WeWork's Ousted CEO Adam Neumann Is Accused of Pregnancy Discrimination - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/business/wework-neumann-discrimination-complaint.html <comment><USER2> >"Adam Nuemann referred to her maternity leave as a "vacation" or "retirement," and another high-level company official, Jennifer Berrent, commented, "Wow, you're getting big," in front of a WeWork executive."

This is the most disgusting thing I've read so far about this entire WeWork disaster. Why is Jennifer Berrent still at the company?

<comment><USER3> Neumann and his wife fired multiple people for completely arbitrary reasons. This seems consistent with their other disgusting behavior. If you haven't read about it, maybe spare yourself the frustration.</comment></comment>


Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves - <AUTHOR> http://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/ <comment><USER2> The problem with Tex is precisely that it's a yak-shaving project.

I know Knuth thinks it's feature complete, but it produces deeply incomprehensible error messages and lots of erroneous warnings that look like errors. Very hard to debug, and that alone turns people off.

<comment><USER3> To the contrary, TeX (not LaTeX) has one of the best error-handling and error- recovery interfaces of any commandline program — if you use TeX as Knuth intended, that is, if you use plain TeX at the commandline and if you have read the entertaining chapters in _The TeXbook_ on dealing with errors. Just try using plain TeX (not LaTeX) for a few months and you'll find that the behaviour when errors happen is one of its delights, the opposite experience from when you use LaTeX. (Of course, you may miss many conveniences from LaTeX, but the error experience is itself almost worth the change.)

Knuth has done a great job that should be the model for all other software writers: every error is described in two ways, one somewhat formal and one somewhat informal, and every error is shown with enough context (and this is configurable too) for you to quickly see what the issue is, and you can even fix errors without having to abort the compilation. He has a great talk where he describes how the English language is optimized for dialogue (things like "I" and "you") and TeX messages are designed in that way.

Unfortunately, LaTeX consists of several layers of complicated macros (all in the name of making things convenient for, and hiding things from, the user) and as they (correctly) decide that all these layers won't make sense to the user, they actually _turn off_ all the context that goes with the error, leading to error messages that are incomprehensible even to experts. But I don't think it's right to blame the fact that LaTeX didn't bother to implement good error-recovery on TeX.

<comment> cup-of-tea > He has a great talk where he describes how the English language is optimized > for dialogue (things like "I" and "you") and TeX messages are designed in > that way.

Is this online? I listen to everything I can from Knuth but haven't heard this one.

<comment><USER3> I have seen it written down in print somewhere more eloquently (probably one of his interviews or conversations); the thing I was referring to (incorrectly) was not an entire talk of its own, but a passing brief remark (a few seconds or a minute) during one of the "Internal Details of TeX82" lectures about the source code of the TeX program ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbqY1mTwrj8&list=PL94E35692E...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbqY1mTwrj8&list=PL94E35692EB9D36F3&index=12)). Sorry I don't have a more exact reference right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I also created a typesetting program to produce a book I was writing, because I was impressed with what was available. I wanted to push a button, and have it compile a PDF for printing, an EPUB for tablets and phones, a text version for proofreading, and an html version for debugging. Shockingly, nobody had done this.

<comment><USER5> Each publishing house and newspaper has a home-grown pipeline to do something close to this.

With work, you can get something that does most of what you want with a few stacks. You can cobble it together for markdown. Alternatively, there are strong plugins to emacs org mode that can go to TeX, then postscript, then PDF. There is probably a stack centred around docbook as well.

My experience has been that if you care about details, you will need to write parts yourself, as you have done. Emacs org mode is a good starting point. You can create your foundation data structures in org-mode trees, and then transform out to the main render pipelines (TeX, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds a bit snarky, but I appreciate the shout-out.

</comment><comment><USER7> Typo in the last line, 'Lamdba.'

</comment><comment><USER8> The other kind of hundred-year language (or not).

</comment><comment><USER9> Stopped reading at _It transpiles to PASCAL_.

<comment><USER10> Why? It's correct. You run a tool to convert the Web source to Pascal. If you want to compile TeX on modern computers, you run another conversion step to convert the Pascal to C, but Knuth used a real Pascal compiler when he made TeX.

<comment><USER9> Sure. All this is absolutely cool. What isn't is using questionable words like _transpiler_. Citations needed on whether that is an actual meaningful word (Wikipedia isn't it).

<comment><USER11> Can you give more details on why the term is ambiguous or ill-defined? I thought I knew what it meant, and a brief web search seems to reinforce my existing understanding (a source-to-source compiler), but I'm probably missing the subtleties. If you have a couple of minutes to clarify what your objection is, I'd love to learn more.

<comment><USER9> I'd go further and say that it is redundant to even say 'source-to-source'. Just 'compiler' is enough, IMHO. See the first few pages of any compiler book.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=_tgh4bgQ6PAC&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=_tgh4bgQ6PAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=engineering+a+compiler&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiM3_aVgMXTAhVD0WMKHd1YDtkQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=engineering%20a%20compiler&f=false)

 _Compilers are computer programs that translate a program written in one language into a program written in another language._</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The New Diamond Age: Next up, the computing industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond_pr.html

<comment><USER2> When is this from? The article is undated.

I've no idea whether "Wired 11.09" means "the November 2009 issue of Wired" or "the September 2011 issue of Wired" or something else. The copyrights at the bottom are dated "1993-2004" and "1994-2003".

<comment><AUTHOR> Upon further investigation, it appears to be from September 2003. (Unfortunately, I can no longer change the article title to reflect the old date.)

EDIT: I looked into the two companies mentioned in the article, and as of now, nine years later, Gemesis still hasn't started full production, and Apollo folded (with its assets purchased by another synthetic-diamond company).</comment></comment>


Where do you keep your knowledge base? - <AUTHOR>

As a developer, I find myself documenting those edge cases I see (or just something new I learn) every now and then in my own knowledge base. Google Sites seems like a good place to keep these details but I was wondering where most people would keep them. <comment><USER2> I'd suggest you keep them locally or wherever you like using Freemind which can output to HTML, PDF, Flash and as a Java applet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Evernote</comment>


Spotify to Acquire Parcast in Podcast Push - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/spotify-acquire-parcast-podcast-push-1197023 <comment><USER2> It's unfortunate that Spotify's podcast functionality still sucks. Podcasts have been shoe-horned into Spotify's usual UI, making the app less usable than, say, Pocket Casts. Also, because the app insists on recommending podcasts to my locale and has no way of changing this, I'm presented with shitty Swedish podcasts instead of international ones.</comment>


Free Time - <AUTHOR> http://macournoyer.com/blog/2011/07/26/free-time/

<comment><USER2> I agree with everything except sleeping less. If I cut my sleep by two hours every night, then I effectively lose three hours of the day to deprivation. I've tried that too many times to know it doesn't work for me. (But if it works for you, go for it.)</comment>


How Your Coffee Mug Controls Your Feelings (& What You Can Do About It)  - <AUTHOR> http://johnnyholland.org/2011/03/01/how-your-coffee-mug-controls-your-feelings-what-you-can-do-about-it/ <comment><USER3> For some reason this reminded me of neuro-linguistic programming: there's something there, but it's easy to overstate your case.

<comment><USER4> I more than readily accept your skepticism re NLP. But the first paper he talks about got into Science

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5986/1712.abstract?sid...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5986/1712.abstract?sid=9a6810a0-0083-4a3b-9449-04d476d7e6d1)

I don't have access to the article itself, but I assume the writer didn't mangle the conclusions that badly. Can anyone with access help out here?

<comment><USER5> If the research was anything like the psychology studies I participated in as a college student, it is a far reach from college students paid to pretend to "interview a job applicant", to conclusions about a professional interviewer.

With nothing else on the line (your reputation, income, self-image), its easy for the warm coffee or comfy chair to dominate your attitude.

<comment><USER6> What if I said that participants' physiology (stress response, in this case) is completely different depending on a single variable: being interviewed by a person, versus giving an unprepared speech to a camera about why you should be hired.

You can be as cynical as you want, but there's no justification for ignoring good experimental design and the statistics that demonstrate it's unlikely that people would react so differently based on the camera/person condition.

The evidence is: if you interview in front of a person, your blood pressure is demonstrably higher, your palms sweat more, and you self-report that you were stressed out. In front of a camera, the averageperson does not exhibit a stress response.

You're not the first to observe that college students are a poor stand-in for the general population, but I have experience with one of the labs that conducted this work, and they did extensive "general population" work as well, which means it's not all college students.

So many of these naive criticisms are addressed in the paper itself - if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote (i.e. "read the science".)

<comment><USER7> > if only people would take the time to read what the scientists wrote

To do that, I'd have to either pay $15 (for just this one paper) or take a trip to my local university library.

You're free to chastise people all you like, but as long as the actual papers are locked up behind paywalls, it's quite difficult to "read the science".

<comment><USER6> You can still get this kind of literature from a library, though - <USER2> university libraries. It's like how books aren't free, yet you can still read them for free by going to the library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If my coffee mug exerts that much control over my feelings my laptop must be in charge of my very existence.

</comment><comment><USER9> "It may seem incredulous to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and emotions."

Yes it does seem incredulous.

Are we to believe that the only differing factor in each case was the stated coffee cup, puzzle piece softness etc..

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a study around desktop methaphors in this context? For example: moving files to the recycle bin can be 'heavier' or 'lighter' depending on the total size of the selection (more files are slightly heaver and therefore subconsciously they're more important - resulting in less user error).

<comment><USER11> There's an anecdote claiming that the Mac's old "overstuffed" icon for a non- empty trash was unsettling to users, who felt like they should immediately "empty trash" to alleviate the condition... Which defeats the purpose of having a trash can instead of instant delete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of a theory I have that the color beige _may_ cause brain damage.

<comment><USER13> The wall behind my monitor right now (at work) is beige :(

<comment><USER14> You'd best offset it by making your desktop background a flat shade of maroon; it's the only proven way to counteract neural damage from off-white sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was holding a warm cup of tea while reading the article but I still think it sounds a bit fuzzy. I'm guessing the decline effect will push the results below the noise floor.

</comment><comment> DanI-S This is just a reminder of how desperately important good design is. No matter how minimal this effect may turn out to be, we all interact with thousands of man-made objects each day. Improving the quality of those interactions is a cheap way of raising quality of life.

<comment><USER5> So now we all adopt feng-sui and hope for the best?

<comment> DanI-S I would've thought adopting an arbitrary standard and hoping for the best is pretty much the opposite of good design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing how you think and feel about the people and places around you."

What's more important to me than how this might/should effect product design, is how it should effect our concept of free will.

</comment><comment><USER16> Um, yeah. Reason why Zen Gardens exist and in minimalism art/architecture/design/etc common for many aesthetic/meditative disciplines such as Zen Buddhism.

</comment><comment><USER17> _subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it._

What?!

</comment><comment><USER18> This article made me thirsty and I don't know why.</comment>


Rename files to match hash of contents - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/SimplGy/75bb4fd26a12d4f16da6df1c4e506562 <comment><USER2> Fun! This is similar to how git stores files internally. You can do some neat tricks like this:

      $ ls
      01.jpg      03.jpg      03_copy.jpg 04.jpg      05.jpg

      $ git init
      Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/test/.git/

      $ git hash-object -w *
      82f7d50fc89d2fd47150aff539ea4acf45ec1589
      0080672bc4f248c400d569cce1a2a3d743eb1331
      0080672bc4f248c400d569cce1a2a3d743eb1331
      58db57b10c219b9b71f0223e58a6dc0d51cfe207
      05dcde743807bddaf55ad1231572c1365d4db4af

      $ find .git/objects -type f
      .git/objects/00/80672bc4f248c400d569cce1a2a3d743eb1331
      .git/objects/05/dcde743807bddaf55ad1231572c1365d4db4af
      .git/objects/58/db57b10c219b9b71f0223e58a6dc0d51cfe207
      .git/objects/82/f7d50fc89d2fd47150aff539ea4acf45ec1589

If you're curious, you can read more about how it works here: [https://git- scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-Internals-Git-Objects](https://git- scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-Internals-Git-Objects)

<comment><USER3> This is also how FreeBSD Update and Portsnap store files. This technique has been around for a long time.

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content- addressable_storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content- addressable_storage)

<comment><USER3> Right. I'm not a fan of the terminology though; I prefer _hash-addressed storage_ to avoid the potential confusion with associative memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls)

</comment><comment><USER6> Be warned that this (by default) only looks at part of the file. Seems like a poor default.

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't modern filesystems allow you to store metadata like this separately to the filename or file data?

</comment><comment><USER8> Nirsofts 'hashmyfiles' has this functionality built in already, known as duplicate search mode. Works extremely well. [http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/hash_my_files.html](http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/hash_my_files.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Content-addressable storage is always neat. Does anyone know if using truncated md5 like this is somehow more robust than using some non-crypto hash like siphash, which already produces 64bit hashes.

</comment><comment><USER10> duff (duplicate file finder) is another useful tool for this with flags to operate once duplicates are found:

[http://duff.dreda.org/](http://duff.dreda.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> It would be nice to turn this into a program that stores the previous name so they can be renamed back after deduplicating.

Very cool!

<comment><USER12> Why rename them at all? There are already good tools for duplicate detection. An example is fdupes [1], which is smart enough to rule out dupes by other tricks like partial hashes etc., so you can avoid hashing some of the files.

[1] [https://github.com/adrianlopezroche/fdupes](https://github.com/adrianlopezroche/fdupes)

Edit: just noticed that it's using md5, which is broken [2], and that it's using truncated md5 hashes.....!

[2] [https://natmchugh.blogspot.ca/2015/02/create-your-own- md5-co...](https://natmchugh.blogspot.ca/2015/02/create-your-own- md5-collisions.html)

<comment><USER13> Using md5 is only a problem here if someone has actually gained access to your files and then gone to the trouble of secretly adding new files and calculating/brute-forcing the correct 'chosen-prefixes' to ensure a clash. It would be a pretty weird attack to mount, that's for sure.

md5 is fine for deduplicating. It's extremely improbable you'd 'organically' get a md5 hash clash for two different files.

<comment><USER12> If you had a copy of the two image files from my second link, this 'dupe detector' would erroneously flag one as a dupe.

Also, what of truncating the hashes?

I don't get why people try to justify using severely weakened things when using the non-broken (ie, secure) version is a /trivial/ drop in replacement...

<comment><USER13> I'm not trying to justify anything. I'm just trying to suggest you're labouring under a misapprehension. And this has nothing to do with security. I'm guessing you've heard the (good) advice that md5 is not a secure hashing function for, say, storing passwords, and then promptly joined the 'md5 is bad for all the things' cargo cult.

So while you're correct about the two images on that blog, the only reason why you'd get a clash is because the author of that blog post spent ~15 hours on an AWS GPU instance to generate the correct prefixes which, when appended to those files, results in a clash.

So, I guess if you are in the habit of grabbing random files from your hdd, loading them on to an AWS GPU instance for 15 hours (per file) and generating hash collisions, then yeah, don't use fdupes.

<comment><USER12> fdupes is not a problem assuming wikipedia's description [1] is correct: "It first compares file sizes, partial MD5 signatures, full MD5 signatures, and then performs a byte-by-byte comparison for verification."

I was unimpressed by the md5 used in the shell script at the original link, which is using a truncated md5...

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

<comment><USER13> Ok, fair enough. I would agree with the view that using md5, presumably for the faster performance, is probably not the best trade-off to be making here. Unless we're dealing with an NVMe drive (or something more exotic), you're likely to be IO bound even if using more computationally intensive hashing functions.

And if you are deduping on really fast storage, you'd get way better performance (with comparable safety) using something like xxHash64 ([https://cyan4973.github.io/xxHash/](https://cyan4973.github.io/xxHash/)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote something similar once, but only for gifs and it also fixes file extensions for a few mimetypes.

</comment><comment><USER15> wouldn't symbolic links be more appropriate?</comment>


When computer programming was 'women's work' - <AUTHOR> http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-08-26/opinions/35268904_1_computer-science-young-women-grace-hopper

<comment><USER2> Women tend to get chased out of any industry that is shrinking, especially if the industry continues to offer good pay to the survivors. The medical profession has grown, so we have more women doctors. The computer industry has shrunk, so women are getting pushed out. The number of computer programmers in America has shrunk by more than 30%. Sources:

Stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (USA):

[http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information- technology/c...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information- technology/computer-programmers.htm)

2010 Number of Jobs 363,100

Especially worth a look:

<http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/programming-jobs-fall/>

"In its 1990 Occupational Outlook Handbook, the U.S. Department of Labor was especially bullish: "The need for programmers will increase as businesses, government, schools and scientific organizations seek new applications for computers and improvements to the software already in use [and] further automation . . . will drive the growth of programmer employment." The report predicted that the greatest demand would be for programmers with four years of college who would earn above-average salaries.

When Labor made these projections in 1990, there were 565,000 computer programmers. With computer usage expanding, the department predicted that "employment of programmers is expected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations through the year 2005 . . ."

It didn't. Employment fluctuated in the years following the report, then settled into a slow downward pattern after 2000. By 2002, the number of programmers had slipped to 499,000. That was down 12 percent–not up–from 1990. Nonetheless, the Labor Department was still optimistic that the field would create jobs–not at the robust rate the agency had predicted, but at least at the same rate as the economy as a whole.

Wrong again. By 2006, with the actual number of programming jobs continuing to decline, even that illusion couldn't be maintained. With the number of jobs falling to 435,000, or 130,000 fewer than in 1990, Labor finally acknowledged that jobs in computer programming were "expected to decline slowly." "

<comment><USER3> While the other responses to your post seem accurate, I do want to fixate on one quote in the article: "Instead of seeking to create a level economic playing field, lawmakers and presidents, Democrats and Republicans, have permitted foreign governments to set American job policies by eroding the country's basic industries."

I think this "level playing field" talk is bullshit. The American government shouldn't strive to create a level playing field. It should strive to rig the game in favor of American workers as much as possible. That doesn't mean protectionism per se, but rather what India and China have the sense to do: free trade when it helps them, dirty underhanded tricks when they can get away with it.

<comment><USER4> > free trade when it helps them, dirty underhanded tricks when they can get > away with it.

Do you think the U.S. doesn't do this today or hasn't done so in the past?

<comment><USER5> Maybe, but rather to favor its corporations than workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny, a 'women programmer' piece that starts in 1967. How about 1946? <http://www.topsecretrosies.com/Top_Secret_Rosies/Home.html> In the latter half of the documentary, we meet the programmers of Eniac. It seems the male scientists were Electrical_Engineers, first and foremost. They left the tedious wire plugging demo for the cream of the ballistics calculating department, Betty Jean Jennings.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I first broke into the realm of professional computer programming, after graduation in the late 80s with a Computer Science degree, the teams I worked on were populated with just as many, if not more, women than men.

In total contrast to a Ruby conference I volunteered to help out a few years where the only woman in the conference presence was the SO of the conference founder.

Can only speculate on the sociological reasons for this shift, other than toss a personal observation that comparatively, it seems men were the more geeked out, enamored with technology than women who seemed to hold a more pragmatic outlook and confined "work" to working hours only.

</comment><comment><USER8> "The numbers suggest that women with aptitude are out there; they're just not choosing computer science"

Pretty sure no one thinks women with aptitude aren't "out there".

<comment><USER9> probably because the average lawyer or doctor has higher status and a more secure future :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 2011\. I think this was discussed here when it was first published. This is definitely an interesting article.

</comment><comment><USER11> The first day of our CS class was going to the (a) CS museum and showing us pictures of the early programmers ( who were all cis females)

<comment><USER12> How do you know they were cis?

<comment><USER11> I assumed back then they would not photograph what would (back then) be considered "not normal".

Just an assumption, I guess it does sound stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The word programming causes one to conjure up an image of wizard effect. Someone sitting in a chair and coming up with awesome ideas. Then they bang on the keyboard and stuff spews out. How about we relabel programming something akin with arts. Code is just the utensil. Like oil for painting?

</comment><comment><USER9> pre electronic computers originally programmers where clerks that did repative calculations by hand and most of those where women.

<comment><USER14> Those weren't programmers, they were computers ([http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/History.ht...](http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/History.htm), [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware#D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware#Desktop_calculators))</comment></comment>


Show HN: Dripi.com - A little web app that won a Google I/O ticket - <AUTHOR>

http://dripi.com
I thought I'd share my winning entry to the Google I/O last call competition with ya'll.
Took me about 9 hours, which seems like a lot looking at it now (my only excuse is that it took place after 12am). I truly did not expect to be one of the winners. My guess is that the YouTube API category had fewer entries than others.
Feel free to let me know what you think!
This was the challenge:
Wouldn't it be nice if you could create a video mash-up by chaining player invocations that work for both Flash and HTML5 videos ? Well, with the JavaScript API to the <iframe> embed we think you can.
Your task is to build a mash-up player using the <iframe> JavaScript API. You will be given a list of video IDs, and from-to timestamps. For example the following sequence (<xxasdadad, 65s, 95s>, <xxffwwe22, 20s, 35s>), which will trigger the mash-up player to play video with ID xxasdadad for 30 seconds, starting at second 65 and ending at second 95, then proceed to play video with ID xxffwwe22, starting at second 20 and ending at second 35.
Given the sequence, implement a player which will play the sections of the listed videos, starting at the 'from' timestamp, and ending at the 'to' timestamp for each video.
Try to make the transitions between videos as smooth as possible, and make it easy for users to embed your mash-up player in their own web applications.
I encourage everyone to enter this contest if they hold it again next year. It was a blast! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://dripi.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> Have you considered trying to hack some sort of 'double buffered' style approach to transitions? You could conceivably open a hidden player that's loading in the background while the visible one is playing, and flip between them, dumping the previously visible player's video and always buffering the next chunk in the hidden bit.

This idea has been something my friends and I discussed a lot at one time or another, it's really cool to see it in action.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did try something like that where I loaded all the video segments at once and hid all but the current segment with CSS. However I wasn't able to get it working how I wanted, there were still loading delays and some visual glitches when switching clips, it also was a little unreliable. After fiddling with it, trying different hiding and timing methods and not getting the results I wanted I opted for a much simpler system. But, I think that a "double buffer" system could have improved playback if I'd spent more time on it.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome! Is there anyway to mix more than one video in one mashup? That would be really useful to me right now.

</comment><comment><USER4> really awesome idea... I think your underestimating yourself a little in thinking they didn't get many submissions. This is honestly a good idea executed well.

Congrats on winning.

<comment><USER5> +1</comment></comment>


The History of Computers 1938 to 2010 [Infographic] - <AUTHOR> http://smashinghub.com/history-of-computers.htm

<comment><USER2> A very partial and wildly selective subset based on an about.com article. Lame.

EDIT gave this a point in error, wish I hadn't.</comment>


What education startup you will start if you had a million to spend? - <AUTHOR>

If you had a capital of one million US dollars to invest in any education/training related startup that makes trainee "employable" what kind of startup will you choose? How will you spend the money? <comment><USER2> A skill network for trainees connecting content to learn, challenges to solve and showcase skills with their work.</comment>


ES6 Rest/Spread, Defaults and Destructuring - <AUTHOR> http://www.datchley.name/es6-rest-spread-defaults-and-destructuring/ <comment><USER2> This is slightly wrong: Object rest and spread is not part of ES2015, it's actually a stage 2 proposal. [0]

Here's the list [1] of current proposals.

[0] [https://github.com/sebmarkbage/ecmascript-rest- spread](https://github.com/sebmarkbage/ecmascript-rest-spread)

[1] [https://github.com/tc39/ecma262#current- proposals](https://github.com/tc39/ecma262#current-proposals)</comment>


Newsweek on the cooling world - <AUTHOR> http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm <comment><USER2> I'm not a Global Warming advocate.

But I've never found the "Global Cooling" argument very compelling. I don't think you can take any misconception from 34 years ago and use it to invalidate a current scientific theory because the technology we use to measure and extrapolate has increased so greatly.

Keep in mind this article was written only 4 years after the first commercial microprocessor was release (the 4-bit Intel 4004). So you can't even compare our ability to measure and interrupt data now to what they had then.

</comment><comment><USER3> Newsweek is not a good resource for judging the true scientific research of the era. Newsweek spins stories to sell magazines. If anyone is curious about the real details of the research I would suggest reading:

The Myth Of The 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus by Thomas C. Peterson, William m. Connolley, and John Fleck

[http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0...](http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> When were clean air legislations enacted? Maybe that halted the possible cooling effects of soot, and allowed temperatures to start rising.

<comment><USER5> That's actually an important effect, decreases in aerosols has probably caused an increase in temperature especially in urban areas in the western industrialized world. Interestingly, the increasing use of coal burning to fuel developing economies, especially in China, is leading to increasing local cooling in some areas.

<comment><USER6> But you can't deny the fact that burning those chemicals releases gasses into the atmosphere which lead to a runaway greenhouse effect. That's no good for Earth's environment if life is to survive nearly as well as it did 10 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm confused -- are they saying that the Earth is cooling or is the temperature increasing??</comment>


Penguins inspire a novel way of making sure code in smart cars does not crash - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38637006 <comment><USER2> Can someone translate this for me? Why do penguins change how software development works?

" _They forage in groups and have been observed to synchronise their dives to get fish, " said Prof Papadopoulos. "They also have the ability to communicate using vocalisations and possibly convey information about food resources._"

" _This solution has generic elements which can be abstracted and be used to solve other problems, " he said, "such as determining the integrity of software components needed to reach the high safety requirements of a modern car._"

 _By mimicking penguin behaviour in a testing system which seeks the safest ways to arrange code instead of shoals of fish, it becomes possible to slowly zero in on the best way for that software to be structured._

... What?

<comment><USER3> And the article doesn't appear to have any links with further technical detail. As given, I'd say it amounts to clickbait.

<comment><USER4> Or birdbait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Relevant publication: [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7397214/?reload=true](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7397214/?reload=true) _Can aquatic flightless birds allocate Automotive Safety requirements?_

TL;DR: Penguins Search Optimisation Algorithm (PeSOA). PeSOA mimics the collaborative hunting strategy of penguins, using the metaphor of oxygen reserves as a search intensification operator. This allows the penguins to preserve energy, consuming it only in areas of the search space that are rich in good solutions. The performance of the approach is evaluated by applying it to a benchmark hybrid braking system case study, demonstrating performance that is an improvement to those reported in the literature.

<comment><USER5> Another nature-inspired take on optimization. For anyone curious, the Wikipedia article below on Ant Optimization and its "Related" section have detail on how these sorts of things get applied.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Scary fact of the day: There are about a million lines of code in the average car, and more in connected ones.

If they have done _really_ well at debugging, they may only have 5 bugs per kloc, so 5000 bugs.

<comment><USER7> Where does that "5 bugs per kloc" figure come from?

<comment><USER6> Google "bugs per line of code", and the top result says that the industry average is 15 to 50 bugs per kloc. I'd expect (hope) people making cars do a little better than that, hence a guestimate of 5.</comment></comment></comment>


China's tech industry is catching up with Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/02/daily-chart-11 <comment><AUTHOR> Here is one likely root cause of China's rapid rise and US' relative stagnation:

""Of 200,000 doctorates in science and engineering earned worldwide in 2010, about 33,000 were awarded by universities in the United States, China 31,000, Russia 16,000, Germany 12,000 and the United kingdom 11, 000," says the report."

"But China leads the world when factoring in doctorates in the biological, physical, Earth, atmospheric, ocean and agricultural sciences and computer sciences."

"Also, in the United States only 57% of doctorates were earned by citizens and permanent residents, while temporary visa holders obtained the remainder." [1]

China's figures are likely higher now in 2018.

Note that there appears to be some quality issues that come with the acceleration of China's PhD production, although initiatives are being taken to reform the system. [2]

In the long run, the advantage of having an abundant number of STEM and CS graduates to recruit from may prove highly impactful, or even decisive, for many tech-based industries. To compete, the US needs to develop more local talent in STEM as well as attracting talent from abroad.

A focus on the very top-end by doing groundbreaking research, which the US has often excelled at, might also be necessary.

[1] [http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014022...](http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140227152409830)

[2] [https://www.editage.com/insights/where-does-china-stand- in-t...](https://www.editage.com/insights/where-does-china-stand-in-the- global-phd-boom)

<comment><USER2> I'm reluctant to use "number of PhDs" as a proxy for "depth of tech talent pool". PhDs in the US have become somewhat odd -- I see advertisements on public transit (!) for quick doctoral programs in all sorts of fields, and many of these programs appear to be PhDs in name only, awarding degrees with little to no connection with actual original research. So a PhD alone is no longer an indicator of actual research ability but just another academic credential to slog your way through.

I would guess something like this holds in China as well, possibly confounded by 1. China's different political culture, which appears to blend political advancement and academic titles in a weird way, 2. a stronger cultural emphasis in China on academic titles, and 3. China's historical preference for people with science/engineering backgrounds (rather than, say, law as in the US) to lead its state.

If anything I imagine China's loose regulatory environment, abundant supply of citizens unconcerned about data privacy, and sheer number of people trying things are bigger advantages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Copying intensifies_.

Joking aside, one of my latest worries is that China will win out in the end with its EV-focused industry, which will also be self-driving vehicles for the most part. I think they're planning on doing to the western auto industry what they did to the western solar panel industry: encourage its own EV industry aggressively through subsidies and regulation, then subsidize exports, too. Western car companies in 2 decades = bankrupt.

If half of the world ends-up travelling via backdoored self-driving Chinese cars 20 years from now, I think we're screwed. And I mean that even if the Chinese government has no intention of exploiting the backdoors maliciously _itself_ \- other than the occasional assassination of Chinese dissidents/critics (say no more than a few hundred a year - they've got to keep that sort of thing in check after all) and complete surveillance of your driving habits, what you say in your car, who you're seeing in your car, and other stuff like that, _of course_. The backdoors in there will be more than enough for _every other malicious actor_ out there to exploit them.

<comment><USER4> I am pretty sure the "western" auto industry has been doing themselves more harm for a long time, compared to what the Chinese could do.

And as far as State created exploits, there are plenty of these being introduced by "western" governments. I don't really prefer to have either having access to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think similar observations and arguments were made in the 80s about Japanese firms. It would be interesting to make some comparison, if only to see how things are (or could be) different this time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Exactly as the US did to the UK in the late 1800s, and Japan + Korea to the US in the 1970s on.

There is advantage to not being the incumbent. First you copy (badly) and soon enough you match quality and innovate. That you can do so without the years of technical debt or obsolete tooling and infrastructure gives speed advantages.

</comment><comment><USER7> This trend should not be surprising. China has a population of 1.4 __billion __people, almost 5x the population of the US. If you 'll excuse the Saturday morning math, the Chinese population only needs to produce quality software engineers at 1/5 the rate of the US in order to outpace US engineers in terms of pure numbers.

Programming is not some elite field that only enlightened Western minds are capable of. After a certain point it really is a numbers game -- how many smart people can you throw at big problems? In this sense, the US is at a distinct long-term disadvantage compared to larger countries like China and India, simply due to the sheer size of the population differences.

<comment><USER8> And yet china population has been 5x US population for at least a century, but we're witnessing china waking up only for the last 20 years. The fact that they're reaching phd level in large quantity is a new thing.

<comment><USER9> Interesting isn't it? Chinese people didn't just bootstrap themselves either. They got help. I mean, does anyone actually think that the Chinese populace asked for Communism and built up their tyrannical government from within? No way.

So who helped them start all this and why? Yale admits that they were complicit in helping Mao Tse Tung come to power in an article entitled "Yale Group Spurs Maos Emergence" \- [http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collectio...](http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/yale- ydn/id/135148/rec/14)

Without even looking at individual players, you can see what's going on. The USA has empowered China by buying everything they've made over the past 60 years. You'd think based on our values, a country like the US would have a big problem doing business with China. But nope! Everything's fine, just don't let any controlled-media mouthpiece talk about it though.

There are many, many, many open and obvious details which outline an invisible hand at work here. If you look deeper, you'll also find the involvement of such shady characters as a certain well-known family of international banksters who loan money to start wars and people who start wars to be able to sell their drugs to people. Long story short: I think that China is the prototype for a new world-wide government that is going to take over after the big-bad USA (my homeland) is wiped out either economically or physically. The stage is being set right now and there is no time in history that we've looked worse than we do right now. I'm pretty sure we deserve whatever we get though because we've let our tax dollars be used for some pretty nasty business.

Regardless of who anyone thinks the players are, we all know that the culture of corruption is real. This is the absolute height of corruption and it is definitely possible if not probable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I can say as an more or less of an insider: the report is credible.

Look at electronics industry, while the "China wave" is waining already, but you still can't do anything electronics without going to a single city in China.

Same will eventually be true for software, but it will take no less than a decade as it was for electronics.

It took around 15 years for the sentiment to change from "hey look, they can actually make electronics" to "I can't make parts A and B for my project outside of China" to "to don't even try making out of China"

<comment><USER11> With electronics - like with most physical products - having your production facilities near your suppliers and customers, and having lots of low cost labor, has a really big impact. With software, it's a completely different story.

<comment><USER10> Not that much. It is an illusion that Shenzhen has an overwhelming advantage from the cluster effect. China still imports even passive components from Taiwan, and labour costs for professionally trained assembly line staff are higher than in some parts of Europe.

It is 100% percent due to intellectual capital there. Multiple cities in China has more developers than a whole state of California.

Just now the lion share of them toil in China's analogues of pets.com, or outsourcing sweatshops for Western online giants like Amazon.

It will be take just a flick to turn the tide in reverse when Chinese domestic companies get to the point when making software for themselves will make more money than selling as a service outside. Then, the chain reaction will start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The first chart says that the number of AI professionals in China is less than 10% that of the US, while the number of third-party cited AI papers is around 80-90%. This implies that either 1) each Chinese AI professional publishes many, many times more papers than a US-based one, which seems unlikely, or 2) there are many more non-publishing AI professionals in the US, e.g. working as a non-research engineer, than in China, where presumably many or most with the label 'AI professional' publish papers.

Anyone with more knowledge/insight about this peculiarity?

</comment><comment> dis-sys if you look at the first chart, it basically says that when compared with the US, China is producing comparable number of third party cited AI papers when its number of AI professionals is just like 10% of the US total. clearly you don't need to be an AI professional to see the problem here - it is all about quantity not quality. then the sad truth is that for most other categories, China is also far behind in term of quantity.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is China influential or a creator in terms of the underlying tech used around the world? Software, coding languages (or contributions), frameworks?

<comment><USER13> Have at look at most recent CS research papers. There is invariably one or more authors who are Chinese - especially so in the fields of AI and NLP.

<comment><USER7> Luckily for those of us who cannot speak Chinese, even papers from Tsinghua University are generally published in English.

There are so many Chinese natives compared to the rest of the world. It will be interesting to see in the next decade how the open source community evolves as China grows from 50->100% Internet penetration and some of those users become involved in open source. Anecdotally, you can already see this happening on some fairly popular repos on github that are entirely in Chinese.

Will we see two open source communities develop in parallel, one in English and one in Chinese? Will we see more effort at translation of documentation for major software packages?

<comment><USER14> While they keep github blocked (is it?) I doubt we will see so much original content that gets traction.

<comment><USER15> GitHub was blocked briefly and then unblocked in China. Other than gist, which remains outside the wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not surprising. The things you can do with your smartphone in China makes the US and Europe look like a third world country.

<comment><USER17> You just can't google a certain term, "something square" IIRC.

<comment><USER16> I doubt most Chinese even know what Google is by this point and they certainly don't need it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't this a good thing? Double the research?

Don't we want the rest of the world to equal the US?

<comment><USER19> There's a geopolitical dimension to this question, because of one-party rule in China. If the regime were less oppressive, reactions would be different.

<comment><USER20> I doubt that assertion. Look to its neighbor India - a relatively much freer and open society, but greeted with sneery snarkiness on these fora.

<comment><USER21> until India can ensure basic sanitation infrastructure to their population, all talk of leadership in tech is superfluous.

<comment><USER18> That's probably wrong. If India held tech leadership, it would generate more wealth for the nation, thus raising the standard of living for many.

People would also see a path to take to have a better life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The thing with China though, is that it consistently has something fall apart right before it makes the transition from contender to influencer on the world stage.

Historically it has been famine, but other times it has been the cultural emphasis on being the best copier of ideas (the civil service exam used to be about who could recite the teachings of Confucius the most actually, not who could create the best new interpretation), and not on creating original ideas. When you're at the top you must create original content.

And the third case, although not relevant this time, is the lack of maritime tradition / cultural emphasis on exploration. So somewhat related to point two in that there's little drive to explore the unknown.

<comment><USER21> Have you never heard of Admiral ZhengHe?

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

BTW, the middle kingdom WAS the "influencer on the world stage" prior to the industrial revolution in Europe. You could argue that civil service exam tested for rote memorization as it was looking for a specific aptitude that led to been a good administrator. Plenty of science, math and inventions originated or were independently discovered in China up to at least the Renaissance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't see the point made by the market cap chart or even how much they account for in the total market.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well developed mobile payments are nothing but a sign of undeveloped finance sector, people not having bank accounts or credit cards creates massive market for e-payments. I won't be surprised if Kenya is even more advanced in that field than China.

<comment><USER12> The explosion in mobile payments in China vs America/Europe is amazing, but it grates when it's used as an example of tech advantage (ie. as if Chinese companies were being more innovative or groundbreaking).

There's _a lot_ of cool things that happen or become possible when you have a mobile payments environment like China, but it's possible because of fairly special (and not necessarily desirable) market conditions and lack of regulation in China.

<comment><USER21> Hackernews and the English tech media in general tends to be very US/euro centric, but there is a lot more innovation going on in the Chinese market that never gets highlighted in English tech media. Almost like a parallel universe, until said western audience goes there and experience first hand a paradigm shift. Look up shanzai.

<comment><USER12> I lived there for ten years ;)

But yeah - I think there's amazing things happening. It's a bit of a shame that the discussion is regularly framed as 'who is number one?' - there's some straight up great innovation, and there's a lot of interesting adaptation and innovative use of existing tech to suit market conditions in China.

<comment><USER21> side question...how do short term tourists who might not be able to open a local bank account access wechat or alipay/mobile payments while in China? Are they forced to use just cash?

<comment><USER12> No idea :) I heard some foreign cards can now be linked to WeChat, but I've never had that problem. Otherwise I guess yes, Visa/Mastercard and cash.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Just released an iPhone app for travelers. Looking for feedback and advice - <AUTHOR> Having traveled with my older brother in Italy, I realized there is no good app for finding travelers who speak in your language. At Naples, nobody speaks English, almost.
So i decided to develop an app.
The app is now live at https://itunes.apple.com/app/flipthetrip-travel-chat-enjoy/id1049015937
Basically it is a simple app connects people who will be in the same place at the same time and speak in you language with the locals or other travelers.
We're in a public beta phase so we're looking for some feedback. Thanks in advance!
https://youtu.be/Z1TwIyJWbNo <comment><USER2> Works decent, some things I noticed:

App Store nitpicking...

\- App Store screenshots waste a lot of space on explanatory text. Show me the app!

\- Screenshot color scheme is very blah.

\- If you must use text, don't use a thin orange italicized font that is difficult to read.

The App itself

\- No way to un-check in (correction: just found it, no obvious way to un- check in). The button looks like it's part of the logo.

\- Clicked Message, saw "Some Errors, Try later".

\- Messaging working. Gray text on yellow background?

Feature requests

\- Geolocation sharing for meeting up

\- Profile photo beyond Facebook (I know you're working on this). \- Hire a designer

Basically, it works as advertised but the feature set is limited and the design needs improvement.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Some Errors, Try later" \- it was in anonymous mode?</comment></comment>


The Real Disappointment - <AUTHOR> http://sigusr2.net/2010/Jan/28/the-real-disappointment.html

<comment><USER2> "The real disappointment is the fact that the device is locked down and we'll never get the chance to use it to innovate the way we interact with our real computers."

It's not a computer, though; it's a device. Apple doesn't want you to interact with it like a real computer.

It's disappointing but if you wait someone will come out with a computer that size and you'll get all of the interactivity you want from it. Hell, Dell has one in the wings.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It's not a computer, though; it's a device. Apple doesn't want you to > interact with it like a real computer.

Precisely. My point is that I don't want to use it in the way "The Jobs" wants me too. I want to hack it into an _input_ device _for_ my _real_ computer.

Sorry for the confusion.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like it's meant to be an I/O device for your real computer. Also sounds like a great idea for an App.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If we're not careful this kind of total lockdown is the future for the rest of computing too.

<comment><USER5> I can live with a locked down device. I have a friend who may "love" such a feature, given her light use and the fact that her Windows PC has been wiped 4 times to remove malware.

But when such a device has the potential to take over the market and eliminate other channels of delivery and "ownership", I become very concerned. That's what most concerns me about the iPad; that in a year -- or more likely three -- I'll have to have one in order to access content. And then I'll only have a temporary, non-transferable, revocable-upon-whim license to said content. Bah.

I don't mind paying a reasonable amount. I do mind being locked in to whatever a monopoly dictates, in terms of cost but also in terms of rights. And I mind paying over and over and over for the same thing, as the platform changes.

And when "big media" so controls the content, what's to prevent the effective revision of history? What torture pictures? What treaty details? (What "Catcher In the Rye"?)

I guess some of us will have to resort to taking pictures of our iPads, just to document what was said. Let's just hope we're still able to do that.

(Finally, a personal grudge: I can tolerate advertisements, but ones involving motion and/or sound COMPLETELY distract me. Will the content become unusable for people like me, because the delivery channel forces an overwhelming level of distraction?)

<comment><USER4> I also hate the animated ads, and like most everyone else use Adblock or Ad- art. But on a completely locked down device it's highly unlikely that this type of customisation would be available to you, since ads of whatever annoyance level mean maximization of revenue.

Devices like iPad are exactly what "big media" want, and if we let them it's just what they'll get. Anything inconvenient, be it torture pictures, leaked information or whatever could be erased from millions of devices at the centralized click of a button. Think you own that library of ebooks you paid for? Think again. Want to transfer your content from one locked down device to another? You'll have to pay us first. Think you have any fair use rights whatever? Not on this device, baby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Boo hoo... You proclaim that the problem with the iPad is the restricted environment for 3rd party applications, and then justify this by saying that the iPad would make a great multi-touch VNC client if only Apple would allow. I say "VNC client" instead of mouse because I think this accentuates the lack of creativity on your part in dealing with what are quite minor restrictions. Here are Apple's restrictions (simplified):

      You can't write an arbitrary code execution environment.
      You can't publish someone else's software.
      Your software must carry an appropriate age rating.
      Hardware devices have to go through the dock connector.
      Only one app can run at a time.
      You cannot access the data of other applications.

For a low resources, everyday user device, none of these are unreasonable. You can even run unsigned code on any device you want, it just costs you a developer license.

BTW, there are already both traditional VNC clients and multi-touch "mouse" applications for the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't fully comprehend all the angst over the "closed" nature of the iPad. Where were all these people when Sony brought out the PS3? or when Microsoft brought out the Xbox? How about the Wii? DS? PSP? Amazon Kindle? Nook? All of these are _specialized_ computing devices. All of them are officially "closed" (though a great many are hackable). The fact that those systems are closed dosen't threaten mainstream general purpose computers. Why should the iPad? It's a device built for a specific purpose: consuming entertainment and media content as well as some work-related tasks like email and word processing.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's no reason why Apple can't come out with higher priced "professional" versions which have an open sandbox, or which are totally unlocked. Alternatively, they can create an alternative site where devs can post unsigned apps, to be downloaded by others who have some sort of SDK-installed sandbox.

So long as they can keep such things separate from their walled garden of an App Store, they can maintain the seamless user experience for the end-user consumers.

A virtualized "sandbox" could have a bandwidth-rate cap built into it, so the concern about "protecting the mobile network" could also be satisfied.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but there's no reason to think that they will either. In fact, I would highly doubt that they'd do that given that they haven't for the iPhone and they're notoriously minimalistic when it comes to making different versions of the same product.

<comment><USER3> It's very misguided to extrapolate in that way from the iPhone. After all, it's a _phone_! That _is_ its primary function. It's just dandy that the iPhone can also act as a powerful information tool.

This thing, it's an _information tool_ first and foremost. Also, professionals are willing to pay top dollar. Apple already makes lots of unlocked top-dollar hardware aimed at creative professionals.

But the real kicker -- Apple could sell almost the exact same hardware, with a few tweaks. Voila, a new product with _even higher margins_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am wondering what led you to expect that the ipad would be something different; was it apple's history of making non-locked-down devices? its tendency to produce metric truckloads of insanely popular consumer devices?

I am thinking of a general answer to posts of this sort: If you don't like it, don't buy it. And further, given the nature of this board, if you see a need (e. g., something people want), build it. Apple has seen a need, and it is building something that people want. You are seeing a need for something else, and it is possible that other people want it too, so why not go build it?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I am wondering what led you to expect that the ipad would be something > different; was it apple's history of making non-locked-down devices? its > tendency to produce metric truckloads of insanely popular consumer devices?

I don't think I ever thought it would be open and hackable, however one can always hope!

In reality though, some piece of me always believed that the iPhone was so locked down for reasons of getting it on cellular networks who seem not be so keen on the idea of letting folks do as they please with their devices. I've heard that in years past, getting a developers kit for something like the motorola RAZR was impossible, though that was word of mouth.

And of course the iPad will have GSM support, so that may still remain true.

> I am thinking of a general answer to posts of this sort: If you don't like > it, don't buy it.

I won't.

> And further, given the nature of this board, if you see a need (e. g., > something people want), build it. Apple has seen a need, and it is building > something that people want. You are seeing a need for something else, and it > is possible that other people want it too, so why not go build it?

In this specific case, I don't know if there's a want for it aside from my own. It's my Pony. The biggest reason to not go build it is the threat of patents. But, that aside, I don't have the resources or know-how (easily obtained myself, or by partnering with someone who does of course).

<comment><USER9> _I don't know if there's a want for it aside from my own._

Well, judging by the number of posts expressing disappointment, I see quite a few--I sense there is a need.</comment></comment></comment>


Google's fear: An Apple-Facebook love fest | Technically Incorrect - CNET News - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57446229-71/googles-fear-an-apple-facebook-love-fest/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 <comment><AUTHOR> Never going to happen, that Apple buys Facebook. But for those that own $FB stock, now languishing below 30, it's an interesting dream.</comment>


The World's Biggest Debtor Nations - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/30308959?slide=1

<comment><AUTHOR> It turns out US isn't that bad in debt in terms of percentage.</comment>


The Tick That Gives People Meat Allergies Is Spreading - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/lone-star-tick-that-gives-people-meat-allergies-may-be-spreading <comment><USER2> I personally know four people with this allergy. It's crazy how bad it can be. They all have to carry epipens and constantly remain vigilant about the food they eat. For one of them, it's not even the food they eat though. If they eat from a grill or plate that just had red meat on it, they can still break out in hives. She's been hospitalized several times from accidental exposure.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the relevant radiolab episode: [http://www.radiolab.org/story/alpha- gal/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/alpha-gal/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Would make an interesting premise for an environmentalist terrorism novel.

<comment><USER5> Ticks along with mosquitoes are (IMHO) something we should be waging biological war against to prevent the spread of disease. But then I'd probably eat a shotgun if I could never have another steak or swiss and mushroom burger. Of course some juicy sci-fi exploring the "Eh, what's the _worst_ that could happen" theme sounds like a lot of fun.

My favorite plot in this theme was someone who released a virus that rewrote and reduced your ability to understand abstract concepts, with the idea that lawyers would never again be able to obfuscate evil intentions behind ornate language. Absent was what the impact on software would be since (arguably) software engineers are using the same skills to express abstract thought in sometimes obscure ways.

<comment><USER6> Star Trek: DS9 episode 1x05 Babel. Terrorist device is triggered which causes the replicated to insert a virus that has the effect of causing people to lose their ability to speak - Aphasia.

Actually one of the more interesting episodes.

<comment><USER5> Good example but I was thinking of a book which I can no longer remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also prevalent in Sydney's Northern beaches:

[http://www.sbs.com.au/news/thefeed/article/2016/09/14/epidem...](http://www.sbs.com.au/news/thefeed/article/2016/09/14/epidemic- tick-induced-meat-allergy-sydneys-northern-beaches)

(edit: the allergy that is, not the tick, which is a different species)

<comment><USER8> "I certainly couldn't go to Bunnings on the weekend when there's a sausage sizzle."

How awful. This is the only reason I go to Bunnings. Sometimes I buy a plant or a few screws. But always a snag.

<comment><USER9> Interesting - just researched it; here in the states Lowes or Home Depot will sometimes have vendors selling hotdogs - which sounds similar to what you guys call a "snag" (interesting term), but with a money-making, not fund-raising involved...

Though a hotdog is technically a sausage, it's not the same as what we call a sausage over here, which usually denotes a breakfast item made of pork (and somewhat spicy), or is used in "italian" food (spaghetti and pizza being the main ones), cut into slices (pizza) or crumbles (pizza, spaghetti).

For something similar to "sausage on a bun" \- it would be a bratwurst dog (or "brats" as we say); this is a more coarse kind of "hot dog" sausage, with some spicyness (but not the same as breakfast sausages); if they're done right, they are first boiled in beer (any cheap brew will do - don't have to get fancy here), then grilled; serve on a bun with whatever condiments you desire (I generally prefer some simple yellow mustard and maybe some mayo, nothing else).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gia ie Earth fights human and protects the environment in its own way :D

<comment><USER11> Well, spread of the Lone Star tick may well be a consequence of global climate change. And meat production does contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

But it's probably just coincidence ;)

<comment><USER12> There is an interesting theory that deer ticks and associated diseases are in a symbiosis with deer by damaging predators and competing species that haven't co-evolved.

This tick/disease would be at the maxima of such a natural selection, able to achieve symbiosis perfectly with herbivores it hasn't co-evolved with. A biased probability sort of coincidence. ;)

<comment><USER11> Co-evolved with herbivores to damage carnivores? Insidious!

There's probably a way to check for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No cases outside of the US?

<comment><USER7> Plenty. See my comment above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ticks are freaking creepy AF. Stay safe folks.</comment>


Attack of the Twitter Clones: A look at their traffic, funding source and revenue models. - <AUTHOR> http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/11/1107_twitter_clone/index.htm?technology%20slideshows <comment><USER2> Traffic for many of these sites is much lower than I would have expected.

Looks like HN might get more traffic than several of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was thinking about building a service on top of BrightKite, but at 1/20th the number of visitors vs. Twitter I'm not sure.

Are there any other location-based social networks with a published API? Loopt seems to see itself more as a program and less as a platform.

</comment><comment><USER4> They missed 3jam, which is for group-texting rather than microblogging, but seems to deserve a place in that list

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting... the ones that charge seem to be doing the worst -- even if they add value with the cost.

<comment><USER6> I guess they aren't adding enough.

Or perhaps the lack of scarcity in the market is causing them to do worse.</comment></comment>


My 90's TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.my90stv.com/ <comment><USER2> I got a kick out of one channel where the guy said in 1991 "The rise of political correctness on college campuses".

Oh my! The more things change the more they stay the same.

<comment><USER3> I laughed at the recent South Park episode where some old guys are talking about the new wave of political correctness: "Yup... the last time this happened it lasted about 6 years"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I need scrambled HBO late night to feel it's real.

I used to be able to slam the top of the cable box sometimes to unscramble the feed. Talking about a proper cable box with a dial. 1-60. This might be why punching equipment is now my first line of recourse when dealing with technical issues.

Anyway, a box I can thunder slam would be a nice addition. If not, that's cool.

<comment><USER5> I used to have a 90s TV with a bad color chip. To prevent my game of Sonic the Hedgehog from going completely puke brown in hue I had to whack the side of the TV. (Sonic wasn't weird then... another nostalgic memory.)

Of course, much like cartridge blowjobs, hitting the TV may have been based more on superstition than reality.

<comment><USER6> We had an old cabinet TV that required a good smack in just the right spot on the left side to prevent most of the picture being green. As I recall the green-ness varied in saturation from the left to the right for some reason.

Over time the required smack became more and more forceful, and the smack target became smaller. Fortunately it kept working until the time came for a new TV though. Afterward I kind of missed that. (Sort of like I now miss the great triumph of getting my parents' old lawn mower to start.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is one obvious mistake. The 90's didn't officially begin until September 24, 1991 when Nirvana dropped Nevermind. Anything before that is still 80's.

<comment><USER8> I'd argue that the new era was ushered in by the controversy-engulfed March 1989 release of Madonna's "Like A Prayer."

<comment><USER9> For me the 90s began November 1989 watching the Berlin wall fall on TV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> YouTube Time Machine has been doing this for awhile, and they do a _great_ job at it:

[http://yttm.tv](http://yttm.tv)

<comment><USER11> Also [http://neave.tv/](http://neave.tv/)

Words can't even describe...

<comment><USER12> [http://vj.tv/wallflower/](http://vj.tv/wallflower/)

VJTV Wallflower also used to a good one to put on in the background on unused monitors in hip restaruants/lounges/offices/cafes. It makes a seamless playback experience and smooths the transition between videos.

Seems to be down now, but they use a Vimeo playlist for their videos here:

[http://vimeo.com/groups/wallflower](http://vimeo.com/groups/wallflower)

<comment><USER13> There is also AWSMTV [http://awsmtv.com/](http://awsmtv.com/)

24/7 non-stop music television

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is amazing. I'm watching a newscast covering the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. They have someone on there speculating about how they could evacuate people off the roof with baskets and helicopters. It's so eerie, watching this now.

Before that, there was a newscast talking about teen obesity in the US--only 15% of teens were overweight.

And the clothes...pleated khaki chinos, jean shirts, paisley ties. LOL.

</comment><comment><USER15> Neat. Came across this ad from AT&T about connectivity.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kfIFDX9kE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kfIFDX9kE4)

<comment><USER16> Yep. Something like ~20mbit symmetric fiber service was _supposed_ to be rolled out by the incumbent telcos _nationwide_ back in the 1990's. _Super_ glad to see that they kept to their promises.

<comment><USER17> they kept the tax breaks!

<comment><USER16> And lost the money in _really_ bad foreign investments!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice.

BTW, if the creator is listening, if you add "pointer-events: none;" to all the elements above the YouTube player we'll be able to close the ads.

</comment><comment><USER19> Really captured the experience of 90s TV. No fast forward. Instead, you have to change the channel every 10-30 seconds until you found something that held your attention. There was an anxious boredom that permeated the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Computer Chronicles from 1984

[http://www.my80stv.com/#cmhtRHw_Bv0](http://www.my80stv.com/#cmhtRHw_Bv0)

</comment><comment><USER21> For some reason I always knew something like this was coming. All that content form the 90's must be stored somewhere out there and one of us would recreate the channels in a way that we could relive it.

I really wish this gets to something real and that I might be able to show my kids in the future the cartoons that I grew up on.

Great work on this project!

<comment><USER22> You'd probably enjoy Nick Reboot or Toonami Aftermath, which are both community-generated channels that show that old content.

T.A. has a regular schedule, and have even managed to dig up old commercials and promos for the channel. It's pretty magical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd love something like this but for the internet. Wayback Machine is cool, but pretty slow, and modern browsers tend to render things a bit differently.

Someone should be able to compile a 1990s web browser with Emscripten, right?

<comment><USER23> It's not public yet, but yes: [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4546](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4546)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It was a bizarre era. Almost reminiscent of Rick and Morty's Inter-Dimensional TV bits.

<comment><USER25> Haha, yeah I got glimpses of Man vs Car!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is quite a blast from the past, Green PCs: [http://www.my90stv.com/#7Hm7gi5pGeM](http://www.my90stv.com/#7Hm7gi5pGeM)

Apple's representative talking about packaging was particularly interesting.

<comment><USER27> "Don't copy that floppy!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ran across a young Conan O'Brien appearing on young Jon Stewart's MTV talk show.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow. Check out my80stv.com Specials. It has KCSM's Computer Chronicles. Lots of old school tech is demonstrated, current events are discussed, people wrongly predict the future... It's amazing.

</comment><comment><USER30> Oh wow, I caught news report on Y2K bug: [http://www.my90stv.com/#1xWNm_w8uVg](http://www.my90stv.com/#1xWNm_w8uVg)

<comment><USER31> Check out this special on 'desktop presentation graphics' from 1989 (on sister site My 80's TV): [http://www.my80stv.com/#ysJZn3wqsAw](http://www.my80stv.com/#ysJZn3wqsAw)

There's a demo of MacroMind (now Macromedia/Adobe) Director in there that's pretty 80s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> brilliant! one small criticism - 60, maybe 99 channels MAX!

yes I am sure some folks had more, but double digits were the standard. and yes I'm a 90's teenager, 80s child.

</comment><comment><USER33> All that's missing is Butthead commenting on all this.

</comment><comment><USER34> Everything loads for me except the (I assume) videos and I get a special message:

"WARNING: This site only works on desktop browsers currently :|"

Does this use Flash or something?

</comment><comment><USER35> This was on Product Hunt like a year ago! :D

</comment><comment><USER36> My contribution: [http://betamaxmas.com](http://betamaxmas.com)

<comment><USER37> Wow, well done. That really took me back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is great, though I'd love to see something localized for Australia (and other countries)

<comment><USER39> Psh, it's already localized...

..to southern ohio. I miss my missouri commercials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Very cute project. It makes me wish that there were really a way to watch some of this stuff.

<comment><USER41> Youtube does have a ton of the cartoons from the 90s.

<comment><USER40> Yes, but it's very hit and miss, they tend to leave a lot to be desired re quality, a lot of them are mirror-imaged to get around automatic copyright detection, or the sound is bad, or...and so on.

<comment><USER42> Don't forget that at the time, HDTV was almost non-existent, and VHS tape at ~240p resolution was the most common recording medium.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, understood, but what I mean is that I don't want to watch 17 year old bootleg tapes that random people have uploaded to YouTube, I want Viacom or somebody to actually put this content online in whatever is the best quality they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The accuracy here is frightening!

</comment><comment><USER44> Is there a way to tell exactly what you are watching at any given time?

<comment><USER45> The title's down towards the bottom of the interface

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Holy Cow!

Life Stinks Trailer! I thought I was the only who remembered that movie!

</comment><comment><USER47> Gets to loading 99% and stops there for me.

<comment><USER48> You lucky, lucky person. 74% for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> that tube glow thing is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER50> This is awesome. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER51> How does this even work?

</comment><comment><USER52> Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER39> Flipped through channels, saw a Wallflowers music video, stopped.

Same thing happened 18 years ago. Nice to relive that.</comment>


Ask PG: When I login via OpenID, why does HN look at my contacts? - <AUTHOR>

I use the Google OpenID method, and every time it makes sure I'm okay sharing my contacts.  Is this just unavoidable when using OpenID with Google? <comment><USER2> nvm I answered my own question with some checking

this is interesting: <http://www.clickpass.com/docs/privacy-policy>

and this

[http://blog.teampatent.com/2009/03/30/clickpass-harvests- add...](http://blog.teampatent.com/2009/03/30/clickpass-harvests-address- books/)

<comment><USER3> This is particularly annoying. What can we do about it? If I don't want to use clickpass (with my gmail account) will my profile disappear? Can I substitute a different way of authenticating?

<comment><USER2> Couldn't you just click on your username and change your password which would allow you to directly log in?</comment></comment></comment>