Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me - <AUTHOR> http://www.notla.com/archives/2010/07/nigerian-scammer-gets-a-laptop-from-me/comment-page-2/ <comment><USER2> _"If people in the U.S. aren't suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal's FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them."_

I could easily see my parents falling for this. I don't think they deserve to have their money taken.

Although, to be fair, I doubt my parents could set up and use a Paypal account. So they've got that going for them.

<comment><USER3> God help us if the scammers ever find someone who can write correct English. I know many people get caught by these scams, and I suspect that the numbers would increase if the wording was improved a bit.

There's a metaphor about conversions and copy-writing and startups in there somewhere.

<comment><USER4> I've heard that for many scams it's actually the opposite: They intentionally throw in huge warning flags so that the people who initially "bite" are less likely to have second thoughts later on, and thus the scammer wastes less time chasing false leads. They're basically prequalifying you as a good mark. (There is a good lesson about marketing here too — theoretically "perfect" copy or design may not be ideal for your market, so test and see what provides the best ROI.)

<comment><USER5> here's a source that says something similar: [http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/428151/why_nigerian_...](http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/428151/why_nigerian_scammers_say_they_re_from_nigeria/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't the scammers often use the victimized sellers as drop shippers?

Say, Alice lists a laptop on eBay or Craigslist. The scammer has also listed a similar model for sale, and Bob has purchased it in what he believes to be a legitimate transaction.

Scammer "buys" it from Alice, with either fraudulent funds from a stolen card (that would get charged back eventually) or just delivering a forged paypal mail. Or the famous "P-p-p-p-p-owerbook"[1] scam involved a fake escrow service. The scammer has Alice ship the laptop to Bob.

Alice is out a laptop, Bob gets a laptop, scammer gets Bob's money.

[1] [http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=101...](http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1016390)

<comment><USER7> OOC, what is the legal remedy in such a situation for Alice and Bob? Is Alice ultimately the one who loses out there presumably?

<comment><USER8> If Alice can prove it's her laptop, Bob has to give it back.

<comment><USER9> This might be dependent on the country in which the transaction takes place. Under some circumstances, if Bob believes that the laptop is now his, it actually _is_ his property in some legislations.

<comment><USER10> Correct.

For instance in the Netherlands if you believe the person selling you the item has the right to sell it to you // perform that transaction, its yours. (The so called 'Vertrouwensbeginsel')

The only way for Alice to get her money back would be by going after the scammer, because he did not do his part of his deal with her(paying).

<comment><USER10> It should be noted that the belief should fall within reason.

So if something about the transaction is completely and obviously fishy, i.e. 'you should have known something was wrong'. Then its impossible to invoke the 'vertrouwensbeginsel'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excuse me, before we get all excited, where did Rebecca say that she is from Nigeria? Or are all internet scams now called 'Nigerian scams'?

The number of times Nigeria was used in that post, you would think the Nigerian flag and Rebecca's Nigerian passport accompanied the emails.

<comment><USER12> REBECCA DID NOT SAY SHE WAS FROM NIGERIA.

HOWEVER, MY LATE FATHER GOD BLESS HIM AZIZ ABDOULAYE WAS FINANCE MINISTER OF NIGERIA CRUELLY ASSASINATED BY THE CORRUPT OIL COMPANY AND HAS LEFT ME AND MY WIDOW MOTHER $75 MILLION AMERICA US DOLLAR IN HIS FORTUNE IN LONDON BANK ACCOUNT.

KNOWING YOU ARE AN HONEST BUSINESS MAN OF AMERICA AND GOT YOUR NAME FROM A TRUSTED ASSOCIATE GOD BLESS HIM I WISH YOU TO BE MY AGENT BUSINESS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. FOR THIS YOU SHALL HAVE FEE OF TEN PERCENT OF THE MONEYS SECURED FOR ME BY MY LATE FATHER

...

<comment><USER13> Hello good Sir,

I see that you know that I am an honest man of business and would kindly like to offer my services in transferring the aforementioned funds on your behalf for a mere ten percent. I have attached my passport and other details for your convenience and look forward to your response.

Yours,

Shiv R Metimbers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After seeing the stickers I was hoping the OP actually sent the computer with an undercover style backdoor installed so he could remotely control the computer, e.g. take shots with webcam, screenshots, install key logger, etc. That would have been incredibly amusing.

<comment><USER15> This is what I was expecting as well. It would be an interesting study into what happens when you 'fall' for one of these scams, although most likely this laptop was sent to a legitimate buyer as part of a larger scam, detailed by ben1040 here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566587>

<comment><USER16> Im in! would someone please create a kickstarter project like that?

Goal: $400 for mediocre laptop and shipping cost to Nigeria.

$1: you get a photoshots in 5 sec intervals from the moment laptop comes online.

$10: you get a life video-feed from the moment the laptop comes online.

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't bother with the kickstarter project. $400+shipping is relatively cheap, and the exposure/blog material/research potential is worth that cost, for the right person.

(There is of course, the risk that the recipients are wise enough to isolate and wipe it before it has a chance to phone home.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very (probably unintentionally) similar to: <http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/>

<comment><USER18> That was a great read, but the end is a tad scary! "Finally, and most disturbingly, [the victim] Jeff was not heard from again." <http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/index04.html>

<comment><USER19> I found that disturbing too, so I looked up Jeff. His twitter account is active with recent tweets: <http://twitter.com/MyNameIsJeff>

Probably doing fine!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This can go badly of course, taunting crooks is never the safe policy no matter how tempting it can be. The thing is, they are crooks, so they have already decided that they are willing to break the rules, what you don't know is how many they are willing to break.

<comment><USER21> > _they are willing to break the rules, what you don't know is how many they > are willing to break_ //

Isn't this true of almost everyone in society - whether it's jaywalking, or [minor] speeding, or not declaring income, or under-age drinking, or taking a sick day, or 'borrowing' a ream of paper from the office, or ...

My point I guess is that scamming people online doesn't seem to be a gateway to violent crime or anything like that??

<comment><USER22> Well, I suppose you could argue that the extra risk is the knowledge they have gathered as part of being a scammer. Knowledge being power and all that. A jaywalker doesn't know your phone number, where you live, and where your wife works.

Hopefully the scammer doesn't either, but hopefully this still conveys the point.

Edit: There's a difference too; jaywalking et al do not implicitly harm other people. I don't know all the legal intricacies, but theft (scams) is different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> More records of people baiting Nigerian scammers: <http://419eater.com/html/letters.htm>. People on <http://www.419eater.com/> lead these "4-1-9" scammers on wild goose chases deliberately to waste their time, in the hopes of distracting them from attacking other people and also just having fun.

<comment><USER24> Not to defend or in any way condone the actions of the scammers (which I certainly don't), but I wonder how many of the counter-scammers do so out of high-mindedness, and how many are just looking for a chance to humiliate a relatively easy target - particularly after seeing some of the photos in the 'Trophy Room'.

I also wonder how many of those initiating the scams are actually the vicious, heartless criminals that the site insists they are - for example, one of the exchanges [1] results in the scammer sending about 9 hours of (ostensibly) himself reading Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy on the promise of earning some money for it. Career criminal, or having trouble finding work? Of course, some are genuinely dangerous people but it seems to me that there is probably a spectrum.

As I said, I'm not trying to defend those who seek to profit at the expense of others, but the level of grandstanding present on that site leaves me thinking that some of the counter-scammers themselves are doing exactly that.

[1] www.419eater.com/html/booked.htm

<comment><USER25> Who cares why they do it? And who cares why the 419 scammers do it? The point is, scamming makes the world a worse place and it's done because it makes money. Anything that can be done to ensure that it never makes money makes it more likely to go away. Yes, there's a chance people just looking for work are the ones who's time is wasted. Bad luck, but they chose that job. Yes, it's possible that the counter-scammers enjoy their hobby a bit to much. At least they use their possible character flaws to better mankind, ever so slightly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hilarious. But it sucks that the author draws this conclusion:

"If people in the U.S. aren't suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, [...], or _just Nigerians in general_ , then they deserve to have their money taken from them."

I feel like we need a tumblr to post blatantly obvious scams like these. Maybe that would help the common folk be better at identifying them.

<comment><USER27> Someone actually did a paper on why every one of these scams seems to come from Nigeria[1]. If you're not at least suspicious when something like this comes "from Nigeria" at this point, there's probably no helping you.

[1]<http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/WhyFromNigeria.pdf>

<comment><USER28> Thanks for linking that paper, fascinating, the thought had never occurred to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was somewhat hoping that the writer sent a _real_ laptop, but deeply loaded with spyware so he could learn more about the scam operations. (Of course, such a tactic might just learn about a possibly-innocent later repurchaser.)

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't help but feel that whilst there is a chance that this is a Nigerian scammer, he shouldn't instantly presume it is. He also directly warns to be wary of Nigerians, without providing any reasoning that this IS a Nigerian. Even if it was, it's not really very important to the story.

</comment><comment><USER3> While we're talking about scams, here's an interesting form which has cost several people their jobs and lost a lot of money for some UK schools.

([http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public- sector/3400081/ba...](http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/public- sector/3400081/bank-writes-off-debt-for-school-technology-lease-scam/))

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n2t2f>)

</comment><comment><USER31> If you like that, have a look at <http://www.419eater.com/> where there's a large community of people doing all sorts of scammer pranks. Obligatory warning: will decrease productivity for the rest of the day :-)

</comment><comment><USER32> "If people in the U.S. aren't suspicious of...Nigerians in general"

HN is a placed for reasoned argument, not stereotypes. Not <all> Nigerians are scammers.

<comment><USER33> Well, it's a good thing no one said that then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It was a great read and a nice way to give it back. Btw, after the last few chat messages I get a creaky feeling that Rebecca is a dude!

<comment><USER35> Yeah, "suck my divck" was a dead giveaway. Not something that a female is likely to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> While I enjoyed your story, it's quite ignorant to ask people to be wary of "Nigerians in general". NOT every Nigerian is a scammer so making such a statement is unnecessary. There are many hard working Nigerians around the world.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is one of the reasons that I built bidkat.com. With BidKat, scammers have to go through the trouble of making a valid offer (which can't be done with a screen scraper), verifying their offer, and then hoping that the seller contacts them before they can even start these conversations.

If the seller does happen to contact them, the conversation ends quickly once they aren't interested in paying since most sellers will have multiple offers to fall back on. While it doesn't solve the problem, we find that it raises the bar sufficiently to the point it currently isn't worth it for the scammers to bother.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ahh.. It all makes sense now. After recently trying to sell my car on craigslist I received at least 20 emails of the same nature: vague, never a specific label of what they actually wanted to inquire of mine, and very interestingly using ASAP. Almost every one used that term... hm. Anyways I knew by the broken english and vague response it was a scam but never knew how they intended on pulling it off. They would ask for a paypal account to send funds too immediately without even seeing the car. I never did give them my paypal account as I didn't intend on wasting my time of getting faulty payments etc. But before I permanently deleted these contacts, I wanted to see if I could actually talk to one. I gave them all my number (it was in the add anyway) and told them before I can release my paypal info they have to call me.

The responses were priceless! 7-10 of them were in the navy deployed at sea and didn't have a phone (none of them knew each other surprisingly) a few were government officials who worked in such high level jobs that they couldn't be caught on the phone(but can buy cars on craigslist interestingly enough) and the last one claimed to be deaf.(and get this didn't know how to text!) Moral: Ask to speak with anyone who buys items off of you locally.

</comment><comment><USER39> Nice job there. It is easy to forget though that we're all pretty tech savvy here on hacker news. There's a ton of people out there that would see that government logo and get all panicked and confused.

Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam. Thankfully he was only out a couple of hundred bucks, but damn, we need a way to stop it.

<comment><USER40> > Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers > (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam.

Please don't insult butchers. Not falling for a Nigerian scam has nothing to do with "[being] good at computers". It requires nothing more than the level- headed application of logic and reason.

<comment><USER22> I think you're reading the quote wrong. It could just as easily have been written thusly:

> Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers > (he doesn't work with or in tech) fell for a Nigerian scam.

<comment><USER41> Still don't think it has anything to do with working in tech, it's common sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I really wish someone would install some of the dye packs used to prevent theft in stores/banks in shipping boxes and mail those to scammers. it would be interesting to see if walking around with blue dye on their face would decrease their desire to scam others.

bonus points for a cheap cell phone camera that uploads a pic after the scanner is sprayed with the dye.

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of the P-p-p-powerbook prank!

<http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/>

</comment><comment><USER43> Incidentally, those laptops are pretty good: I got one years ago when Dell was offering Ubuntu, and we still use it for my daughter. The battery is pretty much toast, but otherwise (fingers crossed) it's still going strong.

</comment><comment><USER44> How different people treat the post privacy problem. So far (I hope) no pictures of my son have made it into the internet. Not even Facebook - although I suppose some web mail accounts are unavoidable.

Others post pictures of their kid playing pranks on gangsters on their blog.

</comment><comment><USER45> I remember when I was a CSR at PayPal for the French market I used to think that there should have been some huge warehouses in Nigeria full of computers and phones.

Years later it seems it's still working splendidly.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interestingly, __all__ of the Nigerian scammer e-mails I receive are written in British English.

<comment><USER46> Nigeria is a former British Colony and the official language is English, so that makes sense actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Fake laptop in exchange for a fake payment, sounds equitable.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is super old...

<comment><USER49> you're thinking of po-po-po-powerbook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> You just made my day

</comment><comment><USER51> "If people in the U.S. aren't suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal's FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them."

Nigerian scammers are also just as dumb. A few years ago, I was easily able to phish them out of their accounts and other valuable information.

I made it into a game to see how far I could go. After I got into their accounts, I would change the password and shut their operation down (all through lots of proxies and other sorts of protections).

Most had large lists of stolen credit cards and pictures of licenses and passports.

Many of the people that actually freely gave away their info were lonely and desperate.

</comment><comment><USER41> Trying to sell that ruined POS for $350 is the real punchline</comment>


Hubble Just Spotted Something Massive Coming Out of Uranus (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.physics-astronomy.com/2017/04/hubble-just-spotted-something-massive.html <comment><USER2> _rocking gently in place_

I am a mature, responsible adult. I don't make juvenile jokes.

I am a mature, responsible adult. I don't make juvenile jokes.

<comment><USER3> The title is obviously meant to at least elicit a chuckle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They really have a liking for Uranus...

Another of their headlines were "Uranus Has Experienced A Colossal Pounding" [1].

Metro also used the headline a couple of years ago [2]

[1] [http://www.physics-astronomy.com/2018/07/something- massive-s...](http://www.physics-astronomy.com/2018/07/something-massive- smashed-into-uranus.html)

[2] [https://metro.co.uk/2017/04/11/hubble-just-spotted- something...](https://metro.co.uk/2017/04/11/hubble-just-spotted-something- massive-coming-out-of-uranus-6567896/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The article reads like something generated by an AI. It fixates on a core idea (astronomers use the hubble), repeats it a number of times with minor variation, goes on unrelated tangents (sources of charged particles in general rather than as specific to this anomaly) and riffs on these themes in ways that make zero sense (astronomers controlling solar wind using magnetic fields? Unlikely).

The title will probably be enough to drive millions of views, though.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it is kind of self-evident that editorializing the title to promote more productive discussion might be useful in this specific case...

</comment><comment><USER7> Can we just all appreciate how amazing this headline is?

<comment><USER8> It's the type of clickbait we accept here, I guess. Almost expected a clickhole link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how long they've been waiting to use that phrase for an article

<comment><USER10> I'd say the whole world (or at least, the whole world's middle-school age population) has been waiting for that headline since approximately 1782, when Johann Elert Bode proposed the planet's name.

<comment><USER11> I think the double entendre here is pretty limited to primarily English speakers.

Johann Elert Bode was German, so I'm not sure if the meaning of the word holds there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article seems bullshit clickbait. Shame.

</comment><comment><USER13> (2017)

</comment><comment><USER14> This title is going to make big, big waves in reddit.

<comment><USER15> Cool? Probably Facebook too. What's the deal with redditors bringing it up on other sites?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 🧐</comment>


Top Myths About Teaching Computer Science (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/189498-top-10-myths-about-teaching-computer-science/fulltext <comment><USER2> #2 is off. The article says "the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that we don't need many more software developers" but the link provided ([https://computinged.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/we-need-to- prod...](https://computinged.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/we-need-to-produce-far- more-software-developers-than-programmers-how-do-we-change/)) says we need loads of software developers, but not as many programmers.

From reading the BLS descriptions and some discussions on the programmers stack exchange I'd say programmers as far as the way BLS describes it are essentially intern/entry level software devs. They need someone else to give them direction. [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/4951/what- are...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/4951/what-are-the-key- differences-between-software-engineers-and-programmers)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting. The gender data for AP tests in particular, as it seems to suggest that there's a strong self-selection bias at work years before people start applying for tech jobs. Identifying the reasons behind that and persuading otherwise seems like a particularly important area for women in tech groups to focus on.

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised it isn't clear to more people that we need to be addressing gender imbalances in CS at a much younger age.

Anecdotally, many people get into computer science originally because they're interested in programming because they like the idea of, for a major instance, creating video games. Surprise, many of these kids are male. Added to this is a general STEM selection bias.

So we need outreach about careers, opportunities, and the fun of CS and programming, much younger, and targeted at groups like girls who would otherwise be less likely to try it out on their own. Address our diversity issues from youth up rather than when it's too late.

<comment><USER5> This NPR podcast posits that the source of the current male / female divide in computing began in the early 80s as a result of home computer and videogame marketing. It's definitely worth a listen.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when- women-stopped-coding)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting set of points, but damn, this article is really difficult to read. The light text colour and the tiny font size means I had to basically squint at the screen to make out most of it.

<comment><USER7> That's because the mobile link was submitted. If you're on a desktop then remove the m. subdomain prefix to go here:

[http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/189498-top-10-myths- abou...](http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/189498-top-10-myths-about- teaching-computer-science/fulltext)

<comment><USER6> Huh, I keep getting redirected to the mobile version on a desktop. Guess it must have something to do with uBlock Orign or something.

<comment><USER8> This is the link you want: [http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog- cacm/189498-top-10-myths-abou...](http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog- cacm/189498-top-10-myths-about-teaching-computer- science/fulltext?mobile=false)

<comment><USER9> ^ the hero we deserve

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The graph accompanying the article indicates that we need a global campaign to persuade more men to do "studio.art.drawing".

At the very least, we need an article in the Communications of the ACM on the Top 10 Myths About Teaching Studio.Art.Drawing.

<comment><USER11> i'm guessing this is tongue in cheek, but i think it's actually a good idea. though i think the gender bias that keeps women out of traditionally male- dominated fields is usually more pernicious than the bias that keeps men out of traditionally female-dominated fields [0], the latter's still a problem worthy of addressing. men shouldn't feel odd about wanting to be nurses or teachers or house-husbands or any of the many things that are not traditionally seen as male roles.

also, the article for the "top 10 myths about teaching studio art drawing" would probably be more appropriate for a journal on studio art drawing. the ACM should be concerned with gender bias in the computing world. it doesn't have to be concerned with gender bias in studio art drawing just because you want a witty counter-example to show that gender bias against women isn't such a big deal (because actually, it is).

[0] i think bias against women is more pernicious because there tends to be less bias against men in this regard, and so any one incidence of bias is less likely to be terribly detrimental to their life overall. a gross generalization, obviously, but i don't think it's off the mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >If you think that some students just aren't "wired" to program, you as a teacher are unlikely to do as much to help them learn. //

So, is true but you mustn't think it? Or you have to pretend it's not?

I don't think their conclusion necessarily follows either, seems a possible outcome but some teaching is all about enabling the least "gifted" (and this can tend to fail at stretching those who appear to have a natural propensity).

Of there really no genetic element to intelligence?

<comment><USER13> There is obviously inherited factors for all basic cognitive abilities. Humans varies.

But cultural factors, bias, training is what start to have impact at birth, what we can leverage. The scientific consensus seems to be that culture/education/context/opportunity is the major factor when concerned with two standard persons (average cognitive abilities at birth).

I didn't personally read any cognitive science studies that validated the existence of some people having superior cognitive powers. It appears to be quite grouped at the center, with outliers with very specific talents ("savants").

So let's use the Ockham razor and go for the most likely explanation when learners struggle with any subject: they are not given the right learning process.

It has most probably nothing to do with how their brain is wired, because statically, it is most probably very similar to any other brain picked randomly. (As is our genetic code apparently. Two random humans on earth have a very closely similar genetic code, more than was expected at first).

For example I have a deplorable sequential memory: I can't really well memorize songs or karate katas. I blame my total lack of musical and dance education. I never really trained for memorizing sequences… Of course I could point to some innate genetic flaw, but this seems like a less likely explanation given what we know about the brain plasticity.

<comment><USER14> _> So let's use the Ockham razor and go for the most likely explanation when learners struggle with any subject: they are not given the right learning process._

Strange, I came to the conclusion that people not interested in a subject won't retain information about that subject because they don't care about the subject.

I can think of several topics off-hand that no matter how someone tried to teach me, how many resources they gave me, or what the "learning process" was designed as: I wouldn't care to learn a thing. Zilch. I'm not interested, kindly buzz off and let me do things I'm actually interested in.

Actually - that's exactly why I dropped out of school in freshman year and became an autodidact. I was sick of others telling me what to learn about and thought my time would be better spent teaching myself about things I actually care about.

I 'lucked out' and got a job I enjoy doing things I enjoy because I did things I enjoyed instead of things I didn't enjoy. I'm puzzled how other people could reason to themselves that the reason I didn't become a doctor or a lawyer was because of the learning process and not because of my complete lack of interest.

How come the learning process is only relevant to STEM fields? Especially "tech"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel like on #4 that at least some exposure to rigor is in order somewhere in high school, for everybody. I say that because that would have helped me a lot because I took a lot of math and _really_ grokking rigor made all the difference once I got there. And then both my kids had exactly the same experience.

Is a high school CS course that place for that? Probably not. So I vote for a much tougher algebra course that then of course nobody would ever take.

<comment><USER16> > I vote for a much tougher algebra course

I've played with the notion in my head of teaching something rigorous (but not arduous) like basic Group or Ring theory somewhere in HS. Perhaps in place of the rather large amount of time spent on the algebra of second-order polynomials? Hard to say. I'll admit I have zero training in pedagogy.

<comment><USER11> i've thought for a while that a good survey philosophy course would be a great thing for high schoolers. it could introduce a certain sort of rigor (not quite the same as a programming class where things have to run, or a math class where you have to write proofs, but important and maybe easier for many to grasp at first). plus, it'd introduce a wide variety of other belief systems, things like the need to honestly address objections the other side might have, etc.

but a good CS course would be great too, because computational literacy and facility/comfort with computational thinking are only becoming more important for making it through the world and having some control over your own fate.

<comment><USER15> The course that made it for me was based on "Transition To Advanced Mathematics" by Egger , Smith and St. Andre.

Just learning the actual proofs ( beyond calculus style proofs ) techniques was a big leg up, especially induction and contradiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 57.3% of UK students are female. The majority of University courses in the UK are at least 60% female. If there is any gender bias in evidence it is clearly biased against men. There are only two subjects where the marked pro-female bias switches in favour of men: Computer Science and Engineering.

From Times Higher Education, link here:

[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/infographic- gender...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/infographic-gender- breakdown-at-course-level)

I have two daughters and have desperately tried to interest them in maths and computing and understand my enthusiasm for the subjects. They're just not interested. The elder of the two is off to University this autumn to study Illustration (Art).

Personally I am sick of hearing about "gender discrimination against women" when all the evidence points to the exact opposite. Men and Women are different. They have different interests. The only myth is that these differences are down to systemic male prejudice towards women. It's nonsense and it's about time this nonsense started being called out for what it is.

<comment><USER18> This is a good example of why we say that the plural of anecdote isn't data.

Even if you had two boys, that wouldn't be at all surprising, right? Statistically, most kids aren't going to be interested in computer science. Most children of computer scientists aren't going to go into computer science. Most people don't pick the same major that their parents did, across any and every field.

It's only looking at the broader statistics across all kids that we see these tremendous gender imbalances. It's not surprising that any particular young women aren't interested in computer science, but what's surprising is that practically none are. You can attribute that to inherent differences in interest or aptitude, but to do so is to disregard the strong social signals that programming is "for boys".

If art was as overwhelmingly male-dominated as computer science is, would your daughter still have developed her interest in it in the first place? That's not as easy a question to answer.

<comment><USER17> I agree that I can't expect my children to necessarily follow in my footsteps, however the point I was attempting to make was that my daughters weren't interested in maths and computing even after having been actively encouraged to take such an interest. (I have a son as well - he's studying Engineering at University).

Meanwhile, you haven't addressed the data that the majority of subjects are female dominated. Psychology for example is 75% female, and yet men are three to seven times more likely to commit suicide than women - yet another gender imbalance that seems to get ignored.

All my life I have heard demands that something must be done about any issue where men are in the majority, but at the same time a deafening silence when the reverse is true.

A recent study has shown that when applying for tenure-track positions in university science departments that female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen as equally qualified men.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2015/04/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2015/04/14/study-finds-surprisingly-that-women-are-favored-for-jobs-in- stem/)

That suggests that the current male dominance in STEM subjects is actually _despite_ the same pro-female bias that we see elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> #1 is definitely off, for certain in the opposite direction. There are some people who simply do not "get" software, and never will. And that's ok.

I'm have aphantasia, so I will never be an artist. That's ok. Some people are tone deaf and so will never be musicians. That's ok. Some people are just, let's say "logic blind", and so can never understand how a computer will work through software. They just can't follow it in their minds, in the same way that my mind just can't visualise pictures that are not currently in front of my eyes.

It's important that we don't claim the opposite so that people who discover they have aphantasia, or are tone deaf, or are logic blind don't think there's something wrong with themselves, because if "everyone can do it" but they can't then they must be either broken or lazy.

</comment><comment><USER20> #7 and #8 can be summarized as "Teaching is the right combination of presentation, participation, and feedback". Lecture is a valuable way to do presentation, but you need to integrate participatory activities such as clickers, worksheets, ANYTHING that gets the student to actively work with the material. And of course, that won't be enough for non-didactic people, so you should plan for how students will get timely feedback. Clickers are one mechanism that let you give immediate feedback, but there are many other approaches.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wanna smoke whatever that web designer was smoking.

<comment><USER22> I don't. Grey on white ... and no(!) margin left. _sigh_

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ah the Nordic Self-Selection Paradox showing up in AP studies. Not shocking. Notice too that the writer is not horrified that men don't want to join AP Art History or AP Psychology.

<comment><USER24> There is an argument to be made that the asymmetry in art history should be resolved by having fewer women study it rather than more men.

<comment><USER25> What's the argument?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone else notice that the graph shows that women vastly outnumber men for AP tests? Or are we ignoring that fact?

</comment><comment><USER27> > to get more women in CS

As a single male I admit it would be nice if there were more women in CS, but ultimately why does it really matter? Men and women are interested in different things and most women I know just aren't very interested in CS. Is there also a push to get more men into French language culture or studio art drawing? Even though most men would find it boring.

<comment><USER28> > most women I know just aren't very interested in CS

That makes an assumption about their motivation. Much evidence exists that women aren't "interested" becuase they face exclusion and discrimination in CS and pressure to study more 'feminine" subjects. Why do more women take the Statistics AP exam than men? Also, I think there are now more female math majors in colleges than male (but I don't have the data in front of me).

The same arguments were used, AFAIK, when women were exluded from most of the workforce and from much of higher education: Women just aren't interested in those things. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, first in her class at Columbia Law School, couldn't get a job at top law firms (and Justice Frankfurter turned her down because of her gender, per Wikipedia) at the beginning of her legal career. Now the majority of law school graduates are female - I guess they were interested after all.

But perhaps most telling is that we are talking about women in the third person - this is exactly the problem with a lack of diversity: A bunch of guys are sitting around drawing conclusions about what women experience and think. If only HN was half female - could you imagine the difference?

<comment><USER27> I find this response rather surprising.

I can't speak about law, or the way things used to be, but in software dev I've worked with several women and more men. In my own experience the men sometimes chide with each other to the point I've seen other men complain to management about bullying. But I don't see the women being treated that way at all.

In my personal life I often talk about programming to non-devs. Both genders have some people that are completely uninterested, but it's usually the women. Likewise I have little interest in most female-dominated fields. And that's ok.

Maybe things are different beyond my own limited perspective, but that's what I've seen. It may be different in other fields.

<comment><USER29> A large part of this is culture. My ex-girlfriend grew up with parents who coddled her and her sister, protecting them from many things (a common behavior with female children from what I've seen). The consequence is two very fearful women (nominally) who have strong aversions to technical fields. They were told it was ok they weren't good at math _because_ they were girls.

On the other hand, I've worked with and known many women in adult life, and either they overcame that attitude from their parents and teachers or they weren't presented with that attitude growing up. I can speak with many of them about programming topics (watered down in the same manner I'd water it down with men who don't have a programming background) and bore or interest them to the same degree.

If we, as a society, stop telling people "this is feminine" and "this is masculine" (particularly with respect to fields of study, both technical and non-technical) you'd likely see these things even out quite a bit (though the implied feminine and masculine by observing people's roles in society will still be present).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why the hell would you even think to plot 2^Log2(x) instead of just x?</comment>


Coronavirus: What happens to people's lungs if they get Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-what-happens-to-peoples-lungs-if-they-get-covid-19 <comment><USER2> Seems a reasonable article. This video[0] is quite useful for those who prefer video to reading.

[0]: [https://youtu.be/BtN-goy9VOY](https://youtu.be/BtN-goy9VOY)

<comment><USER3> These videos are one of the rare occasions I prefer over reading in texts. Nicely done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. I took a work trip to SF in November of 2018

2\. I was riding next to a man who seemed to be sick on my flight home

3\. two or three days after arriving home my wife became suddenly Ill, within another day or two she had severe breathing issues

4\. went to an urgent care (we walked and had to stop every few blocks because she couldn't breath)

5\. was immediately put on oxygen and an IV -- stayed the whole day and was sent home with an inhaler and antibiotics

6\. health got worse and we went to the ER the following day

7\. was again put on oxygen + IV, lungs collapsed, ended up getting a bronchoscopy

8\. had non-bacterial pneumonia, was told she had developed asthma

9\. after about 5 days in the hospital was finally released

10\. after taking inhalers for almost a year her prescription ran out and now she seems (mostly) OK again

We still have no clue what was wrong with her. Doctors ran loads of tests and everything came up negative.

I'm not saying she had Covid-19, but this virus has me on high alert after seeing my wife struggling to recover from non-bacterial pneumonia.

<comment><USER4> She also lost all taste and smell for nearly a year after.

Love the down votes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Apple is featuring one of my apps. Should I drop the price to $0.99? - <AUTHOR>

Apple has posted a review of one of my apps in the App Store's official Facebook page. Its price is $2.99 and it's currently ranking 27th on iPhone and 16th on iPad in its category (News).
I'm thinking in lowering the price to $0.99 for the weekend, but I see both upsides and downsides:
Upsides: - More sales - More exposure, since it will climb the rankings higher
Downsides: - I might make less money - Some users who bought the app might be annoyed when they see I dropped to price to $0.99 just after they bought it (this one specially worries me)
So, dear HN, what would you do?
App Store's official FB page: http://www.facebook.com/AppStore
Printful (my app) http://itunes.apple.com/app/printful/id385487729?mt=8 <comment><USER2> You could split the difference, with $1.99. People who already paid wont be so irk'ed, and others will be more likely to find value in your app at the new pricepoint.

</comment><comment><USER3> Users that paid $2.99 shouldn't be upset. When making a purchase decision they decided it was worth that to them. The future lower price could have saved them $2.00 but it isn't a reason to get upset. If you spend time all of your life being bitter by the fact you could have gotten a better deal if you just waited... well this is how bubbles happen.

</comment><comment><USER2> When an app is more then 99 cents, one of the key things I look for in the Description field is upcoming features. It makes me find more value in the app, because I believe the developers are actively working on updates and I will be more likely to purchase the app knowing that its feature set will be increasing.

<comment><USER4> I had in my mind that this kind of thing was grounds for rejection by app reviewers. Though I admittedly haven't read the guidelines in many months so I may very well be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why not double the price?

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+(and+no,+Im+not...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+\(and+no,+Im+not+kidding\))

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting article, but I don't think that would apply to the App Store. Selling more copies increases your rankings, which in turn helps you get more exposure and more sales. That's not applicable to the website which offers a service for a monthly fee.

<comment><USER5> Are you in it for rankings or revenue? Cutting your price to a third may not triple your sales - $2.99 is still nominally free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I see you did it. How did it go? Did it make a difference?

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey people bought it for 2.99 right? What makes you think that more people won't pay that price? It has a nice ranking and all, why not just take nickythegreek's advice and add a upcoming features list.

You may also put a lite version out there which will cost .99. Just saying, not an experienced person here.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I already have a $0.99 iPhone-only version. The "full" version which is priced a $2.99 supports both iPhone and iPad. However, the $0.99 version sells really badly. Around 5% of the full version. I'd say it's because reviewers have only focused in the universal app and users are not finding the iPhone only version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm experienced with the appstore, including having an app that sells for the same price and leveraging short term exposure by lowering the price.

Absolutely lower your price to $0.99. The goal here is not to maximize revenue for the short period apple is featureing you, but to maximize momentum for the next week or two.

If you have viral features, such as sharing, etc, then you have a chance of sparking a lot of further growth by having new people introduced who then share it.

Never once had anyone complain about the price being lowered.</comment>


Massive layoffs (15-20%) looming over EA - <AUTHOR> http://gaming.icrontic.com/news/massive-layoffs-looming-over-ea

<comment><USER2> This isn't necessarily as dramatic as it sounds. EA has an interesting "job ecosystem": They buy smaller companies, keep them alive for 1-2 games, then tend to close said companies' offices and either fire the staff they "inherited" or offer them positions at EA's main offices.

I've heard that EA Canada is only losing about 3% of their people, and that other large offices are being similarly lightly hit; so this sounds to me more like EA deciding that now is a good time to get rid of some underperforming employees and several inherited offices rather than any sort of major internal shake-up.

<comment><USER3> "...this sounds to me more like EA deciding that now is a good time to get rid of some underperforming employees and several inherited offices"

Perhaps it is sampling error, but the companies that have downsized that I've known people at have largely said this same thing. There was some financial pain, and economically forced separations mixed in, but for the most part the recession seems to have provided a good political scapegoat to prune net- negative employees without the stigma or guilt of firing someone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those that follow gaming, it isn't a surprise that EA is shrinking. The article doesn't say so, but I would imagine it is the lower level people getting laid off for the upper level's constant terrible decision making. Sad.

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, why would you imagine that? cperciva's suggestion seems far more likely. I know he commented after you, but I'm still curious why you came to that conclusion.

<comment><USER4> In a sense I think we are saying the same thing. As a gaming dork I hear nightmare after nightmare about the way EA treats companies after they buy them. Imagine a small gaming studio that makes a successful game that came from passion and creativity then being bought by one of the largest gaming companies in the world and being over managed to death. EA isn't run by gamers, it's run by business men. Thats why, in my opinion, the games are suffering.</comment></comment></comment>


GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VdEw_mGjFk <comment><AUTHOR> For easier viewing:

0:00 - Intro & Overview

4:10 - Main Results

5:10 - Mixture-of-Experts

16:00 - Difference to Scaling Classic Transformers

18:50 - Backpropagation in Mixture-of-Experts

20:05 - MoE Routing Algorithm in GShard

38:20 - GShard Einsum Examples

47:40 - Massively Multilingual Translation

56:00 - <USER2>

1:11:30 - Conclusion & Comments</comment>


How to Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced - <AUTHOR> http://tracksuitceo.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/how-to-blog-on-company-time-without-getting-dooced/ My SXSW panel, Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced, will discuss the various ways you can avoid being fired (or not being hired in the first place) for your blog/online profile. And ways you can use your on-the-clock Internet time productively; by blogging or pursuing other online business ventures withouth nailed.

<comment><USER2> There is really no content in this article. I'm a little disappointed.</comment>


The Light L16 – a multi-aperture computational camera - <AUTHOR> https://light.co/ <comment><USER2> Constructive feedback about the video and website (if the founders are reading)... I'm probably not the target demographic since I don't know much about cameras, but the video did not quickly explain to me why this camera was so special aside from me seeing multiple lenses; I would have just turned it off after the 15 second mark (even if I saw this on Product Hunt) if this wasn't posted on HN. It felt like the video didn't really convey anything and I couldn't help but feel that it was a waste of my time watching it to the end. Of course it could just be me.

If only this was front and center on their webpage (it took me a really long time to find this):

 _" With 16 individual cameras, 10 of them firing simultaneously, the L16 captures the detail of your shot at multiple fixed focal lengths. Then the images are computationally fused to create an incredible high-quality final image with up to 52 megapixel resolution."_

So you can fit a camera with the power of a DSLR in your pocket now, while having the same ease of use as a smart phone?

As a quick fix: drop the video and fix your site so that you can explain why your camera is so special at the top of the page. Use the image gallery as quick proof right after the explanation.

<comment><USER3> It's not just you. The video, while beautiful, is completely superfluous and distracting from the target market. In the video, nice people use a cool smartphone to take pictures. One edits them on their computer. People are enjoying what they are doing. I had to guess, based on the fact that the camera appears to have multiple (independent?) lenses, that some kind of computational method was combining the image data, and then returning to the site revealed that this is basically the case.

Many questions remain unanswered. Will I be able to fully edit the photos on my phone, or do I need to get a Mac and some custom software to really take advantage of this system? Will the software on the device be open? I'd like insurance against the unfortunate case that you make a nice device but then go out of business. Will the battery be replaceable? A non-replaceable battery in a $1600 handheld device is a really nasty design decision.

In short, really nice, and I would love to drop $200 right now to reserve one, but I'm afraid that I won't be able to undo the reservation if it turns out that the feature set of the phone doesn't match up with my practical needs. Marketing: you are losing sales right now. Go back to the beginning and explain to us _why_ this is a good device.

<comment><USER4> In addition, neither the video nor the FAQs clearly explain the basic technical details that users look for in a device

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some raw (is there an equivalent here?) or high res samples would be greatly appreciated in exchange for my deposit.

I had an interesting reaction reading this: I'm totally sold on the idea and science behind this. We have large scale radio telescopes, why not cameras?

But, I'm super turned off by the proposed plan: modified android OS combined with the promo photos makes me think viewfinder lag is going to be a bitch. v1 seems likely to feel like a janky short-run phone from a new manufacturer. Which is too bad, because the concept and possibilities are amazing.

Light; the articles mentioned a partnership with FoxConn; why not work with them or Samsung to put one out that you just license tech for?

And, it would be cool to see some high res samples.

<comment><USER6> If you break it out of the gallery, you can get a little better look. [http://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_13.jpg](http://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_13.jpg) [http://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_14.jpg](http://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_14.jpg)

Pretty impressive.

<comment><USER5> I liked that first picture, too. And on closer inspection it's interesting -- some different color temperatures in different spots. I wonder if you get a natural HDR type capability using different sensors like this. The second one makes me think low light should be reasonably good, which is what I would hope for considering the technology description.

<comment><USER7> About the low light... You might want to take a look at this image as well: [https://light.co/content/2-gallery/rtalt6.jpg](https://light.co/content/2-gallery/rtalt6.jpg)

<comment><USER8> That's insane how well the faces are exposed given the dynamic range of the light in that shot. With an SLR the correct exposure is like walking a tightrope. Definite postprocessing required to get a result near the L16 image.

<comment><USER9> I don't see the problem with exposing that on an SLR. Just meter for the faces? It looks just like any noisy high-ISO SLR image to me?

<comment><USER10> Any modern full-frame Canon with the ol' "nifty fifty" (cheap fixed 50mm, 1.8f lens) could get a shot like this. I've taken portraits in-doors in candlelight with mine.

<comment><USER11> It took me a few looks at this picture to pick up on the fact that it is all in focus, whereas the depth of field of the f/1.8 lens is going to give you one of the subjects' eyes in focus.

I was a little disappointed in the amount of noise and the noise reduction in this pic until I started thinking about how it would look with other cameras. Probably a blurry, noisy mess with cellphone or compacts. To get the same effect as this pic with a DSLR, you'd have to massively stop down that 50mm lens and would end up boosting the ISO so high that even a modern full-frame DSLR wouldn't be that much better.

<comment><USER10> You won't get both the front and the back of the table in focus, but given how far back you'd have to sit to get all three people in frame, you'd probably be able to get all three people in focus, especially if the guy in the back leans in a little. Also, I mentioned Canon because their high ISO modes are particularly low noise these days, even before noise reduction. And Nikon might have caught up as well, I haven't reviewed lately.

But that's actually not the most important part.

The most important part is that there are only two cameras in my life: my "good" camera and my smartphone, aka the camera I use when I know I'm going to be taking photos, and the camera I have on me all the time.

Since this image is probably boosted and noise reduced and photoshopped to make it the most presentable representation of the product, I really think the same amount of effort would get you better results, for less money, out of a DSLR. If you're into spending money, the right DSLR and lens combo would get you far, far better results.

On the other hand, yes, DSLRs are bulky and you don't want to carry them everywhere. But the Light is not a smartphone, so it's yet another device to have to remember and carry around, so while it's smaller, I'm still likely to leave it home because I just don't think to bring cameras with me everywhere. I've got an older smartphone (Galaxy Note 3) that can take photos pretty near this quality in its fakey HDR mode. I've seen some shots out of the newest iPhone that very much rival this sort of photo. And that iPhone is cheaper than the Light, plus it's not an extra device.

<comment><USER9> That's why it's most interesting as a concept and not a product. I'd really like my next iPhone (the iPhone 8S if if past shopping behaviour is any indication) to have 3-4 lenses and sensors, if it meant it could be more sensitive in low light _or_ use different focal lengths in good light, and still not be bigger than my current iPhone is. So this company should just make a showcase product, and then wait to be bought by sony/apple/samsung.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There was a pretty good interview with their CTO a few months ago on Imaging Resource. Much more technical than what you see on the site, also gives a glimpse on what they were thinking when they were developing this.

[http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2015/04/27/light- interv...](http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2015/04/27/light-interview-no- more-full-frame-dslrs-by-2025)

Personally I think the money shot is the synthetic DoF simulation on the skater:

[https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_11.jpg](https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_11.jpg) [https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_06.jpg](https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_06.jpg)

The subject isolation properties is a pretty big reason why people still bother with large-sensor cameras. As an amaterur, I don't have big demands for image quality, so I only bring my D60 or F4 when I want subject isolation. Otherwise I'm pretty happy with my smartphone as a camera (Lumia 930).

<comment><USER13> I too am interested in this for shallow dof, and was excited at the idea that these lenses are effectively f1.2. But there's no way that skater shot is f1.2-equivalent. In fact, there are no sample shots anywhere I can see that back up that claim.

<comment><USER14> No, that's not like f/1.2 on a full-frame camera. But you have to consider the sensor size, and thus multiply by the crop factor. Most photographers know this about focal length (50mm on full-frame becomes a 100mm lens on micro four thirds), but it seems people forget that the same goes for aperture. f/1.2 on a full-frame becomes a f/2.4 on m43, so you'll need an even bigger (smaller number) aperture to have the same effect on a smaller sensor.

I'm guessing these sensors are way smaller than m43 even, so that f/1.2 won't produce anything near the stunning bokeh it would on a full-frame camera.

<comment><USER13> Yes, though if that's their angle the marketing line is very misleading: they're discussing focal length as 35mm-equivalent, I had assumed they were doing the same with aperture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The multi-aperture thing isn't what makes this interesting. What is interesting is that it takes a bunch of little sensors and combines them into a single better image with software.

Because a lot of work has been done into making very good sensors and optics for phones, this approach does make some sense. It also lets you have more sensor surface area without the bulky optics. I'm pretty sure that there are telescope arrays that work in a similar way.

I'm not about to replace my cameras with these, but it's got potential.

There's more information in [http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/7/9473793/light-l16-16-lens-...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/7/9473793/light-l16-16-lens- camera-specs-price) and [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542121/a-high- end-camer...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542121/a-high-end-camera- in-a-small-package/) .

<comment><USER16> The multi aperture thing doesn't make much sense, it appears to have multiple lenses which will have debilitating parallax error due to the positioning. I don't see how that's possible. I'm also struggling to see why they laid out the sensors in such a non geometric pattern too.

<comment><USER17> Parallax could be corrected by software as long as the subject isn't too close. You might lose a little detail around the edges but with enough redundancy it's probably not a big deal

<comment><USER16> In their examples there's a macro photo of a chess board.

<comment><USER18> If you look closely at that photo, the result is really weird. The black pieces behind the plane of focus have very uncertain positions that the software didn't bother fixing. It's bokeh, in a way. A horrible way.

<comment><USER19> Yup, it's not nice. Headache inducing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know if it was intentional, or necessitated by the internal mechanics, but I find the layout of lenses to be visually unpleasant. It looks like someone took a camera and gave it chicken pox...

Aside from that, this is a really cool idea! But I don't know how it's being positioned. Is it a point and shoot replacement? Or a mirrorless camera replacement?

Or maybe it's just a technology demonstrator - this sort of system, suitably minimized, would make an excellent smartphone camera.

<comment><USER21> I agree with the unpleasantness, as the multiple irregular holes does stimulate my trypophobia slightly. (Note: do not Google "trypophobia" if things with multiple irregular holes makes you feel uneasy, as you will become _very_ disturbed.)

<comment><USER22> I wasn't aware I have some trypophobia, but now I do heh.

<comment><USER23> The only people without trypophobia are those who do not know about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This camera, like many that have come before it are likely to be subject to the uncanny valley of market. Consumers won't want to stomach the price tag and professionals are already accustomed to their DSLR's, and in most cases have significant investment in specific brand and/or lens type with a lot of expensive glass.

Professionals don't care about the bulkiness of their cameras, they care about the performance and flexibility. DSLRs have 20+ years of development in terms of speed, durability, flexibility and the raw image processing power that the giants have spent decades perfecting (lots of work on DSPs).

How many pictures can it take in burst mode? How long does the battery last? Can I use my suite of existing lenses with this?

Sorry to say this camera, while unique and technical marvel, has an uphill battle from the business perspective. It's interesting from a niche perspective but I don't see it becoming a huge success financially for them, which is unfortunate because many talented people probably worked on this.

<comment><USER25> I agree with everything that you say. However, it's also eerily reminiscent of the explanations I was given 25 years ago about why digital cameras would never catch on. Digitals were far more expensive than a simple Canon or Polaroid, so it would never catch on with consumers. As for professionals, they had far to much experience with developing negatives to throw it all away for some flash in the pan gimmick. Heck, the digitals had terrible lenses compared to what you'd get on Service Merchandise point and shoot, not to mention anything professional grade. Besides, even if CCDs kept improving, they'd be competing with a moving target. Even if digitals were better ten years down the line, it's not like Kodak wasn't going to be improving their processes, too.

<comment><USER18> A very attractive straw man, but I personally can't remember anyone saying that digital would "never catch on". 25 years ago the state-of-the-art digital camera was a 1.3MP digital back for the Nikon F3, that included a gigantic external box that the user wore over their shoulder. Only a weirdo would use a digital camera in 1990, but it was pretty obvious that digital was the future. 15 years ago the digital camera (Nikon D1) was just barely a good idea for dedicated enthusiasts and still basically terrible for everybody else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My first thoughts as a working professional for 11 years (retouch, photographer and later videographer).

Forget a raw file format (that you will be able to use in LR/PS) and the flexibility and editing headroom it gives you. Perhaps there will be some specialist proprietary software like for the Lytro (that will be unsupported in 10 years, leaving you with unusable files). Considering this I really hope, as The Verge article says, "the output isn't as punchy" (which normally means contrasty and saturated).

The lack of a raw file format will also mean that I can forget DCP camera profiles to normalize the output with my other cameras.

What we know nothing about: what will AF be like? What will the dynamic range be like (considering they're stitching, not stacking, smartphone sensors)? Noise will probably be OK as you can downsample. But Sony is and Canon has 42/49 MP FF cameras out that doesn't need downsampling to look good. A year from now (when Light comes out) more cameras will have followed.

Focal length range is a bit strange. 35mm equiv is a bit on the long side to be an all-round solution. 24-70 would have been OK for me, but I realize that's personal.

Perhaps we shouldn't expect the death of the MILC/DSLR because of this camera just yet. Many hobbyist though, has left both the compact and the MILC/DSLR for a more enjoyable smartphone experience. Perhaps it could lure them back to buying a camera (without a phone in it)

<comment><USER11> If you take a look through the FAQ, they do say that they are designing it to work within common photography workflows, giving example formats of JPEG, TIFF, and raw DNG (though I'm assuming the DNG is after their proprietary postprocessing, not a set of the true raw sensor outputs). They're asking for input going forward, so take a few minutes to express your concerns about workflow and maybe it will be a better product for it.

I believe they are doing quite a bit of stacking, as they say they are processing up to 130 megapixels from 10 sensors to get the final image. There should definitely be a dynamic range improvement. I hope they can somehow apply their processing to video streams and provide a wide dynamic range (maybe even HDR) video, but I'd be surprised if they can do more than provide a cellphone-like 4K stream from a single sensor.

Focus speed shouldn't be an issue. I'm guessing it's using tiny cellphone- sized camera sensors, so even at the f/2.4 printed around the lens, they'll have massive depth of field. It looks like they even have the DOF printed on each lens: 10cm-infinity for the 35mm lenses, 40cm-inf for the 70mm, and 100cm-inf for the 150mm. Any focusing will be done computationally at post- processing time.

I'm interested in the concept; I just hope they're a little more developer- friendly then Lytro turned out to be. I know there's a lot of proprietary secret sauce going on with the computational post-processing, but if they can open up their system just a bit to let the crowd in to poke around, there's probably a lot of unique creative opportunities.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for an excellent reply! Well, I had totally overlooked the FAQ and I see now that they are hoping to deliver DNG, and it doesn't seem to be the demosaiced linear DNG variant (which is very good). As you say it most certainly needs to be processed/exported (either in camera or in post) to DNG. If the software lives as long as the camera, that's fine by me. Many camera makers already "cook" their raws so perhaps this doesn't need to be bad.

> Any focusing will be done computationally at post-processing time.

I catch myself being stuck in old ways of thinking. Again you are right and you just threw some fuel on my excitement fire.

I must say I love the innovation that new actors are bringing to the market. However, I will remain a bit skeptical until release. A lot can happen in a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The most exciting thing about this (and things like Lytro) is that people are still discovering fundamentally different ways to do 'camera'. Perhaps one day our phones will use a dozen cameras, some optimised for low light, others for high dynamic range, and others still for action, with software figuring out the best combination to use for the each shot.

<comment><USER28> Despite all the interesting cameras that have been made recently, they all rely on one piece of technology that is pretty archaic, the lens. Today's lenses are definitely limiting the image quality available on small sensors, and they seems to improve at a snails pace. I'm cautiously optimistic that this camera may be able to correct for many of the issues with the lenses by using the multiple lenses to create the single image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Don't really know much about optics to really know the viability of this specially after Litro. But here is what I like

1\. Its a different take on the problem, stitching multiple lens and sensor data to make a whole that's better than the parts. Even if this don't work I think that idea would probably live to see another day.

2\. There are comments about DSLR being fast, viewfinder easier to work on all situations and I agree to all of that. But I think the biggest point is what one of the founder said in the video, it doesn't matter if you have the best camera @home. This is something you can carry just like your smartphone.

3\. Yet even this is a separate device, what I would like eventually is for this idea to be improved and implemented for smartphones. Maybe a 3 lens system that's not as good but much better than current cameras?

4\. And I really loved the way the lenses were placed horizontally. That looks to be a simple yet effective innovation (not that I know if it has bad optical consequence).

<comment><USER30> _> Its a different take on the problem, stitching multiple lens and sensor data to make a whole that's better than the parts._

I've seen the idea discussed a few times in the past, essentially doing for cameras what is done with multiple radio telescopes to create something that would be impractical to achieve with a single unit. This is the first time I've heard about someone having implemented the idea outside of a proof-of- concept. I'd be interested to see how well it works in practice. I'm not that much much of a photo taker myself, but a few of my friends are camera bugs so I'll be passing the link on for them to dissect.

<comment><USER29> I tend to use the HN crowd like that :). You can expect to find from an optics professor to professional photographer and everything in between to comment on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> According to the FAQ they support raw DNG. Does that mean that you can get the raw sensor data for each individual sensor and you can hack around your own algorithm for merging them?

</comment><comment><USER32> Well at least this looks like something new! But notify me again when I can read the review on dpreview.com, the site was kind of light (pun!) on the details.

<comment><USER33> I agree, all this is nothing without thorough review. Looking forward to that, this really looks interesting though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a straight up weird product at the price point they're targeting. And given that they're asking for money up front and not providing sample raw images and/or full resolution jpegs makes me very hesitant.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is quite interesting/cool but the two primary reasons I prefer DSLRs to any point and shoot are: 1. The viewfinder. Screens just don't cut it in sunlight or at night (too much or too little light). 2. Time between getting the camera out and getting that shot is very very quick with a DSLR.

It's hard to imagine this replacing my DSLR. If the cost is low enough it could replace my point and shoot though... I'm still more likely to have my phone on me than a camera...

<comment><USER18> I have an interest in photography and little to no interest in cameras like Lytro, and probably this one although there's not enough information yet to tell. As you point out handling and speed are important. Nobody cares about a "light field" camera if it's impossible to hold and takes three seconds to turn on. $1300 is a huge chunk of money for unknown performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is interesting, but silly. It's hard to imagine a practical use for this other than perhaps wanting to flip between two versions of a photo with one wide open and one sharp across the frame. But you'll have different shutters anyway to keep the same exposure.

Seems like this was spawned from a moment of inquiry where someone was so preoccupied with whether they could that no one stopped to think about whether they should.

<comment><USER37> I don't think the point is to let you switch between different versions of an image (though the after-the-fact adjustments of depth of field are really slick). I think it's more that with a bunch of sensors and lenses you can simulate a much larger sensor and lens, so you get the low noise and choice of lens profiles of a DSLR without having to actually lug one around, or a bag of lenses to go with it. Some of those pictures in their gallery are pretty awesome, particularly in terms of noise. I'd never have guessed that they were taken with something so portable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I try not to engage in classic HN-style middlebrow dismissal, but can I take a moment to complain about their "Watch the Film" promotional video? It tells me nothing more than "this is a device you can take photographs with". Absolutely useless .

</comment><comment><USER39> why do they arrange the lens irregularly, what's the reason behind this arrangement?

<comment><USER40> They're not irregularly arranged. If you look at the image of the front of the camera at the bottom of the [http://light.co/camera](http://light.co/camera) page, they're arranged in concentric circles around a point that's just off to the right hand side of the case. As there are 15 lens and a laser rangefinder, presumably they're directed at various points in space from that center along a straight line in front of the camera. Which 10 lens used for a picture, and consequently how far along that line your subject is, will depend on the rangefinder for an optimal image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It is about time someone makes this.I know it looks gimmicky and it kind of is, but this trend should allow more interesting photography. I personally am looking forward to it, whether this one will be good or someone else, I am not invested much, I am just looking forward to the trend.

Also, better processors should allow more sampling from sensors and aggregating that info for better photos.

</comment><comment><USER41> I was hoping this was an application of the single-pixel camera concept I've read about few years ago[1]. Apparently not.

1\. [http://web.stanford.edu/~jbarral/PSY221/SinglePixelImaging.h...](http://web.stanford.edu/~jbarral/PSY221/SinglePixelImaging.htm)

</comment><comment><USER42> You video is pretty useless. People taking pictures. Tell us why it's different, what's new.

</comment><comment><USER43> This multi-aperture camera was delivered rather before the Light L16:

[https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla](https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla)

It's about time someone did this for consumer products.

</comment><comment><USER44> Everyone in the video seems to be holding the camera in an awkward way to avoid getting their fingers in front of any of the lenses.

</comment><comment><USER45> Man oh man, do I _want to believe._ But given what a huge disappointment Lytro turned out to be, I'll wait for v2 or v3.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can it make calls?</comment>


Finally, at long last, someone hacked Amazon's Alexa into a signing fish - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/04/finally-at-long-last-someone-hacked-amazons-alexa-into-one-of-those-singing-fish/?ncid=tcdaily <comment><USER2> That's amazing since it has no fingers.</comment>


Arch Linux: A Developer-Friendly Operating System - <AUTHOR> https://nanxiao.me/en/arch-linux-a-developer-friendly-operating-system/ <comment><USER2> Arch community repo is the best, any obscure software you are looking for is there one command away of installing it.

Arch wiki is an endless source of information, not even Ubuntu has such support.

Also its highly recommended you follow the wiki install guide (if you have a couple of days) since it will teach you a lot about the different parts that make up your *nix operating system.

Once you have done that and you are feeling lazy i've found Antergos easy to install while keeping the same flexibility as vanilla Arch.

Also, finally, if you are a dev i'd recommend zsh + oh my zsh to have a sleek terminal.

</comment><comment><USER3> I ran it for a few years but they do have breaking changes sometimes. It's a great system if you want the latest versions but that daily update can sometimes make you spend hours troubleshooting, and that's not great for a work environment where everything needs to just work.</comment>


Ask HN: What are other "major components" of highly performant web applications? - <AUTHOR>

I have been messing around with Rails for the past year and it has got me more attuned to what is needed/important when building web apps.
I have seen the words before, but things like memcached, HAProxy, etc - I didn't appreciate why they were useful until I saw the limits of a simple server + db combo.
I was wondering, besides the following:
http server (WEBRick or Puma, Apache)
database + database server (MySQL, postgres, etc)
Load balancer (HAProxy)
Caching middleware (memcached)
Sessions (Redis)
What are other major components of web apps that are critical for building high performance apps?
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> There are many different paths by which user can access the contents of your web app. For high performance apps, you'll want to optimize this process. Here are two suggestions:

\- Use a CDN to serve static content without the need to serve the content out of the origin server every request.

\- Create instances of your application in multiple regions. The shortest path to your web app varies based on where the user is in the world. Multiple regions can minimize the latency introduced via the hops s/he must make.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have a look at "Web Operations". It deals with all the components of building and operating a large web application. [http://www.amazon.com/Web-Operations- Keeping-Data-Time/dp/14...](http://www.amazon.com/Web-Operations-Keeping-Data- Time/dp/1449377440)

</comment><comment><USER4> Depending on the app, a caching proxy (or CDN) with ESI support (and the appropriate ESI tags in the output) can vastly improve performance while retaining user-specific page content.

Personally I like varnish for this role.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tuning your database indexes and monitoring cpu usage, ram usage and queued http request counts are a few that come to mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have $25/month Heroku professional dynos, and I keep maxing out 512MB ram, any advice on what to work on to lower that? It's ridiculously high I know, but worth a shot.

<comment><USER6> The best thing to do is profile your app's performance, make a change and observe the results. It will help you make sure that your effort and money are actually improving things. New Relic has been great for this, and I've also heard good things about Data Dog. Run your app for a while with one of those in place, observe where the bottlenecks are, then come up with experiments to test whether you can improve performance.

If it's a Rails app, two things spring to mind as first things to try once you have profiling in place:

\- lower the number of web server workers and/or threads (depending on what you're using)

\- Ruby 2.1's garbage collector is really not well suited to web apps because it will often promote objects from a single request to the long-lived generation, even though they will not be needed again. Going from 2.0 to 2.1 nearly doubled the memory usage of one of our apps. 2.2 is doing much better.

You might also want to see if you can offload any processing of tasks that can be queued using something like Sidekick or Resque.

There's a bunch of other things you could do but you really need to work out why your app isn't performing as you'd like first.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using Rubinius, the C++ implementation of Ruby in conjunction with Puma. ([http://rubini.us](http://rubini.us))

I'll definitely check out Data Dog and New Relic, thanks for the tip

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You're going to need queues is you want to make it scale.</comment>


How A Non-Salesman Sold Two Startups - with Nori Yoshida (YC W11) - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/nori-yoshida-curebit-interviews/

<comment><USER2> Looks like there's a DDoS attack on CloudFlare, which I use to speed up my site.

If you're having trouble, could you use my IP instead: <http://184.108.40.206/nori-yoshida-curebit-interviews/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Semi-OT, but the ad for Freshbooks is pretty ingenious (giving incentive to not just sign up or click through, but to actually _use_ the service to get info from you Andrew). Was that something they came up with, or something you came up with to drive traffic towards the sponsor (if you can say)?

<comment><USER2> Thanks. My idea. I wanted a way to measure my effectiveness directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like Mixergy is down atm.

<comment><USER2> sorry. I'll check it out.

<comment><USER5> Seems ok to me.

Love your interviews by the way. Your voice, mannerisms and speech patterns are inviting and easy to listen to.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: git self-blame – Blame yourself for others' mistakes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/git-self-blame <comment><USER2> I realize this is a bit of a joke, but does anyone else think "blameless" culture has gone a bit too far? I think it's important to stress that everyone makes mistakes, and that it's okay to make mistakes, but at the end of the day, if someone broke something or caused a bug, they should know about it so it doesn't happen again.

<comment><USER3> I used svn blame a lot recently, but never to trace the cause of bugs. I break out the usual tools (debugger and brains) for that. I only resort to blame to understand how a particular odd piece of code came to be (e.g. commented out leftovers that were last touched years ago and forgotten). Even then, I mostly need to see how line changes relate and when they were made. The author is merely a reference of last resort - a pointer to a person who might, with some luck, still remember that he worked on that part.

When I find a bug in code that a colleague has written I simply tell him about my changes to it. That keeps him in the loop and gives me a confirmation that my attempted fix should indeed be OK. Of course, in more formal projects, tickets and code reviews would replace that process.

Blame is not about assigning blame. The feature has a terrible name because it brings up this undesired association. It is about understanding the lineage of the code.

<comment><USER4> > _The feature has a terrible name_

But in svn the feature is actually called "annotate"; "blame" and "praise" are mere aliases for it. To quote the book[0]:

        you may find yourself typing svn blame …
        or svn praise … instead of using the canonical
        svn annotate command form. That's okay—the
        Subversion developers anticipated as much,
        so those particular command aliases work, too!

[0] [http://svnbook.red- bean.com/en/1.7/svn.tour.history.html#svn...](http://svnbook.red- bean.com/en/1.7/svn.tour.history.html#svn.tour.history.browsing.annotate)

<comment><USER3> Without looking at the archives, I believe that annotate and praise were introduced well after the initial implementation which used blame as the command. I may be wrong, though.

<comment><USER4> It seems the command is listed as `blame` even in the v1.0 book, but does even then have the `annotate` and `praise` aliases. In all the years I used svn I firmly believed annotate was the canonical form and it was the one I always used, so I've learnt something here (about svn, and maybe about myself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh, I have a functionally similar joke project that I named git-upstage:

[https://github.com/SilasX/git-upstage](https://github.com/SilasX/git-upstage)

The difference is, this one's focus is on stealing credit for others' work -- it squashes a branch into one commit under your name, and backdates it five minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool! I did come across this when I was working on `self-blame` and was (and still am) very impressed!

<comment><USER5> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN! Thanks for all the interest! I have somewhat spotty internet now but feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer them when I can!

As a side note, if you're interested in this sort of thing I also wrote out the steps I went through to build this: [https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/git- self-blame/blob/master/gi...](https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/git-self- blame/blob/master/git-self-blame)

</comment><comment><USER6> Rather than just the author of a line of code, I want git or something git like that allows you to attach commentary to bits of code. For one thing that would allow you to preserve the code reviews but there are bigger reasons for this.

In every code base there are at least three generations of styles in the code. The way we want people to write code, the way we used to write it, and the things we wanted the old way to replace. You know, the really terrible code.

I find myself from [time] to time wishing I had a way to durably attach commentary to a block of code that doesn't result in a wall of text and which can't easily be pruned off in a refactor or a cut and paste.

In every team there are people who cut and paste idioms from code they are familiar with into new code. And the code people are [most] familiar with is often the old old way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there! This is a really neat idea, and I've been kicking around some semi- similar ideas for a while now but haven't done anything with them. Let me know if you want to bounce around some ideas!

</comment></comment><comment> dh-g Not in the spirit of the project but I would like to see an alias added to the README to replace `git blame` (to run on your own / teammates / friends computers).

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, I actually looked into that but it's not so easy. See: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/3538791/1103543](https://stackoverflow.com/a/3538791/1103543)

So even if this script is the absolute first thing in your $PATH, `git blame` will always call the builtin rather than this. There are probably more involved ways to make this happen the way you want (like create a different `git` program that shells everything out to the real one except the `blame` command) but I wasn't sure I wanted to go down that rabbit hole.

Feel free to submit a PR if you find a simpler way though!

<comment><USER7> If they're using bash, it shouldn't be _so_ hard. Just put something like this in your/their bashrc

      git() {
        if [[ $1 == blame ]]; then
          shift
          git self-blame "${@}"
        else
          command git "${@}"
        fi
      }

edit: this isn't 100% perfect as it won't work (but won't break git either) in situations where the user uses a global flag _in addition to_ blame. I've been using git for years though and the only global flag I've used are --version and --help

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks for sharing! My Bash skills definitely have lots of room for improvement—I think I learned at least three new things from your comment alone. :)

I too had never really used global git flags until they came in very handy for `git self-blame`!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I appreciate the time you took to document your journey in the source file. In most github repos, all we see is the end result of hours or days of work (especially when authors blow away their commit history by squashing prior to to sharing), and the comments that explain everything you tried that /didn't/ work are just as illustrative and educational as knowing what does work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I appreciate the kind words! (And I'm glad at least one person actually read through that.)

In this case, I think I was "helped" by the fact that I consider myself relatively inexperienced with both shell scripting and advanced git usage. This gave me an irrational fear that I would publish this repo and get lots of "why didn't you just do X" responses, so writing down my journey was at least one way of showing that I actually tried a few different approaches and while my eventual solution may not be the best I know it's not the worst :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What about git-no-blame? Something like your tool but it replace the name with empty spaces instead of your name.

<comment><USER10> Or only the names of people who no longer work at the company

<comment><USER11> I suggest making a git blame-nemesis for this purpose

<comment><USER12> git bofh perhaps? Or are we saving that for the coworker who rejects all of your well commented and wiki'd PRs because it's not in their pet style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does this mean we should also have "git self-praise" ?

</comment><comment><USER14> Alternative name suggestion: "git claim"</comment>