know what this is. Other than being like facebook, a notebook, twitter, blogs, a private journal, and Evernote, not that I've ever heard of Evernote before. How can something be like a facebook timeline and private at the same time?

Why is it so difficult for people to describe their new service? Alternatively, why am I so bad at understanding?

<comment><USER10> Hi, we're sorry the description is confusing. It's similar to Facebook's Timeline in the sense that we list things chronologically, but it's completely private.

I think the easiest way to think of it is a mobile journal that not only lets you input things, but also automatically collects your social activities across the web for you. Does that help?

<comment><USER12> Serious, non snarky question - how are you different than Path, then?

<comment><USER10> A few different ways, I think Path is amazing for what it does, btw. A real inspiration for all of us. It seems to really promote you to share with your friends. We don't share at all. We also import your activities from other networks. You can post to it by email, view it on the web...please give it a try and let us know what you think.

<comment><USER13> Since most people are eager to share a lot of the content they create this can be seen like some sort of backup of your shared data with a built-in viewer. Which may sound like what Facebook is doing right now. But with the added bonus of storing all the other content not considered worthy of sharing in public for whatever reason. This is essentially what any other 'cloud' storage services want to achieve. The chronological timeline or whatever filters can be easily added to any service once it has the data. Phone/tablet vendors have the edge on this since they can implement this feature directly into their devices (e.g iCloud, Google Drive).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does TechCrunch have an army of upvoters? just seems like their posts come from nowhere to the front page with almost no discussion.

<comment><USER15> No, but YC does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another startup being prominently featured on Techcrunch started by "ex- Googlers" I swear every startup that gets Techcrunch coverage was started by ex-Googlers. That all side, I don't see what makes Everyday.me so special (I don't mean to sound so cynical) but what makes this application different in comparison to all of the other available services and mobile applications that do the same thing? Evernote is one of those applications that comes to mind.

It looks to me Everyday.me borrows heavily from the Facebook timeline except it's private. I don't see how Everyday.me is different to Facebook Timeline and Path especially. Am I missing something big here that makes Everyday.me a "killer startup" please kindly put me in my place if I am. To add to the confusion further, what do YC see in Everyday.me to make it worthy of being funded?

<comment><USER17> _what do YC see in Everyday.me to make it worthy of being funded?_

That they are "ex-Googlers."

It may be disingenuous to say that other applications do the _same thing_ ; it's as if you were saying ConnectU and Thefacebook do the same thing. In any case, they are simply launching their product. It's the first step in a long journey.

It's sometimes difficult to notice a great startup unless you've launched. For example, Groupon was a much more modest "tipping point for change" type of startup before they realized they could apply the same concept to small business commerce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure if I would feel comfortable having my private journals on someone else's server.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. I love the Feltron Reports and the stuff Wolfram Alpha does with his own personal data, but I can't really get down with this. ThinkUp (for social media) and Day One / Daytum (for personal data) is all I need. You can't really reproduce Feltron Reports on scale.

<comment><USER20> What if you could do the Wolfram Alpha thing with a local appliance (e.g. a plug computer type thing) and its backups - if you did not explicitly want to manage them yourself - were encrypted before they ever left your network or were seen by a third party?

I guess the problem then is making subscription money on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like the idea. Though I don't like social anything, would a smart long game here be, after many users, to turn this into a social network where users can opt to change their content from private to public ?

Millions of profiles could go live on the same day? All individual content as well as types of content (tweets, images, posts, etc) could have public/private flag, giving you ultimate control but also free to have all tweets or images display instantly from twitter or instagram?

</comment><comment><USER22> While I'm not a target customer I'm sure you'll find early adopters thanks to YC&TC. Launching is hard, so congrats on that. That being said, I am still trying to wrap my head around the whole 'limited sharing' trend. Path got the ball rolling and has gotten pretty popular. Then came the sharing between couples - Pair, cupple etc. (seriously?) And now no sharing but just journaling for yourself ? How do you guys make money ?

<comment><USER23> Charging for the app would be the best way, although if this becomes venture funded then then it will be hard to just do that given the pressure to support a high valuation (see the recent google acquisition of sparrow)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For a long time I tried to build a lifelogging app, something pretty similar to this, hell, we even went to the YC interview with that idea. I love this space & I love seeing someone tackle the problem with such a simple & clean app. This is actually something I would use myself: no numbers, no social bullshit. Just a simple app to keep track of my day. Great job! Good luck & godspeed!

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice idea, and I'm eager to use it day to day, but one small quibble: It would be nice if the setting allowed me to set the language - you currently set the language based on the location, right? Assuming the language of the land is my preferred language setting is not correct.

Can we use location services _and_ set the language preference?

</comment><comment><USER26> Send a similar pitch to ycomb S12 ;)

here are my small feedback:

1\. concentrate on collaborative experience, mixing together social feed from different user on the same experience 2\. i absolutely hate daily mail :) 3\. UI is a little bit boring 4\. guess travel are the best fit for this app 5\. grab the future of people, not only the past :)

</comment><comment><USER27> So when they shut the service down in 18 months and kill all access to our data, will they be quick to point out that "indefinitely" = for as long as they are profitable? Now I'm not saying this is what's going to happen, but you would have to be foolish not to consider this the most likely outcome.

<comment><USER10> Well hopefully with your support we wouldn't have to shut down ;)

<comment><USER28> Promising -- and delivering, asap -- a friendly export format would be more convincing at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks really excellent. Wanted to check it out to see if it's something I could get in to - didn't realise it was iPhone only until I already gave over my email address. Would be nice if this was clear on the website.

</comment><comment><USER30> Evernote already is for my life. This is going nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why would I voluntarily hand over all this data to a third party if the only person who SHOULD ever consume the data is me?

</comment><comment><USER31> too much techcrunch on YC

<comment><USER32> this is more of a case of too much YC on techcrunch.

<comment><USER33> 50-75% of stories on TC are one way or another originated from hacker news...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How do they do the web page to install iPhone app, without you going into the app store?

</comment><comment><USER35> But can you export your data?

</comment><comment><USER36> previous discuss <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4336977>

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like evertale.

</comment><comment><USER38> No privacy policy?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another startup trying to use the success, brand or popularity of other companies or products to attract customers. Everyday.me, how about defining _yourselves_ instead of "We're the Facebook of" or "an Evernote for?" Be _confident_ about your product--that it can stand on its own and has merit above and beyond what competitors can offer.</comment>


Why smartphone owners won't give – even when they're not using their phones - <AUTHOR> http://thestack.com/smartphone-distracted-walking-collision-220215

<comment><USER2> As a disabled person, I have noticed this to be a huge problem in San Francisco over the past 5 years or so. I regularly get pushed into walls and trees as groups of young people walk by. A courtesy I learned as a young child walking in the financial district with my father was to always get into a single file line when approaching a group walking towards your group. It is also a common courtesy to walk on the right side of the sidewalk, like roadways, when walking against oncoming people.

And while I have your attention.. It is also common courtesy, and something San Franciscans have known for years, to remove ones backpack when riding MUNI. Either wear it in the front or put it down between your legs. That way you are not unknowingly smashing people in the face or taking up too much space on a crowded bus.

<comment><USER3> The primary cause is society losing the concept of courtesy, but the secondary cause is people losing the concept of spite. You can thank all of the able- bodied people that have enabled this behavior by accommodating it instead of standing up for themselves.

I give about 65% of the sidewalk to an oncoming person/group. I'm not slowing down either way. Most people take the hint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing to do with smartphones, it's a wider thing. For example, two parents with pushchairs will walk side by side, expecting other pedestrians to step into the gutter or into the road. Or cyclists riding on the pavement, especially on Boris Bikes in London, who adopt the policy of just riding straight at pedestrians as if they're not even there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm just waiting for two of them to have a head-on collision.

An amusing negative-feedback loop when the population gets too high.</comment>


International Human Cell Atlas Initiative - <AUTHOR> http://www.sanger.ac.uk/news/view/international-human-cell-atlas-initiative <comment><USER2> So it's basically the next step in biomedical science, to understand all the different kinds of cells in the body, and how they behave.

<comment><USER3> Yes. But be aware that molecular biologists are still trying to figure out what is happening at the molecular level _within_ the cell [1].

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

<comment><USER4> These efforts are actually more related than you might think. One problem with the current state of molecular biology is that mechanisms are represented as graphs comprised of nodes (genes and molecules) and activities (inhibition, activation, catalysis, etc.); however, these graphs are generally representations at whole-genome scale. Within each single cell, only a subset of the genome is expressed, which greatly limits the size and complexity of the graph in actual incarnations within cells and therefore simplifies the problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Privacy-first and anonymized usage analytics for iOS - <AUTHOR> Hi HN – I'm looking for anonymized usage analytics for iOS that doesn't conflict with my views around privacy.
Goal: To understand what features in the app people are appreciating/engaging-with, and where in the app people get stuck. In gist: to facilitate accessibility and feature discovery.
The old route is Firebase analytics or Facebook events tracking – but I don't want to be part of this surveillance economy. I'd like my products to be part of the solution to our privacy problems.
Any recommendations? Thanks, y'all. <comment><AUTHOR> Well I may as well answer my own question with the research I've done thus far.

First, it appears that even privacy advocates just use Google Firebase. (Yeah, hypocrisy is abundant.)

Matamo.org is the top contender I found for privacy-conscious analytics. Basically, you have immense control over the integration, so you can accomplish any privacy goals you'd like.

Other potential analytics tools (not necessarily privacy-conscious) include segment.com and Mixpanel.com. Many of the other ones were recently acquired by Google and are now shutting down.

<comment><USER2> You may want to check Countly too (open source and self hosted) - could be easily downloaded or there is also a 1-click installation option on Digital Ocean.</comment></comment>


Apple to Invest in Facebook? Facebook says "No". - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/10/25/apple-to-invest-in-facebook-facebook-says-no/ <comment><USER2> Jobs unlikely to overstretch Apple cash ~> [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/af7178e4-df89-11df- bed9-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/af7178e4-df89-11df- bed9-00144feabdc0.html)

"Apple chief executive Steve Jobs's declaration last week that the technology company wants to hold on to its $51bn in cash and securities because it sees "strategic opportunities" ahead, has provoked speculation about what it might acquire.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple has always been very conservative and exceedingly smart when it comes to buyouts, and a takeover of Facebook seems unlikely, to say the least. Purchasing a company with a current P/E ratio of 500 to 1000, in an industry Apple has little experience with, seems like it would be very uncharacteristic.

I could be wrong, but I think this is a good example of a baseless rumor that won't go away.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much the microsoft investment has to do with them refusing apple money, if any at all.</comment>


The Truth - <AUTHOR> http://steinarskipsnes.com/the-truth/

<comment><USER2> I have hugely mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don't see how this strategy could play out well in the long-run. The founder comes off as excessively desperate and even untrustworthy. What's weirder is that for him to have any chance of success with this strategy, it would eventually have to become apparent that he was lying. Which makes it all seem even sleazier. To top all of that, there's no way he maintains any long-term positive relationship with the press.

On the other hand, there is evidently some payoff from this strategy--I had never heard of this service before this little stunt. Given his actions, though, I wouldn't use it even if I needed it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quotes from the article:

"I want to grow and build a business more than anyone can understand."

"When you want something bad enough, you're forced to create a path or quit."

To me personally, this appears to be the behavior of a clinical narcissist and sociopath.

"Love me or hate me. This is the raw me."

Confirmed.

Where are the entrepreneurs who are able to say, "I will succeed only if I have something to offer." And why? Because it's true -- in the final analysis, you will only succeed if you have something to offer that people want. No amount of lying and media manipulation can stand in for actually having a useful product.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I'm not so sure about that. There are plenty of great products that never got attention because the devs couldn't find a mass market story behind it or were unable/unwilling to add some spin.

Frankly, I don't mind the hoax. The media deserves it. I once did a press release in the form of an article (that I wrote) in which the "writer" interviewed me as an industry expert. You'd be amazed at how many places ran that press release as an article with NO alterations, none.

<comment><USER3> > There are plenty of great products that never got attention because the devs > couldn't find a mass market story behind it or were unable/unwilling to add > some spin.

But that agrees with the thesis. A product that "can't find a mass market" is clearly one that people don't need. By contrast, proven over and over again, a product that actually fills a need will certainly find a market with very little ingenuity required by its marketers.

> Frankly, I don't mind the hoax. The media deserves it.

Does the public deserve it? I'm not crazy about this essentially amoral attitude. It's not as thought the media buy the product and face the consequences.

A business can't thrive by cheating people and expecting it will all be forgotten in a fortnight. Not to say that doesn't happen, but I wouldn't want to rely on misbehavior followed by forgetfulness to sustain a business.

I'm not moralizing -- I'm just saying this way of doing things can't create a sustainable business.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Cloud adds 50K instances a day. Ready for more than startups? - <AUTHOR> http://features.techworld.com/data-centre/3203007/inside-amazons-cloud-50000-server-instances-per-day/

<comment><USER2> Not "adds", but "provisions". Personally I provision instances for less than 1 hour, which would still increment server ID that was used for analysis in the article.

Also "instance" != "server". 1 server = "x" instances, which might be provisioned "y" times a day.</comment>


The Importance Of Enthusiasm In Any Product - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/17/the-importance-of-enthusiasm-in-any-product/

<comment><USER2> Passion is the prospect that something incredible is about to take place. Notice the term prospect because a prospect is not a guarantee, but rather a chance that the world will be different based on whatever you desire to achieve. My personal opinion is that you can have all the intellect and money in the world, but if you do not have passion and enthusiasm, you have nothing! The irony of this concept is that passion and enthusiasm are the most powerful forces in the world, which means that as good as they can do, they can also be destructive in such a way that people will forever be changed due to their wrath. Let's think about Madoff, Hitler, or Bin Laden because all three of these infamous figures had passion and enthusiasm which is how they were able to manipulate the lives of thousands, and potentially even millions of people. All three of these men obviously had intellect, but if they were lacking in the passion department, there would have never been a $50billion ponzi scheme, a Holocaust, or 9/11. Now let's bring this to perspective for all of us entrepreneurs because these three men exuded passion in such a way that they were literally able to create a cult-like following and etch a place in history. I am sure that all of you will agree that their passion was overshadowed by their sickness and lack of self worth. But Steven Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Biz Stone are currently doing what these three infamous men have done in the past; but the difference is that they not only have the secret sauce of passion, but also an insatiable desire to impact the world in a positive way! Get excited about what you are doing and start to live with passion…</comment>


JavaFX 1.0 release date is December 2nd 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sun.com/theplanetarium/entry/javafx_1_0_release_date <comment><USER2> JavaFX is GPL'd?

Sun is a study in how to kill a product.

Build a business and be obliged to give your competitors your source code! What a feature!

Do they realize they are behind Flash and Silverlight?

WOW!</comment>


Kim.com - <AUTHOR> http://kim.com

<comment><USER2> Keep yourself in the press so they cant tag&bag you. He sure knows how to do it.</comment>


Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on drive supplied by cops - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/lawyer-representing-whistle-blowers-finds-malware-on-drive-supplied-by-cops/ <comment><USER2> _" The allegations submitted for review appear to be limited to misdemeanor violations which do not rise to a threshold for assigning a case to the CID Special Investigations Unit," the commander of the CID wrote in a September 29 letter declining the request._

I guess felony hacking charges are only for teenagers changing desktop backgrounds.

<comment><USER3> When crimes are committed by law enforcement, the penalties should be higher than for non-LEO.

<comment><USER4> That would be ideal and would hold LEOs to higher standard, but in reality, the exact opposite happens.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if codifying this in law specifically would counteract what happens in reality (DA's operating by creationist logic when the perp is of Blue ethnicity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems from what I've read that this event goes to `chain of custody`, and by nicicacity invalidates ALL digital evidence for EVERY case handled by this police office unless provenance can be reliably established beyond _all_ doubt, and that provenance can be proven not to effect 'original' copies in this or other cases.

It is a catastrophic failure of procedure, that invalidates this, and possibly all copies of this evidence causing it to be judged inadmissible.

From wikipedia[1]: When evidence can be used in court to convict persons of crimes, it must be handled in a scrupulously careful manner to prevent tampering or contamination. The idea behind recording the chain of custody is to establish that the alleged evidence is in fact related to the alleged crime, rather than having, for example, been "planted" fraudulently to make someone appear guilty.

Regarding other comments in this thread about law enforcement being held to a higher standard, they would be. The higher standard is that when they fail to follow proper procedure like this, the effect is the evidence (and often the entire case) is summerly dismissed, and the defendant cannot be tried again for the same crime. the entire US legal system has this built in bias. Whereas a defendant in a similar position of supplying discovery documents would not be held to the same standard risking summery judgement, and might be able to provide replacement copies for discovery, and continue with the definse more or less normally.

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

</comment><comment><USER7> There are quite a few ways that this sort of software could be on the drive without malicious intent by the police department. This article is pretty light on details but it doesn't sound like anyone has actually examined these drives to determine this.

Some possibilities:

* if the police computer was itself infected and the malware was trying to propagate

* The data was copied from a drive or computer that was infected

<comment><USER8> If the malware came from the Police computers then wouldn't that likely taint all the data supplied, to well everyone? Every defendant for at least the last year will be taking a shot at this and why not?

<comment><USER9> Ding ding.

There's really only 4 possibilities, and they're all significant.

1) PD is responsible, and intentionally infecting defense attorneys with malware. Major obstruction of justice.

2) PD is responsible, and has been hacked. At a minimum, all their computer evidence is tainted; who knows if someone has been using their access for ill as well. Access to police DBs is useful for all sorts of nefarious purposes.

3) Defense attorney has faked the whole thing. Noteworthy in its own right; defense attorneys are pretty used to losing as a matter of necessity so for one to go on some kind of intentional crusade against the local PD, especially in such a public and falsifiable way... No judge will sign off on criminal sanctions here without a thorough investigation, so this is extremely unlikely barring a psychotic break (which does happen now again, it's a high-stress job).

4) Defense attorney has been hacked. Who hacked him? Have any of his clients been affected? Is someone, perhaps a technically sophisticated someone, targeting defense attorneys?

<comment><USER10> That fourth one is the killer. Regardless of its truth or falsehood, it gives everyone an out because none of the interesting consequences of the first three have to happen.

Perhaps the proper move would have been to surveil the malware without revealing that you know of it. Could prove/falsify #4, or implicate PD conclusively if #1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." My guess is that one of the police computers is infected, but it shouldn't be too hard to install this malware on a VM and see where it phones home.

<comment><USER12> It's a worthless phrase unless you have some understanding of the likelihood of malice based on whom you're dealing with.

If you're dealing with malicious people, then that phrase completely loses its already low value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good thing they weren't complacent and they had the drive checked. It's appalling that this came from a police department, but it could happen with any drive someone gives you, accidentally or maliciously.

What's the best way to counteract this? Only plug foreign drives into a dedicated computer, probably running Linux, so you can scan it and copy the files you need before letting them touch other machines?

<comment><USER14> Nowadays I check any drive that's been out of my house, after my spouse brought a virus home from her workplace. A dedicated Linux box, a quick booting distro on a trusted flash drive, or even a Raspberry Pi can be used for this purpose.

<comment><USER15> I would second the Raspberry Pi, it would be more or less immune to malware that targets x86 land, even Linux based malware. Still, I'd not have it connected to the network and I would wipe the Pi's SD card afterward, just to be sure. Scripts can run on any architecture.

The Pi doesn't have a BIOS or EFI on board, it uses a special partition on the SD card to POST from, so there's no worry of the device itself being infected.

<comment><USER16> _The Pi doesn 't have a BIOS or EFI on board, it uses a special partition on the SD card to POST from, so there's no worry of the device itself being infected._

It _might_ be possible for a malicious script that gains root access to replace the SD card firmware with something that looks clean on the Pi, but delivers malware when some conditions are met.

<comment><USER15> Yep, which is why I said "I would wipe the Pi's SD card afterward, just to be sure. Scripts can run on any architecture."

The SD card is not part of the RPi; there's nothing on the board itself that is writable.

<comment><USER16> Wiping the SD card using standard disk tools would not affect the SD card's firmware. SD cards are not dumb storage devices; they have built-in CPUs that handle DRM, protocol interfacing, and wear leveling, possibly among other things. That CPU has its own firmware, which might be reprogrammable by an attacker that knows the right commands to send.

<comment><USER15> Fair enough, I didn't think about that. I guess if you were using a RPi for a quarantine job like this, you would consider the SD cards as one time use devices and destroy them after use. The RPi itself shouldn't be affected though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm having a hard time picturing a local police department in Arkansas having the technical skills needed to make use of this malware. But maybe they paid someone. Or it's a false flag. Who knows.

<comment> bob-2 That's assuming they're working alone for their own intent. Given how federal government agencies are responding to FOIA requests to local police departments regarding stingray operations, it wouldn't be completely ridiculous to consider they had help/orders from federal agents. That's just speculation, but it's possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "the district doesn't have the technical resources to conduct such a probe"

I love how they dont have resources for this, but if the plaintiff happens to speak some International language for which they dont have a translator, they fly one in from wherever they are available and pay them huge amounts of money for maybe 2 hours of work (I know its a but more complicated then that, but its still resources), but you cant dedicate a few thousands to verify the how the stuff got on to the hard drive.

[1] Corrected spelling etc: Need more coffee

<comment><USER19> So... The FBI might have such resources? A whole department of dirty cops attempting to obstruct justice using cybercrime (their remit) being... a big target.

Police officers take oaths to protect the public on behalf of the US federal & state governments, and to uphold the Constitution. Breaking these oaths and abusing the power they are granted for personal gain or to cover up things that occurred on duty is, to be blunt, _treason_. It's easy to be a _bad_ police officer who deserves to be fired for egregious negligence or excessive force or poor performance, but premeditated attempts to protect their own from the justice system represent the worst sort of insurrection this country can realistically face. I don't see why a terrorist or a Soviet spy should receive one sentence, and an officer running a corrupt police department should receive another: They are all trying to overthrow our functioning government.

Did that happen here? I don't have any idea. But when internal affairs ceases to act aggressively to investigate this sort of thing, it casts the entire department's fidelity into doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Says police department brass tried to infect him, seeks criminal sanctions."

First, the lawyer most likely found the malware via an anti-virus software and did not detect a new malware specifically targeted to him. Second, the police probably used the drive at an unsafe machine.

Is it only me who finds this illogical nonsense? It sounds like if I get a "real world" infection like xyz flu - I have the right to seek criminal action against the person who got me that infection.

<comment><USER21> One big difference is that an innocent policeman infected with the flu is not put under the secret mental domination of a criminal puppetmaster.

Even if you give the police the benefit of the doubt and assume zero malicious intent, the fact that malware appeared on the drive suggests either:

(A) Mishandling of evidence by cycling it through an insecure/unofficial system.

(B) Official systems have been pwned, and they are no longer trustworthy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> hear fucking hear

EDIT: Ahh yes, downvoted for agreeing. Fantastic guys!

<comment><USER23> To clarify, you probably got downvoted because it doesn't contribute anything. We have upvotes for agreement.

<comment><USER24> I think it's a childish and nonacademic worldview if you think the only value in another post is if you agree or not.

<comment><USER25> Are they asking thought provoking questions or contributing new information or insights, or is it a me-too comment? The latter does not really contribute to the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> At this point, there is absolutely no evidence, beyond the defense attorney's claim, that the malicious software neither existed prior to him handing it over to the police department, nor that it was installed after the fact, by the defense attorney. It is just as likely that, in either of those possibilities, this is a self-inflicted attempt by the defense attorney to discredit the police. Arstechnica, and every comment that I've read, both there and here on YC, reach conclusions based on a potentially, and _just-as- likely-false_ , premise: that the act of the software installation occurred as a result of some action or inaction of the police. False premise = potentially false conclusion. Brains, people, brains. Use them, please.

<comment><USER2> Maybe the Arstechnica article is biased towards the defense attorney's side of the story - but I definitely don't see the primary issue here as being _law enforcement officers installed said software_ (as you pointed out, this is yet an unproven hypothesis - though quite a likely one perhaps). At least for me the substantiated and proven issue is that the CID Special Investigations Unit _refused to investigate whether such a thing occurred_.

> Brains, people, brains. Use them, please.

Adding insults to your comment does not make for a better discussion.

<comment><USER26> Is it an insult or a plea for reasoning? No, I have a Bachelor's degree in CJ, but outside of that, if the primary issue is the determination to pursue charges, then what happens if there are no actions which precipitate charges?

<comment><USER27> > _" Is it an insult or a plea for reasoning?"_

The former. Possibly also the later, but definitely the former.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why There Aren't More Women In Tech: A Realistic Look at the Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://jolieodell.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/women-in-tech-stats/

<comment><USER2> The amount of "men vs. women in tech" stories on HN is starting to be a bit ridiculous. If there were no such thing as social construction, and all people had the freedom to do whatever they want to do, how many people actually believe there would be an equal number of male and female computer engineers or helicopter mechanics?

In America today, I submit to you that women are at least as free to pursue their dreams as any other civilization in history. The article says CMU "began (a) campaign to enroll more women", so one could even argue that women have an advantage here in terms of recruitment.

I'm no sociologist, but isn't it even remotely possible that fewer women _want_ to be computer engineers or helicopter mechanics?</comment>


Unintentionally starting an XML debate - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1090034/xml-or-sql/1090050#1090050

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting to see that some developers really are okay with accepting XML for what it has become, thanks to tools/abstractions that make it easy to cope with. I don't think they actually feel as if they are coping though, but rather they are consuming something that is good in principle or even design.

Edit: I'm really just regurgitating stuff I've read in the past on HN and comp.lang.lisp (namely posts by Kaz Kylheku and Erik Naggum), including:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666611> [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/tree/browse_fr...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/tree/browse_frm/thread/d4aac731fa350221/487839dfc87314d0?rnum=91&_done=%2Fgroup%2Fcomp.lang.lisp%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2Fd4aac731fa350221%2F0af931d81e3d830f%3Ftvc%3D1%26#doc_b2af4ed49c8a393b) [http://web.archive.org/web/20071231152902/xmlsucks.org/but_y...](http://web.archive.org/web/20071231152902/xmlsucks.org/but_you_have_to_use_it_anyway/useful- xml.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Does dithering impact your programming productivity? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes I realize I've been kinda dithering for a while - programming, but perhaps not doing the tasks that will have high impact on project completion.  Or maybe I've just started working on something interesting but not important.
I've started to think maybe this dithering time might be making a big impact on my programming productivity.
Does it happen to you?  Do you find yourself dithering? <comment><USER2> Oh man, this is a huge problem, and managing it is critical. I find the best way to deal with catching myself doing trivial work is to immediately stop coding at all, step away from the computer, and get a little exercise.

That way I can't use busyness as an excuse for just spinning my wheels. After a few minutes of not thinking too hard, I'll head back to the desk and verbally state my goals. After that, I tend to be orders of magnitude more productive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try it.

I certainly have a "self assessment" program running in my head which asks "is your brain out of steam"? I usually run this in my brain at the end of the day because I have a tendency to keep programming long after my brain is too tired to keep going.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, end of the day is too much potential lost time, and 'pushing through it' feels more... Righteous? But it's really, really destructive to creative work.</comment></comment></comment>


PayPal's Support Is the Best Thing That Could Happen to Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/paypals-support-is-the-best-thing-that-could-happen-to-bitcoin/

<comment><USER2> I think bitcoin has had as much media attention, excitement and such as it could have possible hoped for. Most of it was dues to the rapid rise in value/price, but regardless it has a crapload of mindshare now.

Now what we need is for people to start using it to transfer money or buy goods and services. That I haven't seen as much of. That's what it will take to make Bitcoin stick.

<comment><USER3> if I'm any given bitcoin user (which I'm not), what incentive is for me to actually use it for those purposes?

It's "deflationary" and "free" (in quotes because every day new coins are created out of thin air, and because the actual cost of processing each transaction is ~$25-40)

Let's assume it's deflationary. I'm way better off convincing others to spend it while I hoard as much as I'm able to.

The more you believe in bitcoin the less reason there is to ever spend them.

<comment><USER2> _what incentive is for me to actually use it?_

You want a taco. I'm selling tacos for bitcoin. Trying to convince me to spend while you hoard will not result in you eating one of my tacos.

<comment><USER3> If you won't accept real money for your taco I'll find someone who will, and very easily.

<comment><USER2> If you sell the best tacos, you can charge whatever money you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Wonderful_. Now we can take the _excellent_ customer service and responsiveness that PayPal is known for and apply it to something with even less regulation than the quasi-bank niche they sit in currently!

What could _possibly_ go wrong?

<comment><USER5> Paypal regularly close/freeze funds for customers, putting many many businesses out of business, causing all sorts of issues

This can not be done with your "quasi-bank niche", until it happens to you you dont realise how shitty Paypal can be, and if they block you altogether you are effectively cut off from being able to spend money online, well this was the case until bitcoin came along

Long live bitcoin

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure why I got down voted - maybe the sarcasm was not quite sarcastic enough? We agree - Paypal's service sucks, and seeing them handle something that happens to have less regulation than they have now can not possibly be a good thing in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That title has two different meaninings, depending on what "support" means. Both are true.

</comment><comment><USER7> So, then all those Bitcoiners who curse PayPal as the biggest enemy should stop at once as it serves them well?</comment>


The $5 Million Violin and the Telltale Taser - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/the-5-million-violin-and-the-telltale-taser-inside-an-epically-stupid-crime <comment><USER2> This incident was mentioned in NPR's latest Planet Money: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/09/310447054/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/09/310447054/episode-538-is- a-stradivarius-just-a-violin)

</comment><comment><USER3> > According to British cultural critic Norman Lebrecht, a violinist in 1960 > could expect to pay about $1,600 for "a fine 19th-century instrument," or > _roughly double his annual salary_.

Emphasis mine.

That seems unlikely to me, $800 over the course of a year?

<comment><USER4> It's not unrealistic --- keep in mind that the collective earnings of an orchestra are not large to begin with. There are great operational expenses, and once those have been taken care of, the remaining money is divided among the members of the orchestra. Keep in mind that playing in an orchestra is not a full-time job, adjust for inflation, and then an annual salary of $800 may even seem generous...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think the author of this piece fully understands the criminal mindset.

Clearly a lot of criminals are retarded idiots, however, there are some that are extremely well read and educated. For reasons of their crime, e.g. if drugs related but without them having ever used violence against others, some 'criminal masterminds' have an outsider view to society, a rejection of capitalism and a dislike of government institutions. Yet at the same time, they might prize certain objects. From having done time they might also have the obsessional way of thinking that goes with spending ten years working out how to steal something that, for reasons of their own, they particularly want.

Plenty of people like to have things that are unobtainable by normal means - 'trophies' that you have to either pay a lot of money for or steal. Things that have to be stolen have a cachet to them that merely very expensive things do not have. Not so recently, in the UK, there was a 'football casual' hooligan scene where the clothes that went with it _had_ to be stolen, buying them, even if the money was available was just not the way to do it if you were to be 'part of the gang'.

My point being that people steal these valuable artworks to sell them simply does not apply in a lot of cases. It might have been in this one particular tale, however, it is to underestimate the tastes and education of 'the criminal' to assume that outrageously valuable things are sold down the pawn shop for a couple of quid.

</comment><comment><USER6> For a person calling themselves "Universal Knowledge Allah" he seemed to lack any.</comment>