Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone!
We're Nick & Omar from Flowdash (https://flowdash.com). We help companies quickly build internal tools to track and execute human-in-the-loop workflows.
We're built specifically for technology companies that have manual work behind the scenes. For example, a fintech that has a beautiful mobile-first experience for its end users, likely also has a risk team internally approving new accounts, or reviewing suspicious transactions for anomalies. These teams need tools to get their jobs done, but building those tools is time consuming and often means spending your limited engineering resources on internal tools when you'd much rather invest in building user-facing features.
What's more, maintenance of these tools is an ongoing endeavor. As the company scales and the operations team identifies ways they can improve their workflow, they're often bottlenecked on engineering availability, forcing the team to implement workarounds in the interim, such as working out of spreadsheets and Slack. These workarounds, while easy to implement, come with pitfalls such as tasks slipping through the cracks or data getting out-of-sync.
With Flowdash, we're combining the best of both worlds. We want to enable the deep integration that comes from building custom software, while making it possible for operations teams to iterate and improve their workflow over time.  We're able to do this because we're not trying to be a general-purpose low-code platform, but really focus on use cases where a team of humans works through a backlog of tasks.
Flowdash was inspired by our own experience. Omar and I were early engineers at Gusto and over the course of six years, built several internal tools to support our payments, risk, and payroll operations teams. We saw first-hand the benefits of equipping our ops teams with great tools, but also struggled to prioritize improvements to these tools against user-facing features.
We think of operations teams as unsung heroes. Their work is critical to the day-to-day operations of the company, yet few people externally know they exist. We want to give them better tools to get their work done.
Here's how it works:
Flowdash's core primitive is a Flow, which we define as a pipeline of work, where tasks move through a set of stages from creation to completion. Every Flow exposes an endpoint where developers can push new tasks with a single POST request. Users then claim tasks and move them along the pipeline. Additionally, actions can be customized in a number of ways, such as sending email, calling a third-party API, or talking back to your main application. Because stages and actions can be customized without code, the end-user can change how they work without requiring engineering intervention. From the developer perspective, you can think of it as a human-powered background job.
As a concrete example, let's consider a fintech onboarding new clients. When a new client signs up, a task is automatically pushed to Flowdash. From there, a risk agent reviews the account and decides whether to Approve or Reject the client. In turn, that action issues a callback to the main application to complete onboarding. Here's a 3-min video setting this up end-to-end: https://flowdash.com/demo.
We're excited (and a little intimidated) to be on HN today, and would love to get your feedback. Have you had to build similar tools? What were some of the pain points or challenges? Thanks in advance!
Nick and Omar <comment><USER3> Good idea, works really well for companies with "established" operations.

However, the missing problem we've found (and are investing significant resources internally to fix) is that, in a lot of situations (especially in a startup), _you don 't actually know what you're doing operationally_ at a detailed enough level to have engineers write code for, or even humans to "do". _You 're learning as you go_, but still need everything in the database as you do so you _can_ automate thing sooner rather than later.

So, automation is still required. But not yet! You need a way for humans to do things, then automation, and back again...on a "flow" (to use your terminology) that is radically changing as you learn.

In our case, new business opportunities require creating and/or updating tens of millions of rows in our Postgres database, but can start out very small as we learn—say, 5000 independent flows.

Oftentimes, we need to temporarily "fix" things that we've already done a lot of work on—again, with a mix of human and compute tasks, depending on what's going on. Those fixes are temporary and we remove them once the data in Postgres is clean.

Another major area is, for lack of a better term, "tech onboarding". There's a lot of work that's effectively one-off, needs to be done at scale, and yet each day it's something different. (Imaging ramping up some service over four weeks—a literal situation we encounter regularly.) Being able to mix human and automation there is again critical, but really no tooling that I'm aware of exists to help with.

Anyway…congrats on the launch. I can definitely see it working for really well-defined operation systems that just need that extra touch of automation to reduce the busy work when humans are inserted into flows.

</comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations on the launch. You are definitely tackling an interesting problem, but I will play a devil's advocate here, because I've spent some time researching similar use-cases for dealing mainly with triage of security & abuse incidents. From the demo, the application seems to be pretty basic, you accept an input and allow users to set actions, take actions, and move tasks through the tasks' life-cycle. You argue that your solution will lower the costs associated with the implementation and maintenance of such applications, but is that really the real added value of your solution for a customer?

In my experience, many teams have already established flows and homebrew solutions that are working "just fine". With your solution in place, how do you convince these type of customers to migrate? Why they should spend time on integrating with your application that offers just fancy manual triage of tasks? You list numerous use-cases which I would say are mission critical (onboarding of customers, triage of risk transactions, etc.) and your solution doesn't really help the operators (=humans) to resolve the problem faster. In my experience, the operators often times have to deal with so called "alarm/alert fatigue", how does your solution helps companies do more with less?

<comment><USER5> Hey! Omar here, co-founder of Flowdash. Thanks for playing devil's advocate, and for so many great questions -- I'll try to take a stab at it, and curious to hear your perspective on it as well.

> but is that really the real added value of your solution for a customer?

It's two-fold: 1/ On the engineering side, there's immediate value in freeing up time that can be used elsewhere. Also, because we've built a lot of the features operations teams would need as they scale (e.g. task assignment, analytics, common integrations), we expect a lot less "feature requests" to make their way back to engineering. 2/ Operators are arguably benefitting even more from Flowdash, as they're able to update how they work on their own. Many operators we've chatted with expressed frustrations from being unable to change their workflow, or having to wait 6+ months for engineering to make simple updates to their tools.

> how do you convince these type of customers to migrate?

Short answer is, it depends. If the current process works well, has no pain points, and requires no new features for the foreseeable future -- why change? However, if business is evolving (or team is growing), that's where the maintenance cost of these tools starts to grow quickly. Companies may find themselves building basic task assignment at first. Then, some sort of audit log for debugging issues. Before you know, you need notes for team collaboration. The team grows a bit more and you have to build analytics, and so on... Our goal is to partner with companies throughout their growth with the features they'll need to keep the business running efficiently.

> your solution doesn't really help the operators (=humans) to resolve the > problem faster

In the demo video, it's not immediately clear how we help operators resolve their problem faster as the API simply talks back to the core application. However, actions can be setup to automate many of the more mundane tasks that operators have to do (e.g. sending email, triggering alerts, generate documents).

> so called "alarm/alert fatigue", how does your solution helps companies do > more with less?

Alert fatigue is real, I'm glad you brought that up. I know it's cliché to say we're the one tool that hopes to bring all the others in a single place... but that's what we're trying to do. For operators, "Work" can originate from many places such as email, slack alerts, another person in the organisation, and so on. Keeping track of all those places makes it hard to be efficient, and also causes things to fall through the cracks. By making it easy to push data into Flowdash from various sources, we want to become the single place where operators have to work from. There's a lot of work to get to that ideal, but that's the vision :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats on the launch guys!

Full disclosure, I worked with Nick and Omar at Gusto. I saw firsthand how much software can help an ops team. Since we didn't have Flowdash at Gusto, we often scrambled for resources to empower our operations team. We also probably could've done a better job responding to user feedback since we were so resource constrained.

Having a tool that the Ops team can truly own is a game-changer for that iterative feedback loop and frees up the eng team. Really looking forward to seeing this product grow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on the launch!

This reminds me of Orchestra by B12 in many ways:

[https://orchestra.b12.io/](https://orchestra.b12.io/)

Do you have any thoughts on how you compare to that solution (besides it being OSS and yourselves a company)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I actually hadn't heard of Orchestra before but will definitely check it out. Have you used it in production before? How was your experience?

<comment><USER7> I've spoken to folks who've used it and spoken positively about it, but not myself.

I'll point them your way, to see if they can share their experiences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi Nick and Omar - excited be this. Synergy with what I am doing at Clause. What to have a chat?

</comment><comment><USER9> Flowdash has really improved our workflows at my job! We use to have a very tedious human in the loop process which is now much faster and more transparent for the entire team. The main benefit has been turning excel spreadsheets into a more defined work flow with a better user interface.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks brilliant!! Have signed up with [https://aidem.network](https://aidem.network) as this is perfect for us and potential my sister company. Was going to use Orchestra by B12 but this is a much better package for us + no code

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for signing up! We tried reaching out but the email bounced. Can you message me directly at nick <at> flowdash <dot> com?

<comment><USER10> That's worrying! Will do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does this compare to Retool?

<comment><USER12> Seems like it provides a business logic backend, which Retool does not, and less customizability on the frontend. You could conceivably use Retool to build a frontend to a backend powered here. e.g. in their demo video instead of a Rails app, you could use Retool for the GUI and API calls instead.

<comment><USER13> They're just different. Retool has a more sophisticated app builder and is much more mature.

Retool can do pretty much everything this thing can do and more. I'm definitely keeping my Retool instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really cool. My one concern is the pricing strategy. I run a really small ridesharing business with sub 500 users, and $25/mo is too steep for me right now. I was extremely excited to start transferring some of my flows over, but the pricing plan killed it.

Can you talk a bit more about your pricing strategy and how you settled on these plans? I may just not be in your target market, in which case - <USER2> understand!

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to provide more details. We settled on our current pricing based on conversations with our early customers. For many of them, the alternative was to build something in-house, so they saw our pricing as pretty affordable when compared to the dev cost to build a custom solution.

That being said, we're pretty early and still iterating on our pricing. If you're up for it, we'd love to learn more about your use case.

<comment><USER14> Sure. What questions do you have? I replied to another comment down below explaining why the pricing model is out of my reach, but I'll copy it here too:

>

I can definitely put down the $25/mo, but if I want to add two people who can help me out that jumps to $75/mo or $900/yr. I'm not at the stage where I can afford to hire employees yet (I'm the only one, and the drivers are contractors), so this would be a big expense for the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your perspective. I can see how per-user pricing doesn't scale well for you.

> What questions do you have? We're curious what specific flows you were > interested in migrating over? Who performs this work today? How does it work > end-to-end? What tools do you use to track the work? If you prefer to > message me privately, my email address is nick <at> flowdash <dot> com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I may be wrong but this is a "MeToo" workflow automation app/engine. It's nothing that can't be done with open source tools, for much less than $400/year per user.

Just research "Open source workflow automation engine" to see it for yourself.

Good luck guys, WORKFLOW AUTOMATION IS A SOLVED PROBLEM!!! You'll make a buck, it's a big pie, but not from everyone.

<comment><USER16> But I think that's he point. This is aimed at non tech teams. It minimises the amount of work the engineers need to do. Using open source solutions doesn't because let's face it an engineer needs to sit down figure out how to install it and they have to maintain it. For example at work we use Wikipedia. That's open source right. It's run on a k8s cluster. Open source! This is not a no- cost solution!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a problem that I'm facing right now, and the solution looks simple and easy to use.

I wonder if anyone has experience to make a comparison with more complex BPMN tools like Camunda and Zeebe? Or with Salesforce plugins like Process Builder? These came up when I looked at more established solutions for the "business process automation" solutions.

Can Flowdash handle fan-out/parallel stages for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I wonder if anyone has experience to make a comparison with more complex > BPMN tools like Camunda and Zeebe? Or with Salesforce plugins like Process > Builder?

I don't have any personal experience with these tools, but am also curious to hear from the HN community here.

> Can Flowdash handle fan-out/parallel stages for example?

Not at this time, but we're adding new features every week. If you're up for it, I'd love to learn more about your use case and how you're evaluating the different options on the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a very interesting solution, and is going after some of my main pain points right now (I operate within a large operationally focused org with about 20,000+ employees). I signed up for early access, would be very interesting to try out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, this sounds like a really cool idea! Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER20> interesting. couldn't this just be done with a popular kanban tool like jira + Zapier?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, simple workflows can be wired up with Jira + Zapier. Tools like Jira are great at tracking work, but the work itself generally happens somewhere else. Our vision is for Flowdash to not only be the place work is tracked, but also where it's performed. We make this happen by providing common building blocks like reading from a database or kicking off a document signing flow and allowing teams to configure them to match their workflows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Congrats, looks really great!!</comment>


Two guys with guns have showdown on first day of Georgia's new law - <AUTHOR> http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/georgia-showdown-guns-everywhere

<comment><USER2> They need a law against brandishing a firearm. Like most states in the US AFAIK. Someone shouldn't have to "point or aim" a gun at you (O.C.G.A. § 16-11-102) to have their license revoked and thrown in jail; it should be enough that the weapon was brandished.</comment>


Top 5 Signs You Are Working with a Cowboy Software Consultant - <AUTHOR> http://metroize.com/cowboy-software-consultant/ <comment><USER2> This article sounds like its discussing a very specific person and not a class of people. I don't see much in the way of solutions other than 'fire the guy', so it sounds like someone needs to vent. We've all been there and either inherited or hired a bad developer. Do you need a hug?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No hugs, but much appreciated.

Definitely an entire class of people. Maybe since I am on the east coast/NYC area there are more cowboys? When I worked in Colorado there seemed less. And when I worked one time (small sample size) there were zero cowboys.

Probably just the culture of the employer.</comment>


What's Good for Apple Is Better for Everyone Else - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2008/06/iphone_smartphones <comment><USER2> Seems a bit short-sighted from the RIM lot. According to the rumours, the iPhone 3G is going to be subject to the same carrier discounts as any other phone. That would totally blow away the BlackBerry's only advantage (price).

Because let's face it, the BlackBerry (I am cursed to be the owner of an 8800 that I completely and thoroughly hate (bought before the iPhone was available)) is really bad when compared to an iPhone. At a similar price, only an idiot would buy the BlackBerry.

<comment><USER3> I mostly agree with you, but I think another benefit of the blackberry is the physical keyboard. After a year (almost) on the iPhone I'm nowhere near as efficient at typing as I used to be on a BlackBerry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> RIM's attitude kind of reminded me of Gandhis quote: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."</comment>


Ask HN: How to get first clients as a freelance consultant? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The BEST way to get your first client is to go to your employer before you leave and get them to hire you on a per job basis. Say you are the best person they have at creating infographics, or rendering using Revit, or whatever, but they do not have enough work to keep you around. Take your skilz and still support your old company while getting new clients.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a recent grad from uni, undergrad. Dont have an employer, and my past internship was in another country</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you recommend giving out equity for legal services? - <AUTHOR>

I've read that Mint gave equity to lawyers in exchange for deferred legal fees [1]. Is that a standard practice? If you have the money, do you recommend investing the money in customer and product development instead of legal services?<p>[1] http://michaelbungartz.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/mint-com-a-step-by-step-guide-to-a-web-startup/ <comment><USER2> I think the issue needs to be decided case-by-case, and it depends on the early-stage legal needs of the startup.

A few thoughts on what to consider:

1\. As indicated by jacquesm, you should never do this where the amount of the equity will cause the attorney to have a conflict in the representation. A rough rule of thumb in the profession is that less than 2% is acceptable for this purpose but I use a less-than-1% measure when I occasionally do these. Very important to keep this part clean.

2\. A deferred-fee deal is based on an extension of credit by the attorney performing early-stage services. For example, the attorney might extend up to $20K in fees prior to the earlier of 6 months or first funding in exchange for, say 0.5% of the company. There is real credit risk associated with this because, if the company fails, the attorney has no recourse except against a dead entity. In such a context, it might make sense for a founding group to want to do such an arrangement to avoid having to require members of the founding team to pay their share of such fees and to cut the risks of the formation and company launch.

3\. Given the rationale in point 2 for when this might make sense, there are various situations where it obviously does not: (a) where the company does not expect to have too much in the way of early-stage fees (e.g., if it will incur incorporation expenses and not too much more in the early phases, particularly where it will not be going for outside funding - in such a case, the anticipated legal expenses at this stage may be a low as a few thousand dollars); (b) where the deal among the founding team assumes one lead founder will advance such costs and the lead founder is willing and able to do so; (c) where a sole founder is willing to incur the early costs and can comfortably do so; and (d) where a founding team is willing to incur the up-front costs among themselves and does not want to give up the equity.

The prototypical case where deferred fees make sense is a founding team going out quickly for VC funding. This is the "big firm" model. In such cases, unless the founders are serial entrepreneurs or otherwise quite capable of paying the rather high up-front fees of such firms, they should at least seriously consider doing a deferred-fee deal. In all other cases, do so only with caution, as the deferred-fee arrangement often makes no sense for the startup (I can say this from the attorney side as well).

General rule: always consider it as an option but be careful before entering into such a deal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Definitely not. Mint did it, it worked for them but there is a very good reason not to go this road. As the proverb says 'a lawyer representing his own interests has a fool for a client'.

By having your legal representative be a part of your business you may skip a bit on legal fees, but in the end the lawyer may not have the exact expertise that a certain situation requires, may be required to represent both the company _and_ himself, will not have the distance required to keep his head cool, or will always be in a conflict of interest situation and so on.

It's a recipe for trouble.

Legal advice is best contracted out on a per-case basis.

Maybe Grellas or some other legal eagle on here can comment on what they think of that, this is just my $0.02.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty standard in SV (the #'s mentioned by Mint are market).</comment>


Keyringless GnuPG - <AUTHOR> https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/08/09/ <comment><USER2> Looks like this does signing but not encryption. Assuming I'm not missing anything: Is anyone planning on adding the encryption side of things?

</comment><comment><USER3> To me, this is another example of functional vs object oriented styles of programming.

signify is essentially a pure function. It carries no state and the output is purely a function of its inputs (and a bunch of internal constants).

GnuPG (and indeed music players) are stateful. To some, it may be irritating to build up that state to do something simple. OTOH, that state is useful if it's a cache hit and it's annoying to repeatedly pass the same parameters (i.e., you want to repeatedly do a bunch of ops against the same identity you've imported).

It's usually easier to write a functional core and wrap it in something stateful (by currying the arguments) rather than the trying to do the reverse as the author is doing here.

<comment><USER4> It can still be useful if it's a means to an end, a goad.

One bit of advice I give is that if the code doesn't work the way you want then one option is to pretend. If you can emulate a better interface using the existing code, then you can start making the lie true later on.

But it does require that this section of the code be something that will receive ongoing attention for some time. You will have to amortize those changes over a lot of stories. Otherwise it's a bad candidate for the technique and you will get the Lavaflow antipattern along with unnecessary indirection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This passphrase2pgp thing is really neat!

Also sequoia PGP supports the kind of one-off signature verification the author does with simplegpg:

sq verify --public-key-file keyname.asc message.txt

I'd be curious to hear what the author thinks of that project

</comment><comment><USER6> Somewhat off-topic: Are there any efforts to add signify/minisign support to git?

</comment><comment><USER7> See also the "gpgv" and "symcryptrun" tools included in GnuPG:

[https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/gpgv.html#gpgv](https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/gpgv.html#gpgv)

[https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/symcryptrun.ht...](https://gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/symcryptrun.html#symcryptrun)

</comment><comment><USER8> Great advertisement on why you should just use signify instead

</comment><comment> awinter-py > GnuPG is like a media player

sign me up</comment>


Ask HN: How to come up with a domain name if all options are already taken? - <AUTHOR> I have an internet business idea, but all domains I tried are either taken or cost premium. Does it make sense to go with a random name and then compensate the lack of a good name with heavy SEO/promotion? It's kind of depressing not being able to move past this point. <comment><USER2> As long as a domain name is easy enough to be remembered (so that you can visit it without clicking a link), the name doesn't really matter. The origin of businesses' names are a nice anecdote, but they hardly decide over success (unless the name is offensive in other languages). Google is an example where the name is very easy to remember whereas the connection of the name and the search business is not very intuitive to most.

So choose a word that people can remember and know how to write, but it doesn't have to be connected to the nature of your business.

</comment><comment><USER3> For most businesses, the name won't be the determining factor of success or failure. I'd focus on the product, and understanding the needs of your customers, and worry about the name later. If your idea has legs, there should be ample opportunity to secure a name prior to when the vast majority of your customers hear about you. Also - happy to help you screen domain name ideas if you'd like another set of eyes. Contact info in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have reached the end of the internet. There are no further links. What you are searching for can not be found, or may no longer exist.

</comment><comment><USER5> Are you willing to share the niche/product? Perhaps others might be able to come up with name ideas you've missed.

I'm skeptical that all good names are taken and/or expensive. After all, the name doesn't have to be descriptive or a dictionary word, it could just be something that rings out as a brand name.</comment>


America's Sudden U-Turn on Highway Fonts - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/01/official-united-states-highway-sign-font-clearview/427068/ <comment><USER2> Wayfinding Sans Pro [1] & [2] from Rulf Herrmann looks like it would be good. It's quirky but with a purpose, to lessen ambiguity by exaggerating unique qualities of a glyph under harsh visibility [not seen it in action on highways in the dark] but will say the current Clearview has something to be desired. In the rain at night letters merge and become hard to distinguish from similar letters [lower case i looks like it could be lower case l under some lighting conditions, for example, if there isn't an l to contrast it with]

[1][http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a- signag...](http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signage- typeface/)

[2][http://www.fonts.info/store/index.php/en/fonts/wayfinding- sa...](http://www.fonts.info/store/index.php/en/fonts/wayfinding-sans.html)

<comment><USER3> Blurring the sign digitally to simulate how it might looks at night, under reflection and in bad weather is a darn good idea.

I suspect that the thinner strokes of Highway Gothic would fare better in this test than the thicker Clearsign. When we look at the "Expressway" image in your [1] reference, the difference between the top and bottom is reminiscent of Hwy. Gothic versus Clearsign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I prefer Clearview, but it was disappointing to learn that it's [essentially] a public work and yet it's proprietary and requires jurisdictions to license the typeface.

<comment><USER5> The whole font licensing situation is out of control.

It's a mix of creative interpretations of the law and rent-seeking on typeface designs that are a hundred years old (Akzidenz Grotesk, the basis for every Helvetica-like), or 300 years old in the case of Caslon.

Remember that in a lot of countries (the US included) typefaces are specifically excluded from being copyrightable due to their usefulness to the public; they can of course, be trademarked, but it's completely legal to trace any font you like and call it something else. In a nice bit of corporate welfare, it was decided that _font files_ fall under copyright in 1992.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This led me to this interesting Wikipedia page listing public signage fonts: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_signage_typefac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_signage_typefaces)

<comment><USER7> Lots of info seems to be missing. This seems a bit better: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_European_road_si...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_European_road_signs#Different_typefaces_in_texts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _small change that has huge implications for the nation._

Waaay overstated.

Anyway, they should just pick the fonts out of this:

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

I learned about this via HN some time ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8302529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8302529) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7809626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7809626) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6117593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6117593)

</comment><comment><USER8> Meanwhile we get huge electronic billboards that switch advertisements every few seconds. They initially hurt my eyes to even look at them, but it seems they've "detuned" them in recent years. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER9> New Transport Pro in the UK is such a nice font and I'm glad we have it.

Even the government homepage gov.uk uses it

</comment><comment><USER10> itt and in the article, everyone talks about legibility etc but nobody points to any study (or even pictures) on how those fonts compare under low conditions (night, rain, not illuminated, headlight full on)

usability is about the 5% cases. in broad day light the fonts only compare in a matter of personal taste.

<comment><USER11> I don't think low conditions have anything to do with the fonts per se.

<comment><USER12> yes they would, if a font is more readable, it's more readable. And you can test it measuring recognition time and distance. And you can test in the sub optimal conditions mentioned, just like you could test readability on sub optimal substrates, resolution, degradation etc. It's not easy, but it's testable. i would like to see these articles accompanied by some in car photos of the signs being visible, where their conclusion is shown.

<comment><USER11> The most readable font on a matte surface won't perfom as good as a not-so- readable font on a reflective surface during a rainy night. So, again, it's more an issue with the material, not the type. As long as they don't use, say, palace script.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Want to share my newsletter with HN readers - <AUTHOR> There's been a lot of talk on HN recently about missing the personal blogs and interesting musings of the old web, so I believe I have something of value to share with the HN community.
I've been a long-time lurker in the HN community and really enjoy the diversity of thought and ideas. Like many of you, I'm an incredibly curious person and enjoy thinking about things from a critical lens and new points of view.
I run a newsletter called Thinking About Things that consists of an email every other day with a link to an article about something interesting, in a myriad of different topics. Its goal is to allow people to think about things in ways they hadn't before. You can see the website [0] and a sample of previous articles [1] for more info. I don't make any money off of this newsletter - I do it for the thrill of sharing and contributing new ideas with hundreds of other people. They are generally articles by lesser-known bloggers who are very interesting to read.
Readers of HN are exactly the target audience of this newsletter, people who care and are excited about new ideas. If you do sign up, I'd very much love to hear comments and feedback - you can reach me by replying to the emails.
If this sounds like something you'd enjoy, you can sign up here [2]. I hope you find it interesting!
[0] thinking-about-things.com
[1] mix.com/thinkingaboutthings
[2] thinking-about-things.com/subscribe <comment><USER2> It's impossible to underestimate the degree to which curation is becoming the differentiator in the digital economy. Those who can be trusted to provide valuable content from the fire hose of all that's available on the internet will become the new information brokers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get Thinking About Things and am frequently astonished at the breadth of topics you cover. How in the world do you find all of these articles?

</comment><comment><USER4> Make one newsletter public so people can see what it is all about before they sign in.</comment>


State found $117k in double payments through data analytics - <AUTHOR> https://www.routefifty.com/finance/2019/12/ohio-found-117000-double-payments-through-data-analytics/161747/ <comment><USER2> All things being equal, catching $117k in double payments sounds great.

I'm curious of it's a net win, though, once all the costs (and benefits) are considered.

<comment><USER3> I'm wondering the same thing. $117K out of what total?

<comment><USER4> So the article is a bit confusing, as it says in a year the state processes over 18 million dollars in transactions.

However the pilot program only analyzed transactions from Jan to Sept. For all state agencies (which seems impressive from an aggregation and governance stand point). With in that time period it found 117k in duplicates, so assuming that dollar/transactions are at a constant rate through out the year (they aren't).

117,000/(18,000,000 * (8/12)) ~ .975 % loss in state to vendor(?) transactions.

Put another way, with in the time period they studied assuming 12 million dollars in transactions were made, they can potentially recuperate roughly 1% of the total value transacted.

<comment><USER5> They process 18 million transactions per year, total, not 18 million dollars of transactions. And they only found 56 duplicates, i.e. a 0.0004% rate. (56 / (18e6 * 8/12))

For comparison there's a Kaggle dataset of 2 days of European credit card transactions from 2013. It contains 284k transactions of which 0.147% are fraudulent.

This 1000x difference can either be good since it means the state is mostly paying appropriately or bad since the detection is not as good as the credit card company's.

<comment><USER4> >18 million payment transactions

god damnit you're right. whoops

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A recent Masters graduate trained in data science with Pandas, and also accounts payable work experience, got hired very very fast on good terms when the hiring department found out how facile and fast the Pandas python approach was to finding duplicate or other problematic payments. Maybe the novelty will wear off, but right now, this is absolutely practical.

<comment><USER7> Would love to see this skill set put to work automating away a lot of accounting functions. I know too many accountants (Controllers, specifically) doing mind numbing work.

<comment><USER8> The mind numbing work is what give them a salary to provide for their families. They might not like unemployment as an alternative.

I've met certified accountants whose daily job was to take an excel spread sheet, add 1% to every cell with a number, then return to the client. It's not automated but not because it can't be automated.

<comment><USER7> Automation is coming regardless. Political and economic systems must adapt to soften the blow. People will need to find purpose and meaning elsewhere than a job that can be automated. I suggest family, community, and self development, but to each their own.

As a disclaimer, I have recently become enchanted with automating accounting work due to hearing about the problems accounting functions face. I'm a tad biased.

<comment><USER8> You'd think that but nope. Well, not as quickly or as strongly as one would anticipate.

Large banks, automated trading shops and assimilated have automation, because it's their jobs. Other things don't.

Recruiting chartered accountant is easy and cheap. Recruiting developers that can deliver is not as easy or as cheap. Bear in mind that it's not a tech environment so no source control in place, no servers to deploy to, won't be easy to execute.

<comment><USER7> Okay. I'm still going to take a crack at it, working in tech within finance. Worst case scenario, I fail and have a story to tell.

<comment><USER8> I worked in finance too, trading platforms in investment banks and prop trading shops. There hasn't been accountants there for a long time. Places that still rely on manual labor are a very different kind.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. In those cases, where the business is stubborn, you might have to consume the entire business [1] [2] to be able to enact automation in the underlying functions. That's also the question, right? What tools can you develop (Similar to Brex and Stripe) that make it exceedingly more simple for upstarts to compete against the entrenched? If I can't sell to your internal divisions, maybe I go get some VC and compete against your whole business. Lots of margin hiding as inefficiencies in the economy still, just have to go get it.

Give me a lever long enough.

[1] [https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the- world...](https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/)

[2] [https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/software-is-eating-the- wor...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/software-is-eating-the- world-5-years-later/)

<comment><USER8> Remind me, saw a fintech company with almost a billion in VC funding earlier this year. Basically a bank doing loans.

The whole business was based low cost labor taking whole days to evaluate stuff manually and write risk reports. Crazy thing is they were hiring loads of developers and data scientists, but the core of the business is all manual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know the comments are all "how much money did they spend to find $117K in duplicate payments" and I am one of them. But if this system helps in identifying process/audit flaws then its a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this mean the state isn't SOX compliant? I thought reconciliation was a requirement

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(accounting)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_\(accounting\))

<comment><USER11> Are states required to be in the first place?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> which begs the question: "how much did the data analytics cost?"

</comment><comment><USER13> SELECT TransactionID, Amount, COUNT(*) FROM Transactions GROUP BY TransactionID, Amount

I'll take 10% of savings

<comment><USER14> HAVING COUNT(*) > 2;

I'll take 9% );

<comment><USER13> HAVING COUNT(*) >= 2;

Back to 10%

<comment><USER15> Add a date field or you might get legitimate duplicates if the payment amounts are the same across months.

<comment><USER16> They shouldn't have the same transactionID then, no?

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't think so. Each transaction ID would represent a unique transaction?

>Other double payments made by mistake included times that the state received multiple invoices.

I would assume each paid invoice was a new transaction ID. The real problem seems like there are two invoices being paid. Not that there are two transactions (which seems like just a symptom). It's possible that each invoice even has it's own ID.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ordinary, awesome people - real hanging out - <AUTHOR> http://awesomepeoplehangingouttogether.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Stop working so hard, let's hang out damn it!</comment>


Born Red: Profile of Xi Jinping - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/born-red <comment><USER2> Did this jump out at anyone?

> he praised the creation of a holiday dedicated to the Second World War: > "Victory Day of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese > Aggression."

Is explicitly calling out Japan (or other countries) typical for contemporary Chinese propaganda? From my understanding, relations between China and Japan are not exactly friendly, but this seems a step towards inoculating the population with a villain-like image of Japan (if it does not exist already). What with praising Putin vis-a-vis Ukraine, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and Japan's increasing offensive military capability, I hope this isn't setting the stage for a horrific showdown in the future.

<comment><USER3> China has a nasty opinion of what Japan did to them during WWII, largely because of the nasty things that Japan did to them during WWII.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I dislike the sensationalist title, which is not really supported in the article. But the article itself is quite detailed, and have many interesting insights.

While most of the issues mentioned in the article are not new, the tightening of the Internet is quite worrisome. Based on online comments, GFW is still passable through most VPN, although some have stopped working (banned presumably). I hope this is just a temporary crackdown instead of a growing trend, because it will be a serious blow to the economy and academia, and a step toward becoming North Korea.

And back to personality cult thing, I don't think Xi enjoys as much support as the article claimed. I mean, of course you only hear good things about him from Chinese media, because talking badly about the leader is generally done in private, which is the case for all the leaders before him.

<comment><USER5> First, it is misinterpretation to say "personality cult thing". Xi does has much stronger support than Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. There have been endless mockeries towards Hu and Jiang in the Internet. You won't find many towards Xi. People may disagree with Xi and voice their opposition. But they won't mock him. That is a big difference.

Xi get more accepted and supported largely because he is open to new ideas. As mentioned in the article, Xi doesn't believe in implementing democracy in China in present days. His stance is not because he was told so, but from his studying and understanding of democracy and China. One might disagree with him, but one might have to admit he does have some valid points.

Second, it is very easy to bypass GFW in China. There are many tools available in the Internet. It requires only basic knowledge on Internet. The young generations have no problem in browsing websites in western countries if they really want to.

<comment><USER6> Someone flagkill this. All this is blatant lie.

<comment><USER5> Wow. Could you provide your arguments instead of calling them lies?

<comment><USER6> > There have been endless mockeries towards Hu and Jiang in the Internet. You > won't find many towards Xi. People may disagree with Xi and voice their > opposition. But they won't mock him.

Of course you won't see people mocking him on the surface. The regime has cracked down on pretty much all criticism on him.

> Xi get more accepted and supported largely because he is open to new ideas

This is where the hypocrisy lies. On the surface he poses to be "open" while below the surface his regime cracks down on media and tightens up control on videos/animation/publication. Also, propaganda on his "merits" are way over the top -- just short of Mao's.

> it is very easy to bypass GFW in China. There are many tools available in > the Internet. It requires only basic knowledge on Internet. The young > generations have no problem in browsing websites in western countries if > they really want to

Lie. GFW just attacked GitHub. And AFAIK GFW is getting harder and harder to bypass every single day. The regime cuts off Google services (and throttles/cuts VPN connections) for no reason every now and then even when all you do is checking your inbox.

\---

And to you, presumably a 50-cent, [citation needed].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if it's fair to compare him to Mao, as Mao's reputation is pretty bad in the west. The general feel of this article is like: oh, he's pretty cool, well, anti-corruption, but controlling, and take his job really seriously, just like HITLER! Whut...

But this article has very good details though. I enjoyed reading it.

<comment><USER8> Mao's reputation is mixed in mainland China, too. For more than 150 years, the big and powerful nation state of mind and the weakness in reality stay as a main force behind many things we see. It's a good starting point for reasoning many issues in China. And for me as a Chinese, it's a big negative sign before anything organically good could happen back home.

<comment><USER9> Ask any Chinese person and they will tell you: Mao was 70% right, 30% wrong. This is the official party line taught in schools.

<comment><USER8> Well, I translated what you said into Chinese in my mind and get what those Chinese really said. In Chinese, we often use 70% and 30% as a way to indicate both sides exist but the 70% part comes with more weight. It's not to say that is exactly 70%. Their original words are probably like this: 毛主席七分功,三分过。 Just to make this expression more clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Off-topic: as a paying newyorker.com subscriber I resent the fact that the _New Yorker_ uses page-covering video ads, and I resent the fact that they're incompetently implemented even more (they're borked on mobile devices that are zoomed or in landscape mode).

<comment><USER11> No disagreement on crappy readability and accessibility. Never an excuse for that, it's just dumb, bad to users and even bad for business.

But if you're implying 'shouldn't get ads' because you pay... I can get a sub at $4 a month. Don't think that quite covers costs. So I can certainly imagine how they'd still show me ads even if I pay and accept that. The sub is geared not for removal of ads, but rather the option of reading more than the limited few articles a month you can read for free. (which is extremely easy to circumvent as they have no login system but that's another story).

<comment><USER10> I'm happy -- well, not incensed -- to get ads that are well-implemented.

I'm paying $4/month and purposely chose not to get a physical copy (which was offered for free). It's depressing if I'm not covering their costs and then some.

The New Yorker's online ads are increasingly obtrusive, including ads in the article body that are seemingly designed to be clicked accidentally (which doesn't benefit the advertiser).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Xi's nickname is known as "慶豐包" -- qingfeng Bun

</comment><comment><USER6> To all the 50-cent trash downvoters here: you guys suck.

EDIT: funny how this get downvoted in a minute.

</comment><comment><USER13> In all of that text, I couldn't find why he's supposedly "china's most authoritarian leader since Mao," other than a discussion of him trying to limit corruption in local government, which is a massive problem in China. If anything, this seems like a fluff piece trying keep in step with the "evil, scary China" narrative.

<comment><USER14> _the "evil, scary China" narrative_

A friend is studying journalism. Last week he told me about 90% of western media on China follows that narrative, and around 30% of international headlines in recent months have been about China. Sad. Then again, media in China on the west is not exactly impartial and well researched, either.

<comment><USER15> I kinda start to think is this article related to people Xi trying to crack down in China. Very similar to pervious Bloomberg stories, the sources and timings are very suspicious. Not saying the story is false or anything.

<comment><USER16> Not sure if paid shill or just biased?

The Bloomberg article was about the wealth amassed by Xi's extended family.[1] This New Yorker piece cites an article by Geremie Barme which points out that of the 48 highest-profile corruption cases, none were targeted at "second- generation reds" (aka princelings)[2]. Note that the very high profile case of corrupt princeling Bo Xilai was just prior to Xi's appointment. The ostensible anti-corruption crusade embarked on afterward was targeted at scapegoat officials "from 'commoner' 平民 families." Indeed, Barme's article quotes numerous princeling Party officials extolling the inherent virtue of "bureaucrats from the Red Second Generation" and their naturally-born resistance to vice and corruption (Bo Xilai is an exceedingly rare anomaly). Instead, the real danger is "Bureaucrats who come from extreme poverty in youth easily fall prey to vile excesses of corruption, whoring and gambling."

> _It goes with saying that, in the murky corridors of Communist power, an > impressive number of party gentry progeny, or the offspring of the Mao-era > nomenclatura, have been implicated in corrupt practices, but word has it > that, like the well-connected elites of other climes, they've enjoyed a > 'soft landing ': being discretely relocated, shunted into delicate > retirement or quietly 'redeployed'. It's all very comfy; and it's all very > much business as usual._

1\. [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/xi- jinping...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/xi-jinping- millionaire-relations-reveal-fortunes-of-elite)

2\. [https://www.thechinastory.org/2014/10/tyger-tyger-a- fearful-...](https://www.thechinastory.org/2014/10/tyger-tyger-a-fearful- symmetry/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you handling sales tax for your SaaS sales? - <AUTHOR> The Supreme Court recently overturned Quill [1, 2], which opened up for states collecting sales tax from remote sellers.
The states are responding to this in various ways, but at least HI, LA, UT, and WA now claim the right to assess sales tax on remote SaaS sales when total revenue in the state exceeds $100k OR 200 transactions (the thresholds SD had set as part of the Supreme Court case).
1. If you bill monthly and assuming each bill counts as a transaction then you pass the second threshold after only 17 customers, even if the revenue is modest. E.g. $5-10/mo => $1000-2000, meaning $50-200 in sales tax.
This is in stark contrast to the text in the Supreme Court decision [2]: "The Act applies only to sellers who engage in a significant quantity of business in the State, and respondents are large, national companies that undoubtedly maintain an extensive virtual presence." - looks like the Supreme Court were thinking $100k _AND_ 200tx not OR.
2. With regular e-commerce you always have a shipping address, and this makes the sales tax location reasonably clear. With SaaS there's usually at best a billing address, but with e.g. PayPal you may not even be collecting that. Does that mean we have to start collecting the location of the buyer? And what about existing subscriptions in unknown locations? Do we have to email people to confirm their locations? And what about those who don't respond?
3. Sales tax rates and rules are varied and changing, so using a service provider seems unavoidable. However, they charge an arm and a leg. While developer time is mostly a one-off, it still feels like the direct cost to our business will be a significant fraction of the sales tax collected.
What is your SaaS company doing about sales tax?
1: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2018/jun/supreme-court-sales-tax-decision-201819203.html
2: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf <comment><USER2> We started doing this a year or two ago. We collect postal code (not full billing address) and pass it through to a vendor that calculates how much tax needs to be collected. The vendor also calculates for us how much needs to be sent to which tax collecting entity at what times, which is handy.

We've always collected billing postal codes from our users, so we didn't have to worry about starting to do that - we just sent them an email informing them that at their next renewal we'd begin charging sales tax.

I think for REALLY old subscriptions where we didn't have that info we may have just treated them as being in non-taxable locations, but don't quote me on that. You might want to consult a tax lawyer.

We measured the effect on renewal rates. It was difficult to tell how many cancellations were due to the tax vs how many due to being reminded they had subscriptions they hadn't realized they were still paying for (our interpretation leaned toward the latter).</comment>


Social From the Ground Up - <AUTHOR> http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/405

<comment><USER2> Interesting... so if, say, the diaspora guys want to apply to YC, will that create a conflict of interest?

<comment><AUTHOR> Zuckerberg himself donated to Diaspora, so I don't think he'd care.

You're not going to see a startup get accepted that is essentially a competitor to Facebook -- it's too late for that. Even if it were, this partnership would give them the chance to know about the startup and acquire it long before it becomes a threat.

<comment><USER3> _You're not going to see a startup get accepted that is essentially a competitor to Facebook -- it's too late for that._

Really? In the recent video of Scoble interviewing pg pg mentioned that yc funded a privacy-oriented social network company that failed.

So I don't think a facebook competitor is out of the realm of yc funding.</comment></comment></comment>


Of the biggies who uses Ruby? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> <http://www.workingwithrails.com/high-profile-organisations> yell.com is also pretty high profile, but not listed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rails is not Ruby.

<comment><USER3> You got that wrong: ruby is not Rails, but Rails is ruby.

Meaning: any app using Rails is using ruby, so this list matches. OTOH, any app using ruby doesn't necessarily use Rails, so the other way around wouldn't work.

Working with Rails is a subset of what the OP was asking.</comment></comment></comment>


Did Evernote remove all references to 2fa from forums after they got hacked? - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=evernote+2fa&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB503GB503&aq=f&oq=evernote+2fa&aqs=chrome.0.57j60l3j0l2.2228&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

<comment><USER2> It's unclear. Some of the search results don't work, but this one does: [http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/20932-two-factor- authen...](http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/20932-two-factor- authentication/)

<comment><USER3> The top search result (for me) is [http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/24995-security-two- fact...](http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/24995-security-two-factor- authentication-please/)

which appears to have been merged with a thread to create

[http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/35674-two-step- authenti...](http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/35674-two-step- authentication-eg-via-google-authenticator-and-encryption/)

If you check Google's cache you'll see that this post is the opening post of the missing page:

[http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/35674-two-step- authenti...](http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/35674-two-step- authentication-eg-via-google-authenticator-and-encryption/?p=132143)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Cwstq1...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Cwstq1thYdgJ:discussion.evernote.com/topic/24995-security- two-factor-authentication-please/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER4> Ah, interesting. Maybe a case where a 301 could have removed all ambiguity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Better link: [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adiscussion.evernote.c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adiscussion.evernote.com+2fa)

</comment><comment><USER6> At a former company (which has since gone out of business) I met some people who loved Evernote.

One was an administrator who cheerfully kept confidential details about the security of our corporate network in it without once reading the Evernote TOS or considering the consequences if those TOS changed.

Even after I explained that those TOS clearly violated several parts of his employment agreements, he continued to use it. He didn't think there was anything wrong since our CFO also kept a lot of sensitive information in it...

</comment><comment><USER7> Hmm.. As a site owner I try not to jump to conspiracy conclusions, as I've certainly been on the receiving end of enough of them due to random coincidences and such. That said, this does indeed seem odd. Did you try posting a question in their forums about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Me also but have regularly checked their 2fa threads because it's a feature I'm interested in so was surprised to see them gone so soon after the hack. As you say, could be unrelated.

Haven't posted a question no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did they tell how they get hacked?

<comment><USER9> Would probably would have been SQL injection, given what was leaked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No. If anything, they pulled all the different references into a single thread.

</comment><comment><USER11> Evernote: We're Adding Two-Factor Authentication

<http://goo.gl/NiAAm></comment>


After 15 months, Windows 8 has sold 100 million fewer copies than Windows 7 did - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/02/13/15-months-windows-8-sold-100-million-fewer-copies-windows-7 <comment><USER2> First 15 months sales:

* Windows 8: 200 million

* Windows 7: 300 million

* Windows Vista: ~128 million

* Windows XP: ~120 million (based on an IDC estimate, as Microsoft released few early sales figures for XP).

It looks to me like Windows 7 was the anomaly: a stronger PC market at the time, and 8+ years worth of computers running XP looking for an upgrade. Vista was not a realistic option mainly due to a lack of drivers at release, much higher system requirements, and absurd pricing-- up to $359 for a boxed copy. By the time Windows 7 came out, manufacturers had gotten around to creating the Vista drivers that'd also work in 7, computers that would've been sluggish in Vista could easily run 7, and the price of the OS was slashed.

Getting people and businesses to upgrade again when they just did so in the past few years is a tougher sell. The hardware available at the release of Windows 8 was pretty un-exciting too, which probably contributed to 2013's record-breaking decline in PC sales overall. Only in the past 3-4 months have the updated models from most manufacturers made it into stores -- touchscreens, new form factors and doubled battery life -- reasons for people to actually want to buy a new PC.

<comment><USER3> Windows 7 is not an anomaly, the OS sales numbers should be on an increasing trend. Windows 8 is the anomaly that is comparable to the failure of Vista. I am pretty sure that they could have achieved a sales better than Windows 7, if the product was really compelling.

Unlike in the past, the OS upgrade cycle has shortened considerably thanks to mobile devices. People don't really mind upgrading their OS even though Windows users might be more reluctant than others. But I am sure that the Windows 8 user interface changes are the real reason why most people would not even want to upgrade.

<comment><USER4> Why should OS sales numbers be on increasing trend when PC shipment is on decreasing trend?

<comment><USER5> Said trend may be partly explained by Windows 8.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently bought the first Windows computer I have had in years. It came with Windows 8. What a disaster. In a few days I upgraded to Windows 8.1 which made things a bit better. You can right click on a start menu button and pretty much get a much reduced functional start menu and boot into desktop mode by default.

I'm glad Microsoft is backtracking on this. What they did was bold, but the product they forced down everyone's throat was just so terrible. Maybe it was innovative, but so much functionality and customizability was stripped. The Windows Store is a joke. I hate metro apps, I hate that Skype is a metro app, it's the only one I use and it bugs me that I can't put it on the desktop somewhere. I just want metro to go away forever.

Luckily under the hood is still that vaunted desktop Windows from old. It just needs to come back as soon as possible.

<comment><USER7> Could you explain what it is that you actually hate about Windows 8? I keep on seeing this sentiment and I just don't get it. I've been using it since it was released and it just feels like 7 with a flatter desktop and a different start menu. I get that a lot of people lost their minds when there wasn't a button that you could click to get to the start menu but since that's been added in 8.1 if you want to completely ignore the new UI you pretty much can.

Is it just the fact that things have changed that causes all the hate or is there some rational explanation that I'm completely missing? You're right the Windows Store is pretty feeble but if you hate it's easy to ignore.

<comment><USER6> Death by a thousand cuts.

What I hate is moving my mouse to the corner by accident during a DayZ fire fight and windows charms covering up my screen.

What I hate about Windows 8 is having 3 or 4 different settings panes.

What I hate about Windows 8 is having to relearn how to open up settings.

What I hate about Windows 8 is that it has two kinds of applications, from apparently two different universes and they can't interact, or if they can I can't figure it out. I just pretend one of them doesn't exist.

What I hate about Windows 8 is that I have to right click on start button.

What I hate about Windows 8 is that if I want to hit a keyboard short cut that requires the windows key and I make a mistake I'm looking at the Metro screen.

When it comes to Metro I hate everything about it, including the little tiny arrow on the bottom right that brings up a second start menu like thing. The little label-less arrows that take you to some kind of app view that's littered with every exe on the computer and scrolls horizontally. Have you seen the way the windows selection charm works? You drag your mouse into the top corner, then drag down to see all the open applications, this list also includes metro applications. The Windows 8 search thing is not even remotely as good as the old Windows 7 search in the start menu and it's only available in metro.

I can go on but I'm tired of being angry and annoyed.

<comment><USER7> > What I hate is moving my mouse to the corner by accident during a DayZ fire > fight and windows charms covering up my screen.

Turn off corner navigation.

> What I hate about Windows 8 is that it has two kinds of applications, from > apparently two different universes and they can't interact, or if they can I > can't figure it out. I just pretend one of them doesn't exist.

Metro and desktop applications can and do happily interact, I don't understand what you mean here.

> What I hate about Windows 8 is that I have to right click on start button

Why do you have to? You get a menu if you do but you don't have to, you used to get a menu if you right clicked the start button in Windows 7

> You drag your mouse into the top corner, then drag down to see all the open > applications, this list also includes metro applications.

Just use Alt-Tab it works like it always has, you don't even need to see Metro

> The Windows 8 search thing is not even remotely as good as the old Windows 7 > search

Here I have to respectfully disagree, IMHO the search in 8 is way better than in 7

Without wanting to make you even more angry and annoyed every one of the other issues seems to basically boil down to things have changed a bit and I don't like change.

<comment><USER8> There are whole host of stupid defaults. It ridiculous to say "just turn them off" or adjust that setting.

Installing Linux on a laptop recently was a pain thanks to the secure boot nonsense, but I got there. Using windows while before getting it installed was terrible. There is a whole load of unintuitive stuff (closing a fullscreen app by dragging it down? That's obvious!).

It takes 3 or 4 actions to shut the computer down if I remember correctly - find the charm menu, click it, click shutdown, confirm. There are some gestures (I still don't know what) that flip between the start menu and the app you are on. So you end up clicking an app in the start menu, moving to the part of the screen you want to click, and trigger the gesture t go back to the start menu. The whole experience was awful (and I was only really using the computer for surfing the web for articles about dual booting Linux with secure boot).

One thing I am really enjoying about Linux just now, is that no matter what crap gets shoved onto the latest and greatest desktop, I can choose a different one. Xfce is currently very nice. Feels like what windows XP did.

<comment><USER9> > "Installing Linux on a laptop recently was a pain thanks to the secure boot > nonsense, but I got there."

Is it easier if you just temporarily remove the HDD, boot the laptop, get thrown into the UEFI settings, remove the unwanted crypto key, then put the HDD back in again? I was thinking about doing that the last time someone asked me to install Linux on their secureboot laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Windows 7 was the first compelling upgrade of Windows in over eight years, it pretty much works, and it was a necessary upgrade to properly take advantage of 64 bit computing.

Windows 8 is a customer-hostile mess that adds very little to the Windows 7 formula.

<comment><USER11> > and it was a necessary upgrade to properly take advantage of 64 bit > computing.

Huh? I ran Windows XP x64 Edition with no problems before Vista even arrived.

<comment><USER12> A LOT of drivers were not available for xp 64, otherwise you are right, it was just fine.

<comment><USER10> Yep, hence why I qualified it with _properly._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kind of misleading. Let us not forget that people were coming from the shitshow that was Vista (before all the service packs / hotfixes were applied) or XP if they didn't get Vista. The latter made people long overdue for an overhaul.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well there is also no need to upgrade for a lot of people. A dual core/quad core computer with windows 7 it can run office, media, and the internet perfectly fine and pretty fast. This is what most people use computer for. So Windows 8 need not be bad for it not to be purchased it is just that it is not needed.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not sure how widespread this is, but in my own experience businesses are actively avoiding buying or upgrading to Windows 8.

<comment><USER16> A lot of businesses jumped from XP to 7. Maybe Microsoft has a chance to hold on to them if 9 isn't garbage. Scarily, I also see a possibility that business start jumping ship to Apple, Ubuntu and/or some Google ChromeOS offering on the desktop, and Active Directory, Exchange, and MSSQL servers the last remnants of Microsoft operating systems in the enterprise.

Granted, I think it's a slim chance, and I might be crazy.

<comment><USER17> Apple, yes (through BYO and the iPhone/iPad trojan horses). The rest, probably not. Any large business with an IT department worth its salt would steer well clear of "supportless" nonstandard oddities like ChromeOS.

<comment><USER16> But a googleOS that just connects to google services, supplimented with a few apps? I could see that making headway in small businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think these numbers are a testament to how good Windows 7 is. There was definitely a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista, but, with Windows 7 being so good, Windows 8 is a tough sell for some consumers.

In my experience, Windows 7 has been more stable than Windows 8. For average users, there's no real reason to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER19> It almost sounds like Microsoft would be better off adopting the Ubuntu model - two consumer releases supported for a shorter period followed by one long term supported Pro release. The consumer release can be priced to sell the pro one can retain today's Windows 8 Pro pricing.

The consumer release can push the boundaries in terms of features and experimentation, while the pro release can pickup stabilized Pro centric features and security updates from it.

While they are at it they can also deemphasize Metro from the Pro edition, leaving it as a mostly consumer feature.

</comment><comment><USER20> What I'd like to see in the next iteration of Windows is desktop application windows that are /scalable/, as in the "pinch to zoom" on smartphones, but mouseable.

On Windows' windows, all four corners presently control clipping. Two of those four could be devoted to scaling instead of clipping.

This is something a desktop OS could do to increase my productivity. One desktop /application/, Real VNC Viewer, does this -- and I find it very convenient.

</comment><comment><USER21> Much of an improvement that Windows 8 is, this doesn't surprise me - There is no -need- to upgrade to it over Windows 7. It's not like the difference between XP and 7, where users were upgrading from an ageing buggy mess (or in the case of upgrades from vista, just a buggy mess).

</comment><comment><USER22> The decline of Windows has begun, and this time Windows is not coming back (in a strong way).

<comment><USER23> XP sold 120 million in the same time period. Care to explain your view?

<comment><USER24> In 2001 the PC install base was less than a 10th of what it is today. Raw sales are kind of a terrible comparison. Relevant to MS's revenue, sure, but not a good means of comparison. The better comparison would be the relative market share. I haven't seen numbers, but I would guess that XP's market share was substantially better than W8's over the same duration, even if only considering PCs operating on Windows.

<comment><USER23> I'm kind of curious about that number and how it was obtained. Do you have a link? I couldn't find anything good.

<comment><USER24> I am going to have to recant I guess. Quickly looking through the IDC, Gartner, World Bank and Strategy Analytics numbers, I can't find something to cite. If you look at global device shipment numbers from 1996 - 2013 and plot shipments per year with a 5 year tailing use to estimate the user base (which seems the norm for the PC user base values) it seems like 15-20% would be closer to the average, not 10% like I stated. I doubt it's important enough to either of us to spend the time to it. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Whatever the larger significance, surely these sales figures represent billions of lost dollars (or dollars not earned) for Microsoft?

EDIT: to downvoters - I'm just assuming that Microsoft make at least tens of dollars per licence sold. Am I wrong?</comment>


Milos Forman Has Died - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/entertainment/milos-forman-obit/index.html <comment><USER2> One of the all time greats. The scene in Amadeus where Mozart is on his deathbed composing and Salieri is acting as anamnesis is just an absolutely genius use of sound design.

I got to see Forman introduce some of his early films at a retrospective at Lincoln Center. Loves of a Blond and Firemans Ball and some experimental avant garde animated shorts. Very funny stuff if you can find it!

There is also a "making of" documentary about the filming of Amadeus in Prague that I think should be on youtube somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is one of those movies I can watch today and enjoy as much (or more) than the first time I saw it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also _Amadeus_ , and _Man On The Moon_.

<comment><USER5> I have not seen Amadeus, but Man on the Moon was great!

<comment><USER4> Oh, man. Amadeus is really excellent, _much_ better than MotM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A tribute to Forman's films:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scx0hb57E-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scx0hb57E-4)</comment>


jQuery Core: Migrate from AMD to ES modules - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/d0ce00cdfa680f1f0c38460bc51ea14079ae8b07 <comment><USER2> A nice thing is you can import from `src/jquery.js` directly from the browser without any build process in every modern browser.

[https://gist.github.com/mgol/af95c1358d4ca9f2d45db4f0c55a74a...](https://gist.github.com/mgol/af95c1358d4ca9f2d45db4f0c55a74a4)

[https://twitter.com/m_gol/status/1196893162859573250](https://twitter.com/m_gol/status/1196893162859573250)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know if there is any effort to move jQuery development towards using TypeScript or something similar? For some reason I had assumed they probably already were.

<comment><USER2> Some of jQuery APIs wouldn't be that easy to convert to TS internally, we'd have to have lots of casting and most likely file size would suffer and that's one thing we care a lot about in the jQuery team. Plus, that would be a barrier for some contributors.

The @types/jquery package is maintained quite well so TS users can consume a typed jQuery anyway.

So, no plans to switch to TypeScript (or to ES6+ with the exception for imports) for now.

<comment><USER4> Not to take anything away from your larger point, but TypeScript doesn't have not casting, it has type assertions. This matters because casting means "turn it into this type", which generates code. A type assertions only means "assume it's this type". It gets removed at compile time, plus any intermediate variables you might need to create to avoid the occasional type assertion monstrosity will be appropriately cleaned up by any minifier.

In short, I strongly doubt that the need for type assertions would meaningfully impact jQuery file size.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the terminology fix. With lots of these assertions, especially in the form of `x as unknown as TheProperType` we wouldn't have to increase file size but that would nullify most of the TypeScript gains and would make the code more readable. If we wanted to make internal code more in line with what TypeScript expects, that would require code changes which I expect may increase the file size, though.

I haven't done any real testing on the jQuery code base but that's my experience working on some TypeScript projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a bit dyslectic (and yes, pedantic too), but isn't that commit d0ce00? (d0ce00 != d0c00)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here and it seems I'm even more dyslectic :)</comment></comment>


The All-Meat Lunch for College Avoiders - <AUTHOR> http://lshap.blogspot.com/2012/06/go-to-college-or-eat-unlimited-meat.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: We have a group of 4 college avoiders joining me for an AMLCA tomorrow at noon, and 2 spots left. Email me or reply if you want to join.</comment>


Intel Broadwell Architecture Preview: A Glimpse into Core M - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/8355/intel-broadwell-architecture-preview

<comment><USER2> 14 nanometer process. I vaguely recall how impossible people said that would be to achieve back when the original pentium was an 800 nm process.

very cool.

<comment><USER3> Still, it looks like 5 nanometers is the end of it. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer)

Not that it will necessarily be the absolute end of Moore's law, as hardware manufacturers are trying alternative approaches to keep ramping up power, e.g. Samsung already sells its 850 Pro series SSDs [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_6?url=search- alias%...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_6?url=search- alias%3Dcomputers&field-keywords=850%20pro&sprefix=850+pr%2Caps%2C404) made with its VNAND memory [http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/html/pr...](http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/html/product/flash- solution/vnand/overview.html) which fell back to 40 nm from 840 EVO's 19 nm, while going 3D, which seemed to improve both speed and reliability. Now they have a bit more runway in their Moore's law, but still not much in sight.

<comment><USER4> I hear this end to moores law all the time but couldn't we just make the CPUs physically larger?

I know this probably wouldn't work for a mobile device but for desktops/servers theres a ton of room for larger dimension chips right?

<comment><USER5> (Disclaimer: I'm not an EE)

To be technical, Moore's law is about the number of transistors on an integrated circuit.

So your point isn't too far off the 3D comments elsewhere.

Simply making the die bigger doesn't get you much: larger dies (without additional redundancy) have lower yields (as you're more likely to have a defect given a constant defect/area rate) and fewer can be stamped out of a standard sized wafer.

However, if you carry that idea to its logical conclusion... we may turn from shrinking the transistor to shrinking the packaging as the path of least resistance. 3D transistors, chip stacking (aka PoP), and through-silicon vias (aka vertical connectivity) all help get us more processing / area (while remaining within fundamental thermal, manufacturing, etc. physical limits).

Again, this is a CS major with an architecture interest, so anyone please feel free to correct me if I'm off-base.

<comment><USER6> 3D doesn't help very much. We're already at the limits of thermal capacity for consumer-chips. 3D just exacerbates that, since now you've lost a whole dimension you can shunt heat through.

If you go 3D, you need a very large drop in heat dissipation to keep your junction temperatures down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please Intel, release it in 2014! Don't make it slip into 2015! I really really want a 10W NUC with Broadwell i7 as my main desktop machine!

<comment><USER8> It seems Intel's misleading marketing is already working, even on the HN crowd. The whole point of the "M" chip is to be low-power/low performance. If you want "Core i7", get a version that actually has a lot of power behind it, not a "10W i7". The 10w Core i7 won't be faster than a desktop Core i3 SNB. Heck I bet it won't be more than 50 percent faster than the latest ARM chip either.

<comment><USER7> I don't really care about super high performance - I need a small NUC that I can cool passively with reasonable performance for typical business stuff I do on the desktop. I understand the difference between mobile i5 vs i7 is almost none even on Haswell (both are dual-core with hyperthreading unlike desktop versions). I already have a 17W IvyBridge i7-3517U in one of my notebooks so I know what I am talking about. I also can't wait for 19W Kaveri for another tiny desktop setup...

EDIT: i7 details

<comment><USER9> From Wikipedia, Intel also has quad-core + hyperthreading mobile CPUs, with model numbers 4700 and up. The top mobile i7 is about equivalent to a 4770S desktop chip, but with a bit lower TDP.

So don't lump all the mobile parts in with the ultrabook-optimised chips.

<comment><USER7> Sure, there is a 47W i7-4960HQ in rMBP which has significantly higher power consumption than what I am looking for. If you look at low power U versions of i5 and i7, they seem almost identical (with i7 having larger cache and a bit higher frequency; both are dual core and have hyperthreading). In desktop, you can see i5 is without HT contrary to i7.

If Broadwell can bring 20W quadcore i5/i7 - that would be even better! Currently only BayTrail Pentium J can offer that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> AKA: The chip that will finally let you buy a retina Macbook Air.

<comment><USER11> If the GPU is fast enough to drive a retina display.

<comment><USER12> Even the "hd graphics" or low end Kaveri GPUs from AMD can drive 4k.

Hell, Adreno from Qualcomm can probably drive 4k.

Desktops, compositing, and light effects like transparency are nothing next to video game or 3d model rendering. In practice, any GPU manufactured today is enough for non-3d purposes, unless you try running 3 4k monitors off the numberless hd graphics or something.

If you aren't getting 60 fps scrolling, it is usually due to the cpus being low powered and the application not using GL accelerated drawing for the scrolling.

<comment><USER13> Also, just because the GPU can power 4K doesn't mean it will for a reasonably small amount of power, such that the MBA can continue to pull a 12-hour battery life.

<comment><USER14> If you are plugged into a 4k monitor, you are probably reasonably close to a power outlet.

<comment><USER15> Theoretically, Thunderbolt is capable of being your power outlet.

<comment><USER16> Yeah but if you're powering your 4K monitor from Thunderbolt, I doubt you'd get that 12 hour battery life either :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing I'm looking forward too more than the power saving advances are the arbitrary precision maths they are starting to finally add. Albeit just integer , add and multiply instructions for now, but a good start.

<comment><USER18> Cool, I hadn't heard of this. I couldn't find much info on a quick search, so here's Intel's reference: [http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white- papers/ia-large-integer-arithmetic-paper.pdf)

MULX was introduced on Haswell as part of the BMI instructions. Basically it allows two explicit destinations (still an implied rdx source though).

ADCX/ADOX are pretty weird. They both operate basically the same as ADC, but only read/write the carry or overflow flag respectively. The idea is to allow two interleaved independent chains of adds, putting less pressure on the out- of-order logic on chip. This seems kinda weird though: the renaming logic would have to detect that the bit of the flags register that one chain of adds reads aren't written by the other chain, so those instructions wouldn't be hazards, and thus both chains can be executed in parallel. OTOH, IIRC there are other instructions that only write certain bits of the flags, so I guess the logic for this bit-level renaming of flags is already there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds like Intel went after a lot of one time optimization improvements for these low power chips, stuff that they aren't going to be able to be able to call on multiple times to improver performance. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like they are really pulling out the stops here.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love ultra low power CPUs that still are able to drive a modern minimal Linux system, based mostly on CLI applications. I thought my Intel NUC was already great, but this might take it to the next level with a completely fanless design, yet cooler and very capable.

</comment><comment><USER21> New Apple's CPUs are ready. Macbooks will be ready for a holiday season. Nothing to see here.</comment>


The Nuclear Scientist Who Skipped College - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/taylor-wilson/309132/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a tad less credulity in tales like this. Certainly, innovations in engineering are quite workable by an amateur enthusiast, particularly in niche areas with significant commercial interest like medical isotope manufacturing.

But hard fusion is an area that's been looked at for decades by literally thousands of top physicists around the world, and there's little low-hanging fruit left for a tabletop inventor to come across. Multi-billion dollar efforts like the National Ignition Facility involving hundreds or thousands of scientists are where the action's at today, and they've brought together solid plans for pursuing economically sustainable fusion.

An outsider may indeed bring new ideas that have value in niche areas, simply because that's not where the majority of scientific attention is being focused -- but it's unlikely to be a replacement for the core effort of an entire movement, as the article suggests.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, while reading it my inner (outer?) cynic thought, "another phenom I'll be reading about on the 30-years-from-now version of cracked.com, about "Young Phenoms Who Became Merely Very Good".

And after seeing all of the African urine generator stories that didn't have even the slightest amount of scientific rigor to them, that didn't help.

But that said, one could argue that if thousands of people with traditional backgrounds all attacked the same problem and couldn't crack it, if it's ever going to be cracked it might require someone who comes from a completely different system.

<comment><USER4> Overall amateurs spend a lot of time and money and contribute next to nothing to scientific progress. Astronomy is known for the contributions from armatures, but if you actually look at all known objects in space they have contributed a ridiculously small fraction of them and have been limited to rather bright objects.

I fear the media focuses so much on the armatures contributions that most people have a rather distorted view of the value of large and well funded projects like ITER.

<comment><USER5> Amateur astronomers may only contribute a little on an individual basis (it is not their primary job, after all), but collectively, they contribute massively in some sub-disciplines. Two fairly prominent examples:

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

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_zoo>

As a side note, astronomy is not simply about discovering objects. Furthermore, many amateurs have access to pretty impressive hardware; they are not as limited as you might think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I, for one, am interested in his creating a fusion reactor at 14. I suppose from a regulatory perspective it's easier than fission, because the materials are safer and there's no risk of a runaway reaction (we wish). But while I've heard accounts of fission in garages and such, I'd never heard of anyone doing fusion. Ostensibly because of the exotic materials and energy required.

This piece is pretty fluffy, does anyone have something more technical about his first reactor design?

<comment><USER7> Probabably a fusor, according to the Wikiepedia article "Fusors have been assembled in low-power forms by hobbyists."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor>

<comment><USER8> Apparently correct. As noted by direction from

[http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/01/living/teen-nuclear- scientist/...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/01/living/teen-nuclear- scientist/index.html)

to

<http://www.fusor.net/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> His website: <http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/Welcome.html>

As speculated, he did indeed build a fusor: [http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/Neutron_Sources....](http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/Neutron_Sources.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Thick on rebellion against the system, thin on science.

Auto-didactic nuclear physicist? OK, not entirely impossible, but pardon my skepticism, I need more details. Did any of his inventions went in production? What kind of fusion reaction we're talking about?

<comment><USER11> Fusion at 14 was just a hobby. Cheap sensitive detector and isotope production method are innovative achievements.

<comment><USER12> If these achievements are anything like the ones that get hyped at things like the Intel science fair, there's probably a lot more mainstream science than is getting credit.

Behind nearly every 14-year-old "genius" stands a supportive expert who made the work possible, but doesn't get the press. The media is credulous when it comes to stories of youthful precocity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think he should still knock out a quick PhD in physics or similar, especially from a top notch school. There's got to be -something- he can learn being around and cooperating with really smart people. Or as his mom says, "You've got to have something to fall back on..."

<comment><USER14> Even if he gets accepted directly into a graduate program (I think this is very rare but he may qualify), the first couple years are not going to be dedicated to research. I agree that there would be a lot of value there for someone so young - what's the rush? - but I've never heard of a quick PhD.

<comment><USER15> Wittgenstein received a PhD from Cambridge solely from his book _Tractatus_ , which he wrote during WWI.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#section_6>

<comment><USER16> Well thanks to you I just spent the last hour reading about Wittgenstein...

<comment><USER17> _1929–1941: Fellowship at Cambridge PhD and fellowship

At the urging of Ramsey and others, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929. Keynes wrote in a letter to his wife: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train."[123] Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge as he did not have a degree, so he applied as an advanced undergraduate. Russell noted that his previous residency was sufficient for a PhD, and urged him to offer the Tractatus as his thesis. It was examined in 1929 by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defence, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it."[124] Moore wrote in the examiner's report: "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree."_[125]

\-- The story in a nutshell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool he's going off to do such things. I only hope he'll meet the right people that allow him to achieve even more, people that he would have met at, say, MIT.

<comment><USER6> Being a wunderkind has probably afforded him more opportunities for networking than the average postdoc. He may be resented over his age or education, but he's already differentiated himself, even outside his field. I feel like a lab he's associated with could do very well funding-wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The NIF reminds us that the line between optimism and overselling is a thin one that can too easily be crossed.

<http://www.nature.com/news/ignition-switch-1.11748>

</comment><comment><USER20> Reminded me vaguely of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn> The Radioactive Boy Scout..

</comment><comment><USER21> My favorite anecdote from his Popular Science write up: "Tay, it's time for supper." "I think I'm going to have to clean this up first." "That's not the stuff you said would kill us if it broke open, is it?" "I don't think so," he said. "Not instantly."

[http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who- played...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played- fusion?page=all)

</comment><comment><USER22> "My other big development is a system to produce medical isotopes that are injected into patients and used to diagnose and treat cancer. It's a design that costs less than $100,000 and wheels right into a hospital room—replacing multimillion-dollar, warehouse-size facilities."

I can see how a low price is attractive. But why bring the isotope source into a hospital room? Seems to be better placed in a warehouse...

<comment><USER23> These isotopes have limited (and sometimes quite short) lifetimes. Bringing them closer to the patients means that they can be produced in smaller quantities on an as needed basis, and reduces the necessary infrastructure to transport them.

<comment><USER24> Is it correct that this is the kind of stuff used for PET scans? I didn't read the article, but my radiology friend told me that they create semi-custom isotopes for PET scans.

<comment><USER25> PET (for oncology at least) typically uses 18-FDG, a glucose analog. Unfortunately has a short half life requiring facilities to be close to the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm surprised we haven't seen more mention of ITER in this thread

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER> <http://www.iter.org/>

One of my professors from college moonlights as a consultant for the project.

What most people don't acknowledge about the "30 years away" joke is the type of environments in which the statement was made. In the 1950's the confidence was rooted in naivete (similar statements were made about making artificial life), but in the 1970's the confidence was rooted in economics. The fuel crises led to substantially increased funding in alternative energy sources.

Much lamented by my professor from college, as oil prices dropped back down so did research funding for fusion reactors (although given that the bulk of electricity in this country comes from coal, nuclear, natural gas, and to a lesser extent hydro I'm not clear why that would've been the case, maybe we were running more extensively on fuel oil back then).

If ITER proves promising (beyond energy break even) another facility will have to be constructed that will be more expensive and will take longer to construct, this facility will prove promising only if it indicates potential for economic break even (I think it has to put out >7x the input energy). If that can be accomplished then there's still a few material challenges (neutron bombardment has a tendency to make metals brittle, the appropriate containment chamber materials aren't even a glimmer in a material scientists eyes yet as well as the radioactivity issue (the entire plant will gradually become more radioactive).

If this kid built a fusor he clearly has a great deal of potential, while I'm skeptical that he can make a difference alone I wouldn't be surprised if he could offer contributions to the current projects underway to advance this field. Plasma magnetohydrodynamics has so few people that understand it that every additional mind has potential to make a difference.

</comment><comment><USER27> Here is a brief Ted talk he gave, [http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_yup_i_built_a_nuclear...](http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_yup_i_built_a_nuclear_fusion_reactor.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> FYI,

Taylor's self described "best nuclear friend" (1) is a fellow named Carl Willis who has an interesting, albeit infrequently updated, blog called "special nuclear material" here: <http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/>

(1) [http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who- played...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played- fusion?page=all)

</comment><comment><USER29> I love the photo of his 'lab'. <http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/My_Lab.html> \--- it's amazing to see such a smart kid that is also a strong communicator.

<comment><USER3> Same thing struck me about his prose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> He's not only bright but incredibly articulate.

</comment><comment><USER31> L. Ron?

</comment><comment><USER32> Life imitates Art.. This is the real life Sheldon Cooper :)

<comment><USER33> "art"?

<comment><USER32> Sorry.. think im seen too much camelcase c++ classes these days :/</comment></comment></comment>


How a nosy bureaucrat created the first social networking and blogging service - <AUTHOR> https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/sail/finger.html <comment><AUTHOR> An account of the creation of _finger_ by its creator. It's a little more put- together than the netnews quote that was posted yesterday.

One anecdote:

 _One issue that arose at SAIL, for example, was that Prof. Donald Knuth, who had become well known because of his authorship of a series of textbooks on The Art of Computer Programming, used SAIL as his primary computer and Finger showed everyone when he was online and revealed his login ID (DEK), which could be used to send him email, with the result that he started receiving a lot of unwanted inquiries. We fixed that by giving him a private pseudonymous email address while continuing to show his real login ID in Finger._</comment>