Killing car privacy by federal mandate - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/06/21/killing-car-privacy-by-federal-mandate/ <comment><USER2> Not only are there privacy implications in terms of what the vehicles will be transmitting locally, vehicles also need to have a network connection as well to receive new certificates and certificate revocations:

        Under the proposal, each message will be digitally signed. Each car
        will be provisioned with 20 certificates (and corresponding secret keys)
        per week, and will cycle through these certificates during the week,
        using each one for five minutes at a time. Certificates will be revocable;
        revocation is meant to guard against incorrect (malicious or erroneous)
        information in the broadcast messages, though there is no concrete proposal
        for how to detect such incorrect information.

This regulation will force all cars to be connected cars, and being connected comes with its own security and privacy implications.

</comment><comment><USER3> Car privacy has been dead for a decade or more between cashless toll systems, cellular carriers and LPR. It's not coming back.

Sticking your head in the sand and pushing back against a system that is necessary to protect the safety of the driving public as automated vehicles become a thing is shortsighted.

Image recognition technology is such that you likely have a dozen or more government and private entities noticing you. You can buy data from cell carriers to know the average income of travelers on a road at a given time for 45 minute drive in urban and suburban areas.

Hell, I built a parking gate system for somebody with a raspberry pi and an outdoor security camera sourced from EBay -- and I'm a dope with no unique skill in these areas.

<comment><USER4> This is different. It is full surveillance everywhere, for every car and everytime. Not just some roads with cameras. Whose pictures (at least in Germany) are supposed not to be saved except for trucks.

<comment><USER3> It's there now.

In the US, I'm sure the FBI and DEA have realtime feeds of phone movements for thousands or millions of phones. They had pervasive LPR surveillance a decade ago.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps. But you can put your phone on airplane mode or turn it off or just leave it at home if you don't want it to be tracked.

<comment><USER6> You really believe a phone is truly switched off? Unless the main processor kills the baseband power by GPIO, it is not - and baseband processors are a fairly easy exploit target, much more so for a state-level threat.

<comment><USER7> I can leave it at home or buy a phone that has hardware validation processes to ascertain its correctness when turned off (or the transmitter system is disabled). I could put the phone in a Farraday cage or selectively raise the noise level of certain broadcast ranges within a limited range. I could kill the radio-IC and use a wifi mesh network. All of these measures are not prevented by federal law.

Federally mandating trackers in a car is a completely different story. It will be illegal to remove these trackers, so a basic liberty will be taken away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Given how shoddy ([http://illmatics.com/Remote%20Car%20Hacking.pdf](http://illmatics.com/Remote%20Car%20Hacking.pdf)) automobile software is, the idea of safety-critical components parsing radio broadcasts from other vehicles and acting upon that is very worrisome. I do not trust vehicle software manufacturers to get this anywhere near right.

</comment><comment><USER9> _None of them, however, permits tracking quite as cheaply, undetectably, and pervasively_

This is a theme. Large swathes of privacy have been eroded simply because technology allowed the Government to use principally legal methods on a much greater and automated scale. And with the past an current government, there is no particular push to reverse this.

The only help here has been the Supreme Court decision on warrantless GPS trackers.

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of the complete lack of security in ADS-B transmissions from aircraft.

See an interesting DefCon talk from a few years ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk)

<comment><USER11> Not to mention the widespread availability of SDR chips in the RTL family which can hear this data transmitted if you're reasonably close to an airport.

<comment><USER12> So far as I'm aware, ADS-B wasn't designed to be private. In fact, something of the opposite -- ADS-B was meant (in part) to provide notice of your presence to other aircraft in the vicinity.

<comment><USER13> I think he means lack of any authentication. Messages could be signed by the aircraft, by they aren't.

You can buy hackrf below $200 and transmit them yourself. If you feel like breaking the law that is.

<comment><USER14> In Germany you can get up to ten years for doing that.

<comment><USER13> I definitely do not advocate doing at. It's just that Mallory usually doesn't care about the law, so security should be based on something more.

<comment><USER15> Also relevant: war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "What about the safety benefits of proposed technology?"

Yes, what about the safety benefits of proposed technology? As in, what are they? Until that paragraph I didn't even know this was supposed to be a safety system, just a surveillance system. How is this supposed to increase safety?

Also, who is going to pay for these boxes and what will be the penalty for not installing one?

This makes spying by Google and FB look mild by comparison.

<comment><USER17> > How is this supposed to increase safety?

I guess the idea is to make it easier to build fully autonomous vehicles.

I think it's pointless, though. It will take decades to equip the entire US auto fleet with these transmitters, and by that point, the vision and scene analysis problems that currently give autonomous vehicles trouble will have long since been solved anyway.

ETA: the PDF linked from the article [0] supplies a rationale. But it also says that under the proposal, only new light vehicles would be required to have the transmitter. I think my argument stands: by the time even 50% of the cars have this, autonomous driving will be a solved problem.

[0] [https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.p...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.pdf)

<comment><USER18> I think you've got your causation backwards; this is what will allow for widespread autonomous adoption. This proposal is making sure that all cars are speaking the same language and are talking to each other. I look at this as the Federal Government standardizing the width of rail roads so that we could get on with our business. But autonomous cars without intra-car communication seems hampered. As to the vision and scene analysis, the proposal specifically mentions that vision is limited by line of sight. This allows for cars to communicate around corners and through other cars. This seems like a net boon for all drivers that won't be rendered moot by a few cameras on cars.

<comment><USER17> The median age of cars and light trucks in the US is around 9 years. That means it will take 9 years for this system to reach 50% penetration, once it becomes available at all, which is probably 3 years away at least. At the rate things are progressing, do you really think autonomy won't be a solved problem, or nearly so, in a dozen years?

I can see the attraction of this system from a strictly engineering point of view -- it would be nice not to be limited by line of sight. But how many collisions between vehicles have you ever heard of where the drivers literally couldn't see each other until too late? I think these are pretty rare. Seems like occlusion is more of a problem when pedestrians or cyclists are involved, as they sometimes pop out unwisely from behind parked vehicles; but they're not going to be wearing transmitters. Also, radar provides some ability to see occluded vehicles; transmitters are not even the only solution to that problem.

So, given the threat to privacy this system would represent, I don't see that the benefits approach the costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My thoughts:

 _> The basic summary of the proposal, known as Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), is as follows. From the moment a car turns on and every tenth of a second until it shuts off, it will broadcast a so-called "basic safety message" (BSM) to within a minimum distance of 300m. The message will include position (with accuracy of 1.5m), speed, heading, acceleration, yaw rate, path history for the past 300m, predicted path curvature, steering wheel angle, car length and width rounded to 20cm precision, and a few other indicators. Each message will also include a temporary vehicle id (randomly generated and changed every five minutes), to enable receivers to tell whether they are hearing from the same car or from different cars._

Ok this could be useful, especially with autonomous vehicles hitting the road.

 _> Under the proposal, each message will be digitally signed. Each car will be provisioned with 20 certificates (and corresponding secret keys) per week, and will cycle through these certificates during the week, using each one for five minutes at a time. Certificates will be revocable; revocation is meant to guard against incorrect (malicious or erroneous) information in the broadcast messages, though there is no concrete proposal for how to detect such incorrect information._

Ugh, why do they need to be provisioned by a third party. Just let each car generate its own random ephemeral keypairs per some time interval and sign with those. You already said "Each message will also include a temporary vehicle id (randomly generated and changed every five minutes)", so what's the need for third party certificate provisioning.

<comment><USER20> _Ugh, why do they need to be provisioned by a third party._

So the authorities know where to send the speeding tickets.

<comment><USER19> Traffic cameras, radar guns, and license plates already work pretty well for that.

<comment><USER20> They do work, but what if they could be cheaper and more effective?

A radio receiver is a cheap interface to implement and doesn't have the same line of sight requirements. Such a system would offer a bigger speed trap monitoring range, easier installation, and much more location flexibility.

Put one in every police vehicle. Get on a few interstate-adjacent radio towers. Roadside battery-powered installations that can easily be moved on a regular basis.

I wasn't trying to make a moral claim about the good/badness of speed traps. Just that a broadcast vehicle position system that allows the state to easily identify the vehicle will eventually be used for enforcing traffic law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm betting that will cut down on speeders since automated ticketing will be as easy as a receiver that matches the certificate with the car and automatically issues a ticket.

<comment><USER22> Also it will enable passive average speed enforcement. "You were in LA and Vegas, and exceeded the minimum time to legally travel there".

<comment><USER18> The ID is a randomly generated 4 byte integer. This is obviously not identifying for law enforcement. I don't know about the certificates if they could be identifying but I'm not seeing a way to track down an owner or operator from this otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The proposed message format isn't including car identity, at least that I can tell.

[https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.p...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.pdf)

Without identity, how is this a massive invasion of privacy on the order of Google and Facebook?

<comment><USER9> It is, messages are signed by a certificate rotated every 5 minutes.

So for 5 minutes you know precisely which car it is and then when the changeover happens you just look for which certificate has disappeared and which has newly appeared and do some fuzzy matching based on position and heading. That is not remotely anonymous.

<comment><USER22> So anyone who can already follow a car can continue to follow a car. You're aware that cars have a globally unique identifier painted on the outside already, yes? And that identifier never changes and is trivially tied to the owners identity? Let's try to maintain some perspective.

<comment><USER24> The VIN isn't transmitted wirelessly though. The article mentions that it is possible to build antennas that can extend the reception range by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude, so 300m (the proposed design range) may be stalked from as far away as 30km (2 orders of magnitude) or even more.

Place strategically a few of these antennas and you can monitor a huge area.

<comment><USER22> License plate + state = GUID.

<comment><USER25> Did you respond to the wrong comment? I don't think the parent commenter is debating that a license plate identifies a vehicle.

<comment><USER22> Nope. I said GUID, they said VIN, I was clarifying that I was talking about the license plate not the VIN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Big Auto Exec... "Hey we are years behind on self driving tech, what are we going to do about it? How can we catch up? We're going to end up having to license software from Tesla/Google?!"

Other Big Auto Exec... "Oh don't worry we'll just use our political influence to change the rules to dramatically simplify the problem."

<comment><USER22> Self-driving car engineer: "detecting cars you can't directly see is a huge problem, what are we going to do about this??"

Other Engineer: "just have the other car tell us. I know you like solving hard general case problems, but come on. This solution is super obvious."

<comment><USER26> Problem... this broadcast approach isn't particularly helpful unless all cars have it. So to add this TCAS style solution to all cars might cost what? $100/car in equipment alone? For all 263 million cars in the US that would be $26 billion. Seems pricy when Tesla has a system today that solves this problem without all that infrastructure, or the privacy concerns?

<comment><USER18> the broadcast system is certainly helpful if less than all cars have it. The proposal estimates the cost per car at 100-300 dollars.

> Seems pricy when Tesla has a system today that solves this problem without > all that infrastructure, or the privacy concerns?

Solves it for those cars, and certainly at an expense higher than 100-300 cars. And it will only get better as it gets information from other cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Woah, how did this even get on the table? It takes mere seconds to think of a vast array of _genuine societal disasters_ that could come from this. This is beyond clipper chip levels of stupid.</comment>


OSSEC v2.4 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.ossec.net/main/ossec-v24-released

<comment><AUTHOR> OSSEC is a powerful open source HIDS. If you are not using it on your servers, you should be.</comment>


What Russian Journalists Think of How American Reporters Cover Putin and Trump - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-russian-journalists-think-of-how-american-reporters-cover-putin-and-trump <comment><AUTHOR> Seems like good opsec:

 _[...] during the course of his reporting, he was struck by how technologically backward much of the Russian state's security apparatus appeared—a nuance he said that he hasn't often observed in American press coverage of the situation. Once, a source took Turovsky inside a cybersecurity facility run by the F.S.B., Russia's main security service and the successor agency to the K.G.B. As he described it, "the F.S.B. officers had to give up their phones upon entering. There were no computers connected to the Internet—just one for each floor. To access it, they have to sign up in advance and get a key that was good for a certain amount of time. They were complaining that it was impossible to investigate anything in such conditions_</comment>


Unladen Swallow: Python 3'S Best Feature - <AUTHOR> http://jessenoller.com/2010/01/06/unladen-swallow-python-3s-best-feature/

<comment><USER2> <http://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/7464557748> BDFL likes

<comment><USER3> I imagine BDFL would do _anything_ at this point to get Py3k jumpstarted.

<comment><USER4> That assumes any of us (BDFL included) are desperate to get it in production Right Now, which isn't true. However, backwards incompatibility is a tough pill to swallow and while Py3k is a cleaner, saner language it has still been a tough sell.

This should give it a helpful kick in the pants.

<comment><USER5> I honestly thought py3k wasnt being sold. As of the last pycon, there was a lot of talk of 'slow and steady py3k adoption'. The general roadmap assumed by most people I interact with is: at some point someone will make a killer feature with py3k and that will be the tipping point. Until then, 2.x doesn't stop being awesome just cuz 3 around.

<comment><USER6> What is the killer app for python though? Django? numpy? I don't think it really has one, certainly not like the ruby/rails relationship.

<comment><USER7> Python might not have a single "killer-app", but it has a killer ecosystem, which I learned to value higher.

Much of the joy in working with python comes from the "already written" effect. Libraries exist for almost any imaginable task, and it doesn't cease to surprise me how good the average code-quality is. It's extremely rare for me to run into a foul egg, which is a pleasant change from the platforms I've previously worked with.

<comment><USER6> I agree and I love python for that, but people learn Ruby specifically to do Rails work.

My point is only that python has no similar library or framework driving uptake.

<comment><USER7> So far it hasn't been hurt by that. Every time I read about scripting language popularity python is usually right up there, in front of all others.

Only because the python community is not as vocal as, say, the rails community doesn't mean it has no uptake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also see Michael's post: [http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2010_01_02...](http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2010_01_02.shtml) (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1036400>)

<comment><USER8> Direct link: [http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2010_01_02...](http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/arch_d7_2010_01_02.shtml#e1146)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought Unladen Swallow had good reasons to be on 2.x, such as the fact that Google is on 2.x internally. Maybe Google's decided it's time to migrate?

EDIT: the FAQ I was thinking of is at the top of <http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/FAQ> . They do say 2.x internal, but willing to port to 3.x to get it merged with mainline.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty amazing news. Last I heard, I _thought_ that UnladenSwallow was 2.x-only. Now it turns out that it's going into 3.x and there will be no 2.x Unladen. Wow.

Really great news for Py3k.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does this mean Unladen Swallow is giving up? Just kind of liquidating the useful things they made into Python proper?

<comment><USER12> Giving up! Quite the opposite, the goal the entire type was for Unladen Swallow to be merged back into Python itself, so everyone can benefit. Bringing it back into CPython gives it the potential for the most eyeballs. I don't know whether Google will continue to pay devs to work on it full time, but certainly the community won't let it languish!</comment></comment>


Tell HN:  Stanford HNer meetup tomorrow night (5/24), open to all - <AUTHOR>

The Stanford group on HNDir had a spate of new users recently and we decided to meet up for dinner tomorrow night.  Any other HNers in the area are welcome to join.  We're currently expecting 8-10 people.
Details:
8:00 PM, Tuesday May 24
Tandoori Oven
365 S California Ave, Palo Alto, California <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone who didn't see bcx's question, this is Tuesday the 25th, _not_ Monday the 24th.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hmm.. is it Tuesday the 25th or Monday the 24th?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry - Tuesday the 25th.

If a mod happens to see this and wants to edit the submission, it would be appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> /me is in. might bring friend. don't know if you need me to tell you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, you can just show up. :) I imagine it'll be obvious who we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My cofounder an I are in town until Wednesday morning, so there's a pretty decent chance we'll come to this. It'd be great to meet some HNers from out here.</comment>


9 most popular websites built with django - <AUTHOR> http://dream-force.com/post/60070885405/9-most-popular-websites-built-with-django

<comment><USER2> Greatly disappointed by this list. Some of the popular websites that should be on there like Reddit or Dropbox is missing while companies like Mahalo and Lanyrd is on the list. I doubt for the mass majority, those two would even be known.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought Reddit was built with Django?</comment>


DreamIt Ventures Announces Its First Batch Of NYC Startups - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/09/dreamit-ventures-announces-its-first-batch-of-nyc-startups/

<comment><USER2> Here is a list of the startups. Does anyone else find it odd that they would disclose the whole batch at once?

\---

1DocWay, St Louis, MO: video-chat based doctor's office with back-end automation

Admitly, New York, NY: Admission pipeline to US schools

AfterSteps, Boston, MA: Online end-of-life planning platform. Store your wishes and important information securely in the cloud, and access expert advice on how and why to prepare for the worst-case scenario in advance. Experts include estate, financial and funeral planners.

Class.io, Honduras: Online classroom communication, helps teachers share assignments with students

Clothes Horse, New York, NY: Data-driven platform that makes fashion fit

Cognection, New Haven, CT: Online retail optimization CustomCoup, Philadlephia, PA: Demand-driven deals, focusing on local, aiming to give the user the power to determine prices on the things they want

Hoot.me, Austin, TX: Interactive knowledge network; put Facebook into study mode by connecting you with friends for homework and projects.

KeepRecipes, New York, NY: iTunes for all-star chef's recipes

LearnBop, Pittsburgh, PA: Online adaptive learning platform

LetsGiftIt, New York, NY: Social gifting platform; a way for friends, family, and coworkers to contribute towards the purchase of a gift for someone special

ListenVoice, Boston, MA: App creation and distribution platform, allowing individuals and organizations to launch any form of content using mobile and web applications without prior programming knowledge

New Quill, Los Angeles, CA: Mobile publishing and collaborative learning

SocialAdMX, New York, NY: Social and mobile app publishing and advertising

TakeTheInterview, Boston, MA: Cloud-based video interviewing platform for employers to more efficiently screen candidates

</comment><comment><USER3> These guys seem to be focused on getting kids in who will most likely be acquired if successful by a big company. Very few of these seem to be poised to be stand alone companies.

<comment><USER4> Maybe a problem a few years ago, but certainly not in this kind of environment. Congrats to all the recipients.</comment></comment>


One concrete tip for the self-employed programmer (that procrastinates) - <AUTHOR> http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2008/05/one-concrete-tip-for-procrastinating.php

<comment><USER2> This is a great tip about starting your own fires, one that I've phrased as "setting artificial constraints" instead, which doesn't have the same ring to it.</comment>


OpenTracing: A vendor-neutral open standard for distributed network tracing - <AUTHOR> http://opentracing.io/ <comment><USER2> This is a fantastic introduction.

[https://medium.com/opentracing/take-opentracing-for-a- hotrod...](https://medium.com/opentracing/take-opentracing-for-a-hotrod- ride-f6e3141f7941?source=linkShare-63b30e0190ff-1514826557)

</comment><comment><USER3> (disclaimer: I am one of the people who started opentracing)

Someone sent me this HN thread – nice to see the questions here!

OpenTracing has had a big end-of-2017 with support landing for various service mesh(es), bindings announced from some major vendors (newrelic and datadog), many community contributions in the "core" OpenTracing repos as well as integrations with numerous external projects, lots of uptake from companies large and small, etc.

Anyway, if people have questions, the best place to go is the public Gitter: [https://gitter.im/opentracing/public](https://gitter.im/opentracing/public)

People are friendly there :)

Also feel free to reach out to me directly. I will probably do a bad job following this thread... email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> If I understand it correctly this only species an API that implementors of the different solutions must follow, so that in your program you may import different vendor implementations. This allows easier change of vendor.

But no wire protocol is specified or anything like that. It is the duty of the vendor to create all the different programming language bindings and API implementations, and store the data from whenever it comes.

From my point of view it is the second part that would be more interesting: a standard logging protocol with tracing incorporated, and standard ways to pass along the tracing id (spans) to other services.

Is there anything like that?

<comment><USER5> OpenCensus [1] provides an implementation for tracing and app-level metrics, a context wire protocol, and exporters for various backends. While it provides similar tracing APIs to OpenTracing, they're not identical, though there have been some early conversations about resolving this.

I'm the PM for Census at Google, though other vendors are involved as well. Basic implementations for Java and Go are already functional, with much more to come. We gave a small talk at Kubecon last month, but will start promoting the project once it's slightly more mature.

[1] [http://opencensus.io/](http://opencensus.io/)

<comment><USER6> This discussion goes into more detail about commonalities and differences between the two:

[https://github.com/census-instrumentation/opencensus- java/is...](https://github.com/census-instrumentation/opencensus- java/issues/482)

The use case of non-request metrics is the biggest difference to me. While it's great to track e.g. resource usage for each incoming request, there are also workloads that don't fit that mold. Think of a garbage collecting background worker: either you use a separate API to push the data or you make up bogus GC RPCs to attach metrics to their traces.

<comment><USER7> I have to say, after reading through that, I'm still not quite mystified as to what the differences are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really great. We are currently using it with Google Stackdriver ([https://cloud.google.com/trace/](https://cloud.google.com/trace/)), since we do not want to care about hosting Jaeger/Zipkin infrastructure. I think Aws X-ray needs to catch up on Stackdriver.

Since we want to be compatible with opentracing, you need a bridge for Google Stackdriver and Opentracing/Zipkin.

You can either use a Google-provided Java-server for this ([https://cloud.google.com/trace/docs/zipkin](https://cloud.google.com/trace/docs/zipkin)) or in our case we use [https://github.com/lovoo/gcloud- opentracing](https://github.com/lovoo/gcloud-opentracing) which is great.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're interested in getting involved, we're kicking off a documentation overhaul and looking for language maintainers (especially ruby), come say hi in our gitter channel if you're interested or have any questions! [https://gitter.im/opentracing/public](https://gitter.im/opentracing/public)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm excited by the portability OpenTracing offers between APM products if they start adopting it. Datadog has already pledged support.

[https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/opentracing-datadog- cncf/](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/opentracing-datadog-cncf/)

<comment><USER11> as has NewRelic. [https://blog.newrelic.com/2017/09/13/distributed-tracing- ope...](https://blog.newrelic.com/2017/09/13/distributed-tracing-opentracing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> OpenTracing is awesome. We plan to use it in GitLab with Jaeger. Extensive notes are in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/41449](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/41449)

</comment><comment><USER13> I really hope AWS X-Ray gets on board with this. I just finished making a library to integrate X-Ray with our Haskell applications and then realized OpenTracing exists. I would love to be able to easily support more tracing backends.

</comment><comment><USER14> This sounds distinct from the similarly-named "Open Trace Format (OTF)" [1]. Though it's a big bonus that this one has libraries for so many languages.

[1] [http://www.paratools.com/otf/](http://www.paratools.com/otf/)

</comment><comment><USER15> For a little more context, this post explains what can OpenTracing do for you.

[https://medium.com/opentracing/distributed-tracing- in-10-min...](https://medium.com/opentracing/distributed-tracing- in-10-minutes-51b378ee40f1)

<comment><USER16> Maybe they should put it on their homepage

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Timely! We are about to dogfood the Graphistry visual graph analysis stack for seeing correlations in logs, for our internal use of zipkin. If your team has this stuff feeding into Splunk/elk/etc, and would want to try as well, please reach out! Reference this post and ping info@graphistry[com], we'd love to chat on it.

</comment><comment><USER18> The guys working on Jaeger are very helpful on Gitter.

</comment><comment><USER19> When I saw the term tracing my mind went to network tracing and then ray tracing before whatever this is. Is the front page of this more obvious to other people?

<comment><USER20> This is network tracing. It's been around a few years, started as zipkin

<comment><USER21> Ok, we'll add a network above.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists reverse aging in human cell lines and give theory of aging a new life - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150526085138.htm <comment><USER2> I know my words are probably going to sound quite harsh, and I realize that there will be people who will take offense, still this is my opinion on the matter, and this being the Internet you're obliged to read and then ignore it ;p

To me it seems that choosing whether or not to live is a very personal choice, arguably the most personal choice you can make. Not wanting to contribute to a goal another might have is fine, nobody should be forcing you to contribute to anti-aging research or experimentation. However I don't think you should have a say in whether or not another ends/extends his or her life. It follows that you aren't allowed to forbid research into this area either, you might think it immoral, dangerous or distasteful, but it's not your choice to make.

There are a lot of arguments against changing what people think of as the 'natural order'. Various people are concerned that it will lead to overpopulation, perhaps it will. Perhaps when it gets really bad wars and/or famine will break out. Nature doing its 'job'.

Perhaps it's selfish of me, but given the choice between inventing a 'cure' for aging (that I can then subsequently use) and dying when 'my time has come'. I'll pick the cure for sure. I do care about the consequences, just not enough to stop me from producing and using said cure.

And I think that goes for many people. Only they're afraid to make that point and/or follow through with what they are actually advocating. Why else would you prefer dying of old age, to not dying at all?

If you truly think it's better to die of aging, and thereby preventing <insert horrible future> why don't you just decide to end yourself, and leave others be?

<comment><USER3> Whether I should have a say depends on what the costs are, who pays them and who benefits.

Given that there are so many causes of death, and each one is so hard to avoid, we could spend unlimited resources trying in vain to stamp out death for good, at the opportunity cost of much better returns on other things we could do to make life better for humans other than just the wealthiest people who have so few problems that mortality is their highest priority. Right now and in any plausible future scenario there is simply not a choice "whether or not to live." Everyone dies eventually, merely making modern healthcare available is too hard for us to do worldwide and people (poor brown people "somewhere else") are still being crippled by polio, for example.

Rather than telling people you disagree with to commit suicide, it would help if you understood that what you are asking for is a fantasy and that it is problematic to accept literally any cost to other humans in its pursuit.

<comment><USER4> In that case the ethical problem is already there: most 1-st world countries subsidise own poor people (including single mothers) to have extra children that they cannot afford. France is even legally prosecuting casual paternity tests - raising someone else's child is just another form of wellfare. I guess I can spend whatever is left of my post tax money on making myself live longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whenever this kind of thing makes it to human trials, I will be the first in line. Injections, blood treatment therapy, uploading my consciousness to the internet... Whatever. More time to learn all those JavaScript frameworks. ;)

<comment><USER6> I'll let you alpha test, I'll sign up for the beta.

<comment><USER7> If at all possible I'll wait version 2

<comment><USER8> Theres already 7 new frameworks to learn by the time 1.0 is released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thought has recently occurred to me that we should all be working on the "aging problem", until it's solved, and then spending all our extra time on other pursuits.

<comment><USER10> Maybe we need to work on how humans tend to prioritize longevity over things like whether your neighbor can eat. I don't think that the "aging problem" is even in the top 100 of "problems humanity needs to solve." Reproduction has been working great for keeping population up, and "defeating death" has always been seen as somewhat quixotic of a quest.

<comment><USER11> For an individual, why should he/she care about keeping the population up? If that's the only point to our existence, we sure waste a lot of time with arts and sciences. We should be training everyone to just grow food and mate as soon as possible.

<comment><USER10> > For an individual, why should he/she care about keeping the population up?

They shouldn't.

> If that's the only point to our existence, we sure waste a lot of time with > arts and sciences

There is no point to our existence. Extending your existence will not change the quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been excitedly keeping up on telomere therapy - based on the observation that telomeres (tiny hairs on our DNA) get shorter as we age, and this internal clock causes our cells to shut off and auto-die.

This research has been in a different area of aging - preventing mitochondria damage. This is also an important part of keeping cells operating correctly.

<comment><USER13> Maybe you already know this and in that case a FYI to anyone else.

According to [1] telomere-lengthening treatments _may_ (the author points out that this conclusion may be incorrect since the data measurement may need some changes) only give you an extra 5 years.

So research in other directions is definitely interesting.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9456792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9456792)

<comment><USER12> I'd heard speculation of 10 years, and further speculation that it would be a repeatable treatment. Essentially it would be a vaccine that we'd take like a tetanus shot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Open access paper: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep10434](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep10434)

Read the paper, not the publicity materials in this case - they are more than usually misleading.

In the past researchers have shown that reprogramming adult cells to create induced pluripotent stem cells sweeps away some specific forms of damage observed in old cells. In particular it seems to clean up damaged mitochondria, which is of considerable interest given the role of mitochondrial DNA damage in aging. It is possible that this has some connection to the aggressive cleanup that takes place in early stage embryos, stripping out damage inherited from parental cells. There may be the basis for a future therapy somewhere in here, but is also possible that finding out how to apply this sort of process in isolation to adult cells safely is going to be very hard, and the end result impractical in comparison to other technologies: if induced pluripotency as it currently stands somehow happened to many of your cells, you would certainly die.

I've linked to the open access paper above rather than the publicity materials because I think that the latter are misleading as to what was accomplished and the significance of the research. The researchers theorize that the ability to restore mitochondrial function, and then break it again when you take the induced pluripotent stem cells and redifferentiate them back into ordinary cells, means that mitochondrial DNA damage is not a primary source of harm, but rather something under the influence of the state of nuclear DNA and thus some other cell process. For example, perhaps epigenetic changes in nuclear DNA are mediating the pace of replication-induced DNA damage in mitochondria.

All in all it is interesting work, and programmed aging supporters, who theorize that aging is largely caused by epigenetic changes, will no doubt find it encouraging, though I think that at this stage there are other possible interpretations of what is taking place here. For example, in how reprogramming restores function and how that function is lost again: one could proposed clearance and damage mechanisms rather than direct regulation mechanisms. The researchers are in most circumstances looking at mitochondrial function (via oxygen consumption rates) rather than at mitochondrial DNA damage, which greatly muddies the water. The two do not have a straightforward relationship, and there are any number of simple drug treatments that can tinker with the results of measures of mitochondrial function without touching the issue of damage. I'd like to see the same work done again with mitochondrial DNA damage assessments at each stage and each intervention, and also animal studies rather than just cell line studies in the case of the interventions in ordinary aged cells - which seems to be where this research group is heading in any case.

Aubrey de Grey commented to me that:

It has long been very obvious that mito dysfunction in the elderly is hardly at all caused by mutations (since they are too rare) and rather, by elimination, almost entirely by "deliberate" (i.e. regulated) nuclear gene expression changes, occurring as an adaptation to other things that are going wrong. That's not to say that mito mutations are harmless though, not at all - but that their harm is via other means, such as my "reductive hotspot hypothesis" from 1998. There is one interesting result in the paper, namely that glycine supplementation partly rejuvenates mito function - but I don't think the authors believe that the result is robust, because they have relegated it to one sentence at the end of the results and one supplementary figure.

<comment><USER15> Great post, modded up.

I have a question, since you seem to be rather conversant with aging research. I am a physicist, and I'm interested in how mitochondrial function is measured and the efficiency is defined. I know that it is measured via oxygen consumption rates, but all the papers that I have read do not define precisely how this is measured and defined. Would you kind enough to point me to some resources on this? I am capable at reading the medical/biology literature, but searching it can be a different matter.

<comment><USER14> In all such matters PubMed is your friend:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=measure+mitochondri...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=measure+mitochondrial+oxygen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just published an article this week on this exact topic - feel free to peruse for additional information on aging theory

[http://mitchkirby.com/2015/05/26/comprehensive-map-aging- pro...](http://mitchkirby.com/2015/05/26/comprehensive-map-aging-process/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Allowing people to live indefinitely/much longer than currently won't make the world a better place. Children humble and ground adults. Younger brains are more malleable and young people carry newer gene evolutions. Our species would halt exactly where we are, ignorance would never vanish, our species would stop adapting.

80 year old racists would be 200 year old racists.

<comment><USER18> Or people would live long enough to grow wiser... realize the errors of their ways.

People might start caring about their communities if they knew they had to deal with it 200 years from now.

<comment><USER19> Imagine politicians being accountable for their decisions, or relaxing the pressure that women are under to reproduce before they are 30. Mastering aging would allow the human race to significantly rise about our natural apeish behaviour that has to be unlearned through education during adolescents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This has nothing to do with escaping death, aging is only one of the causes of death, making life longer will just expose you to more risk of accident, suicide, or illnesses, this is not what makes you immortal. There are other more philosophical problems with the notion of an ever-expanding life length -- your brain will probably not remember everything, so after a while it will only remember a part of what you have been, so is it really you? and if it is no longer "you", what is the point, you are not extending "your" life, you are extending the life of the person you will become after you have forgotten who you are. Same applies if you "upload your consciousness to the Internet"

Reversing aging will improve your quality of life, but will also force your death to be brutal, since the only cause of death is now accidental or some illness. So you'll die not wanting to peacefully go away as people aging in good condition do, but you will die wanting to live, hurting badly. I'll stick with buddhism.

<comment><USER21> In contrast, I believe that reversing aging would likely also improve a person's quality of death. Death by aging can be a horrifically prolonged and painful process. In the case of Alzheimer's, you slowly watch your mind and identity slip away. In the case of cancer, you may submit to vomit-inducing therapies to prolong your life; whether or not you do, you may end up dying slowly and painfully while bed-ridden and utterly exhausted. Spending years in a nursing home while someone else wipes your bottom isn't exactly a glamorous, graceful way to go. On the other hand, the "brutal" deaths you complain about involve what -- something between a fraction of a second and a few hours of physical pain? When my time comes, sign me up.

As an ancillary point, there is no such thing as "aging in good condition". Aging is the process by which your body gradually fails to function until it can't function at all. It can be better or worse, but not good.

<comment><USER20> Reversing aging has nothing to do with cancer, on the contrary, by living longer you expose yourself more to die from a painful illness than from a age death

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Any chance the project was called Lazarus? :D</comment>


Introducing Watsi's new logo - <AUTHOR> http://exposure.watsi.org/introducing-watsis-new-logo <comment><USER2> I hate doing this to a new, exciting brand launch, but... it really looks like a pair of underwear (briefs) to me.

<comment><USER3> This would not be the first time!

"A Brief Problem"...

[http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2013/10/09/our-logo-looks-like- und...](http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2013/10/09/our-logo-looks-like-underpants-a- case-study-in-internationalization/)

<comment><USER4> It's not something you'd have thought was a common problem but some things surprise you...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe not a huge deal to most, but the use of "OCD" in this sentence made me wince a bit: "They put up with our OCD tendencies and pulled long hours to make sure we walked away with a perfect mark."

Not sure it's good form for a company dedicated to healthcare to misuse a medical term like that.

Edit: They've since updated the post. Thanks for doing that!

<comment><USER6> Likewise. I've mild OCD and I wouldn't wish it on anyone as although it doesn't interfere with my life all that much, it's an incredible annoyance.

Being picky over details or striving to make something perfect (in your view) is not obsessive compulsive disorder.

<comment><USER7> You're 100% right. Edited.

<comment><USER8> Still makes a similar OCD remark in the image halfway down the page.

Not to _nitpick_ :P

<comment><USER7> Swapping out the screengrab too, will be updated soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're going all in on responsive design, make sure your images still look passable on a decently sized monitor. I'm on a cinema display, and every image of that logo on the page looks atrocious...so much pixelation it's hard for me to even judge the logo itself.

This is the unveiling of months of work and debate that went into a new logo. Feels to me like the absolute worst time to decide to skimp on file size.

<comment><USER10> This is truly puzzling. If you spend that much time on logo design, you ought to at least devote some effort to ensuring that it doesn't look pixelated across a smattering of typical displays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with logos, for outsiders, is that if they're well designed, they just _work_...and it's hard to discern _why_ without a frame of reference and comparison. So even a matter of fact description ( _" In the final version, we connected the individual triangles and unified the mark with color."_) is really interesting to a typography/design-layperson like myself, so thanks for posting this!

(in the case of that last step, the reason for the change isn't fully described, but I imagine at least one person thought, like me, that the previous iteration looks like an angry bird looking right at you)

Also, here's what Watsi's original logo looked like, which they had to change because of an infringement claim by Blue Cross: [http://teespring.com/watsi- blue-logo](http://teespring.com/watsi-blue-logo)

Did anyone else order this t-shirt and get like 3 shirts or more? I think they had a surplus or something...

<comment><USER5> They sent out an email about it. They had some goof ups in printing them (wrong material, wrong color) so they ended up sending out multiple shirts. My first was on Gildan cotton instead of AA, then I got the right one, and then I got an additional one in darker grey. Only got charged for one so not a big deal, just kinda funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Two thoughts:

1) More work could've been done on the rounded edges. They don't flow very well and after seeing the W + bars graphic, the problem stands out more.

2) Why are such low-quality images being used on the page announcing the logo? [https://exposure-1.imgix.net/production/users/23251/avatar/o...](https://exposure-1.imgix.net/production/users/23251/avatar/original-1400215009.png?1400215009&w=200&h=200&fit=crop&q=95) I realize they've chosen to host this on Exposure and can't control how they compress files so maybe the question is why did they go with Exposure?

</comment><comment><USER13> Yup, it totally looks like underpants.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like the "thermal core" of the Mac Pro.

Or Darth Vader's breathing piece.

Or a sharp, fanged trapezoid with extremely menacing eyes.

Or a pair of underpants.

The old logo was decent, but yes, it did look too much like BlueCross' logo. This... I don't really have much to say. It's unremarkable. Uninteresting. Just... uncreative. I think a simple W would have sufficed.

</comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately, all I can see is either 1) a pretzel, or 2) the mouth area of Darth Vader's mask.

I don't usually over-think logos, but this one looks strangely angular, aggressive, and kinda mean-looking, considering Watsi is a non-profit healthcare company.

<comment><USER8> It's very angular and bold, which I agree is unusual considering their goals and message.

First thing I thought of for some reason when I saw the images of people with the logo imposed over them was a company similar to BP. Not 100% sure why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think I like the second one in the iterations better. It is more abstract for the W and it doesn't make you immediately jump to underpants. Though I really didn't see the underpants until someone else mentioned it.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's close to being good, but currently looks to me like a diaper.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like Watsi, an interesting and downright good company, but this post reminded me a little too much of W1A[0].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EySLuYWTy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EySLuYWTy0)

</comment><comment><USER19> What was the old logo?

<comment><USER20> Before/after here: [http://blog.watsi.org/post/85923886351/introducing-our- new-l...](http://blog.watsi.org/post/85923886351/introducing-our-new-logo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Underpants logo fail.

</comment><comment><USER22> Phase 3: Profit

</comment><comment><USER23> Why is this hackernewsworthy?

</comment><comment><USER24> If you need to do a post in the blog to explain, the logo is not good.

<comment><USER25> On the contrary, rebrandings rarely come without an accompanying press release, and this is a rather nice presentation.</comment></comment>


Scala Traits - <AUTHOR> http://workwithplay.com/blog/2013/06/26/scala-traits/

<comment><USER2> Artima wrote an article describing how the use of traits (along with other scala features) can contribute to increased compile times.[1]

FTFA: "... the compile time cost of mixing in a trait compared to extending a superclass likely exists because the compiler must insert forwarding methods for all the methods declared in the trait into the body of the subclass when mixing in, but when extending a superclass it does not. Instead, the subclass simply inherits the superclass implementations of those methods. We did observe that the larger the number of methods to be mixed in the more the compile time was increased."

[1] [http://www.artima.com/articles/compile_time.html](http://www.artima.com/articles/compile_time.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good article, (need to work on colorizing REPL output tho)

Here's a Cake Pattern and type class followups:

Slides

[https://speakerdeck.com/marakana/ne-scala-2012-the- typeclass...](https://speakerdeck.com/marakana/ne-scala-2012-the-typeclass- pattern-an-alternative-to-inheritance)

[https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1679797/NE%20Scala/Bakery%20from%20...](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1679797/NE%20Scala/Bakery%20from%20the%20Black%20Lagoon.pdf)

videos of above: [http://marakana.com/s/post/1397/2013_northeast_scala_symposi...](http://marakana.com/s/post/1397/2013_northeast_scala_symposium_videos)</comment>


5 Reasons to Use Mono for Linux Development - <AUTHOR> http://insights.dice.com/2015/06/17/5-reasons-to-use-mono-for-linux-development/

<comment><USER2> Hopefully soon the .net framework will be fully cross platform and easy to use for projects using C# so you can develop for anywhere easily just like with Mono :)</comment>


Distracted Driving and the Risks of Ride-Hailing Services Like Uber - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/distracted-driving-and-the-risks-of-ride-hailing-services-like-uber/

<comment><USER2> Just my experience but I spoke with a couple of Uber drivers in NYC and almost all were former taxi drivers that claimed Uber was safer. In a cab they'd always be on the lookout for passengers to pickup versus only having to click an area on a phone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most cab drivers outside of NYC have been using information terminals for years. If you've ridden in a cab, you've probably seen one. They have pretty much a full-size keyboard as well as a 3-4 line display that shows cryptic commands in some sort of shorthand.

Compared to this, mashing a button on the Uber app seems like a piece of cake.

</comment><comment><USER4> _" Two lawsuits, one filed against Uber and another against Lyft, contend the services are negligent by violating California's law against driver use of hand-held electronic devices."_

Using a handheld mobile device while driving is also a violation of NY State law unless the device "is affixed to a vehicle surface".[1]

[1] [http://www.safeny.ny.gov/phon-ndx.htm](http://www.safeny.ny.gov/phon- ndx.htm)

<comment><USER5> Every single Uber I've ever ridden in has the phone running the Uber driver app mounted either on the dash or in a cupholder mount.

<comment><USER6> Most of the Uber cars I have ridden in have a phone mounted on the dash or windshield, but they also have at least one other phone loose and active in the car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Butbutbut... a driver who CAN accept a ride request is by definition a driver who is at liberty, not carrying a fare. So said driver should not be actively driving. Driving without a fare is a waste of gas and vehicle wear. Unless your last fare left you positioned so far in the boonies that ride requests are scarce, and you need to reposition -- in which case you don't EXPECT a usable request -- or unless you want to go find a cuppa, or a bathroom, before your next drive -- in which case you don't WANT to respond to a request just now.

Bottom line, the driver who CAN accept a ride is highly likely to be parked, not driving. Having to make that 15-second decision while driving has got to be the exception, not the rule.

<comment><USER8> In a dense city like SF/Manhattan you may need to constantly circle vs. being able to pull over and wait.

However, this leads to an interesting idea: prioritize new fares to drivers whose GPS says they are moving < 10mph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note to startups: you really don't want to pick a battle with newspaper reporters.

</comment><comment><USER10> This would be a moot point if someone released something like the connected bike grips but for hands-free navigation by any mode of transportation.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781407)

What if they were just vibrating wrist bands or gloves?

<comment><USER11> Voice commands would be a lot simpler, and familiar to many ex-taxi drivers.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: AI trained to restore audio cassettes? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone trained a NN to restore audio data that has been degraded with an audio tape? Seems to work great with video [1] but never seen it done with audio. I'm trying to recover the audio of some of the kids songs I had as a kid (on cassettes) so that I can teach them to my kids... but the tapes have degraded terribly over time. Has anyone trained a massive NN to do this?<p>[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxd8XJ_J0Gc&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> There are also companies that specialise in restoring and digitising analog media. I had some Super 8 films done by [https://mediafix.de/](https://mediafix.de/) [German only] and the results were better than expected. They do tapes, but don't say anything about how they can improve the sound

</comment><comment><USER3> This is what I found when I searched for "neural network audio upsampling": [https://kuleshov.github.io/audio-super- res/](https://kuleshov.github.io/audio-super-res/). Here is the search URL if you're interested in looking at the other links: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=neural+network+audio+upsampling&t=...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=neural+network+audio+upsampling&t=ffab&atb=v228-5rk&ia=web).</comment>


(unofficial) YC Meetup: Boston, Sunday, Nov 4, 2007 - <AUTHOR>

We thought it'd be fun to have a meetup this weekend for anyone in town - forum members, applicants, friends, whoever.
Time: Sunday, November 4th, at 7 PM Eastern (don't forget that daylight savings time ends at 2am that day)
Place: Inside "Lobby 7" at MIT - enter at 77 Massaschusetts Ave in Cambridge, MA http://maps.google.com/?q=77%20Massachusetts%20Ave%2C%20Camb... (come up the big steps and inside the lobby - don't wait out in the cold!)
The Plan: Come meet other news.yc'ers, maybe grab some food, talk about cool stuff, share ideas, and who knows what else could happen with this awesome mix of people.
If you're interested in coming, just show up!
(Better yet, send us an email at email@example.com, and we'll give you our cell numbers and more detailed directions if you're from out of town)
My friend Rob and I will be there no matter what - hope you can join us. <comment><AUTHOR> So, after waking up this morning, I realized that it would be more than a bit awkward (and probably very stressful for some) to meet this weekend, with interviews / decisions and all happening.

So we're NOT going to meet this weekend, and instead let's push it out so everyone has more notice - to December 1st.

Maybe people in other cities want to have meetups for the same weekend?

<comment><USER2> Methinks as the organizer you should keep your word and still show up; whoever finds it awkward would simply not go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ahh, I haven't heard the phrase "Lobby 7" for a long time . . . thinking of coming up from DC just for the nostalgia. :D

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome! Thanks for organizing this.

I'll see you guys there.</comment>


Ask YC:  Instead of online ads, wouldn't seamless website embedding work better? - <AUTHOR>

For example, instead of an online ad for amazon.com, why not allow people to use amazon to buy books from other sites such as acm.org.  It would look like it was designed for acm.org all along with no obvious indication that this is coming from another site.
Taking it further, one might even restrict the selection of books to those that would interest acm.org visitors.
One problem though is that of handling accounts.  Requiring people to register on acm.org to buy a book when they already have an amazon.com account is questionable -- though doing so would preserve the illusion that this is all acm.org.
Another problem is that seamless embedding requires an amazon.com UI that fits in with the rest of acm.org.  Trying to automate this would present some interesting research problems. <comment><USER2> I note that most of the rebuttal of this concept focuses on the Amazon example rather than the concept itself.

As an opportunity for a start-up or less well-known product company to secure distribution through other sites, this may be a beneficial point of differentiation.

The flip-side is that this new company would be choosing not to position its brand with the end consumer, as Amazon does, but rather with the various website hosts, like whatever company provides Store-Brand sugar and flour for your supermarket. This isn't a bad thing, though it means the business runs the risk of being overtaken by a company that builds its brand with end consumers through the affiliate route.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon enables this to a certain extent already:

[http://www.amazon.com/E-Commerce-Service-AWS-home- page/b?ie=...](http://www.amazon.com/E-Commerce-Service-AWS-home- page/b?ie=UTF8&node=12738641)

</comment><comment><USER4> Would what you're describing really be much easier than a "Buy this book at Amazon" link?

There's also the issue of trust: people know Amazon. They might not be as willing to buy a book from a random website.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue is that many people hate ads/affiliate programs. With this method, these issues go away.

Yes trust is an issue, but most companies that need to advertise would benefit from being on a more trusted site anyway.

<comment><USER5> People don't hate affiliate programs so much as they are weary of people trying to sell them something all the time. For this reason any sort of embedded sales link is not much different than an affiliate program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this already exists. its called an affiliate program

<comment><AUTHOR> How is that seamless embedding? Do you have examples?

I think only casual games sites have seamless embedding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with izaidi. I would rather have a link to amazon. I may value your opinion and so if you present the link to amazon as a recommendation instead of an ad, I will likely click through and check it out. But just because I'm on your site and value your opinion, doesn't mean I want you as a third party in my purchase and I already shop on amazon anyways.

</comment><comment><USER5> Various startups have tried various versions of this idea already. I forget their names; they all seem to have failed.</comment>


Ask HN: As a CS professor, what books should be in my office? - <AUTHOR> I recently moved into my new office as a professor and would like recommendations for what books I should keep on my shelves (they're completely bare at the moment). My research is in the human aspects of software engineering, but I am particularly interested in books outside of my specific research areas since I probably already have them.<p>So, what books should every [computer science] professor have in their office? <comment><USER2> You need to have the books that 1) you reference reasonably often in your work and 2) those books you've read and kept.</comment>


Show HN: Who Did Git? – Find out who the made that unknown commit - <AUTHOR> http://whodidgit.herokuapp.com

<comment><USER2> You can also add ".patch" at the end of a github commit url, which will show the users email address. For example:

[https://github.com/TinyCC/TinyCC/commit/c52d79605a3c895a16e1...](https://github.com/TinyCC/TinyCC/commit/c52d79605a3c895a16e18f0b7193f1f4b480a60f.patch)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh. That would've saved some time, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For certain repositories it's also useful to install a git hook to prevent individuals from pushing without properly configuring name/email in .gitconfig. This assumes you have administrative access to the server, of course.

</comment><comment><USER4> wait, isn't it one of core purpose of VCS like Git to know who is doing commit ?

I mean how can you not know who did commit ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. If someone doesn't configure their username or email (using git config), git will try to create an email address using the format <local_username>@<machine_name>.local and will not set a name. If there's no user.name set, and the email isn't connected to a Github account (or isn't an email address at all), Github will display "unknown" as the commit author.</comment></comment>


ASK HN: Can any of you solve this? - <AUTHOR> http://zombal.com/zomb/scientific-calculation/calculate-percent-of-visible-sky-from-flat-surface I was driving the other day, having lots of time to think, I wonder what percentage of the entire sky was I looking at. <comment><USER2> Assumptions: 1) Earth is a sphere with radius r 2) "Sky" is a hollow spherical shell with radius R

The surface area of the entire spherical sky is: 4\piR^2

This can be represented by a spherical integral that I'm not sure I can write cleanly here.

We just need to change the bounds of that integral to find the area of the observable part of that shell. The Intersecting Chord Theorem along with some trigonometry can be used to find these bounds.

The answer I get is:

(1 - cos(x)) / 2 where x = Arctan(sqrt(r(R-r)) / r)

This seems to have the correct asymptotic behavior (as r approaches 0, cos(x) approaches cos(pi/2) = 0, and the answer approaches 50%

EDIT: My previous answer assumed the shapes were cones instead of spheres. Sorry about the confusion.

<comment><USER3> That can't be right - it doesn't have the right behavior as R->oo. As R->oo you need to get an answer of 0.5, but this gives an answer of 0.25.

<comment><USER2> Ah you're right, I missed a factor of 2 in the top integral. Will edit shortly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [edit, Made a mistake, added sanity checks]

sin theta = r_earth / (r_earth + altitude)

theta = arcsin( r_earth/(r_earth + altitude))

p_visible = (2pi - 2*theta)/(2pi)

p_visible = 1 - arcsin ( r_earth / (r_earth + altitude))/pi

.

.

Sanity checks:

r_earth = 6378.1 X 1000 m

altitude = 1m

p_visible = .50006

.

altitude = 10^7 m

p_visible = .66766

This fits intuitively: the further away you are from the Earth's surface, the more of the sky you can see without the horizon interfering.

</comment><comment><USER5> most of that is simple geometry (heh). The interesting parts creep in with the 'non-ideal' conditions.

You're not just referring to the percentage of the surface area of a sphere (which earth isn't), atmospheric distribution isn't uniform even if we go by volume (or should we be going by density?), then there's the curvature of light in the atmosphere to take into consideration, and the arbitrary descisions as to what height above sea level our observer is standing at, the variable nature of the tropopause ...

an interesting problem, but likely more interesting as a mental exercise than in actual execution.

</comment><comment><USER3> The question is ill defined - it depends.

Define "The Sky" as an enclosing sphere. When it has the same size as the Earth, the percentage of it you can see is 0. As it gets larger, so the percentage you can see goes to 50%.

<comment><USER6> That was my reaction too. Without a better definition of what the enclosing sphere is, there is no answer.

What portion of the night sky (constellations) can we see? About 50%

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was driving the other day, having lots of time to think, I wondered what percentage of the entire sky was I looking at.

<comment><USER7> I don't know the answer and don't care to try, but if I did, I would use Frink[1] for this task. Seems the perfect tool for these kinds of problems. Hell, I bet if you posted on the mailing list, Alan Eliasen would happily solve this problem for you - seems like the kind of problem he likes to solve on the mailing list.

[1] <http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What % of the sky is visible from a point on a sphere.

50%, duh.

<comment><USER9> This is one of those things where it would be much, much easier to explain with images, but bear with me.

Draw a circle. Within that circle, with the same center as the first circle, draw a smaller circle. Choose a point on that circle, and draw a tangent line from that point. Now, consider the fact that the portion of the exterior circle between the two intersections the tangent line has to it is not half of the circle.

The same principle applies when expanding to three dimensions: a plain can only divide a sphere in half if it passes through the center of the sphere. When that plain must be tangent to a smaller sphere with the same center, it is only possible to divide the larger sphere in half when the radius of the smaller sphere is zero.

As such, the portion of sky visible from any point on a sphere is less than 50%.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I don't think it's exactly 50%, should be less. Here's a simple drawing: <http://zombal-zomb.s3.amazonaws.com/70/earth.png></comment></comment></comment>


My Facebook Word Association Prediction Game (feedback appreciated, 2 more users needed for submission) - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=18077388976

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a very simple game. If it becomes popular, I could use it to direct traffic to my Study Stickies app:

<http://apps.facebook.com/studystickies/></comment>


Ask HN: Google/FB engineers, Do you like Mercurial? - <AUTHOR>

All the Google and Facebook engineers who are currently using Mercurial, I want to hear from them how they feel about Mercurial over Git. If they leave GooG or FB, will they still use Mercurial? <comment><USER2> The problem with this question is that there are so many _different ways_ to use Mercurial. hg's core is fairly minimal and everyone I know who uses it rely heavily on core- and third party extensions to get any productive work done.

Mercurial does a good job at facilitating everyone's favourite, yet obscure, workflow. There are people who prefer using things like mq (patchset queues), which until recently also was Mozilla's recommended workflow. Queues are a novel way to organise your work in progress, but is quite different from what people are used to coming from svn or git.

More recently bookmarks were added (also as an extension you have to opt-in to), which are reminiscent of git branches. They make it possible to have a HEAD-based workflow where you rebase frequently, much like you would with git, only that the defaults of `hg log` and various other commands don't interop very well, which means you have to memorise a lot of flags and arguments.

There are also many strange defaults in hg that you simply have to get used to, for example that `hg push` by default pushes everything. I have a hook in place on the remote end which prevents me from doing that.

By far the most frustrating experience with hg is that you cannot expect the default installation to come with sensible defaults. The argument is that keeping "advanced" functionality out of core prevents new users from accidentally using it.

An unintended consequence is that it sometimes makes it difficult for other people to help when you're stuck because more often than not their environment won't match yours.

One frequently lauded aspect of hg is that the user interface is easier to understand. Whilst I appreciate difference in taste, my experience is the opposite. If you follow the HEAD-based bookmark-style workflow, I find many cognitive dissonances in how the bookmark feature interacts with other commands.

At Mozilla we use hg for the canonical repositories and we have many Mozilla related extensions, but whereas I use hg every day now and it's a fine experience as long as I stay within the marked lines, I would return to git in a heartbeat if I had the chance.

<comment><USER3> "The problem with this question is that there are so many _different ways_ to use Mercurial. hg's core is fairly minimal and everyone I know who uses it rely heavily on core- and third party extensions to get any productive work done. Mercurial does a good job at facilitating everyone's favourite, yet obscure, workflow. There are people who prefer using things like mq (patchset queues), which until recently also was Mozilla's recommended workflow. Queues are a novel way to organise your work in progress, but is quite different from what people are used to coming from svn or git."

Up to this point your comment was true, objective, and very helpful (though I would remove the word "obscure"). Then it starts to sound like maybe you learned git first and got used to it's defaults and now mercurial tastes a little funny to you. I'm guessing this because I got good with mercurial first and then when I tried git it left a funny taste in my mouth. I thought, what is this "fast-forward merge" that doesn't actually merge anything? Why do people talk about deleting a branch when it doesn't actually delete the branch of commits in the DAG of commits, just a pointer? Why does pull do a pull (fetch) _and_ merge (mercurial's pull just pulls, or fetches, I guess)? Stuff like that.

<comment><USER4> There's definitely a lot of baby duck syndrome on both sides of this git-vs-hg thing:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_%28psychology%29#Ba...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_%28psychology%29#Baby_duck_syndrome)

Habituation is the best user interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why only Google and Facebook engineers?

I use both Mercurial and Git, and honestly, they aren't that different. Unless you're doing something very specific I don't see why you would choose one over the other.

<comment><USER6> I've never used mercurial outside of TortoiseHg. In fact, the only time I've used mercurial is when I was attempting to build Firefox from source before I realized that they do a git mirror thing so you don't have to touch mercurial at all.

I don't know much about mercurial. I use git because somebody said it is easier to rewrite history in git.

<comment><USER7> I don't believe the ability to rewrite history is a good idea. One of the reasons I like Fossil-SCM is that you can't rewrite history.

<comment><USER8> > Subversion uses a centralized revision control model. Ben Collins-Sussman, > one of the designers of Subversion, believes a centralised model would help > prevent "insecure programmers" from hiding their work from other team > members.

source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion#Limitations_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion#Limitations_and_problems)

Sounds like you should be using Subversion then.

Do you understand how history rewriting works in git? do you understand why it's there? do you understand why people use it?

Personal beliefs don't advance computing, hard facts do.

<comment><USER9> Note that Ben (a personal friend) has been an enthusiastic user of Mercurial for several (4? 5?) years, and is pretty happy with it. He was even using hgsubversion for a while I think.

Note that there's a lot of social problems around DVCS, and the thing Ben worried about is still a _real problem_. I get potential contributors showing up with _months_ of work, and it's an enormous pain in the ass (both for them to rewrite and for me to beg them to work with me) when they did something architecturally unacceptable early in the process that a simple 2 minute review could have caught.

<comment><USER3> But would the insecure people have done that work at all if they knew they would be forced to commit it publicly? Maybe so, but would it all be one huge commit to svn instead of maybe a string of more concise commits to git or mercurial?

I just envision someone insecure (like I feel at times) saying, well, I'll just clone this and play around on my own machine. Then after making some commits and building up courage, saying, OK, I'll try and go public with this. With centralized VCS that seems _less_ likely to me. The insecure programmer just won't even try. I don't know, it's probably different for different people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> heavy mercurial user. all my open source projects are on it. first at Google code (rip) and now on bitbucket.

though i have to use git at work daily. github to add insult...

my finger memory is now on git. and that's where git "wins". the chance that you will be forced to use it and learn the awful laundry list of steps to properly use it (hint, if you ever type "pull" you are doing it wrong) you get your finger memory and then curse when you have to use the simple and more intuitive solutions. damn dumb fingers.

<comment><USER11> > hint, if you ever type "pull" you are doing it wrong

Genuine question: what's wrong with executing 'git pull' on a branch you haven't changed locally?

<comment><USER12> Nothing unless you're rebasing upstream, but I think the point he was trying to make was that you should always run `git fetch` and then `merge` from there (again, there are some situations where the pull is fine IMHO).

<comment><USER13> _git pull_ just runs _git fetch_ then _git merge_.

At least that is what the docs say: [http://git-scm.com/docs/git- pull](http://git-scm.com/docs/git-pull)

What am I missing?

<comment><USER10> but it tries to be smart about how to merge. and usually it's not what you want. i consider it the clippy of linus.

if you run merge/rebase/etc on its own, it will tell and ask you about anything out of the ordinary and then there's no surprise.

again, it's all about avoiding errors on the rare cases because you developed dangerous finger memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> the question about mercurial by "gitdude" is very umm.. leading.

<comment><USER11> You can be a fanboy about something and still want to understand why people prefer the alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honest question: could someone summarize why would one use mercurial vs git? Both seems really close in features. What would be a use case where one would outshine the other?

<comment><USER4> I promise I'll turn this FAQ you just posed into a wiki page... in the meantime,

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9467096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9467096)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google is working on integrating Mercurial into their workflows, but hasn't quite achieved this goal yet. They are growing their hg team with hopes of replicating what Facebook has done, but they aren't there yet. Check out their contributions:

[http://selenic.com/hg/log?rev=google.com&revcount=80](http://selenic.com/hg/log?rev=google.com&revcount=80)

Facebook is almost entirely hg by this point, though.

</comment><comment><USER16> Mercurial is almost unknown at Google.

</comment><comment><USER17> I did some work on Hg and I liked, but now EVERYBODY is using Git. Very similar systems by the way. I work on iOs apps.</comment>


Starcraft in a bar? TwitchTV promoting social Starcraft in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=124196187665382

<comment><USER2> Awesome that this is catching on.

Here's one of the reddit posts about one in Seattle: [http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/huzr1/watch_profe...](http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/huzr1/watch_professional_starcraft_at_a_bar_in_seattle/)

And here's the NASL article about it: <http://nasl.tv/News/Article/20110616nasl-barcraft>

</comment><comment><USER3> There is an entire BarCraft subreddit: <http://www.reddit.com/r/BarCraft/>

You can check out one of the barfood menus here, featuring treats like the "Nuclear Launch - shot of sake dropped into a beer": [http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/hkhcx/starcraft_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/hkhcx/starcraft_barfood_menu_i_made/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yahtzee and some of the Australian Gamer guys have had success mixing gaming and bars with the Mana Bar <http://www.manabar.com.au/> in Brisbane, Australia.

<comment> dorian-graph I'm from Brisbane and have been there a few times. Aside from being _tiny_ it's pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been watching a lot of live gaming lately. Primarily for "League of Legends", a game I've been playing consistently for the last 18 months.

Last weekend was the first world championships for the game. At it's height, over 200,000 people were watching the finals. They believed it was the highest number for people watching a streaming game online.

During the workday, I'll often jump over to www.own3d.tv/live/ for a couple minutes and watch top League players stream their daily games. As I watch now, one top player has close to 6,000 people watching his game -- I watched him start at about 800 people a few months ago.

This streaming model is worth keeping an eye on!

<comment> dorian-graph I wonder how many spectators there were during the heyday of CS on HLTV watching the matches — during CPL and whatnot . .

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a related anecdote, through Reddit and /r/pittsburgh, I've found about a dozen or so local SC players. We've formed a mailing list and I'm holding a viewing party at my apartment next week. We're still looking currently for a local bar which might let us watch SC.

SC2 and the pro-gaming community has never been better!

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been completely fascinated Husky's Starcraft commentaries lately. I don't even own Starcraft 2.

<http://www.youtube.com/user/HuskyStarcraft>

</comment><comment><USER8> Love that this is coming together. I shed a nerd tear of loneliness watching the GSL at the wee hours of the morning :) We should get a group together for that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Man, if this was down the peninsula or south bay, I'd be all over it.

</comment><comment><USER10> That'll be my first weekend after I move to SF! Sounds like a deal

</comment><comment><USER11> this is incredibly relevant to my interests.

</comment><comment><USER12> hon would be more fun to watch - 5v5!

<comment><USER13> I vote League of Legends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ugh. NASL isn't live. Not fun.

SC2 is awesome to watch, but not if it isn't live.

<comment><USER15> Why does it need to be live to be exciting? NASL is filmed being cast live, and delayed a day for three reasons:

      1. Provides more flexibility for the players schedules
      2. Allows time to edit the video, which allows higher production value
      3. Prevents the players from cheating by watching a live stream of the game.

I agree casting replays isn't as exciting (because the casters often know the winner), but I don't see how a delayed broadcast of a live casted game is any less exciting than something fully live.

<comment><USER16> It doesn't need to be live, but result needs to be unknown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow Mad Dog is a block from my house on Haight.</comment>


15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography. Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent-examples-of-web-typography/ <comment><USER2> Site down?

Dotcache version of the site:

[http://dotcache.com/http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15...](http://dotcache.com/http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent- examples-of-web-typography/)

While we're at it, CacheView plugin for Firefox:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2323>

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite typography design book is "Advertising Design and Typography" by Alex White ([http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Design-Typography-Alex- Whi...](http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Design-Typography-Alex- White/dp/1581154658/sr=8-1/qid=1170452339/ref=sr_1_1/103-4603201-1119037?ie=UTF8&s=books)).

Has good visual examples and step by step thought processes for designing the type, layout, and visual effects that we place on text to convey an overall design message.

<comment><USER4> For running text itself -- as opposed to posters and advertisements -- try _The Elements of Typographic Style_ by Robert Bringhurst (<http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780881792065-1>). It goes well with Tufte's books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Red Interactive Agency one on this list is way cool - just wait for a moment for the page to load and click and drag the statuette. If you make her run fast enough, she flies too.</comment>


Informed Voters (1993) - chupa-chups https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-02-07 <comment><USER2> My New Years resolution is to avoid all nonsense sources of information - <AUTHOR> news, reddit etc.</comment>


One Shot 3D Photography (Facebook Siggraph 2020) - <AUTHOR> https://facebookresearch.github.io/one_shot_3d_photography/ <comment><USER2> Can we try this?

<comment><USER3> I think it has already been rolled out to FB - I've seen a similar approach used on some photos posted to a FB group I am a member of.

It does a poor job of "filling in" behind objects it moves, but it's a neat party trick, I suppose.</comment></comment>


Building an Analog Computer (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://www.clear.rice.edu/elec301/Projects99/anlgcomp/ <comment><USER2> This is more of an analog circuit. Here's some links to analog computers, specific and general purpose. The computing in empty space concept is particularly interesting. One of these is very practical with a huge speedup on numerical computation on the cheap.

Posted links to all here:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/friday_squid_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/friday_squid_bl_488.html#c6701962)

Wikipedia has links to old ones below. The mechanical ones trip me out.

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

Another little-known use of analog is obfuscating trade secrets in ASIC's. One hardware engineer that used to post on Schneier's blog told us how most engineers and tools did digital with little understanding of analog or especially combinations of the two ("mixed signal"). So, he would put parts of the critical algorithms in analog with odd tie-ins to the digital side. Integrating their I.P. with digital tools was still easy but ripping it off required analog or mixed-signal experts spending a lot of time. A trick worth remembering.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Vintage Computing Festival in Berlin which ran this weekend had a room dedicated to analog computers, most of them still working, with instructors, demo programs and one could even play around with them. A 'program' is basically a set of wires that connect blocks like oscillators, integrators, filters, etc... you started with some mathematical formula you wanted to solve (mostly some integration problem), translated this into a 'block diagram', built this with wires, and then you could fiddle around at the dials and knobs and see how the result changed on an oscilloscope. I was told that this was mainly used to simulate how complex real-world industrial systems like coal energy plant components would behave under extreme conditions. At least that's how I understood it all :)

Here are 2 photo I took of Eastern Block analog computers: [https://twitter.com/flohofwoe/status/650324920862441472](https://twitter.com/flohofwoe/status/650324920862441472) (the grey one was from 1975, which was really late in the analog era, it was only used for educating students who had to work with older analog computers). And more impressions from someone's blog with much better image quality: [http://blog.awsm.de/post/130463580578/vintage-computer- festi...](http://blog.awsm.de/post/130463580578/vintage-computer-festival- berlin-2015-impressions)

Also interesting: the Soviets built analog water computers starting in the late 1920s which could solve specific problems so fast that digital computers needed 50 years to do the same thing in comparable time: [http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/338106](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/338106)

</comment><comment><USER4> Analog computers are fun, there are even "universal" ones : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_compute...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_analog_computer)

</comment><comment><USER5> Of course they had noise problems. They were using a solderless breadboard. Analog computers require shielding, good ground planes, and bypass caps on power at each IC.

I once had two 555 timers, set up as oscillators, on a solderless breadboard, and they'd phase-lock just from inductive coupling if they were near the same frequency. Without bypass caps at each IC, they'd phase-lock even when the frequencies weren't close, at some ratio like 7:6. When the big power transistor in a 555 switches, it introduces a transient, which gets into the input signals. Fun to watch on a scope.

While you can build analog differentiators, they're so noise-sensitive that they're almost useless. Combined differentiators and low-pass filters can work, but a pure differentiator tries to track the slope of every tiny noise event. Analog computing is usually all integrators, summers, and multipliers, as they did here.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can add the fascinating work of Ivan Sutherland about "clockless computers":

[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Computing_Without_Clocks....](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Computing_Without_Clocks.pdf)</comment>


Edible Blob Is a Water Bottle Without the Plastic - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028012/this-edible-blob-is-a-water-bottle-without-the-plastic <comment><USER2> _" The other problem, as you can see from the videos, is that you're going to get some water on your face, clothes, and the table. That's the sacrifice you make for getting rid of water bottles from your life."_

Of course, if you're concerned about disposable water bottles ending up in landfills, you could just use a conventional reusable water bottle (available in stores everywhere!).

I don't understand how you could carry around an edible water bottle without at least some kind of plastic wrapper to keep it clean. If so, the edible water bottle sounds less eco-friendly than a conventional reusable water bottle.</comment>


State of Development Podcast - <AUTHOR> http://www.stateofdevelopmentpodcast.com/1 <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if anyone is seeing this for the second time today. I deleted the original post due to a problem with the link. Fixed now though.</comment>