Theranos didn't work with the huge drug company it supposedly made money from - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/26/9618390/Theranos-glaxosmithkline-denies-partnership-pfizer-blood-test <comment><USER2> This company is looking less and less like they're struggling to develop new technology, more and more like a deliberate sham. Given that so much of their support thus far has been due solely to the Cult of Disruption, I can't help but wonder if news like this might make at least a few investors consider a return to good old-fashioned due diligence before placing their bets.

<comment><USER3> What's interesting is that venture capitalists are slamming media outlets for reporting on the issue.

Here's a rather silly rebuttal to a recent Theranos piece on The Information from Dave Morin: [https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/658705178523258880](https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/658705178523258880)

"Isn't it time as Millenials that we try to use the Internet to unearth deeper facts and see through these traditional smear campaigns?"

<comment><USER4> It's a conflict of interest only if there actually is a conflict of interest. Tell me, what "conflict of interest" does Dave Morin have with Theranos?

<comment><USER5> It doesn't look like there's a conflict of interest (Morin, as far as I can tell, is not a Theranos investor), but I think you're overlooking the fact that a lot of prominent tech investors are sitting on investments in companies that have been significantly overvalued, and the cracks in some of these companies are starting to become apparent.

There's a decent discussion on this here[1]. Red flags, like reports of late- stage investors marking down the value of some of their unicorn investments, are starting to mount and I think that has to be worrisome for investors who are sitting on large unrealized gains that could easily evaporate.

Expect to see a lot more hand-waving on the part of investors as prominent unicorns come apart at the seams.

Morin, according to his AngelList profile, is an investor in a number of unicorns, including AirBnB, Dropbox, Evernote and Slack. Two of the mutual funds that invested in Dropbox have reportedly marked down their investments[2] and some media reports suggest Evernote is in trouble[3].

[1] [https://pando.com/2015/10/27/techpocalypse- coming/](https://pando.com/2015/10/27/techpocalypse-coming/)

[2] [https://www.theinformation.com/mutual-funds-mark-down- dropbo...](https://www.theinformation.com/mutual-funds-mark-down-dropbox- holdings)

[3] [http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-is-in-deep- trouble-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-is-in-deep- trouble-2015-10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I interviewed at Theranos a year ago, and found the employees to be smart and dedicated.

However, the company was the most secretive I've interviewed at and the employees complained about being overworked. The fact the founder sold C++ compilers to Chinese universities when g++ is open-source sounded odd.

But I still had hope in them even after they passed on me -- a Silicon Valley company actually making a difference in the people's health. I WANT TO BELIEVE.

If this turns out to be smokes and mirrors, I'd be very saddened. Theranos' failure would confirm what everyone interested in biotech knows but wishes wasn't true: that advancements in this field do not move at the speed of the digital economy.

<comment><USER7> Holmes ran that business in high school. She was born in 1984, so that would put the date around 2000. There were good reasons not to use G++ in 2000. When Alexandrescu's book was published, in 2001, it was somewhat notorious on my team (shipping code on G++) for how much of it didn't work well, or at all, in G++.

<comment><USER8> Heck, virtually any C++ compiler was a big pile of sharp edges back then, by comparison to just a few years later. _Especially_ if you dared to use it for embedded work, not so much due to the "embedded" part but just because the embedded suite compilers were just so much further behind the C++ curve.

<comment><USER7> Yep, but the commercial compilers generally had better STLs (particularly for debugging), debuggers that could properly mangle/demangle symbols, and precompiled headers --- in addition to different sets of C++ features that did or didn't work properly.

<comment><USER8> Largely true, but I recall actually isolating one chunk of code and compiling with g++ just to get halfway sane error messaging around a (IIRC) template- related error. I.e. you could do worse. The primary compiler for that code was the circa-2001 ARM tools suite. I wrote a few novels worth of feedback and bug reporting to them...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Walgreens recently halted all Theranos expansions (currently only 41 Walgreens have Theranos centers... there were plans to expand to many more): [http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/walgreens-halts-theranos- te...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/walgreens-halts-theranos-testing- center-expansion/)

And it recently came to light that Elizabeth Holmes was misleading people when she said her company voluntarily stopped using nanotainers -- it seems she was forced to stop by FDA: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/business/theranos- quality-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/business/theranos-quality- control-was-questioned-by-fda.html)

Between all of this, FDA coming in for tests, and other strange things, it seems they have a lot of answering to do.

Or, alternatively, them being in stealth mode is the reason for all of these strange happenings and lack of better information out there.

<comment><USER10> How can you perform live tests on patients and still be in stealth mode?

At some point you have to come clean with the FDA about your technology, right? Or is this considered a wide-field clinical trial?

<comment><USER11> > How can you perform live tests on patients and still be in stealth mode?

That really hit the nail on the head for me.

<comment><USER12> From an old article on the subject: [http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos- blood-holmes/](http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/)

The tl;dr is that Theranos makes their own machines, which makes every test that they perform _technically_ a "Lab Developed Test" LDT which doesn't have the same oversight that machines which are sold to others. As long as they make their machines and use their machines, they're effectively exploiting a loophole.

From the article:

The backdrop for this dispute is an unusual regulatory structure that does, in fact, confer upon some–though not all–conventional lab tests an extra layer of validation that Theranos's do not yet have. Most labs, like Quest and Laboratory Corp. of America, perform many of their routine tests using analyzers they buy from medical-device manufacturers, like Siemens, Olympus, and Beckman Coulter. Before those manufacturers can sell such equipment, they must obtain U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the tests those analyzers perform–a process that is in addition to, and more searching than, the audits and proficiency tests required to win CMS certification for the lab itself.

At the same time, for other procedures conventional labs will devise their own lab-developed tests, or LDTs, which they do not have cleared by the FDA. While the FDA takes the position that it could require approval for LDTs, for many years it has said it would forgo that right in the exercise of its "enforcement discretion."

Theranos, which does not buy any analyzers from third parties, is therefore in a unique position. While it would need FDA approval to sell its own analyzers to other labs, it doesn't do that. It uses its analyzers only in its own CMS- certified lab. All its tests are therefore LDTs, effectively exempt from FDA oversight.

<comment><USER10> Beautiful explanation. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Between this and the "wireless energy over ultrasound" scam I'm starting to wonder if VCs actually do any due diligence at all.

<comment><USER14> I bet they pour over and nitpick lots of minor details on the financials

Tech? That's for the nerds. The light is blinking so it's fine I guess

<comment><USER5> > I bet they pour over and nitpick lots of minor details on the financials

What financials? Lots of these companies have little to no revenue.

<comment><USER15> Projections up and to the right.

<comment><USER13> "this graph looks like a hockey stick, how's $50 million?"

<comment><USER16> to be fair, their competition has well-known financials. The size of the existing market for blood tests is already large; any penetration would give you a sizable business.

<comment><USER5> "If this company obtains 1% of a $500 billion market, things will be great!" is _not_ due diligence. Here, everything realistically comes down to the technology because the company's ability to gain and sustain market share is almost wholly dependent on it having a superior technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I never understood what was unique about this company. I worked for a company over a decade ago that did a clinical trail for a bacterial pneumonia micro- assay at Arup Labs in SLC. This seemed like the same thing but with a lot more fanfare. I called some folks I used to work with to check if I was missing something and they felt the same. (I'm not a biologist, I wrote the software and did the stat research).

</comment><comment><USER18> The "dress like Steve Jobs" thing is starting to feel kind of messed up, am I right?

(I read somewhere that she claimed that she hadn't considered that Steve Jobs used to wear black turtlenecks, that she was more inspired by Sharon Stone... which is really hard to believe)

<comment><USER19> You probably have better funding rounds if you dress like Steve Jobs. /sarcasm

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel like we've seen this before. Young startup, visionary founder, boat loads of money, then after lots of money burned, outright lies, false claims, or at the very least vaporware.

<comment><USER21> The funny thing is, this startup isn't that young. It's 12 years old. Someone basically gave a completely inexperienced founder tens of millions of dollars and over a decade to run an R&D lab.

<comment><USER22> hundreds of millions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just wonder instead of going back and forth and create more controversy - why don't they just show which tests are working right now - and which don't. Demonstrating with data is the best defense they can put forth.

its ok - if only small portion of tests are valid at this point but if they show progress with data - this validates they are on the right track.

<comment> semi-extrinsic They have one test which is FDA approved, for herpes simplex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If their tests work, why not just show the world? Invite the press. Invite doctors. Livestream it. Whoever it takes to validate what they say. What's the downside?

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what the real story is. A lot of questions, that if true make it look bad, but if those are just random guesses with no basis in fact? Then its just a hit piece.

<comment><USER26> Me too, but I'm also very curious to see the due diligence reports (if any), DFJ has on Theranos given that they've been in Serias A, B, and C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there somewhere a clear indication that the extent of the relationship with Phizer or GSK was misrepresented to reporters by someone from Theranos?

</comment><comment><USER5> Since there's so much interest in unicorn valuations today, and Theranos is a prominent unicorn, anyone wondering about the potential implications of all this news on Theranos' valuation might find it useful to look at Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a publicly-traded company (ticker: VRX).

It is facing a number of issues, a few of which have led some to speculate that it could become pharma's version of Enron[1]. In July, VRX hit a high above $260. Today it's trading at less than $110.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/opinion/is-valeant- pharmac...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/opinion/is-valeant- pharmaceuticals-the-next-enron.html)

<comment><USER28> Accounting rules changed after Enron; it's a lot harder to do what they did. The biggest recent drop was after a very negative piece from someone who publishes negative pieces while short-selling. I don't have much information, but I'm not all that convinced Valeant has real fraud issues.

Also, Theranos and Valeant seem like entirely different businesses.

<comment><USER5> > Theranos and Valeant seem like entirely different businesses.

I think you're missing the point I was making: Valeant is a timely and interesting example of what can happen to the valuation of a company under fire.

> I don't have much information, but I'm not all that convinced Valeant has > real fraud issues.

If you don't have much information, how can you be convinced of anything one way or the other?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I seem to detect the familiar odor of negative PR wafting over this entire series of articles. The New Yorker has one of the most famously rigorous fact checking policies in journalism. Things rarely ever slip past them. Companies like Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp have immense amounts of revenue to lose to a new, more efficient entrant like Theranos. No surprise they would go negative to undermine a new competitor. As far as the company ferreting out journalistic mistakes and correcting them, the onus should be on the media to get the story right.

<comment><USER30> Yes, agreed, except that micro-assay isn't new, and is actually used on newborns all the time. It isn't used in adults because it tends to be wildly inaccurate/variable, even under the best of circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So Theranos definitely worked with Pfizer and probably worked with GSK.

I am not a Theranos apologist but this is lousy reporting.

</comment><comment><USER32> hopefully this isn't an example of a biotech startup embracing the silicon valley 'fake it until you make it' mentality.

</comment><comment><USER33> Dead unicorn list

1\. Homejoy

2\. Theranos

3\. ....

<comment><USER34> There should be a dying unicorn list too..

<comment><USER35> I'm working on rolling out fuckedunicorns.com (a nod to pud's fuckedcompany.com).

As someone who lived through the first boom bust, very interested to watch things play out again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Fake it till you make it."

</comment><comment><USER37> The Emperor's New Clothes: the Emperor is wearing nothing at all. What a sham company.

<comment><USER38> What emperor? You mean that homeless dude with schizophrenia?

Yeah, that's VC funding for you.</comment></comment>


Twitter ordered to reveal details of racist users - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22887988 <comment><USER2> So lets say if the government was Syria and they requested the tweets of Jewish users from their country be removed and that their user information was turned over; Pretty sure there'd be more outcry. While I don't think France is going to put these people to death, I'm certain its not to give them a free speech award.

This is why we have the 1st amendment in the US, its too bad we can't have it on the internet too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ask the NSA, they know.</comment>


More is Different: Broken symmetry and hierarchical structure in science (1972) - <AUTHOR> https://www.jstor.org/stable/1734697?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents <comment><USER2> The author of that paper was the thesis advisor of many faculty in the Cornell Physics department when I was there in the 1990s.

He is a Colossus of condensed matter physics and was thoughtful about the "complex systems" work around condensed matter that later fell out of fashion.</comment>


Hutch: Inter-Service Communication with RabbitMQ - <AUTHOR> https://gocardless.com/blog/hutch-inter-service-communication-with-rabbitmq/ <comment><USER2> I've built something similar as part of renovations to a large, legacy PHP code base.

We're writing our consumers in Go using some impressively well written AMQP libraries ([https://github.com/streadway/amqp](https://github.com/streadway/amqp)) and some custom framework code. The framework code takes care of retries and acking, so the consumers are very simple (in: an envelope, out: fail/done/retry-later). Each worker runs as its own binary. I'm currently adding standardized variable exports for monitoring, and ephemeral queue-based reply capability.

On the PHP side, I found none of the PHP AMQP libraries to be worth using. They all have compilation problems or bugs or seem to be unmaintained. Instead, I'm using RabbitMQ's STOMP plugin w/default login and then wrote a simple TCP client in PHP using persistent connections. The client supports timeouts and multiple backends.

So far, this is working really well. Anybody doing their own RPC implementations using HTTP should take a look at using something like RabbitMQ. It solves a host of real-world problems and introduces much flexibility into your architecture.

<comment><USER3> > On the PHP side, I found none of the PHP AMQP libraries to be worth using. > They all have compilation problems or bugs or seem to be unmaintained.

I take care of this one [https://github.com/videlalvaro/php- amqplib](https://github.com/videlalvaro/php-amqplib) and it's very well maintained and used by many companies in production.

Also is, it's a pure PHP library so there's no need to compile it. It's been installed +72000 times already [https://packagist.org/packages/videlalvaro/php- amqplib](https://packagist.org/packages/videlalvaro/php-amqplib)

<comment><USER2> Oh, that's great to hear. I'm surprised I didn't find that previously. I vaguely remember trying a php-amqplib and having issues with error messages, but your client promises to be strict-compliant so perhaps I was using an ancient version somehow.

For the sole purposes of producing messages, STOMP and a few dozen lines of PHP seems more attractive to me than using the full library (plain text protocol, easy persistent connections, simple retry behaviors, and no surprises). I'll use your library when we add PHP consumers, though, because consumption is harder to get right.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks analogous to Promiscuous from CrowdTap, also a framework for Rails / RabbitMQ. Promiscuous takes a different approach in that it also allows you to go to an SOA architecture but by decomposing your app to run across multiple servers.

From the repo readme: "Promiscuous is a publisher-subscriber framework for easily replicating data across your Ruby applications."

[https://github.com/crowdtap/promiscuous](https://github.com/crowdtap/promiscuous)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing jbarmash. Promiscuous has enabled us to break up our monolithic application into 10 single purpose apps. It's essentially MVC application level replication.</comment></comment>


How to Integrate Netlify's Form Handling in a React App – Netlify - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/07/20/how-to-integrate-netlifys-form-handling-in-a-react-app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone figure out how to use gatsby and netlify to upload a form. I have add input type="file" and given field unique name as well as a enctype in form tag but it does not work. All other fields do work but not file uploads. Any advice?</comment>


Judge Rules Against 'Edge' Trademark Troll Tim Langdell - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/05/judge-rules-against.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _Tim "Edge Games" Langdell has lost a round in court with EA over the use of his "Edge" trademarks. In refusing his request for a preliminary injunction, judge William Alsup described Edge Games as 'trolling' and suggested that it could face criminal charges.

"Given the suspect nature of Dr. Langdell's representations to both the USPTO and the Court concerning plaintiff's current and future sales and business activities, it is an open question whether plaintiff's business activities legitimately extend beyond trolling various gaming-related industries for licensing opportunities," wrote the judge._

Original Article (Aug 09) <http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-edge-of- reason>

Original HN Post <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739390></comment>


Microsoft Issues WanaCrypt Patch for Windows 8, XP - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/05/microsoft-issues-wanacrypt-patch-for-windows-8-xp/ <comment><USER2> Although it is probably good for the companies still using windows XP to receive those updates, I do not think updating windows xp was such a smart move because now those companies do not need to update once again and keep running outdated windows machines.

If Microsoft did not provide this update for older OSes, I believe more people would update because they simply had to. Smaller hacks might not be enough for the manager of those machines to allocate resources to update, but this hack might have been just fatale enough for them to update those machines.

And we should all expect to see such a hack again. This is not a one in a century thing. Such costly hacks could easily happen a few times a year.

<comment><USER3> Alternatively, Microsoft should continue to support Windows XP as long as there are a large number of critical systems that rely on it. They are unable to upgrade because it would break a lot of legacy software. I believe Windows XP should have been supported for at least 50 years, considering how many people still depend on it. IMO, Microsoft has acted irresponsibly, and the decision was only driven by money. Sure, 2001 was a long time ago, but so what? What's wrong with a PC that runs the same OS for 100 years? Sometimes things work fine just the way they are. For all intents and purposes, most machines running Windows XP are fast enough. Office workers aren't running some insane virtual reality system, they're responding to emails and entering data into some Visual Basic application.

I understand that newer versions of Windows do have stronger security, so it is better if people can upgrade to a more secure version of Windows. But it would have been better if those security features were somehow back-ported. But seriously, can the current version of Windows please be considered "finished"? Why not spend the next 50 years just maintaining Windows 10, just the way it is? Imagine if they devoted all of their resources to finding and fixing all of the possible security issues until it's virtually bulletproof, and the price of a zero-day gets to a billion dollars. I think it's a shame that Microsoft constantly releases unnecessary upgrades and tried to get people to keep buying new licenses.

<comment><USER4> _> They are unable to upgrade because it would break a lot of legacy software. I believe Windows XP should have been supported for at least 50 years, considering how many people still depend on it._

It's not Microsoft's fault that people depend on Windows XP. IMHO it's the fault of companies buying hardware and software from manufacturers who are unwilling or unable to upgrade their product to run on newer versions of Windows.

To put it another way: the only reason there is a huge demand for COBOL programmers is because banks are too spendthrift to rewrite their software in more modern languages.

 _> IMO, Microsoft has acted irresponsibly, and the decision was only driven by money._

Welcome to the world of successful businesses. They don't do things for altruistic reasons, they do it because it makes money.

 _> Imagine if they devoted all of their resources to finding and fixing all of the possible security issues until it's virtually bulletproof, and the price of a zero-day gets to a billion dollars. I think it's a shame that Microsoft constantly releases unnecessary upgrades and tried to get people to keep buying new licenses._

A lot to unpack here.

1) I personally don't think it's possible for anyone to design a general purpose OS as complex as Windows that is bug free.

Just look up how small the space shuttle software was (IIRC ~600,000 LOC) and how mind bogglingly expensive it was.

2) Businesses could already avoid a lot of this if they didn't view IT as a cost centre and instead as an investment.

3) Yes Windows 10 is a privacy nightmare. But Microsoft has made real strides in OS security since XP. It's wrong to claim that all they've done is put a minimalist theme on the same old OS.

From a security perspective they absolutely are not "unnecessary upgrades"

<comment><USER5> > To put it another way: the only reason there is a huge demand for COBOL > programmers is because banks are too spendthrift to rewrite their software > in more modern languages.

I heard that medical devices are approved (by whatever regulatory body) to run an _exact_ set of software. As such, even applying a security update invalidates the approval, because it could potentially introduce bugs that place a patient's life at risk.

<comment><USER6> The computers that store patient records (which were compromised) are not medical devices under any regulatory regime I know of.

And in any case the compromises were in the UK, which may have different rules on this subject than the FDA.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, my point was just that sometimes systems have out of date security for reasons besides penny pinching and laziness. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Additionally, we are taking the highly unusual step of providing a security > update for all customers to protect Windows platforms that are in custom > support only, including Windows XP, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2003.

That's impressive!

<comment><USER8> It's impressive that they had the patches, but chose to put the security of their customers on a lower level than making more money by forcing said customers to upgrade.

<comment><USER9> This is more like a pharmaceutical company taking a financial hit to help in a sudden epidemic by giving out antidotes/vaccines for free, for the sake of public interest and the ecosystem.

Just because they had the vaccines ready in warehouses or could manufacture more easily doesn't mean that their customers "deserved" them for free before the epidemic hit.

If the customers actually desired security, they would've paid for XP/2003 patches or upgraded to a different supported OS. Those customers messed up on their own, and Microsoft is giving them an out here.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you broadly but your analogy is flawed because patches have zero marginal cost (once developed, code can be infinitely duplicated at no additional cost) whereas vaccines are physical entities and therefore giving one to somebody entails not giving that same item to somebody else. If Microsoft had already developed these patches why not distribute them widely, since it costs nothing to do so and takes nothing away from paying customers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The patch was finalized already in February. I wonder why it took so long to release it?

[https://twitter.com/mikelabatt/status/863356853576749056](https://twitter.com/mikelabatt/status/863356853576749056)

<comment><USER12> So a month before patches for supported versions of Windows.

Does that mean I can get info on current Windows 0days simply by subscribing to XP support program?

<comment><USER9> Many of the researchers already test to see if they work on XP.

You could do what you said but it's pretty expensive and only works for a bulk deal at around $200/PC/year with a large number of PCs at a minimum.

<comment><USER12> I surely won't be doing it myself, but I can imagine some spook making this small personal sacrifice of becoming an employee at some Windows XP shop just to smuggle patches to his mothership for vulnerability analysis.

I hope that the fact this patch was signed in February doesn't imply that it was published in February and available to every semi-competent cyberwarfare unit in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my opinion, hospitals should never run any kind of software accessing complex protocols locally. Should run everything, except real-time critical devices, using virtualized remote applications, so the security gets ensured at data-center level, instead of at client level.

<comment><USER14> Ahh yes the magic cloud, solving all security problems

Move to the Cloud and never have to worry about security again /s

<comment><USER15> You're taking it to a weird extreme of magic. There are reasons to run things locally and there are reasons for centralisation. Medical centres (at least on my area) often run on thin clients, because that's a better solution than having local technical staff in each village and town. This makes things like security controls easier to manage. It also makes things like backups a part of the contract rather than part of infrastructure you need to buy. On the other hand when the internet goes down, your results may not be available.

Look at tradeoffs. There are no magic solutions. Pretending that cloud services don't solve any problems is as bad as pretending they solve all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If a bug is wormable & your OS is still in widespread use then this ought to be the least you can do. If you're unwilling to put the effort in, then open source the OS in some form so that someone else can.

There are vast numbers of XP boxes out there. They represent a risk to all of us.

<comment><USER17> There was a Microsoft Research project that made it possible to run Windows XP (or Server 2003, I don't remember exactly) as a PV guest.

That was really cool, but the whole project disappeared.

If it had been open source, I bet it would still be actively maintained to this day.

Edit: Found the paper [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2003/10/2003-sosp.pdf)

<comment><USER18> I will admit I've just rapidly paged through that PDF, but it looks like I'm reading a Xen introductory paper.

Xen is open source.

I found some PV IO drivers at [https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Windows_GplPv](https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Windows_GplPv) which mention XP (search for 'XP' including (!) single quotes), and a quick Google does immediately give hits on running XP as a HVM guest.

I'm (genuinely) curious what you're describing/referring to here. What project disappeared?

<comment><AUTHOR> He's talking about Windows on Xen, which existed at a time, but was never released, like a lot of research projects. AMD-V and Intel VT made it mostly moot though.

<comment><USER18> So you mean like... NTOSKRNL et al essentially retrofitted to run in a kind of userspace?

Nice.

I don't expect that kind of thing to ever leave a research environment though. It would mess with too many people's heads and give people too many ideas of running bare-metal kernels other than NT.

Now I think about it, I realize the reason why HW virtualization really took off is because it let vendors keep their operating systems as actual operating systems in the traditional sense of the word, making for fewer legal issues (among many other reasons).

Also, I thought Xen was essentially just a super-thin layer to kickstart VT-x/AMD-V. I didn't know it could do anything else. In fact, I thought there was only emulation and hardware-assisted virtualization. Is there a middle ground I'm not aware of?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It's paravirtualization. Oh, Drawbridge is full NT in user-space, is in production now for SQL Server on Linux, but Dk (Drawbridge) is much newer. :)

<comment><USER18> TIL. That's really cool. Now I'm wondering if there are any small fully- paravirtualized hypervisors and guests I can play with. I guess Linux's support for various forms of I/O acceleration is more or less it.

I didn't know Drawbridge was _that_ amazing - that's incredible.

And now I'm starting to understand Microsoft's vision: they have WSL to get Linux infrastructure onto Windows, and Dk to get selected Windows infrastructure onto Linux. Impressive.

But now I think about it that way, I know Dk will only ever be an internal framework - if that got released we'd basically have "perfect Wine" and it would allow quite a few too many applications to move off of NT.

<comment><AUTHOR> WSL uses Drawbridge picoprocesses internally by the way. :)

The Drawbridge NTUM(User-Mode NT kernel) is maintained as NT 6.2 (Windows 8) which is new enough for almost all purposes - except modern Windows apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Funnily, WannaCry itself doesn't work on WinXP:

[https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/863339558364229634](https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/863339558364229634)

<comment><USER20> Interesting, but I suspect that a slight variant of it would work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not all vulnerabilities are equal. If I understand correctly, the reason this one enabled extremely easy spread of ransomware is that, reading the description of MS17-010, it is enough for the computer to be a part of the local network and have the "file sharing" enabled to be infected.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ok, having to scrap an excellent hp laptop that had vista (did not buy it in a month that Microsoft thought they had to offer free upgrades to W 7) My doorstop was not past it's prime. If car companies treated customers like window does, the brakes would fail at 4 years and the 40 page online agreement would say that the purchaser would not be able to hold the auto mfg. liable for intentional brake malfunction. Kind of like GM screwed Americans by filing for bankruptcy, getting federal funding and saving 10 cents on the ignition switch that killed many people. Microsoft and GM could be good companies, they choose not to be.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks like humanity needs some long-term-support version of an operating system, where "long term" would mean 50 years or so (not five or ten).

<comment><USER24> Enter rolling distributions, where each upgrade is guaranteed to work. Even if you can't upgrade from version A to C, you can upgrade from A to B to C. Why can't Microsoft products also upgrade this way, even between major versions?

<comment><USER25> Except you can see Youtube videos of examples where people started on early versions of DOS in a VM and upgraded all the way to Windows 10. Name one company that does more work to ensure backwards compatibility. You can even read Raymond Chen's blog about times where Microsoft developers wrote shims to emulate bugs in previous versions so that specific applications would continue to work.

And no, Microsoft can't guarantee everything developed by a 3rd party will continue working, and nor should they.

The bottom line when it comes to places like the NHS is that they decided to cut costs by either not entering into a custom support agreement with Microsoft so that they could continue to get security patches for XP, or by upgrading their systems to run on newer versions of the OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The title probably should include the word WannaCrypt since that's the motivation.

Good on Microsoft for doing this.

<comment><USER18> > _The title probably should include the word WannaCrypt since that 's the > motivation._

Your comment was directly above [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14330193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14330193) when I saw this page. Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/8fydOGG.png](http://i.imgur.com/8fydOGG.png)

I'm starting to seriously dislike HN's lack of moderation transparency. I don't know who changed the title - if it was the post author or a moderator - and when.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For the life of me, and embarrassingly, I could not locate this patch (or any patches) to download manually, for offline install on 2008 server which would not get online updates (the reasons I would leave unknown).

<comment><USER27> Try again. The page has been updated with a direct link (CDN).

Here is the direct link to executable just in case. [1]

[1] - [http://download.windowsupdate.com/c/msdownload/update/softwa...](http://download.windowsupdate.com/c/msdownload/update/software/secu/2017/05/windows8-rt- kb4012598-x86_a0f1c953a24dd042acc540c59b339f55fb18f594.msu)

<comment><USER28> Wait - a critical security update distributed via plain HTTP instead of HTTPS...? I checked all the links provided for my computers, too - they're all [http://](http://)

<comment><USER29> Probably because some windows xp boxes can't connect to https servers running TLS 1.2 so the patches are available under http as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does that mean that they will fix all future (major) remote vulnerabilities?

<comment><USER31> It's an interesting conundrum. One could argue this is a precedent. Then it becomes a question of "for what levels of severity do they patch vulnerability for?".

<comment><USER32> Exactly! IMHO Microsoft shouldn't have released the patch to people that aren't paying for extended support. It is just going to encourage cheap CIOs to continue to ignore their dying infrastructure. They just doomed themselves to another 10+ years of Windows XP support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Original title is "Customer Guidance for WannaCrypt attacks"

</comment><comment><USER34> I can't get this to work on Win 8. The application starts up, then says "Searching for updates on this computer". I have been waiting for like 15 minutes now

<comment><USER35> Have you considered getting Windows 10? The update isn't so expensive.

<comment><USER34> I am on 8.1, problem is I tried upgrading to windows 10 a year ago. I was one of the "early adopters". I cant remember properly but there was incompatibility with Visual Studio with Xamarin on. I was reliant on developing an app at that time and could not afford downtime, so I reverted back to 8.1.

I will try upgrading again when I get time.

<comment><AUTHOR> 8.1 still gets updates until 2023. They only mean 8.0 with those packages. :) They should add a clearer error message when trying to install an 8.0 package though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can a Windows laptop that doesn't have the Windows Update patch get infected just by being connected to the Internet via a home Wi-Fi network?

</comment><comment><USER37> Am I wrong to say that app sandboxing would fix this kind of issues and a lot more(i.e. keyloggers) ?

</comment><comment><USER38> Please remove "?utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral" from the URL.

<comment><USER39> I hate dinglequeries too.

I wish more people would learn what can and can't be removed from a URL before sharing it. It's not that difficult, and it's easy to test that the "minified" version still works.

<comment><USER27> Just curious, why do you care so much about them? They are just data for analytics. Everyone is probably just clicking on them not typing manually.

<comment><USER40> Because they are data for analytics. Not everyone is a fan of that, especially when the URL points to the servers of a company with such a terrible privacy policy.

<comment><USER41> Surely if you dislike analytics, keeping these bogus utm parameters is "good"? They are misleading the webmaster in some form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> People need it. People want it. Allow the people to pay for it.

<comment><USER43> They do, it's called custom support, but it's very expensive (think six figures)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Was Vista affected by this?

</comment><comment><USER45> Is Windows 7 not affected?</comment>


Poor Man's Template A/B Testing (in Django) - <AUTHOR> http://tech.matchfwd.com/poor-mans-template-ab-testing/ Ever wanted to A/B test your templates in Django and didn't know where to start? Here is a 50 line function as a drop-in replacement for render_to_response with full breakdown of how and why. <comment><USER2> Everytime I read about A/B testing I remember this posting about why you do better than A/B using solutions to the multi-armed bandit problem: <http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=132>

<comment><AUTHOR> Convienently, the solution I wrote allows you to utilize two or as many templates as you want, add and remove to the directory as you wish. For us, setting off a handful of template options for two weeks then seeing which one has higher conversion is extremely simple (no need for 'reward' function as such) and effective (it's a fair distribution across the options). We explicitly wanted to avoid needing to track the number of times each possibility is viewed.

I think "better" needs to be defined. "More accurate results?" Possibly, but probably not by much. Less disturbance to general conversion rates (since the 'successful' case is presented most often barring random variability), sure. But the point is to try out every option, not try out the seemingly more successful option the majority of the time.</comment></comment>


I'm no physicist, however this is bugging me. - <AUTHOR>

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484
The CERN experiment has bothered myself. Maybe because I'm uneducated in the field however this is how I feel:
Time as we know can be stopped, time as we know can be traveled back and fro into. However, time as we know is simply a measurement of results. Results from impulsive and undefined actions from participants in life.
Proving that we can travel faster than light may prove we can time travel, I feel it merely proves we can bend a measurement of life. The ability to travel and arrive at a destination not in a negative amount of time but in an amount of time we can not measure in our current capacity. <comment><USER2> Interesting subject. Time allows us to measure results. Not the other way around.

Our consciousness cannot experience time going backwards. Time travel to the experiencer, would happen in +ve time for him/her.

Also, even if those neutrino speed measurements stand true, travelling back in time should still be an impossibility.

What is it about the experiment, that bothers you?

</comment><comment><USER3> You might find Paul Borrill's talk given in Stanford's EE380 of interest. <http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/permlinks/Borrill.html></comment>


Taiwanese to Form Patent Bank to Defend Local Companies - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/taiwanese-to-form-patent-bank-to-defend-local-companies

<comment><USER2> It's usually not the patent trolls. It's companies like Apple that they need to protect against. I guess patent trolls don't want you to go out of business as long as they get the "protection money". Besides you have a situation were a country as a whole declaring war on a patent troll. That could create good PR and a favorable judgement.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does a patent bank protect against trolls who cannot be countersued as they are not infringing?

<comment><USER4> I guess the thinking is that if you have enough patents, the other guy is surely infringing one (or more) of them.

<comment><USER5> That's the whole point of trolls (or Non-practicising Entities), if they don't do anything (besides sue) then they can't be countersued on the basis of patents they infringe.

<comment><USER6> <evil>The defendant could use their patent bank to sue the troll's licensees, thereby starving the troll.</evil></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where there is public data about companies ? - <AUTHOR> In UK there is https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/companies-house
I Spain there is https://boe.es/diario_borme/
Do you know if there is anything like this in your country ? <comment><USER2> Public companies in the US must file with the SEC. Generally, the SEC site is the best place to find this stuff. [https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html](https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> After submit I found [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_registers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_registers)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://opencorporates.com/](https://opencorporates.com/) comes to mind

</comment><comment><USER4> mca.gov.in for India. You can find things like directors, annual filings, financial statements etc.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a service for asking others to poke holes in your plan? - <AUTHOR>

I recently bought the domain 'disabuse.me' and am considering this idea as an option for what to do with it. <comment><USER2> There are probably message boards full of snarky, or perhaps civil, users who would be glad to tell you what's wrong with any idea you propose (discussions on halfbakery.com often go this way, though it seems to be generally expected that the cunning plan hasn't been fully thought through). Would this service be meant to focus the naysaying discussion to users with known credentials?

<comment><AUTHOR> Known credentials, not necessarily. But it would put a priority on increasing the visibility of good input and diminishing the snark and bluster, and culturally, it would be tuned toward intelligent civility.

Think HN-style comment ranking, for instance.

However, if someone were to verify relevant credentials, then that would be indicated visually somehow such as with a small icon or a highlight color for their name.

An alternative idea I have is to be more active in curating the content -- make it a blog and disabuse common misunderstandings in a comprehensive and constructive way. A link to that entry would serve as a convenient and comprehensive way to address those issues whenever and wherever the popped up.

<comment><USER2> So if not the curated blog, what would be the difference between what you're thinking of and making something like a section of stackexchange?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good question -- I don't know enough about SE to answer it right now.

My impression of SE is that it is about asking and answering questions -- for the site I envision, the question is always implied as "Am I wrong?" and you lay out your plan. This matters because people expect questions to be precise, but that doesn't translate well to trying to find errors in reasoning unless you already have a theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since I see 4 votes and one comment, I assume those people are asking the question along with me with those votes.

If I'm wrong, voters, let me know.</comment>


Why we're a titleless startup - <AUTHOR> http://socialuxe.com/2010/04/why-we-are-a-titleless-startup/

<comment><USER2> It's a good article, but there's a flip side to not having titles: You risk confusing people who don't know much about your company yet.

To put it another way, titles aren't just about establishing a pecking order -- they are also about helping others identify who in your organization is responsible for what.

A journalist who wants to talk about your innovative technical solution wants to talk to the CTO (or VP engineering or whatever.) But if they instead unknowingly send an email to the person in the CEO role, that message might sit in the CEO's inbox for a while before getting redirected to the right person.

Or a legal threat could end up in a junior staff member's inbox, where the staff member might take the threat less seriously than a CFO would.

And the problem isn't just about where to send emails. What happens when you grow to a staff of six, three of whom are working on website development? Who is ultimately responsible for the application? The UI? The servers? Someone could ask questions and ultimately figure it out -- but it'd be a lot easier if they could just contact the "sysadmin", the "designer," and the "developer".

To be fair, the article does mention using "role based" titles when talking to the media. And I think that the author's real issue is with the "pecking order" aspect of titles. But forgoing titles altogether isn't the right solution.

Likewise, choosing something that completely obscures your role, like Mad Hatter, is like choosing random names for the variables in your code. You might think it's humorous to have $foo and $bar and $number in your code, but it doesn't help anyone who has to read your code later.

<comment><USER3> " _You risk confusing people who don't know much about your company yet._ "

Haven't really seen that be a problem at our startup (the same one as the OA). Whether running a couple of usability tests over skype or meeting people at the adtech conference yesterday, people seem more interested in what the company is building than what our particular role is. And if need be, we'll often describe ourselves in terms they'll understand, like "designer", "usability test moderator" or whatever the situation warrants.

It's worth pointing out that the blog post title is Why _WE'RE_ A Titleless Startup. It works in our situation because we have a small team (less than 10) and it's completely flat - we all report to John, our CEO. It wouldn't work if there's a strong caste system-style divide between certain groups (like founders vs employees, or employees vs contractors) or super-specialized prima donnas unwilling to wear many hats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Impressive sounding titles are for resumes, not egos. Most people here recognize the importance of explaining a product in as few words as possible so the people who want what you're selling stay for more, but for some reason, the same effect in hiring is overlooked.

If you want future jobs that carry the kind of responsibilities that a VP of Engineering, for instance, would typically handle, those jobs will be easier to get if that title's already on your resume. Forcing people to accept the title of "Irreverence Engineer" is forcing them to leave money on the table, and it's not a necessary feature of a culture that deemphasizes hierarchy.

<comment><USER5> Question: at a startup without titles, what do you think of fashioning one's own, within certain ethical limits?

It's obviously wrong to take the CEO title if you weren't the CEO (he or she might take it personally) or CFO if your job had nothing to do with finance, but I think a certain amount of leniency is allowed.

<comment><USER6> The biggest practical downside I can think of is if in checking references, your former boss gets called and has a reaction of, "John Doe, Senior Foobar? I don't think we even _had_ a Foobar". So might be worth running it by whoever it is from the company you'd be likely to put down as a reference. I've met founders who are perfectly fine vouching for any reasonable title the employee wants to pick, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The OA article comes off a bit like a bunch of teenagers complaining how their parents generation are a bunch of conformists so they're going to rebel by all doing their hair different. And then the teenagers all do their hair in exactly the same "different" way.

Then they get older, and realize, hey, most people's hair is like that because as you get older, most people don't care that much, so a sort of "style freeze" happens. Then, luckily, these people give birth to their own set of teenagers, and the cycle repeats.

If he doesn't understand the value of a job title, even in a small company, he just hasn't been in business long enough. Eventually he'll learn, "Oh yeah, those things really do have a purpose!". They help settle who has final say on decisions within a particular area. They help route questions to the right folks who can answer them or get them answered. It also puts an outside-facing name next to a certain slice of the business: forcing a person to "own" an area because if, say, an outside observer thinks that some company's marketing is done badly, it will reflect badly on the VP of Marketting, etc. Sure, inside the company, in the dark, when nobody else is around, you can have whatever silly titles you want, or even no titles at all. But if you really think titles are meaningless, you should take it to it's logical conclusion: renounce all use of personal names, location names, etc. Afterall, they are just titles, they don't mean anything. Oh yeah, that's right: they _are_ useful. That's why they exist!

</comment><comment><USER8> Until you reach a certain scale titles are for the benefit of external parties. How much this matters depends on industry.

I can remember people handing me cards with titles of "Tech Dude" and "Web Boy" during the dotcom boom (although I'm yet to notch up a "Mad Hatter"). Wiser to eschew titles entirely.

</comment><comment><USER9> Two friends of mine did a startups some years ago. One technical guy and one business guy. The tech guys title was simply "technology" and the business guys title was "everything else".

It worked - everybody understood it immediately and it brought a smile to peoples face.

<comment><USER10> Definitely a refreshing change from grandiose titles like CEO in a 3 person company!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Read the book _The Leader who Had no title_ by Robin Sharma. He philosophizes this concept and applies it to life in general. You don't need a title. If you do, you're not busy working enough.

My business card simply reads _Without title_ under my name.

Think of it this way. When does another person come across your card? When you hand it to them.

If you are serious about building meaningful relationships with clients/vendors/strangers, a title on a business card should not define your role. _You_ should.

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't it better to _optimize_ the titles, not just abandon them completely? One way would be having dynamic titles based on what you do: _user identity coordinator_ , _analytics specialist_ and keep it flat? Titles change when your _actual_ role changes and if you leave the company it will be (even more) possible to meaningfully describe yourself in the CV.

</comment><comment><USER13> Without titles, how do you ensure that you got a fair deal when you sign up?

(Assumption: If you end up with a "Director of Engineering" title, you can easily ask your peers, startup blogs, salary.com to determine the right mix of cash/equity.)

<comment><USER14> If you feel like you're being paid too little, you didn't get a fair deal. If you feel like you're overpaid, what a horrible problem to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Colin Powell very much eschews the command and control structure in his advice for leadership.

"Organizational Charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing"

<http://www.blaisdell.com/powell/>

Also, the modern business suit is heavily inspired by military command dress.

<comment><USER16> That link deserved its own submission. Thanks and upvoted.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, his advice was very surprising to me as well coming from the upper echelons of the US military machinery.

I've posted it to the front page to see if others are interested as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 'No title' is a title itself. Worth thinking about.</comment>


[Python 3] Argson: import and manage arguments with defaults from JSON files - <AUTHOR> https://pypi.org/project/argson/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this simple wrapper for argparse because I wanted more flexibility in managing and writing arguments for my programs. Just recently I mustered up the energy to port the code to a standalone module and publish it. I think this is sufficiently neat to may be of interest to some.

What you do is provide an arguments.json (required, will raise an error if module is unable to open the file), defaults.json and self.json (that will configure the text when your program is called with '\--help'), call argparse.parse_file_and_arguments() and the module figures out the flags and returns the object with defaults and inputs parsed.

All default configurations and directories are documented in the readme.

You can programatically change defaults.json to match environment needs.

There is more detailed information and documentation in the pypi project page, as well as several examples in the github page showing configuration effects.

Everyone is welcome to contribute too. Thanks! Hope to hearing from the community</comment>


How CEO Anne Wojcicki Turned 23andMe Around After Falling Out with the FDA - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3052283/most-creative-people/how-ceo-anne-wojcicki-turned-23andme-around-after-falling-out-with-the- <comment><USER2> You mean "How the 23andMe marketing department put the best spin possible on a massive FDA compliance failure by getting tech sites to write personality- driven fluff pieces, putting the CEO in the best possible light."

</comment><comment><USER3> A number of changes to their terms of service over the last few days indicate that the change in their business model may have come at the cost of user data protection. See recent change diluting privacy protections enjoyed by their users.

[http://imgur.com/ygrHxuY](http://imgur.com/ygrHxuY)

More details can be found here: [https://tracker.terminosycondiciones.es/en/doc/2058](https://tracker.terminosycondiciones.es/en/doc/2058)

<comment><USER4> Unchanged:

 _23andMe will never release your individual-level Genetic Information and /or Self-Reported Information to any third party without asking for and receiving your explicit consent to do so_

That sounds pretty cut and dried to me.

<comment><USER5> The part of the sentence you left out: _unless required by law._

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure that applies to any and all companies regardless of what they put in their ToS...

<comment><USER6> Almost, but not quite all!

The first exception that comes to mind is tarsnap. Who does not only offer that promise, but offers code and reasoning for why it is impossible for them to compromise your data even if law enforcement comes calling!

Lavabit also comes to mind. While they could have technically compromised their customers, when law enforcement came calling (after Snowden famously used them), the owner chose to shut down instead of complying with the requests of law enforcement.

That said, such heroes are few and far between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been their customer since the beginning and have participated in all their upgrades.

 __None __of the data has been useful /insightful, its been good for mere entertainment so far. I don't expect it to get any useful anytime soon.

<comment><USER8> I actually wonder about any potential adverse effects it might have.

For some time now I've wanted to try such service for kicks and giggles but the thought of getting a result like you have some gene which makes it more likely for you to get toe cancer by 700% which will pester me for the rest of my life even if it has very low scientific value always bugged me enough not too.

Sure if i was going to die I would rather know about it sooner than later, but I never thought that filling my head with the potentialities of mortality was warranted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did she really? I think it still remains to be seen.

</comment><comment><USER10> Somebody tell Theranos....

</comment><comment><USER11> It'd be nice if they offered some sort of backup. I fear I'm going to lose access to all my health reports when they switch over to the parenting-centric model.

<comment><USER12> You can download your genotype SNP data as a backup. I don't know about the health reports (are they so voluminous that you cannot open up each in a tab and then save them all as a batch of HTML files?) but there's a partial replacement in the form of the Promethease service which will take a SNP export and try to summarize any interesting hits.

<comment><USER11> If I scraped it myself, there'd be over 400 pages. Looks like they don't do async fetches for the main pages until you use the risk indicator (e.g. to try different age ranges to see when you're most likely to have a health problem).

So, as long as they don't ban your account for scraping, you could probably write a script to get most of it. I see personalized data in the view-source, which is a good sign (it means they server-render the personalized bit).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr - she followed the rules.

<comment><USER14> You don't have a "falling out" with regulatory agencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do they actually have customers? What kind of idiot hands over their entire genetic data to a for-profit corporation?

<comment><USER16> Is this comment a joke? What are they going to do with your gnome that you're worried about? Considering, on average, dozens of companies have your social, bank account information and other really important data why is it your gnome that crosses the line?

If you're waiting for a non-profit to do this you're going to be waiting for a while. This is expensive and difficult.

<comment><USER17> The wait is over! I just had it done for free by a research study at U of M. Check out genes for good:[http://genesforgood.sph.umich.edu](http://genesforgood.sph.umich.edu)

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the tip! Just started the process for qualifying.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Startup refuses to remove your card from their system? - <AUTHOR> Having canceled services for a startup. They are still placing charges on my card every now and then. When I report it, they quickly refund the charges but next month it still happens. They said it's because of a software bug. I requested credit card removal, they refused. What can I do? They use stripe and braintree. <comment><USER2> Report it as fraud to your credit card company or cancel your card and have a new one issued.</comment>


NoSQL Benchmark Compares PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Neo4j, OrientDB and ArangoDB - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.com/2015/10/benchmark-postgresql-mongodb-arangodb/ <comment><USER2> I really, really distrust these kinds of evaluations when they come from someone whose product is included in the comparison. Even if everything is above-board, they're not going to publish if it shows their product just completely sucks at it. That kind of publication bias makes these kinds of results a lot less trustworthy than independent benchmarks even if you assume the best of intentions from the people putting them out there.

<comment><USER3> Ingo from ArangoDB here. I agree that vendor tests are always biased, of course you want to show that your product is competitive.

But as there is no independent institution that compared our product and as we want to know where we stand with ArangoDB, Claudius did his own tests. And as the work is already done, why not share it.

We tried our best to do it as open as possible. PostgreSQL performed very well and we have a problem with memory consumption - have a look at the charts, we will try to improve there.

\- Every database configuration is public

\- All test scripts are available on Github

\- We publish updates if we get pull-requests or comments with suggestions for improvements

We did that before and after the last test, some database vendors sent us improved snapshots of their databases which found their way into the latest products (OrientDB and Neo4j).

If you have suggestions for improvements, please let us know.

<comment><USER4> > PostgreSQL performed very well

Despite the fact that you crippled it by not using jsonb columns.

<comment><USER5> Why so hostile? Personally, I assume this is just an instance of them not being PostgeSQL experts. So, before jumping to conclusions (namely that they deliberatly skewed their test, despite being very open in the way they described the setup), I'll instead wait and see -- perhaps they'll explain why they used json instead of jsonb, or perhaps (better!) they can updat the test to also include jsonb.

<comment><USER6> If they're not Postgres experts then they shouldn't be including Postgres in the line-up. Or ask someone that ask someone that knows better.

<comment><USER7> That's why they welcome pull-requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm Claudius, author of the tests. I've been asked to include a lot of different databases into the test runs. The most requested databases were Postgres/JSON and RethinkDB. I started with Postgres. The Postgres manual states that JSONB might be faster, but some StackOverflow answers indicate that it takes more space than JSON, while JSON might be slightly more compatible with legacy code. I've shown the queries and setup to some local Postgres users. They did not point that JSONB will be much faster for the kinds of requests used in the test setup. For instance, we do not use special indexes apart from the primary one by choice.

I wanted to move on to RethinkDB next, but I see your point that a comparison between the different JSON formats of Postgres can also be very enlightening. This should replace guessing with hard facts. As always I will update the blog post and add this tests as well - as we did in the past, see [https://www.arangodb.com/nosql-performance-blog- series/](https://www.arangodb.com/nosql-performance-blog-series/).

If you have any improvements concerning the configuration of Postgres or SQL queries, I'm will be more than happy to include them as well in the update. I will push the used configuration to GITHUB as well.

<comment><USER9> Please refer to the #postgresql channel on irc.freenode.net for any postgres inquiries, you will receive an answer from experts and core developers on the correct processes within minutes for almost any question. It is a very active channel full of knowledgeable folks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am just going to say: have a try with the LDBC social benchmark [http://ldbcouncil.org/](http://ldbcouncil.org/) and [http://ldbcouncil.org/benchmarks](http://ldbcouncil.org/benchmarks). Where you can even have audited results.

These are also graph database benchmarks that are synthetic, designed to look like real data and are quite hard to do well on.

As someone responsible for a public free to use deployment of a graph database with more than 2 billion nodes and 15 billion edges (sparql.uniprot.org) I must say this looks like a SPARQL benchmark from 10 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder why there's not the equivalent to the Frameworks Benchmark[1] for databases. It seems we could all really benefit from that. Ideally it would get to a place where they would be able to simulate real-world worst case scenarios and test for problems. Each database would likely want multiple entries with different configs, but if you have some engineered failure scenarios and tests in the results it becomes obvious what the trade-off is. Sure, a specific setting may reduce consistency in the event of a failure for speed, but sometimes that's what you might want, and if the failure cases clearly show the problem, at least you aren't going in blind.

1: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

<comment><USER12> Having benchmarks for different storage models : Relational/Document/Graph/Object/XML, would be a better solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clicking the link got me "Error establishing a database connection." :/

</comment><comment><USER14> I was kind of shocked how good PostgesSQL did.

I still think PostgresSQL and MariaDB are a better tool for most jobs considered big data.

<comment><USER15> Postgres was actually somewhat crippled in these tests since they used json rather than jsonb for storage, which stores the json in a binary format which doesn't need to be serialised on reads.

<comment><USER16> That's not quite correct. The jsonb requires that reads deserialize jsonb into textual JSON, whereas the json type can be sent directly to the client with no processing.

jsonb is superior when:

1\. You want to use any of the built-in JSON functions, e.g. for extracting fields from the document.

2\. You want to index the JSON (either the entire thing via GIN, or individual fields via ordinary B-tree indexes).

3\. You want to save space; jsonb strips whitespace.

jsonb incurs an overhead on both reads and writes since it must serialize to/from textual JSON.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looking around, it seems that different graph engines pull ahead depending on the use case.

[http://www.slideshare.net/sympapadopoulos/adbis2014-presenta...](http://www.slideshare.net/sympapadopoulos/adbis2014-presentation)

</comment><comment><USER18> >Error establishing a database connection

</comment><comment> nevi-me Like others mention here, I'm skeptical of these types of comparisons. If I compare myself to my competitors, I won't publish results if they're better than me.

I tried ArangoDB about a year ago, I think I still have the branch that I tried it on. After spending a weekend porting some stuff from MongoDB to Arango, I ended up regretting doing that by Sunday evening. It'd be nice to fire things up, update the branch's code and see how it performs.

</comment><comment><USER19> No RethinkDB?

</comment><comment><USER20> Comparison of X1, X2, ... , Xn, Y, written by Y

=> suspicion

</comment><comment><USER21> Hugged to death.

[https://archive.is/cMWCQ](https://archive.is/cMWCQ)

<comment><USER3> No, running on XXXXX Cloud. :(

We currently look into it. Thank's for the mirrored page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> and now a 10-node cluster

</comment><comment><USER23> Would love to see the results for CouchDB in comparison to these.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would like to see - Titan with Cassandra backend here.

<comment><USER16> Out of interest, which version of Titan are you on? I see that 1.0 was released recently, with little apparent fanfare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why not include redis or rethinkdb?

<comment><USER25> redis and rethinkdb are not ACID across documents. So it's not the same usecase _at all_.

<comment><USER26> Are you implying that MongoDB and friends _are_ ACID across documents?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The graph dataset is too small in size. It makes little sense for real-world usage.

<comment><USER3> Ingo from ArangoDB: Despite it's the whole dataset of a real-world use case. :)

[https://snap.stanford.edu/data/soc- pokec.html](https://snap.stanford.edu/data/soc-pokec.html)

But of course, you need to test and decide on basis of your individual requirements and use cases.

<comment><USER27> Ingo - SNAP has a bunch of other "real-world use case" graphs available for free, many of which larger than this 1M-node, 30M-edge toy.

I've done a bunch of related benchmarkings, and the _smallest_ real-world dataset I've used is the _largest_ one on SNAP: orkut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have looked at ArangoDB and really hope it takes off, it has some pretty nifty features I think just at this point the lack of integration with frameworks like Meteor.js is holding me back.</comment>


We made an open source ESP8266 dev board for makers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MaloufSleep/ME-ESP8266 <comment><USER2> I built something like this but more special-purpose. It just switches a USB-A power source on/off. I wanted it to control my 5-volt fish-tank lights. I didn't want to use a 120VAC smart switch for each light because I prefer to use a single USB hub to power them all, and a bonus feature was being able to PWM the lights so the fish aren't freaked out when the lights suddenly turn on 100% in the morning.

I ordered PCBs from JLCPCB and components from LCSC. I think each one cost around $5 in parts, and I hand-assemble them as I need more around the house.

[https://github.com/sowbug/smart-usb-switch](https://github.com/sowbug/smart- usb-switch)

Picture: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sowbug/smart-usb- switch/ma...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sowbug/smart-usb- switch/master/completed.jpg)

<comment><USER3> I am sure this is something will be able to answer:

I need to build a custom board for an ESP32 which should support low-power deep sleep and which should contain some additional circuitry (is that what you call it?) to drive an Eink display.

Basically this[1] board, but a different shape and better low-power sleep properties.

If I wanted to design this board myself, how long would it take to learn this? Are there good resources?

If I were to _pay_ somebody to do design this, what order of magnitude would the cost be in?

> [https://eckstein-shop.de/Waveshare-Universal-e-Paper-Raw- > Pan...](https://eckstein-shop.de/Waveshare-Universal-e-Paper-Raw-Panel- > Driver-Board-ESP32-WiFi-Bluetooth-Wireless)

<comment><USER4> Have you already made the circuit on a breadboard? If so, learning KiCAD and building the board from scratch would take around a week of afternoons.

I really recommend it, designing PCBs is very enjoyable (at least to me).

<comment><USER3> How would I work with SMD components on a breadboard?

<comment><USER4> Either breakout boards or you use the through-hole versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool - it looks like a well-designed board, although the timing is a bit unfortunate with the ESP32-S2 emerging as an ESP8266 replacement with USB.

A few questions:

* Should the relay have some sort of isolation, like an optocoupler?

* Is it FCC-certified?

* Like other people asked, any information on how the antenna was designed?

I like the old-school dome LEDs. And it's cool to see another project with a CH340 USB/USART bridge, even if they wouldn't need it with an ESP32-S2.

<comment><USER6> > * Is it FCC-certified?

It would certainly appear to lack the FCC ID label/marking it is required to have if it is FCC certified. So probably not. Thus, it also appears doubtful whether it can legally be marketed or sold in the U.S.

<comment><USER7> This is the exact reason why I didn't see through my plan to build and sell the EspUSB (a very small ESP board that fits inside a USB-A port).

I got 3 units built for myself by PCBWay at a cost of $77. I got quotes of ~$500 for 100 units from Elecrow and Makerfabs, but didn't know what to do with the other 90.

Although I really want this great little gadget to be easily available, I can't afford $10,000 for FCC certification, and therefore I have no solution.

If anybody wants more details, email firstname.lastname@example.com and we can chat about it on there.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how the folks that sell on Tindie get around this... [https://www.tindie.com/](https://www.tindie.com/)

<comment><USER9> There are various exemptions for subassemblies and other non-end-user products. Those may not always apply. However, in practice, a product that's sold in small quantities and does not in fact emit egregious electromagnetic interference is unlikely to attract enforcement attention. So a fair bit of skirting of the rules does go on.

<comment><USER7> Based on the PAL project and WiFi capability, I think the ESP8266 does emit electromagnetic radiation. Whether it's interference or a feature depends on your perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who has used RS232 voltage for serial in the last 10 years? I'd rather a few MOSFETs to cut the power to everything for lower power. I guess there is a specific market for this and it is not me. I have at least 20 of Esp8266 and esp32 boards around the house. A bit of fun to design and produce though. I would not bother with the ESP8266 anymore considering the marginal cost of the esp32 and it is a much better device, learnt from their mistakes. The new one with on chip USB looks great too.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I'm regretting getting the esp8266 not knowing of the esp32. Besides being a better device for basically the same price, it has better tooling from espressif.

<comment><USER12> Esp-idf is amazing .

Esp8266 doesnt have flash encryption and secure boot. Esp32-s2 does though.

<comment><USER13> > Esp-idf is amazing .

I have the opposite experience. Sure, if you just need to adapt their examples a bit, it's quite smooth. But the documentation is horrendous! If you need to do anything non-trivial that isn't covered by examples, I found it very very hard to work with. The documentation barely exists and is written in poor English. Compare this to the documentation for ARM SDKs, for example! Night and day.

<comment><USER12> I was comparing the Esp-idf to the Arduino libraries! The documentation isn't too bad, it's quite lengthy. The examples, tutorials online, and github issues in the idf repo help a lot too since the documentation doesn't dive into code examples too well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice. There's also a project called FEMU, which is an ESP32 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth board that fits in a USB port: [https://hackaday.io/project/167005-femu-an- esp32-wi-fiblueto...](https://hackaday.io/project/167005-femu-an-esp32-wi- fibluetooth-board-in-tomu-form)

</comment><comment><USER15> I recently created a board for the nrf8001 Bluetooth low energy chip. I see your antenna section isn't fully open since that LED is in the way, have you considered rearranging things so that PCB antenna has an unobstructed path on the left and right sides?

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty rad! I could see lots of applications. Available on amazon you say? 19.99 you say?

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GY2GTW5?ref=myi_title_dp](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GY2GTW5?ref=myi_title_dp)

I'm curious about availability. Are they ready to ship? Awaiting preorders?

EDIT: Oh I see 18 in stock. Probably remains of a small run to gauge interest. I hope it takes off. I'm going to make it 17. :-)

<comment><USER17> we have more stock, just waiting to transfer to Amazon

<comment><USER18> Any plans to make it available in Canada?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting. Seems fairly comparable to the Sonoff Basic (also ESP8266, retails around $5), but more DIY friendly.

Are you planning to sell a case to go with it?

<comment><USER17> Yes we probably design a case that you can 3D print and will add it to GitHub soon ish

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Charles Lohr has done some neat projects with this board. Recently he made this post and I've never thought about this level of hand-holding interaction with the silicon itself.

[https://twitter.com/cnlohr/status/1307890077041909760](https://twitter.com/cnlohr/status/1307890077041909760)

</comment><comment><USER21> Is the antenna open source? Is it characterized (bandwidth, efficiency, radiation pattern)?

Almost like one from here: [https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra351a/swra351a.pdf](https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra351a/swra351a.pdf)

<comment><USER22> Yeah the antenna footprint is actually that one provided by ti. I had created a footprint from that pdf but then I found a kicad footprint somewhere that looked a little nicer than my rudimentary skills. This was my first design with an antenna and I am certainly not a good rf engineer. I'd appreciate any tips and feed back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks interesting. How would I program it, do I need a FTDI board?

Also I wish it was available in Canada.

<comment><USER23> It says it can be programmed over the microUSB (just like an Arduino).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just curious not really familiar with electronics but what can i build using this

<comment><USER17> Here is a few ideas:

Alexa enabled switch to turn on / off a TV using the IR blaster

my boss used 3 of these this to build a smart sprinkler system for his house.

<comment><USER24> Oh that's so cool Thank for the suggestion. I'm really trying to learn more about hardware.

<comment><USER25> Get an Arduino starter kit and start hacking on some little project around the house. With a bit of persistence, C/C++ is not so difficult to become productive coming from almost any other language. And with the help of platformio's [1] CLI tooling it makes uploading and debugging your code on chips like the ESP8266 (or ESP32 or Arduino) pretty straight forward. Then of course there are the actual physical pieces of hardware, wires, circuits, components, etc. It's a whole new world in which to learn and break stuff. Good luck!

[1] [https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/what-is- platformio.htm...](https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/what-is- platformio.html)

<comment><USER26> So much this. You can tie in to Home Assistant quite easily. You can then make all sorts of things. Buttons to turn things on, screens to show data from Home Assistant, measure things (distance, door open/closed state, humidity, light/dark, weight etc). The sensors are nearly all really inexpensive and seem to be pretty accurate. From knowing nothing to having something functional working takes a few hours. It's great fun and anything with lights and sound gets kids involved very easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fun looking little board. Great to see people sharing these things!

It makes me wonder if there's interest in more of these type ofESP* dev kit boards. One I haven't seen is one with just Ethernet PHY but no Ethernet jack/magnetics. It's been useful in my designs to have a ETH+/\- that can be brought out to various Ethernet / PoE setups. Something like the wESP32 is handy for kits but not for integration.

<comment><USER28> Cnohlr did just this, although he strongly suggests using proper interfacing, but having the bare signal wires at hand can be useful for chip to chip communications on the same board. One could build a board with N ESP chips then connect them directly by daisy chaining their TX and RX pins, that is, passing packets in circle, or behind an Ethernet switch chip, de facto creating a board level local network. Might be interesting for some applications.

[https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet](https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet)

<comment><USER27> Using the I2S is a clever hack. I didn't know I2S could drive at 40 Hz!

<comment><USER27> Ah, 40 MHz, autocorrect fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe I'm missing it but I wish there was an ESP8266 board with a proper JTAG connector.

I have hacked something on a protoboard for nodemcus before, but it ended up being pretty messy.

</comment><comment><USER30> I too want to have this FCC certified.

$19.99 seems a bit expensive to me though.

</comment><comment><USER31> the wifi stack onthe esp8266 is a mess. it also does not support the latest espressif sdk. so you should buy an esp32 module and dont bother with this. ( the price is 3 bucks instead of 20)

</comment><comment><USER32> The biggest/best reason I know for using ESP8266 is the integrated WiFi module, but it seems that this doesn't expose that or at least capitalize on it, which gives little incentive to use this over something like the Teensy.

Is there any intention to add WiFi support to the dev kit?

<comment><USER17> Yes ESP8266 has WiFi Built-in but thanks for the pointer, I will update the description to reflect that fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting project. By why no USB? Why does it have a Relay?

<comment><USER22> What do you mean by no USB? There is a CH340C uart to USB chip onboard and a micro usb port. Is there something specific you're looking for?

The relay would just be used as a switch to turn on/off an external device using higher voltages, AC or DC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Cool board! The only thing I think would be a nice-to-have is an integrated wifi module.

<comment><USER35> doesn't esp8266 have wifi built in?

<comment><USER36> ESP8266 does, source, have several and:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have an interest in electronics and would call myself a "maker" (well, I have a growing box filled with various arduinos and microcontrollers)... but after scouring the repo and the website, I can't figure out what this is, or what I could do with it!

What is an "ESP8266 board"? Is that something that is so common it doesn't need explaining? Of course I will google it [and probably buy one], but just pointing out that it's not very clear from the website!

[EDIT: ok, after 10 minutes of googlin', it seems no one will explain what it is - it's just "an esp8266 system on a chip". It must be the first rule of ESP8266 club...]

<comment><USER38> Esp8266 is a microcontroller which is incredibly popular in the maker/hacker movement for it's low cost and wifi integration. You can add a relay to this microcontroller and put it on your wifi network and use it to switch appliances on/off from the internet quite easily. If you read hackaday, you'll run into esp8266 projects regularly.

It's a bit harder to get started with than your average arduino project. If you want, you can use the Arduino IDE which hides a lot of the complexities. But the docs from espressif are aimed more at the firmware engineer crowd, so if you want to get serious there's more of a learning curve (IE nvflash partitions, understanding what a bootloader is, etc). Also, you'll probably end up getting into freertos at some point, which further complicates things. But it's a super great module for home projects.

The esp-32 is a newer chip which is similar but adds bluetooth. In general you're better off going with esp-32 nowadays -- it's got a second core as well.

Until recently the only thing missing was USB (though there were bit-banged USB implementations!). But now there's an esp-32 with USB too, so really for the cost, the features are unparalleled.

If you're okay with things not being as polished as the Arduino experience (you might have to learn "real" firmware programming), it's really the best starting choice for your side projects.

<comment><USER39> that's a helpful info for newbies. thanks for sharing</comment></comment></comment>


Sam Altman: E Pur Si Muove - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/ <comment><USER2> This is unbelievably ignorant. If everything wasn't already so bad I literally would not believe he wrote this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for writing this Sam.

I'd add that contrary to intuition, sometimes bad ideas might be required to get to good ones. Sometimes if you're wrong in an interesting way it opens up somewhere that has been overlooked by the others who sped off in another direction.

Consider that probably a majority of the most influential early scientists thought the world was 6000 years old, that most interesting people in the Middle Ages were deep down the Alchemy rabbit hole.

I distinctly remember a BBC article on a Chinese scientist saying (paraphrased) "Hey, if you eat these animals, if you like them, you should sequence them right away, they should be priority". The pathos of the article implied this was mildly barbaric instead of making complete sense. I remember thinking "Man, you can't even explain why this dude is wrong". Abrupt, yes, wrong, no.

Scott Alexander made an observation on why this happens.

"But I can't help noticing that eight years ago, New Atheism was really popular, and now it's really unpopular. Or that eight years ago I was in a place where having Richard Dawkins style hyperrationalism was a useful brand, and now I'm (for some reason) in a place where having James C. Scott style intellectual conservativism is a useful brand. A lot of the "wisdom" I've "gained" with age is the kind of wisdom that helps me channel James C. Scott instead of Richard Dawkins; how sure am I that this is the right path?

Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it's considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low- status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of "low-status" and "bad and wrong" have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it's true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it's in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it's true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don't know how many times it's slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement."

<comment><USER3> I realize this contradicts a core CompSci idea of bad data in, bad data out, but if I recall right then at the higher levels of rationality like neural networks we have similar counterintuitive results.</comment></comment>


How the Soviets bugged typewriters in the US Embassy from 1976 through 1984 - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/07/gunman/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9954159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9954159)

<comment><USER3> One of these days make it big here, one of these days :)

Thanks for the discussion link.</comment></comment>


My Quest to Reengineer a Legendary Beer in a Dirty Kitchen - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/the-very-best-beer/

<comment><USER2> For anyone interested in homebrewing, I strongly recommend reading Jim Palmer's How To Brew [0]. It's available for free online and does a great job explaining the basics of brewing, while also including details about the chemistry behind what happens during the brewing process. It's much easier to brew an ale than making the lambics described in this article.

[0] [http://www.howtobrew.com/](http://www.howtobrew.com/)

<comment><USER3> Also the book "Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation (Brewing Elements)" provides an excellent guide to using yeast. Describing aspects such as the different flavour components produced by yeasts, up to plating your own yeast samples.

It's amazing how different yeasts can produce radically different flavours. A fun experiment to try is to split the wort (unfermented beer) into different vessels and try different yeasts out. For instance using a hefeweizen yeast, will give clove/banana notes.</comment></comment>


Google's Motorola acquisition is just a 10% premium over their 2011 high - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffreytalajic.com/2011/08/15/google-goes-bargain-hunting/

<comment><USER2> The idea that Google went bargain hunting would be stronger if anyone genuinely believed that what has happened to the market in the last couple of weeks is short term.

The reality is that before the recent drop stocks were over valued so all he's really saying is "they only paid a relatively small amount above a previous over valuation".

</comment><comment><USER3> I never understood this notion that the "fair value" of a company is somehow tied to anything but the price of its stock. If the fact that a stock used to be worth more than it is now means that it's somehow under priced then you'd have an easy arbitrage strategy on your hands. Google paid a 63% markup even though this author spins it as though they paid only 10% above some "true value".

</comment><comment><USER4> by that logic when microsoft was trying to buy yahoo a couple of years ago they were getting a huge discount compared to the 2001 high. Microsoft should have really upped the offer.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft's offer assigned Yahoo's shares at the same value as Microsoft shares. It was a fair and it was questionable for Yahoo not to take it.

On the other side of that coin Microsoft is really lucky that Yahoo didn't take the offer.</comment></comment>


U.S. Nuclear Weapons Have Been Compromised by Unidentified Aerial Objects - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS166901+15-Sep-2010+PRN20100915 <comment><USER2> Sounds like the usual UFO nonsense. Nuclear weapons bases are bound to be swarming with CCTV for security reasons, so if a highly unusual event like this were to occur there would be plenty of video footage.

<comment><USER3> Like the pentagon?</comment></comment>


'Play by your own rules' - How Gowalla lost the race against Foursquare - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/work-education/6152adc41de9

<comment><USER2> That was a great read. Thanks for posting. It might just be your writing style but one thing I took away was Foursquare was leading and you were following. Or, to put it another way, you guys obsessed over them at the expense of your vision and they stuck to their vision. If that happens they're always going to be 1 step ahead by definition. Maybe that's what you mean by "Play by your own rules"

Great story, thanks for the post and congrats on achieving what you did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment. I was just posting it, I am not the author. In this thread I found out this was posted before and I hope Josh reads all of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I heard Foursquare is just burning cash now. Do they even have a sustainable business model?

<comment><USER4> I feel like Foursquare had their biggest revenue thunder stolen by the hype around the Coupon companies.

They had a major opportunity to be a universal customer rewards program, using checkins as a proxy. But that has to be a much tougher row to hoe after the rise and fall of Groupon et al, and the stories of burned businesses in their wake.

I also think they missed the boat a bit on social. They had a chance to focus on building communities of people with geographically similar habits, but I don't think they ever found the way to make it click. I don't know what the revenue model would have been there, necessarily, but it does feel like they missed an opportunity with it.

<comment><USER5> Checkins are a terrible way to do any kind of rewards program because they can be trivially faked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used both Gowalla and Foursquare when they launched. The reason I stopped using Gowalla was that they were pushing game features that distracted from simply keeping a check-in record of places you visited. Being a Foursquare mayor is simple and makes intuitive sense (you are mayor because you like a place and go there a lot), but Gowalla was sending you on what were essentially scavenger hunts, pushing you to visit places in order to complete a map or theme that they had created.

"Game-ification" was/is a popular app strategy but not everyone wants to make everything they do into a scored game. Sometimes you just want to record and/or communicate.

</comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussion <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5328993>

</comment><comment><USER8> One bit missing from this story is that Foursquare and Gowalla didn't actually launch on the same day at SxSW. Foursquare had previously launched at the New York Tech Meetup a week or two earlier to an audience with a surprising amount of clout in the pre-celebrity Twittersphere of 2009.</comment>


Sencha remade Facebook's native iOS app faster - <AUTHOR> http://fb.html5isready.com/

<comment><USER2> Kudos to Jamie and Jacky for proving that the problem isn't HTML5. Does anyone know if the code is available?</comment>


Done? - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/done-15c1d35d31c0 <comment><USER2> I think Nathan makes a very good point. There are some people who are still on the rise w creativity and personal/professional growth. As a result of our own biases we focus so much attention on age over product (or product potential). This is unfortunate because we deny them an opportunity to shine and the world access to new, inventive options.</comment>