Show HN: Memory AI – Fully Automatic Time Tracking Powered by Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://timelyapp.com/memory-ai <comment><USER2> Hello everybody :) When we released Timely a few years back we always described it as the time tracking app to end time tracking. The truth is that it wasn't quite there at the time.

But now, with AI coming as far it has, we can finally actually able to deliver on that promise.

It's been a long road here and I'm so happy to launch it. Please let us know what you think! :)

<comment><USER3> Hi there, great idea and app! One suggestion though - this could be a huge thing in the freelancer world. I wonder if you will be supporting freelancer model of working?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Could you specify exactly what you mean with 'freelancer model of working'?

We have a lot of freelancers using Timely today, but we'd love to make it even better for them!

<comment><USER3> I mean no suggested working hours. Most time management, work management tools assume, that you work similar hours every day. So when you try to log something outside of those hours, either it is difficult, or time-consuming.

If I work - let's say - at 9am to 4pm today and 5pm to 3am tomorrow, I would like to be able to log that. Too many tools are ignoring people, that work crazy hours, and usually, those are the people, that could use time management tools the most...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twisted way to earn money by broadcasting video games. should I trigger? - <AUTHOR> (Just in case: English isn't my native language).
Some months ago I created for fun this landing page http://www.megaxing.tv/, and surprisingly it is doing very good on traffic, leads and conversions.
I'm now at that point thinking about prototyping an MVP.
My biggest concern is how do businesses like this get people to start using their services if users are required on both sides for it to work? In one side are the streamers and in the other are viewers. To the more viewers then more ads impressions, then more revenue and money to share with streamers.
any good advice?
Thanks for ur time. <comment><USER2> this is new to me, how do you make money to give to the streamers? You put ads on their streams? I just registered as my son plays a lot of video games, maybe he can make some money playing ;)</comment>


Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-performance-review-process-blamed.html <comment><USER2> I'm always baffled when I see the stuff employees complain about in SF. Not that they're wrong, but my experience is that these things are 100% standard across the board.

I've never worked somewhere that I could openly call out my chief executives in front of the whole team and not expect that to be a thoroughly career limiting move.

I've definitely never worked anywhere that I could organize protests and still expect to have a job by the end of the day. (I'm aware of unionized workplaces that do this on a semi-regular basis, but that's about it and you can bet that participation guarantees you won't be considered for joining management any time soon.)

I hesitate to say y'all are entitled, because maybe you're right to be doing this. Maybe I'm jealous. I dunno. But I feel like at a minimum the people at these companies don't recognize how uncommonly privileged they are to even be able to voice their concerns like this.

By all means, fight the good fight, but if you ever leave the valley... good luck to you.

<comment><USER3> The fact is that the big tech companies are feeding at a trough of money that seems to be infinitely deep, but only a million or so people worldwide have the skills to build and implement Internet services at the billion-user scale. Until the money trough runs dry or the skills pool deepens, employees will still have the tech companies by the balls.

<comment><USER4> This article contradicts that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All big companies I worked at so far suppress internal dissent. It's just the nature of the beast. Your boss doesn't want her boss look bad, and she also doesn't want to look bad herself come review/promo time. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are at stake. So all communication upward gets massaged with that in mind. By the time it gets through 5,6,7 layers of management "shit's bad" becomes "everything is awesome" even if the initial message gets out at all.

<comment><USER6> The classic (and hilarious) book _The Systems Bible_ ([https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide- Large/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide- Large/dp/0961825170)) has some deliciously tart words on this subject:

 _We present the Fundamental Law of Administrative Workings (F.L.A.W.): THINGS ARE WHAT THEY ARE REPORTED TO BE..._

 _The net effect of this Law is to ensure that people in Systems are never dealing with the real world that the rest of us have to live in, but instead with a filtered, distorted, and censored version which is all that can get past the sensory organisms of the System itself..._

 _This effect has been studied in detail by a small group of dedicated General Systemanticists. In an effort to introduce quantitative methodology into this important area of research they have paid particular attention to the amount of information that reaches, or fails to reach, the attention of the relevant administrative officer or corresponding Control Unit._

 _The crucial variable, they have found, is the fraction Ro /Rs, where Ro represents the amount of Reality which fails to reach the Control Unit, and Rs equals the total amount of Reality presented to the System. The fraction Ro/Rs varies from zero (full awareness of outside reality) to unity (no reality getting through). It is known, naturally enough, as the COEFFICIENT OF FICTION._

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are there people who still believe the PR nonsense of big companies like Google and Facebook? At the end of the day by agreeing to work for these companies, you gain prestige, $$$, and maybe something interesting to work on, that is pretty much it and those are only offered to you because you bring in much more $$$ than you get in perks or $$$. If you are naive enough to think that these corporations are interested in anything but making money, you are sadly mistaken.

<comment><USER8> This comment makes me want to work for a large company. If all they provide is lots of money and potential for interesting work then that sounds great!

<comment><USER9> Doesn't even have to be large. I work for a public company that has a staff of < 200\. Small engineering team inside of a non-software company. We solve business problems. Sometimes that means building SPA web apps. Sometimes it means coding up the corporate site redesign. It's up to you to make it interesting. I think it's interesting, and I always try to play a part in a project that works toward advancing my career goals.

Pace is slower than the start-ups I've worked at in the past, but salary and incentives are above most tech start-up "competitive salaries" I hear about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> May I recommend Dan Lyon's Disrupted as a deep, touching, funny and horrifying portrayal of what startup culture can look like?

It's one of the best books I read last year.

<comment><USER11> Facebook was started in 2004, so it's a good 15 years old now. It also has 30,000 employees. That's way to big and way too old to be a startup in any meaningful sense. It's a big and powerful, but young, company.

<comment><USER12> Its cultural roots go back to a startup, however.

<comment><USER13> By that standard, almost every company's cultural roots go back to a startup.

<comment><USER12> So, such a period would be a sensible time and place to look in an examination of cultural factors. The fact that Facebook is still young means that those roots are closer in time than for other companies and would seem to make that more relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >The message was clear in August 2016 when the company laid off the editorial staff of its trending news team, shortly after some workers on that team leaked to the press that they were suppressing conservative-leaning stories.

So - All the claims of censorship for conservative views. it's true then? I previously thought it was an excuse.

How can we have a dialogue as a nation, if we don't allow opposite positions to speak?

</comment><comment><USER15> A large part of the article is about the review/promotion system at Facebook, and it highlights that:

-Facebook has twice-a-year performance reviews.

-The reviews involve peer feedback, some of it blind to the reviewee.

-Managers have quotas for performance categories.

I believe those features are standard at most big US companies, with some exceptions like Microsoft.

The consequences are (a) twice-a-year crunch time, (b) pressure to deliver bullshit results, (c) pressure to be popular, and (d) employees are incentivized to sabotage their peers.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is every job I've ever worked at, nothing about this is unique to Facebook.

I'm glad this is actually getting attention though. At least it's a step towards getting this problem fixed. It's downright degrading that we have to (especially in the tech industry) pretend like we love everything about our jobs and being cogs in top-down authoritarian organizations.</comment>


Ask HN: What does your ideal software engineering interview look like? - <AUTHOR> Posted this before but it got lost quick, so trying again. I've seen many posts talk about the deplorable state of interviewing today, calling out whiteboarding, take-homes, multi-days, algorithmic, etc as all have massive shortcomings (and I think many who've done the rounds of the interview circuit would agree that its a stressful pain in the ass situation). Maybe the answer is that there isn't any one-size fits all situation here, but I was generally curious about what people think their ideal software engineering interview would look like? <comment><USER2> The best interviews, and the best places I've ended up working, are the least- technical. A simple free-form conversation in a casual environment (over coffee, lunch, beer, whatever) is sufficient. Talk shop. Geek out about something. If you can joke with the interviewer about how annoying it is that Docker Swarm punches holes in your firewall; playfully debate Vim vs. IDEs; have an opinion on the quality of open source web frameworks in Go vs Python; have a favorite Linux shell; can relate a horror story migrating a UI from React to Vue; etc., then I'm going to learn a whole lot more about you than I'd ever learn in a formal interview. Gotcha questions, whiteboarding, hypothetical situations, etc. rarely demonstrate much actual experience writing software. The bulk of the work that most developers do doesn't involve inventing anything; it's usually just wiring things together.

If you've got a specific, narrow skill that you're hiring for, then you might need to get more technical, but you should have vetted that already by selecting your candidates from a PhD program or a prior successful job where you're already familiar with their research.

If you're hiring someone right out of undergrad, there's no technical interview that's really going to help. You just need to find someone smart and motivated to learn, and a casual conversation is better for that as well.

<comment><USER2> My response above is perhaps a bit overly-dismissive of technical questions. I always ask technical questions, but they're more open and conversational, and I learn more from going off on tangents. There's rarely a single right answer. I'm trying to get a sense of your experience and how you approach unknowns.

Here are some of the more-technical questions I ask interview candidates, which are still best done in a casual way:

* What happens when a user enters a URL in their browser and hits return? If they start talking about DNS, protocol/port mapping, networks/firewalls, web servers-application communication, cookies, page rendering, etc. then I can go off on various tangents.

* How do you test your software? Can get into the differences between unit/integration testing, mocking/fixtures, QA, etc.

* How do you deploy software? Leads to discussions about SCM/branching, CI/CD, containerization, IaC, cloud services, the benefits/drawbacks of self-hosting vs cloud hosting.

There are plenty of others along these lines. My goal is to see if the person has actually done anything in a real environment, formed opinions, and stayed up to date on modern technology and practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Fantastic CV. You're hired. Any questions?"

</comment><comment><USER4> One where I end with a job.</comment>


Show HN: GitBook Editor – Merge Conflict Resolution UI - <AUTHOR> https://www.gitbook.com/blog/features/merge-conflicts <comment><USER2> This sounds awesome. I avoid merging things specifically because I never learned Git command line, and GitHub doesn't have a UI to deal with it.

<comment><USER3> Hi Aaron from GitBook here.

Exactly. I use git a lot, I'm familiar with git's internals and have written a lot of git related code (our git server and all our git related infrastructure). Yet I still flinch at the idea of solving conflicts in the CLI.

I'm sure other developers feel the same, more so for less or non technical people.

<comment><USER2> So, I see you can sign into GitBook with your GitHub account. But it looks like you guys are selling your own Git hosting service. So... question... does GitBook's client work with GitHub repositories? Your site doesn't make that very clear.

<comment><USER2> Okay, so, honest truth... I thought I could do code with this. I really WANT to do code with this. I really do. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> excellent - we love Gitbook and are super excited any time we get new features.</comment>


Unix Toolbox (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml <comment><USER2> Some errors, just from the first few sections alone.

From section 1:

* "man hier" is out of date, alas. [https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/567405/5132](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/567405/5132)

* If one is going to have a Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris split, one needs to apply it to section 1. "lsbrelease" is a Linux-based operating system only command.

* Debian now includes /etc/os-release . Interestingly, so too does DragonFlyBSD (but not FreeBSD).

* "last reboot" has been supposedly superseded in systemd operating systems, by "journalctl -b".

* "atacontrol" was superseded by "camcontrol" in FreeBSD back in 2012. [https://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/relnotes-detailed.html...](https://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/relnotes-detailed.html#AEN1308)

* Not even everyone has /var/log/messages any more, or /var/log/warn . Even Debian has, just last month, made the systemd journal its primary on-disc storage.

* Use "vipw" to avoid having to remember to recompile master.passwd . It respects $EDITOR .

* Most Linux operating systems do not use run levels _at all_ now. [http://jdebp.uk./FGA/run-levels-are-history.html](http://jdebp.uk./FGA/run-levels-are-history.html)

In section 2:

* The ps flags are 30 years out of date for the BSDs. BSD switched ps to use getopt() at the start of the 1990s, and they've officially started with a minus sign all of that time since.

* The better trace program on FreeBSD, and the only one on OpenBSD, is the original BSD ktrace/kdump .

In section 3:

* FreeBSD partitioning is done with "gpart".

I stopped there. There are probably some howlers under installation and shells, given how outdated some of the other stuff was. Debian and Ubuntu changed /bin/sh to the Debian Almquist shell a decade and a bit ago. FreeBSD replaced pkg with pkg-ng in version 9. These are two very common errors that I see.

<comment><USER3> A lot of these seem to be issues with out-of-date information, which is not unreasonable for a 12-year-old document.

<comment><USER2> Dated 2016, revision 14.5, if you look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A thread from 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10022729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10022729)

2010: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411075](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411075)

<comment><USER5> Thank you @dang for your tireless, thankless modding and curation.

:prayer hands emoji here:

<comment><USER6> He must have something that automatically pastes dates of already posted urls in his view of the site

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a tool that returns linux system information in json format, that works for most kernel versions and / is actively supported? i think it would be easier to pipe through jq in order to get a desired value, rather then pipe through grep/awk/sed.

<comment><USER8> There's jc [1], that can return the JSON output of standard Linux CLI tools.

[1] - [https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc](https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc)

<comment><USER9> Off-topic: Whenever I start thinking about json (or xml) I get lost in the turtle tower of metadata.

Like 'jc ls' gives json output with following entry format: { "filename": "[actual-filename-string]" }

Then I start asking: why not simply { "[actual-filename-string]" } ?

But then why stop at keyword value pairs? Why not:

{ "keyword": "filename", "value": "[actual-filename-string]" }

But then why not:

{ { "metakeyword": "keyword", "metavalue": "filename" }, { "metakeyword": "value", "metavalue": "[actual-filename-string]" } }

And so on.

Surely I can't be the only one. Would love to have this discussed, where to draw the line (and why), what's the utility, and so on.

<comment><USER10>
        { "[actual-filename-string]" }

...isn't valid JSON. As for going up the metatower, my personal take on this would be to strive for brevity. That is, what's the least structure we can get away with to unambiguously serialise what is needed? In most(?) cases, this is probably best:

        { "filename": "whatever", "foo": "bar", "etc": "etc" }

However, _maybe_ there are instances where:

        [
          { "attribute": "filename", "value": "whatever" },
          { "attribute": "foo", "value": "bar" },
          { "attribute": "etc", "value": "etc" }
        ]

...is more appropriate. If, for example, you need to encode a flexible schema, rather than a fixed one.

<comment><USER11> If brevity is what you want then what's wrong with the default field record ls output? It's even a regular language!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For fun: [http://cb.vu](http://cb.vu)

</comment><comment><USER13> I've needed this for a long time!

One word: anyone know why it Firefox mobile can't scale the page text up? No issue on Brave/Chrome mobile.

</comment><comment><USER14> I spy some Windows ;)

<comment><USER15> Probably worth reading, then.</comment></comment>


Instacart launches Express – Amazon Prime for Groceries - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/growing-35-monthly-instacart-introduces-express-its-amazon-prime-equivalent-for-grocery-delivery/

<comment><USER2> It's just like Amazon Prime, except all the prices on Amazon aren't inflated by a ludicrous markup when compared to other online stores. (On top of a delivery fee or annual subscription.)

<comment><USER3> This is probably partly due to Amazon's policy that the price you charge on their site is the lowest price you charge anywhere, for each item.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Mehta, in a call with TechCrunch, stated that simply tacking on new cities to his company's service doesn't, in a sense, prove much; that's just hiring._

I think the whole idea behind geographic expansion is that it proves more people are willing to pay for service X or Y than just those living in the Bay Area, who are perhaps the most amenable cross-section of the country for a service like this.

(Not advocating expansion for expansion's sake -- I think Instacart is making a wise choice -- but saying "It's just hiring" is disingenuous.)

<comment><USER5> New York is probably even stronger than the Bay Area for this kind of service, but there are entrenched competitors there.

College campuses, big industrial parks, and maybe military bases would be my next pick after NYC and SFBA. Another interesting market might be events -- during Sturgis, or Oshkosh, or other vents, running something like Instacart would work, while it wouldn't work in the same towns otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Instacart is a neat concept, but knowing that they charge more on items than the store charges irritates me enough that I don't use it.

I'd rather pay a clear delivery fee and not feel that I'm paying extra for every item than have free delivery but a mark -up on every item. I know that financially it might come out to the same thing, but psychologically I get annoyed that they charge me $4.99 when Trader Joe's charges $3.99.

I'm hoping they hit the scale where they can take some of their margin from the store (Trader Joe's specifically). Instacart Plus is a step in the right direction there.

</comment><comment><USER7> _In testing, Express members ordered from Instacart, again according to Mehta, two or three times weekly. The caveat to the Express deal is that delivery is only free on orders over $35._

So Express members are spending $70-105+ per week on groceries? I guess Instacart must be a hit with families.

For those kinds of users who spend $280-$420 per month on groceries, $99/year is relatively small.

<comment><USER4> Napkin math is saying that you'd only have to purchase thirteen orders a year (13 * 7.99 = roughly 104) at above $35 each to recoup your investment. Even for someone living alone, that's very easy to do.

<comment><USER8> All of my Instacart orders have cost $3.99 in shipping -- and that's for a shopper living alone whose office provides meals on weekdays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "We deliver in the San Francisco Bay Area"

 _I enter a Zipcode from downtown San Jose_

"Bummer! We don't deliver there... yet!"

So typical. Nothing cool ever works in San Jose. :-(

<comment><USER10> Number of NHL teams in SJ: 1.

Number of NHL teams in SF: 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't AmazonFresh Amazon Prime for Groceries?

<comment><USER12> No; did you read the article? AmazonFresh does not offer benefits at a yearly fee similar to Prime. The closest thing it has to that is extra benefits for those who purchase $300 in a certain time frame (Big Radish).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish Instacart had delivery in my city. Oh well. You can always order groceries from Amazon, although its limited.

</comment><comment><USER14> i don't get this. For me, instacart delivery has always been free on orders over $35. What does express buy me?

<comment><USER15> Perhaps you're in the express beta the article mentioned? I used Instacart a few times, and always had to pay the delivery fee unless they sent out a newsletter offering free delivery for one day for orders over ~$80 (which seems to happen a lot).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author of this piece doesn't seem to know much about Amazon's product offerings. Prime is free 2 day shipping along with some free video streaming. Fresh is the Grocery delivery service.

<comment><USER17> Prime is a subscription you pay in exchange for free shipping from Amazon, and Express is a subscription you pay in exchange for free shipping from Instacart. Offering such a subscription had a positive impact on revenue-per- customer for Amazon, and Instacart may benefit from the same. The author seems to have made a fine analogy to me, and the fact that Amazon also has a separate grocery delivery service is completely tangential to his point.</comment></comment>


Reef project takes Google Street View underwater - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-29/reef-project-takes-google-streetview-underwater/3861036 A new marine research project is aiming to create an underwater version of Google's street view, offering 360 degree views of parts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. <comment><USER2> I hope a Florida school does this. I'd also put $20 in on a kickerstarter if someone started it. It would be amazing and may bring awareness where we need it.</comment>


Costco will not allow returns on high-demand items like toilet paper, water - <AUTHOR> https://www.today.com/food/costco-not-allowing-returns-high-demand-items-toilet-paper-t176417 <comment><USER2> Costco has done a really good job of handling this tough situation. Beyond this, I've noticed a few other things:

* Stock most items overnight so that if you absolutely need something you can prioritize getting there before they open and likely getting it rather than having to come back over and over (or go to multiple other stores), which limits exposure.

* Set aside additional hours before the general opening for seniors.

* Limit high-demand items. This does have some perverse ramifications for a few items. For instance, we wanted about 4 dozen eggs to get us through a few weeks. Unfortunately the smaller packs were limited to 1 so we ended up having to buy 5 dozen.

* Flood the market with in-demand items to create confidence. I think this is a Seattle thing, but last week I started seeing social mediate posts showing literal aisles composed of nothing but toilet paper. Many people (myself included to some extent) are just just buying because they don't want to get caught without TP when they run out, but if they feel that it's likely it will be in stock they won't rush out to buy some immediately.

<comment><USER3> Yes! By flooding the market to create an over abundance of TP, you reduce our innate anxieties to panic buy.

These actions can do a lot to alleviate panic not only at Costco, but other retailers too.

<comment><USER4> I especially liked the CNN headline last week: "People are panic-buying TP and stores are running out."

Gee, I wonder what effect that will have?

<comment><USER5> Getting more clicks, which is what profit seeking corporations optimize for, regardless of the externalities.

<comment><USER6> Can't waste a good crisis. Just like those senators today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite part of this is that it implies grifters are failing to offload their stock. They bought it all hoping to profit off of shortages, and then not only did Amazon and Ebay clamp down on reselling, _there isn 't actually a shortage_. Justice.

<comment><USER8> > grifters are failing to offload their stock

The word you're looking for is arbitrageur. Or scalper. Grifter implies some thing dishonest. Arbitrageurs are very up-front with what they're doing, and you get exactly why you're paying for.

<comment><USER9> There is dishonesty in this situation. If you ask Costco if it's ok to buy lots of toilet paper to resell, they'll say no.

By buying in bulk to arbitrage you're acting against the interests of Costco and their customers, and hoping you fly under the radar.

<comment><USER10> >There is dishonesty in this situation. If you ask Costco if it's ok to buy lots of toilet paper to resell, they'll say no.

That's debatable. Plenty of small businesses buy Costco stuff to resell, or for business use. They even have business memberships! Unless they have explicit no resell notices (although even then it's unclear what legal force they have), I wouldn't say it's dishonest.

<comment><USER11> Costco literally is designed as a small business supply warehouse. There are some Costco they cater exclusively to this. Now not trying to price gouge in a pandemic is another thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My first thought was - who returns toilet paper!?!

But I suppose if you're a hoarder or reseller then you'd probably return whatever you don't need/sell. So good move.

<comment><USER13> I've seen people return crazy things at Costco:

\- Bag of potatoes almost completely empty. The guy had a few potatoes that were sprouting roots. Costco refunded the cost of the entire bag.

\- Cart full of sushi platters. Obviously somebody bought it for a party and didn't finish it. Again Costco refunded.

<comment><USER14> We all pay the price for these customers misusing the return policy. Companies got to have a decent enforcement of these policies.

<comment><USER15> Nordstrom was famous for refunding customers' money. One person brought in a used tire (Nordy's sells clothes) and was refunded his money. A Nordy's salesman I know told me that people would return obviously well worn shoes and would get a refund, no questions asked.

Nordstrom doesn't do that anymore. Too many abusers.

<comment><USER16> One of the outdoor retailers (REI?) had to give up their "No Questions Asked" return policy because of idiots doing things like buying a tent, using it for a trip, and then returning it.

<comment><USER17> LLBean changed their lifetime guarantee a few years back after people would return worn-out from normal use items for a refund or replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was in the Redwood City Costco today, just as they were running out of TP. It was 11:30 AM, and an employee said to the fellow taking the last pack: "I unload 16 pallets of the stuff every day, and it always runs out!"

Conveniently, they had a sign out front showing things they did or did not have in stock, to save you time in case you just came for one thing. The sign included things like TP and bottled water.

<comment><USER19> Insane. We have some of the best tap water in the world on the Peninsula. WTF.

<comment><USER20> At the present moment, people may be buying the container more than the water.

<comment><USER21> That's an interesting hypothesis. Why would a person want 50+ 20oz bottles?

<comment><USER20> To store water in case civilization ends, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Costco allows purchases to members only. I do not understand why in the very beginning they did not enforce the purchase limit of each membership to something reasonable e.g. 2 big boxes (~70 rolls) per month.

<comment><USER23> A lot of their members are various types of small businesses. Remember when Costco was becoming popular like 20-30 years ago they mostly marketed themselves as a place for small businesses to stock up. It is hard to say what would be reasonable for a small business.

<comment><USER24> It would be insane for a small business to buy items at retail prices. They should be going to a wholesaler to buy what they need.

I used to work for my uncle's coin-op business. I would often go to the wholesaler to purchase vending machine stock. Cases of cigarettes were insanely expensive ($2K each??) even at a wholesaler back in the late 1980s early 1990s.

<comment><USER25> You misunderstood. It's for small businesses to stock up on items they need for their place of business, not for resale. Countless small offices in the US may need a lot more TP than a 3 person family but doesn't need enough to justify a direct wholesale account. Same goes for coffee, snacks, various office appliances.

<comment><USER26> There are businesses that buy stock for resale at Costco too. It's usually because the volume they buy is too small for wholesalers to take them seriously. Examples around here are small vending businesses and movie theaters.

<comment><USER27> The cafe near my office resells Costco baked goods like muffins and cookies. They primarily do hot breakfast/lunch/sandwiches, but hey, sometimes people just want a cookie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hoarders should just hold on to the toilet paper. It's not perishable, so at least they will have a stash for the next time there is a similar scare, and fewer regular customers will be affected.

<comment><USER29> Hoarders would never return them. That goes against everything.

Only failed resellers would.

<comment><USER30> These panic buyers are a different kind of hoarder. These aren't hoarders buying it due to a mental illness. The people who panic bought a lot of toilet paper did so for what they thought were rational reasons: to get toilet paper before everyone else bought it all, to get toilet paper in case of long term quarantine, perhaps to resell it a higher price, or fear of long term disruption of supply lines. Once these rational reasons turn out to be incorrect they may desire to return their purchase.

<comment><USER31> I don't know, man, I "hoarded" 2 months worth of TP: two large packs of 18 "mega-rolls". If I bought enough to fill a room, that'd be like 10 years of TP. I have 2 people in my home, if that helps. Anyone who bought more than ~2-3 large packs was hoarding for resale OR has a huge family.

<comment><USER32> You are thinking rationally. People buying years of toilet paper while they have food for the next two weeks are not thinking things through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> These are mostly bulky items, it would be an inventory-storage nightmare. Let the d-bags who bought a years supply of toilet paper deal with that themselves.

</comment><comment><USER18> Whole Foods had signs all over about not taking returns on food due to coronavirus. It's a reasonable position for them to take, given the risk. Months ago I remember seeing a sign in a Whole Foods in SF that asked customers not to load up their reusable bags while shopping (to use a basket/cart instead). The reason was that if you take something off the shelf and later put it back, then you've potentially contaminated someone else's food. This is basically the same logic for not accepting returns (that have been in someone's house) now.

Not surprisingly, the signs were mostly clustered near goods that people might stockpile, like pasta and canned tomatoes. Aside from liability, they also want to discourage hoarding.

</comment><comment><USER34> protip: there are many, many other ways to clean an ass. No need to panic. At worst you'll be inconvenienced.

<comment><USER35> 50%+ of the US population also uses paper when peeing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Costco has a very liberal return policy. This has already been discussed here, but people are buying toilet paper with the ability to easily return in mind. If they can't use it, they will just return it for a full refund.

This is an excellent step by Costco to cut down on the return mindset. If you buy pallets worth of toilet paper, good on Costco for not letting you return them. You better have the square footage to deal with your own inventory.

</comment><comment><USER37> Perhaps there are health reasons for it. Maybe they can't resell used toilet paper.

</comment><comment><USER38> Like most things Costco...'as it should be'...

</comment><comment><USER39> You still need to wait 2-3 hours to get just a pack of toilet paper. In addition, you need to enter a closed space and potentially get infected. High- demand items should be sold outside on the parking lot with either their key fobs or credit cards. This way, the store won't be crazy and infected with so many people wasting hours just to get toilet paper and water. Stop praising Costco too much!

</comment><comment><USER40> I've often wondered if there isn't a "secret" mailing list of people who go around and buy some product with the intention of creating a shortage and making a buck on amazon. The retail equivalent of a bunch of traders gaming some commodity.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wish Costco would do two things

1) Limit the number of people in the store. Do better crowd control. The over packed stores makes me hate visiting Costco.

2) Make the shopping carts smaller. To allow for easier navigation.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have a feeling some people bought HUGE quantities in hopes of selling on Amazon/ebay for inflated prices. When these plans fell through, they're trying to return it.

<comment><USER43> Like these guys, who rented trucks and drove 1300 miles, hitting every store they could find. They got left holding 17700 bottles of hand sanitizer.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus- pu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-purell-wipes- amazon-sellers.html) (Filed under "technology", ha!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Costco ought to allow returns for these things, for an exchange of a like item.

</comment><comment><USER44> Popular toilet paper and coronavirus warehouse video making the rounds: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA4KS546rZo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA4KS546rZo)

</comment><comment><USER45> The title is confusing, we all know how people for hygiene stuff including toilet papers.

</comment><comment><USER46> why is this on hn? this was like news on the mainstream sites weeks ago.

<comment><USER47> Same reason as always: someone posted it, and others found it interesting enough to upvote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> They should accept the returns so they can restock the shelves again.

<comment><USER49> They have enough supply available from their normal suppliers to restock the shelves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> So lets say I own a business - and buy for the business, now al the sudden everyone is working from home. As a business owner I can either, return it so others can get it or I can save it for later.

Seems like there could be good reason to allow returns.

<comment><USER51> If this is the case, you speak to the Costco management staff and explain the situation. Maybe they'll let you. Maybe they won't. But either way, not allowing returns is the correct move to keep people from hoarding.

<comment><USER29> This doesn't stop hoarding. Hoarders keep things well past their usefulness. These are failed amazon/ebay resellers who tried to make a profit but no market existed.

<comment><USER52> Your parent comment meant short-term, "screw you poors, I've got $7000 cash, so buying it ALL" hoarders, who went in with bad faith motives of reselling/gouging and/or returning excess stock when the run has completed its course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Hmm. What if some of these people realize they are hurting their community and trying to return what they don't need so others can have it?

<comment><USER51> They can stand outside Costco and give it away and get some of that Karma back.

<comment><USER54> Or sell it at the price they paid and break even.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm glad this is happening. But I could see how a consumer would be upset with this. Were these rules listed when I purchased the product? Why didn't you limit me if you had intentions of limiting what I can return?

Costco is very open about their return policy and it's part of the reason people shop there. They can buy things and know they can return them if they don't need them. It may be the wrong reason to buy things, but if that's the case Costco should alter their return policy.

<comment><USER56> They did alter their return policy. That's what the article is about.

<comment><USER57> GP presumably meant at time of sale, rather than retroactively.</comment></comment></comment>


2B Records Exposed in Smart Home Device Breach - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/07/02/confirmed-2-billion-records-exposed-in-massive-smart-home-device-breach/ <comment><USER2> This is the one IoT device I use... They used MD5 too, great.

I'd really like to give them a prize....

</comment><comment><USER3> No surprise here......</comment>


GPU Accelerated JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://gpu.rocks/ <comment><USER2> _Graceful pure JavaScript fallback when GPU is not available._

This is a bad thing, not a happy thing to be advertised. Software fallback was of the most frustrating parts of working with OpenGL circa 2010.

If you're making a hardware accelerated library, stop trying to make it "gracefully" fail. Just fail! That way people can address the root problem.

On the other hand, as long as the library is sufficiently noisy about the fact that it's in CPU mode, it seems fine. I just hope they don't follow OpenGL's design decisions.

It's surprisingly hard to figure out the answer from the README: [https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/#readme](https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/#readme) There's a "How to check what's supported" section, but it's also "mostly for unit tests."

<comment><USER3> I'm actually curious, given the massive speed difference between CPU and GPU: can anyone here think of any situation where a fallback to CPU speed _would_ still be acceptable for a real-life application?

The only thing I can think of is simple image operations like a 5x speedup for a Gaussian blur filter... but then I also wonder if you'd even bother writing code to do it on the GPU in the first place.

<comment><USER4> > can anyone here think of any situation where a fallback to CPU speed would > still be acceptable for a real-life application?

Sure, there are valid scenarios where the slower speed fallback is acceptable. Note that I agree with the GP comment; fallback should be explicit not automatic.

\- Developer adoption. Not everyone has a GPU, but with a fallback path everyone can try it out and write code that will work on the fast path.

\- Application development. Along the same lines as developer adoption, not every customer has a GPU either, so if I write an app I may want to let the user try a new feature (with a warning that it's slow) rather than tell them they can't use the feature at all until they upgrade their hardware.

\- Heterogeneous compute farms. I'm thinking in particular of render farms for VFX and CG movies, as an example, how a render farm is large and may not be full of GPU nodes due to cost. A fallback path allows time/perf to be balanced against whatever the farm's budget for GPU nodes is.

\- Test machines. Running automated end-to-end integration tests to check for correctness doesn't depend on speed, and if you're renting your test machines, it might be cheaper to fallback to CPU than to rent GPU nodes. Think Selenium tests running on a bunch of AWS nodes, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For what it's worth, HN might be interested to look into how programming a simple WebGPU calculator works. I worked on one some time ago: [https://laskin.live/](https://laskin.live/)

Source-code is here: [https://github.com/Laged/laskin.live](https://github.com/Laged/laskin.live)

This way you can use some "better" API like Vulkan to run programs that are written in the new SPIR-V intermediate representation. In general, if you are interested in GPU programming, I would definitely look into WebGPU. The API is much easier to get started than Vulkan is, and achieves the most basic things required for simple GPGPU tasks (despite the fact that WebGPU can use Vulkan as the GPU API driver).

Note that WebGPU needs a browser flag to be enabled, and is generally very dangerous. It's possible to kernel panic operating systems on web page load, despite the fact that you are using a web browser.

<comment><USER6> Implementation status for the major browsers here: [https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation- Status](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status)

This, along with WebAssembly (threads, SIMD, etc), are going to be a very big deal in the next few years. The obvious use case is AAA games running in your browser, but I think once we've got 80-90% of native speeds on the web, basically all of the "client-heavy" apps (video processing, game dev tools, etc.) are going to start migrating over too. Not really an interesting prediction at this stage, since it already started happening way back in asm days. IIRC photopea.com doesn't even use WASM at all, and it has excellent performance on all sorts of image manipulation/encoding/etc tasks. Still, I think there are exciting times ahead for those hacking on the web platform.

<comment><USER7> > The obvious use case is AAA games running in your browser

Er, no? Why would an AAA game, which typically wants every ounce of performance and control it can get, ever jump onto a web platform and lose all of that? And in exchange get... nothing at all? And since modern consoles are the same architecture & ISAs as gaming PCs are, why would they want to figure out a WASM backend with lagging hardware support & high overhead when 100% of their users are x86-64 with the entirely same set of SIMD features? And do they just not run an anti-cheat or DRM system? Good luck with that sales pitch.

It's not like you'll ever be able to click a link and just start playing a AAA game locally in your browser, either, you need to pull several gigs of assets first. And go through a login/paywall unless we're only talking F2P games which are almost never AAA games.

This use case comes up a lot, but if (and that's a big if) it happens, AAA games will be the _last_ thing to switch, not the first. More plausible first users would be things like CAD & 3D modelling applications, which need high performance but also don't have 80GB+ installs.

<comment><USER8> Non-AAA games seem like a huge target as well. Just look at the Steam store. The web would be a really interesting medium for indie games.

<comment><USER7> > The web would be a really interesting medium for indie games.

It already was. Flash gaming was huge (so was embedded Java gaming such as Runescape). It regressed rather heavily over the years, perhaps from mobile, perhaps from regressions in the web's tech stack even, or perhaps just from social changes. But unless it was web technology regressing, I don't see why WASM + WebGPU would suddenly bring it back, either.

<comment><USER8> > But unless it was web technology regressing

Arguably it was. I'd say we still don't have something that rivals every feature Flash provided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is cool and I am glad it exists as someone who works with nodejs often, but if you're doing heavy server side computations where serious parallelization is actually important, I'm a little skeptical that investing in having those computations in JS is likely to be a reasonable choice in many cases outside of small hobby projects. I could be wrong, but I think the performance compared to other alternatives also using parallelization via the GPU would be very unfavorable and you also wouldn't have rich complementary libraries for this as a result of the low performance ceiling for JS in this domain.

<comment><USER2> Those criticisms haven't really been true of JS for years. Google has invested many dozens of millions to make JS fast. And GPU acceleration is largely unrelated to the particular language that happens to drive the GPU.

If the critique is "static typing good, JS bad" then that's a fair argument. But personally I'm excited to have something akin to a scripting language for a GPU.

<comment><USER9> Javascript is now fast in the sense that V8 is good enough at the things you are likely to do in the browser or in a typical node server. The very example in this link of how a matrix of random numbers is to be generated is an absolute joke compared to how this would be achieved in lower level languages. Javascript's lack of static typing doesn't just affect DX but what performance enhancements can be made. You don't have direct access to memory and V8's optimizations just aren't THAT helpful for this sort of thing. This is a large part of the appeal of WebAssembly in the browser context. Even asm.js, impressive as it is/was, doesn't really compare favorably and what you see here is clearly nothing like asmjs. I have a lot of love for JS and there are many domains it does well in but unless you show numbers that prove otherwise, I'm quite sure you are totally wrong here.

<comment><USER2> _You don't have direct access to memory and V8's optimizations just aren't THAT helpful for this sort of thing._

You do: ArrayBuffer works great.

 _I have a lot of love for JS and there are many domains it does well in but unless you show numbers that prove otherwise, I'm quite sure you are totally wrong here._

I speak from experience :) Here's a demo of Javascript doing what it's unsuited for: buttery-smooth 60FPS on iOS [https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1222280670908600321](https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1222280670908600321)

Voice recognition: [https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1151613837264732167](https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1151613837264732167)

It's fair to say that writing a matrix multiply in pure JS might not be the best way to deploy your production code. But curing that is a matter of "run profiler, see clear hotspot, optimize hotspot." Especially now that you have so many options for dropping down to a lower-level stack.

JS is merely the wrapper, in many cases.

<comment><USER10> I always wonder when I see these demos: what is it like in a real world workload?

I remember some years ago everyone was going nuts over how WebGL was able to render a detailed model in the browser, native games are dead! Except it was a single non-animated 3D model, in a simple or non-existent background. _real_ games had many animated models, in complex environments, with complex interaction, physics, AI, audio and gameplay logic.

Ever since that comparison, I think, yeah, those demos look cool and indeed silky smooth, but most are a single simple thing. Real workloads tend to be much more complex: how does it fare with those?

(Of course if the vast majority of the processing time is in the GPU, then it really doesn't matter what language, fast or slow, you use to control or feed it.)

<comment><USER8> One recent innovation that (IMO) hasn't got much attention is OffscreenCanvas. Even with WebGL, JS has been sorely limited by the fact that it's single threaded. OffscreenCanvas lets you pass a drawing context off to a separate thread, or multiple contexts to multiple threads even. There's a whole lot of potential there that I haven't seen tapped yet (but I'll admit I'm not very clued into the kind of scenes you'd see making the most of this).

As ever, browser support matters. Chrome and Firefox: yes. Safari? No.

[https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183720](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183720)

<comment><USER11> I'm excited by the prospect of OffscreenCanvas, and yet at the same time I'm not convinced that it's going to be massively useful for my canvas library[1]. The one area where it could have a big impact (I think) would be to run the OC in a web worker alongside the bulk of the library's code, leaving the main thread to deal with final canvas display, user interactions, etc. But to implement that I'd need to recode the entire library from scratch.

At the moment I generate additional canvas elements in the code (in a pool, for reuse) and use them without adding them to the DOM. I'm happy with the resulting frame rates, and the flexibility the system gives me for creating responsive, accessible canvas elements in the web page. This is all done using a simple 2d context (even the bendy images code[2] is 2d, rendered in the main thread). I've avoided WebGL and the whole GPU acceleration thing because shaders scare me more than quaternions!

[1] - Scrawl-canvas - [https://scrawl.rikweb.org.uk/](https://scrawl.rikweb.org.uk/)

[2] - Bendy images interactive demo - [https://scrawl.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-024.html](https://scrawl.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-024.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As noted by others, instead of the handcuffs of lowest-common-denominator, we do GPU JS with best of class in node, where we get to play with Apache Arrow, RAPIDS, etc. We now shim nodejs to PyData for GPU tech vs doing node- opencl/cuda to get more GPU lib access, but I'd love to add a more direct numba-equiv and serverless layer here as V8 is better in key ways than cpython in many key ways here, and only a few glaring gaps afaict (gotchas in bigint / large memory space / etc still smoothing, TBD for multigpu and networking streaming.)

GPU JS and related frameworks are really 'browser GPU JS', and we find predictability there low enough that we still handroll WebGL 1.0 instead of them. When we shift, I'd hope it'll be for a webgl2+ (opencl2+...), but 10+ years later, I've stopped tracking the politics.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like how easy it is to write a new GPU kernel function.

I have never done any GPU kernel programming but I might give this a try.

I wonder if TensorFlow.js is implemented in much the same way. TensorFlow.js is fairly much awesome, largely because the examples are so well done, getting up to speed is painless.

</comment><comment><USER14> This could be useful for embarrassingly parallel workloads but 2 points:

\- the backend is OpenGL so it won't be as performant on NVIDIA hardware as CUDA (NVIDIA don't like OpenGL)

\- I don't see any explicit GPU memory management so you might not be able to setup a pipeline of operations which all operate GPU memory (aka the big pipelines you see in ML). That would be another performance hit.

Having said that it looks like fun and I'm going to check it out!

<comment><USER15> > NVIDIA don't like OpenGL

Nvidia loves OpenGL. They are probably the single biggest supporter of OpenGL. They have the best OpenGL driver in the industry. The president of Khronos is an Nvidia employee, as is the chair of the OpenGL working group.

CUDA is faster than OpenGL because it exposes more Nvidia proprietary features. GPU.js could add a CUDA backend for the Node version, but it wouldn't be portable to the Web or non-Nvidia GPUs.

<comment><USER16> Kind of, while they do love OpenGL for the graphics workstation cards, they are also the main hardware partner for DirectX design.

NVidia's OpenGL and Vulkan extensions are usually born as hardware support for DirectX capabilities, and then trickle down as extensions for OpenGL/Vulkan.

Also their main rendering products, like Optix, are CUDA based actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Neat project, but I'm slightly disappointed there's no link to run the benchmark directly in my browser without installing anything.

<comment><USER18> Ran fine for me: [https://gpu.rocks/#/benchmark](https://gpu.rocks/#/benchmark)

<comment><USER17> Ah. I clicked on benchmark, but because I'd already scrolled down on the page I was on, it remained scrolled and all I saw was the graph. Thanks.

<comment><USER19> Please edit your top-level comment.

EDIT: Apparently you can't. Sorry.

<comment><USER17> I can't any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like if it's possible to accelerate JS with a GPU it should be far more possible to do it with a many-core CPU. This bodes well for the likely future of dozens of X64 cores or even hundreds of ARM cores on a higher-end desktop/laptop chip and hundreds to thousands on server chips.

</comment><comment><USER21> I may be confused as I do not know much javascript, but the installation page mentions a dependency on Mesa, is it relying on it to perform the actual work? If so, I do not quite understand the debates here around avoiding OpenGL design and fallback to software emulation.

</comment><comment><USER22> Since this supports doing image convolutions I guess it can be used to do efficient CNN inference. Are there any examples doing that?

I see there are some other libraries to run deep learning networks in the browser (like Tensorflow.js), but it seems they have some limitation regarding the use of the GPU.

It may be interesting in pushing the boundaries of this project to get an efficient and generic CNN library. They seem to not use CUDA, which may be a limitation...

</comment><comment><USER23> My point is that if you are using JS as a wrapper for a big black box of gpu computations that are close to the metal then you are not really using JS in any meaningful sense and can wrap anything else that has a much better library ecosystem and performance qualities for anything that you're not just getting the gpu to crank out in a server context (which is implied by nodejs).

There's the speed of generating inputs, the speed of transforming and passing data at the input/output boundaries, and the ability to conveniently and performantly work with data in memory natively (i.e. while not outsourcing the computations elsewhere) that matters here. Is JS a great choice for any of these things? Most importantly, the last thing? This library isn't using ArrayBuffers for setting up all data or working on the data in JS so even if they work great for performance it seems totally irrelevant and let's be honest, if it were working with ArrayBuffers directly you would be so far away from usual JS and any convenience JS offers, you might as well not be writing JS.[https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/05/follow-my-blog-with- blog...](https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/05/follow-my-blog-with- bloglovin.html?m=1)

</comment><comment><USER24> really a bummer that they require function keywors so that the gpu function can access this.threads ! Would have been cleaner IMO - and more modern ideomatic - if the callback would have a parameter that would refer to the gpu.

otherwise this stuff is AWESOME. it would be great if we could reduce our dependency on python

<comment><USER25> What are you doing with Python that somehow this would help at all?

I am really curious, specially given there are many other languages out there to move to vs js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do you want exploits? Because exposing more and more bare metal OS functionality to javascript and then running all javascript you receive without a care in the world is how you get exploits.

And then once the exploits appear now the user is the danger for going to those sites, or installing that add-on, so the control must be taken away from the user. And so on with HTTPS only and no more accepting self signed certs so everyone has to be leashed to a cert authority and ask for permission to host a visitable website.

No, making the browser the OS is the path to loss of control and darkness.

<comment><USER27> Do you have a specific criticism of their work, or are you just reacting to the title?

<comment><USER26> >You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

Unfortunately the title is all that's available.</comment></comment></comment>


Dynamic Data Pipelines Using Common Lisp Conditions (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/tarballs_are_good/dynamic-collect/src/10d87a2d838ed6db568c8c826b7dea292e214795/dynamic-collect.pdf?at=default

<comment><AUTHOR> A few notes.

1\. There is a little bit of unwarranted "lying to the children" in the paper as it stands—particularly in some descriptions of the mechanics of the condition system—which should be corrected.

2\. The notion of a "dynamic data pipeline" could also be implemented with the use of special variables, though one might lose a bit of control flexibility.

BitBucket link from paper: [https://bitbucket.org/tarballs_are_good/dynamic- collect](https://bitbucket.org/tarballs_are_good/dynamic-collect)</comment>


Apple gives Stadia and xCloud the green light to run on iOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/apple-app-store-google-stadia-xcloud-microsoft-171436934.html <comment><USER2> Apple being Apple: "But you'll need to download each game directly from the App Store."</comment>


Alicia Keys, the creative director of BlackBerry loves her iPhone  - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+AliciaKeys/posts/enKYvYqWoep

<comment><USER2>
      > Jan 6, 2012

Pertinent? How long has she been creative director at Blackberry?

<comment><USER3> Damn I read that as Jan 6, 2013 in my head when I saw the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What role does a creative director have on a big consumer product like this? Would her role be more about branding and messaging, or does this suggest that Keys is actually getting her hands dirty with product design, and possibly signal a greater trend of Hollywood figures attempting to take the reigns of the tech scene?

Alicia Keys doesn't exactly seem like a Johnny Ive, but then again I would've said that Ashton Kutcher would be a funny pick for a VC.

</comment><comment><USER5> She loves the iPhone AND Google+ ..double trouble.</comment>


Longevity – Do we want to live longer? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jasonbits/longevity-fe3c3ca6923f

<comment><USER2> Of course we do. It's also a must. It's a requirement for any progress related to space travel and in relation to populating other planets. It's amazing that this is and still is, a question. The real question here is - does life have meaning or not?</comment>


73,000 Security Cameras Viewable Online Due to Use of Default Passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/top-security-stories/73000-security-cameras-viewable-online-due-to-use-of-default-passwords/#.VFzF6xBvu7E.twitter

<comment><USER2> Manufacturers should make changing the password a mandatory part of initial set-up.</comment>


How Uber Makes Its Drivers Pay - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-uber-makes-its-drivers-pay-11565737028?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> For those wondering why this is WSJ news —

Uber wouldn't be profitable, or even viable, if it had to reimburse for mileage like any other business does. In the business world, offsetting a billion dollar expense off of your books altogether is newsworthy.

The federal government left a loophole in the mileage coverage rules, specifying that only employees of a business need to be reimbursed for mileage. Uber exploits this loophole by treating each driver as a business, but also prohibits them from operating as a business of 2+ people, which forces drivers into a scenario where they are not reimbursed for their costs by any business - yet are somehow considered a 'business' even though they are no such thing.

That's financially newsworthy for those considering whether to invest in Uber or replicate its abuse of law, as the chances remain high that the government will find their contractor arrangement in violation of labor law.

Uber's practices, and therefore Uber's risks, apply theoretically to any business that uses "individual independent contractors" (Uber, Lyft) to offset these costs. It is unresolved what will come of this attempt to sidestep employee reimbursement rules.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most Uber drivers know they are putting wear on the car that is going to cost a lot in the long term.

But also, most Uber drivers are like most people: when they needed a job, they needed one sooner than later, and they cannot easily just quit and find another better one.

People are not driving for Uber because they think its the ultimate investment strategy or something or because they are too dumb to realize car maintenance adds up.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Uber Game. See if you can win! [https://ig.ft.com/uber- game/](https://ig.ft.com/uber-game/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've asked a lot of Lyft drivers about this. Only one said, "Yes, exactly, I've tried to explain to other people that after my expenses I'm not really earning any money." The others blew me off.

<comment><USER5> So she, basically, is using it as an emergency fund.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author of this article, who possibly already lost a bunch of money on Uber or is a short seller of Uber stock, does not think much of the intelligence of Uber drivers. They can't do math apparently. It's possible to make a profit driving for Uber taking into consideration all expenses. The drivers who don't know how to do this don't last.</comment>


July Matched, and Maybe Broke, Record for the Hottest Month Since Analysis Began - <AUTHOR> https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/july-matched-and-maybe-broke-record-hottest-month-analysis-began <comment> mAEStro-paNDa With this topic it's important to remind people that while individual actions to address climate change are good, and encouraged, it's going to take serious systemic action and cooperation to address this to the degree it should be.

There was a climate scientist not long ago calling for a "world war-like mobilization" in regards to addressing climate change and that's exactly what needs to happen. Buying an electric vehicle and slapping a solar panel on your roof simply isn't enough.

<comment><USER2> Transport is a third of emissions, most of that road transport, so if everyone bought an electric car it would certainly have an impact.

I think people have to bear in mind this is also about industrial scale. One person buying an electric car brings down the price for another, each new person brings down the price more and opens up the possibility to more people, and at some point you'll get a mass transfer. Electric cars are only something like 0.3% of cars on the road but already have the scale to get quite close to competitive. They're already cheaper for high mileage cases.

Although I do agree we will need concerted effort, it's likely this will be in conjunction with, not opposed to, these kind of individual decisions.

<comment><USER3> It would have an impact alright, a catastrophic impact. Most people don't have cars, and we need to reverse the trend of increased car ownership.

<comment><USER2> Why? Electrification of grid electricity is comparatively easy, and may even substantially happen (say, to 60-80%) without government action because of the relentlessness of the learning curves for wind and solar. But that's only a third of emissions. The core challenge is to electrify transport and heating to tackle the other two thirds. Replacing combustion cars with electric cars might involve a lot of mining (as does all of industrial civilization), but it will almost certainly be a benefit for climate change. Just plateauing the number of cars would be an achievement, reducing them by 90%+ globally, as would be needed without electrification, is cloud cuckoo land.

<comment><USER3> EVs still have big co2 lifecycle footprints, more than is sustainable, so a dead end. Bonus: each new EV will put another low cost used gas vehicle on the market to guzzle gas for another 20 years.

<comment><USER2> Their lifecycle is almost all dependent on the grid, most of the rest is the battery, which are already being manufactured using renewable energy. Even mining is being electrified. In the UK I can already buy a car which will reduce emissions by 40%, and by the end of its lifetime probably 80% as the grid decarbonises. Or even more if I have solar panels. How many decades of campaigning would we need to halve car ownership? Your perfect outcome from this is not going to happen, not quickly enough to tackle the problem, don't make the enemy the perfect of the good.

<comment><USER4> That's bad math. If you add EVs to a grid that's in the process of decarbonizing, the marginal impact is all that extra power comes from whatever would be shut down next.

EVs are still worth it if they're powered by coal or natural gas. But quoting them as getting cleaner as the grid decarbonizes is wrong, until the existing load is satisfied with renewables (even instantaneously).

The only exception is if EVs allow you to increase the renewable share beyond what you'd otherwise be able to do eg with demand dispatch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> semi-extrinsic In November 2020, the 26th COP summit will be held in the UK, where world leaders will agree on the action plans for cutting emissions.

When that conference ends, we have _one decade to cut global emissions by 50%_.

Are we going to make it? If so, how?

<comment><USER5> _Are we going to make it?_

No.

Global heating is pretty much inevitable. There's no taste for fixing it among the people who can actually do something. Politicians don't see farther than their next term in office, and the rich don't need to fix it. It's not really a case of "if" any more. It's going to happen.

<comment><USER6> Speak for your own country.

Where I live major political parties are now scrambling to adopt greener policies after losing big to green parties in the recent EU wide elections.

Because people have shown that if they don't do it, they will vote for someone who will.

There's also the issue of thousands of students rallying for greener policies every friday instead of attending school. It's been going on for some time and politicians are further under pressure because of that.

<comment><USER7> That's great, but Europe could dial all emissions to zero right now there would be virtually no impact. Even the US doing the same would hardly put a dent in climate change's trajectory, and the issue people have is that we can't simply assume that if we overhaul our entire economies at ruinous cost, China (over 2x America's emissions now and increasing every day), India, Russia, etc will be inspired to get on board. We need a binding global solution. Domestic solutions seem worthless to me.

<comment><USER6> > overhaul our entire economies at ruinous cost

Reading this gives me a headache. Guess what will _WAY_ be worse than that?

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B5-lDJWCUAAwfya.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B5-lDJWCUAAwfya.jpg)

Also most of the developing countries, those people like you like to point their finger at and use as an excuse to keep dooming yourself, your planet and most of all your children's futures, will be hit first and the hardest by climate change. And they know it. China is already coming around.

<comment><USER7> I'm seeing a lot of rhetoric and no substance. Yawn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could we start framing hot years in the same way we do floods? I mean, everyone knows what a "10 year flood" or a "100 year flood" is supposed to look like. No one has a proper statistical relation for what the likelihood of a broken temperature means, and I find that rather odd.

Even if climate change has made it so that the 100 year year broken temperature records are now 10 year temperature broken temperature records, could we at least say that statistically? Is it too much to ask?

</comment><comment><USER9> As a counterpoint, consider this quote from an article [1] by economist Robert Murphy: "In the climate change debate, people often forget that under all but the most catastrophic scenarios, the future generations who will benefit from our current mitigation efforts will be much richer than we are. For example, Nigel Lawson points out that even under one of the worst case scenarios studied by the IPCC, failure to act would simply mean that people in the developing world would be "only" 8.5 times as wealthy a century from now, compared to 9.5 times as wealthy if there were no climate change. [2]"

[1] [https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Murphyclimate....](https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Murphyclimate.html) [2] Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (New York: Duckworth Overlook, 2008), p. 36.

<comment><USER10> Wealth?

What is this "wealth" you speak of?

Can you eat money?

Do all the technological advances, smartphones, VR, blah blah, counteract killing off the megafauna, turning the natural landscape into deserts and concrete?

Pure insanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could anyone who is more informed comment on this WSJ article discussing climate change media coverage? [https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-media- corrupted-climate...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-media-corrupted- climate-policy-11562360829)

<comment><USER12> Sure. You live in an echo chamber on HN where everyone is worried about climate change. The WSJ is another echo chamber that is almost the polar opposite where people either don't believe in climate change, or that it's greatly exaggerated.

I've engaged with commenters in the WSJ hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Basically, you'll talk yourself into one big circle. People have all sorts of standard answers like "the climate is always changing", references to debunked movies, a handful of "scientific names", the Global Warming Hiatus, etc.

You can address all of them but they'll simply start over again with the same comments in the next article.

Several years ago I was even going to create an FAQ of questions.

[https://2cco2.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/hello- world/](https://2cco2.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/hello-world/)

The only positive is that recently the WSJ stopped letting people comment on most articles.

<comment><USER13> While we're talking about this, I just listened to an older Freakonomics about climate change ([http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-the- planet/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-the-planet/))

One of the guests was Nathan Myhrvold, who was advocating for geoengineering. I'm wondering why geoengineering is not being seriously considered as a solution at this point.

Perhaps your understanding of both camps might help explain this.

<comment><USER14> > I'm wondering why geoengineering is not being seriously considered as a > solution at this point.

Because an overshoot in the other direction would be even worse than a couple degrees of warming. Feedback loops can work both ways. We are currently in an ice age[1] and glaciation covering most of the northern hemisphere could happen in about a decade[2]. Reducing emissions is just tuning a known activity and second order effects aside is perfectly safe, but geoengineering is a giant unknown that could cause catastrophic consequences.

[1][https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/cause-ice- age/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/cause-ice-age/)

[2][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/)

<comment><USER15> > > [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34297/)

That was an interesting read. It suggests that really abrupt changes in warming are possible. The downside seems that only one good data source exists.

Are you aware of any computational modeling of the large scale mechanisms? I'm coming from computational neuroscience and bayesian modeling and found this data pretty interesting

<comment><USER14> I don't, but the data quality really is impressive, so it would be interesting to see if anyone has tried to develop a model using it, especially since you could test it by taking other cores.

<comment><USER15> I started reading a bit and found CESM but it seems like a lot of these models require supercomputers. It's not clear that simulation of many years (ie predicting what a core might look like) is feasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is to be expected- we will continue to break these records until such a time we deploy carbon sequestration at scale.

<comment><USER17> What is the plan to pay for carbon sequestration? My assumption was always that it would be via carbon taxation or some kind of offset/credits scheme— if you run a business with a conventional emissions footprint, you need to pay for that footprint, and the cost of paying (for someone elsewhere to capture and sequester your emissions) will simultaneously provide the incentive to improve efficiency and reduce your emissions at the source (which is always preferable to having to scrub them afterwards, of course).

But... carbon taxes seem to be a huge non starter. The current (centrist) Liberal government in Canada introduced an extremely modest and utterly inadequate one that is revenue neutral (the money for the year came back on our tax returns this spring), and the opposition Conservative party is having a field day attacking it as a "cash grab" that's just ideologues taking money out of the pockets of "everyday Canadians". Check out the parade of last carbon-tax-free fill ups posted on social media the night before it kicked in:

[https://www.macleans.ca/news/conservative-mpps-fill-up- their...](https://www.macleans.ca/news/conservative-mpps-fill-up-their- massive-gas-guzzling-tanks-in-protest-of-the-carbon-tax/)

And the keyboard warriors on social media are even worse— they read the word "tax" and their brains just click over into rage mode, despite that carbon taxation is a long time conservative policy, and that similar market-based solutions were openly favoured by previous generations of right wing politicians in Canada:

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-if-youre- a-c...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-if-youre-a- conservative-who-opposes-carbon-pricing-are-you-really-a/)

How do we make progress on this? If a relatively progressive country like Canada can't even collect a tiny payment for incentive purposes (because all the revenue is being returned), how in the heck are we supposed to get to a place where polluters are charged the actual cost of scrubbing their emissions?

If we can't get polluters to pay directly, where are the trillions going to come from to pay for this? We can't even seem to find the money to build high speed rail, or get proper running water to our indigenous communities.

<comment><USER16> A carbon tax and dividend scheme might be more politically palatable, as it wouldn't be as regressive.

<comment><USER17> This is exactly what the Canadian system is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend)

It's almost certain to be repealed when the current government loses power in this fall's election. :(

But the larger point is that when you pay back all the revenues as dividends, then you only get the reduction incentives. Where does the extra cash come from to actually pay for sequestration?

<comment><USER16> That is unfortunate.

Perhaps government contracts to sequestration companies in order to hit emissions targets could be carved out of existing budgets. I'm from the U.S. and there is certainly money to be diverted. Maybe we just need sequestration contractors in the right districts for certain politicians?

<comment><USER17> Possibly. But the reality is that if we (either Canada or the US) were looking to "spend money on jobs", there are a million things we could have been hiring people for over the past couple decades, even stuff as simple as infrastructure maintenance and tree planting.

Looks like there are projections for a bunch of jobs in the carbon capture industry (eg [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/17/carbon-c...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/17/carbon- capture-and-storage-strategy)), but I'm still hazy on how we're going to find trillions in the general revenue pot to make it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the meantime in Finland, NE Russia and Baltics: "The average temperature over Europe in July 2019 was just above the 1981-2010 average for the month. It was warmer than normal over western Europe, except for south-western Iberia, but cooler than normal over the east of the continent, particularly the north-east. " [1]

[1] [https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature- july-2...](https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-july-2019)

<comment><USER2> You could just as well pick out unusually hot regions as well, the article is about a global average, it takes both these fluctuations around the mean into account. What matters is that the mean is increasing.

<comment><USER18> I was not trying to deny the average increase. Rather I wanted to point out that there are extremes which are becoming more pronounced on both ends. The July was extremely cold in NE Europe and even the map shows only few degrees below average, in real life it translated to nightly temperatures falling to almost freezing point several days in a row. And the August here is no better so far...

<comment><USER19> I had been using electric blanket July/August - quite unusual :-)

<comment><USER18> The look outside the window right now is depressing :(

<comment><USER19> These Western Europeans will never understand what we must suffer here :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A species which by dint of evolutionary happenstance has skirted limits on reproduction and consumption goes ahead to strip its habitat. Big surprise (said no ecologist ever).

A pity in this case its habitat is a whole planet, but that's life (and death). I wonder if something like this eventually happens on every living world, and if the overrunning species generally comes to harbour a comforting superstition that basic biology doesn't apply to it in its magnificent superior aloneness?

</comment><comment><USER21> For finding where you can have the most impact here, I highly recommend _Project Drawdown_ ; it's a data-driven roundup of proposed solutions, ranked by how effective they are actually estimated to be. It takes into account things like cost, timelines and political feasibility as well. There's a summary of the book here: [https://www.drawdown.org/](https://www.drawdown.org/)

If you are in the US, consider looking into Citizens Climate Lobby. They are pushing for a carbon tax-and-dividend bill, shown by independent analysis to be enough for the US to surpass the Paris Accord if implemented, it currently has bipartisan support in the House: [https://citizensclimatelobby.org/](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/)

And if you're into graphic design, there's a really small group of devs within CCL working on an OSS project we're using to coordinate calls to representatives - like reminding members to call, helping with talking points and tracking which districts we are making calls in: [https://projectgrandcanyon.com/](https://projectgrandcanyon.com/) You can message me (email in profile) if you're keen and I can put you in touch with the maintainers.

</comment><comment><USER22> genuine question: does that imply that no recent month set a hottest record, or we'd have seen that in the news?

<comment><USER16> June broke the record, too: [https://www.noaa.gov/news/june-2019-was-hottest- on-record-fo...](https://www.noaa.gov/news/june-2019-was-hottest-on-record- for-globe)

July was hotter than June.

May was the 4th hottest ever: [https://www.noaa.gov/news/may-2019-was-4th- hottest-on-record...](https://www.noaa.gov/news/may-2019-was-4th-hottest-on- record-for-globe)

<comment><USER22> Thanks : I hadn't thought of looking it up there, though should have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The server appears to be down. Mirror: [https://outline.com/fqYT2e](https://outline.com/fqYT2e)

</comment><comment><USER24> We'll be alright.

</comment><comment><USER25> Unfortunately, any gains my western countries will just be wiped out by other growing nations. America could cut its emissions by 90% and it wouldn't put a dent in what Chind puts out.

<comment><USER17> Western nations have had a 200 year head start. Even if our current status is middle of the pack, we have a lot of climate guilt to atone for.

Even moreso because we are outsized in our cultural influence. As we model the lifestyle changes ourselves, and those changes are reflected in the movies, etc that we export. That impacts what lifestyle the rising middle class aspires to in places like China and Africa.

<comment><USER26> Well, if they're watching our movies then they won't be surprised when our solution turns out badly for them.

<comment><USER17> Not sure what point you're trying to make here, but right now the rising middle class worldwide wants to join westerners in doing things like living a suburban, car-oriented lifestyle, eating lots of beef and chicken, and flying to overseas vacation destinations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Padmasree Warrior on Designing Autonomous Vehicles [video] - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/padmasree-warrior-on-designing-autonomous-vehicles-with-anu-hariharan-at-the-female-founders-conference/ <comment><USER2> That video (or at least its transcript) isn't very useful.

Nio has built a self-driving supercar. A real race car, it's doing quite well on empty tracks. Even Road and Track is impressed.[1] It costs $1.5 million. Each. They've built about 9 cars.

This is a China-based startup. Founder is William Li. Crunchbase doesn't know anything about him. Anyone have more info? Baidu is the lead investor. $600M invested so far. About 2,000 employees. This is the highest-funded self- driving startup.

It's not clear where they go from here, but they have a lot of resources.

[1] [http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/videos/a33498/watch- the...](http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/videos/a33498/watch-the-nio- ep9-lap-the-nurburgring-faster-than-any-production-car/)

<comment><USER3> The article linked does not mention "autonomous" or "self driving". It just looks like an electric powered supercar (which sets a mighty impressive lap time)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The one who ran Motorola "Research."

</comment><comment><USER5> She has always been a complete moron.</comment>


China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/china-censors-letter-n-in-crackdown-on-presidential-term-limit-discussion-2018-2 <comment><USER2> The really scary part of that article is the screenshot of Weibo with every message censored automatically with "content is illegal".

If you think this sort of thing could never happen in the west, I think you're underestimating how quickly it could happen. The constitutions and bills of rights of any country are not laws of nature that can't be broken- they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore.

Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?

<comment><USER3> > they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily > ignore

For example, China's constitution also contains "Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."

However various words and phrases to even mention Article 35 itself are banned in some chat apps, etc... in China even though the full text of the constitution is available anyways.

<comment><USER4> They can do it without any cognitive dissonance by either classifying certain persons as non-citizens (hence not granted those rights) or by raising some unclear limit to these rights (so those who break national unity, "harmony" or some such aren't covered).

An example outside of China: Venezuela's Maduro, paying attention to international sensibilities, now classifies opposition to him and his government as "hate speech".

[https://hosted.ap.org/article/8b39037f0c71478784778e4dcc8bb4...](https://hosted.ap.org/article/8b39037f0c71478784778e4dcc8bb434/venezuela- president-orders-2-bishops-probed-hate-crimes)

<comment><USER5> like censorship doesn't happen in the usa. remember all that media coverage sanders got when he was packing stadiums while Clinton could barely fill a highschool auditorium? me neither.

how many mass shootings china had last year? oh wait

how about all those bombs dropped daily in the middle east? ah ooos sorry, america again.

USA USA USA

<comment><USER6> That's not censorship. Censorship is when the government restricts speech. The government doesn't control American news media.

With that said I have no disagreement about the hypocrisy of USA bombing foreign countries.

As for shooting, how would we know if this happened in China since the government does control the media there. They could suppress anything they reflected negatively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Government censorship is no fun, but the best part about this article for me was learning that Xi Jinping is sometimes compared to Winnie the Pooh. The comparison picture is dead on.

[https://twitter.com/vinayak_jain/status/899886641157783553](https://twitter.com/vinayak_jain/status/899886641157783553)

<comment><USER8> This one's so much better: [http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/07/17/15/426A9E150000057...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/07/17/15/426A9E1500000578-4702522-And_in_2015_a_picture_of_Xi_standing_up_through_the_roof_of_a_pa-a-4_1500300034377.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Headline should be: Chia baed letter from iteret after people used it to attack Xi Jipig

<comment><USER10> It should be called a "headlie" as well, which could be a more fitting word for it anyway depending on which news outlet you visit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]:

"This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part."

I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a very strange explanation to me. Are there any native speakers with more insight on this?

[1] [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36939](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36939)

<comment><USER12> Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that recognizes "N" as part of phrases or sentences that have a high probability of containing other banned words. It is like query expansion in NLP, but in this case it has accidentally banned a word that is widely used in other context.

Edit: This looks like a more reasonable explanation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061), N is the 14th letter in the alphabet, referring to the 14th item in the proposed changes [1] (the change that removes term limit).

[1] (Chinese) [http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm](http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm)

<comment><USER13> This is the only believable explanation I have seen on this bizarre result. I kept looking to see if the article was from the Onion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember Steam mods removing posts containing and even banning people for posting "WE" because it was part of a "WE WUZ KANGZ" meme phrase.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/6wocla/assassins_cre...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/6wocla/assassins_creed_origins_steam_forums_completely/)

There's something about censorship that always makes it turn ridiculous in the end.

</comment><comment><USER15> This kind of chicanery shows up at every point in monarchical rule...one would have anticipated it to be a bit more delayed in this case given how recent the abolition of the term limit has been

Term limits are a check-and-balance against this sort of silliness. The divine inspiration cited by George W Bush for example to invade the middle east was no guarantee that the US would continue the practice of seeking holy affirmation to invade a country. Abolition of the term limit disrupts international confidence in a parties ability to advance domestic and foreign policy as now, you've pinned yourself to a single dependency in the government.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm reminded of [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ab5y7/did_g...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ab5y7/did_greece_really_ban_the_letter_z/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I get it, freedom of speech is important yadda-yadda, but this is hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER18> Web site claims I have an ad blocker, and refuses to show content.

<comment><USER19> That's interesting, because I have an adblocker(ublock origin) and it works fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What a _o_se_se!

</comment><comment><USER21> graffiti artists are now even less likely to get caught.

</comment><comment><USER22> So, hold on--they can't write "China"..?

<comment><USER23> 中國

<comment><USER22> What's that</comment></comment></comment>


Google parent pulls the plug on power-generating kite project - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/google-parent-pulls-the-plug-on-power-generating-kite-project/ <comment><USER2> Holy Crap! Makani's idea is brilliant, and I haven't even heard of them!

As a child, I recall getting a kite high enough such that it was in a constant wind, such that it could be tethered, and it would basically "fly itself".

Well, Makani's idea appears to be a version of the above -- but you also put propellers/turbines and generators on the kite, and the kite is replaced by a more solid glider airframe...

Net result if it works?

The glider flys high up enough in the air such that there is always a windstream. That windstream drives propeller/turbine blades (much like in stationary windfarms), which in turn, turn generators.

Then you send the electric power back down to the earth via the tether, which is also an electric cord...

A brilliant idea.

I wonder exactly what went wrong, such that this project had to be shelved...</comment>