Using CNNs for Handbag Brand and Color Detection - <AUTHOR> https://technology.condenast.com/story/handbag-brand-and-color-detection <comment><USER2> Although they describe the process of how they went about collecting the data set, it would have been an extra special touch for them to release a formatted/clean version of it!

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. It's really crazy how it can pick the handbag out even with complex similar backgrounds.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't quite understand the object localization piece of the article. Are there other resources on this topic that explain how do do the same thing (object localization). Or tutorials/examples on this topic?

<comment><USER5> It's based on this paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.04150.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.04150.pdf) The approach is different than the Faster R-CNN etc mentioned below as it is not fully supervised, i.e. the position of the objected is not in the training data. I can write a simple tutorial and link in the article and here later today.

<comment><USER4> > I can write a simple tutorial and link in the article and here later today

That would be fantastic. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am curious if you can use this "process" to spot a fake. Fake handbags are a BIG problem in the luxury accessories market. R-CNN. Object detection and classification.

</comment><comment><USER7> A big piece missing here is data augmentation. If they had more of it maybe they wouldn't need to do the separate final layer training.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if it will ever get good enough to detect counterfeit bags? My understanding is that they are a prolific problem.

<comment><USER9> You shouldn't be getting downvoted for this.

Yes, this is an active area of research. There was a paper at KDD17 working on this: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3098186&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CF...](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3098186&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=827097581&CFTOKEN=86319338)

NVidia had a blog post about this: [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/08/03/detecting- counterfe...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/08/03/detecting-counterfeit- products/)

There's a French company with a product: [http://cypheme.com/](http://cypheme.com/)

<comment><USER8> Neat, thanks! I could see a few valuable use cases, from customs to personal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have no idea why condenast got into tech, I believe it is simply getting trendy with their crowd

<comment><USER11> Hi - Team Lead from Condé Nast here. You're right in that WIRED and New Yorker readers are interested in ML, but that's not solely why we've invested. This work is driven by our platform research team (FORE) which produces predictive models for a [wide] variety of uses, primarily to deliver a better user experience for our readers.

For example, these models are directly integrated into our search, recommendation, SEO optimization engines. Those engines then power both our in-house CMS as well as the modules you see on the brand websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how long it took to train.

<comment><USER5> I took about a day on one aws p2.xlarge (one Tesla K80) starting from a pre- trained inception model (trained and opened sourced by Googled on ImageNet data).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Killer work Johan and Paul!</comment>


Ask HN: Companies and source control - <AUTHOR> So recently, I've been checking out a lot of companies, speaking with their engineering teams and interviewing. The general stuff a CS senior would do.
As far as the older companies go, they use a wide array of revision control software.
Most of the newer startups I've spoken to use Mercurial though. Anybody know why? It seems like git is the more popular public choice, and I've heard engineers say "we use hg here, but if I had a choice, I'd use git." Why then are most startups using Mercurial? <comment><USER2> I used mercurial for a couple of years before switching to git - mostly I didn't like git's complexity or ease of shooting yourself in the foot. I'd suspect these startups have a similar line of reasoning.

The mercurial CLI is well thought out and easy to use vs git's incredible number of commands and command line options, and is also similar to SVN which probably helps get people up to speed. Generally with hg there's one right way to do things, but many with git.

As far as shooting yourself in the foot goes, git's ability to rewrite history is great for maintaining a clean revision history even after commits are made. Rebasing is quite handy for keeping multiple branches up to date and easy to merge. But these are power tools that can result a lot of pain if they aren't used properly.

I switched to git because the extra power and flexibility was more than worth the cost, and git's branching model ends up working much better for me, but mercurial is a very nice tool!

</comment><comment><USER3> I was going to mention TortoiseHG as a possible reason, I've found running git on windows painful, but then I found TortoiseGit just now.

Personally I prefer Git, it's what we use here, but we don't really have a hard and fast rule - I think we have some subversion-based code trees knocking around too.

</comment><comment><USER4> It feels like if a shop is starting from scratch, they're more likely to go with Mercurial - I'm betting the Python connection is a big reason for that, along with its comparative user-friendliness - while a shop that's migrating off SVN tends to go to git.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like python people tend to go hg over git maybe the startups in question are python shops?</comment>


Show HN: Openemacs – a tiny emacs clone, ≤ 1024 LOC (C), based on kilo (BSD) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/practicalswift/openemacs <comment><USER2> Nice!

Other emacs clones of interest [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsImplementations](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsImplementations)

I quite like mg.</comment>


Magic Transit: Network Functions at Cloudflare Scale - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/magic-transit-network-functions/ <comment><USER2> The blog post is a lot more informative than the email I received from them selling it (points at [https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/magic- transit/](https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/magic-transit/)).</comment>


Yahoo to Spin Off Its Stake in Alibaba - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/technology/yahoo-earnings-alibaba-spinoff.html <comment><USER2> This is the only outcome that made sense.

\- Yahoo already has 7B in after-tax cash from the sale of a 7% share in Alibaba.

\- Yahoo could not just sell more BABA shares, incur a 35% tax just to complete some large acquisition while they already have 10B in cash which is more than the value of their core business.

\- They still own 35% of Yahoo Japan and that share is worth another 7B in itself. Yahoo still has tons of assets.

What's interesting is that the market values Yahoo at around 50B at the moment. The BABA spinoff is worth 40B. They have 10B in cash. Their share of Yahoo Japan is 7B. Even before accounting for Yahoo's core business, they should be worth 57B. We're probably looking at an adjustment in their market cap if no legal obstacles to the spinoff are met.

<comment><USER3> > What's interesting is that the market values Yahoo at around 50B at the > moment. The BABA spinoff is worth 40B. They have 10B in cash. Their share of > Yahoo Japan is 7B. Even before accounting for Yahoo's core business, they > should be worth 57B.

Which suggests (assuming all that is accurate) that the market values Yahoo's "core business" as a $7 billion liability.

<comment><USER4> More like the market is expecting them to lose the $10 billion in the bank (spending on money losing core businesses) rather than return money to shareholders.

<comment><USER5> I think that the core business has an EBITDA of $1,362 million according to their 2014 results. That may be declining but it is still very much a profitable business.

[http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-reports-fourth- quarter-f...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-reports-fourth-quarter- full-210500209.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like Yahoo is the most successful VC in Silicon Valley!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a much more detailed explanation of why the spin-out saves on taxes:

[http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-28/yahoo- would...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-28/yahoo-would-rather- not-pay-taxes-on-its-alibaba-shares)

It also suggests that at some point, after some time has gone by, Alibaba will find it a no-brainer to buy the spin-out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Aside from the Alibaba news, which smarter and more capable people here are commenting on, I found this nugget to be really interesting:

"The company's net income was $166 million, or 17 cents a share, in the fourth quarter, compared with $348 million, or 33 cents a share, in the same quarter a year ago."

How long is the current trend sustainable? Year-over-year losing half their net income! At this point it seems like a simple matter of time.

<comment><USER9> It is bad, and yet, it isn't. I would give just about anything to own a business throwing off net profits of ~$650 million per year, or half that, or even 10% of that. Many people feel the same way you do - the market currently assigns a negative value to this $650 million annual income - but I think it's not a terrible thing to have coming in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can see how this benefits Yahoo's shareholders, and they are after all a publicly traded company.

It still seems like an exceptionally poor way for Yahoo itself to reap the rewards of this long term investment, particularly when it needs to inject some life into its business by spending on talent acquisition or new ventures.

Here's how I think the Alibaba investment breaks down for Yahoo:

Yahoo paid $1bn to Alibaba in 2005. They sold a portion back to Alibaba in 2012 for $4.3bn (after tax), and returned $3.65bn of that to shareholders. Yahoo made $0.65bn after taxes.

They sold more shares during the Alibaba IPO, and made $6.3bn (after tax), with a pledge to return $3.15bn. Yahoo made $3.15bn from the IPO.

Yahoo's remaining stake is now valued at $40bn, which they intend to spin off into another company -- seemingly with no ownership interest for Yahoo (and therefore, no further financial stake).

So over the course of ten years, Yahoo turned $1bn into $3.8bn. A 14.3% APY is nothing to sneeze at, but It sure is a far cry from the $103bn / 58.5% APY they could have had if they retained all of their Alibaba shares today. Even taking 40% off for taxes and a few billion for dividends, that is a lot of walking around town money.

Besides shareholder goodwill and getting Alibaba off their back, I don't see what Yahoo gets of any real value. Yahoo's stock price will collapse when the Alibaba shares are spun off. A company worth $1-10bn has a lot more potential buyers than a $50bn company, and someone will acquire and consume Yahoo shortly thereafter. Unless they announce plans to spin off the Yahoo Japan shares, in which case a potential acquirer just needs to wait to pick them up for a few hundred million after that event.

<comment><USER11> I agree with your thinking here but I don't think Marrissa had a choice either. Long term thinking if Yahoo wants to stick it out as an independently operating company this move is most likely short sighted, but at this point none of the investors want that. It's pretty clear that a large part of the board no longer believes in Yahoo's potential for success. They just want the money that is tied up in the Alibaba stock so they can move on with other ventures. Marissa's choices were either find a way to put a big chunk of cash in shareholder pockets ASAP or face a hostile board that was going to do it's best to take control of the company and divest the Alibaba stock anyway (you can see that certain characters on the board have been angling for this for a while now). Either way Yahoo probably loses but at least this way she has bought the company time to try and turn the corner and see if her vision can work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Several have been critical of Marissa's performance. Can you please briefly explain why? Bonus for sharing what you would have safely expected from a Yahoo CEO in two years.

<comment><USER13> This New York Times piece does a really nice job of cataloging all of the criticisms:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened- whe...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa- mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know why Yahoo! can't simply distribute its Alibaba shares to the Yahoo! shareholders? I'm assuming it would incur a tax liability of some kind but I haven't seen any explanation or discussion as to why it's not as good an option as the spin-off plan.

<comment><USER2> It's the same thing. Distributing the shares or creating a spin-off that current Yahoo shareholders will own is the same.

The other option would have been to sell the Alibaba shares and give the proceeds to shareholders but in that case, they'd have to pay 35% in taxes.

<comment><USER14> I don't think it _is_ quite the same thing. This plan will result in Yahoo!'s shareholders being given shares in SpinCo, which will own Alibaba shares.

Distributing the Alibaba shares directly to the Yahoo! shareholders would result in them owning Alibaba shares directly.

<comment><USER15> Maybe its about power/control.

If they gave out the shares then most shareholders would likely just resell them onto the open market.

However with the spin-off now they have a great little power house to direct and influence Alibaba.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So current investors will get stock in Yahoo-Alibaba, a company that exists only to own Alibaba stock, and then they can sell their stock in that new company as if it they owned the Alibaba stock itself?

<comment><USER17> Yes which sounds stupid until you realize they didn't own "Alibaba stock itself," Yahoo did. Yahoo could've used that money as it wished but activist investors held Mayer's job as ransom, and she just payed in full.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, the market put such a small premium on the non-Alibaba value in Yahoo largely because they weren't confident that Yahoo wouldn't just squander it.

Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr for nearly a billion dollars is a great example. That asset will likely never give Yahoo a return.

<comment><USER19> Are there any Yahoo acquisitions that haven't been complete disasters?

<comment><USER20> Flickr and Tumblr haven't been disasters (yet) for _users_ , at least... :)

<comment><USER21> Flickr stagnated for nearly a decade post-acquisition.

<comment><USER11> it's ironic because technically Yahoo and their acquisitions are sound. Flickr is still one of the best looking photo sites around, and from what I hear from my Photography friends performs like a champ. Tumblr likewise is a good technological investment. I think the failure has been turning good technology into money, which is where a lot of companies fail. The beauty of Flickr and Tumblr are ruined as soon as you start heaping crap tons of banner ads on every page. But that said you still have to find a way to generate revenue from those investments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I cannot for the life of me figure out how Yahoo! is making this spinoff tax- free. How can a non-Investment Company spin off an Investment Company? How can this new Investment Company be exempt from diversification rules?

This is just my opinion, but if Yahoo has figured out and easy way for corporations to directly exempt themselves from capital gains taxes, this may be their most significant contribution to the world yet. And Warren Buffett should be very thankful!

<comment><USER23> Yes, let us all cheer for the latest means by which a corporation has managed to avoid their tax obligations and continue to be a drain on society.

Whee.

<comment><USER24> But at least they are delivering excellent value to shareholders!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here is the official video from Yahoo on FY14 earnings : Marissa Mayer answering questions - [http://finance.yahoo.com/topics/yahoo-q4-full- year-2014-earn...](http://finance.yahoo.com/topics/yahoo-q4-full- year-2014-earnings/)

</comment><comment><USER17> This demonstrates incredible weakness by Mayer. Giving away Yahoo's future in order to save her own skin.

This should mark the end of Yahoo. I expect to see a merger or buyout soon after this closes.

<comment><USER26> I've been waiting for either Alibaba or Softbank to step up and buy them out for months. Now that they're spinning off the Alibaba shares, and given that their core business is currently valued around $0 (by the market), I imagine that Softbank might pick them up for a steal.

<comment><USER17> An Aol merger or SoftBank buyout seem like the most likely scenarios. Microsoft might also be interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ... why?

</comment><comment><USER28> These tax loopholes are disgusting. All these greedy millionaires assholes.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is sad on so many levels. Multi-billion tax avoidance, opportunistic shareholders, an over-hyped CEO, and a good Internet company on its twilight.</comment>


How our headphones changed work and public life forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-headphones-changed-the-world/257830/

<comment><USER2> liked this, and also felt it had a tinge of HN appeal.

Reminds of also the cultural world changing impact of another thing related to privacy/public space: Air Conditioning.</comment>


Ask HN: When have you hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage? - <AUTHOR>

When have you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage? <comment><USER2> This is a question on YC application.

<comment><USER3> Ok, potentially lot of people on this forum will be applying to YC in near future. (including me)

It will be good if all these questions are kept secret. I dont want to spend my next one or two years doing everything in order to answer these questions. :)</comment></comment>


Building Fizzbuzz in Fractran from the bottom up - <AUTHOR> http://malisper.me/2016/06/11/building-fizzbuzz-fractran-bottom/ <comment><USER2> Years ago I participated in a CTF where one of the challenges was to produce Fractran programs that met certain requirements. They were relatively simple- sounding things like computing the nth power of two, but even that is a bit of a pain in Fractran. I initially tried something similar to this article, manually compiling programs that use only the (Turing-complete) JZDEC instruction on paper. Unfortunately, there was a length limitation which made this approach impossible as it did not produce fraction lists nearly as small as one can write by hand. I ended up finding it easier to write a program to brute force all possible Fractran programs under the length limit until one of them had the correct behavior than to actually write useful Fractran code by hand.

<comment><USER3> That's interesting. How do you brute force all possible Fractran programs when they take natural numbers? Did you have an upper limit like 10,000?

<comment><USER2> The limit was quite small. There was a relationship between the number of distinct primes you allowed to appear and the number of registers the Turing machine it modeled had, but I don't remember the details. I don't recall the choice of composites being very important. There was a pretty natural limit that was apparent to me at the time but I've long since lost my Fractran intuition.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Which language is funnest/least frustrating to develop with? - <AUTHOR>

? <comment><USER2> Well, what are you trying to make?</comment>


Should you scroll or flip content? - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ipad-scroll-or-card

<comment><USER2> This is a very good primer on the issues, but some of the specific prescriptions feel a bit short-sighted.

 _As long as you are not reading the Great Gatsby on one page, scroll length is a better indicator for article size than page numbers. With pagination you never really know how much text is waiting for you. It is too abstract. Having no text mass indicator forces the user to check with a swipe if there is more is not interaction design. And that's very very unfriendly._

There's really no guarantee with scrolling _or_ pagination that the text density ahead will be consistent with what the user is currently observing. It could be text, images, figures, or tables. And a good pagination display (such as in iBooks) gives the user as clear an indication of where they are in the document as any scroll display.

Of course, scroll bars and page numbers are just two methods for showing the focus state of a document that happen to have become standards. There's room for exploration -- perhaps even with something iA has been experimenting with in their excellent Writer iPad app, reading time: Instead of a scroll bar or pagination display, Why not just show estimated reading time remaining?

</comment><comment><USER3> To make scrolling slightly easier, I implemented a jQuery thing that provides a visual clue to delimit the new content from the old one.

I haven't seen anything like that before, yet it feels like obvious to me.

You see the effect here: <http://virteal.com/ScrollCue></comment>


Key selector is the most important one in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://csswizardry.com/2012/07/shoot-to-kill-css-selector-intent/

<comment><USER2> What about inheritance? I'd rather start with 'header ul{}', then continue with 'header ul.nav{}' and 'header ul.nav.main{}'</comment>


How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad... 23 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago.ars <comment><USER2> So you can fly the Enterprise from a PADD, and you can change the interface, or what it's connected to, and interface with the rest of the ship, and yet ...

... when handing over several reports, they handed over several PADDs

<comment><USER3> You could write a little essay on the subject of props and what they are for. It would be a meditation on questions like _why is it so much more dramatically effective to have two characters fight for possession of a gun than it is to have them shoot magic lightning at each other from their fingertips_?

Or you could write an essay on all the things that neophiles forget when they declare war on paper. The good news is that Malcolm Gladwell wrote that already:

<http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_03_25_a_paper.htm>

...in the form of a review of an MIT press book on the subject.

Or we could just make a list of why one would use several PADDs if PADDs were free. You can juxtapose two reports on a desk and rapidly glance from one to another. (Paging Edward Tufte, who goes on and _on_ about this.) You can walk into a room with five people and hand one report to the first four and the remaining three reports to the last one. When you do hand over a stack of reports, they can be in priority order. And you can add commentary to the reports via the _way_ you hand over each one: A careful two-handed presentation (note the proper technique for exchanging Japanese business cards), a jumbled stack, a light toss, a disgusted look as you gingerly pinch the report between thumb and forefinger, or even a mock attempt to shield the bad-news report behind your body as you hand over the good news first. See? Props are not just for actors; _everyone_ is an actor and we all use props.

<comment><USER4> I voted up, but I'm going to breach HN brevity protocol to comment that that Gladwell article is really, really worth reading. E.g.

 _But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains._

<comment><USER2> I've now added that to my "Great Articles" project. Forty articles/items now and gradually increasing.

Here's a question: If you were to put tags on that article, what tags would you use?

<comment><USER5> That's a funny question considering the quote above is precisely about the process of filing (aka tagging) things.

<comment><USER4> Tags are a great alternative or adjunct to a hierarchical, single-node organization. The largest problems I've encountered with tagging are cumbersome and/or overly limiting implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have on several occasions attempted to make a user interface that looked and felt like the okudagrams[1] in ST:TNG or DS9. My conclusion is that they are a stunningly bad use of space and a terrible way to direct user attention. If only they didn't look so cool I would stop trying.

I think now that I sometimes need to display an iPhone's worth of information on an iPad the day of the okudagram has come.

[1] _okudagram_ – _Okudagram is a nickname for the interactive (and usually reorganizable) displays found on control panels in 23rd and 24th century starships, and beyond. The nickname is a reference to Michael Okuda, a tech advisor for the show, who created definitive signage styles for a new design of control panel, without any physical controls, that was used in the later Star Trek Movies and TNG era productions._

</comment><comment><USER7> Great. Now all we need is warp drive and we can call it a day.

<comment><USER8> This actually opens a profound issue: why has progress in areas like computers and biotech been so breakneck fast but has utterly stalled in areas like energy, propulsion, aviation, etc.?

I think I know the answer: those fields are capital intensive, so their "generation time" is very slow. But that might not be the only answer.

<comment><USER9> For every person who chooses to dive into computing and biotech, that's one more person who cannot work on energy, propulsion and aviation. I know I for one would probably do one of those if I wasn't in computing.

<comment><USER8> Maybe it's that the job market in computers especially is so much more dynamic with better opportunity for advancement, so it attracts a greater share of the best and the brightest.

It might also be accessibility. Anyone can play with a computer. A jet engine, not so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Damn Chris -- I blogged this just yesterday. I understand that good authors borrow and great authors steal, but geesh. At least give it a few days.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587909>

<comment><USER11> Do you think you're the only one to notice the similarity, or are you saying he took something from your article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We'd be remiss in not mentioning this: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lcars- internet-media-reader/i...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lcars-internet- media-reader/id366238562?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hopefully this invalidates some patents.</comment>


In Online Privacy Plan, the Opt-Out Question Looms - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/business/media/06privacy.html?hpw

<comment><USER2> The new FTC privacy report is certainly worth discussion, but this hit piece smells like a submarine. Had anyone ever heard of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, subtly brought into the article about half way through?

<comment><USER3> Anybody who works in the industry has heard of them -- they're the IAB in IAB standard ad sizes, etc.

What do you mean by submarine?

<comment><USER2> <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

Article supplied by industry group or PR firm, passed off as original reporting.

edit: Compare it to this article in the new york times, [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/business/media/02privacy.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/business/media/02privacy.html), three days earlier, which contains the FTC perspective, as well as comments from Google and Mozilla (and a note that Apple declined to comment).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow. If your goal is to butcher display advertising, this is how you do it. Retargeting, demographic targeting, and predictive targeting would all be gone -- you'd be left with top shelf inventory sold by salespeople, and remnant inventory at remnant prices. Because every other type of ad tech is really about better calculating the value and hence price of so-called remnant inventory. The same tech is applied to top shelf, but it's not as critical.

On the other hand, this would be an enormous gift to fb -- they'd be the only company standing with demo targeting, because they know your demos since you told them, no history tracking or prediction involved. Similarly an enormous gift to G because I'd bet their adwords / adsense still work pretty well in the absence of any history tracking. Though performance might degrade over time if you can't even tie eg search terms back to downstream conversions -- it's unclear just how far a no tracking proviso goes.

I do think many publishers would be forced to require visitors to allow tracking or pay money. And it would certainly be strange to see the US with more stringent privacy requirements than the EU.

Honestly, if people are concerned with this today, they should disable 3rd party cookies.

Worth noting, this would also be an enormous gift to TV and cable -- if you look at the ratio of ad spend to time, it's enormously skewed in favor of cable/tv at the expense of online. The massive influx of dollars to online advertising is just those ratios rebalancing themselves and people figuring out how to do online advertising properly.

edit:

for tools: my opinions are mine and mine alone. They were neither vetted nor approved by any employer; past, present, or future.

edit2:

I work at an advertising company you've heard of. I'd rather not say the name here not because it's a secret but because I'd rather it not be easily googleable by people who want to make my thoughts out to be representative of anyone else.</comment>


Ask HN: [video] Can i get feedback for my YC S13 hardware pitch? - <AUTHOR>

would love the community feedback<p>http://youtu.be/bgsWYDCOvA8 <comment><USER2> Oh dear.

Okay there's a lot of issues.

You say "Uh." a lot. Don't do this.

The video quality isn't very good. Do you have a prototype? Maybe a cad drawing? If so, you should show this.

It's kind of interesting that you're talking about posture yet you're slouched over a laptop in your pitch.

This is YC. They have a lot of cash and you need to convince them to throw this wad of cash at you. The reality is, if you were placed in front of a potential customer, it wouldn't go well if you spoke the same way you're speaking now.

I believe that you have great technical skills but, you need to be a salesman too. I would recommend writing a script in your case.

Also it may be worth investing a few hundred bucks to hire a videographer [sp?]. You want to put your best foot forward.

You need someone that's pretty creative to market the idea to YC. Based on what I've seen in this video, you're not really the marketing type. That's okay though! You can either find someone, or hire them just for this video pitch!

Good luck! Keep us posted.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure you're on target here. Your describing everything that PG says not to do in the video:

"The video should contain nothing except the founders talking. No screenshots or postproduction wizardry please; we don't want this to turn into a video making contest. If you're going to spend time making something cool, put it into your demo/product.

Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still, text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you're a good enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than you gain from a more polished message."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi atrajan, I like the concept and I think there are a lot of large companies who would contract with you to provide those services. Still, the concept certainly doesn't seem easy to scale. You need ergo experts either jet-setting across the globe or regional people who can handle major accounts.

Nothing seems self-servicey about this (probably not your intention), which means you'll need a large investment beyond building the product. And, well, that's just fine, but it also means that organization and cash-flow is going to be a big issue, and hopefully your team is prepared for that.

I would say the barrier for you guys is having sales skills out the wazzoo.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you. our current plan is to go the kick starter route. Thereby also validating the interest in an ergo smart chair. We have a prototype unit built to test our hypothesis and have got favorable interest by ergo experts. Yes we are too early to plan to scale ... but just delivering locally in the bay area can be a good start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Working remotely.. can sometimes work, but when a team is together fighting the crazy battles to create a successful company from the ground up, you really need to be together to form the bond and grind all the hard shit together.

<comment><USER6> Marissa Mayer, is that you? ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to store diagrams in Git? - <AUTHOR> Just wondering if there's any easy alternatives to store software artifacts into Git <comment><USER2> What kind of diagrams? If they're text based (eg svg or dot format) there should be no problem storing them in git

<comment><AUTHOR> Some in PNG some in svg. How do you usually go about it? Noob here.

<comment><USER2> Well if it's eg a document with a diagram I usually write the document in markdown and reference an svg image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just check them in.</comment>


Unsafe Query Risk in Active Record - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security/8CVoclw-Xkk

<comment><USER2> You can easily see if you are vulnerable to this by opening up rails console and iterating over your models and seeing if the model's table name is a column name:

        Dir.glob(File.join(Rails.root, 'app/models/**/*.rb')).each { |file| require file }
        ActiveRecord::Base.descendants.select do |model|
          model.column_names.include? model.table_name
        end

EDIT: As rosser points out below, the code above doesn't cover the case of doing a join between two tables where one table has a column named the same as the joining table name. Below you can find any table that has a column name from another table. From there you can check to make sure you aren't joining this table with the table sharing the same name as the column.

        ActiveRecord::Base.descendants.select do |model|
          shared = model.column_names & ActiveRecord::Base.descendants.map(&:table_name)
          if shared.any?
            puts "#{model.to_s} has potentially dangerous columns: #{shared.join(' ')}"
            true
          end
        end

<comment><USER3> Doesn't that only capture the first of the two vulnerable cases (a table that has a column with the same name as the table itself)? What about the second case, where you have a column on one table that has the same name as another table?

Queries (PostgreSQL-specific) I whipped up investigating our stack this morning for this issue that appear to catch both cases (corrections or improvements welcome):

Case 1:

      select c.relname
           , a.attname
        from pg_class c
        join pg_attribute a on a.attrelid = c.oid
       where c.relname = a.attname;

Case 2:

      select c2.relname
           , c1.relname || '.' || a.attname
        from pg_class c1
        join pg_attribute a on a.attrelid = c1.oid
        join pg_namespace n on c1.relnamespace = n.oid
        left join pg_class c2 on c2.relname = a.attname
       where c2.relname is not null
         and n.nspname not in ('pg_catalog', 'information_schema');

<comment><USER2> I think case 2 is only for when you're doing joins, less likely but still possible.

<comment><USER3> My query for that case may also yield some false positives, as we appear to have a couple of cases where one table has a column that shares its name with a completely unrelated table.

<comment><USER2> Yup, I updated my reply above. You can get the list but then you still have to manually go through your codebase to make sure you aren't joining the table with the potentially dangerous column name with that exact table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Due to the typical approach of pluralizing for tables and using singular > names for columns, this kind of conflict is very unlikely.

In PostgreSQL, where a table is really a type definition (you can effectively think of a table as a struct), using plural names for tables is against the recommended practice; this will be much more common.

Though, in a way, the conflict is still rare for a different but highly related reason, an implicit column which I sadly don't know enough about ActiveRecord (having never used it) to know if this bug could be used on.

        select product from product;

This will return records, each with one field whose value is a record of type product that contains the value of all fields in the row of the table being scanned; effectively you are returning the row as a field.

(And now you can see an example where thinking of the table type name as "plural" leads to weird semantics: PostgreSQL prefers thinking of them as classes of object from which you are pulling a subset of instances.)

You can also compare this record if you can get a tuple into the ActiveRecord query; alternatively, if ActiveRecord doesn't specify the type of its parameter values (something a lot of drivers I've seen don't automatically do for string input), you could also pass an unknown-typed text value that happens to be comma-separated and surrounded in parenthesis and it will be coerced to a compatible record type.

Again, I don't know if the issue with ActiveRecord requires the column to be defined in the model or something (the description was really brief and didn't explain the underlying bug), but maybe someone else knows.

<comment><USER5> In the absence of instructions telling it to do something different, AR relies on the convention that instances of a class Foo are stored in a table called "foos", regardless of what database system you're using. That cuts down on the amount of configuration you have to do, and you wouldn't normally override it unless you were applying AR to a preexisting schema.

Edit: removing speculation

<comment><USER4> OK, and I then imagine the idea is that the kind of person using ActiveRecord doesn't "design their database with the idea of multiple potential consumers, only one of which might be ActiveRecord"? Fair enough.

Regardless, the primary question that my post was leading up to stands: a table with the name "foos" will still have what is effectively an implicit column with the name "foos" that is a record value of type "foos".

<comment><USER5> People pick their tools per-project, so I would put it as "if you need to build a database with multiple consumers, AR will be a less valuable choice for any of them, and you are thus much less likely to use it for that project". Right tool, right job, etc.

On your primary question, since I've now played with "select foos from foos" on my PG database: I doubt it. When you do a query like Foo.where(foos: 'value').to_a or Foo.find_by_foos('value'), what you're basically doing is a "select foos.* from foos where foos='value'". If foos doesn't actually exist as an explicit column, that doesn't actually work:

PG::UndefinedColumn: ERROR: column foos.foos does not exist

So it's not like people have been writing queries like that expecting that the implicit column will do something (which I'm not sure would make sense anyway). Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it remains the case that you'd have to have explicitly created a column with the same name as your table to trigger this bug with otherwise working code.

Edit: Of course, maybe there are more ways to trigger this bug than the ones provided in the email, and maybe they include queries where you might be relying on an implicit column for something else, such as selecting foos from foos. I'm just saying the cases listed in the email don't seem to be affected by the implicit column.

<comment><USER4> Did you mean "foos.foos = 'value'"? I do not get an error on the column not existing with "where foos = 'value'" (which is the query you wrote). However, it does turn out I'm wrong on a key aspect: PostgreSQL refuses to convert untyped-text to a record without a cast "ERROR: input of anonymous composite types is not implemented" (which would make this require at least a tuple to have been passed into the query to begin with, which seems extremely unlikely, and likely require the cast, which wouldn't happen).

<comment><USER5> Sorry, yes, I meant "foos.foos='value'", which AR writes because the code generating it doesn't pay attention to what joins you've attached (or in this case, haven't) and what ambiguities that might create, so it does the safe thing.

I also noticed the error you mentioned when playing with it, but didn't understand it well enough to be confident there was no way to force that cast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Actually readable: [https://gist.github.com/sergiotapia/89c2b90251c4d489a162](https://gist.github.com/sergiotapia/89c2b90251c4d489a162)

</comment><comment><USER7> Query to check if you have any columns with the same name as their table (in Postgres):

        SELECT table_name, column_name
        FROM   information_schema.columns
        WHERE  table_name = column_name;

</comment><comment><USER8> I am one of the reporters of this issue (Fraser Newton of Clio www.clio.com).

We applied the following patch (and configured the blacklist as described in the comment) to resolve this issue. This works by rejecting any query parameters that look like user-supplied hashes while allowing developer- supplied hashes. e.g.,

      Model.where(something: params[:something])

raises an exception if params[:something] was constructed to be a hash while

      Model.where(something: {id: 1})

works as expected. This also doesn't require any casting to work around the vulnerability.

      diff --git a/activerecord/lib/active_record/relation/predicate_builder.rb b/activerecord/lib/active_record/relation/predicate_builder.rb
      index 413b81c..a114f08 100644
      --- a/activerecord/lib/active_record/relation/predicate_builder.rb
      +++ b/activerecord/lib/active_record/relation/predicate_builder.rb
      @@ -1,6 +1,22 @@
       module ActiveRecord
         class PredicateBuilder # :nodoc:
      +
      +    ##
      +    # :singleton-method:
      +    # Refuse to trust attributes of the given classes when building predicates.
      +    # For example, the following...
      +    #
      +    #   ActiveRecord::PredicateBuilder.blacklist = [ActionController::Parameters]
      +    #
      +    # ... would reject any user-supplied hashes submitted via controllers.
      +    cattr_accessor :blacklist , :instance_writer => false
      +    @@blacklist = []
      +
      +
           def self.build_from_hash(engine, attributes, default_table, allow_table_name = true)
      +      ActiveRecord::PredicateBuilder.blacklist.each do |blacklisted|
      +        raise ArgumentError, "Blacklist violation: instance of #{blacklisted.name} found" if attributes.is_a?(blacklisted)
      +      end
             predicates = attributes.map do |column, value|
               table = default_table

</comment><comment><USER9> I reported this one last year to their security list.

I noticed the problem when bots/scrapers screwed with URL parameters which made ActiveRecord generate SQL for columns and tables that didn't exist in the database. Sorta worrying.

You should make sure that you don't have any columns that match your table names.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really hate to be that person because the author took time to help other people and it's a great thing to do, really, but this is excruciating to read due to very strange page layout.

That being said, thanks to Rafael for a simple and layman-accessible explanation of the issue.</comment>


The Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of Microblog Post Deletions - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0597

<comment><USER2> It's really impressive the speed at which censors are able to delete posts.

Great work, it's worth reading!

</comment><comment><USER3> Fairly good distillation of the research at [http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/03/08/just-how- fast-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/03/08/just-how-fast-are- chinas-internet-censors-very-a-new-study-finds/)</comment>


Steve Jobs: People Are Voting Against Flash By Buying An iPad Every 3 Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/01/steve-jobs-people-are-voting-against-flash-by-buying-an-ipad-every-3-seconds/ <comment><USER2> The Internet cannot be built around a plugin from one company. We are much better off taking the one step back then moving two steps forward. Soon there will be at least five good browsers that support Html5/css3. If we can get canvas support in ie9, html5 usage is going to exploded.

<comment><USER3> Internet is not built around Flash.It exists to compliment what the regular web cant (Device access, DRM enabled video etc) Have you tried running any content rich html5 app on an iPad? It rendering frame rate is so bad that it is unsable.

IMHO, right now , Flash (while being a resource hog) is the best medium to deliver "engaging-rich" content on the internet.

<comment><USER4> The point is that the iPad is helping, and will continue to help, HTML5 become the new best medium for rich content. Apple isn't always concerned with using whatever is best or most practical at the moment. Sometimes they want to help along less established technologies that have the potential to be even better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People are voting for flash by not buying one more iPad every 2 seconds.

Really, you can't take a sold iPad as a vote against flash, besides there could be any number of people that have _not_ bought it for the exact same reason.

From a computer manufacturer you'd expect better logic.

<comment><USER6> The poor logic originates from the techcrunch headline... Not what Steve Jobs said.

>"People seem to be liking the iPad," Jobs said to laughs and applause. "We've sold one every three seconds since we launched it," he added.

<comment><USER5> Check the title here:

> Steve Jobs: People Are Voting Against Flash By Buying An iPad Every 3 > Seconds

If they attribute that to Steve Jobs then he has either said it or TC is completely out to lunch on this one.

<comment><USER7> Journalistic outlets frequently like to use a paraphrase of what someone said or implied as their headline. Some paraphrases are pretty accurate, while others are trash. This is the latter.

Here's transcription from Engadget:

\</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>----

> 6:33PM Walt: And what... we'll move on to the next thing you don't want to > talk about. What if the market says 'hey it's important enough to us...' > there's some great stuff out there in Flash. What if the market says it > wants it? What if people say the iPad is crippled?

> 6:34PM Steve: Well things are packages. Some things are good in a product, > some things are bad. If the market tells us we're making bad choices, we'll > make changes. We're just trying to make great products. We don't think this > is great and we're going to leave it out. We're going to take the heat > because we want to make the best product in the world for customers!

> 6:35PM Steve: If we succeed, they'll buy them! If we don't, we won't sell > any. And I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad! (huge laughs and > applause)

\</comment><comment>----

Nowhere in here does he imply that people are voting against Flash by buying iPads. He's saying that people seem to be buying and liking iPads even though they don't have Flash.

</comment><comment><USER8> I bought an Ipad not because it left out Flash,Java ,Qt and those; but because i wanted to see what the hype is all about. I was just curious. I wasnt voting for or against anyone.

</comment><comment><USER9> HTML5 rendering on iPad's webkit is an absolute disaster. So perhaps they are voting against HTML5 rendering in acceptable framerates.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Jobs: Adobe had a chance to get Flash on their devices, but came up short.

> Jobs: this removal of Flash was simply the latest in a series of moves Apple > has always taken to stay ahead of the curve.

Seems inconsistent.

<comment><USER11> How so? If you've invested some amount of resources in something but it didn't work out, the best move is to cut your losses and move on.

<comment><USER10> Different motivation. The reason you give differs from "staying ahead of the curve".</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin plunges again, now down more than 28% since Sunday's all-time high - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-dives-again-now-down-more-than-23-since-sundays-all-time-high-2017-12-21 <comment><USER2> But .. but ... bu .. "This time it's different!"

Yes, yes. Of course it is.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's worth noting Bitcoin Cash had a similar plunge, down about 33%

<comment><USER4> Also worth noting: none of the coins have a real business partnerships. only announcements.

Because of the announcements all the prices inflated. (Bitcoin is in most cases the entry to exchange to other currencies)

After those announcements (sometimes announcements of announcements) didn't deliver... well..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All the altcoins plunged as well, its a great time to buy any of them.

<comment><USER6> I had a hypothesis that altcoins would go up when Bitcoin weakens. Due to people moving their money there instead of holding BTC. But seems everyone sells off to fiat? Or something else keeps the prices strongly linked? At least for these quick drops

<comment><USER7> I believe the prices are linked because you still have to cash out into Bitcoin first before anything else. Sometimes you can in ethereum but not always. If we can start buying with. Altcoins are worth Bitcoin. So it makes sense they follow each other. What we need is more pairs to buy altcoins from other than Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's amazing watching the mainstream (sites like MarketWatch/Bloomberg) try to make sense of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. I spent some of my career in finance and a market move of double-digit percent in anything apart from exotic stuff like peakload power futures is unheard of.</comment>


Line Launches Its First Cryptocurrency 'Link' - <AUTHOR> https://linecorp.com/en/pr/news/global/2018/20 <comment><USER2> Sounds like a lot of hot air. There's a lot written about how some new companies are going to encourage LINK use and reward the users (doesn't exactly sound very decentralized), and then a bunch of vague lines about how LINK can be used to incentivize users of decentralized apps (dApps) of every possible category. Nothing specific about those dApps though. Where do they run? Ethereum? A brand new blockchain with its own vm and language? Systems that focus on just a single of those categories have had a lot of hard technical problems in being decentralized, but LINK is going to accomplish all of those?

New cryptocurrency press releases that read like press releases and spend all the time talking about company partnerships rather than the difficulties and trade-offs of decentralization almost always end up being pump-and-dump schemes in my experience.

<comment><USER3> The interesting point here is that they aren't doing an ICO. This reads to me more like a blockchain exploration of a rewards system from a large company.

Far less likely to be a 'pump and dump' than the me too altcoin of the week startups who focus on ICOs and being listed on bigger exchanges instead of what value is actually being created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why all the new crypto projects are so complex.

When Bitcoin was invented, it was already a pretty complex solution to a problem that indeed should be tackled with new technology: Make payments easier and more independent of third parties.

So far, Bitcoin has not achieved this well. Yet, I think there will be technology that does.

But all those new projects are super complex. As if it is already time to build whole new ecosystems on top of the crypto tech we have.

But we don't have very useful technology yet.

<comment><USER5> So you're saying a technology that has spawned a new market doing volume to the tune of $500 million per day is 'not very useful'? I disagree.

Anyway, a lot of the complexity in this space is indeed over-engineering and me-too engineering for problems that are already solved but that need to be 'customized' ever so slightly. In LINE's case they want the tech to line up with their business model so just forking Bitcoin is not necessarily an option for them (though perhaps they are using it on the backend or in some aspect of their architecture / accounting system).

Maybe their new system will fail, maybe it won't - but definitely if they are doing anything close to Bitcoin volume I wouldn't write it off as failure.

<comment><USER6> > So you're saying a technology that has spawned a new market doing volume to > the tune of $500 million per day is 'not very useful'?

Well, actually that's pretty obvious. Most of the volume you speak of is just trading. Trading isn't very useful, especially when it's just speculations on speculations on virtual things that nobody really trusts enough to actually go whole-hog on.

<comment><USER5> Nobody really uses the internet, most of the traffic you speak of is just usenet boards and people pirating books. The internet isn't very useful especially when you can get all the information you need at the library. Nobody really trusts all these servers in different locations, it's to slow to actually go whole-hog on anyway.

<comment><USER6> The benefits of the internet at the time were time to access information, and the varying types of information (much of which couldn't be provided by a library, such as email, or porn.) Bitcoin doesn't win either of these scenarios: it's somehow slower to transact in digital currency (specifically Bitcoin) than even hand to hand exchange of physical money - it's faster for me to walk down the block and pay for a sandwich than for me to pay online with Bitcoin and have someone deliver it. Bitcoin isn't really accepted anywhere. You can take cash anywhere and pay for anything. Same with credit for the most part.

Solve these issues and your argument might make sense.

And a friendly reminder that blockchain PoW systems are incredibly bad for the environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They have an exchange after all too called bitbox [https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/bitbox](https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/bitbox)</comment>


Emacs or vi: neither (Rob Pike) - <AUTHOR> https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ <comment> white-flame Rob Pike has apparently never had an internet outage, or traveled outside modern civilization?

Independence is a virtue. Even in the old phones-as-infrastructure case, there were many times when there was simply no working phone around, or available. Broken down on the road, being in an industrial area of town on the weekend, etc.

If everything your life revolves around requires working and accessible infrastructure to access it, you're going to have times where you're left staring at a connection error screen, or no screen at all. And because the universe hates you, that will happen at the worst possible times. ;-)

<comment><USER2> He's at Google. Many people there seem to think of network connectivity the same way we think of clean water, electricity, and natural gas - things that are just always there, in whatever quantity you want. Ditto for storage and computational power, because _for them_ all those things are like utilities. Never mind that people in many parts of the world can't even take those "old fashioned" utilities for granted. People who live in bubbles tend to lose touch with the outside world.

<comment><USER3> Thinks like the Andrew File System and Coda were actually developed to try and work around this, to provide resilience and allow one to have "soft" state in the presence of outages. The interest was not there, certainly not when most people were working on standalone Windows boxes or Macs, and didn't have any idea of the sort of power that was available in research labs via X and Ethernet.

It's a shame, because not only did research groups think about these issues, 20 solid years ago, but also several strong contenders for solutions were implemented. Society did not see the value in supporting further work on the projects and so the researchers moved on.

Pike is not an idiot. He is a pragmatist.

<comment><USER2> How is it "pragmatic" to assume infinite connectivity instead of working to solve the problems when that assumption fails? That word does not mean what you want it to mean. I've worked on those problems for a couple of decades too. I also bemoan the relative lack of attention given to them. That's exactly why I find his attitude so disappointing.

<comment><USER3> It's pragmatic to delegate that aspect to other people who are/were working on it. It is not pragmatic to try and solve all the different problems involved all at the same time.

Pike was brought in to Google to do something about log management (hence Sawmill -- it was a disaster prior to his arrival). The solution was pragmatic: awk on GFS.

It would be nice if more attention to intermittent connectivity solved the problem. The trouble is that I see no interest from research funders and not much motive for commercial funders. As best as I can tell, it is in fact quite pragmatic to leave that detail (important as it may be) aside until there's enough interest in stateless "dumb" workstations to reintroduce it.

It's pragmatic to make flawed assumptions so that you can get something done in the common-within-Google case, and come back later for the common-outside- of-Google case, at least if you happen to be within Google.

<comment><USER2> That would be fine if he had been talking about what he was doing within Google, but he was specifically talking about _his dream system_. Here's an analogy.

"I have a dream about a programming language and runtime that will automatically determine how serial code can be distributed across a bunch of machines, and do so without totally screwing up performance or failure semantics. But that's somebody else's problem. I'm not even going to mention any actual ideas about how to do it."

Would you say "pragmatic" is the right word to describe that? I wouldn't. We left the realm of pragmatism as soon as we started talking about dreams. It's not necessarily _wrong_ for me to mention such a dream. Such a compiler would make my life a lot easier. However, it misses an opportunity to inspire would- be collaborators in areas where I have concrete ideas and actually am working to make a difference. It contributes less to actual progress than another answer might have, and that's disappointing.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I personally think Rob's dream setup sounds horrible. I love having my own phone -- it was shitty having to look for a pay phone or buy a beer in a bar just to use the phone.

And I don't use my phone or laptop for the local storage. If I lose either one I buy a new one and I reconnect to some accounts and I'm ready to go. That doesn't mean i don't appreciate having my own that I can carry around.

Next time I'm hiking in the middle of the forest using Google Maps Offline and want to take a pic of something, I'll think of Rob rolling out his paper map trying to figure out how to get to the nearest camera rental place. Sorry, no storage for pics or maps on your unrolling pen screen.

<comment><USER5> _I 'll think of Rob rolling out his paper map_

I was just down in southern Oregon, and between the frequent "No Service" and the shitty Google and Apple maps, I would have killed for a decent paper map. It's a good thing I had my Garmin app on my phone; it's not reliant on cell service.

My parents and I traveled 9000+ miles around the country in 1974, using a Rand McNally atlas to guide us. The experience was far more pleasant than the maps Google offered up just a few days ago. "Offline" wouldn't have helped, the map quality is abysmal. Locations pop in and out of existence as you zoom in. Many features are totally unlabelled (e.g. rivers). The UI sucks as well.

<comment><USER6> I think there is a middle ground. Paper and contact does have a categorical advantage for field use: at least, anything with batteries has a categorical disadvantage. On the other hand, it's nice that you can print 1 map of your own to cover terrain that used to be split over the corners of 4 published maps. And it's a pretty cool feeling when you click on contours that the surveyors got wrong and drag them into the right place.

There is a place for automation, but that place isn't everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I actually sort of agree with his idea that our portable devices should be stateless, but the way he puts it comes off way too much like "storage is magic that someone else should deal with" for me. Scalable storage with a usable interface (i.e. not an HTTP-based eventually-consistent object store) is hard enough even in a LAN environment. Making it happen in a WAN environment, which is what he's asking for, involves some very hard tradeoffs and engineering problems equivalent to anything you might do with the data once you get it. It's very disappointing to see what amounts to "other people's problem" from someone of his stature.

<comment><USER3> That's a bit silly. His perspective is that of someone who watched tractable solutions to the cached-state and resync/reconciliation problems be implemented and then marginalized, since no one at the time saw the point. Now, 20-30 years later, it's starting to dawn on people, and the response is essentially a kludge.

I'm disappointed, and I was never at Bell Labs. I imagine Pike is being diplomatic, to be honest. Research is incredibly frustrating when it depends so much on fashion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I do love this little pearl:

> In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry > them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. > The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather > than fix the way computers work.

He's right, it used to be that I could jump from machine to machine in a Unix environment and really the only thing I gave a shit about locally was my login shell. (I started out using Irix in an SGI/AFS environment, so our logins were essentially stateless; since openGL/XGL worked over the wire, I ran demos in DC on hardware in NY just because, and it was fucking great).

I was sad when the majority of businesses and individuals seemingly decided that Microsoft's single-user desktop worldview was preferable to the Bold Old World of Unix and Plan9, which at that point, thanks to things like XGL and the Andrew File System, was quite multi-user and network-centric. This is why Pike's little pearl speaks to me.

The cloud was a good idea 20 years ago, too. But only recently has it become the focus it should have been, and in a way that isn't quite as satisfying as MIT and CMU were attempting in the 90s. It really was a spectacular time. VR in research labs was, then, ahead of where it is, now, in most respects; certainly for things like molecular dynamics, we viewed it as a given that you'd want to wander around and poke the computed empirical force field for a molecule. I guess the up side is that it should be a lot faster and easier to catch up given the ubiquitous and powerful CPUs of today -- a Raspberry Pi is more powerful than my old SGI Indigo ever was. Just a matter of will and intent if society wants to recover and surpass the progress we made back when, and democratize it much further than it was.

<comment><USER7> Everything you wrote was quite interesting up until the last sentence. Seriously do we really need this tired old OS flamebait crap here?

Edit: @apathy gracefully edited out the offending last sentence so my comment above is no longer valid, however I'll leave here to provide context for the replies below.

<comment><USER3> Probably not. However, an OS is a tool, and your tools inevitably shape the way you view what you are working on. I'm going to revise my comment to tone it down, but the fact remains that network-native multiuser OSes (Unix, Plan9) encourage a very different view of the world than desktop-centric single-user OSes (Windows, in particular). That's not really something that needs further explanation if you've seriously used both, and the differences were much, much starker in the late 90s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I were implementing such setup today, would AFS still be my best option?</comment>


Are Chess and Islam Incompatible? - <AUTHOR> http://en.chessbase.com/post/are-chess-and-islam-incompatible <comment><USER2> At the end, the author cites some personal angst over winning $666 in a chess tournament.

For a cultural contrast, fear of the number 'four' is more prevalent in Asia, because it is a near homophone with "death" in some Asian languages. 'Tetraphobia' has its own wikipedia page, which notes a possible self- fulfilling prophecy, given that heart failure rates spike on the fourth of the month in these cultures.[0]

It's startlingly sad that anyone should suffer emotional angst at what are essentially random numerical coincidences.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia#Research_on_tetrap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia#Research_on_tetraphobia)

</comment><comment><USER3> They shouldn't be. Chess is just a game.

When they add in gambling to it, then they can raise an objectionto it. But not because of the game but that people are placing bets on it.</comment>


Adobe Acknowledges Flash Problem in Chrome Notebooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/adobe-acknowledges-flash-problem-in-chrome-notebooks/ <comment><USER2> Sometimes I get the feeling that the Flash codebase is probably a huge clusterfuck. You know these doomed projects, that were never properly written at the beginning and then more and more stuff gets added on top of it. Then you change developers and even more stuff gets added. Instead of rewritting the whole mess, you do silly things like trying to port it to 64bit. At the end you got some completly ridiculous binary, that went through several dozen QA cycles and appears to be somewhat stable, but nobody really know why its actually working anymore.

<comment><USER3> Its funny a lot of people see flash as a way to address platform fragmentation, but its starting to become a cause of it.

<comment><USER4> Interestingly Adobe have rewritten large parts of Creative Suite in AIR (AS3) to allow greater cross platform code sharing, especially for UI code. I believe this is one of the reasons that they have been able to bring Adobe Audition to Mac OS. The important difference here is that none of the Creative Suite applications are intended for low power/low performance devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if there's a better thread for this, but 2010 sure hasn't been Adobe's year.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, and as someone who spends a large portion of my time developing Flex (so I'm biased for instead of against these technologies) my fear is that they don't seem to care/understand how bad of a year it has been. Flash 10 was released more than 2 years ago, and as far as I can tell Flash 11 is a year away even if all goes well, and the focus is on 3d graphics and shiny stuff. Meanwhile they desperately need to release a 10.2 that improves performance, has a reasonable settings interface, and integrates more fully with the browser.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, at the time I thought Air was a great idea and even flirted with learning AS and focussing a not-insignificant amount of time accounting for it in my ideas. However, and I think HTML5 surprised everybody, the market has zigged where Adobe zagged. These transitions take ages to complete, but when companies like YouTube make their choices, people listen and many times follow suit. We'll see how they wiggle through the next few years, technologically, but they may be headed for a low-grade tragedy (see: Corel).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are the specific problems with Flash and YouTube on Cr48s?

<comment><USER8> The Atom N455 has integrated GMA 3150 video. So no hardware video acceleration with Flash 10.1. h264 video will play, but maybe not at full frame rate, and certainly not full screen. And forget about HD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> youtube could as well detect if you're running chrome os and use their HTML5 player instead of the Flash-based one. any idea why they don't do this by default on supported browsers? last time i checked, the HTML5 player was opt- in.

<comment><USER10> I am not sure but I think they can't show ads in HTML5 version of the player - thats why they have it as opt-in, I might be wrong.

But what the hell Adobe.. for every new device that flash runs, they need 2-3 years to optimize it. Flash needs to die!!

<comment><AUTHOR> They've been able to start making some money from YouTube ads in-video, and it seems like they scaled back their whole HTML5 effort for YouTube after that... Then they decided to integrate Flash into Chrome, which I'm sure played a part in the decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the article: "Adobe's senior director for engineering Paul Betlam took to their corporate blog and declared Flash 10.1 support on Chrome OS notebooks 'a work in progress'."

A work in progress. Just like on my macbook, except they've had what -- a decade to work on that? : rolleyes :

<comment><USER12> For a long time Adobe got away with its broken clients on non-Windows platforms because the majority of Windows users were happy with a decent implementation. And the developers of websites followed the market.

Now it backfires when suddenly lots of non-Windows platforms grow in popularity and Adobe has no immediate solutions to address the performance and stability issues. I guess when it realized this would be a big deal, it was already too late.</comment></comment>


The slow cooker revolution - open-source-ux http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38286715 <comment><AUTHOR> >>Sales are up by 30%

But 'sales' != 'usage'

I know quite a few people who bought slow cookers, after reading the hype about them (including myself). Every one of those slow cookers (including my own) now languishes, abandoned, at the back of a kitchen cupboard.

They take all day to cook anything and, after waiting all that time, It's usually not worth it. Most cuts of meat need higher temperatures to bring out the flavour. Not surprisingly, 6 hours at just below boiling point in a slow cooker usually results in meat that, while tender, just tastes like meat that's been boiled for a while.

</comment><comment><USER2> If you're interested in slow cookers, it's worth trying a pressure cooker as well or instead.

I have a Beef Bourguignon recipe that cooks in 45 minutes and is superb.

<comment><USER3> I've had both in the past: I have the pressure cooker now.

While there is some overlap - cooking plain beans for freezing, for example - it lacks the convenience factor. I can cook soup all day while I leave the house.</comment></comment>


Facebook again declines to limit political ad targeting - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/90e5e81f501346f8779cb2f8b8880d9c <comment><USER2> Facebook should maybe take a lesson fron early ISPs like Uunet, Earthlink and a few others. Everyone except Uunet thought Uunet had a spam problem. Uunet would act on some spammers, but not the high volume problems. It turned out that Uunet had "pink contracts" some some spammers, and wouldn't turn them off.

Where is Uunet today? An odious memory, merged into MCI and forgotten. Corporations aren't forever. They can ruin themselves.</comment>


Why you should stay away from Appcelerator Titanium - <AUTHOR> http://usingimho.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/why-you-should-stay-away-from-appcelerators-titanium

<comment><USER2> We experienced similar issues while making the iPhone app for <http://www.playlookit.com>. My partner wrote the same kind of blog post: [http://tannerburson.com/2011/04/03/Thoughts-on- Appcelerator-...](http://tannerburson.com/2011/04/03/Thoughts-on-Appcelerator- Titanium.html)

Buggy, not very well documented, and an incredibly weak community.

I can't help but agree with you.</comment>


The rationale behind password policies - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zercurity/the-rationale-behind-password-policies-c3bc436b01a4 <comment><USER2> I think it would certainly be very interesting if more companies provided rationales behind some of their corporate policies. Perhaps this would create more of a discussion and better educate employees rather than just setting out the rules. Maybe go one step further and allow employees to request changes?

</comment><comment><USER3> Huh. I hadn't really thought about malicious actors using these vast password dumps to try and target users that are continually using weak passwords.</comment>


Aptible (YC S14) Handles the Hard Parts of HIPAA Compliance - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/05/backed-by-yc-and-rock-health-aptible-handles-the-hard-parts-of-hipaa-compliance/

<comment><USER2> Hey everyone! We did a Show HN last week [0], and are happy to answer any questions you have here. We're also on the Olark widget if you want to chat directly.

\- Chas

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086431)

<comment><USER3> Any plans to support Windows stacks?

<comment><USER2> We're exclusively Linux at the moment, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, how hard is it to become HIPAA compliant?

<comment><USER5> it is easy to assert you are hipaa compliant, but more work to actually demonstrate.

most requirements overlap with PCI (having built both banking and healthcare systems, PCI is much more demanding if still superficial)

the hardest part is paperwork and staff procedures

the most expensive part, amd i am not sure if this solution addresses this, is every single hospital customer i have insists on a totally independent 3rd part audit. what that entails is totally arbitrary but it costs ~25-50k per year. they would not, for example, take the internal audit of the vendor providng hipaa compliance as sufficient. however, if the vendor also provided an audit by an external party, i suspect that would work

be sure this or any other vendor is willing to sign a BAA with you specific to each customer

<comment><USER6> Well said!

Just to add a few more points. On the technology side you want to make sure you have data encrypted "at rest" and "in transit". i.e. At rest means things like running AES encrypted drives for your DB data storage. AWS has docs & case studies on this and is HIPAA compliant. Just don't use RDS, it isn't HIPAA compliant yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Password manager for OS X? - <AUTHOR>

Working on multiple sites I have dozens of passwords saved for each client. I tried out 1Password but wasn't too impressed. I've looked at Wallet and a few other password managers, but before I purchase and buy into one option I wanted to get the low-down from this community. Anyone have any recommendations / feedback on various password managers? Here are my requirements:
- must be an application (not a firefox plugin) - must store usernames/passwords for web sites, accounts, etc - must store other notes (credit numbers, contact info, etc) - easily searchable (some sort of integration with quicksilver would be awesome) - bonus: ability to store the passwords on my iphone and sync them on other computers. <comment><USER2> SplashID.

<http://www.splashdata.com/splashid/download/iphone.htm>

You can download the desktop version as a stand-alone app or use it with the iPhone, Treo, etc.

It's not the prettiest mac application but I think it gets the job done. I originally used it first when I was on Treo many moons ago. Then when I switched to the iPhone I really missed it. As soon as they came out with the iPhone version, I bought it immediately. You have to sync the iPhone and your desktop through a manual process but it's pretty straightforward once you do it.

It's not integrated with quicksilver though, but I don't know if you want that sort of info easily accessible outside of the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a huge requirement. It's just nice to be able to hit a few keys and have the password I need copied to the clipboard.

<comment><USER2> If you click on the password in the app, it'll automatically copy that field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like you're looking for 1Password.

<http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password>

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried this out, but just wasn't thrilled. I don't really like that it integrates with my browsers. The password dropdown gets annoying in Safari and I ended up with TONS of duplicates added to my password database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's this: <http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/Gorilla/>, which is a port of Schneier's Password Safe.

If you're already on OS X, why not use Keychain? In Keychain Access.app, you can create a new password entry (⌘N) or a new note entry (⌘⇧N).

<comment><AUTHOR> I like Keychain, but it's missing some key features for me, unless I'm totally missing them. No quick copy feature, no sharing across computers. When I have to find a password I open keychain, search for the password, click it, enter my password to unlock the keychain, copy it, etc. Looking for something a bit more lightweight/agile I suppose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Passpack (<https://www.passpack.com/>) have an Air version.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take a look at this. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like password wallet - <http://passwordwallet.com></comment>