Caring for Your Introvert (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for-your-introvert/2696/

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I buy the binary approach to this, nor his experience with "extroverts."

One, I'm not really one or the other; 23andme quizzes claims I'm extroverted, Meyer Briggs claims I'm introverted. I actually went around and asked people in my high school what they thought I was, and all the teachers thought I was an extrovert and all the students thought I was an introvert. Apparently it's situational.

And like the author, I often get tired of talking to people. But usually it's a result of conversing with someone who is extremely talkative. Sure, those people don't seem to _get_ that you are not into talking... but _not_ because they're extroverts. It's because they're socially disabled. Only someone who can't read facial cues will keep chattering away at you. Most people can see I'm getting weary and will stop.

I think this guy met one to many people who basically can't tell that you're just not interested in speaking with them, and confused them with "extroverts."

<comment><USER4> Introversion and extraversion are preferences, not skills. People who are introverted can do all the things that an extravert can, they just don't want to.

It's also possible to develop one even though your preference is for another. You may just be a well-rounded person in terms of social skills.

To make a long story short, phrasing things in terms of a strict dichotomy is an oversimplification, but I think it's one that makes this author's point clearer. It's difficult to discuss all of the ins and outs without making a piece like this overly complex.

<comment><USER5> they aren't preferences either, because preferences can change easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing for me I guess would be phone calls, pretty much don't like phone calls unless it's from a small select group of people or is something that would take many messages to resolve. Which kind of puts me at odds with those who like to call no matter what over messaging.

It's just those formalities of phone call that put me off, unless your close to a person focusing just on the question you have can come off as rude.

<comment><USER7> If I feel extra contact with someone is inevitable, I usually try to request that the person email me some helpful info that I need. If they say they'll "just call," I point out that [list of people] might find it useful, and joke that I can't forward them a phone conversation we've had. Some people still insist on calling, and I let them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't get tired by being with people so much as ... feel as if I've lost grounding - and most of my friends say that I'm extroverted and friendly and nice to be around with. So I don't know. After a couple of days of going out with friends I tend to want to come home because I feel too many things are going on, and I can't think.

Does that make sense? Am I the only one who feels this?

<comment><USER4> You sound like an introvert to me. Introverts are more sensitive than other people, so it definitely can lead to sensory overload. For example, I believe that introverts are affected more by caffeine.

Also, listen to your friends, but take them with a grain of salt. The only person that can correctly judge your personality is you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to date this girl who would tell me I was too serious... It was hard because I didn't have the words at the time to explain myself... Now I do.

Just... Thank you for sharing this.

<comment><USER4> I think this goes beyond just being introverted. I'd highly recommend picking up "please understand me" by David Keirsey. It's a pretty good breakdown of the different personality type and the axes on which personality is measured.

<comment><USER10> what, girls thinking you are 'too serious' goes beyond being introverted? It seems like a pretty normal experience to me.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't implying that it was abnormal. I was just saying that it's an orthogonal issue. More specifically, it's a thinking vs feeling issue rather than an introversion vs extraversion issue:

[http://www.care2.com/greenliving/thinking-vs-feeling- which-i...](http://www.care2.com/greenliving/thinking-vs-feeling-which-is- better-in-relationships.html#)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> But would anyone show up at the "Introverts' Rights movement" ?

Or would we just stay home? (lol!)

<comment><USER12> Stay at Home Introverts' Rights Movement, SHIRM.

<comment><USER13> And you know what SHIRM means in hindi? - <USER2>

<comment><USER12> It seems to be English slang word too: <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shirm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Being an ENTJ (not an introvert expert by any means) I wonder if those who are more introverted would be more comfortable, and thus perform better, with walls (tall private cubicles) vs. being in a bullpen style development environment that is favored by so many startups?

Based on the assumption that a lot of developers are INTJ in the Meyer's Briggs.

Any input on this guys?

<comment><USER15> Walls are totally not about introvert/extrovert, it's about the fact that if you get interrupted for 30 seconds, it can cost 15 minutes of productivity.

Walls make it more of an effort for someone to interrupt you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love how this article is 7 years old and it keeps getting reposed time & again. Classic stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> This article gave me the wrong impression that introverts are geniuses.

They are not, I know, I'm an introvert.

Of course a lot a people here are going to say that this article rocks, because I guess many people on HN are introverts.

I see no proof, no figure, no statistics on this article, at first I thought it was some blog post but it seems to be a real article in an actual newspaper. That's a shame.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what is the ratio of intro/extroverts among programmers. Something like 90/10 I guess.

<comment> a-priori According to the analysis I posted to a Myers-Briggs survey that appeared here this summer, about 75% of Hacker News is introverted according to that test. The INTJ and INTP types alone account for 60% of those surveyed (compared to 6.4% in the general population).

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249>

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that HN is a biased sample even among programmers though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everyone can be an extrovert on the Internet

</comment><comment><USER19> Excellent article. Hits the right note.

</comment><comment><USER20> groans...yet another special group.

<comment><USER4> If by "special" you mean "different", you're correct.</comment></comment>


Titanoboa – an open-source alternative to Zapier - <AUTHOR> https://www.titanoboa.io/using-titanoboa-for-cloud-integration.html <comment><USER2> The title meta tag said "alternative to ansible" and I thought, "why in the world?!?". Must have been a typo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed by now, as a bonus here is the original post: [https://www.titanoboa.io/using-titanoboa-for-it- automation.h...](https://www.titanoboa.io/using-titanoboa-for-it- automation.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> N8n.io is also a workflow automation alternative to Zapier, discussed here a couple months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676)</comment>


Ask HN: If future is AI – how can a company overtake Google/Facebook/Baidu? - <AUTHOR> Recent raise of AI to mainstream has also meant companies with large amounts of text/audio/video data are 'only' capable of having significant impact/progress. Google/Facebook/Baidu are way ahead in these. Any AI company would want to be with Google/Facebook etc for the data. There is a little paradox in this like a zen koan.<p>So if future belongs to AI - how should 'young turks coming out of school' plan to make impact or overtake likes of Google/Facebook. <comment><USER2> Why do people think so? They have definitely more manpower for leading certain areas (like internet search results)... but their AIs certainly don't cover every aspect of life. Imagine a very specific "field of your choice" where AI can improve... so you take one of the many open source AI libraries and train/retrain that thing to your specific needs and voila, you have your own AI which solves your problem pretty good. The bigger problem is more that this sort of development is new for most developers... but I think this will change over time. <\- this is a very good area where young people can be better than old developers. It's like a new chance maybe (like web development in the past).

<comment><AUTHOR> Although I do agree for a niche field AI. My original question is how do you get ahead of giants in a generic way once you come out of that niche. If we imagine internet as a book - google has that complete book in its servers with more understanding than any one. A niche field might be equivalent to a line in that book.

<comment><USER2> You're underexpecting your possibilities I would say. This is like saying: I will stop trying because the big companies are always better than me. Just go a little beside what they are focusing and then you will be better than them, for sure. Do it different etc.. Of course you will not beat them in their main game (search engine, personal assistant AI with searches etc.) but saying that this niche is only a line in the book is a huge underestimation... there are whole industries living in that niche. Google is not the world. For sure not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I could not make myself clear on this - I am with you on Google is not the world. There will be a 'niche thing' in future which will overtake it. Just like Google over took Microsoft. Read any tech book during late 90s and even Bill Gates own books. He has predicted all billion dollar companies in his book 'Road Ahead' but nowhere is Microsoft created those billion dollar companies/markets. Hence my point is: With AI dependent on large amounts of data - what could be that which will be grow bigger than Google in AI. We have to come out of logic to see this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Andrew Ng said the current need for massive data is due to the naiveness of current ai. Human doesn't need to see that many pictures to do classification. So one shouldn't focus on "brute force" ai in order to compete.</comment>


Ask HN: Opinions on cheating and modern computer science education - <AUTHOR> So it turns out that I'll be teaching a pretty typical CS course this coming fall at a local university as a part-time professor. I have some time to consider how I want to structure the course before I review my plan with the department. So I was hoping to get the HN community's take on two things that I am having a hard time balancing in my plan:

    - Improving learning and modernizing classroom procedures
    - Preventing cheating
 Basically, I'm interested in the possibility of using Git, Github, and a CI testing service to deliver, collect, and (at least partially) grade assignments via the most commonly used VCS workflow used by projects hosted on the platform. That is: everyone forks, pulls down, pushes up upon completion, submits PR for testing/review.
Overall I like the idea because it would expose them to these basic workflow & development lifecycle concepts early. Later, if they take well to it, I would like to explore creating assignments that are multi-stage and legitimately collaborative between me and them (perhaps organized into small groups). I think there is a lot of potential for learning there. And the platform removes a lot of the tedious parts of the process on my end.
But, there is a pretty big catch to running a course my preferred way though: other students will see each other's pull requests (ie. their completed assignments). In the minds of most faculty, the concern is that this would promote cheating. Academic integrity is something institutions need to protect to ensure the future value of their degree offerings, and enforcing individual assessments of all learning objectives is the way used to achieve that.
The on-again-off-again professor in me agrees with that, but the working software engineer in me is a lot less sure.
Any thoughts on this from the software professional side of the tracks? I'm asking the same to other professors that I know as well. I'm interesting in contrasting the two perspectives. <comment><USER2> To _me_ , CI and distributed version control and such and their tooling are more in the realm of engineering practice in the domain of computer science. The cryptographic hashing and merkle trees and scheduling algorithms that underly them are more the domain of CS.

Requiring students to have full fledged competence in using those tools seems way outside the bounds of most CS courses other than a practicum that is focused on _introducing_ those things and again that seems more the realm of engineering than computer science unless the department has settled on a curriculum that integrates such tooling.

Otherwise, the risk that you're only teaching to a portion of the class is perhaps greater than the benefits that come from tossing everyone into the deep end. The idea that students entering a computer science curriculum ought to have professional competence as developers is a recent development and seen by some people as a problem.

Anyway, professors should be professorial and if that's at odds with the working software engineer hat, take the hat off.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> What you can do, is create a repo that contains the explanation for a task, maybe some boilerplate, and some tests that will be run by travisCI or something similar. When students submit a pull request, the tests will automatically be run, so there you have your automatic grading part. CI can do more than tests though. You could also check for code style, and complexity using several tools.

Regarding cheating, maybe MOSS is useful: [https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/](https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/)</comment>


Microsoft teases HoloLens 2 launch for later this month - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18220038/microsoft-hololens-2-video-teaser-launch-mobile-world-congress <comment><USER2> Kind of wish they hadn't released a teaser for something so heavily anticipated and with so few public updates. Really sets the bar higher than it needs to be.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If they improve the FOV this might be amazing - I tried the first iteration and it worked quite well. Very excited :-)

<comment><USER3> Apart from the FOV and the crummy controls (the gestures were very unreliable and it really needed Vive-esque hand controllers) the first Hololens was basically perfect: object tracking was spot on with no lag or jitter and the holograms looked great. So this could be a real hit if V2 addresses those two pain points.</comment></comment>


The Problems With Half-Working - <AUTHOR> http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=181

<comment><USER2> You lost me at the part about going to the spa. Insert going to have a beer for each mention of spa, and have some clear and concise point, and it'd be a great post. Still- good read.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe this is one of the reasons that Seymour Cray dug holes as a hobby. Instead of work, just do something else that is not mental. Relax, Social, Drink, or Exercise.</comment>


3.7X speedup from removing a call to sleep - <AUTHOR> http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/117478 <comment><USER2> I am the one who originally added this sleep call to WebKit, when we first imported TCMalloc to use as our custom allocator. It was indeed there for a reason, but that reason is not applicable to WebKit's allocation patterns. TCMalloc was designed for a server workload, over time we have adapted it more to the unique needs of a browser engine. This change may help other operations, but probably not as much as the GC benchmark in question.

<comment><USER3> The person making this change seems to have not read the original comment either. It sounds like your change made the previous iteration of that code faster.

<comment><USER2> This reminds me why I hate comments. They tell you what someone once thought the code did. They don't actually tell you what the code does. You should always trust actual code and actual measurements above comments.

The original author of this comment (not me, I just imported the code) believed that it improved performance on a given server-side workload.

The person who removed the sleep, Geoff Garen (a colleague and a friend), is a good programmer. I am confident that he read the comment before deleting it. However, his actual performance measurement trumps the comment.

BTW, here is Geoff's snarky response on reading the posts here that mention the comment above the sleep() call: <[http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qqgwz/>](http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qqgwz/>). I agree with him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> True story...

Client gives me a Help Desk Ticket. User claims batch job use to run in 5 minutes but now runs for hours. The logs confirm this. The commit logs show that an offshore programmer forgot to remove a 10 second sleep command from inside an iteration (for debugging I presume) before promoting to production. I removed it and got a 100X improvement in throughput.

My client said that now his user loves him; what did I do to fix it so fast?

When I told him that I removed the Sleep, he said, "No! No! No! Change it to a 5 second Sleep so I have something to give him the next time he complains!"

<comment><USER5> " that an offshore programmer forgot..."

Unnecessarily mentioning a characteristic of an individual is a sign of selfish, biased, and/or malicious thinking. Do you mention "American programmer" whenever recounting their bugs? It appears you have an agenda of promoting negative stereotypes, presumably in your favor. This is lame. In the future, you'll appear more credible if you omit this bigotry from your comments.

I am certain there are thousands of programmers, male, female, gay, straight, onshore and offshore who are much better than you (or me.)

<comment><USER6> Hogwash. Haven't you ever read a novel or a news story or any kind of narrative? Details add color (uh-oh, I'm sure that'll get you riled up) and they help the listener understand context and picture the story in their head. How boring would life be if every time you read or heard anything negative about someone, it only referred to them as a human?

You can't solve prejudice and bias by pretending that people's race, gender, nationality, height, weight, shoe size, etc. don't exist. They do, they always will, get over it.

<comment><USER5> Sure, good stories have details, but a person's choice of detail reveals how they see the world. The comment's mention of "offshore" clearly serves no purpose beyond encouraging stereotype-based thinking. Knowing this programmer was offshore is as irrelevant as knowing their sex or their eye color. We've generally (and I think rightfully) exorcised this language in reference to other characteristics, why not this one?

In my experience, programmers who emphasize that "offshore" programmers are bad seem insecure about their own skills and job stability. The same is true of sexist men who go out of their way to mention when a mistake was made by a woman but never explicitly highlight when it was a man.

<comment><USER7> I understand what you're saying, but it's not bigotry if the "stereotype" is true.

"offshore" is synonymous with "cheap(er) labor" in the US programming world, and is an accurate statement since that's what it's _generally_ used for ("let's send it to XXX and it will cost us 1/10 as much")...

How many times do you think outsourcing happens in the US because they are looking for higher-quality code? 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% of the time?

"cheap(er) labor" is also synonymous with a bad product/service, because you often get what you pay for.

Are there exceptions to all this? Yes. Sometimes you can't find good quality coders in the US, but I doubt this is why outsourcing happens most of the time.

He might have generalized by adding that detail ("offshore") but that's not biggotry IMO as much as it is a flavoring.

<comment><USER8> Offshore is, most of the times, about getting the same quality of work at cheaper cost. How is it cheaper? Not because it is shoddy work, but the economics in the other country work out that way. How can you equate cheaper price = lower quality. If you are looking for people in US alone, then cheaper = lower quality. Since another factor of the equation, the country, is changing, that is not the case.

<comment><USER9> _Offshore is, most of the times, about getting the same quality of work at cheaper cost._

I see you've never worked with offshore development.

<comment><USER10> I see you've never worked with GOOD offshore development.

<comment><USER11> Offshore also doesn't mean not American...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting how spinlocks are making a comeback in user space code. They are widely used in kernel code, but their use has previously been discouraged in application code. As this example illustrates, it's pretty easy to get them wrong...

<comment><USER13> Spin locks are discouraged in FreeBSD kernel code too, except for very low- level areas (serial console, pmap, and interrupt handling come to mind) where you can't safely ask the scheduler to do anything for you.

That said, our sleep locks are actually adaptive locks, so on SMP systems they'll spin for a bit before giving up and asking to be descheduled.

<comment><USER14> They are encouraged in the Linux kernel in places where it is nessesary to lock for a very short time. Using mutexes takes a bit of overhead, so they can't give you very short sleep times; that is when spinlocks have to be used.

<http://kernel.org/doc/Documentation/spinlocks.txt>

<comment><USER13> In FreeBSD the vast majority of sleep lock acquisitions are uncontended and end up being a single compare-and-exchange -- very fast. Spin locks are slightly more work, since we disable interrupts during them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone wanna supply some context? I have no idea what is going on here

</comment><comment><USER16> It was "only" on one particular benchmark, still it shows that profiling often give you surprising results that nobody familiar with the code anticipated.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why did they roll their own spinlock implementation in the first place? They could encapsulate the lock primitives provided by, and optimized for, each platform: CRITICAL_SECTIONs on Windows, futexes on Linux, and pthread_spin_locks elsewhere. iOS and OSX have some Mach-specific spinlocks (OSSpinLockLock?), but I don't have any experience using them.

</comment><comment><USER18> So if I understand this correctly the 3.7x speedup is a speedup in garbage collection and will have a positive effect on the speed of the browser which is nice.

But what sort of effect will this have on page rendering? Anyone in the know care to comment on the specifics?

edit: improvements to my shoddy wording.

<comment><USER16> My guess from spending only a few days with the WebKit source is that it will not effect page rendering at all.

Possibly not desktop performance at all since I believe GC is done in a separate thread and (from my understanding) you never wait on it, unless you are really memory constrained.

Could make a difference on IOS where I believe you actually don't have this GC memory scavenger thread.

Anyway, the source is quite readable and everyone working with WebKit on one level or another could benefit from taking a look. At the very least it gives you a feeling for the tremendous effort from a huge number of people that the WebKit project really is.

<comment><USER18> Cool, thanks for the insight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are sleeps() always necessary in multithreaded programming?

<comment><USER20> Use of sleep() in multithreaded programming is a bad code smell. There are other safer, more accurate, ways of suspending execution of the current thread until a particular event has occurred, though they may take a little more work to integrate into a program than sprinkling sleep's.

Spinlock implementations sometimes use sleep() calls in them to yield the current thread to others that may be ready to run but are currently being blocked. It's still a bad code smell though because spinlocks, at least in user space code, are used to avoid the overhead of yielding to other threads. There are also other locking mechanisms, like mutexes/futexes, that will accomplish the same yielding behavior if it's really needed, like if it's anticipated that the code waiting for the lock may be held up for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There was a long comment before the sleep. It seems likely that the sleep was there for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER22> To be fair, it's a sleep(0), which I assume is just the easiest way to get the process to context switch. I assume this is a speed improvement only when locks become ready sooner than a context switch.

The real fix would be to make context switches faster, this is just a data- driven tweak rather than a general solution.

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome!! I wonder when this is going to get pushed to mainstream Safari.

<comment> jarek-foksa The patch was committed on 2012-05-17, so it should be already present in Safari for OSX 10.8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Reminds me of "the speedup loop": <http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The- Speedup-Loop.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER25> The code is, appropriately, in the WTF directory.

</comment><comment><USER26> What's with the old comment "// Sleep for a few milliseconds", followed by the sleep function?

</comment><comment><USER27> Reduced the number of lines in the code base AND improved the product? nice.

<comment><USER28> Double nice. A co-worker and I once had a joke where we wanted our code counts for the year to be negative. No one tracks code counts, of course, but it was a fun idea.

He eventually replaced a particularly ugly and complicated system with a much simpler system, and thus he met his goal of going into the negative. Less code is better code.</comment></comment>


The quest to crystallize time - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/the-quest-to-crystallize-time-1.21595?href= <comment><USER2> Any of you saw the movie "Arrival"? Without spoiling anything, it drops an amazing concept, which is also exploited in the novel in a much subtler way, and it's bugging me ever since.

In the movie, the "alien" are not perceiving time like us, they experience it in a circular way, they also write in a circular way. There is no beginning and no end to what they write, it just happen. The main character, after having studied them for a long time, start to think like them, and she start to experience time like them. So she merely exist in the present, past and future, she just exist. You can take what you want, but for me it's like we maybe simply exist, at any given time, we can remember or/and live our past but also our future. We just exist, at any given moment of OUR time; You can BE at anytime between your birth and death. We're maybe just stuck in our current concept of time, like we maybe don't perceive other dimensions because they are "hidden" to our way of experiencing our world.

Enough talk anyway.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like Philip K Dick's take on time. IIRC he had a mental breakdown at one point, and believed this is exactly how time works. That at any moment, you could be walking down the same street in 2000 AD, 4000AD, and 0 AD, and the same stories would be or could be unfolding

<comment><USER4> Actually based on a short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang:

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

<comment><USER5> Not from what I know. PK Dick towards the end of his life believed himself to be living both in 1974 and as an early Christian named Thomas in the Levant sometime in the first century CE contemporaneously.

<comment><USER4> It's easy to check:

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/)

Writers: Eric Heisserer (screenplay), Ted Chiang (based on the story "Story of Your Life" written by)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Much of it was better explained a few years ago at [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130425-perpetual-motion- tes...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130425-perpetual-motion-test-could- amend-theory-of-time/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am not a physicist, but I'm seeing a similarity between time crystals and the vacuum, as the vacuum results in quantum fluctuation - which is also a form of activity at zero-point energy. This point of view means that the vacuum could be contrived to be a time crystal. I'm clearly drawing an incorrect conclusion, but why?

<comment><USER7> I think the crystal part is more about the symmetry breaking than the non-zero energy part.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, what an obvious miss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Crystallization of time seems like a misnomer to me. Aren't they continually adding laser energy to the system to maintain the "crystal" state? Doesn't crystallization imply a stable state resistant to external energy sources rather than dependent on them?

<comment><USER9> I tend to agree, but had a lot of trouble understanding the article (I studied different branch of physics). I think this is the key:

"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder... More than that, the researchers found that even if they started to flip the system in an imperfect way, such as by slightly changing the frequency of the kicks, the oscillation remained the same."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Time doesn't exist. It is simply an abstraction to measure the comparative rates of the movement of matter.

All our measurements of time refer to the movement of matter: the rotation of the Earth, the orbit of Earth around the Sun, the swinging of a pendulum, the vibrations of a cesium atom.

Time travel is not possible. It would require the re-arrangements of atoms into exactly their former position, which is precluded by entropy. Too bad.

There is no past or future. There is only the forever "now".

<comment><USER11> > Time doesn't exist. It is simply an abstraction to measure the comparative > rates of the movement of matter.

You can't claim time doesn't exist, then offer a definition of time, which _requires time to exist._

Also, general relativity would like to have a word with you after class.

<comment><USER12> The point boils down to, is time invented or discovered?

Most science (I think) presumes that time was discovered (before recorded history for obvious reasons).

Critics argue that it's invented to help orient our perspective of events.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bullshit. Whatever they think they have crystallized, according to an interpretation of reading of their instruments, which uses statistics and probability, is not time.

Time is a derived characteristic of an observed process and requires an observer, so it does not exist as an independent phenomena. Whatever they have convinced themselves it was, it is not time.

<comment><USER14> Yes, the scientists are full of bullshit, but your quasimystical interpretation of requiring an observer is insightful.

I think your post is just nonsense. Particularly because you used the phrase "crystalize time" rather than "crystalize matter in the time direction", which makes me wonder if you even know what a time crystal is.

<comment><USER13> Yes, some "modern science" is no different from astrology or metaphysics, nothing extraordinary here. Same dogmatic, unproven theological sectarian arguments about abstract concepts and fancy theoretical models.

<comment><USER14> This is literally a case of someone performing a test because the community thought the concept couldn't happen (after some debate).

That's pretty much exactly the _opposite_ of dogmatic.

Let me ask you this, though: do you have a better idea of how to do science? Because it sounds like you're just whining science isn't perfect and modern science is hard/confusing.

<comment><USER13> The case of performing a computer simulation, or an empirical experiment?

<comment><USER14> Empirical experiment.

Did you even read the article before ranting at the concept?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can't remember iPhone stock photo site submitted to HN (don't upvote) - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone remember the HNer that submitted this site a few months ago?
There were royalty-free high-res PSD templates of iPhones with blanked-out screens; some on wood picnic tables, outdoors with trees (lol, right?), indoors next to other Apple products, and people holding them in various ways.  One could use these to show their app's screenshots "in use" on their site. I neglected to bookmark it, thinking I'd never have a use for them... whoops!
Thanks for your help. <comment><USER2> Are you perhaps thinking of Placeit? [https://placeit.net/](https://placeit.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahah yes!!!! Thank you SO much. My only regret is that I have but 1 upvote to give.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I upvoted just because I think the site is SO cool.</comment>


Magic Mask – A behavior-changing application to help stop the spread of viruses - <AUTHOR> https://magicmask.stanford.edu <comment><USER2> april fools ?</comment>


Jeff Bezos: I spend my billions on space because we're destroying Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/why-jeff-bezos-spends-billions-on-space-technology.html <comment><USER2> Maybe it's related to the cult of optimism that surrounds these kinds of "startup" ideas, but what is the actual plan for living a nice life outside of Earth? At least on a timeline that's helpful for Jeff Bezos and his peers.

Supporting life in space or our on our planetary neighbors will always be harder then trying to sustain life on a Earth, even one that's less hospitable and riven with climate instigated strife. Unless their plan is to hide in orbit while the society and environment they were born into crumble.

What happened oldest pastime of the fortunate: being a humanitarian and philanthropist?

This man can have anything he wants, yet still he can only wants to escape his troubles and anxieties, and lacks the courage to help current and future generations that will inherit the mess he's choosing to ignore.

We'll never solve our problems if our society's leaders don't have the will to face them.

<comment><USER3> In fairness, Bezos is only doing what billionaires are expected to do: do billionaire things like send rockets into space and do billionaire things like anticipate future utopias. He wouldn't be a billionaire if he wasn't into aeronautics and space flight. We all know about the old stereotype of Dr Evil and his moonbases. It was portrayed very nicely in the Austin Powers movies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He should be spending his money on cleaning up the trash and pollution his company produces directly or indirectly and then helping shift to greener ways of life.

At this point in time it seems highly unlikely that we can ditch Earth for somewhere else. We must take responsibility now and execute radical change.

It starts with men like Bezos.</comment>


'Dead Sea Scrolls' at the Museum of the Bible Are All Forgeries - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/museum-of-the-bible-dead-sea-scrolls-forgeries/#close <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569457) (without #close appended to the URL)

</comment><comment><USER3> To clarify, the Dead Sea Scrolls are not forgeries. These specific (what were though to be) copies/additional fragments that this one museum bought are forgeries, but the Dead Sea Scrolls are real.

<comment><USER4> I doubt anyone was confused on that point, but for what its worth: _One of the earliest carbon dating tests was carried out on November 14, 1950. This was on a piece of linen from Qumran Cave 1, the resulting date range being 167 BCE – 233 CE._

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this means the authentic copies are in better hands, then this is good news.</comment>


How can one believe in science and religion at the same time? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/How-can-one-believe-in-science-and-religion-at-the-same-time/answer/Jae-Won-Joh?srid=dP

<comment><USER2> This long article is mostly true, but it doesn't contain any strong reconciliation of science and religion. The author states, correctly, that there is a huge amount that science can't yet explain, and that effective scientists must not rule out any possibility prematurely. He then suggests that this idea can help make religion and science more compatible in one's mind, but not without so many qualifications and reservations as to demonstrate that even he doesn't quite see how it's possible, which it isn't.

Most "atheists" are, strictly speaking, agnostic (or "possibilian," the author's preferred term). No scientifically-minded person is absolutely certain that no god exists. That doesn't make belief in a god in the least bit scientifically justifiable. Nevermind belief in a particular god. Until evidence for the existence of any god is found, the only rational position one can hold is that no god exists.</comment>


Cruise Automation, GM's Self-Driving Cars, and the Founders Behind It - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/cruise-automation-general-motors-driverless-cars/ <comment><USER2> This is a great quote: "Startups with no demanding customers can lose their urgency, with development cycles dragging on for years, says Rust, who worked at Google's experimental research factory before joining Cruise. "We tried to accomplish what one of the most talented teams at Google did in two years and compress that into six months," Vogt says."

This is one of the main reasons why "internal startups" at big companies fail. They lack urgency. The same thing often happens at startups that are over- funded too -- they think they can afford to take their time and that leads to compounding slowness.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but in this particular case I would say that urgency is not the best thing to have. When my life is on the line, I would much rather have an autonomous driving system that was developed slowly and deliberately without time pressure instead of one that was rushed out the door to beat a competitor to market.

<comment><USER4> This is a fair point, but don't underestimate the value of getting something to market sooner rather than later, even for something like this.

Look at it this way: would you rather wait for five 9s against getting in a collision of any kind, in a car you won't be able to buy for another 25 years ... or settle for four 9s, and take delivery by christmas?

I don't know enough about the odds or the effect vs speed to comment with any confidence about whether Cruise's autonomous driving system fits this pattern or not, but I too often see a knee-jerk "slower and safer is always better when _LIVES_ are on the line!" reaction, and I think it's worth being careful about whether it actually does make for a safer world.

<comment><USER5> This is a false dichotomy and just not representative of reality.

There _can never be_ self-driving cars because the type of generalized intelligence that would be required is impossible to achieve. The fact remains that a computer program can only do what it is told, it cannot think. Code has no mind.

So what the choice is between is, instead, someone (Tesla) pushing out a falsely marketed support system that does none of the things it is believe to be able to, and causes unnecessary deaths and injuries. And, on the other hand, thorough testing to uncover the possibilities and limits of the technology, to produce a reliable, usable product.

<comment><USER6> This is a little simplistic. Computers can do things they aren't heuristically programmed to do - that's the basic idea behind machine learning. I've seen some incredibly impressive robots that ran entirely on neural nets and never failed, but because it was impossible to understand how they worked they could only be used for demonstration purposes as guaranteeing safety was impossible.

What you seem to be referring to is true AI. I agree we are nowhere close to anything resembling true AI, but I do believe something representative of a computer that can "think" will appear in the coming decades.

That said, you can program a car heuristically. Statistically speaking, the unknown unknowns are so rare that assuming it doesn't fail under expected conditions you can guarantee it to be safer than humans. The unknown unknowns are not the problem right now, it's just dealing with limited sensor input (cars have a hard time "seeing" what's around them) and making sense of the world around it.

<comment><USER7> There is a considerable ongoing research effort in formal verification of learned systems. Once an ML system has been trained, it becomes deterministic and can be tested.

<comment><USER6> That sounds neat. Can you link me to a paper?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now that explains some things. The initial Cruise Automation system was lane keeping and auto speed control, which everybody has. It was over-promoted as full automatic driving on the Cruise web site and Youtube.[1] "Just sit back and enjoy the ride", says the video.

The founder was credible enough to sell GM on buying their 40-person startup for somewhere between $500M and $1BN. GM already had the Cadillac/CMU technology self-driving technology, which was better than what Cruise had. But GM bought anyway.

One of the best deals made since Bill Gates sold IBM on adopting DOS.

Meanwhile, Cruise now has multiple Velodyne laser units on a rack on top of the car, like everybody else.

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

<comment><USER2> You are watching a two year old youtube video and then confidently extrapolating to conclude that Cruise has no tech and that GM got duped out of a billion dollars.

<comment><USER9> Well, all they are showing is that they have no tech.

Even the photos in this article are a bunch of Chevrolet dumps charging.

<comment><USER10> there is 15+ self driving startups at the moment, GM has prolly seen all of them and went with Cruise

<comment><USER6> That isn't sound logic. GM has a track record of making terrible managerial decisions, so assuming they know best is ignoring history. The people making the decisions haven't worked on self-driving cars and are not the best people to judge the technology, in fact these are the very people who twice (technically thrice, but that's another story) abandoned their own self- driving R&D which ultimately went to Google and Delphi (and another which was just completely thrown away).

You're also assuming that all of the other companies wanted to sell, which isn't true.

<comment><USER10> Otto sold for 680 million to Uber in August 2016, the company started in 2015, that's atleast one company that was willing to sell and I figure most of them would, they all have no end game other then being acquired for the most part

[http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber- paid-680-milli...](http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber- paid-680-million-for-self-driving-truck-company-otto-for-the-tech-not-the- trucks)

time will tell if the Cruise acquisition pays off or not

<comment><USER6> Otto was designed to be sold to Uber before it was created, there's a reason it was self-funded despite having nearly 100 employees by the time it was acquired. Anthony Levandowski met Travis Kalanick years ago and had been planning something like this for a while. It's basically an open secret.

<comment><USER10> we will see a few more acquisitions play out in this space over the next year or so but I do believe Google will have a hard time acquiring the companies in the space as tons of people are jumping ship and some are even starting their own self driving startups with prolly no intention of going back to google like Otto

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Cruise is working with GM to add autonomous-driving technology to the Bolt.

May be GM popped out $1 billion so that they can put their own of version of Tesla's auto pilot in Bolt.

<comment><USER12> I am not sure any company is going it alone, Tesla didn't create their system on their own anymore than GM did. After reading a Motortrend article where they tested most of the major systems it seemed most are very good at unsafe tailgating and work only in ideal conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Statistically speaking, most of us will never build a billion-dollar company. We definitely won't build two of them"

If you mad a billion dollars from your first company then you have a hell of a lot of money to invest in your second, so statistically speaking its actually quite high.

</comment><comment><USER14> I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I'm virtually positive that Cruise was just snake oil. I expect GM to trail other automakers in this area, particularly after this acquisition. Now, to be fair, that is pretty much the null hypothesis since GM trails in a lot of areas. But, I view the Cruise acquisition as a confirmation of -- not a rebuttal to -- the notion that they are far behind and will fail.

<comment><USER15> > _I know I 'll get downvoted for this_

Please don't break the HN guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)) by going on about getting downvoted.

Your assessment was also off base, because unsubstantive dismissals (which your comment unfortunately is) routinely get lots of upvotes, alas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Prepare for downvotes. how dare you criticize the great accomplishments of our new startup heroes?

<comment><USER15> Please don't do this here. Substantive criticism is fine; snarky meta comments add nothing.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12567998) and marked it off-topic.

Edit: it turns out you've been posting a lot of stuff like this. Please don't post any more stuff like this. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

<comment><USER14> I'll go with "not at all." Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment></comment>


The Architecture of a Large-Scale Web Search Engine, Circa 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-14/the-architecture-of-a-large-scale-web-search-engine-circa-2019.html <comment><USER2> I hadn't heard of it, but apparently Cliqz is a search engine [1] and browser [2] built by a German media company [3].

[1] [https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-01/the-world-needs-cliqz- the-w...](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-01/the-world-needs-cliqz-the-world- needs-more-search-engines.html)

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

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

</comment><comment><USER3> How does a new engine find webpages at start? Does it work from the Dns system and indexes every domain name? At a certain point it will follow links I presume, but how does it start?

<comment><USER4> [Disclaimer: work at Cliqz] We do not crawl the web in the traditional sense, our search was bootstrapped on query logs. It is the very reason we could succeed in building a search engine with minimal resources, in comparison to our competitors.We have written about this in a lot more detail here :

How we collect data : [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web- collecting-da...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting- data-in-a-socially-responsible-manner.html)

How we build the search using this data: [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search- engin...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-06/building-a-search-engine-from- scratch.html)

Feel free to peruse these posts and ask questions!

<comment><USER5> Does really all of your data come from the human web project or do you also buy clickstream data from data brokers?

<comment><USER4> We speak about this is much more detail in this post ([https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-05/a-new-search- engine.html](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-05/a-new-search-engine.html)), but in short, we prototyped our search initially with data we purchased from data- brokers. Once the concept was proven and HumanWeb was deployed (2015/2016), we rely only on our data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> last time Cliqz came up on here was not in the best of contexts...

[https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...](https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_mozilla_as_i_understand_it_and_metadrama/)

<comment><USER7> The "last time Cliqz came up" can be found here: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=0x65.dev&sort=byDate&type=story). We have been posting multiple articles on our tech blog, explaining what we do and how we do it in great details. Your link points to an old thread of more than two years ago.

There were more recent discussions about Cliqz no latter than this month, in particular here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676252)

[disclaimer: I work at Cliqz]

<comment><USER6> yeah sorry, should have said "last i remember".

> We have been posting multiple articles on our tech blog, explaining what we > do and how we do it in great details.

it's possible to have both great tech and loose morals - the two are not mutually exclusive, and one does not absolve the other (e.g. facebook's social experiments)

has there been a followup to any of the points brought up in the reddit thread?

<comment><USER8> [Disclaimer: I do work at Cliqz]

There is plenty of documentation on data collected (see first posts regarding Human Web on the tech blog), how anonymization works, why record-linkability on data collected is prevented (and forbidden), etc. Furthermore, source code can be inspected, as well as traffic in the case documentation is not enough. I believe that is a better proxy to assess "morality" than random accusations on reddit or opinions formed solely on a half-baked press releases.

Do we need to refute all miss-conceptions and FUD that might arise due to the fact that 1) we collect data to build our services (search) and 2) we are funded by a media company (VCs seem to be more pure for an unknown reason).

The answer is no. Cannot recall who said that it takes much more effort to refute BS than to generate it. (That does not go for your comment in particular, that's why we replied, but for many of the comments and some of content of the subredit that you mention.)

<comment><USER9> > There is plenty of documentation on data collected (see first posts > regarding Human Web on the tech blog), how anonymization works, why record- > linkability on data collected is prevented (and forbidden), etc. > Furthermore, source code can be inspected, as well as traffic in the case > documentation is not enough.

Question is, is it opt-in data collection or do you make the choice for me? If it's opt-in, great. Otherwise, I don't want to read your "plenty of documentation" and so on and so forth.

<comment><USER10> You can apparently opt-out. On mobile but I think it was in one of their blog posts.

<comment><USER9> I really rather opt-in:-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I remember correctly, Yahoo Open Source their current and next generation Search Engine Vespa [1], why wasn't that used, and instead starting from scratch?

[1] [https://vespa.ai](https://vespa.ai)

<comment><USER12> Vespa is a very interesting project. But, it came quite late for us (Sept. 2017 [1]).

Work on Cliqz Search started way earlier ~2013. Our work on Kubernetes and modernizing our architecture was also started around year 2016.

[1] [https://www.verizonmedia.com/press/open-sourcing-vespa- yahoo...](https://www.verizonmedia.com/press/open-sourcing-vespa-yahoo-s-big- data-processing-and-serving-eng/)

<comment><USER13> Did you guys choose Go over Java?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like how the blog post title is, likely, based on Google's Page and Brin seminal paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". :)

This blog post, and other in the series, mention RocksDB is used for the index, but it's not explicitly described how and to what end. I 'd love to know the details.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you for great article. I've been writing my own search engine during last 3 years and it's funny how similar my setup is to yours with K8S/Kafka/Streams/Go/RocksDB. Actually about RocksDB - are you using it from Go(via gorocksdb?). Now and then I have hard time optimising RocksDB and still have very loose understanding how much RAM it will consume

</comment><comment><USER16> Just be careful. Kubeflow is heading toward GCP only features (for example, they are dropping cert-manager), while you are betting on AWS.

<comment><USER17> Would it be fair to say you're saying that Kubeflow may become eventually incompatible with EKS?

<comment><USER16> Yes. Or more likely there will be a version of kubeflow for EKS. Alas amazon is pushing sage maker.

Note that kubeflow R&D is all done by google cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if they have any plans for an API...?</comment>


It's Time to Cancel FuckJerry - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/vic-berger-opinion-cancel-fuck-jerry-media-789699/ <comment><USER2> I remember seeing this account forever ago and thinking nothing of it. It seemed like another stupid meme account that posted some funny occasionally but mostly seemed pointless/harmless. I had no idea that they were rolling in the money/followers. It is just crazy to me that these advertisers are paying this meme account money for adspace.

</comment><comment><USER3> what is this jerry show</comment>


Artificial intelligence experts sign openletter to protect mankind from machines - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/artificial-intelligence-experts-sign-open-letter-to-protect-mankind-from-machines/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8870456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8870456)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879182)</comment>


Do Any Ecommerce Sites Need Help Writing/Editing Web Content? - <AUTHOR>

I could potentially help you to write readable clear copy, edit your existing work, and clean up web content if you're looking to improve your ecommerce site. I have an MA in English and have dabbled in copywriting and am interested in the concept of creating stories to sell products. Contact me if this is something in which you may be interested. <comment><USER2> as someone who launched a marketing firm on the basis of copywriting I'm going to give you a spot or two of advice.

it's a service that's one of the first to cut when expenditure budgets get tightened.

the best skill you can develop is the ability to quickly write (and justify) scalable copy.

you'll get a lot more mileage out of just submitting copy corrections to established entities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


ping `curl whatismyip.akamai.com` - <AUTHOR> http://whatismyip.akamai.com/

<comment><USER2> From the methods outlined in the thread so far, I think I'd pick Akamai after a quick test of each of them. (results in the following are based on the 'real' value returned in a 'time' command

      Google 'ping' "baseline" from my ISP
         20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
         round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 19.858/23.823/31.484/2.593 ms

      #/SITE/METHOD
      #1: myip.opendns.com (dig)
      #2: whatismyip.akamai.com (curl)
      #3: ifconfig.me (curl)
      #4: ip.nux.ro (curl)
      #5: icanhazip.com (curl)

      RESULTS

      #1      #2      #3      #4      #5
      0.051   0.144   3.45    0.24    0.333
      0.05    0.143   7.229   0.237   0.106
      0.053   0.147   1.986   0.246   0.103
      0.047   0.143   7.065   0.246   0.109
      0.045   0.145   2.15    0.257   0.102
      0.046   0.141   4.301   0.273   0.113
      0.05    0.141   2.763   0.242   0.103
      0.048   0.144   3.685   0.251   0.114
      0.045   0.149   15.312  0.256   0.195
      0.047   0.148   5.091   0.244   0.118
      0.044   0.144   2.637   0.248   0.133
      5.038   0.142   1.535   0.247   0.109
      0.049   0.143   7.065   0.238   0.115
      0.044   0.146   4.098   0.241   0.106
      0.05    0.145   1.665   0.248   0.216
      0.05    0.142   1.365   0.261   0.108
      0.051   0.143   2.509   0.256   0.159
      0.046   0.17    5.323   0.245   0.109
      0.044   0.141   83.252  0.246   0.117
      0.05    0.145   1.435   0.242   0.119

      0.048   0.144   3.685   0.246   0.113 MEDIAN
      0.310   0.145   8.551   0.248   0.135 AVERAGE
      1.144   0.006   18.377  0.008   0.057 STDEV

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exactly what I was looking for. I was previously using <http://automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp>, but the author is no longer making it available for free.

</comment><comment><USER4> ... and give anyone who controls your DNS a shell on your box. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> How so?

<comment><USER5> Not 100%, but can't you just re-point the DNS to a server you control and return a different body from the curl request?

<comment><USER4> Maybe depending on your shell I'm probably wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see how you could be right. It won't evaluate the result:

      ajf@Ubuntu-1204-precise-64-minimal:~$ echo `echo "3 > file"`
      3 > file

<comment><USER4> CONCEDING THIS IN ADVANCE OF VERIFYING.

<comment><USER6>
        ping `\`echo /etc/passwd\``
        zsh: permission denied: /etc/passwd

I may be wrong here, but would just returning \\`rootyourmachine.sh\\`` in the request body therefore work?

Edit: Serving that from a web server via ping `curl localhost:9999` only causes ping to respond with a usage warning, as if you had entered an incorrect command.

Is there a way to "break out of" ping from here, though?

<comment><USER4> No; you can pass arguments to ping, of course, but that's not helpful.

Sorry, gut reaction to command interpolation with curl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like `curl icanhazip.com` because it's cuter.

<comment><USER8> It also supports IPv6. whatismyip.akamai.com is IPv4 only.

<comment><USER9> <http://ipv6.whatismyip.akamai.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I usually use <http://checkip.dyndns.org>.

Good find, thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I prefer akamai's, since you can just curl it and get just the IP, nothing more. So you can do, say:

      ping `curl whatismyip.akamai.com`

EDIT: Edited title from "whatismyip.akamai.com" to "ping `curl whatismyip.akamai.com`"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> <http://ifconfig.me> also has a fairly simple way to get more information beyond just an ip address.

</comment><comment><USER12> Forgive me, but what's so exciting about this?

<comment><USER13> Most "what is my IP?" services either return it in hard-to-parse format, or they block curl.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't you roll your own with a few lines of Ruby and send it off to heroku?

<comment><USER13> I could also write my own version of /bin/cat, but that doesn't mean it's a good use of my time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From a Verizon FiOS connection in the Boston area:

        --- a1524.g.akamai.net ping statistics ---
        29 packets transmitted, 29 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 20.872/22.326/26.220/1.058 ms

For comparison:

        --- google.com ping statistics ---
        24 packets transmitted, 24 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 10.791/12.767/16.010/1.329 ms

<comment><AUTHOR> The point of this submission was more to point out you can do `curl whatismyip.akamai.com` rather than "ping `curl whatismyip.akamai.com`" specifically, but that's still interesting.

<comment><USER15> I was just trying to measure the latency to the server, an important characteristic for this service.

Previous ones I've used in the past (e.g., to update a dynamic DNS server) have suffered from excessive (multi-second) latency or would simply timeout unpredictably. I ended up writing my own on appspot.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, sorry, I had misread your post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can also just google 'my ip'.

But the Akamai service is obviously much easier to use from a script.

<comment><USER16> Why not grep+awk ifconfig if you need your IP from a script?

<comment><USER17> If you're looking for your public ip, it won't always work. Especially if you are behind a nat/proxy.

That, plus knowing which interface to inspect among those returned by ifconfig isn't always obvious.

<comment><USER16> Cool, thanks for the reply! (and to all other replies as well :) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> on a side note, <http://l2.io/ip.js> is pretty cool. since it allows script injection into the return, it can be used clientside to inject their ip into the webpage. Pretty cool if you're posting from static html to a 3rd party form.

<script type="text/javascript" src="[http://l2.io/ip.js?var=document.getElementById(ip1).value...](http://l2.io/ip.js?var=document.getElementById\(ip1\).value></script>);

works where item ip1 is where you want to IP address to end up on the client html.

</comment><comment><USER19> I really don't understand why this was upvoted, or have I missed something?

</comment><comment><USER20> curl ifconfig.me

</comment><comment><USER21> Wow <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2278975> (788 days ago)

</comment><comment><USER22> curlmyip.com is usually my go to.

</comment><comment><USER23> what is the difference between this and "curl ifconfig.me". I tried, "curl ifconfig.me" seemed a little bit slower.

</comment><comment><USER24> alias ip="dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com"

</comment><comment><USER25> ping `curl ip.nux.ro` :P</comment>


Ask HN: Choosing paths, what will you do? - <AUTHOR>

I know this is a very personal decision but I would like to ask to the HN community for their thoughts. After all, more input, better decisions =)
I have been given the opportunity to follow the security path in a well known bank (somewhat a security project manager). This was a no-brainer for me like two weeks ago but... In my current enterprise, out of the blue, a week ago (without anyone knowing I was planning on leaving) I have been given the opportunity to change to the new "Innovation" team, in which we will need to go to congresses, stay up to date and provide the enterprise with input on where to move it. My current enterprise is also a well known enterprise in Europe but in the betting and gambling industry.
The bank offers me a better salary (around 20% more) and a well known path inside security management. On the other hand I know nothing about innovation but I believe I could be good at it, but I don't know nothing about a path in "innovation" and the job market in innovation.
What are your two pennies?
What do you think about this innovation career? <comment><USER2> As many engineers, I'm attracted to the "innovation" aspect. I've worked on that capacity for a number of years and it can be very rewarding, e.g. participating in congresses, keeping up-to-date, leading proof-of-concept projects and evangelizing.

But it has a downside that it can be frustrating because new tools, processes, architectures, etc. are not easily applied at existing business units, for a number of reasons, even when management and employees would like to use them. There's a lot of inertia and hidden costs to be overcome, not to mention risks associated with the changes.

It's not a bad job, but the security job offer sounds better, being also in a reputable company, with better salary and clearer career path.

Even if the results of the innovation projects are successfully applied to the existing teams and projects, and produce measurable gains, it doesn't sound likely that any raises you'd get in the, let's say, next 2 years, would offset the advantage of starting at 20% more in the next job as initial compensation, with room for further progress.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your insight =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Take the Well Known Bank job, change is good. It looks like a promotion from a career perspective.

Assuming the bank has it's own innovation team, befriend the people working on those projects-- or you can champion innovation with your new colleagues. Also, you can ask the bank for budget/time to attend relevant industry congress events.

<comment><AUTHOR> These have some good points =)</comment></comment>


Why do people still say Java is slow? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/368/why-do-people-still-say-java-is-slow

<comment><USER2> If you are doing a lot of processing on numeric arrays, then no, Java is certainly not one of the faster languages. Its very difficult to have safety (for example no out of bounds dereferencing of arrays) and performance. (An extremely interesting language that tries to do that is ATS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_%28programming_language%29>)

Yes in theory Java will elliminate most of those checks, but difference between theory and practice is more than what theory would suggest.

For simple loops for (i==; i < n; ++i) where n is a compile time constant (or something that can be proved to be a constant) this would work. But one encounters a lot of loops where n isnt a constant. This is just one example of what slows Java down, there are others. It overspecifies semantics (think order of evaluation of arguments), gaining safety but losing on performance.

That said I think the JVM is one of the best optimized runtime that we have. Overall JVM is a great platform, but Java is not necessarily the best way to exploit it. Coming back to Java performance, in my experience it would get to around 80% of the speed of a C or C++ code but would use 3~4 times the memory. No careful benchmarking this, just anecdotal experience.

JVM developers, in case you are reading this, please add tail call ellimination and SIMD.

I am not a "3 cheers for dynamically typed languages" person, but for Java I am willing to concede that the type system comes with the drawbacks but little benefit. In C++, and D you can pull the gloves off when required. And please dont get me started on JINI.

A problem is that Java based systems are slow both in the big (I am looking at you Hadoop) and the small. You can run some of the C++ based mapreduce implementations (<http://sector.sourceforge.net/>) and draw your own conclusion.

<comment><USER3> > I am not a "3 cheers for dynamically typed languages" person, but for Java I > am willing to concede that the type system comes with the drawbacks but > little benefit. In C++, and D you can pull the gloves off when required. And > please dont get me started on JINI.

I expect you mean JNI and not Apache JINI...

That probably highlights the difference between Java and other languages you like to mention, it may use more memory and be marginally slower computationally, but when you take that the most interesting applications these days are distributed the ability to sort an array and save a few clock cycles fades into insignificance compared to network latency and connection times.

Not to mention also, you can optimize your CPU's workload or you can optimize your personal workload. Java lets you pick great libraries off the shelf. Or you can choose to manually do your own array bounds checking and pick up your own garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because Java set itself up for failure. Java _can_ theoretically be faster than optimized C code, but the problem is that people over-promised and/or believe this would be the common case. Sun/Oracle failed to deliver a JIT that outperformed optimized C code in the common case.

Java also messed up and was too preoccupied on getting faster throughput (in too specialized circumstances) and didn't focus much on latency/user- responsiveness.

End users don't care about theory. The only care about their individual user experience. When they see slow launch times, long unresponsive pauses (due to garbage collection), and similar apps written in native languages running faster and being more responsive as a general trend, people are going to rightly blame Java.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think people who really know what they're talking about say that. Sure the JVM is slow to start so there's latency involved in getting Java up and going, but Java is very fast over the long term.

<comment><USER6> ... which is useless when you're trying to develop Java code.

Java also eats a lot of RAM in many applications (J2EE apps can easily eat a few GB of RAM), so combined with the multi-second latency for startup, you're basically confined to a single programming model: One giant, long-running, multithreaded program.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily. It "might" consume a lot of memory depending on your particular application.

We recently went live with a suite of applications (5 apps all together, both web and backend), processing tons of data in "real-time" in multiple threads and after a few days of usage someone noticed it was running with default 512M of RAM (8gb planned).

Considering the load it is processing - it is very impressive. And yes, it is using all of J2EE in WebSphere with mq, hibernate, spring core, spring integration, etc.

BUT I could not make JIRA work with 512 linode, had to upgrade to 1m and later on switch to jira-cloud as it was failing all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of my theories on why Java feels so doggone slow on GUI apps is that it refuses to use native platform APIs for anything. Everything must be reimplemented in Java. So Java manages to feel more sluggish than python, which has a slower interpreter, but isn't bound by doctrine to reimplement the entire UI toolkit in pure python.

That, and I think Java has huge internal libraries, full of redundancy, that get recompiled on every run, because nothing gets done without them.

The fundamental problem is that Java can't decide whether it wants to be a low level or high level language. It tries to be both at once, and one casualty is performance.

</comment><comment><USER9> Admittedly I don't have that much experience in Java but have worked on C++ systems with sub 10us latency (and it did fairly complex things). Any memory allocation can take an order of magnitude more time than that.

Apart from writing your own memory arena, you would need to put local objects on the heap in Java. It is possible to write high performance Java, but like a previous comment mentioned, that code looks more and more like C++, so why not just write C++?

</comment><comment><USER10> Because that is what someone/blog/article told them one time (or less commonly they remember 1998 Java performance). Java is one of the faster languages out there and has been since 1.4+: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&data=u64q)

<comment><USER11> It's one of the faster languages... on benchmarks. Sure you can get Java to perform close to C if its written like C, but if you've reached that point, why not just write C code?

<comment><USER12> Dynamic memory allocation, pointers, lack of IDE's etc etc..

<comment><USER10> This. Java is almost as fast as C++ safer for the average bear, and IMHO easier in the maintenance phase.

I make that last point because I think new people coming into large C++ projects often take longer to ramp up and understand the code than in large Java code bases. But that is purely anecdotal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently went back to an old Java app to benchmark it against some new code.

For small command line utilities the startup overhead can be massive compared to the actual running time of the program, even if the <insert algorithm> runs 100ms faster in Java compared to C/C++/Go/<insert other> it won't matter if the startup time takes 400ms longer.

</comment><comment><USER14> Until Java can beat C/Fortran in FFTs and SVDs, it's too slow for me. Show me FFTW in Java please. Where's the Java LAPACK?

<comment><USER15> [https://sites.google.com/site/piotrwendykier/software/jtrans...](https://sites.google.com/site/piotrwendykier/software/jtransforms)

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the link, but the benchmarks at the bottom of that page show that JTransforms is almost always slower than FFTW, and in only a few cases is it marginally faster. Benchmarks are always questionable, and I really wish they had compared single threaded performance, but I think this shows that Java still has some catching up to do before anyone should be called foolish for thinking C is faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem with Java isn't being slow. Look JavaScript is the fastest growing language in usage lately and is much slower than Java. What is the problem than? The community (sorry just my opinion). Where is the npm (maven? c'mon something good please) for Java where I can find plug-in-play modules for my applications? Where are the exciting web frameworks for Java like Express/Rails/Laravel (ok we have play... but still). How many times I've heard something exciting about Java here on HN? 1...2... never mind.

Stop being a secret society (sorry again) type of community and start putting more projects on Github (that are easy to use and get started with), writing more tutorials on visible places, being more active.

I am sure I will hurt some feelings here. Get easy on the comments ;)

<comment><USER7> :) as far as I remember, Java was (is?) the most popular language on SF.

Java devs are not too vocal on HN lists, but this is the nature of HN, which is not a fair reflection of the state of things in the industry....

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems to me that the only time I hear that Java is slow anymore is when I read someone asking "Why do people still say Java is slow," and the like.

Do people still say Java is slow?

</comment><comment><USER7> There is no such thing as "slow" or "fast". It is all about the satisfaction of requirements.

</comment><comment><USER18> Because it is? There are some circumstances where the slow-down is minimal or at least inconsequential, but not always. JIT-delay is a real thing, and even though in some applications the impact can be minimized (e.g. services) in others it's not. There's a reason why it's still very rare for games to be written in java, for example, and it's not because of blind prejudice.

<comment><USER19> Aside from one of the most popular... Minecraft (played for days and never saw a GC pause). I think it actually is because of blind prejudice OR POSSIBLY expressiveness rather than "slowness" since most of the scripting languages within the game platforms also make use of GC systems that are much worse than the JVMs.

<comment><USER20> I'm one of those folks who suspects that projects which were written in Java might be slower that they otherwise would have been. I also bought Minecraft some time ago (back when it was roughly €7).

Having used Minecraft for a pretty long time, I don't feel like it's the sort of thing someone should hold up as exemplary of how fast Java is / can be. Instead, for me at least, it's more evidence of Java apps having troubles making use of available system resources (particularly many cores and/or larger amounts of RAM) as well as demonstrating that portability still can be a problem with Java apps (as in OpenGL v OpenGL ES; MCPC v. MCPE, MCPI & MC360; and even windows v Linux & Mac).

I get that it is possible to write Java such that certain things run pretty fast. I also don't think that these sorts of metrics should be used as the only metric every developer uses to decide what language to use for their projects. Therefore, I don't feel that these are reasons to conclude that someone else should or shouldn't use java for their project (as surely they have their own priorities which they base their own decisions on).

On the other-hand I don't think that any software programming language having advanced features which allow for efficient use of these various other system resources matters much, if many (most?, most popular?, many popular?) projects don't use them (or perhaps don't use them correctly). For that matter the same goes with hardware... it hardly matters if some chip has amazing super powers, if few projects use them.

Back to why people think Java app can be slower than they ought to be. My experience has been that when Java first began to become popular, it became the language of choice in many universities. Not long after that it was common to find poorly designed & implemented projects to be written in Java. While this has changed by now, nearly all of the Java projects, that I have experience with don't have an obvious priority of maximising performance by using all available system resources as efficiently as they can be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Eclipse -- The titanic of IDEs.</comment>


Crowdfunding is too expensive - <AUTHOR> http://ink.hackeress.com/2014/12/crowdfunding-is-too-expensive-payments.html

<comment><USER2> _shrug_ As someone who's done Kickstarters for comic books, it's still a hell of a lot less expensive than printing a ton of books on spec and getting them into the bookstore/comic shop distribution system. You'll lose like 50-75% of your cover price to all the middlemen involved in that.

When you plan your campaign, you look at the cuts taken by your crowdfunding site and its payment processor, and you work out all your numbers with that taken into account. I just go with a flat 10% of the take going to Kickstarter and Amazon. And if you're shipping stuff, build a lot of slack into the budget for that too. It keeps creeping up.

If 2% of the final number either way matters to you, then good luck finding a way to take payments without them. I mean, yeah, it'd be nice to live in a world without payment fees, sure. You'd have to battle the huge amounts of money banks have available to pour int politics. Have fun tilting at that windmill, Hackeress.

<comment><USER3> To add to your comment, it's not so much that banks have money to pour into politics. It's that A) the infrastructure to process the payments has a tangible cost and B) that fraudulent transactions need some form of insurance. B) is a large part of the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The overblown rhetoric used makes this piece hard to read.

For example, charging a rate that the market will bear for a product like payment processing is simply the free market, not some kind of 'evil' practice.

<comment><USER5> > simply the free market

This is a common misconception. A market is only "free" to the degree that it is perfect[1].

I hope we'd all agree that payment processing is nowhere near a perfect market. The barriers to entry are quite high. It takes a huge amount of lawyers and regulation wrangling to get a new financial startup up and running. Consumers certainly do not have clear information or free choice about which payment processor to use. I'm sure there are other things making this area far from perfect.

I like the idea of the free market, and it seems to work tolerably well for a lot of things, but I really get frustrated by this idea that it's a magic bullet. Free markets are pretty great for determining prices for brain-dead simple physical commodities that are simple to produce. As soon as you start straying from that, they very quickly become inefficient.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_market](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_market)

<comment><USER6> I upvoted your post, but I wanted to reply because this is so on-point. So very many people who talk about free markets fail to understand that imperfect markets and free markets are at odds. The veneration of free markets _sounds_ so very good...and then the people who cheer for them happily go along with unregulated, imperfect markets which hurt them.

<comment><USER7> Of course there are market imperfections for other reasons. Back at the turn of the century when people were railing at Ebay because it "raised the price of junk incredibly" I defended it as just bringing more buyers and thus making the market "more free". The result was higher prices.

In that case, buyers _wanted_ their imperfect markets because nobody at the local garage sale realized this old Lionel electric train was "collectable" and so would sell it for $10, but on Ebay it was going for $300 and that caused the garage sale prices to skyrocket.

From the payments market perspective it is one of the reasons I find Dwolla so interesting as they decided to just take on payments completely. That was a really interesting move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Given the business model of credit cards, where the banks eat losses due to fraud, there is some justification for a percentage of the transaction since the liability involved in a $1000 fraud transaction is much greater than that of a $10 fraud transaction.

In some other business model that might not be the case, but on that kind of platform you might have much stronger technical and procedural protections against fraud so it might be like PayPal where if you do anything that is even slightly sketchy (i.e. a crowdfunding campaign) you get kicked.

<comment><USER9> A bit tangential to your point, but... banks generally don't eat losses due to common credit card fraud (a stolen/cloned card number being misused). When you call your bank and say that some charges on your card were unauthorized, and they give you back that money, it immediately comes out of the bank accounts of the stores that made the charges. They are paying for the reversals, not the card issuer. Each of those stores also pays a significant chargeback fee, which more than covers the cost of that customer support agent that took the call, and reissuing the physical card if necessary. Plus, much of the transaction fee goes to paying out rewards to card holders and to the processing networks that make everything work (e.g. VisaNet), rather than to the banks' profits. That reflects the fact that the banks generally don't have significant fraud losses to cover. The cost to banks from reissuing cards after massive data breaches at major retailers is a relatively new phenomenon and isn't priced into those fees.

<comment><USER10> Could crowdfunding sites require ACH transfers instead of credit card network processing, thereby substantially reducing their processing fees?

<comment><USER11> Dwolla has been working on a better interface for that, and their transaction costs are far lower than anything mentioned in this article.

<comment><USER10> I'm aware of Dwolla, but unsure why an additional middleman is required. Direct ACH transfers cost 15-20 cents/transaction, and Dwolla isn't required to do that, just a bank that supports you submitting properly formatted text files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We're living in a world where anyone, anywhere in the world can raise money from complete strangers, with essentially no oversight into whether the money actually is effectively directed towards what they claim it's going to be, and some financial intermediary takes single digit fees for doing so[1]. Sounds rather _low_ compared with the cost of sending out emissaries to persuade people to part with money by hand, or dealing with the rich people and financial institutions that traditionally sponsor such programmes and their expectations...

[1]not to mention the crowdfunding platform, which often takes a larger chunk of fees for providing a pretty interface to the payments infrastructure, some eyeballs and some t&cs but apparently isn't subject to the same criticism?

</comment><comment><USER13> This isn't about crowd funding at all its about payment processing. Makes the title pretty misleading. As somebody who spends virtually all my time running a company combatting online payment fees I love anything that seeks to shed light on the horrific online payment processing fees but this title seems completely mismatched to the content.

<comment><USER14> Yes it is. Some sites take 5-7% on top of processing fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obligatory non-US HNer snark: I wish I my credit card processing rates were _2.9% + 30¢ expensive_ , not _8.9% expensive._

</comment><comment><USER16> "For the record, MOST online payment processors have been treating debit card transactions like credit card transactions, and therefore charge the higher interchange -- even when they have no legal right to do so."

Erm, you are aware that lower interchange fees for debit cards used at point- of-sale is because users have to type in a PIN on a (nominally) secure terminal? That reduces fraud risk, so the rate is lower.

Most payment UIs don't prompt for PIN, so they don't get the rate. Tighten down your tinfoil hat before typing next time.

(full disclosure: I'm a developer at a payment processor)

<comment><USER17> The fee will be different even for a credit card depending on whether or not the card is present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's a breakdown of who gets what fees during payment processing:

1\. Credit Card issuer. They get the bulk of the fees because they assume all cardholder risks. Besides fraud risk, they also care about the riskiness of the loan to the cardholder.

2\. Gateway / Third Party Processor. The gateway helps a merchant process some part of the fees(e.g. tokenization, authorizations, settlements, etc.). Generally, they get a smallest percentage of the transaction. Authorize.net or Stripe would be examples of these.

3\. Merchant's bank. They basically buy a merchant's credit/debit sales. They get a percentage of the transaction. If your transaction volume is high enough, you can probably convince your bank to lower your rate.

4\. Visa/MC. Technically, they don't get anything. However, banks are required to pay dues in order to offer or process MC or Visa cards.

Some other things to note:

Online sites often use a Gateway directly and don't have a merchant bank. In those cases, the Gateway is acting as both a gateway and a merchant's bank.

Issuing banks (the bank that gives customers a credit card) charge higher fees for reward cards so that they can provide customers with rewards. Rewards cards are annoying for merchants because one can't always tell if a card is a reward card or a regular credit card. Additionally, fees for different rewards are different. These fees can be found in the voluminous fine print in your credit card agreements.

</comment><comment><USER19> For the last eight months I have been working on an app called Lighthouse. It's nearly ready for public (beta) release, probably in the next couple of weeks.

Lighthouse is an all-or-nothing crowdfunding app that uses the smart contracts feature of the Bitcoin protocol. You do not need to deposit money with a third party site. Anyone can create a project, or pledge money to someone elses project and revoke that pledge before the project is claimed if they want the money back.

Unlike Kickstarter, there are no fees and it works in any country, although you do have to use Bitcoin so you are exposed to volatility and exchange fees (if your costs are in some other currency which is quite likely).

Over time I expect and hope that volatility will slowly decrease, and there are lots of ways to optimise currency exchange fees. So whilst this is somewhat exploratory today, I hope it can grow into a real competitor over the long run (5-10 years).

[http://blog.vinumeris.com/2014/09/12/lighthouse-alpha-now- op...](http://blog.vinumeris.com/2014/09/12/lighthouse-alpha-now-open-source/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I have no love for the payments industry, but this article overstates things a bit. I dropped out when it started ranting about charging credit-card-level fees for debit cards. There is a reason why those cards are run as credit from an online site - there's no alternative. Have you ever typed a PIN number into a web site? The whole infrastructure is set up to make it impossible (in theory) to capture and store the PIN number; it's supposed to be proof that the card holder was present. That property is not present for arbitrary web sites, so they have to run the cards as credit.

<comment><USER21> Perhaps in the US. In other parts of the world you can use debit cards online. Far from as common as it should be though. Fees are naturally much lower for such transactions.

<comment><USER22> Do you type in your pin?

<comment><USER23> In Germany the debit card would be tied to a bank account. In that case you select a different payment method and just type in your (SEPA) bank account number.

For VISA debit and credit cards some banks now require online PIN (different from the card PIN) and then send a transaction code to your mobile which you type into the web form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The merchant complaint is legitimate: Many credit cards have variable rates depending on the type of credit card. Many premium cards have higher transaction rates and a merchant is forced to accept all cards of that brand or none. So no, a credit card is not just a credit card and a debit card is not just a debit card. That simplification can happen at the 2.9% + $0.30 level, but many of the discounted rates get much more complicated with tiers for various cards -> You are extremely unlikely to get a 1% rate at high volume on a 1.25% cashback card for example.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the title is a bit misleading. The article only talks about payment processing fees. The situation for crowdfunding is even worse. Crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter take an _additional_ 5% fee...

But of course, there is a way around some of the fees charged by paypal or stripe. You can open your own merchant account and handle card payments yourself; then you might get lower per-transaction fees. But then you need to do a lot of bureaucratic nonsense that will probably end up costing you more...

</comment><comment><USER26> I hope we will see more crowdfunding websites adopt Bitcoin. It allows projects to get a lot more money because basically all of the money could go to them.

<comment><USER27> Apart from, you know, the Bitcoin transaction fees. Plus the fees to convert money into Bitcoin.

<comment><USER28> Plus fraud costs.

<comment><USER29> What fraud costs? Bitcoin transactions are (basically) irreversible.

You either received them or you didn't, and if your policy is to allow refunds to your customers (when they report a fraud or for any other reason) then all you have to do is send it back. So, what fraud costs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Crowdfunding is by far not the worst offender in all of these fees.

What about event tickets? Even [http://www.dnalounge.com/](http://www.dnalounge.com/) charges outrageous "service" fees when buying tickets online. For NYE, the ticket price is 50$, service fee is another 10$ -- that's some 20% commission! (And not at all unique to NYE, either.)

</comment><comment><USER31> If card processing fees bother her so much, then why doesn't she take checks/cheques?

I'd hazard a guess that after a few weeks of doing that, the overhead of card processing looks pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if the typo in the HN submission (crow instead of crowd) was intentional.

<comment><USER33> Thanks, we missed that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is that guy saying Paypal is crowdfunding? WTF.</comment>


At 15, Mark Zuckerberg might have been working through early Facebook prototypes - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/innovation/blogs/inside-the-hive/2013/04/03/angelfire-year-old-mark-zuckerberg-might-have-been-working-through-early-facebook-prototypes/os8bH4EO2b8Tiudr6e08oM/blog.html

<comment><USER2> Had the same kind of page at his age. AngelFire and Geocities. Was also scripting my own "eZine" in ASP for a music news page that summarized articles around the web, linked to them and allowed reader comments. This was a pretty new concept at the time (in the "mainstream"... Slashdot started it in 97) the term blog didn't really exist yet. However, I'm not sure I saw the web as "small," it just was what it was. He had good sensibilities to recognize its potential at that age and time.

</comment><comment><USER3> He did what everybody did at that age and time, a html full of java applets. The article is very poetic. "Fourteen years later, he's still the the most visible face of the world's largest social network." meh</comment>