API responses should be signed - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/why-api-responses-should-be-signed/ <comment><USER2> This article brazenly glosses over HTTPS, which is designed to tackle the very issues that are raised (privacy and authenticity). APIs do not need to sign every response, they just need to properly use HTTPS.

<comment><USER3> This is addressed in the article specifically. They're not talking about the person making the API request needing a signature to verify its authenticity. It's about if someone else sends you an API response that _they_ retrieved, you should be able to verify it wasn't tampered with.

<comment><USER4> They can share the exact same encrypted bytes they received. Others can verify those bytes with the cert as normal. Or do I have it wrong, and the traffic is only signed with the user signature after the handshake?

<comment><AUTHOR> You have it wrong. I also thought that was the answer. See these responses to my question on StackExchange [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/193559/saving-a...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/193559/saving- and-verifying-an-https-request)

<comment><USER4> Looks like the message is encrypted with a key derived by both parties but this produces a symmetric encryption. The client then has the ability to spoof encrypted server communications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This might not be the most salient place to start when critiquing this article but it did irk me that they get the definition of idempotent wrong even while linking to Wikipedia.

>That is, the data returned from a query is always the same.

That is not correct. Only the system state remains the same. As stated in the linked wiki page:

>[...] the end result is always the same as the result of the initial execution, even if the response differs.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair criticism. What is the correct word for "this request always generates an identical response"?

<comment><USER5> Immutable

<comment><USER6> Immuteble describes data, whereas an API call is more like a function call, in which case we'd call the property "referential transparency", which means, a function always returns the same result for a given input value.

"referential transparency" makes up half the definition of a "pure" function, with the other half being the absence of side effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool concept but totally overblown need.

If the usage for api signing is to verify that leaked private messages are legit then I don't think we should have such tech in place.

If anyone has any more legitimate use cases that auth does not account for I would love to hear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are a few that I considered including in the post...

The city's car park API told me I could park here - why have I been given a parking ticket?

The hospital's drug API told me I could mix these two tablets.

The bank's API told me a client hadn't received the funds I sent.

Basically, if I have to go to court and say "I have proof that your system told me XYZ."

<comment><USER6> Better yet:

Someone sends you a tweet with your address, a picture of your house and a picture of a gun, then deletes the tweet the next day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Code signing does something similar; it allows data to be published on untrusted mirror sites. But it's not clear why most API owners should care about this use case?

In particular, Twitter allows users to delete their Tweets. If you think it's good to be able to take back what you said, signing tweets doesn't help.

</comment><comment><USER9> The author seems to have written this article in a very web-centric way, as if "API" could only possibly refer to web service APIs that go over the open internet.

But of course sometimes (you might even say often) APIs don't go over a network at all and don't cross the sort of boundaries that require signing.

For example, the Linux kernel has an API that applications can use. There's no need for the response to open(2) to be signed. If you can't trust the result, you can't trust anything else that is happening either since you are at the mercy of the kernel.

<comment><AUTHOR> The author primarily works with web APIs. But, for example, the Kernel's USB API may want to verify that it is communicating with a _specific_ device. And, for audit purposes, log the signed input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sounds like coming full circle back to SOAP. Library support for signing an XML doc and adding the cert for offline verification is pretty well established.

<comment><USER11> The main problems with SOAP were practical problems - bad dev experience and inefficient, like almost everything XML.

But the goals of SOAP were not bad.

<comment><USER10> I hated it at first but once I realised the use-cases I changed my mind. When you have regulations telling you to keep hold of documents for 5+ years, and you want to digitise them, then communicating through signed XML documents is a pretty nice solution. The format is suitable.

I mean, we're not talking about Twitter searches or any such useless stuff. It's inter-bank transactions, direct debits, payment pre-authorisation, etc. Everything that you really do need a paper-trail for for years and years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Author presumes that the platform (in charge of signing the response) finds the signature valuable. This presumption is faulty - indeed, plausible deniability is a feature, not a bug for these platforms. Which platform wants to give the government a loaded gun by cryptographically verifying that they hosted content or behavior that broke the law?

</comment><comment><USER6> It might make sense to also add a section to the article considering why you'd want to verify an API signature instead of calling the API again.

Some examples I could think of:

\- You don't have access to (that part of) the API, but to its public key

\- The data in question has been deleted

\- The entire API or even Service is gone

\- The API call involves some complex calculations that takes a long time

\- The data might have to be verified without access to the API or the network as a whole

\- You are being Surveilled and/or your access to the API or some of its endpoints is being restricted

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this solved by HTTP-Signatures, which is a draft RFC? I guess not, as there's no way to forward that signature to a third party without some imposter-ing, depending on the HTTP headers that were signed.

</comment><comment><USER14> Finally a use case for blockchain. Not new though, look around at the "trust economy".

</comment><comment><USER15> Basically this is the raison d'etrê of Verified Claims.

Not every API response is a verified claim.

Next?

</comment><comment><USER16> and how do you suppose to get the end user the certificate? because if it's trough the same channel, none of this matter.

<comment><USER6> The idea (if I understand it correctly), is that you can get a signed API resopnse from anywhere, and the public key from the signer to verify the legitimacy of the data in the API response without having to call the API again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reposting the comment as top level, as I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere.

Google has developed Signed HTTP Exchanges [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed- exc...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/11/signed-exchanges) that can then be bundled [https://web.dev/web-bundles/](https://web.dev/web- bundles/) .

Its main motivation is the rehosting of AMP pages while verifying that the cache hasn't tampered with them; but it could be extended to sign and bundle API calls for redistribution if needed.</comment>


Show HN: Frontexpress – manages routes in browser like Express does on Node - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/camelaissani/frontexpress <comment><AUTHOR> Here a sample project which demos frontexpress: [https://github.com/camelaissani/frontexpress- demo](https://github.com/camelaissani/frontexpress-demo)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to code the front-end logic with the same style than on the back- end with express.

I've tried to push the isomorphism logic one level up by aligning the front- end and the back-end Frameworks. So with frontexpress same language same API on all the stack.</comment>


Xcode and git: bridging the gap - <AUTHOR> http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/33796217972/xcode-and-git-bridging-the-gap

<comment><USER2> I was actually looking into this a day ago and stumbled upon this .gitignore file: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49478/git-ignore-file- for...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49478/git-ignore-file-for-xcode- projects)

Similar for the most part, what do you guys think?

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like there's got to be a better way to merge Xcode project files. Keeping both sides of the conflict blows up often enough that I usually resolve any conflicts manually in my text editor, so I'm hesitant to add a .gitattributes file.</comment>


Show HN: today's project: Gifsplode, a way to bookmark and reuse reaction gifs - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cjejkfibgnfjocgbaenhjnedjojfjhil

<comment><AUTHOR> We built a little chrome extension to bookmark and relink images this morning. Scratching and itch and all.

This has increased sarcasm on internal mailing lists by over 9000.</comment>


Ask HN: How can we get people to read submissions before commenting on them? - <AUTHOR> Over and over, top rated comments on submissions are by people who clearly didn't read the thing they're commenting on. The longer the submission, the more uninformed the commentary.
To make matters worse, I frequently see people who say they come to HN because of the quality comments. There's a Dunning-Kruger effect happening, where people don't read the submissions, so they don't know that people aren't reading the submissions, so people think they're becoming more informed by reading the comments when in fact the comments are just as uninformed as they are. There are exceptions of course, but they are becoming more and more exceptions, when they would ideally be the rule.
I think we can do better.
The commenting guidelines say:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
While it certainly avoids some conflict, I am beginning to see some benefit to this sort of conflict, if it pushes people to actually read things before they opine, instead of just sharing uninformed opinions.
Are there any other ideas for what could be done about this? <comment><USER2> A lot of the time I come for the comments as they are often more interesting and informative than the article. You get a variety of viewpoints (as opposed to usually just one viewpoint from the article) and HN users in general seem fairly knowledgable on most of the subjects posted here. It's a couple of levels above Reddit.

> when in fact the comments are just as uninformed as they are

What's your basis for this?

(As a small practical suggestion towards your goal, don't allow paywalled stuff to be linked, or stuff that involves to much nonsense before being able read it).

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes the discussion here is more interesting than the article. If there's something uninformed, then it's totally fine to politely call them out on it.

It can also be interesting to see discussions deviate from the exact topic of the article. I enjoy reading personal anecdotes and related information (with sources).

How could you even enforce reading the article before commenting? People could have skimmed it, misinterpreted it, intentionally disagree with it.

Have you seen the comment sections on the rest of the internet? Youtube, Twitter, Reddit.... I think we're relatively informed here

</comment><comment><USER4> HN could allow the submitter to optionally configure up to 3 multiple choice questions about the article.

A user would need to answer all of them correctly before being able to comment. An incorrect answer would add a delay of ~1h before they can comment (without needing to do the quiz again).

Even though it's fairly easy to cheat or work around, it might be enough to tilt the incentives towards just reading or at least skimming the article.

<comment><USER5> It would be unfair to people who only wish to comment on one aspect of it without the need to have an encyclopædic understanding of the content, to those with reading difficulties, for poorly-formatted content, for videos (which present their own accessibility issues) rather than text articles, and plenty of other scenarios.

Imagine trying to comment on a comment without reading the article. The article would be irrelevant but obligatory.

This idea discourages discussion rather than promote it. One can guarantee any submission with such questions would never make it to the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you're fighting a losing battle there.

I always browse HN by the [https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) link, so I get the latest articles at the top. Every time there's a story of note afoot, it shows up numerous times in the submissions. I've seen the same news story submitted up to a dozen times in the space of a few hours.

If the HN site isn't capable of flagging up the fact that an article someone is about to submit has already been submitted by several other people; and if people are too lazy [or too desperate to earn upvotes] to bother to check whether a story has already been submitted, before submitting it themselves; then I think expecting them to hold back on commenting til they've read an article is extremely optimistic.

PS: Hope this reply is relevant. I couldn't be bothered reading what you wrote, before responding. :-)

<comment><USER7> > If the HN site isn't capable of flagging up the fact that an article someone > is about to submit has already been submitted by several other people

It does prevent you from submitting a URL that's identical to a recent submission.

<comment><USER8> > It does prevent you from submitting a URL that's identical to a recent > submission.

No, it does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like this might be a good thing.

For example, someone recently brought up that the solution model in the article is unfair, but misunderstood it. I quoted the part of the article where the author put in his definition, and the Wikipedia article on how this problem is fixed. It's a quick conversation that solves a common misconception, but someone has to raise their hand and bring up the misconception.

One problem is that a lot of people do read the article, but misunderstand it. The better and more information dense it is, the more people don't get it, even after reading it. So simply asking people to read it first might not solve the problem. HN is a good place to "raise your hand" on difficult reading material.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't really see the issue on hand as a bad thing because it opens up discussions and all sorts of viewpoints. I see a lot of comments on articles that aren't really connected but it provides interesting anecdotes and stories. People that are looking for informed comments should simply read the articles themselves and form their own opinions. Everyone has opinions, whether informed or uninformed, and it'll be a hard road trying to put barriers up but I think that would take away some of the essence of HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> The problem is not that people didn't read the submission.

The problem is that people commented without knowing what the fuck they're talking about.

I just replied to a comment on the HAProxy 2.2 release. I haven't read the article yet, what I commented isn't related to changes in 2.2 - I was able to comment in a meaningful way (i.e. it's an opinion but it's an informed opinion) because of previous experience and knowledge of the topic.

As with many problems, better "voting" of comments would likely solve this.

If HN adopted reasoned voting (i.e. not just down votes, which lead to an echo chamber of whatever koolaid is flavour of the week) you could easily have a "Incorrect" or "Hasn't read TFA" downvote 'reason'.

Combine that with better handling of downvoted comments (i.e. don't just fade them to oblivion, due the aforementioned koolaid circle jerk) and I believe people would use the voting system more effectively.

Right now I simply refuse to downvote any comment, because it's just completely broken (and yet "working as intended" according to the PTB).

<comment><AUTHOR> > The problem is not that people didn't read the submission.

> The problem is that people commented without knowing what the fuck they're > talking about.

Right, but if you are commenting on a submission you haven't read, you don't know what you're talking about.

> I just replied to a comment on the HAProxy 2.2 release. I haven't read the > article yet, what I commented isn't related to changes in 2.2 - I was able > to comment in a meaningful way (i.e. it's an opinion but it's an informed > opinion) because of previous experience and knowledge of the topic.

It sounds like while you didn't read the article, you read the thing you were commenting on, though--this isn't really the thing I'm criticizing.

> If HN adopted reasoned voting (i.e. not just down votes, which lead to an > echo chamber of whatever koolaid is flavour of the week) you could easily > have a "Incorrect" or "Hasn't read TFA" downvote 'reason'.

Tagging comments with "Didn't RTFA" would at least inform other readers that the opinion they're reading is uninformed.

<comment><USER11> > Right, but if you are commenting on a submission you haven't read, you don't > know what you're talking about.

Not at all. I literally gave you an example. Plenty of articles are about a topic people are sufficiently knowledgeable about to be able to discuss it at length without reading the article in question.

> It sounds like while you didn't read the article, you read the thing you > were commenting on, though--this isn't really the thing I'm criticizing.

I'd suggest that at least 40% of comments on HN threads are discussion about the greater topic in general rather than the specific article itself. While this type of discussion can also include people who are commenting while uninformed, that doesn't mean that anyone who hasn't read the linked piece is uninformed about the topic. There are very few topics where there is literally only one singular article about it that is required reading to be considered "knowledgable".

<comment><AUTHOR> > Plenty of articles are about a topic people are sufficiently knowledgeable > about to be able to discuss it at length without reading the article in > question.

What I mean is: the article _is_ the topic. The comments I'm objecting to, are, for example, pointing out a problem with something said in the article, because they got to that paragraph, and then went to HN and posted their disagreement, without reading _the very next paragraph where that objection is addressed_. Even if they are very knowledgeable about the topic, this isn't a contribution to the discussion, it's a step back in the discussion--maybe they are an expert and could address the author's response to their objection too, but they don't, because they weren't arsed to read the thing they were responding to.

> While this type of discussion can also include people who are commenting > while uninformed, that doesn't mean that anyone who hasn't read the linked > piece is uninformed about the topic.

Agreed, but it _does_ mean they are uninformed about the linked piece, which hinders discussion if they're just repeating things said in the piece, objecting to things already addressed in the piece, or whatever. Being an expert on the topic of an article doesn't prevent this.

<comment><USER11> Right - so I still think some kind of user flagging/voting is the solution there, rather than eg weird click tracking timeouts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I'll agree that weird click tracking timeouts isn't the solution. I don't think flagging/voting is either, though, at least in its current form.

<comment><USER11> > in its current form

This is the key issue, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The longer the submission, the more uninformed the commentary.

Well that's hardly news; and it applies to pretty much all text both online and offline. If you really want someone to comment on what you think is the main point of a submission write an executive summary and do an Ask HN instead.

Do the summarizing work once instead of expecting ten thousand people to do it.

<comment><USER13> No, we shouldn't encourage laziness, too many people here grasp for low hanging fruit as it is. This is supposed to be a community of highly intelligent elites looking for thought-provoking, mature discussion on intellectually gratifying topics. If someone needs a concept dumbed down and distilled to the length of a tweet before they can approach it then maybe they shouldn't be here.

It's not to much to ask that people read the articles, or at least be willing to _attempt_ it, and to refrain from commenting unless they actually have something insightful to offer. And I'm including people who refuse to turn JS on or refuse to deal with paywalls in the latter group. Don't complain about paywalls or ads or ad blockers... just move on.

<comment><USER5> > If someone needs a concept dumbed down and distilled to the length of a > tweet before they can approach it then maybe they shouldn't be here.

I would be afraid that taking such a view would be (A) gatekeeping, (B) elitism (despite your assertion, this is _not_ supposed to be a community of elites; high-level discussion doesn't require elitism), (C) and dismissiveness about the use and usefulness of summaries — they're a perfectly reasonable tool for conveying the most interesting point of what sometimes are very long, technical documents; videos; and often presented inaccessibly.

Such assertions preclude curiosity which is a crime greater than failing to read an article to someone's arbitrary satisfaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unless people _want_ to go through the effort to read an article, they won't - and it _is_ more effort to read the article than not, so most people will simply either read what they want into the title, or pile on to the first comment that catches their interest.

I don't believe there is technical solution to this, all feasible solutions are likely social, and have diminishing returns over time. Donwvote poor comments, upvote good comments. Correct misinformed commenters as civilly possible, and know when to disengage from toxic threads and people. The culture has to encourage engagement the way that it does civility, or seriousness.

</comment><comment><USER14> Uninformed opinions have likely been more prevalent on the internet since the first comment box appeared.

People that comment without reading the article or maybe even without clicking into it will likely make comments that just don't make sense. I think in engineering circles the corrector/completionist personality trait is more prevalent.

People that did read the article and spark conversation will get more up arrow clicks. Uninformed comments will float to the bottom most of the time on HN.

<comment><USER8> > People that did read the article and spark conversation will get more up > arrow clicks. Uninformed comments will float to the bottom most of the time > on HN.

Did you even read the question? ;-)

"Over and over, top rated comments on submissions are by people who clearly didn't read the thing they're commenting on."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd think for a system to scale you need good comment ranking like reddit has. Not sure if hn is strictly "top" votes or like reddits "best" which takes in to account that younger comments have been seen less and comments with few votes need the benefit of doubt and a boost to get "reviewed".

That should be able to weed out bad comments that are bad because ppl haven't read the thing. (first child comment will call them out, than people will downvote)

<comment><USER16> I don't think reddit has good comment ranking. I think they default to showing the most popular comments. Popularity and merit are not the same thing.

<comment><USER15> it's not perfect, but better than everything else.

More detail here: [https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment- sortin...](https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting- system/)

I love how it's related to the likelihood that the sun will rise again tomorrow (now that we have observed the behavior a few times)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reading the original article takes effort, in part because it may be hosted on a slow-loading site with a bad UI, have intrusive ads, be long, uninteresting and / or written in a language that's difficult to read.

I wish HN had at least snippet previews for submissions (like in Twitter, WhatsApp or Facebook) so that I could look at them without following a link and decide whether to open them or not based on more information than just the title.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think we are pretty close to having AI that can automatically generated little pop-quizes that verify that people read the article or at least opened them to look up the answers. Not sure it is 100% there but within a few years there should be at least an imperfect implementation.

</comment><comment><USER18> The heading gives them biases, though there is moderation after submission. But may be if the moderator or AI could give a small abstraction of the article posted could benefit more on the corresponding thread.

</comment><comment><USER19> Despite the intellectual aura HN puts off, most people come here to blow off steam or waste time. You're not going to get these people to read the article or formulate complex thoughts. At best they'll type a lot.

<comment><USER20> Definitely, getting into any kind of dialogue usually devolves into a word- count contest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Having a good headline, as opposed to the clickbaits being popular the last 10 years or so

</comment><comment><USER22> It would be interesting to analyze HN comments at scale to see if there are predictable genres or features of comments that are upvoted. Same for down voting, but it seems easy to predict downvotes. What pockets of the HN readership are rewarding what genres of comment? I am sure this is not a fresh idea...

Readership could choose to reward TLDR summaries of submissions. In general, discussion would then be better informed about the content submission.

Personally, I have found interesting discussion to sometimes be not so much about the content of a submission, but about the topic of the submission. A tedious pattern for content-focused stuff is that "what the author didn't do ..." post; a more engaging one is essentially "yes, and here is related or parallel work..." Elaboration is more interesting than negation for this reader.

Up or down voting is a big signal of relevance for the reader but not the only one. Really what I would like is some agent that can read HN submissions and comments for me, extract topics from submissions and interesting comments and links from discussions, and allow me to browse that digest first. Again, not a fresh idea.

</comment><comment><USER23> Since most people select the link before commenting to at least see the page, take a timestamp between that selection and comment time for that IP. Based on the length of the article and average reading time, make them wait.

Speed readers can spend more time ruminating, since they are probably thinking too fast also.

<comment><AUTHOR> The implementation of collecting the length of the article is prohibitively complex and error-prone.

<comment><USER23> If there's no way to accurately scrape by article today, sounds like a need for a startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think for most possible clients it would be a solution in search of a problem. Even for Hacker News, I'm not sure how it would actually work out, so if I were HN I wouldn't be willing to invest much in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My highest upvoted comment this month was for an article I didn't read because it was behind a paywall. So yes, I think there is a problem. The karma system rewards you for being on time more than it rewards you for being correct. It also seem to reward snark a lot.

For example, some time ago there was an article about why dynamic linking was worse than static linking along supported with a set of benchmarks. Many people posted highly upvoted, snarky, derisive comments about how the author was wrong and questioned his benchmarks. No one tried to reproduce his benchmark figures (had they tried to they would have found some bugs in them).

I'm confident that if someone were to post an article about why static linking is worse than dynamic linking it would be met with the same kind of snark. So it's not the subject.

</comment><comment><USER25> Blocking links to paywalled articles might help, although I'm sure people will disagree with that idea (you can detect most paywalls, as they try to play friendly with Google).

You might try to find a way to soften the influence of people who are badly behaved voters, and causing those comments to float to the top. A lot of review sites seem to suffer from the people who give well thought out ratings being drowned out by a majority who only ever give the minimum and maximum rating. That's made some sites give up and only offer thumbs up and thumbs down, but if you can detect those users, you can always try to reduce the influence they have on the final rating.</comment>


Microsoft acknowledges permission problems with MS16-072 patches - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3084930/microsoft-windows/microsoft-acknowledges-permission-problems-with-ms16-072-patches-kb-3159398-3163017-3163018-3163016.html <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, these kinds of issues are normal for patch Tuesday since Nadella took over. His re-doing of QA at MS hasn't helped matters and perhaps is the cause of all these issues. I'm hoping they can get back to their old QA levels soon.

Lots of admins I've spoken to have added longer delays for more testing nowadays. That means a critical Windows update may take 4-8 weeks to get to desktops and servers now. I think MS is playing with fire here with its terrible QA and also making updates mandatory in Win10.

MS has effectively passed the testing it should be doing to its customers. If it wasn't for its monopolistic position, none of this would be remotely tolerable.

<comment><USER3> c'mon buddy, I hate MS as much as the next guy but this is a far cry from how bad things use to be, at the very least the patch can be removed.

<comment><USER2> I've been a sysadmin for over a decade now. Patches have never been this bad. Its incredible how there's a major problem pretty much every other month now.

<comment><USER3> Next time you have to rebuild a domain because of a patch that couldn't be removed, you let me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is probably a deliberate change, not a bug.</comment>


My Code or Someone Else's Code? - <AUTHOR> http://lookatsoftware.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-code-or-someone-elses-code.html

<comment><USER2> I really enjoy looking at other people's code. I also enjoy them working on mine. I tend to approach the situation as "I can make it better". Sometimes I'm just blown away by what is there. Most of the time however fresh eyes are good, and I can refactor it prettier, or add edge case handling or whatnot.

I also find maintaining my own code boring. In my head, I've already done all the interesting bits. Letting someone else work on it, then bring it back to me makes it interesting again, because it turns on all sorts of new ideas based on what the other person discovered (and I missed).

In general the best code I've ever been part of has included passing code around the group. Ownership of modules was shared by at least 2 people, and everyone had input on it. Unfortunately this gets ruined frequently by the type of dev that thinks my changes to his code are an insult ("it was working just fine before, now its all weird, I don't know what you did" where before means before the spec changed).

<comment><USER3> I think that your ability to keep the ego out of the picture can convert (potentially fractious) collaboration into the best kind of continuing ed. Bravo!

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's hard for me: not to be defensive; always to remember i _am_ a continuing student (and that that's a _good_ thing).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This 200 word blog post made it to page 1?

<comment><USER6> Concision is good.</comment></comment>


Black hole made in the lab shows signs of quantum entanglement - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2100985-black-hole-made-in-the-lab-shows-signs-of-quantum-entanglement/ <comment><USER2> It's an interesting experiment, it worth reading, but the title is not clear.

* It's not a real black hole, it's a analogous sonic black hole.

* The entanglement is not between the black hole and whatever, it's between the pair of particles in the analogous Hawking's radiation.

(The nice thing is that they can see the particle that goes inside the sonic black hole using light, because it's only a sonic black hole.)

Anyway, I don't have a better alternative. ("Sonic black hole made in lab shows quantum entanglement in Hacking particle pairs"???)

<comment><USER3> I'd say lose the "Black Hole" part, since what's been created is an artificial event horizon, not a singularity or any extremely compact mass. "In Lab, Sonic Event Horizon Shows Quantum Entanglement of Analogous Hawking Particle Pairs."</comment></comment>


Structured Procrastination: Do Less and Deceive Yourself - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20160227122619/http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ <comment><USER2> This is a longer and more lucid version of a quip I have about my procrastination:

"I can do anything in the world... as long as there's something _more important_ I'm supposed to be doing instead!"

<comment><USER3> A friend of mine always says something similar.

"There's no limit to what you can do, as long as it isn't what you're supposed to be doing."

<comment><USER4> Is your friend the same Robert Benchley, from Chips off the Old Benchley, that was quoted at the top of the article?

<comment><USER3> Missed that quote. Good to see the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is kind of a thumbtack solution to a more systemic issue. Self- deception, in my opinion, never works: you have to force yourself to be slightly dumber than you are.

The other reason why it doesn't work in the long-term is that you will always be working on things that are adjacent to what's truly important.

Clairvoyance is a better solution. Ever get stuck in a circular argument? After a while, you realize its going nowhere and you walk away. Procrastination, at least in my mind, is almost the same thing. If I let myself observe the mundane things I do, I'll eventually get sick of myself and stop doing it.

Success in dealing with procrastination really a question how viscerally you feel a dead-end coming, and also making the necessary adjustments to remove triggers if its difficult to stop yourself in the act.

<comment><USER6> Another alternative (still requires willpower, but significantly less) is to ask yourself "What is the smallest step I can take in the direction of finishing the task" repeatedly.

It looks simple, but the answer to that question isn't always easy. Sometimes the "smallest step" really isn't; then you have to drill down to get to a smaller one. Sometimes its not clear which step should be first; a list of potential steps is beneficial in those cases.

I think most procrastination stems from a combination of unclear goals and getting stuck; for me the above method gets rid of the second aspect and lets me move without having a clear idea which direction I'm going.

<comment><USER7> That's also a way to analysis paralysis though; sometimes you think about it, make a list of steps, put the first on your to do list, and so on.

Later you find that the first five steps could in fact have been done in ten minutes total without deep thoughts required.

<comment><USER6> The important part is that it lets you move, even if at much slower speeds. The small nature and unambiguity of the first step allows the possibility for it to beat procrastination impulses with lower willpower.

Slow movement is better than no movement. Also it often makes it easier to pick up speed afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But if I put big seemingly important but not really important things at the top and then work on the bottom ones, I will know that I am doing this, and resent myself. That's the biggest issue with my procrastination: my self loathing.

(Ironically, here I am, reading this article about how to do the things I am suppose to be doing with at least 5 things that need to be done before this week is over)

<comment><USER9> I manage my procrastination by taking on more tasks than I can handle, and then letting the seemingly really important ones wait while I finish less important stuff. As an example, my apartment was never so clean as when I was working from home on a side job, because I would wake up in the morning and immediately clean it as a way of avoiding the side job.

<comment><USER8> I get that part. What I don't get is how you deal with the fact that you know you are just scheming yourself?

<comment><USER10> You were already scheming, slacking off and feeling bad about it. Now you get some useful work done on the side.

<comment><USER11> I think the self that you are scheming will see what you are doing, admire you for it, and agree to play along. You're both participating in the con because you both get what you want.

Granted, this feels insane as I type it, but it also sounds like it might work quite well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My tip? Make your to-do list your twitter. I.e., when you get that ping of dopamine depletion that makes you want to pop open a social network or similar, open your to-do list instead. Start out by just scrolling through it, then maybe go do whatever you were going to do. Ideally you'll have some small, easily completable tasks on the list along with the larger more annoying ones. If so, maybe sometime you'll spot one you can get done really fast. Make sure you check off the item when you're done. Do it enough & the goal is to rewire your reward drive towards productivity, eventually building up a chemical response to checking off items that's greater than dipping into the infostream.

<comment><USER13> Great idea. I will start by developing my to-do app...

<comment><USER14> Legitimately gone down this path and hack on it to procrastinate. It's now redis-backed, supports dependent todos, and has a decent command-line interface.

No idea how I am still employed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A far more effective method in my experience has been to focus not on the end product, about which one has a feeling of dread, but on the process. Frame the task as "spend N minutes doing X."

Of course, there is the possibility that you start doing X and just find you don't know what to do with yourself in those minutes. That's useful information! You've just discovered that you don't know enough about the task to get started. Now your task is to write a coherent request for help/clarification.

<comment><USER16> I've noticed this principle come up in the pomodoro technique and the "Learning How to Learn" course on Coursera.

Not sure how applicable it is outside of just-do-it work (paperwork, emails, etc) though. I've used it in my design work, for example, but I'm concerned I'll spend too many cycles on spinning my wheels on rather than thinking deeply about the problem and solving it simply.

<comment><USER15> I recently watched the lectures from that class. I wish I'd taken it 8 years ago because it was a clear and concise summary of a bunch of lessons I'd learned through much harder ways.

As far as thinking deeply about the problem, I've found that is helped by first getting your brain into the task by doing a pomodoro and, if you still feel the desire to procrastinate, either talking it through with someone else, going for a walk, or both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hard to tell (on my mobile screen anyway), but this was written by John Perry, philosophy professor at Stanford [1]. I've been a huge fan of his ideas on this for ~20 years. He has a number of other light essays. His website appears down at the moment though.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_(philosopher)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_\(philosopher\))

<comment> vic-traill To avoid MeTooism, I'll agree _and_ note that my own favourite among JP's varied, tongue-in-cheek, yet thoughtful essays has always been The Case Against Golf [0].

[Posting webarchive.org link as the HN attention seems to have dropped the site]

[0] [http://web.archive.org/web/20160211223333/http://www.structu...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160211223333/http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/the- case-against-golf/)

<comment><USER18> Submitted to [https://www.reddit.com/r/nongolfers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nongolfers/) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Better advice is to allow yourself to do other things sometimes. We all have this idea of what we should be doing, usually work related and when we are not doing it we feel guilty. It took me a long time to accept that it was OK to sometimes go off on a tangent to satisfy my own curiosity and that not only did I not need to feel guilty about it but that it was actually good for me mentally and for my career because I learned new and valuable skills and avoided burnout.

<comment><USER20> I suspect that, over time, the brain learns to use nagging curiosities as a signal that something important to one's current work can be found by pursuing the tangent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize > their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they > will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the > basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of > motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most > important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This > is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

<comment><USER22> Avoiding commitment out of fear of over-commitment is a problem, but there there is also a danger in taking on more than we think we can handle, because that can lead to feeling overwhelmed and becoming paralyzed and unable to do anything. Probably this affects some personality types more than others. To me it's better to gradually build up confidence in how much we can handle-- especially since the inability to say 'no' is such a prevalent disease in some circles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely > nothing."

I felt that way since I know the word "procrastination". When I talk about "procrastiantion" with other people I propose exactly this definition: Procrastination is a way to get stuff done, only that it's not the stuff with the closest deadline.

> Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for > getting a lot done.

This is why I felt the idea of the "instant gratification monkey"[0] doesn't fit my definition of procrastination so well. It's not just a pet in my head, but also friends, flatmates and co-workers whom I doing favors while I'm procrastinating.

Anecdotal example: When somethings broken in our flat, my flatmates asking me when I have much work to do, because then will be the time when I will fix the broken stuff instead of doing the actual (paid) work. There's also the joke about me that when I stop doing (paid) work the whole house will go down because I will have less motivations to fix things.

But there's also a dark side of this kind of behaviour: When I call it a day and review the things I have achieved that day, all the things I got done can easily drown in the sea of things which I have not but were on the top of the ToDo list. Sometimes this is the moment where "panic monster"[0] is seeing its chance.

And yes, even reading article about procrastination is still procrastination in the sense of my proposed definition.

[0] [http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators- procrastin...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators- procrastinate.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Second time this has been posted. It's a cute idea but doesn't solve the underlying problem that most people need to simplify and give themselves time/permission to not be "succeeding" at all moments.

<comment><USER25> I agree that we do need to give ourselves permission to turn off sometimes; and culturally we need to stop being so damn masochistic about work and such. It would be good if we all put more of a priority on LIVING. Work, no matter how inspiring, is still work.

That said, I think a lot of procrastinators could use this intentional strategy to get more done when we are working. For instance, I can see how this might help me out. And hey, I'm a big believer in doing whatever works, even if it seems silly on the surface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I use a to-do ordered by perceived energy and alternate between low and high energy tasks over the course of the day. On most days this means that I do a lot of low energy things and few or no high energy things, but as with the structured procrastination approach, I am getting a lot done, the only difference being that I'm not couching it in terms of ineptitude and avoidance.

Edit: And I also had a huge issue before with concerning myself about the "right time" to do a thing. The right time is now when I have the energy and there are appropriate external conditions(time of day, weather).

</comment><comment><USER27> The only thing that helps me to be more productive is allowing myself to procrastinate as long as I want and do whatever I want. Because any other scenarios make me caught in an endless "try to force myself - get nervous and lose self respect because it didn't work - hate all work on earth forever" cycle. If I allow myself to do whatever I want and procrastinate as long as I want, I simply get bored soon and return to work. Or find better ideas what to do next.

</comment><comment><USER28> Slightly different approach -- I put my big projects on top of my list, and smaller bites of those projects below. The smaller bites are more approachable, and I tend to want to tackle them quicker. And sometimes I surprise myself, realizing a project IS done, as I tick off the last little bite and realize there isn't another one to start.

</comment><comment><USER29> Although I can see the reasoning, this absolutely does not work for me. The times procrastination bothers me is exactly in those cases: when there is something important but not exactly specified at the top of the list. I'll feel guilty about not working on it and then end up in a sort of limbo between the task I could be doing and the 'important' one.

What helps for me is exactly the opposite: deciding this important task does not have a clear path forward and therefore go write down each and every question I have about it and need answered before moving forward or explicitly decide I don't have the proper energy/focus for it at that time and move on to something easier.

</comment><comment><USER30> I find it even more effective to pretend I have already completed the task and then bask in the gratification of being done.

<comment><USER31> a tweak to this is to throw a few things in the list that you've already done, then at least you get to cross off something at the end of the day..

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I used to try stacking the deck in the way this article mentions, until I tried Adderall and realized that it made this kind of task juggling totally unnecessary.

It was really bizarre to experience. However, to be honest, I don't need laser focus most the time, and like the sort ambling approach he discusses. My strategy for the next few months is going to be using it one day a week, for sweeping up the boring things (that otherwise haunt my waking life).

</comment><comment><USER33> This seems a lot like the idea a lot of people I know do. They set their alarm clock 10 minutes fast, so in theory they will assume they are running late and get moving in the morning.

I honestly don't know how people think this will work. You _know_ you changed the time, so people quickly just adapt to the new 'running late time'

<comment><USER34> Interestingly, the real awareness starts when, after some weeks, one changes such a clock back to the actual time:

Then you suddenly have to remember that this clock does show the correct time, which increases the stress level even more than the previous "10 minutes fast" phase.

Not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but an intesting experience nevertheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My most innovate times are during procrastination. My brain subconsciously looks for something else to do, and my very best ideas come at this time.

When I'm razor focused on the task at hand (i.e. NOT procrastination), there's no "creative" freedom to capture a tiger by his tail and follow him wherever that may lead.

</comment><comment><USER36> When I tried this technique, all of the self-deception stressed me out to the point where I got nothing done.

I feel like it probably works better for people only balancing a few tasks that aren't interrelated.

</comment><comment><USER37> Except for the super annoying blue bar popping in and out of this horrible website I'll never visit again, great article!

I have found myself inadvertently taking advantage of my procrastination in this way before, and it's useful to codify it in the language this article uses.

EDIT: The horrible website is one I have respect for, archive.org, which didn't use to have this eye-gouging UX. I'll send them a friendly feedback email about it.

<comment><USER38> I think the blue bar is from [http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/](http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/), archive has it's own bar with capture date selection, that can be closed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This fits in with games like setting your clock forward 5 mins to trick yourself into being on time. It's a slippery slope.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oddly, my mobile provider Three (UK) blocks this, claiming it's 'adult' content.

</comment><comment><USER40> Imagine you are doing procrastination in a structured way. Everything you do will go on to this algorithm before you even do it. So the combined effect of all these might take you to a new direction in life which you intent not to be in.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Good and Bad Procrastination" (Dec 2005) [http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html)

</comment><comment><USER42> Apparently nothing was ever more important than renewing the domain…

</comment><comment><USER43> The only thing i feel about procrastination -- problem exist only when it receives your attention. Have no hunger? Keep it simple: don't eat.

<comment><USER44> talk smack, noone complain? just keep going! (honestly, what are you trying to say?)

<comment><USER43> What i want to say is that given explanation is more complicated than necessary. If we have no flaws (?) with simple: "no wish -> don't do" why there is a need to construct such complex things with self-tricking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It seems the book the art of procrastination by Perry is about this kind of thing. Has someone read that book?

<comment><USER45> The article is by John Perry author of the book: The art of procrastination, more meat.

<comment><USER45> John Perry is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University and currently teaches at UC Riverside. He is the co-host of the nationally syndicated public radio program Philosophy Talk, and winner, in 2011, of an Ig Nobel Prize in Literature for the essay "Structured Procrastination."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Spot on. How else are we all supposed to rack up HN Karma points?

</comment><comment><USER47> Holy shit! This is me. Now everything makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER48> Procrastination is often caused by wanting to do something but not knowing exactly what to do. The solution is to cut it up into bite-sized pieces and start doing them one at a time.

</comment><comment><USER49> This looks like it might be inline with a philosophy that I've been developing independently. I should totally read this article at some point.</comment>


How Google played its cards right in India, and Facebook suffered - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/google-winning-over-facebook-in-india <comment><AUTHOR> FB was a tad condescending, IMHO</comment>


Bpftrace 0.10.0 Release Notes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace/releases/tag/v0.10.0 <comment><USER2> Also see the book 'BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability', published by Brendan Gregg (2019). This book can help you get the most out of your systems and applications, helping you improve performance, reduce costs, and solve software issues. [1]

[1]: [http://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools- book.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html)</comment>


Realtime Political Fact-Checking Becomes A Reality With WaPo's 'Truth Teller' - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/29/realtime-political-fact-checking-becomes-a-reality-with-wapos-truth-teller/

<comment><USER2> Considering that most "fact checkers" that I've seen seem to write more editorials than objective reports, I'm quite dubious about this kind of thing. I've seen too many "he's technically correct but..." to believe anything these checkers say.

How do we know the "facts" that the system is checking the statements against are in fact themselves true?

Does the system take into account the actual definition of lying? As in that a lie is knowingly making a false statement in an attempt to deceive. If the person speaking believes what they state is true then it is not a matter of lying or telling the truth, it's simply being mistaken or correct. Painting "Liar, Liar" on the forehead of a politician simply because he's mistaken is stupid and a bad thing for an election process.

If the system gets it wrong, will they publish a correction in an equally visible manner and explain what the problem was? How can you trust such a system if they don't?

These "fact checkers" have turned out to be an incredibly bad idea, especially during an election. The idea of fact checking faster only makes it exponentially worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Facts are fickle.

That Obama is christian is not a "fact" to people who believe that he's secretly a muslim. Like all other good conspiracy theories, it's based on an irrefutable possible situation. You can't "fact check" that.

Second example on the page, "House Speaker John Boehner claims that raising taxes on the top 2% would kill 700,000 jobs", the link lists three bullet points to refute this: one is completely unrelated to the statement made, the second assumes that Boehner misrepresents rather than misbelieves Obama's intention to only use the revenue to plug the deficit and editorializes that the job loss would happen over a long period of time has an impact on the truthfulness of the statement. The third claims that "relatively small" effects on the economy is not enough to say that proposal will "would slow our economy".

That's not a fact check, that's a counter argument.

<comment><USER4> >> That Obama is christian is not a "fact" to people who believe that he's secretly a muslim.

fact /fakt/ Noun - A thing that is indisputably the case.

Being separated from reality does not mean you get your own facts. facts are facts.

While I will agree that you can't prove a negative, you can prove that he is not a muslim, which is really the crux of the statement.

The second point is from factcheck.org, not from truth teller. It actually is a counter argument.

<comment><USER3> > While I will agree that you can't prove a negative, you can prove that he is > not a muslim

That is contradictory? How do you, in fact, prove that? It is not indisputably the case that Obama is a christian, because people are actively disputing it.

> The second point is from factcheck.org, not from truth teller. It actually > is a counter argument.

I made a general reference to the fact-checking trend which factcheck.org is very much a part of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's an interesting project, but since it depends on the data it is being fed, its reliability is questionable. All media corporations have a large amount of media at their disposal (tv, radio, newspapers, etc) which is used to support the desired view on every piece of news, depending on the bias of the media. All of the media are either way biased, and are both used to influence and manipulate the consumers of these media to their line of thought, and as a product to be consumed by the niche that is aligned with that line of thought.

If that project was fed with crowdsourced, objective, verified data, then it would really be useful, but if it is fed with the databases of particular media, it can only be trusted as much as that media can be trusted.

And I'm not for or against The Washington Post, since I'm not from USA, and thus I don't really know the political stance or line of thought of The Washington Post. I'm just talking in a general case.

</comment><comment><USER6> Uh, where's the skepticism here?

Converting audio of variable clarity to accurate text is still a challenge even for companies who specialize in it. As Siri has shown, it's even harder to judge actual intent.

And then there is at least one other problem: producing the content for each permutation of each political claim...it's not as if politicians phrase their assertions in exactly one way...and properly mapping them to the true/false evaluations.

And there's also the problem of the whole true/false content production, which even the Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact has problems with.

Given these very difficult technical hurdles, either the WaPo has a massive skunkworks budget. Or whoever came up with this has a poor, Jetsons-fueled understanding of computing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone else think it's sad that "journalism" has degenerated so far that now "fact checkers" are a thing? Isn't it the job of journalists to be fact checkers?

<comment><USER6> No. That is a part of journalism, but not the only "job" of journalists. The best journalism, for example, derives new facts from existing ones (or from debunking lies)...this is an extrapolation beyond just reading through a list of assertions and checking true/false. And a lot of journalism is the conveyance of information for the record, factual or not.

Edit:

To use a software dev analogy, non-devs are bemused at the idea that some developer jobs are focused almost exclusively on testing. "Isn't it the job of a software developer to write software that doesn't crash?" they might ask. Well, yes. That is a part of writing good software, and yet the best software dev places have extensive testing practices. Making sure something is broken is a skill all in itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have to wonder what research says about confirming 'facts' so close to hearing a statement from someone. This seems to me like it is worth more as a propaganda tool than anything else, especially since statements can be taken out of context before someone finishes their narrative.</comment>


Unlocking the Business Secrets of Escape Rooms - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/unlocking-the-business-secrets-of-escape-rooms-1524838226 <comment><USER2> I've been in this business for a bit over four years now, operating as a B2B provider with one key partner (a chain of bowling alleys). Our main point of difference to the typical business in this space is that we don't operate our own rooms. We instead build turn-key games that can be replicated and shipped to site, and we've done a lot of R&D to entirely automate the game-master job. Our rooms track players' progress and introduce easier and easier hints over time, and eventually bypass puzzles (with justifiable story reasons) so everyone sees all the interesting parts.

ER enthusiasts typically seem to prefer losing to having a puzzle spoiled by a clue, and as a result, often hate our rooms. First timers, who make up >99.5% of our customers, absolutely love it. It's a weird position to _not_ focus on repeat business, but in such a supply-limited market there doesn't seem to be any shortage of new customers. It's also a pleasant market to operate in because virtually all the other operators are our friends - everyone refers customers to other venues because they can't replay your rooms anyway. There's hardly any of the cut-throat business practices you might see in other fields.

AMA if you're interested!

<comment><USER3> I went to an escape room in eastern Europe recently. The escape room was a lot of fun, we booked two rooms that were mostly science focussed (one was about Nicola Tesla and the other was a lab where you needed to find the cure against a zombie invasion).

I talked to the owner a bit, and he said that their room was also part of a franchise. They sent the floor plan of the room to the game provider and received the full instructions for setting up the room, as well as a shipment of all the electronics and other stuff needed for the puzzles.

Of course every "instance" of such a room is unique in some way. But all in all it seems to be a good concept - a company with some smart people comes up with interesting puzzles, and escape rooms all over the world implement those ideas in an actual building.

<comment><USER4> I played a Tesla room as well, in Serbia (Novi Sad to be exact). It was a ton of fun, and they explained that a lot of the escape rooms actually originate from that area of the world.

I have no idea if this is accurate or not, but it definitely was one of the best ER experiences I've had so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My wife and I think they are fun and we know folks who've done 50+ and drive to different cities to do them. I spent a lot of time looking into the feasibility of starting my own, but the real estate cost here is too high and you need to be ready to run a brick and mortar business for a few years which is a huge leap from just freelancing.

People say they are fads, maybe, but they are essentially just another "something to do" with a group of friends or co-workers that isn't "going to a bar". If you like it, you do another one, maybe with different friends, etc. The problem is in smaller cities there are only a few rooms and you finish them all and have nothing new to do, so then they either need to reinvest to redo their rooms or they bleed and die, meanwhile in big metros 100s are popping up and shutting down constantly, and the quality spectrum is incredibly wide.

If you like point and click adventure games or hidden object style games, this is for you, gets you out of the house. If you are a game designer, they seem super fun to want to try and design and you get to hack at cool tech to build fun surprises and then delight in seeing real people be amazed by it daily, or alternatively frustrated or ripping your room apart at the hinges. Either way, seems like it'd be fun and profitable to do if you were in the right location. Even if you sold out only on weekends that's like 4 rooms * 8 slots * 4 people * $25 = $3200 * 2 days = $6400 a weekend in revenue.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://outline.com/NCXu93](https://outline.com/NCXu93)

<comment><USER7> Also [http://archive.is/W7Af4](http://archive.is/W7Af4).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Alternatively, when you go to an escape room, try to figure out how the puzzles were implemented. I am guessing lots of custom Arduino. For example, one puzzle required entering a specific price into a cash register to get the cash register drawer to open. How would that be done?

<comment><USER9> You are correct that a lot of rooms are using off the shelf Arduinos, often with buttons/reed switches/RFID tags for inputs, hooked up to a relay + maglock for the output.

Some of the higher end rooms will pay a little extra for PLCs such as the ones from AutomationDirect.

Another somewhat common controller are the BooBox controllers which come from the haunt industry. A lot of haunters got into escape rooms as a way to supplement income the rest of the year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My son birthday was in a escape room. The children loved it. The monitors know exactly how to nudge the children according their age. They escaped in the last second and laughed a lot.

<comment><USER11> Sounds a bit like how we might all still enjoy solving puzzles even after the AIs take over. (I don't think the AIs will take over, but I also don't think we'll stop solving puzzles if they do.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I live in the Boston metro. There's a place called Boda Borg that is sort of like Escape the Room, but much more fun in my opinion. There's about 30 puzzles, and each one has three rooms. You can buy two hours or unlimited time. Once you solve each room, you are able to go to the next. If you get it wrong or run out of time after about 4 minutes, you just get a buzzer, leave, wait in line and do it all over again. We just went for a team out for our startup ([https://tettra.co](https://tettra.co)) and it was a great activity. Highly recommend it if you have one near you.

<comment><USER13> Did you really have to plug your startup when telling the story?

<comment><USER14> He did, and both you and I thought that it was unnecessary. Not all publicity is good publicity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there anyone here who is greatly familiar with the overall scene/industry in the U.S.? I'm heavily into the scene in Tokyo and I'd love to compare notes. Based on articles like this one, I sense there are a lot of differences, but I'd also like to hear more anecdotes/perspectives from the consumer side.

<comment><USER16> I live in Tokyo but hadn't heard about this. Could you please recomment a couple.

<comment><USER15> How good is your Japanese? There are a ton of games in Tokyo, but if you can't read/speak Japanese your choices will be limited. In any case, ideally you should go with people you know, since communication will be important.

First off, there are four general types of escape games in Japan: 1) Room-type (single team trapped in a room/series of rooms) 2) Hall-type (multiple teams at separate tables in a conference room/hall) 3) Stadium-type (large areas like convention centers/stadiums, sometimes with no limit to team size) 4) Field-type (no team size limit and no time limit; play area ranges from in- store to city-wide)

In general, room-types are the best experience for beginners, since they are more immersive, you don't have the distraction of other teams, you're free to talk/make noise without fear of spoiling other teams, and you have the staff's full attention. I get the impression that the majority of games outside Japan are room-type, while hall-type and field-type are much more common in Japan.

If you just want to get the feel for what kind of puzzles you'll have to solve, field-types are low-investment, and are less stressful since you can solve them at your own pace.

Most of the games I would usually recommend for beginners aren't running, but out of the ones that are (that I've already played), I would suggest these if your Japanese is fine:

\- 時空研究所からの脱出 (room-type)

\- 下北沢謎解き街歩き (field-type)

\- ある牢獄からの脱出1&2 (room-type; highly recommend going with a full group you know)

\- マグノリア銀行からの脱出 (hall-type)

\- のび太の宝島からの脱出 (hall-type; better if you like Doraemon)

These are also okay for beginners but may be better if it's not your first time:

\- 2099年からの脱出 (room-type; this is a sequel of sorts to 時空研究所からの脱出)

\- 不思議な晩餐会へようこそ (hall-type; the tables use projection mapping to advance the story)

\- Escape from the Red Room (room-type; also can be played in English)

\- The Mummy Escape Game (room-type)

\- ある都市伝説からの脱出 (room-type; it's an escape game + haunted house, so only if you like horror)

\- アイドルは100万回死ぬ2 (room-type; this one's a "time-loop game" where instead of solving puzzles you're trying to figure out how to successfully break the time loop, but very fun even for those who aren't good at puzzle-solving)

\- Any of the Detective Conan games (hall-type)

\- ドラキュラ城からの脱出 (hall-type)

\- 監獄アルバトロスからの脱出 (room-type)

All of the suggestions above are SCRAP-produced games, since I feel they're entertaining even for beginners, especially if you're not sure whether you'll like escape games in the first place.

If you can't read/speak Japanese:

\- Escape from the Red Room (mentioned above)

\- Mystery Mail Box Global Edition (field-type)

\- Tokyo Metro: The Underground Mysteries (field-type; the play area is city- wide, taking you to various Metro stations; not currently running but they've run one every year, generally starting in October)

\- Any of the Escape Hunt Tokyo (recently rebranded as Nazobako)-produced games (room-type)

<comment><USER16> Thank you so much for a very thorough answer. To be honest, my Japanese is ok, but probably not good enough for this type of game. Nevertheless I am now considering making a team of people who would work well in such an environment as room-type, since we'd all be beginners. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think I watched too many 1960s horror movies. I can't stop thinking about the twenty-tonne block of concrete, or the ruby laser aimed between my legs on the band-saw table as the villain goes to feed his kitty..

</comment><comment><USER18> There are these weird fad-based franchises that pop up often and slowly die over time. Edible Arrangements (fruit arranged like flowers), Froyo frozen yogurt shops, Curves for women fitness centers, and more. You can go to a medium to large size strip mall and see them.

My guess is that it's mostly advertising in franchise lifestyle places (like magazines) combined with the fact that it's selling a relatively low-cost service and works more by appointment than an open storefront. Sort of a cheap version of a business retreat or clown showing up at your birthday party.

Interestingly, a company as big as Square Enix has one, their "Trials of Bahamut" escape room in various cities.

Oh, and they aren't really new per se, it's just dinner mystery theatre without the dinner. Places have been doing that for decades.

<comment><USER19> Not sure if "weird, fad-based franchise" is the correct term here. It's more of just a basic trend cycle in effect.

Froyo places are far from dead, it's just that after the initial uptrend with a place on every corner, it has solidified as a market of a few chain stores. I'm expecting the same to happen with escape rooms.

Also, not sure if low-cost is right either, escape rooms are usually around 30e per hour per person at least here where I am from.

and finally, your last sentence feels like a weird sort of "oh its just x but with y" handwaving that you could use on any sort of new activity.

<comment><USER18> If you've been to a mystery dinner theater, it's the same general principle, a group of people get together to solve a mystery. One is escaping a room, the other is questioning actors to solve a crime. It's just the escape rooms get rid of the actors and dinner parts and focus more on props.

As for low cost, I meant to start one. Service-based, low amount of employees, not much need for location if you focus on appointments, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to read the article - unfortunately the link shows only two paragraphs.

<comment><USER21> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

Users often post workarounds in the threads.

<comment><USER20> This cat-and-mouse game is absurd.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but the absurdity is in the state of the publications market, as the current top story talks about: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007036).

Since HN would be much worse off without articles from NYT, WSJ, New Yorker, Economist, and others, I don't know what a better policy would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> xyz-x Broken article

<comment><USER21> Please don't.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find escape rooms extremely boring. I had experienced two in my life and I just couldn't get it. First of all, the escape room is not real - you can always just walk out and then you also know that the riddles were created to entertain average person, so there is nothing special about solving them. About two hours of pretending I enjoy it, so I wouldn't upset work mates that thought it will be great team bonding exercise.

<comment><USER23> > First of all, the escape room is not real - you can always just walk out and > then you also know that the riddles were created to entertain average > person, so there is nothing special about solving them.

Well, yes. It's a game you play with other people. Have you never encountered a game before? Did you know that when you play chess, you are not actually commanding real knights and bishops to fight each other?

<comment><USER24> > Did you know that when you play chess, you are not actually commanding real > knights and bishops to fight each other?

You reminded me of a game called "Battle Chess", in which bishops hold glaives, the rook is a stone golem, pawns carry short swords. And yes, they do battle to the death in accordance to the rules in chess.

I played it years ago, and found that the death scene was different for each thing attacked. It was quite entertaining :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKcZwPb7C3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKcZwPb7C3k)

<comment><USER25> And the queen had a duck!

[http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck- technique](http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck-technique)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ashely Madison's CTO earlier hacked rival site's database - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/toronto-police-say-two-suicides-tied-to-ashley-madison-hack-ceo-wanted-to-steal-nerves-user-emails/?utm_content=bufferd11a6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

<comment><AUTHOR> code sample is not accessible anymore at [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gist/2a308a111d17f7e47976](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gist/2a308a111d17f7e47976)</comment>


Scientists develop very early stage human stem cell lines - <AUTHOR> https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-develop-very-early-stage-human-stem-cell-lines-for-first-time <comment><USER2> Kudos to the author for pointing out the distinction between stem cells derived from the destruction of an embryo and stem cells derived from adult tissue, and for explaining which type of stem cells this research involves (embryonic). Too often, even reputable news sites don't properly explain the difference, or even say which of the two they're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Related facts that were new to me:

The cells of the placenta correspond genetically to the fetus, not the mother (although it meshes with maternal cells, so that the physical organ contains a layer of maternal cells that intermingle with fetal cells).

[http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=53497](http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=53497)

The division between placental and non-placental cells is, rather sensibly, the first step of specialization in the developing fetus.

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

The chain of increasing specializatio can be broken up like this:

> _Totipotent_ (a.k.a. omnipotent) stem cells can differentiate into embryonic > and extraembryonic cell types. Such cells can construct a complete, viable > organism.[4] These cells are produced from the fusion of an egg and sperm > cell. Cells produced by the first few divisions of the fertilized egg are > also totipotent.[5]

> _Pluripotent_ stem cells are the descendants of totipotent cells and can > differentiate into nearly all cells,[4] i.e. cells derived from any of the > three germ layers.[6]

> _Multipotent_ stem cells can differentiate into a number of cell types, but > only those of a closely related family of cells.[4]

> _Oligopotent_ stem cells can differentiate into only a few cell types, such > as lymphoid or myeloid stem cells.[4]

> _Unipotent_ cells can produce only one cell type, their own,[4] but have the > property of self-renewal, which distinguishes them from non-stem cells (e.g. > progenitor cells, muscle stem cells).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell#Potency_definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell#Potency_definition)

</comment><comment><USER4> Glad to see more focus on breakthroughs in health care.

We are living in exciting times, but I just wish that more research authorities would be willing to share clinical trial data with one another or even work together.

I suspect most of them are unwilling to do so due to the refusal of patent- sharing (and initial funding costs).

How come there isn't a YC for more health related startups/companies (or is there and I just haven't heard of it yet)?</comment>


Singe: Leveraging Warp Specialization for High Performance on GPUs [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/ppopp14.pdf

<comment><USER2> My first reaction: Some Nvidia cards can synchronize between warps? Nice!

I've been living in OpenCL world which is pretty much just everyone except Nvidia (because nvidia intentionally ignores OpenCL and cripples their support for it) so I have unfortunately missed this development.

On the other hand the particular use case in the article was to circumvent some other limitations of the architecture, such as relatively small register file and the shared instruction counter for a block of 32 threads. Clever and interesting nevertheless.

<comment><USER3> There are rumours that Nvidia will sooner rather than later support OpenCL 1.2 [0] - apparently CUDA 6 contains a stub library that has OpenCL 1.2 symbols and more.

[0] [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY2OTg](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY2OTg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a guess, this paper is appearing here not only because it's cool, but also the "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" course (by Martin Odersky) has just re-started on Coursera.

He mentioned GPU-related DSLs in his OSCON Java 2011 keynote (see : [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jg1AheF4n0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jg1AheF4n0) at ~14m20s) which was one of the listed 'Learning Resources'. However, the Stanford group he was involved in was doing 'Liszt' and this is 'Singe' (and his name isn't in the paper) - so I'm wondering if there isn't some kind of internal race going on...

</comment><comment><USER5> It appears that these algorithms aren't a good candidate for a GPU. They require complicated consumer producers, and only run on the GPU in reduced mode which questions the scientific merit. One wonders why the authors couldn't have arbitrarily expanded or reduced their data set or perhaps done their algorithm in two passes.</comment>


DailyHack: A Coomunity of Makers, Developers and Geeks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mddanishyusuf/dailyhack/ <comment><USER2> So cool :-) I found 2 interesting hacks on first visit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. You can also share your hack or tricks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the hacks, makes me learn</comment>


Why wine isn't an investment  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/03/30/why-wine-isnt-an-investment/

<comment><USER2> My father would also warn you that your teenage children may break into your wine cellar to take a taste of nearly every rare bottle (judging each one uniquely disgusting). This alone can cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

<comment><USER3> Did you (or your siblings) do that? How was the wine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is another problem with wine and that is that, contrary to popular belief, you cannot just hold wine in your cellar for as long as you want and have it appreciate in value.

Wines usually have a good or perfect age beyond which their quality goes down. It is different for each wine, and it is complicated wine connoisseur stuff. So your old wines may reach a point where you have to either drink them or sell them ASAP or they will start deteriorating. So you may be forced to sell in a bad market. As such wine is even worse than art (which is another fun but dodgy investment).

</comment><comment><USER5> The 2 comments at the bottom are enlightening as well, and the second one is hilarious.

<comment><USER6> Second comment: "I imagine the wine market did very well in the last 13 years as compared to the Russell 3000, but so did practically ever single other asset class, such as Hannah Montana concert tickets, iPhone fart application futures, and wood already on fire."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> By the way, Felix Salmon is a remarkably good writer to whom you should subscribe. I don't think he gets enough attention relative to how well he writes.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Why wine isn't an investment"

because you drink it?</comment>


Compile PHP to .NET online - <AUTHOR> http://try.peachpie.io <comment><USER2> The generated C# code is so weird and completely incomprehensible. I've never seen anything like that.

The practical use case also seems non-existent. How can you possibly translate all sorts of functions that .NET doesn't even have?

<comment><USER3> To be fair, it is decompiled code you are looking at. If you open the dropdown you will find the optgroup with the label that says "Decompiled".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Serious question: Who is this for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends if you mean this tool or the compiler in general. I'd recommend distancing yourself from your possible prejudices against either language, taking a step back and looking at it objectively. You won't be able to argue against the fact that a massive chunk of the internet is written in PHP. You'd also be hard pressed to disagree that .NET is an architecturally superior and highly robust language with a very good tooling and service ecosystem. You can make the connection.

<comment><USER4> I'm not being prejudiced. I have a genuine professional curiosity regarding the use cases for this. Somebody clearly spent a lot of time and effort making this, generally people don't do that sort of thing without a good reason. The fact that I cannot fathom a reason for this makes me think there is room for self education. It's good to take that approach is all aspects of life I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not disagreeing with you. Somebody posted the usecases below (https:/www.peachpie.io/usecases). The most common usecase is basically a legacy site in PHP that wants to/has to migrate to .NET. Reasons can include connecting PHP to .NET modules, performance enhancements, security issues that .NET doesn't have to worry about. There are other possible usecases though, like producing/consuming NuGets from PHP codes, distributing PHP apps sourcelessly, being able to run PHP apps on any platform or OS, extending massive PHP frameworks with C# modules, for instance. And then some funky exotic ones like crating games/apps/IoT software in PHP.

For most people (not saying it's your case) it's just a matter of not being that close minded and understanding that different companies or devs might have different language preferences. Or just to look outside their current box of thinking and see that any of the above might be useful for someone.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What license for our ad server project? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on an ad server (that collects and randomizes ads from different sources, displays them on your site, and collects statistics).  We can't decide what to license it under. GPLv2? GPLv3? Affero GPL? MIT??
My initial reaction was to license under 'GPLv2 and up'... I have some qualms with v3 but I don't want to limit anybody's use based on that.  But it would suck if someone took it, improved on it, and made a lot of money off of it (say by running an ad hosting service like OpenX), and never contributed their changes back to the community.
But I'm not sure I'd use a project under Affero (if it weren't mine).  Argh  what to do? <comment><USER2> you can't really force people to contribute code.

you only really have two options. release the code how you want and suck it up if someone makes money on it. or, release the code how you want and create a commercial branch of your company to preclude other people from making $ (see: sugarCRM)

<comment><AUTHOR> well you can try : )

Is that your way of saying 'just GPL it'?

<comment><USER2> you can try, sure, but if a group really wants to make money and wants to keep their changes internal, they're not going to cough them up.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Google Meet Studio Mini – Change your appearance with a browser script - <AUTHOR> https://x-ing.space/mercator <comment><USER2> This looks like pretty clear trademark infringement to me, unless you work for Google and I think that's unlikely.

I'm surprised Google lets anyone post a Chrome extension with a title beginning with "Google".

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably right, but seeing that Google Meet isn't enforcing its trademark on extensions used by tens thousands of people ("Google Meet Grid View", "Google Meet Enhancement Suite", "Google Meet Push to Talk", etc), I'll just keep the name.

<comment><USER3> I'd be careful. On August 27, they're getting stricter on spam [https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/spam- faq](https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/spam-faq) so don't be surprised if they start cracking down on this as well.

"...for Google Meet" will probably be okay. They have specific examples like that here: [https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/branding](https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/branding)

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. Thank you both for the warning :]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat! This would be pretty useful to me if the settings persisted between sessions -- I don't have the time to fine-tune my camera for each meeting, but if I could tune it once and use it again and again, that'd be worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Implemented in 1.13.0. Update is pending review from the webstores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The source is also available on GitHub [https://github.com/FlyOrBoom/mercator](https://github.com/FlyOrBoom/mercator)

</comment><comment><USER6> OMG I love this. This is like the photobooth application but for google meet. This needs to have the weird lens effects like fish eye.

<comment><AUTHOR> feDisplacementMap [1] should work, although I have no idea how to make one, and Google Meet on Firefox is having problems with SVG filters [2].

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/feD...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/feDisplacementMap)

[2] [https://github.com/FlyOrBoom/mercator/issues/2](https://github.com/FlyOrBoom/mercator/issues/2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Change the extension name. This is not an official Google product. The name is misleading.

e.g.: Mercator for Google Meet</comment>


Ask HN: What Are Todays Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas - <AUTHOR> In 2012 PG wrote an essay about Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas (http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)<p>Many of the items have been tackled (though admitedly perhaps not that successful yet).  What would a new list look like today? <comment><USER2> I would say food / nutrition. It's crazy how simple (not easy) it is to eat right, and how far, as a society, we are from eating right.

When you realize that a LOT of problems originate with food, it's becoming mind blowing. Probably more than half of deaths and health expenditures could be fixed with 'eating right'.

I'm thinking more and more about this.

<comment><USER3> That's about education. Teach people to cook and value the experience.

<comment><USER4> > Teach people to cook and value the experience.

I'm not so sure about this.

I very much value healthy eating, but I'm not so sure how effective I am at doing so, and I've never been a "foodie". Some people deeply care about food -- about the taste, about the culture behind it, about the social experience of eating it. They get excited about going to new restaurants, and will talk about the food while they're ordering and eating it. (I tend to find these conversations a bit mystifying, and not have anything to contribute.) And, they tend to enjoy cooking.

Personally, this is not something that has captured my imagination; I regard cooking as a chore. If I have a lot of energy after work, then I'd rather go out than stay in cooking.

Perhaps, one day, I will "see the light" and become a devoted foodie. Until then, I imagine there is room for a startup to sell to me.

<comment><USER5> Coming from someone who felt the same about cooking for most of my life, I can say it happened almost overnight for me. Michael Pollan does a good job of dissecting the history of cooking/food and it's relationship to our health. Reading some of his work might be a good catalyst if you feel like giving it another try.

<comment><USER4> I've read some Pollan, _In Defense of Food_ I believe. Certainly enough to convince me that nutrition matters.

I just don't get all that excited about food. For example, I'm currently visiting a research collaborator and friend away from home. Last night, even though he is unable to eat out due to health concerns, he insisted on taking me out to dinner. I was happy and grateful -- but despite the fact that he would be eating nothing, he was more excited by the menu than I was!

And more generally, I've been disappointed that eating together is the "default" social activity. Social life (at least at my age, and where I live) seems to be centered around getting a meal, drinks, or coffee. I've tried to expand things by inviting friends to more eclectic activities, but they usually haven't been interested.

The one exception is when I have a bunch of friends over for a party, then I _do_ get excited about cooking. But that's an occasional thing.

Were your circumstances at all similar to mine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Solving our housing supply issues in the US.

1\. We need more small spaces

2\. suitable to families of three or fewer people

3\. that allow for a middle class lifestyle without owning a car because you can access jobs, shopping and entertainment via walking and public transit

4\. that don't cost a fortune so people in the bottom half economically have some hope of living well.

<comment><USER5> I believe the problem is that institutional buyers are out-competing small families in the market. Large funds are paying cash for these houses to flip them and the people who actually need to homes can't make the same deal.

<comment><USER6> It's far more complicated than that.

In the 1950s, the average new home was 1200sqft and held about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is more than twice that size and holds one less person.

Since about the 1960s, we've also torn down about a million SROs. SROs used to be normal market rate housing. Now, most seem to be part of some transitional housing program for homeless people.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an up to date list here: [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

Personally I'd be interested in seeing more energy related things. Something that can displace oil. Something that can be more effective and reduce energy wastage. It has the potential to unlock a lot of cool things like desalination.

Optical routers would also be a cool thing if it doesn't exist yet.

Quantum computers has been in research for a while, but will do some interesting things when it happens.

</comment><comment><USER8> Automated Freight. Good´s exchange is the fundation of the society a low cost automated exchange could be extremely helpful or extremely harmful.

</comment><comment><USER9> A better Facebook. (Recall that Google started when somebody else (Yahoo?) was the "default" search engine.)

<comment><USER7> duckduckgo but for social media

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Artificial General Intelligence --- boom!

<comment><USER11> This!</comment></comment>