By building "fairy circles," termites engineer their own ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/03/by-building-fairy-circles-termites-engineer-their-own-ecosystem/ <comment><USER2> Nice example of "ecosystem engineering" or "niche construction". It's increasingly considered to be an important evolutionary mechanism.

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

One of the most significant inadvertent "engineering" events was the biologically-induced oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere:

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

<comment><USER3> If we get our atmosphere back to higher oxygen levels then we could have big dinosaurs again! I'm unsure of how humans would fair though.

<comment><USER4> From what I understand, higher oxygen levels were only linked to large invertebrates, not dinosaurs:

 _Some paleontologists speculated that oxygen might be behind the evolution of huge dinosaurs, too, but the hypothesis has been totally undermined by evidence from the geological record and dinosaur anatomy. Geochemical evidence has shown that Jurassic and Cretaceous air contained about as much oxygen as today, if not a little less. More than that, the dinosaurs did not need increased oxygen to adequately nourish their bodies.

As part of their respiratory system, sauropods had a complex network of air sacs that gave them two advantages._

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/25/dinosaur-...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/25/dinosaur- reproduction-not-ancient-gravity-made-sauropods-super-sized/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm reminded of a similarly circular phenomenon, known as "fairy ring," where mushrooms grow in a circle. They appeared on our lawn in Saskatchewan from time to time; apparently it happens all over the world.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_ring></comment>


IPad iOS 5 vs Windows 8 Slate [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.winrumors.com/ipad-ios-5-vs-windows-8-slate-video/

<comment><USER2> After seeing this video it appeared to me both interfaces are quite bad for first time users. Most HN readers won't have a problem with it, but concepts like multiple desktop-pages are very hard to understand for first time users.

Overall I think iOS is much better for first time users. Take the unlock screen for example. On iOS you see you need to unlock it. On W8 you don't have a clue. After pushing around you might notice you can slide the screen up. It's a strange concept.

But I have to admit W8 is looking very clean, very customizable. I think this will be good competition for the iOS.

<comment> dorian-graph The Win8 lockscreen being confusing depends on the context. For example, a first time user buys a Win8 slate there's probably a basic 'This is how to unlock' tip somewhere, I imagine. Also, seeing average users pick up wild Android unlock schemes I think they'd be okay. :P Though, if they suddenly started playing with a friend's slate the exploring of the interface would be interesting to watch.

<comment><USER3> Android is an interesting point of comparison because the lock screen on the Galaxy S2 is exactly like the Windows 8 lock screen. When I first got the phone, it took me _minutes_ to figure out how to unlock it. I handed it to a couple friends and asked them to figure out how to unlock the phone and they struggled as well.

On the other hand, I feel like somehow the feedback for the Windows 8 version of unlock is a little bit better - it responds to the swipe a little bit quicker. I do fear that it creates a bad starting point for your first experience with the device though - going into it confused isn't a good thing.

A lot of the gestural input in Win8 feels like it relies on blind exploration to discover how to use the device, unless someone teaches you. In a way, that could be a good idea - encouraging the device's owner to explore and play with gestures - but I think the risk of features remaining hidden and undiscovered is pretty significant.

<comment><USER4> Good points. The chromeless IE interface looks like another example where users will chafe. I can go completely "chromeless" in Chrome for OSX but I never do because seeing open tabs and having immediate access to extension buttons at all times is too important. I imagine less seasoned users will feel the same way about the URL bar and their favorites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I kind of like the "picture password" option. It shows innovation in an area that badly needs some (authentication) and should be easier to remember for many people than a PIN code, I think.

Picture passwords would be harder to write down, but I'm not yet sure whether that's a negative or a positive.

<comment><USER6> "should be easier to remember for many people than a PIN code"

Until that day you forgot your tablet home and you had to explain your wife where to tap in order to retrieve that document you need. :)

<comment><USER7> This problem is solved by simply keeping documents on a server somewhere (I hesitate to say 'the cloud', but that's the marketing term for it) instead of only on the device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like touch is more natural on Apple devices...maybe people are just trained for it by now, but he seemed to have less difficulty with getting the iPad to do what he wants it to do. Many times he had to try his gesture a 2nd or 3rd time on the Windows 8 tablet.

<comment><USER9> A lot of development time has gone into the gesture recognizers in iOS. My understanding is that they we're not easy to get right, having a lot of subtlety and edge cases, especially when a given view employs several if them and they need to disambiguate between multiple possible gestures.

Win8 will get there in time, and already has at least one that I would like to see iOS shamelessly copy: the ability, when drag-moving an icon, to employ a finger from another hand to swipe from page to page. Awesome!

<comment><USER10> > _the ability, when drag-moving an icon, to employ a finger from another hand > to swipe from page to page. Awesome!_

OS X does this on laptops and magic trackpad, you can drag and drop icons that way. iOS supports the drag with one finger/nav with another as well--try it with a text selection handle with your left index and scrolling the page with your right. But to your point, home screen icon moving doesn't use that gesture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> i'm really surprised to find myself more impressed with microsoft's metro style than ios. i wish android had gone with something extremely minimalistic like this.

<comment><USER12> I'm with you there. I'm normally an Apple fanboy, but iOS is looking cluttered and dated beside Metro.

<comment><USER13> At first I was really impressed with the Metro-style home screen. But as I watched this video, actually, for the first time, having now seen Metro several times, I realized that there was something about it I didn't like: I think it came down to the constant movement on the home screen. It actually reminds me of web banner ads. Now I'm sure that's configurable but I think I understand why that wouldn't be desirable. Of course that said I'm sure that's the kind of thing some people will love.

<comment><USER14> Live tiles are great; on my Windows Phone 7 I can get a lot of context just by looking at few tiles in the "root" display (time, the next meeting I'm in -- hopefully not many -- email count, etc.)

I used an iPhone for a couple of years, and would hate to go back.

I was surprised how static and dull the iPad looked; just a bunch of dead icons that don't do anything for you. Reminded me a lot of the desktop in Windows 3.1

<comment><USER15> The other thing to realize is that you don't stay on the home screen for long. You see if there are any inrestesting notifications and then move on to what you want to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What bothers me is that it looks distinctly like Win8 wouldn't run very effectively on tablets of smaller screen sizes - even with the size it's at, for those of us who are heavy users I don't think it's even beginning to match iOS's information density - the iOS 5 homescreen should hold a lot more data than, say, the alert icons or the data 'streaming' into the panels - how often does one sit at that screen staring at it anyway?

<comment><USER9> Wasn't metro started as Windows Phone 7, though? What did they change that would keep it from scaling back down to a smaller screen?

<comment><USER17> In Windows 8 you can two apps running concurrently, but only at screen size of width of something like 1366. So many tablets won't get his functionality at all.

And multitasking on Win8 seems much worse than WP7, although that's not a scale issue. The WP7 multitasking seems better almost regardless of size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, that comment thread is like a black hole. I ventured way too close.

<comment><USER19> I read your comment, then went back to have a look. One day I'll learn...

The video, however, I thought was one of the most level and unbiased comparisons I've ever seen. Didn't go into a lot of depth (probably hard because Win8 is still largely incomplete), but what it did cover it did well.</comment></comment>


Amazon zaps purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/17/amazon-zaps-purchase.html <comment><USER2> Dupe, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=710506></comment>


Crashing a chrome tab with a single character - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/zainamro/status/1195868573534584832 <comment><USER2> Chrome mobile too: [https://streamable.com/mzan5](https://streamable.com/mzan5)

<comment><USER3> Crashes Chrome mobile and Chrome desktop but doesn't seem to crash Chrome Canary on mobile (Android 10).

</comment></comment><comment> noman-land Confirmed also crashes Brave on mobile.</comment>


AI Research Suffering Gender Diversity Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://digit.fyi/ai-research-suffering-gender-diversity-crisis/ <comment><USER2> A crisis is "a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger", with the implication that the status quo is unsustainable. Yet AI research is making huge strides. Some people may wish that the demographics of the field be different, but there is no "crisis".</comment>


How six companies have flourished during the recession.  - <AUTHOR> http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/02/26/survivors?page=full <comment><USER2> For now, it helps Verizon every time they introduce FIOS to an area its often cheaper and better for existing cable customers.

Which is why I think eventually cable companies like Comcast and AT&T could easily take back Verizon customers with more aggressive pricing and upgrading their existing network, which costs a lot less than Verizon's fiber optic network.</comment>


Google Reverses Its Decision to Ban Ad Blocking Apps from the Google Play Store - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/google-reverses-its-decision-to-ban-ad-blocking-apps-from-the-google-play-store/ <comment><USER2> Google is set to launch their own mobile HTML replacement (AMP[1]) where ad blocking may be difficult or impossible. Allowing ad blocking apps on the Play Store would encourage publishers to switch to AMP.

[1] [http://adage.com/article/digital/google-amp-launch-looms- sea...](http://adage.com/article/digital/google-amp-launch-looms-search- engine-scores-follow/302599/)

<comment><USER3> Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Apple/Google/Facebook doesn't know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. Apple/Google/Facebook is undertaking an effort to change content creation and consumption, to make their own platform less like the rest of the Web for their own gain.

<comment><USER4> Having seen this now several times, I find myself wondering if people are aware that it should either be "dispense with once and for all the fiction that..." or "dispel the fiction once and for all that...". To "dispel with" is to use a thing to dispel, such as "Let us dispel the fiction that the sky is green with this spectrograph result." (although that is still so klunky I'd never say that).

<comment><USER5> The phrase is a meme that comes from an actual (repeated) quote. In the context of that original quote there have been plenty of people who have commented on its grammatical errancy, but in the context of the meme it perhaps would make less sense if you fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now if Google would just reverse their blocking of applications that allow us to limit certain what apps have access to on my phone for privacy concerns, then I'd be happy. Might switch over to a Blackphone 2 just for this reason alone.

<comment><USER7> This is already part of the built-in permissions management in the latest version of android, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Adds are not the problem, the problem is the problem is the quantity of Adware. I whitelist the pages and creators I want to support because I know they make a living out of that. Removing add blockers won't fix the problem, removing adware will.

</comment><comment><USER6> "In case you haven't heard ... I'm kind of a big deal."</comment>


Congrats to Hyman Roth/ Digg (Marksonland) - <AUTHOR> http://www.marksonland.com/2008/09/congrats_to_hyman_roth_digg.html <comment><USER2> I've left my own gangster movie characterization in a comment on his blog (it's in moderation right now). See my blog (linked from my profile) to see a hint (Goodfellas!).</comment>


IE9 not on XP due to hardware rendering that can be disabled? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_members_of_the_ie9_product_team_here/c10vifn

<comment><USER2> It's in microsoftish, it means: "go buy windows 7 and make us more $$$"

<comment><USER3> Maybe there's some long-game benefit to supporting Windows XP forever, but I can't see it. Windows XP was released in 2001. It's a nine year old operating system. Software costs money to develop and maintain, so why should Microsoft continue to release free updates for such old software? Is it unreasonable for Microsoft to expect users to upgrade at this point?</comment></comment>


The Most Secure Android Phone, Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1786472/most-secure-android-phone-ever-blackberry-headache?partner=gnews

<comment><USER2> VMware has been demoing what sounds like almost identical technology for a while now:

[http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/IT-watch- blog/like...](http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/IT-watch-blog/like- supermanclark-kent-for-your-phone-vmwares-mobile-virtualization-platform-mvp/)

It creates a virtual machine that's hardware encrypted on the device, and actually runs them as two separate phones. Similar full-on or pseudo- virtualized environments have been used on the iPhone, iPad, and other devices to various degrees of success over the years, but I think it is a slight hyperbole to say "this could change the way people use smartphones, entirely".

<comment><USER3> as far as i can read, that's incorrect. VMWare virtualize the phone's hardware. That's actually adding some security between the 2 environments (personal and business, mind you).

The linked article seems to be about 2 separate disk partitions, but the same user space. And that doesn't sound good then.

<comment><USER2> You're right. I definitely shouldn't have used the term "identical". The user interface paradigm seems very similar in concept, regardless of the underlying technology, and I guess I was trying to push back on that hype as an original take.

There was a consumer grade phone a few years ago that pulled very similar partitioning tricks but my Google-Fu has failed me in retrieving it. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see anybody ditching RIM yet. Security needs to be proven with a track record. No matter what systems they deploy, there will always be exploits and hacks.

<comment><USER5> A number of companies already allow use of non-RIM smart-phones for company email though. I know of at least one big-four consulting firm that issues iPhones instead of BBs, and an oil major that allows reading of company email on iPads. I'm sure they're not the only ones.

<comment><USER6> ^This - many IT organizations are allowing (and actually distributing) iPhones.

There are quite a few companies using iPads as well (SAP for example bought 3,000+ for their sales workforce)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Enterproid does something similar : [http://www.techspot.com/news/45771-enterproids-divide- separa...](http://www.techspot.com/news/45771-enterproids-divide-separates- work-from-play-on-android.html)

They call it the Divide platform. The professional side of the device has includes enhanced security, access control, remote wipe capabilities..

</comment><comment><USER8> "All software installed on Bizztrust-enabled Androids is automatically scanned before the user logs on to their company's network via VPN; if any irregularities are detected, the user will not be able to use compromised apps"

What exactly does that mean? Do they keep a blacklist of apps? Perhaps they only mean the "work apps"?

<comment><USER9> And if the phone is compromised, how can you trust the "scan"?

A compromised phone scanning itself does not make a lot of sense. If the server scans the phone, it still can't be trusted since you're asking an insecure device: "are you compromised?".

Guess the point is just to know if there are any unwanted apps, that did not gain "root", on the phone. Is this useful?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know if this is open source?

<comment><USER11> Given that it comes out of a Fraunhofer Institute, I highly doubt that it is open source. I would also assume that this product is actually only a tech demo, not a fully implemented solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if they've solved the problem of shipping year old kernels and letting untrusted apps run native code without any explicit permission. Until then, the words "Android" and "secure" should never appear in the same sentence.

<comment><USER5> Dalvik is not intended to be part of the Android security model. Security comes from the separation of processes based on user permissions at the Linux level.

<comment><USER12> I don't see how this statement addresses what I said.

I am referring to the fact that applications can be installed from Market (or otherwise), receive no explicit user-granted (or visible) permission, and yet have unfettered access to the largest chunk of native code in the system, which more often than not is a year behind the latest security updates.

No amount of userspace virtualisation can work around that.

<comment><USER3> If you didn't know that, anything that sounds like a negative comment of a G. product on HN is down voted. It's like a meme. No need to worry.

The kernel vulns are still there in most phones and exploitable from user space.

Have a look at the very new Android security review, by "experts" and official:

<http://source.android.com/tech/security/index.html>

While its a good start (user separation among others), it doesnt address any core security issue, like timely kernel updates (and many phones don't even support OTA properly/don't get updates pushed, so no timely Android core updates either), sdcard security, drivers fully communicating in user space (this one won't be fixed as its a work-around to avoid GPL).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I had to guess, I'd say that these folks are going to make a lot of money.</comment>


Top NASA scientist busted for leaking satellite intel - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/20/nasa_security/

<comment><USER2> Why would you risk execution to deliver US military intel to Israel? That's like smuggling sand to the beach.

<comment><USER3> Human intel shops have a nice acronym for that: M.I.C.E. Money, Ideals, Coercion, Ego

Money: You pay them.

Ideals: Appeal to their ideals. Say in this case, protecting the Jewish state.

Coercion: Blackmail

Ego: Make a powerless bureaucrat feel important on a historical scale.

Top three countries that spy on the US:

1) Israel

2) China

3) France

<comment><USER4> He seems to have been quite receptive to M with more than a little E thrown in, to the extent that receiving M from a (probably non-Mossad but there is no proving that) Israeli source convinced his E that he was really a Highly Sought After Secret Agent.

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/20/nasa_security/>

Mr. International Espionage was apparently a really cheap date: $9,000 for "... information classified as both top secret and secret, on U.S. satellites, early warning systems, means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack, communications intelligence information, and major elements of defense strategy".

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/19/stewart-nozette- pic...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/19/stewart-nozette-picture- s_n_326447.html)

<comment><USER5> >(probably non-Mossad but there is no proving that)

Did you read the article? It was an FBI sting - no Israeli involvement. In fact, from your HuffPo link:

>The complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf violated U.S. law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obviously I don't know the details of the sting operation, but shouldn't it be the default to assume someone approaching you about selling classified information is an FBI agent, unless very convincingly demonstrated otherwise?

</comment><comment><USER5> Would this qualify as entrapment?</comment>


Ruby style guide - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/chneukirchen/styleguide/tree/master

<comment><USER2> Hm. Use one letter variable names for scoped variables? Excerpt from lines 92-112:

"* The length of an identifier determines its scope. Use one-letter variables for short block/method parameters, according to this scheme:

        a,b,c: any object
        d: directory names
        e: elements of an Enumerable
        ex: rescued exceptions
        f: files and file names
        i,j: indexes
        k: the key part of a hash entry
        m: methods
        o: any object
        r: return values of short methods
        s: strings
        v: any value
        v: the value part of a hash entry
        x,y,z: numbers

      And in general, the first letter of the class name if all objects are of that type."

<comment><USER3> This is explicitly disallowed within some companies...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Do not program defensively. (See<http://www.erlang.se/doc/programming_rules.shtml#HDR11.>) _

I cross-referenced to the Erlang documentation, and they provided no other real justification for this rule, other than to say that the burden lies on the caller. Is there a history behind this convention? Is there a considerable benefit, other than more stream-lined code, to coding this way?

<comment><USER5> Firstly, it's basic DRY principles. Rather than have code dotted around your system dealing with data integrity issues, put it in one place and make your business logic more readable and easier to maintain. When trying to understand a subroutine or Class I should not have to wade through all the lines of code that try to make sure the input is 'safe.'

Secondly, something I've noticed about defensive programming is that generally it creates a culture of "meta rules" that only exist in the system architect's head. When someone else reuses one of their models, then the danger is they don't know all these different rules because they are scattered around different controllers or scripts. This has been a particularly vicious source of bugs in our legacy systems. Domain experience becomes critical.

Lastly, defensive programming by its nature is also traditionally a big red warning sign that says "there is no data integrity strategy in place for this system." It doesn't matter if that data is coming from a CRUD form, a relational database or a file... there should be some validation layer that ensures the data is 'correct' before making it 'safe' to reuse across the rest of the system.

I've found that defensive programming is particularly rife in systems powered by MySQL databases. MySQL has traditionally lacked the data integrity mechanisms of Oracle or other Enterprisey systems and thus has created a whole bunch of MySQL 'experts' that actually don't know anything about data integrity. A system I'm working with this very minute has a function where the first 20 lines of code (out of 28 total) is compensating for potential orphan entries in the database. The reason? The admin tool for removing entries does not do cascading deletes. Rather than fix the root of the problem, we have this 20 line check everywhere that we need to access the data safely.

I could go on and on, but in short: defensive programming is one of the major 'code smells.'

<comment><USER6> Maybe I have a different idea of defensive programming. But for me, defensing programming is making sure that when you call a method (or something else) the data is assumed to be good or else it will go KABOOM. This is for example asserting for all the arguments that should exist and not for if (something) return;

For example, if I call a Draw method on an object, I assert if the object Color property hasn't been set. I don't create a default color for it. This makes sure that the Draw will work as it should, it will make no assumptions on how it is being called it just makes sure that when it was called it will have to be valid.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, there's two different things you could call defensive programming: first is asserting that code assumptions are true (and crashing loudly when they're not), second is trying to work properly with bad data.

I find the former really useful in quickly finding bugs in my code and documenting the function input assumptions. In general, I'd rather my code fail early and visibly (e.g. crash in debugging environment, return error and log the problem in production environment) than produce garbage because the input was garbage.

I agree the latter bad for defending against inconsistencies in internal data model or as a "precaution" when using API you don't trust, but it's still vital if you're dealing with data from outside world, when you do want to try and behave sanely in possibly damaged input (e.g. not ignore the entire RSS feed if an item from it doesn't have pubDate set).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not quite sure why this style guide is more noteworthy than all the other ruby style guides out there.. e.g.:

<http://www.caliban.org/ruby/rubyguide.shtml>

and

<http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/elements-of-ruby-style/>

<comment><USER9> Christian is a very well known Ruby developer.

I'd say having a noteworthy developer write a style guide is noteworthy.

<comment><USER10> Well all it tells me is to stay out of his projects. Everybody knows that there is only _one_ space after a dot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really hate other people's style-guides. Most of it is common-sense, but there's always some aspect or another that _really_ grates against my preferences, e.g. "Keep lines fewer than 80 characters" is a pet hate; when did we return to Green-screen terminals?? My current company enforces this, and it often creates worse multi-line dischord cf. adding an extra 10 to 20 char's to the current line.

And "Read other style guides and apply the parts that don't dissent with this list" is a little too arrogant for _any_ coder in the entire world -- perhaps should be "Replace any parts of this list that don't conform to your style".

<comment><USER11> Actually, I find limiting to ~80-100 chars makes code more readable.

On a 24" screen I like to have 2-3 files open side by side.

Having to scroll down is no big deal, scrolling sideways is pretty awkward. It also makes diffs harder to read if lines are too long.

I certainly wouldn't argue for a hard limit of 80, but I find it's generally a good idea to break up lines if they're getting too long.

<comment><USER3> That's kind-of the point: emphasis should be on readability, not "this long, and no longer!", and that applies to all points in any style-guide, i.e. it's a "guide" not a rule-book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the second time in the past few days I've been told to use two spaces instead of tabs. Can anyone provide any insight as to what difference this makes?

<comment><USER13> Tabs are not fixed-width. Tabs are interpreted by the viewing application according to that application's settings.

Two spaces are always two spaces.

<comment><USER14> I've always viewed this as a plus for tabs. Personally, I think two spaces is too small. If I'm looking at someone's code and it's hardcoded to two space indentation, I'm screwed. But if it's using tabs, I can set it to whatever I want. Some people like 2, some 4, and some 8. I prefer to use tabs to denote logical indentation, and then space for formatting. But not many people agree with me, so I usually just use spaces.

<comment><USER13> Generally I agree, but for the pedantic there are other issues. Tabs at the beginning of lines aren't a problem. But, for example, it's common to see multi-line declarations of, let's say, a hash where each line looks like this:

key <tab> => <tab> value

This might look perfectly fine for someone using 8-width tabs, but it will most likely be screwy for anyone using 4-width tabs or smaller. The tab's location is calculated as the distance where the cursor position modulo the tab width is 0.

E.g. one key is 2 chars long and another is 5 chars long. You tabbed it using 8-width tabs. Looks fine. If someone loads it with 4-width tabs, they see the two lines aligned differently.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One Word Defined Tech Companies' Growth. It Is Now 'Exploding in Their Face.' - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-word-defined-tech-companies-growth-it-is-now-exploding-in-their-face-11577463455 <comment><AUTHOR> For most of their history, the tech companies were so focused on the challenges of fast growth that tending to what was on their platforms wasn't as urgent, says Geoffrey Parker, a Dartmouth College professor of engineering and co-author of a book about the rise of such businesses called "Platform Revolution."

"Now," he says, "it's exploding in their face."</comment>


Ride along as I get back to coding with Swift - <AUTHOR> http://buildanappwithme.blogspot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> As I progressed in my career in tech I stopped coding about 10 years back. I'm not entirely sure why, but working on legacy systems in maintenance mode for an extended period of time might have killed my love for it. After I got out I always missed it, but getting back to coding after a while as a career move seemed intimidating.

When iPhone came out I tried getting into app development as a hobby. But Objective C seemed extremely difficult to get a hang of (previously C++/C# developer). When Swift came out I was instantly comfortable with the familiar syntax. But since it was new there wasn't enough tutorials and examples to build fun stuff. But now that Swift is maturing I got started on it and it is great fun. However there is a slight shift in my focus.

This time around I'm trying to build a ramp for people in my situation to jump into developing apps. I will attempt to post tutorials on fun little projects that can get folks interested and started with app development.</comment>


ACM is 95% original content - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/161584/is-it-worth-joining-the-acm/161641#161641

<comment><USER2> Could one of the mods please change the title from "ACM is 95% original content" to "CACM is 95% original content" or alternatively "Communications of the ACM is 95% original content".</comment>


Apple Tablet Shipping in March - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/01/04/wsj-apple-tablet-shipping-in-march/

<comment><USER2> $1000 is a little too much for a tablet/net book/web surfing device.

I would be willing to pay up to $500 for an Apple tablet and up to $300 for a tablet developed by any other company.</comment>


Show HN: Random Google Street View - <AUTHOR>

I just redesigned an old (1 year) project and would appreciate any feedback.
The site has no real purpose other than allowing you to explore the large amount of imagery gathered by Google.
You can make it less random by choosing a country, or indeed any geographical area (cities etc.)
http://www.mapcrunch.com
Thanks <comment><USER3> I saw the tiger and immediately wanted to send it to a friend. Assuming the front page changes, here's a UI recommendation: give me a permalink so I can save/share interesting ones.

Fun site!

<comment><USER4> Haha, after a few minutes of digging around I managed to find the link to the google maps.

Feature Idea: If you are able to take a screenshot of a specific view, I would put it as a jpg so when I share the url, it shows up as preview pic in the facebook story. I was totally sharing this story and linking to your site until I found there is no preview pic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I generate screenshots of every featured view, to be used as a backup in case Google update their imagery.

Facebook should pickup the preview image if you use the permalink - <USER2> button in the 'share this view' panel.

<comment><USER5> Add an og:url meta tag that references the permalink, and people will be able to share the original page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about putting two random Street Views side by side and letting people pick the best view?

</comment><comment><USER7> Good job on the site. I love it. I started noticing a feeling of wanderlust rising within me as I clicked around.

Is it just me or is Norway ridiculously beautiful?

<comment><USER8> It's not just you. I've spent a lot more time than I care to admit looking at the street view in Norway, especially around the fjords and way up north.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this somehow keyed off interesting views? The first one that showed up for me showed a tiger walking thru a parking lot.

ETA: I ask because darn near every view that shows up is "interesting" somehow.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first view you see is fixed. It changes every day and is chosen from the views people submit (using the 'submit to gallery' button)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> clickable :)

<http://www.mapcrunch.com>

</comment><comment><USER11> Really nice design on the website! Very polished and fun to use.

Related question: Are you going to be negatively affected by the Google maps usage fees next year? ( Reference: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3162352> )

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The design took almost forever, as one of those programmers-who-suck- at-design types.

Using Street View in this way doesn't seem to be on their fee list, so hopefully I will avoid that. Otherwise I will have a problem, serving about 20,000 panoramas per day!

<comment><USER11> You should be good, even at 22K per day. I didn't dig into your js, but there is a 25K per day threshold for using the Street View Image API.

<http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#usagelimits> (scroll down a bit further to the table)

Your project is one great example of why I think Google needs to reexamine the pricing of their maps API. With the threat of being charged more than adsense would payout, great sites like yours might not be created in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool, I found the end of the earth. It's in Finland. [http://www.mapcrunch.com/p/54.877919_-7.675938_202.36_20.83_...](http://www.mapcrunch.com/p/54.877919_-7.675938_202.36_20.83_0)

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice. May be provide some clues and make it a 'Guess the place' game..

<comment><USER14> Making this into a game was the first thing I thought. It could be as simple as having a game mode that puts a small country map in the corner; you click where you think the view is and receive a score based on how close you are. This could be surprisingly fun and addictive.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I immediately checked the "hide location" box and tried to start guessing countries. Vegetation helps get it down to very wide bands, but I bet with some experience you could get it pretty specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, just wow! This triggered the most severe case of Wanderlust I felt in quite a while. I'm happy that I'm headed for Amsterdam and the Quantified Self conference by the end of the month!

</comment><comment><USER17> "Guess the country". Would make a cool game.

</comment><comment><USER18> Really like this. Just checked the 'urban' and 'auto' boxes and took in a nice gallery of random places.

</comment><comment><USER19> James Bridle's "Robot Flâneur" is technically similar: <http://robotflaneur.com> , <http://booktwo.org/notebook/robot-flaneur>

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice! RSS feeds with the view of the day / gallery images would be great

<comment><AUTHOR> Gallery now has an RSS feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Comments on saved ones might be nice. For example, on the one I started on, there appears to be a tiger in Colorado. I have an urge to comment and ask if that is in fact a tiger.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did add comments to the gallery. The first view in the gallery is always the previous day's view of the day, so tomorrow you'll see the tiger in there.

Adding comments to the front page does makes sense, I just couldn't figure out a tidy way of doing it (no space).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fantastic - makes me want to book a vacation to an exotic destination. Maybe you should add links to travel agencies that service these type of trips :-)

</comment><comment><USER23> As a seasoned armchair holiday-maker, I love this. Maybe a 'you may also like...' function to widen horizons?

</comment><comment> kai-zer This is a really great idea, the gallery has some interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER24> awesome. i'm going to have some fun with this and my hmd-z1 (right click > 3d mode on) when it comes in!

it's really staggering the amount of work and data google is offering up here.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is awesome. Suddenly I feel like traveling the world.

</comment><comment><USER26> Would be nice to see where exactly is that place

<comment><AUTHOR> Click the Google logo at the bottom left, it is a link to Google Maps at the location you see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is really cool - thanks for making this.

</comment><comment><USER28> hey is there a way to make a screensaver and changing wallpaper for windows7 with these views? :) It will be fun

</comment><comment><USER29> Love it! Great job!</comment>


My Naive Thoughts of 2 Flaws with Loyalty Programmes Nowadays - <AUTHOR> http://kafechew.com/2015/06/21/my-naive-thoughts-of-2-flaws-with-loyalty-programmes-nowadays/

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Need to bring along the physical burdens (card or digital based loyalty).

2\. Rewarding the wrong groups of people.</comment>


Intel hit with 32 lawsuits over security flaws - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-intel-lawsuit/intel-hit-with-32-lawsuits-over-security-flaws-idUSKCN1G01KX <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who thinks that now would be a good time to buy intel shares, or even wait a bit more until these suits are won (intel will likely lose), so the stock price will go down even further. There is no way intel will lose its market position, so stock prices are likely to go back up after all this drama settles down...

<comment><USER3> >There is no way intel will lose its market position

Famous last words if I ever heard them. Ryzen and threadripper are a significant threat especially knowing that AMD is not vulnerable to meltdown (only Spectre).

<comment><USER4> I was due for an upgrade, this time I got an AMD Ryzen 1800x.

First time I've EVER bought an AMD product, and I'm definitely impressed.

<comment><USER5> But the large margins are in Xeons for enterprise and HPC computing. We use high-end Xeon machines for research and would think twice before purchasing AMD. Besides a generally good reputation and good performance, Intel has a great ecosystem with Intel MKL, ICC, etc.

Besides that, Spectre also affects AMD and many ARM CPUs.

<comment><USER6> > We use high-end Xeon machines for research and would think twice before > purchasing AMD

Ryzen supposedly have a price-performance benefit over Xeons for multi- threaded workloads.

What would you say the main reasons for staying with Xeons are for your type of research? Is single threaded performance intrinsic to the type of computation your research requires? or do those optimised math libraries you mentioned bring so much practical benefit as to outweight any current raw price-performance differences?

Soz, lots of questions, was just interested in how it applies to HPC based research in reality.

<comment><USER7> At least my case, our compute servers are 4 dual Xeon servers in a 2U format, sold by Dell. I haven't yet found any vendor with the same core density based on AMD.

<comment><USER8> Supermicro blows AMD out of the water when it comes to density.

Here's equivalent 4 node in 2U AMD systems (they differ based on disk configuration -- SAS, NVME, or a mix of both). They also support Supermicro SIOM, so you can choose what integrated networking you want:

[http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/2U/2123/AS-2123BT- HNC...](http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/2U/2123/AS-2123BT-HNC0R.cfm)

[http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/2U/2123/AS-2123BT- HNR...](http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/2U/2123/AS-2123BT-HNR.cfm)

[http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/2U/2123/AS-2123BT- HTR...](http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/system/2U/2123/AS-2123BT-HTR.cfm)

If you wanted even more density, there's the MicroCloud and MicroBlade series (although they use Intel processors):

[https://www.supermicro.com/products/MicroBlade/](https://www.supermicro.com/products/MicroBlade/)

[https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/MicroCloud.cfm](https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/MicroCloud.cfm)

That being said, these don't make a lot of sense unless you're very space- constrained, or your racks have a ton of power available. Given a 30A 208V circuit, I could only safely run three of the above AMD systems at full power. I'd rather just get dedicated 1U or 2U servers, and not have to make compromises about expandability or serviceability.

<comment><USER7> thanks for the links. I hadn't found any vendors on those 4 node systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem, I feel, is with the Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake R release _after_ learning of Spectre and Meltdown.

<comment><USER10> Spectre can be avoided (at small performance cost on new CPUs) with microcode updates and OS fixes. Meltdown can be fixed just at the OS level.

At this point, whether you're releasing a chip with or without the vulnerability is not an issue. Fixing them will make you look _better_ in benchmarks if anything, because you don't need anymore the slow PTI mitigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If the behaviors (bus timing logic and such) that are being used to spill information across process and privilege boundaries actually were fully documented, wouldn't the liability fall on the people who used these chips to write multi-user environments without knowing or understanding the implications of the technical details?

<comment><USER12> It's very well documented that writing outside array boundaries in C can cause undefined behavior (leading to arbitrary code execution no less!), yet Adobe isn't exactly sued for every buffer overflow in Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know how one could take part in these class action suits? And are they limited to US citizens only?

</comment><comment><USER14> This comment on Slashdot is interesting: [https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11756132&cid=561358...](https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11756132&cid=56135852)

<comment><USER15> That's about ME, not the recent Spectre and Meltdown that the article talks about: "Security researchers at the start of January publicized two flaws, dubbed Spectre and Meltdown"

<comment><USER16> > That's about ME, not the recent Spectre and Meltdown

I'm a layman, but spectre and meltdown seems like it can be a vehicle to exploit the intel management engine.

Once your on ME with a "designed"/obfuscated or hacked path. It is basically over, because ME a unix system; with lan access; can run java-applets while the host machine is powered down.

I hope it is only time before intel gives us the keys to our own ME jail. Hopefully ME will feature in some of these lawsuits.

<comment><USER17> > I'm a layman, but spectre and meltdown seems like it can be a vehicle to > exploit the intel management engine.

No, or extremely unlikely at the very least.

Spectre and Meltdown allow a low privilege program to read (not write, only read) normally protected system memory accessed by higher privileged software through a shared cache. In the initial attack the privileged and attacking software run on the same CPU, but there are now "Prime" versions where attacker and privileged software can run on separate CPUs as long as they're on the same coherence domain (very simplified: they share some level of cache, at least the last level).

The ME on the other hand is a completely separate CPU. Although it can access system memory, likely in a coherent way, as I understand it has its own dedicated internal memories (sometimes called TCM for "tightly coupled memory" or CCM for "closely coupled meory", it's all the same: internal SRAM directly attached to a CPU core and dedicated to it). All the security context would be in these ME TCMs, so physically unaccessible from software running on the main CPU cores. It's a simple and efficient way to enforce security: true physical isolation with no sharing.

So Spectre and Meltdonw may enable a low privilege application to spy on communications between privileged software on the main CPUs and the ME, but it shouldn't help attack the ME itself. Unless the Intel ME devs did something horribly wrong, like storing sensitive ME data in the main system memory. Which would be very surprising really: if you put an isolated CPU for a ME, it's really to isolate the security state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > dubbed Spectre and Meltdown, that affected nearly every modern computing > device containing chips from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc and ARM > Holdings.

WTF, spreading FUD on Intels behalf again?

<comment><USER18> Apple's CPUs were affected. They're ARM based: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT208394](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394)

AMD's press release on their susceptibility to Spectre: [https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative- execution](https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution)

<comment><USER6> My comment is regarding Meltdown which affects Intel CPUs almost exclusively. The wording used takes the same strategy as Intels own PR statement by blurring the line between Meltdown and Spectre in an attempt to play down how Intel specific the Meltdown vulnerability is.

<comment><USER19> Meltdown affected Apple's ARM CPUs as well. If you read the linked support doc, you can see that they released _Meltdown_ mitigations for iOS as well.

<comment><USER6> Yes... like I said almost exclusively affects Intel CPUs. Just because 0.001% of non-Intel CPUs are affected while 100% of intel CPUs are, doesn't make Intel's strategy forgivable. I'm tired of seeing it echoed everywhere.

<comment><USER20> Do you know how many CPUs Apple makes? It's certainly an order of magnitude larger than all the unaffected vendors combined...

<comment><USER6> Do you know what proportion of the number of ARM based CPUs that Apple has made or distributed in it's devices over last decade that are affected?

Do you know what proportion of the number of x86 CPUs that Intel has made over the last decade that are affected?

<comment><USER20> Are you really implying that the fact Apple doesn't even disclose which processors were vulnerable to this a positive?

<comment><USER6> No. You really don't need that information to infer roughly what proportion are affected.

There is very little information out there about specifically which ARM chips are vulnerable, but it's always "High performance ARM designs". This is one of the few references:

> Intel is the company most significantly affected by these problems. Spectre > hits everyone, but Meltdown only hits Intel and ARM. Moreover, it only hits > the highest performance ARM designs. For Intel, virtually every chip made > for the last five, ten, and possibly even 20 years is vulnerable to > Meltdown.

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and- spectre...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/meltdown-and-spectre- heres-what-intel-apple-microsoft-others-are-doing-about-it/)

Do you really think Apple has been using such a processor going all the way back to the first iPhone and iPad? Not to mention there are far more android phones and tablets than there are Apple ones (revenue !== number of devices) "High performance ARM designs" weren't really a thing until more recently, and they aren't going to be anywhere near a majority used in these devices... Remember what you are comparing this to.

The statement I'm complaining about is already factually wrong by assigning the Meltdown vulnerability to AMD, and then additionally it's extremely missleading by implying equality in it's application to ARM and Intel which is anything but. I'm honestly surprised how many of you replied to my comment in disagreement, I suppose it just shows how well PR FUD works and spreads if it's not dispelled loudly enough. Still I expected more on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am i the only one that thinks bugs are called bugs for a reason, and this was most likely not negligence.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Bugs are called bugs because you could actually find bugs among triodes and they could cause the computer to malfunction. Then the wording was extended to software bugs.

<comment><USER22> Yes, the first known documented was a moth. By Grace Hopper. It prevented a relay from closing, I gather.

[https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/09/18/the-very- first-...](https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/09/18/the-very-first- computer-bug/)

<comment><USER9> This, even after so many years? Please!

[http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm](http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm)

Obligatory working scihub link: [https://sci- hub.la/10.2307/455415](https://sci-hub.la/10.2307/455415)

<comment><USER22> Ah, thanks.

tl;dr - Error-prone semi-automatic telegraph keyers were called bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> meanwhile, equifax stumbles in and yells, "nothing to see here, MOVE ALONG...."

<comment><USER24> riffing on 'the beatings will continue until morale improves': 'the insanity will continue until awareness improves.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm really relieved the number is a power of 2.

</comment><comment><USER26> There needs to be a law that protects engineering corporations against security flaws that were previously unknown.

<comment><USER27> No. Security is already a non-concern amongst non-technical people, who unfortunately control most leadership positions. Protection from liability only means we get to see more, and worse, BS like this in the future.

We need to hold companies even more accountable than what they already are. 32 lawsuits is not enough, more like 320!

<comment><USER12> Assume you build a product using TLS as the underlying encryption layer. Unfortunately, few months later, some bored mathematician figures out how to completely break AES and ECDH.

Should you be held accountable for choosing "weak" ciphers?

<comment><USER28> > Should you be held accountable for choosing "weak" ciphers?

That would be up to the jury. For something like your scenario, as long as you're keeping up and using industry best practices, you almost certainly would have nothing to worry about. In fact, a case like that would likely be dismissed immediately by the judge before it ever went to trial.

<comment><USER12> Okay then, let's assume you are doing something more cutting edge. Like speculative execution involving memory prefetching.

What are "industry best practices" for that? There are like 3 companies which do this competitively at scale and each of them guard their methods like it's the Coca-Cola recipe.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Andreessen: Valley statesman, HP's front man - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/08/11/andreessen-valley-statesman-hps-front-man/?source=yahoo_quote

<comment><USER2> Suddenly elevated status! Two billion dollar companies and 20 years in the valley, is the rest of the world really that cut off to condescend like this?</comment>


Debt Market Distortions Go Global as Nothing Makes Sense Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-15/debt-market-distortions-go-global-as-nothing-makes-sense-anymore <comment><USER2> Transaction costs. Investors prefer swaps because they carry lower transaction costs. (When something doesn't make sense in finance, it's almost always transaction costs.)

Suppose you're a rates dealer. (Rates dealers buy and sell Treasuries and swaps, amongst other things.) An investor wants to invest at the 10-year rate. Say they insist on getting this in the form of a U.S. Treasury. You must either (a) buy a Treasury on the market or (b) pull one from inventory. No other options. Say, on the other hand, they are open to dealing in swaps. You could hedge this like a Treasury. You can also hedge with another swap. Two options instead of one. Makes your life easier, doesn't it?

Dealers always preferred swaps. But investors didn't like taking on the counterparty risk. Dodd-Frank changed that. Now swaps are mutualized. If you take out a swap with JPMorgan and they go kaput, other parties will pool together to make you whole. Less of a difference, in terms of credit quality, between a swap and a Treasury now. Dodd-Frank also made it more expensive to hold Treasuries in inventory.

In summary, swaps were always tastier to dealers. Dodd-Frank made them more attractive to investors. At the same time Treasuries became even less fun for dealers. Left hand meets right hand and you get lower fees on swaps with a commensurate shift in net pricing.

<comment><USER3> I'm a little confused. Are you saying you can hedge a swap like a Treasury, but can't do the reverse -- hedge a Treasury like a swap? Why would that be the case? Or am I misinterpreting you?

<comment><USER4> He's saying that if the investor wants a Treasury, the only way you can sell that to him is with a Treasury. If he's open to a swap, you can sell (write) that contract to him and hedge it with either a Treasury or another swap.

The only way to deliver a Treasury is with a Treasury, which you have to track down out of inventory or from another dealer. You can write a swap without having to go through that ordeal. This means lower transaction costs.

<comment><USER5> Its not true though. You can sell it to him, receive on a 10 year swap and borrow the bond from someone else. Or you can buy futures and borrow the bond. And if you can't manage to borrow the bond, failing for a while to deliver to your customer is hardly the end of the world, last I checked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These stories came around a few years ago when swap spreads went negative, and it seems like the same mistakes in interpretation are being made again. Negative swap spreads do NOT imply that big banks are more creditworthy than the US Treasury. That is obviously fallacious. You are comparing apples and oranges. If you want to do a fair comparison, compare the yield on a Treasury bond with the yield on a non-callable bank bond of the same maturity. Guess what? The Treasury yield will be lower. Or if you prefer, look at the CDS market and compare the CDS spread for protection on the US Government vs the spread for any major bank. Again, the US government spread is less.

If you want to understand this, you need to think about what kind of arbitrage trade would profit from this situation and why it's not happening in large enough size to reverse this. You'll realize that the operative constraints are not fears about the creditworthiness of the US government.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the second time in a week that we're falling all over ourselves wondering why swaps are through Ts. It's not hard: IRS is collateralized, Treasuries are not. With IRS every 3 (or 6) months, you have to cough LIBOR in order to receive the fixed leg. So essentially your maturity commitment is never greater than that, and indeed, for the vast majority of swaps receivers, mark-to-market collateral adjustments happen _daily_ , so your credit risk is 24 hours! This is not the case for USTs where if you invest for 10 years, you have no clue for every single one of those 10 years if your principal will be repaid, and there is absolutely zero collateral adjustment. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

Ts are being printed without even the slightest regard for the (old-fashioned) concept known as fiscal rectitude. Swaps can be printed all day long but if the rates start moving you get paid/have-to-pay every 24-hours for the assumed risk. It follows that Ts are now a much riskier bet than swaps, and indeed, what surprises me, is why it has taken so long for this to be happening.

<comment><USER8> _Why is this so hard for people to understand?_

Here's why:

> swaps are through Ts

> IRS is collateralized

> cough LIBOR in order to receive the fixed leg

> majority of swaps receivers

> mark-to-market collateral adjustments

Nobody (to a second order approximation) knows what the fuck any of that means, because, since they are sane people with lives to lead, they don't delve into the details of advanced finance.

<comment><USER7> let me make it perfectly clear. Lend money for 24 hours is less risky than lend money for 10 years. Does that make sense?

On your point about finance being complex. This is Bloomberg writing the story. They of all people should know. And this is the second time in a week that they're pushing this stuff.

BTW: for the average finance guy the CS jargon on this site would also qualify as something to be dismissed by "sane people with lives to lead". Not a valid argument. And before you tell me that this is a CS site so that is understandable, I'll ask you why this Bloomberg stuff is making it to Page 1.

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't lending money for 24 hours be more risky, since the debtor has less time to raise money to pay you back?

<comment><USER10> On the other hand you gave them the money yesterday so it's pretty likely they still have it to give back to you.

<comment><USER9> But if they don't spend it, why did they take it in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always find these stories interesting but feel like I get lost when they get into the more arcane levels of derivatives. Here is my question; Given the experience of the Subprime mortgage debacle, and the inherent difficulty of understanding who is holding the liability of these derivatives, why doesn't S&P and Moodys just max out their credit worthiness rating at BBB. Just don't ever let them be A rated, at any level. Would that not "fix" the inversion if people are mistakenly believing that counter party interest swaps are "safer" than Treasuries? I'm really curious about that.

<comment><USER12> It's be better to fix the laws and regulations that treat the rating agencies' opinions as true facts about the riskiness of assets (e.g. SMMEA, 7 CFR 240.15c3-1, Basel III, many many etc.) than to apply a band-aid patch at the rating agency level. I'm not even sure the government could legally put in such a requirement as the rating agencies have asserted in litigation that their output is protected speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The language in this is a bit silly:

"Nowhere is that more evident than in the U.S., where lending to the government should be far safer than speculating on the direction of interest rates with Wall Street banks."

You aren't "speculating on the direction of interest rates with Wall Street banks", you're buying a synthetic rates position that is centrally cleared with daily variation margin. That's not quite US Treasury safe, but it's pretty damn safe.

</comment><comment><USER14> Finance prediction is just a game of pure chance, a random walk.

Thing is, the game is rigged and when the big players loose, we all pay the bill.

<comment><USER15> No idea why this is downvoted. The financial crash seems to provide evidence of it happening. And there have been studies showing monkeys being as good as financial analysts at piking stocks.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any- monkey-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey-can- beat-the-market/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The most interesting signal I've seen from the world of finance is a number of smart hedge fund managers shutting down their funds over the past few years, stating that fundamental value investing is now impossible as the markets are too controlled by Government policies and intervention. It doesn't seem like this is healthy long-term unless the Government can manage a very soft landing.

<comment><USER17> What a wonderfully self-serving explanation. Here's an alternative one: hedge fund managers are shutting down their funds because people are waking up to the fact that hedge funds are a terrible investment. After the managers take their 2-and-20, hedge funds have lagged the market every year, in both market ups and downs. Funds are trying to slow the rush to the exits by slashing fees ([http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/693d9b74-73f3-11e5-bdb1-e6e47...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/693d9b74-73f3-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162cc.html)) to keep more people from going the way of CalPERS, but I don't think it's going to work. There's just too much freely-available evidence that hedge funds aren't worth the fees for what you get. Blaming the government as they turn off the lights is a handy way to get at least something positive out of it though.

<comment><USER18> hedge funds on average underperform big bulls and outperform big bears. sharpe ratios matter. maybe mass fund closures signal something more interesting than that calpers is run by geniuses (hint: they aren't).

<comment><USER19> It will be interesting to see how Warren Buffett's long bet comes out. Just a couple more years:

[http://longbets.org/362/](http://longbets.org/362/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


List of Chinese Inventions - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

<comment><USER2> I was raised in China, so these inventions (the major ones) were as ingrained as the founding fathers for Americans.

Much of the Chinese pride was rooted in such golden eras of the Chinese history. Sadly, in the modern days, this pride has become a nationalistic tool and is used to brainwash people into believing that the Chinese way has been and will always be superior to the other countries', when in fact there is so much the culture can learn from the rest of the world. (I suppose you can say that about any country.)

Things are changing however, hopefully for the better.

<comment><USER3> That is interesting because in practice it looks like China is borrowing a lot of the best ideas from the rest of the world and mixing it with its society.

<comment><USER4> I've been recently studying more ancient Chinese history and the game of Weiqi (Go, as it is known in the US). Weiqi is a good way to understand the sociopolitical strategies of China. In Weiqi, it is often easier to surround and assimilate (embrace and extend) than it is to invade and conquer. If there is a grand strategy of the current political heads of China, it is to make China the pivot point of the world. America goes forth and spread democracy; I think the Chinese prefers to get other countries to orbits around them, the way the earth orbits inside the sun's gravity well.

An observation of the inventiveness of the (Han) Chinese I think is best written by Neal Stephenson in his essay published in Wired Magazine in 1994: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell.html>

"This article is the result of a two-week trip to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai during September '93, during which I tried to get some sense of how the Chinese perceived the influence of technology - particularly digital technology - on their culture.

The answer is that this issue hasn't occurred to the Chinese yet, and probably never will, because it basically stems from a Western, post-Enlightenment perspective. Going to China and asking people about the Hacker Ethic is like going to Peoria and talking to the folks down at Ned's Feed & Grain about Taoism. The hacking part comes to them easily enough - China is, in a sense, a nation of analog hackers quickly entering the digital realm. But I didn't see any urge to draw profound, cosmic conclusions from the act of messing around with technology. "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> William Boltz has a very interesting book

<https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2JN00T3AO.HTM>

about an invention that China didn't adopt when it could have (as shown by recently uncovered archeological evidence): a written system based on the consistent sound-indicating principle relatively easy for the masses to learn. That might have made for a radical change in Chinese history, coupled with the subsequent inventions of paper and of movable-type printing.

See

[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2081/is_/ai_n2867916...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2081/is_/ai_n28679162)

for an overview of Boltz's argument.

<comment><USER6> Who is to say the change would have been for the better? Korea switched systems, since then, there was no major advantage of Korea over China. And the 2nd largest economy in the world - Japan - still uses such a system.

I don't think that writing with an alphabet vs writing with characters makes that big a difference. Characters are relatively easy to learn for a child.

(I assume here that with sound-indicating principle, you mean a western like system)

<comment><USER5> "Characters are relatively easy to learn for a child."

Which elementary reading textbooks have you been looking at from what countries and what periods of history?

To reply to your assumption, by "sound-indicating system" I was referring to something like the Japanese kana syllabaries. They are inscriptions that have been found through rather recent archeological work in China from around the time of the founding of the Han Dynasty in which Chinese characters are used strictly for sound value, in disregard of their etymological meaning. It is, of course, possible to write any language strictly by writing out sounds--just as people are able to talk on the telephone, without clues from writing in the air or gestures.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand what you're trying to say. Can you repost your comment, but in a way that a person who is not a language expert would understand?

For example, what do you mean by

"used strictly for sound value" "etymological meaning"

I've been looking at chinese characters, and the simplified characters are pretty easy to learn. The old chinese characters are somewhat more complicated, but the difference in learning to read such a text is minimal - they are more difficult to write, but reading is not more difficult.

<comment><USER5> My first attempt to post this expired. Let's see if this works. I'm attempting to reply to your follow-up question.

It's conventional for popular descriptions of Chinese characters to describe them as being symbols of the MEANING of the character, with no particular relationship to how the word being written is pronounced. That's why many people informally call Chinese characters "ideograms." Let's see if I can resort to Unicode here and put some Chinese characters into my reply.

Plainly, the characters

一 (one)

二 (two)

and

三 (three)

are visual representations of tally marks and can be taken to be ideographic characters. The relationship of these characters to the underlying pronunciations of the WORDS (which are yī, èr, and sān in standard Mandarin) is entirely arbitrary.

But most Chinese characters, since the earliest stage of what can properly be called writing in Chinese, have been mostly sound-indicating. The pattern of historical development is that the language spoken at that time had a lot of words, which in the case of early Chinese were mostly although not quite entirely words consisting of one-syllable meaningful parts (morphemes), some of which were readily pictureable (e.g., horse, fish, mountain, woman, tree) but many of which were not. Ancient scribes would find a sound-alike word, or a close-enough-for-government-work similar sounding word, to represent nonpictureable words, and mark the distinguishable usage of that written character with "radicals" that broadly indicated what semantic category the sound-alike word belonged to, for ease of reading.

Here is a list of Chinese characters that all have the pronunciation /fang/ (in various tones) in Mandarin:

方 放 房 訪 防 芳 仿 妨 紡 坊 肪 枋 倣 舫

I think your eye can spot the common visual element in all those characters. The "proper" way to use each of the characters is to associate it with a particular word (really, morpheme) that has a particular meaning. But one could, in principle, use any of those characters to write any syllable /fang/ that appears anywhere in the Chinese language, and the reader reading aloud would still know from context which morpheme pronounced /fang/ was intended by the writer. Boltz points out that there is actual archeological evidence that Chinese writers more than 2,000 years ago were moving in the direction of using Chinese characters solely for sound value in writing (as shown by their using the "wrong" sound-alike characters in many inscriptions) and they could have gone all the way to what Japanese did in developing systems of syllabary characters that can exhaustively write all sounds in the spoken language with no more written characters than the language has syllables.

P.S. I asked about textbooks above, because no Chinese society had mass literacy until elementary pupils in Chinese-speaking countries were taught to read first by using sound-indicating writings systems (alphabets in all actual cases) as a first step in teaching literacy. In Taiwan, as before in Nationalist China, the zhuyin fuhao (BO PO MO FO) alphabet, with written alphabetic characters based on the shapes of parts of traditional Chinese characters, has long been used for this purpose, and in general any pupil who has completed first grade can write anything that anyone can speak in that system. The P.R.C. since the 1950s has used the elegant Hanyu pinyin Roman alphabetic characters for the same purpose.

P.P.S. An interesting and rather astounding link

[http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_1695...](http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_169500.html)

shows that for a long time Western writers have been overestimating the number of inhabitants of China who are actually conversant in Mandarin. The lower than expected percentage of Chinese persons who can understand one another in Mandarin illustrates how little provision of primary education, broadcasting, or telephony has reached the hinterlands of China. The comparable percentage in Taiwan, which a generation ago had a much lower percentage of families with any family heritage of speaking Mandarin, is much higher, a sign of Taiwan's greater success in providing education and mass communications to all inhabitants.

Please ask follow-up questions as needed.

<comment><USER4> "... shows that for a long time Western writers have been overestimating the number of inhabitants of China who are actually conversant in Mandarin. The lower than expected percentage of Chinese persons who can understand one another in Mandarin illustrates how little provision of primary education, broadcasting, or telephony has reached the hinterlands of China. The comparable percentage in Taiwan, which a generation ago had a much lower percentage of families with any family heritage of speaking Mandarin, is much higher, a sign of Taiwan's greater success in providing education and mass communications to all inhabitants."

I think the more interesting question is how the Chinese were able to hold together a culture as diverse as having many separate, unintelligable dialects, yet still live with the popular myth that they "speak Chinese".

Personally, having these ideograms isn't a bad thing. It makes it harder for me to type in Chinese. However, the way the language is setup has allowed me to think along different lines I would not have had, if I only knew English.

A different line of thought: our decendents may look back and say that the Internet had changed things profoundly, but not for the reasons we think of it now. The legacy may well end up being the ubiquitous use of the Unicode standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another good list <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_inventions>:

      Decimal Number System
      Binary Numbers
      Panini-Backus Form (similarities to BNF)
      Chess

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's often said that the Chinese were on the leading edge of scientific advantage throughout much of history, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this extensive list.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good list.

Another good one - Ancient Roman Technology:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_technology></comment>


Singular Value Decomposition - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition

<comment><USER2> I would have picked these:

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

</comment><comment><USER3> These kinds of posts just open an endless and meaningless debate.

For example, why not list rules from boolean logic? Why don't we have concept of induction? I use tree concepts more often than I use SVD.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because these are among the most important mathematical concepts a programmer needs to understand--not "almost" the most important :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not obvious to me why this is so important to programmers. Can someone explain?

<comment><USER5> You use this to project and move objects to different orientations, shapes and sizes. So if you're doing animation, UI programming or graphics, it's very useful.

If you're doing analysis, you can use SVD to isolate independent forces, and to quantify the relationships of dependent forces.

Some compressions/specification techniques rely on it.

Basically, it's very important to know how to do for some, vaguely informative for others, and very important for yet another group.

<comment><USER6> For UI programming and animation transformation matrices (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_matrix>) (plus some simple calculus) are really all you need.

<comment><USER5> Depends on what part of the animations you're doing. SVD is a technique you'll do on Transformation matrices to find certain things out.

I'm not saying the OP's contention that SVD is fantastically useful is that true. I _am_ saying understanding matrix math down to the point of SVD and being able to do it when you spend much of your day doing transforms is useful for animation beyond setting EaseInOut and going about your day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In response to ha-hn:

The intent to this post is not to create mathematical elitism, but to highlight an important mathematical concept that comes up in programming--and many programmers may work with or around it without realizing it.

As I understand it, this concept is used in: * Compression Algorithms * Signal Analysis * Pagerank * Factor Analysis * Animation (especially when considering more than 3 points of information for each vector) * Clustering in Machine Learning * Noise reduction in DSP * Match.com's dating algorithm * Principal Component analysis * Image scaling * Control theory

I know it has been used in many more applications beyond this list.

I'm sorry you feel a smack of mathematical elitism. The concepts here are not inherently difficult, just a little complex. Here is a great resource to learn more: [http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and- articles/art...](http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and- articles/articles/30-singular-value-decomposition-tutorial.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> That's quite the hyperbole.

When I was studying Electrical Engineering, I noticed that SVDs cropped up frequently. From memory, a quick list of situations where I can recall using SVDs :

\- For computing homographies in Computer Vision

\- For clustering in Machine Learning

\- For noise reduction in DSP

In general, when the problem can be modeled using linear algebra, SVD often proves to be a versatile tool ( for linear optimization, eigenvalue problems, least squares, etc).

However, that doesn't make it the most important topic. I could just as easily name a bunch of other techniques that are also frequently used : FFTs, Linear programming, Monte Carlo methods. If you're an electrical engineer, all of these would be useful. Yet, I wouldn't call any of them the most important topic.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~park283/wp- content/uploads/2010/1...](http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~park283/wp- content/uploads/2010/10/Singular_Value_Decomposition_Tutorial.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Addition, subtraction and order relationships (ie > & <) are the only math that really matters.

Not convinced? Count the number of * and / in any source file and compare that to the number of + and -

Not to say that math is not useful, it's useful if math related stuff is what you do, which is a very small subset of what CS is about.

</comment><comment><USER10> What about algorithmic complexity and induction/deduction?

</comment><comment><USER11> i'm going to go with the 80-20 rule as the most important math concept a programmer can learn

<comment><AUTHOR> I like it. But this is more of a business and economic rule, no?

<comment><USER11> Sure, but also it's better to look for the common case (i.e. the 80%) and make sure that's fast. It's not always worth optimizing the uncommon case (like branch misses with a branch predictor).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> depends on the style of language a) imperative 1+1 = 2 (increment) b) functional f(x) = c) object = if you can't see it, it doesn't matter how much math you know</comment>


Ask HN: What happened to the batteries that charge in 2 minutes? - <AUTHOR> This article was written in 2011: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/423597/batteries-that-recharge-in-seconds/amp/<p>Where is this tech now? <comment><USER2> _Jeff Dahn, professor of physics at Dalhousie University, is skeptical that these electrodes will ever end up in products. "When you look at the flow chart for making this structure, it's pretty complicated, and that is going to be expensive," he says._

Dahn was probably right: too expensive to make the special nanostructured materials in industrial quantities. A lot of battery technologies that are promising on the lab scale are like that; "nanostructures, hard to mass produce" is one of the usual electrochemical storage killers along with "rare elements," "short lifetime," "low rate capability," "low efficiency," and "high self discharge." Reading new battery papers to figure out if they could be commercialized is mostly a matter of trying to spot how many -- ideally zero -- of these common problems afflict the system being proposed.</comment>


Stress Test the Cloud: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP - <AUTHOR> https://interconnected.blog/stress-test-public-cloud-alibaba-aws-azure-gcp/ <comment><USER2> I think this is an interesting analysis, but I'm not sure I can agree with some of the logic here.

For example, a large component of "reliability" comes down to your implementation (multi-regional, graceful fail-over, etc.). It is entirely possible that the statistical reliability of individual components of one of these clouds is worse, but they have engineered their architecture on top of it to handle these failures gracefully. It is very difficult to estimate the probability of an unforeseen multi-regional black swan event that would actually threaten these businesses.

It is also worth noting that these businesses have a choice between their original on-prem datacenter, which was likely built under a similar engineering and management culture (and therefore similar quality), and their cloud offering, which is probably equal or better than on-prem (generally public products will be more polished, better documentation, more consistent, etc.). Factor in the waste of maintaining extra data centers and capacity when their cloud is likely not 100% utilized by customers and the decision seems obvious. Cloud and on-prem could both be terrible and they would still likely migrate to their own cloud for sheer efficiency reasons. They really don't have a choice to use a different cloud.

The author also tries to reason about the complexity of the requests being handled by each business (e-commerce vs. email) and I think it is very difficult to do this meaningfully. All of these companies have to integrate systems, developed by separate teams, which contain lots of unique functionality and data. I'm not sure I agree that e-commerce is necessarily more complex than Google maps or docs. I would have speculated that Google's architecture is generally more complex than Amazon's based on my subjective interactions with the platforms and experience with the two engineering cultures. Even if there are large differences in complexity, this strikes me as using layer 7 information to reason about layer 1-4. As we move to serverless and managed offerings this might make more sense, but I think for most businesses, clouds are very much just compute, storage, and network right now, which doesn't have much bearing on how complex of an architecture you can engineer on top of it.

Another thing I don't see discussed a lot is documentation and stability of API. I have never had an unpredictable API response from AWS or GCP. Their docs may not be perfect but they are generally accurate. Alicloud definitely gets respect for handling Singles Day, however I have run into very unreliable documentation and API behavior. It is always a bit of an adventure re-applying a Terraform template that I made only a few months ago. Perhaps their internal team gets more heads up when things change, but I consider DevOps reliability to be a real issue there. I have also noticed occasional issues with single- zone network latency, managed Hadoop version compatibility, and other general fit-and-finish things.

In general I consider all of these clouds to be equivalent enough in reliability that it just isn't a deciding factor. The location of clients and APIs that I'm working with is a much bigger factor (if they are already in a cloud zone somewhere). I subjectively prefer AWS because I have worked with them longer and I am more familiar, but I have had projects where it made sense to use each of the 4 clouds and I think being able to accommodate those requirements with equal degrees of reliability is exactly what good engineering is about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author of the post here. Thank you so much for reading and for your comment! I learned a lot.

100% agree with you that documentation and API stability is a topic worth discussing more, so I might write a separate post on that in the future. I'm personally a bit obsessed with good documentation (most vendors big and small don't invest enough time and resources on documentation). It gets into both the reliability and usability of the cloud.

<comment><USER2> Haha, I would also consider myself obsessed with good documentation. That would make for a very interesting post. Cheers.</comment></comment></comment>


Smem memory reporting tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.selenic.com/smem/

<comment><USER2> See also the <http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py> tool for reporting real mem usage for programs</comment>


The War on Internet Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-03-23/google-and-media-titans-clash-in-a-war-on-internet-piracy <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see the drop in torrent usage from 2011 to 2015. It makes me wonder how much easier copyright enforcement will be as cloud storage continues to grow in usage. Throw in lack of encryption and data mining and it's possible to see a day where piracy is completely under control.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure why you think "piracy" is a problem, and why it's worth warping the rest of society to bring piracy under control. Nevertheless, what makes you think that encryption, data mining and whatever won't just drive "piracy" further underground, further decentralized, and harder to control? That seems at least as likely as centralized computing (which I think is what you mean by "the cloud" in this context) and the attendant ability to collect data/spy on everyone will be to control something as poorly defined as "piracy". I mean, we could stop it today by just ceasing to enforce copyrights. Poof! Piracy gone, completely under control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a rubbish article. It's totally one sided, the side of copyright maximalist big business. Here's the clue:

"The so-called SOPA and PIPA legislation was dropped after a public backlash spurred by a publicity blitz led by Mark Zuckerberg, Google, Wikipedia and other tech powerhouses that characterized it as government censorship."

Google and Facebook were very late to that battle. They didn't "spearhead" anything about the anti-SOPA stuff. That was almost entirely grass roots (and not in a fake, Wagg-Ed generated way). Most of us were there, it was only 4 years ago. Heck, the reporter and his "researcher" were probably there.

The falsehood about Google spearheading the anti-SOPA movement is just RIAA and MPAA propaganda. Don't bother believing it - just recall for yourself.

And then re-read this article. It will be revealed as a sham, a pro-big- business, pro-monopoly piece of rubbish.</comment>


Why Enterprises Are Embracing Microservices and Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://thenewstack.io/enterprises-embracing-microservices-node-js/ <comment><USER2> > It's also worth noticing that Node.js is highly favored amongst the next > generation developers, who don't really want to work with statically typed > languages like #C or Java anymore.

[citation needed] Seriously, each dev has a personal list of gripes against Java, but C# has been hampered by being tied to the Windows platform. That is changing with .NET Core. Also, the incredible growth of Microsoft's TypeScript language, which was chosen by Google for Angular 2, gives lie to the idea the next generation of developers don't want to work with statically typed languages.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the biggest pain in C++? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> for beginners, the compiling/linking error messages are not intuitive, relating error messages to the true causes of problems require experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> memory management</comment>


Ask HN: I have £100k to spend. How can I use it to increase my quality of life - <AUTHOR> I'm a 32 yr old software dev and have been working pretty hard to save over £100k GBP. I have decided to quit my job, and hopefully discover some new passions over the next few years
- Want to learn more life skills, and challenge different parts of my brain, and have different experiences to stay stimulated - The lifestyle is not healthy, sitting all day, staring at screens, you don't fully undo the damage even by breaking up the day with frequent exercise. All of my close colleagues have poor posture - It's easy to become isolated, I work in an open plan office surrounded by smart people with headphones on - I don't see myself growing older to continue working on a computer when I'm 60. My body is giving me signs that I won't be able to. My father is over 60 and does pottery full time and loves it.
The goal here is to find a lifestyle where I can stay active throughout the day and discover new passions which I may pursue.
Looking for any advice on this, how do you find a new passion? How would you spend the money? I went straight from college to full time employment and haven't stopped working until now. My passion has always been software development. I wouldn't mind investing in courses like blacksmithing, welding, dancing, cooking! Maybe volunteering on a farm. Train to become a paramedic? Become a yoga instructor? Learn the violin.
Feels silly starting dance lessons at 32, ideally I would have started while younger. On the plus side, I do have a big chunk of money which can pay for specialised training, something harder to do when you're younger (you have the time but not the money).
My yearly costs are around £20k, supportive partner, no kids, live near London. Mentally prepared that after a few years I can struggle to get a job in software dev if I want one and prepared that I may not earn any money for the next few years. I'm taking a risk that I'll find a passion and be able to monetize when the time comes. I do have some backup savings. <comment><USER2> Have you tried pair programming? it's more sociable, but your entire team has to do it, all code needs to be pair programmed, not a part of the time. That might increase your quality of life.

</comment><comment><USER3> That money is not gonna increase your quality of life. You, and only you, are the only capable of doing it. It is up to you alone to find something that fills your brain. To me is software engineering, I do see myself doing this when I'm 60. But your life is only yours and it is up to you to decide how to live it, not even 1M pounds can change that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't put too much pressure on yourself to find the new perfect career.

You could easily take a year off and just try anything that catches your fancy for a brief amount of time. For example you could do a weekend course on gardening. You could go and spend a weekend at a monastery. You could spend a weekend here ([https://tasteofselfsufficiency.co.uk/ask- andrew-2](https://tasteofselfsufficiency.co.uk/ask-andrew-2)).

The _only_ way to find your passion, unless you already know what it is, is to just try things. Remember you also have the option to continue to do software engineering but less of it - you could do well contracting, especially as you live near London.

With regards starting new things late in life - you don't have to make money from dancing. You could do it for the joy of it and make money doing your day job (which might not be the same as you are doing now).

What you are doing will require courage though - there will be the temptation to just fall back to what you already know as it is sometimes hard to build a completely new career - at least one that pays as well as software.

Good luck with whatever you try to do!

</comment><comment><USER5> >How do you find a new passion?

Try lots of things out! There are 10,000 things to try. That's where the money would come in very handy.

Stuff like violin - sure, some lessons might be good soon after you start, to make sure you're getting the basics right, but 99% of the time spent on it will be practising and playing on your own (and later with groups), and 99% of what you learn will be from that. (I'm a musician) Dancing I guess is the same. Find the masters you love to see/hear and learn from them, copy from them, study them. Maybe a similar thing applies to all areas.

"Feels silly starting X at 32".. There's always someone younger! If you want to do it, who cares. Everyone's terrible at it when they start doing anything. (I think a lot of people don't realize that, and it stops them doing things they spend their lives wishing they could do, e.g. play flute) I have way too many things I'm passionate about, but occasionally meet people who haven't found anything yet, it's very strange. I guess no-one told them a passion or 3 in life is worth looking for! And it's fun looking anyway. Like online dating but you're the one doing all the rejecting. haha. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER6> I also think of doing the same thing. I'm 26, with $60k saved. One thing that would be cool would be to move down to like 3 cities in South America, each for a month, and become reasonably fluent in Spanish. Or for any language. Spend your free time in the evening working on a project so that you're marketable when you finish.

Go to SEA and go to a Muay Thai camp and get in the best shape of your life.

Find a smaller town in the mountains and go hiking every day for a month. On rainy days, hang inside with a coffee and meditate, journal, yoga.

I also hate the idea of sitting in a cubicle every day like this. It just seems to be so limiting. Everything about the day is expected, and little is left to chance. Such a boring way to live.

</comment><comment><USER7> Start by getting fit. I would go and live on a beach for 3 months. Exercising in soft sand (running, volleyball, etc.) will do your body the world of good with the least risk of injury.

You will find that you will be spoilt for choice for ideas once your body is firing on all cylinders - after all the body is the temple of the mind. Ideas will come especially if you base yourself where you are likely to meet people with lots of different backgrounds.

Hydroponics has an interesting future, worth looking into if you want a mix of tech and activity.

Zappa said "You are what you is", I would add "remembering". Friends and family make the memories sweet and it's the memories that count when all is done.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would save enough to be financially independant. That gives you true freedom, then you don't even have to work. But it would also take about £500k GBP to give you 20k/yr for the rest of your life. This might take another 5-10 years, so do a fun vacation somewhere. Then you are set forever.

</comment><comment><USER9> You are making a reasonable decision I think. I've been thinking about doing the same thing. I want to study more of the classics, meditate, etc. Seek ways to be creative! Also, tennis is pretty cool.</comment>


Ask HN: Have people outside the US heard of the Powerball on the news? - <AUTHOR> Given that the Powerball now holds the lottery as the largest lottery in the world, I was wondering if it is being reported in other countries. <comment><USER2> Why don't you try it yourself, and Google

      Powerball 1.3 site:.co.uk
      Powerball 1.3 site:.de
      Powerball 1.3 site:.fr

? You'll find the answer is "yes".

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are not for the lottery, and if they were, I'm not so sure it would answer my question. I'm asking about if there's hype in other countries talking about it since now it's the highest lottery in the world. For instance, in the US, whenever the amount goes up (like it did from 1.3 to 1.4 and then again to 1.5B) everybody is talking about it. Was curious if the news about it has been a topic of discussion in other parts of the world.

<comment><USER2> I think those searches show up links that show the lottery makes the news in those countries.

Also, I do not read _" is there hype"_ in your original phrase _" have people heard of"_.

I think it is unlikely there is much hype because it is hard, if not impossible, to legally buy tickets outside the USA. Beciase of that, few people would have a stake in this, or know people who do.

My personal interest is only in guesstimating whether it would make sense to take part (my guess is that expected payout has gone down due to the huge influx of would-be milliairdairs)</comment></comment></comment>