Sometimes the Paintbrush is Mightier than the Pen: Hiring a Star Web Designer - <AUTHOR> http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12

<comment><USER2> What I didn't mention is where I found that Paul Buchheit essay and a lot of other very useful resources. Thanks news.yc!</comment>


Jobs the Jerk - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/10/steve_jobs_biography_the_new_book_doesn_t_explain_what_made_the_.single.html

<comment><USER2> I believe the author would have a different opinion if he watched Steve's 2005 commencement speech. <http://goo.gl/l7scw>

Steve said the reason he was successful later in life was from learning from his previous failures. This doesn't seem characteristic of a man who is unable to reflect on his past.

Perhaps the reason he chose not to do so later in life was because he knew of his impending death. The man who lives every day like his last doesn't spend time reminiscing about the past—he lives in the present and enjoys every waking moment.

I'd like to think that in the last months of his life Steve tried to do just that.

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing he has seen it already. Have you read the book? (I haven't)

<comment><USER2> I pre-ordered the book so it hasn't arrived yet. I'm definitely looking forward to reading it. :-)

I did, however, read The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which was an excellent unauthorized biography I read a few years ago. <http://goo.gl/NxK3D>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps he learned nothing and was just lucky enough to be surrounded by people who made him look good.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Even when he was dying, Jobs wasn't in the mood to analyze his strengths, his weaknesses, his victories, or his mistakes."

To me, that represents profound mental blockages and I wouldn't be surprised if they contributed to his cancer.

<comment><USER6> Or maybe he just wasn't comfortable talking about these things with his biographer. Reflection on one's life can be an internal process; it doesn't have to look like an episode of Oprah.</comment></comment>


Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable - <AUTHOR> https://www.chzsoft.de/site/hardware/preserving-a-floppy-disk-with-a-logic-analyzer/ <comment><USER2> I read "Notes on Floppy Disks" <[https://extrapages.de/archives/20190102-Floppy- notes.html>](https://extrapages.de/archives/20190102-Floppy-notes.html>) last night. It, along with this, really makes the technology seem much more accessible to a non-electronics professional like me. These help make the various floppy emulator devices I've got for my retro-computing habits seem more understandable. (It also really makes me want to build some electronics skills, too!)

<comment><USER3> Magnetic recording is kinda fascinating because it is conceptually simple but very hard to do well. Conceptually all you need for a tape machine is two small write coils (erase+write) and the bias oscillator. In practice the "small coils" are complex precision parts. The circuitry of a Nagra is fairly straightforward to replicate, but building comparable tape heads in your workshop will take years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A related project that has been going through an amazing amount of progress is the Applesauce Floppy Disk Controller.

HN Thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17256709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17256709)

IMO the coolest part is the widget they wrote to visualize the raw magnetic flux on the floppy.

Example image: [https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/1026110390491643904](https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/1026110390491643904)

<comment><USER5> While I am sure they released plenty of images on the project's site, as an aside if you change the end of a twitter image url to ":orig", you'll get the original unresized image.

In this case: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dj153frUUAEWAgx.png:orig](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dj153frUUAEWAgx.png:orig)

Really helps you visualize the details of the data, it is really amazing, along the lines of those who look at nand gates and similar things to read decapped roms and silicon circuits. [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RqmN7_KgbFc/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RqmN7_KgbFc/maxresdefault.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those interested, the actual specifications of floppy disks are freely available from the ECMA:

[http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Sta...](http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Standardwithdrawn.htm)

[http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Sta...](http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Standard.htm)

The standardese term is "Flexible Disk Cartridges", and the units are in Metric, but those documents basically provide almost all the information needed to build a disk drive or interpret the data on one.

The CD and DVD specs are there too.

<comment><USER7> > and the units are in Metric

As they should be. Why is this worth mentioning?

<comment><USER8> Floppy disks are typically measured in inches, common sizes being 8", 5.25", 3.5" and 3". Like any distance, these may also be measured in metric units. However, for whatever reason, when it comes to disks, they pretty much never are.

<comment><USER9> Huh, is this true even outside the US? As in, did people in the UK call them 3.5 inch floppy disks, just like us Americans?

<comment><USER10> Yes. Only a few things proliferate in inches, but products that are defined in inches always do. Subway sandwiches are a mixture, in the netherlands they are 30cm (an extra 30mm), in other metric countries they remain as a footlong.

<comment><USER11> 30cm leaves you 4.8mm short of a foot. This is how we lose spacecraft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> while impressive, I wonder where people take the time to explore ancient tech in-depth. work, family, more work. how much time do you guys have?

besides, writing a n64 emulator, yes! fixing a decades old Sun, Xerox or VT terminal, yes! emulating old 8bit cpus in JS yes!

but who wants to understand/explore a floppy drive?? no offense, curious what's so interesting about floppy drives compared to typical retro tech stuff I mentioned above?

<comment><USER13> It's a hobby.

Other people care about collecting small colored pieces of paper, or tweak their cars, or go on hikes, or paint.

<comment><USER14> No offense to OP (of this thread) but a lot of people who have an obscure but intellectually stimulating hobby wonder why other people spend so much time watching Netflix yet passing judgement on others as having 'way too much spare time'. Is it really that alien to you to find this use of time justified? Have you considered that they might be able to do this efficiently in balance with the rest of their life?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So it seems it still needs an actual floppy drive, but controls it in a better way to read it more reliably?

I wonder how hard it is to build something that reads the magnetic signal, or what's left of it, directly from the floppy platter

<comment><USER16> It controls it in the same way PC controller does, the trick is in grabbing raw data instead of relying on primitive hardwired decoders in descendants of uPD765.

>hard it is to build something that reads the magnetic signal, or what's left of it, directly from the floppy platter

Thats exactly what floppy drive does :)

<comment><USER15> > Thats exactly what floppy drive does :)

I meant as a viable home project, doesn't have to be a fully functional drive as long as it somehow allows to view the magnetic values, manually turn their 2D structure into the valid 1.44MB filesystem if necessary :)

<comment><USER16> Floppy drive does not decode disk data on its own, it merely amplifies analog signal from magnetic head, filters and quantizes it (zero crossing).

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US4656533A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US4656533A/en)

What you get on a READ pin of floppy drive is the same information you would probing read head (or rather preamp) using Oscilloscope. All you are interested in is magnetic field flipping, zero crossing, encoded on READ pin as an impulse.

Sure, you could precision machine turntable like contraption to do it manually, but floppy drives are plentiful and practically free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone able to recover 8" disks?</comment>


Show HN: SelfieScore – Crowd Curated Instagram Selfies - <AUTHOR> http://www.selfiescore.com

<comment><USER2> I don't like starting anything off on a negative, so I'll say this: it is a unique twist on a very crowded "rate my X" market.

gave the app a whirl. I have to say, very unintuitive. It took me almost a minute to figure out "what to do." The title just says 'selfie' and nothing else. The site is also incredibly slow and the "next" button doesn't always work (at times it does not take you to the next photo)

From a marketing standpoint, this could take off if you get it positioned within the correct market segment.</comment>


Ask HN: Any (interactive) whiteboard scanning apps (i.e. draw onto canvas) - <AUTHOR>

Interesting idea I'm toying with and I'm not sure how feasible this is yet, but curious to know if there is anything like this out there.
A whiteboard/drawing scanning tool that can then draw the captured image (to an appropriate degree of accuracy) onto a canvas that can then be interacted with. items moved, scaled, removed etc
Similair the 3m sticky note idea but not limited to square blocks of text. anything like that out there? <comment><USER2> Drop me an email geoff at foom.co and I'll show you what I'm building in Python. Not precisely what you are looking for but would not take much to adapt it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool thanks Geoff, will do, I'm very intrigued now.</comment></comment>


Prozac Nation Is Now the United States of Xanax - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/style/anxiety-is-the-new-depression-xanax.html?src=longreads&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531960)

</comment><comment><USER3> > my thought, they don't want to be my friend anymore," she wrote, appending > the hashtag #ThisIsWhatAnxietyFeelsLike.

No doubt their anguish is real. But reading that from the perspective of someone who is struggling to pay bills, feed a family, or starving leads to a less charitable interpretation. And might fall under the #ThisIsWhatBeingMildyDissapointedFeelsLike tag.

Oh and of course they had to mention Trump. Just couldn't resist, it's like they have a quota to fill. And the funny thing is, media like NYT is active participant in feeding and manufacturing that anxiety by reporting how many scoops of ice cream he had or the overextended Russia angle, etc.

Yes that will make 37 year old media consultants from NY very anxious, and they will not hesitate to mention it on Twitter to all their followers.

I only found a little mention at the bottom about general wealth inequality. How about just about plain ol' poverty, lack of jobs, not being able to provide for a family. That will cause a debilitating and constant anxiety. That is something worth reporting and tweeting about.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but reporting on the actual problems in this country instead of Trump tweeting about some people who until a few days ago I had never even heard of doesn't fit the right narrative.

Anyway, I'm going to keep trying to teach kids and adults how to write code and keep making sure I vote in my local elections. I'm really disappointed in the media and our government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The relation between Americans and depression/anxiety is really bizarre. Their mental health complex/industry seems really dysfunctional from outside. Perhaps like the rest of their healthcare...

<comment><USER6> The quality of life for most Americans is on the decline, hence why political extremists on both sides were nearly elected(For those outside the US, yes, Sanders is considered an extremist in this country). Workers work more, make less, get treated less well by their employers, have less stability, and simply don't have much free time. Socially, America is losing their identity due to a spreading mentality that social norms are bad for us. We spend time with other people less, have fewer close relationships, and find trouble spending much time with our kids because both parents work. Those who move to big cities from rural areas because the cities are the only places rising economically right now find that they lose the social support and child- rearing support that families provide, but there's not much they can do about that if they want to be okay financially.

College is seen as the only avenue of getting out of that rat-race, but with ballooning schooling costs and large time and mental requirements to complete it, it's becoming an option for fewer and fewer people... Then when you do graduate, you're still paid significantly less than graduates 10 years ago.

On top of all this, there isn't even healthcare stability. Costs for care and medication are ballooning so high so fast, but it's not like we can do anything about it. Healthcare is a necessity. If you're poor, can't afford insurance, and find yourself with a cut, broken bone, or god forbid cancer, you can't even be sure you'll be able to get care.

With all of this instability, insecurity, and declining quality of life for most, it's only natural that anxiety and depression would be on the rise.

<comment><USER7> It's remarkable, having moved to the EU, to note that most people I know older than their mid-40's can't imagine moving away from the US, and most people younger than that can't imagine moving to the US (with the exception of those who want to chase the startup life in SF).

A month off a year is pretty nice. I can't imagine going back to a couple weeks a year, or getting guilted for not answering emails on weekends.

<comment><USER6> If you got a couple weeks off a year in the US, you were better off than most[1]. Plus we don't get other basics like maternity or paternity leave.

> most people I know older than their mid-40's can't imagine moving away from > the US, and most people younger than that can't imagine moving to the US

This points out a big generational divide. There are tons of people doing just fine in the US right now, but they were mostly grandfathered in. The number of jobs available has not been growing with our population, mostly because exploiting globalization and automation are much cheaper ways of growing a company. It's obviously getting to the point that it's creating social instability, though.

[1] [https://gusto.com/framework/health-benefits/paid-vacation- ti...](https://gusto.com/framework/health-benefits/paid-vacation-time-how-do- you-stack-up/)

<comment><USER7> I got two weeks, and for a while three, but that was only because my boss liked me and I just claimed my week of sick time as holiday. However, my wife only got one week, which meant actual holidays where we left town together were pretty rare.

I probably should have clarified - for both of those groups I should have said "most Europeans I know over their mid-40's, or most Europeans I know under their mid-40's". Among the US-ians I know views vary widely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Technologists like this community often back up how great things are today by pointing out how even poor people today have material objects that kings couldn't dream of years ago, like big TVs.

And yet look at how many people medicate to handle life.

<comment><USER9> Maybe those material objects are also ways both kings then, and poor people now medicate themselves.

Think of how it was to be a part of royalty - there's a lot of isolation involved. Humans need social interaction. When we can't get it, sometimes we fill our lives with stuff that owns us. That doesn't work, so we try drugs.

Perhaps it's more like, we're not fighting the root cause of the problem: we're all lonely and scared.

No amount of money, or social status, or stuff is going to help us how to learn to love, and be loved. It's just going to make others envy us and envy isn't love.

<comment><USER10> We're all lonely and scared, and we all believe that we're the only person on earth who is lonely and scared.

We love to distract our own terrifying thoughts with _stuff_ (work, television, busy social lives...), instead of learning how to handle an overactive brain that spends the majority of its time trying to scare us shitless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a cultural issue where because of how we conceive of correctness we are trapped in an ever-shrinking emotional range that is more and more distressing yet offers no way out without also giving up the implied right to power that is derived from our sense of achieving authority.

Fucked unless we give up on propping up old ideas of the truth and what it's possession implies.</comment>


Chuck Peddle: Personal Computer Pioneer, Dies at 82 – WikiChip Fuse - <AUTHOR> https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3174/chuck-peddle-personal-computer-pioneer-dies-at-82/ <comment><USER2> In case you're interested, here's an interview with Chuck on the Amp Hour podcast (2015). [https://theamphour.com/241-an-interview-with-chuck-peddle- ch...](https://theamphour.com/241-an-interview-with-chuck-peddle-charismatic- chipmaking-coryphaeus/)</comment>


Manage GitHub pull requests from the command line - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/post/2878756980/git-pulls-command-line-tool-for-github-pull-requests

<comment><USER2> And this is why I love git.

</comment><comment><USER3> How do you have your prompt (PS1) set up?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's my riff on the kennethreitz oh-my-zsh theme <http://wynn.fm/9p></comment></comment>


Show HN: I am bootstrapping a video-based Duolingo competitor - <AUTHOR> https://seedlang.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I'm bootstrapping a pretty ambitious language learning project, and would love to get your feedback on it.

I started working on it almost 4 years ago after moving to Berlin, and discovering how crazy-hard learning a language was, and how ill-suited apps were for getting students to any kind of conversational fluency. So I spent about 2 and a half years going through multiple iterations of the app while incorporating elements of different language learning techniques including audio-book courses, Youtube channels, Assimil books, shadowing, tutoring, and of course other apps.

About a year ago I started working on it full time, and started collaborating with a Youtube teacher to produce content. We ended up really stressing humor and fun as a guiding principle of content creation, and think in the end we've made a pretty unique app because of it.

Anyway, I'd love to get your guy's feedback on it! There is an walkthrough video on the home page if you aren't learning German and don't want to register.

<comment><USER2> Great idea. I moved to Berlin recently and I will definitely try it out to complement my lessons. Maybe you could try partnering with businesses that buy lessons for their new employees?

One tip, it would be great to have subtitles on the intro video so I don't have to annoy others with having the volume up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Matt, thanks for the feedback! We will definitely look at partnering with businesses and schools in the future. And I'll have to look into the subtitles on the explainer video, that's a great tip as well.

Once you give Seedlang a try, let me know what you think!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm learning a new language now after moving to a new country and found duolingo was difficult to follow due to the artificial voice.

Memrise has been great though, not only are the voices natural, the app shows a video of a native speaker speaking a new word.

I highly recommend Memrise (so far) for learning a language. The format just clicks for me.

Edit: I will try this out when I get to my computer. Anything to help me learn my new language :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Memrise has been an inspiration to Seedlang, but we have alot of improvements over it. Our videos are complete sentences, and they are also part of larger narratives (a story that we've written, or animated GIFs that we're describing). So it gives context to what is being learned.

Also, we have in depth understanding of grammar with each sentence. So if you don't know why a word has a certain ending, it can be clicked to get a full explanation.

But, yeah I'd love to know what you think of it. Hit me up at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a great idea and after using duolingo to brush up on my Spanish I think you are right about trying another format.

I will leave a comment about the website: on my IPhone, the edges of the centered text are cut off, it seems like it needs to resized for mobile in my case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I think it will be good to have some new ideas in the language learning app space.

I'll get that iphone display issue fixed, thanks for letting me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, especially to "grammar in context" part. I'm working on something similar, using movie subtitles to provide good learning material (words and expressions) in context. Hopefully you will see it here within days, I just really should put a landing page together like yours. How did you built it?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a great idea. I was a Memrise user (back when I had more free time) to learn some Mandarin Chinese and I noticed that I retained way more information in terms of pronunciation when I was watching the videos than with just the audio. I assume it's because of being able to see the native speaker's lips as they speak, but I have no idea if that's really the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi jclos, yeah I think with just audio that we are just missing so much information and it kind of detaches us and makes it harder to retain information. Context is really everything with building memories, which is why I try to pack the flashcards full of as much context as possible on Seedlang. Not just video, but also the context of story, and even the context of grammar as you click through the subtitles of the video.

But back on the topic of video vs audio, have you heard of the McGurk Effect? If not, Google it and watch a youtube video where they demonstrate it. It shows how that the sounds we hear are actually hugely affected by what shapes that are made from lips. So the same sound will be heard differently just based on differing lip shape, it will blow your mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the plan for scaling additional languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Frank, we have two main priorities over the next months: getting a mobile app built and adding other languages. There is some uncertainty as to exact timelines, but if you register we'll notify you when we start adding other languages.</comment></comment>


Zidisha: Crowdfunded Microloans to Reduce Poverty - <AUTHOR> http://fintechnews.sg/2292/crowdfunding/zidisha-crowdfunded-microloans-reduce-poverty/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea, also great to see that people are using it.

As far as i can tell there is nothing in for me. I will get the exact same amount back as i put in? (if i even get it back)

Also when moving such rather small amounts there are several fees for sending and receiving the money back from the banks or paypal. I see you use Stripe but nowhere is mentioned Bitcoin, it seems that would be a perfect use case.</comment>


Ask HN: Comments on and help on improving our recommendation engine for news - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
A friend of mine and I built this news ranking service of sorts based on a ranking algorithm I came up while I was in grad school for CS. Recently I also developed a recommendation engine based on a modified Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. Why modified? Well, as most of you know SVM are really binary classifiers and need to classes of training data - i.e. good/bad. interesting/boring, etc. So in the case of news, you have to ask the user to select both interesting articles and not interesting articles. There have been a number of studies done on the subject how asking the user to do both is soometimes too much of a burden. Ideally, the user should tracked implicitly and the model should account for the uncertainty that arises from lack of explicit ratings. So here is how it works. I created an account and seeded the system with some articles that seem to have been popular on HN and the results are available. Just go to http://www.euraeka.com and click login on the top right. The user name is hackers (at) are (dot) us, and you can email me at haidut (at) gmail (dot) com for the password. Since the system already generated recommendations, you will see them right when you login. If a user likes an article they just click on it and the system records that. There is also a "remove" button next to each article in case the user knows up front they don't like that article and want it removed from view and recorded as uninteresting. The purpose of the remove option is also if you clicked on an article that you thought you will like but it turned out to be not interesting, so you have the option of reversing your initial decision and telling the system that the article was not good. Like I said above, "removing" an article is optional. The system can work if the user only clicks on articles that he/she likes and ignores the rest.
Note: Obviously, I couldn't seed the system with every article that has been on HN. I just picked some that I liked before from topics such as science, entrepreneurship, health, etc. Feel free to seed the system even more. How to do that? Basically, once you are logged in either use the search box at the top to search for keywords of interest, or use the topics section at the right of the screen to find more specific news. If you find anything you like just click on the article. Note: Obviously, if you create your own account you will be able to test your own set of recommendations. Recommendations are generated every 24 hours using ALL the news collected in the last 24 hours. If any of you have used the Google News or Digg recommendaton engines, I'd very interested to hear how this stacks up against those to services, given the fact that they are both based on user-to-user recommendation techniques (i.e. articles are recommended to you based on similarity to other users) rather than content-based recommendations (which is what Euraeka is).
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER3> Just a point on form. Why did you not blog this (or post an article on your web site) and then post a link to same on HN?

You would then have been able to format your text in a manner more suited to the content - and also made it more straightforward to edit your "content" in part in response to feedback from HN and elsewhere.

Good luck with the project though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, will blog next time. Thx

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First, I think just based on your description you are indeed asking a lot of the user. For our service, we simply ask the user to vote up or down a piece of content and our dataset is pretty sparse. Users like to consume-they don't have any interest in helping you tune your algorithm.

With that said, now let's address the algorithm. You're using SVM? Is that quick enough? Are your recs computed offline? To be honest, you don't really need SVM or any complex technique to do recommendations well. You can get by just fine doing hand selected recs even though that might not scale well. To scale you can use something like Pearson correlation or naive Bayes and you'll do just fine.

With recs it's all about the quality of data and not so much the fancy algorithm.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a number of options, with SVM being the fastest so far b/c the library is written in C. Pearson, NaiveBayes and a number of others have all been tried and "tested" for acceptance with several thousand users and the majority picked the results from SVM as the most accurate. The recs are computed offline but there is an option to do that on the fly given enough RAM to load the SVM models for all users. As far as asking users for too much - <USER2> exactly do you mean? All we are asking for is for the user to login and if they find article they like (on the front page or from the topics menu) then click on them. What more simple that that? The voting system up/down you talk about is exactly the same except that you explicitly ask the user to vote, while we implicitly do the same. TechnologyReview ran an article last year how asking the user to explicitly rate stuff is considered overburdening and how the system should quietly monitor the user without asking direct questions. Anyways, your up/down approach and our click/remove approach are the same in my opinion. But thanks for the comments.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, when I wrote the comment I was on my Iphone and didn't check the website. I just did. I see what you mean. Why don't you just aggregate total click data and see which articles get clicked the most, bin the results to categories (5,4,3,2,1) by topic then compute Pearson? SVM still sounds a bit heavy weight. Sure, I guess it'll handle a few thousand...how about 1-10 million? And how do you know if SVM is the most accurate? What's your criteria?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paragraph breaks, please.</comment>


F# Promises a Big Return on Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2013/02/f-promises-big-return-big-data

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there anything in this article that would not apply to other functional languages (Ocaml, etc.) ?

</comment><comment><USER2> Thanks for this. I've been curious about F# and the article links to a great learning resource.</comment>


Windows 8.1:Why the New Name is Important & could change how Windows ships - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtstuff.co.uk/2013/04/windows-8-1-why-the-new-naming-convention-is-important/

<comment><USER2> Well, Windows 8 is a great start, but surely they realize that they are going to have to behave more like an iterating start-up to keep up the pace with other OSs.

Their dominance is waning if not in number, in thought share. They woke up to this fact with IE, so I figure they can figure it out for their Windows group too. Here's hoping, because I like Windows 8!</comment>


Why solve puzzle to get BTC, How about contribute to TOR - <AUTHOR>

In the meanwhile in China, All the google's service, has been banned by GFW(national firewall in China) for a about month, And even Dropbox is banned today. People in China live in a miserable live. someplace VPN is also not useable, all the developer in China are using ShadowSock as their way to access the world.
I have an idea, since I'm a big fan of Bitcoin. Why change solving math puzzle to get BTC, to contribute to be a node to redirect traffic, and get reward from it, something like(TOR).
Hopefully the brilliant hackers group can come up an revolution way to make the internet a true free world without boundary. <comment><USER2> I'm working with a couple of other researchers on this exact concept. We're calling it TorCoin. I submitted it to HN a few weeks ago and it was at #1 on the front page. You can read the paper here [1] and the HN discussion here [2].

[1] [http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/papers/hotpets14-torpath.pd...](http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/papers/hotpets14-torpath.pdf)

[2] [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7r4osQgWVqKTHdxTlowUVpsVmJ...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7r4osQgWVqKTHdxTlowUVpsVmJRcjF3Y3dtcTVscFhEaW5F)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @chatmasta, Thanks very much for your links, I'm so exciting to check it out.</comment>


Sony Japan hacked by SQL injection - <AUTHOR> http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/05/24/sony-music-japan-hacked-through-sql-injection-flaw/

<comment><USER2> the example in the link (the image of the "hack") isn't sql injection - it's just reading a database table through the appropriate api.

the more detailed info at [http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/05/lulzsec-leak- sonys-japa...](http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/05/lulzsec-leak-sonys- japanese-websites.html) again doesn't show any injection. all they are doing is reading the contents of various tables through a simple (REST-like) API/URL.

["IT security blog of the year" and they don't know what injection is? and what about all the "experts" in this thread? do any of you, so ready to pontificate, have proof this is a valid attack?]

<comment><USER3> Security hole or not, Sony clearly has a whole lot of negative momentum in regards to security. Sony are already estimating $171m loss for as a result of the PSN outage[1].

[1][http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/23/psn-breach-and- restoration...](http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/23/psn-breach-and-restoration- to-cost-171m-sony-estimates/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And once again, a proof that to take security seriously, you need to have a security culture and policy in your whole company.

Else, many small Business Units of your International MegaCorp, who won't have the knowledge or the culture of security, will not care enough and might get hacked, in a way or another...

<comment><USER5> _in a way or another..._

In a way that you can eliminate using straightforward technical fixes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually kind of curious about this now. Right now this is hack...5? against something under the Sony umbrella.

1\. Just because it's got "Sony" in the name, how related are these, really? Does Sony actually have a hand in all of them, or were they just random companies that were acquired and picked up the "Sony" brand name, instead of keeping their own and saying "Owned by X", like (for example) Blizzard and Activision?

2\. I realize that 90% of this is because apparently it's fun to kick Sony while they're down, both in terms of crackers saying "Let's poke at Sony sites until we find something, trololo" and media sites saying "Hey, people don't like Sony, let's get some free pagehits and report on this!" Would this hack in particular, and the Sony Thailand from earlier, have even been noted in any tech forum or news site anywhere before the PSN outage?

<comment><USER7> > 2\. I realize that 90% of this is because apparently it's fun to kick Sony > while they're down

Guess Sony isn't "down" yet. Also guess the attacks have less to do with Sony being "up" or "down" and more to do with Sonys history of attacking people held in high esteem by the ones who are capable and willing to attack.

Free advice for Sony: Stop harassing researchers. Measure hacking attempts before / after.

<comment><USER6> I would actually be curious how much of this is recourse for Geohot, although there's probably no possible way of empirically finding out. That said, I'd be willing to bet that "people who hack Sony to protest Geohot" and "people who hack Sony to steal other people's credit cards" are two different camps.

As to the Sony being "down", I'd contend they are. Their reputation for security is in the shitter, and any hacks executed now are going to have a far greater effect than they would at any other time (again, I doubt things like this or the Thailand hack would have ever made news sites in any fashion before the PSN outage).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Despite the name, this is not rails specific, and should serve as a good read for all: <http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html> covering both sql injections and cross site forgery/scripting.

</comment><comment><USER8> Big company with many independent websites has lots of independent vulnerabilities. OK, I get it already. Probably true for many companies.</comment>


On the Left - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/06/04/On-the-Left <comment><USER2> I'm wondering where this "overwhelming evidence" is. If you look at the stats, the US economy is doing fine. Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased.[1] Inflation-adjusted household income has remained stable over that same time.[2] Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of "extreme problems", then every developed economy on the planet is coming apart.

So as interesting as Tim Bray's five point plan sounds, I'd prefer to be in the control group. Of _course_ the status quo has problems (don't get me started). But big changes (especially ones that increase state control of the economy) tend to be catastrophic.

1\. [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/on-income- stagna...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/on-income- stagnation/?_r=0)

2\. See the chart halfway down: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/upshot/the- great-wage-slow...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/upshot/the-great-wage- slowdown-looming-over-politics.html)

<comment><USER3> Hello. Attack!

> Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory > employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased.

That sounds great except that it is not. Zero growth or slight increases are not good enough. Not when real inflation including education, health and property (i.e. things people must do) is growing faster than real incomes.

Our grandparents wage grew in real terms by 10x. Is that going to happen for their grandchildren? If not, why not?

Outside of the SV, I see diminished expectations everywhere.

> Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of "extreme problems", then > every developed economy on the planet is coming apart.

This is much more plausible than you appear to think. Tens of millions of workers are just dropping out of the workforce because they don't see the point in competing anymore and welfare + modest income produces a 'good enough state'. This isn't true of those making > 75k per year but below that it's endemic. It's not just about money, it's about purpose. You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens.

On the point that 'revolutions' tend to be a worse cure than the disease I tend to agree but it depends on how long the stagnation goes on for.

<comment><USER4> >You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens.

So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? At best this is futile. Purpose cannot be given. In reality this is false. Purpose can be given. For a short period of time. You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power. The first thing that disappears amidst civil war is justice.

Those people who feel unfulfilled better find a way to find their meaning of life for themselves instead of nursing jealousy and hatred towards people who did.

<comment><USER5> >So we are supposed to give people purpose in life?

No, you're supposed to acknowledge that "purpose in life" is far more immaterial and nebulous than our ingrained concepts of professionalism and our ingrained cultural work-ethic usually admit, and that if the economy doesn't demand someone's labor, it doesn't affect their innate value as a human being integrated into the same broad moral ecosystem as all other human beings.

Sure, those people _could_ be engineering vastly improved medicines or train systems. They _could_ be painting houses or planting gardens. They _could_ even be taking care of children.

But society has decided, of its own free will and through its own mechanisms, not to allocate living wages to doing those things. Complaining that broke and unemployed people don't form (uncapitalized) work teams to perform pro-bono labor on behalf of Society and the Nation and Humanity simply isn't fair game, even if the things you'd like them to work on seem necessary or beneficial to you. If _you_ think the Greater Glory of Something is so important, _pay for it_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Marx didn't say much useful about how to fix the problem

Nor did he intend to say much. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the kitchens of the future". He gave advice to organizers in his day, and left the future for those in the future, with the material conditions and relations of production they would have.

> there isn't a proletariat any more

In the world of 1867, the proletariat was rather small. The world just shifted from majority rural to majority urban/suburban a few years ago. The proletariat is larger than it ever was. You can argue if it will ever be a vanguard revolutionary class or not, but it has not disappeared.

One point Marx and Engels made is the world has seen several economic systems over the past 10,000 years - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. The last three systems all collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Marx and Engels believed capitalism would run its course and eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions just like the previous economic systems. Capitalism has only become predominant relatively recently historically.

<comment><USER7>
        He gave advice to organizers in his day,

Yes, and terrible advice it was: in the Communist Manifesto [1] Marx & Engels gave concrete recommendations what is to be done to bring about a transition from capitalism to communism via a revolution and an intermediate phase of socialism.

Lenin and Stalin implemented those points to a T. Didn't exactly bring about the predicted benefits.

The core of the problem was that Marx really didn't have a meaningful concept of state and of political change. He could only conceive of a state as an oppressive tool of capitalist control, that would whither away together with capitalism after the revolution. And he thought political systems can only change in revolutionary change. The latter, while false, is kind-of understandable from the myopic view of Marx's times where revolution was more or less the only way governments changed. The former was simply naive. Marx's main teacher (Hegel) already had a much more sophisticated theory of the state in society, but Marx was so blinded by naive economism that he was unable to grasp the productive function of a state structure in any large-scale society.

[1] [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Indeed. It's too bad that so many leftist intellectuals try to defend Marx as merely a product of his time, or worse, as someone misunderstood.

The reality is that Marx's ideas were bad, and were understood to be bad at the time by contemporaries like Bakunin who swiftly identified the obvious flaw in the plan: no state powerful enough to perform massive redistribution of wealth from the bourgeois to the proles would ever simply say "job done" and dissolve itself. To argue for the Marxist plan was inherently to argue for totalitarian dictatorship of a vast and powerful bureaucratic state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting piece. There's so much broken in the world.

We don't inhabit a true Capitalist society any more ( my term for the current system is Crapitalism )

Further it is unclear if our current machine can survive

* peak stuff ( we don't need to consume as much any more ) why would companies invest in new jobs and infrastructure when they are not going to recoup the cost through growing sales ?

* population still on the rise . Where do jobs come from for 10 billion when we've hit peak stuff

* robber barons control the laws, courts and media ( a constant over human existence)

* massive debt load ( unfunded pensions, national debts, private mortgage debts )

But I would ask Tim Bray what I ask everyone else who says radical measures are required. Namely, how is the transition made without mass cleansing and warfare in the interim.

Often ( Viet Cong, Khmer Rouge, Mao, Stalin ) the middle class and educated are unfairly lumped in with the elite and exterminated.

Is the current brokenness worth millions dead, and proportionally lots of HNers ?

<comment><USER5> >* peak stuff ( we don't need to consume as much any more ) why would companies invest in new jobs and infrastructure when they are not going to recoup the cost through growing sales ?

We currently have a glut of consumer goods, but they're mostly consumer goods with low marginal desirability, and we actually have a shortage of physical capital, collective infrastructure, and equipment for personal empowerment.

To wit: it's better to have affordable, high-quality education and public transit, _at the margins_ , than the N+1st craft brewery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bray claims he's not a Marxist. I'm less convinced. Putting aside the jargon for a moment, the core theory of Marxism was that capitalism would collapse due to its own contradictions, and that would open the possibility of creating a fully equal society through the destruction of the ruling capitalist class and massive redistribution of wealth. Marx thought that once that was done the state would disappear (doh).

Brayism, for want of a better name, seems to have the following features:

1) A conviction that capitalism is going to ruin everything good unless it's destroyed.

2) A belief in massive redistribution of wealth (taxing the crap out of the 1%) in order to benefit the poor.

3) Totalitarian state surveillance in which financial privacy is forbidden.

4) A vague desire to whack business people and other capitalists much more severely than today, and generally crack down on anything that smells capitalist (like financial transactions).

5) An uncosted UBI i.e. more massive wealth redistribution.

That all sounds like a rather classically Marxist agenda to me, just with updated terminology. Bray claims the proletariat no longer exists whilst spending the rest of his post talking about the plight of the non-1% and how awful well paid bankers and CEOs are. Instead of "handing the means of production to the proletariat" it's "a universal basic income funded by taxing the 1%", but that's a relatively trivial matter of wording compared to the massive implications.

Bray ends his post by asking which parties have ideas like the ones he listed. I think he'll find the communist party is a good fit.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see no interesting ideas on the left. You need to reinvent yourselves. Since the fall of communism it has been very boring and I blame you for that.

Is it just a little pension increase there, a little distribution here?

Please tell me I'm only seeing the mainstream left and there exists interesting innovators out there I've overlooked.

<comment><USER2> If you're wondering why there's been so little innovation related to the ideas of Marx and Engels, it's probably because most people decided those ideas weren't useful.

Over the past century, a lot of people tried to implement the ideas of Marx and Engels. People tried different versions of communism in different cultures, different geographical regions, and different levels of technological development. On two occasions, people even split a country in half and ran one side communist and the other side capitalist. In every case, the citizens of the communist regimes ended up worse-off.

If we've learned anything from these experiments, it's that Marx's ideas reliably create failed states. There are probably better systems than what we have today, but they're not close relatives to communism.

Fortunately, many far leftists have understood this and gone searching for other ways to improve the lives of the poorest. For example, basic income seems to be growing in popularity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, it's good to see someone putting their own opinion out there, in an election year no less, instead of parroting whatever party nonsense is being spread around. But I don't feel like these are really solving for anything, other than maybe trying to deal with inequality by hammering down the top end.

> 1\. Tax the crap out of the 1%

I don't think we need to go back to the 1950s levels. A move back to the late 1990s would be okay by me. But then again we're not going to get that through Congress and alot of nitwit legislators will use that to justify their reelection so it's not worth the cost as far as I'm concerned.

> 2\. stamp out most forms of high-leverage financial speculation

IMO, a "War on Speculators" would be just like the drug war. Only less costly, and less effective since it's much easier to move massive amounts of money to a country with less lax regulations than it is the comparable amount of drugs. Better enforcement of some of the existing anti-fraud/insider trader rules would be welcome. But this isn't going to help prosperity for the average worker. Just give nitwit legislators something to argue over.

>3\. introduce ruthless transparency such that any asset whose beneficial ownership cannot be established where legally appropriate is subject to summary confiscation

Not even sure what this means? Is this going to pass the 5th amendment even if it can be translated into law? Considering the use of confiscation to fund the Drug war policies, can you maybe see some potential for conflicts of interest here?

> 4\. adopt a zero-tolerance posture on business crime, with jail time > regularly administered for significant financial misdeeds, in > rough proportion to the size of the takings.

Again, "War on finance" vs. "Drug war" potential for abuse and the same lack of effectiveness. I agree that many of the people involved in the collapse in 2008 should have been hammered more than they were. However, this feels more like a case of getting better people in DoJ and other agencies rather than more legislation.

> 5\. roll out a universal basic income to deal with the inevitable > decline in the proportion of humans "enjoying" full employment.

Could work, but maybe just start with raising the minimum wage, increasing overtime protections, and just getting the work week and vacation time closer to Europe, Japan, and/or Australia levels rather than going "full basic income" to start. I also don't know if this will all help the "average unemployed" but it may help make things less miserable for the average worker.

[Edited for typos]</comment>


Toyota previews self driving car - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20910769

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting article as an indicator that Toyota thinks self driving cars are that critical. Perhaps it was in response to GM's messaging along the same lines.

Consider the overall effectiveness vs engineering effort compared to say 'smarter mass transit'. Imagine how useful it would be to have a mass transit system which took advantage of the extreme efficiency of rolling on rails, with vehicle based switching system [1]. We don't do that today because a) trains can't change lanes if something bad is going to happen, and b) the system is optimized for large trains going on the same route.

But autonomously driving a train is a _much_ easier problem than autonomously driving a car. And if you created a system where vehicles could self-select to enter a station then you could create mass transit with 'call on demand' vehicles which only stopped at the pickup and drop off stations. This eliminates the scheduling friction which has empty trains running at 2AM and overly full trains running at 5PM.

Building a system like _that_ is well within our current engineering capabilities, would save energy (these things are electric not gas powered) and achieve high ridership by being very nearly as convenient as a car without the hassle of driving in traffic.

[1] Traditional rail switches use arms on the ground to configure a rail switch to move a car on to one track or another, in a vehicle based system the vehicle configures its wheels to take one path or the other, this allows the track to be 'passive' and not need a central switching authority.

<comment><USER3> One issue with automated trains is when something inevitably goes wrong, if it happens in a heavy trafficked system like in NYC you might have dozens to hundreds of people dead compared to a couple of people with a driver-less car incident, which will make it much bigger news, which will mean a much bigger backlash.

And safety experts will go on the news and explain how the train incident was one issue among billions of safely-moved people and it was really a human error that was the root cause and the automated trains are much, much safer than human drivers by the statistics and they'll be completely right, but people won't care because omg robots.

<comment><USER4> _One issue with automated trains is when something inevitably goes wrong, if it happens in a heavy trafficked system like in NYC you might have dozens to hundreds of people dead_

Can you give an example of a subway accident (in NYC or another US system) that lead to that many dead? A head-on collision on the WMATA system resulted in only 9 dead: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_trai...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_train_collision)

From this list of NYC subway accidents, the worst involved an accident in 1991 that killed 5 passengers: <http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Subway_FAQ:_Accidents>

<comment><USER3> Nope I can't. The numbers I randomly made up are certainly on the high side, but they were made on the assumption that along with automation there would be other changes like increasing the average travelling speed of the trains by a significant amount and having increased loads due to better scheduling algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the description the BBC gave, it seems they're behind the curve: "A series of optical beacons on the roadside can detect the positions of pedestrians and obstacles, and relay information to the prototype about whether a traffic light is red or green, as part of ITS. The car can also independently monitor pedestrians' positions."

What roads are going to be set up with special optical beacons so the car knows where things are? If that was possible, we would have had self-driving cars a decade ago.

<comment><USER6> An open problem that Google has admitted with their car automation project is a certain problem endemic to the northern part of this country: Snow and Ice.

Admittedly, ice is rather difficult in any condition. However, many human drivers drive safely on snow cover with minimal problems. Accidents are higher during those times, but traffic still keeps flowing. Google-car-AI cannot handle these events at all (at this time).

<comment><USER7> If we're at a point where having to take manual control of a robot car during icey weather is a problem, then I'd say we are in a pretty good place.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I agree. If the only time perole's driving skills are used is during the most treacherous time to be driving, that will be _scary_.

I already avoid driving during the first snow storm of the season because, after six months, people have inevitably forgotten that ice is slippery (seriously, it a frightening and dangerous to be on the roads during the first storm!). Now factor in the fact nobody has driven _at all_ during the last six months and it will be exceedingly messy.

<comment><USER9> The Twin Cities (MN) two year ago had about 400 accidents during the big blizzard at the start of the year. I hesitate to think what would have happened if those folks hadn't had to drive all summer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think I'd trust Google more than a car company to make self driving cars. That right there is one of the problems though, which self driving car do you trust the most?

<comment><USER11> Car companies TODAY have been shipping en masse large number of self-parking and automatic accident avoiding cars and have decades of experience in building and shipping reliable control systems.

Google can't even produce bug-free software, make high quality hardware or even ship anything at any decent scale.

<comment><USER12> > self-parking and automatic accident avoiding

Unfortunately these are really simple systems relative to safely driving on the road without supervision. If we're talking about the same things, then self-parking is just a software for recognising the front/end of some vehicle parked on the side and where is the good parking space - in some models also a distance monitor for automatic stopping. It's not that difficult to implement and all the tricky conditions still have to be checked by people - for example my auto-parking car will completely ignore people in its way, anything on the street, will abort if it's on a slope down, will not check for lots of issues that you're supposed to correct manually.

Collision avoidance is for now a simple break when some object is getting close fast. Only a handful of cars implement something more as far as I know, since actively changing the course is actually a rather large challenge to do it right...

I have to disagree with "Google can't even produce bug-free software" too. There's a big difference between programming a web application and doing something that's close to safety critical software. It's a completely different set of skills and requires a specific approach in general. Even then... regarding bug-free at scale, I think they're doing fairly well so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article is unclear, but it sounds like Google is not involved in this.

Why isn't Google selling this technology to car companies? It seems like an excellent second revenue stream.

<comment><USER14> Why should they buy it? I think a lot of people in the tech community are under the impression that this is something Google has invented and that this will be a new cash cow. The reality is car companies have been working on this technology for a while, with many "intelligent" features already existing in higher end cars.

<comment><USER13> Google seems to be ahead of the curve in this tech. I'd love to be proven wrong, have any links?

<comment><USER14> I've been reading about this randomly over the years so I don't have any links in mind, these are off Wikipedia.

[http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an- automated-a...](http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an-automated- adventure-at-the-wheel-of-a-driverless-bmw) <http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/01/gm-says-driverl/> [http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/n...](http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/new_look__reaffirmed.html) [http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997...](http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997E4488B0F78F529C3B2?&id=746&allImage=1&teaser=driving- without-driver-volkswagen-presents-temporary-auto-pilot&mid=138) [http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes- ben...](http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes-benz-s-class- to-debut-autonomous-driving-system) [http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.h...](http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2012/Apr/0420_cadillac.html) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906>

<comment><USER15> Also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUREKA_Prometheus_Project>.

A mean time between human interventions of 9 km may not seem something to brag about, but this project ended before Google was founded aka 10 Moore's generations ago. I think Mercedes has continued working on driverless cars ever since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much time to mainstream acceptance? I'd say ten years.

<comment><USER17> Not in Europe. Still shifting manually. To be in control.

<comment><USER18> The European mood is shifting (no pun intended). I see an increasing number of models being offered with automatic gearboxes, even at the lower end of the price scale.

Sales numbers are probably available somewhere, but, for a quick sample, I took a cursory look at a local used car site - out of 5058 cars listed from 2010 onwards, some 716 are automatic. Nearly 15% is pretty good for something that used to be much harder to come by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The car can also communicate with other vehicles"

This topic is interesting in quite a few aspects. Firstly, it's something I thought of long ago, but due to implementation details (ECM is a closed, obfuscated PITA).

The biggest ideas revolving around this com device is how it processes the communication. Is the communication an authenticated protocol? Being an amateur radio operator and a fellow hacker, I can think of plenty of things to do regarding this device, both good and bad. Does it take "suggestions" from other devices? If so, do these suggestions get stored in a sort of a log to prove action your AI takes is the fault of another?

And there's the security involved in the local processor. Many in this community are turned off to the idea of secure computing. In this case however, could lead to a bad user fake-signing messages to other cars. This is an open question, due to many secure implementations successfully hacked (Nintendo DS, PS2, PS3, Blu-Ray, various media stores).

I'm sure there is a way to make a car-puter that interfaces with other vehicles for a mesh network. However, I would believe that this network would have to be one of those close to being mathematically provable languages. And I would not think that TOYOTA would be capable of this.

<comment><USER17> Car 2 Car communication is already ready:

[https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en....](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Food for thought: the only reason traffic jams happen is because humans are imperfect creatures that can't maintain a uniform speed (barring a total- closure collision or some other abnormal event).

Imagine the impact on humans if traffic jams just vanished. Engineers have known for a while that even in the heaviest congestion (think 405 or 580) it's usually only a mistake by a driver that will completely stop traffic. I wouldn't mind an auto-drive that was just speed control, enforced in situations of congestion. Rather than one person braking too hard and completely stopping a mile of 880, everybody gets programmed to travel at a fixed speed.

A lot of things to work out there, but if vehicles worked together with the road to maintain their own speed, traffic would be _light years_ better.

<comment><USER20> It's really a matter of slow and inconsistent reaction to changes in speed, not the change in speed itself. The delayed reaction of one car causes it to decelerate more then they would have had to, then for the car behind the impact is greater and so on. Simulations suggest that as little as 20% of vehicles having computer-controlled reactions (very fast) would just about eliminate these shockwave traffic jams.

Related, see #6 in this article: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innov...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innovations- issue.html)</comment></comment>


Point nine recurring ... - <AUTHOR> http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=13177 <comment><USER2> The most intuitive explanation I've read is that if two numbers are distinct, then you can find a real number inbetween them. No such number exists for 0.999... and 1.

<comment><AUTHOR> As posted below: (1.0+0.99999...)/2

<comment><USER3> can you solve that equation?

(the answer is no, again it's proveable but it is beyond me to do so. Someone else will have to jump in)

<comment><USER4> See, what's so awesome about that answer is it allows the idiocy to keep rolling. Here goes:

Proof: assume .9... < 1 (b/c lol _I know this_ ); then: X = (1+.9...)/2 => 2X = 1 + .9... =>

\- 2X < 1 + 1 = 2 x 1 (b/c 1 > .9...)

\- 2 x .9... = .9... + .9... < 2X (b/c .9... < 1)

=> 2 x .9... < 2X < 2 x 1

=> .9... < X < 1

=> proof there's a # between .9... and 1, assuming of course .9... < 1.

What's cute about this is it's employing a similar conceptual error: the above proof is literally circular -- it's proving something equivalent to '.9... < 1' (that there exists a distinct # between .9... and 1) by assuming '.9... < 1'; it's just different-looking enough to hide the circularity / equivalence if you don't want to see it (the analogy to the 'debate' as to whether .9... == 1 should be apparent).

<comment><USER3> Indeed - or to put it more simply it's just rearranging the equation, not solving it ;P

<comment><USER2> That's not an equation, it's a number. There's nothing to solve.

<comment><USER4> And if you did 'solve' X = (.9... + 1)/2 using the standard 'algorithms' for doing it by hand you will wind up with X = .9... + .0...1 (more on this in a sec); you get there by noticing 1.9... / 2 looks like it ought to be .9..., but "of course" 2 x .9... == .9...8, ergo you can deduce you have .9... + a remainder of .0...1.

If you don't believe .0...1 exists (infinite 0s followed by a 1) then this ought to convince you that .9... == 1 (as (x+y)/2 == x => x == y) but since we're (hypothetically) arguing with someone who believes .9... != 1 it's quite plausible that the person is also going to believe in .0...1 existing, also.

What I suspect is actually going on (I've also met otherwise-savvy people who will debate this issue also) is that the human numerical-cognition system uses something like a crude form of nonstandard analysis internally; and, under this theory, you see this internal system (and its intuitions) leak out in some people smart enough to get that .9... really does have 'infinitely many' 9s but who also for whatever reason are both undereducated on this point of mathematics and generally self-assured.

Briefly: you can extend the real #s with a new entity (call it delta) such that:

\- delta > 0

\- if r is a nonzero # then delta < |r|

\- (for now) delta^2 = 0

(in effect: delta is an infinitesimal, it's nonzero but smaller than any other positive #, and delta^2 is 0 is mainly an algebraic convenience).

Once you've extended things by including delta you can write extended #s in the form r + s x delta (eg: 1 - delta).

If we re-define ".9..." to be 1 - delta, then the following all drop out of that:

\- .9... != 1 (1 - .9... == delta != 0)

\- .9... < 1, (1 - .9... == delta > 0)

\- and we even get: (1 + .9...)/2 = 1 - (delta/2) ==> (1 + .9...)/2 > .9...

And more generally in my experience most of the spinning-in-circles around people with beliefs about .9... != 1 is that the people who vociferously believe .9... != 1 don't even know about non-standard analysis (or infinitesimals, etc.) and thus can't articulate what their intuition is telling them, but what their intuition is using is basically (a nonrigorous form of) analysis with infinitesimals.

<comment><USER5> _(for now) delta^2 = 0_

Oh, that's another wonderful story — of Clifford algebras: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number> , useful in automatic differentiation.

As to your general point of what constitutes "internal representation", someone below tries to convince people that definitions involved with Reals are arbitrary and can be made differently thus forming Hyperreals. But no. One first have to construct Reals _anyways_ , then one arrives at infinity, which is not a number, hyperreal or otherwise, but a consequence of numbering _per se_. Nothing ad hoc here. Hyperreals are that or another notation, but the main thinking is still the same, just paradoxes pop in different places, the only gain is increase in confusion as hyperreals, tuns out, do not conform to that "internal representation" in many more places than the poor 0.(9) .

<comment><USER4> I'm not trying to claim the "internal representation" is somehow more correct or even prior-to the real #s, etc.; I do think (though admit I haven't proven) that a great many common examples of innumeracy can be explained by assuming the innumerate are using a "reals + infinitesimal" representation...which doesn't make the innumerate claims right, but possibly helps get at why they make those particular mistakes and not others.

In the previous post I was hoping to make (only) the following claims(s):

\- in my experience, the theory "people who claim .9... != 1 are (unknowingly) equating .9... to 1 - delta" has explanatory power (in that the results of doing calculations with deltas are aligned with what these people claim)

\- I suspect that the internal human numerical representation is often a cruder, less rigorous form of nonstandard analysis, and that the reason you encounter otherwise-smart people who won't budge on .9... != 1 is that for them the question goes straight to that internal representation

The just-so story for why I think the internal numerical representation is approximately real #s + some infinitesimal would go like this:

\- small distances aren't reliably perceivable under natural conditions: if I have two identical 8L pots and one has 4L and the other has 4.001L in it I probably can't tell which is which visually; if I'm not in very controlled conditions artifacts of ambient lighting or perspective or variations in the pot material will overrule any perceivable visual difference between the two

\- actions with nonzero actual effect often have no perceivable effect: if i have an 8L pot with 4L in it and I insert 1 ml from a pipette I probably can't see a difference even after the ripples settle down, but of course I will know that there's more water in the pot after I put some in than before

...and thus it'd make sense (at least for items with a continuous scale of size) to keep track of both:

\- what size do I perceive this to be? (the real component)

\- if I know extra information (eg: that I added a .001L) about the size does that information say that the actual size is going to be > or < the size I perceive it to be (the "infinitesimal" component)

...and it's not unreasonable that for ad-hoc, intuitive reasoning the mind would (roughly speaking) make the "correct" adjustments when combining size measurements (eg: (x + delta) + y > x + y, (x + delta) + (y + delta) > x + y + delta, (x + delta) + (y - delta) 'is a wash between' x + y, etc.)...after all even babies and animals apparently can do simple sums intuitively/automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > 1/3 = 0.3333... remainder 0.0...1 (yes this is 0 recurring with a one at the > end)

The main logic failure is there.

<comment><USER6> can you explain the logic you think is being failed? The alternative (that 1/3 is exactly 0.3333...) seems equally arbitrary to me.

It appears to me that the people on this thread arguing that 1!=0.9999... have come up with a fully consistent, alternative way of defining equality when involving infinite fractions that is no worse than the conventional definition.

To expand his argument a bit: The argument is:

         0.3     *3+0.1    =1
         0.33    *3+0.01   =1
         0.333   *3+0.001  =1
         0.333...*3+0.0...1=1

...seems reasonable to me (again, it requires a slightly different definition as to what "equality" truly means)

Kind of an interesting idea, actually. (Of course, that's after only looking at it a couple minutes... the idea might fall apart under more scrutiny)

<comment><USER7> "can you explain the logic you think is being failed?"

You can not have an infinite series of something, followed by something else. One definition of "infinite" is that it never ends, which is also why it isn't a number (a number is intrinsically something that would have a definite end). So to have "an infinite series of something, followed by a 1" is to have "a series of something that never ends, followed by a 1 after the end". I can type those words without crashing English, but it has no meaning.

"The alternative (that 1/3 is exactly 0.3333...) seems equally arbitrary to me."

No. I'm not even sure what else to say. If you need convincing, start the long division on paper and keep going until you're convinced.

No, seriously, keep doing it until you're convinced. Right now. Don't reply with a counterargument until you've done that. There's nothing arbitrary about it; to prove that there is, you need to show some point where you came to a choice and you _chose_ to add the next 3, rather than some other hypothetical alternative.

"have come up with a fully consistent, alternative way of defining equality when involving infinite fractions that is no worse than the conventional definition."

Well, no worse, other than also defining an internally-contradictory definition of "infinity" for the sole purpose of winning an internet argument. Other than that, no worse, no.

Recall that introducing one contradictory premise into a logical system allows you to prove any statement. If you are not bothered by a "small" contradiction to prove a dubious point, you don't understand math. Thus, making up definitions to prove a point must be analyzed in the _full_ context of a mathematical system, not just analyzed on some other abstract measurement system (that doesn't matter). Breaking infinity to win an argument doesn't work.

...

Most people go about proving this the wrong way. Proving something about the string "1" vs. ".999..." is wrong. In order to show the two are distinct entities, you need to show a situation in which they behave differently. No such situation exists. Until you do that, "1" = ".9999..." is no more surprising that "2/2" = "1". Or (ahem) "9/9" = "1". Numbers are what they do, they have no existence beyond what they do.

On that note, when teaching I think the point that "=" means "is bidirectionally fully substitutable by" is not taught properly. "2 + 2 = [underline]" is a flawed question; oh, we all know what it means, but "2 + 2 = 2 + 2" is a perfectly correct answer to the question as written. We ought to define a separate operator for what we really mean, "simplification", so we can do something like put "2 + 2 => [underline]" on a test, and save the equality operator for actual equality.

That is also why, for instance, the definition of the square root function must include the stipulation that it takes the _positive_ root, because otherwise "sqrt(4) = 2" is _not_ a true statement; if sqrt(4) means "both" roots somehow it is _not_ fully substitutable with 2. (You can't say that both "sqrt(4) = 2" and "sqrt(4) = -2", either, because then "2 = sqrt(4) = -2". Oops.)

That's the background for my statement that .9999... = 1. It means that there's no way to tease the two apart with any (valid!) mathematical operation. Here's another way to say it: On the real number line, if you have real number A and real number B, and there are no points between A and B, then A and B must be equal. To show they are two different real numbers, you must show a number C between 1 and .9999.... You can not do this... well, again, you can't do this _validly_.

(Also, per RiderOfGiraffe's point, yes, there's some simplification here, but I think it's fair to run on the theory that intrinsic to this argument is that we're on the real number line. People who know enough to talk about transfinite ordinals don't usually get into these arguments; by then, they've learned the secret of math lies in the definitions chosen and understand the ultimately contingent nature of any answer. :) )

<comment><USER6> Again, I don't think this is necessarily that fruitful a discussion, since the whole point of the guy's argument, as I see it, is that you can slightly adjust the meaning of "equality" as it relates to infinite fractions and maintain a completely self-consistent mathematical system.

      > You can not have an infinite series of something,
      > followed by something else.

Why is that? How about the number 19...91? why are you denying me that number? :)

      > If you need convincing, start the long division
      > on paper and keep going until you're convinced.

When I do that, I constantly am left with a remainder. If I accept that 1/3=0.3333..., as you're arguing, then the remainder disappears, for unexplained reasons. An alternative argument is that the remainder persists in the form 0.0...1 and then you don't have to "hand wave away" the remainder.

      > Recall that introducing one contradictory premise
      > into a logical system allows you to prove any statement

I agree with that completely, but I haven't seen the "contradictory premise" yet... all I see (at this point) is some alternative premises that seem fully internally consistent.

      > In order to show the two are distinct entities, you
      > need to show a situation in which they behave
      > differently.

I think that's actually the best argument you've put forward so far. Basically, an argument in favor of choosing the more pragmatic way of handling these situations.

<comment><USER7> "When I do that, I constantly am left with a remainder. If I accept that 1/3=0.3333..., as you're arguing, then the remainder disappears, for unexplained reasons."

No, it doesn't. You stopped finitely soon into an infinite process. You apparently didn't take it far enough.

No disrespect intended, but a HN comment is not a place to post a full description of infinity. Hie thee hence to a textbook. And read it like a _textbook_ , not an internet post. You know, where you go over it with a fine- tooth comb looking for opportunities to leap up and call your opponent a Nazi. Yeah, I know that style. Without that, counterarguments are getting mangled on their way into your brain, because you don't actually understand them in Math. That can't be corrected by people batting down various ill-posed English-based objections.

(If it could, I would have seen it happen by now.)

<comment><USER6> I agree this discussion can't be taken much further on an HN thread for the reasons you give :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People are still talking about this? I remember being convinced of the right answer ("yes") back in elementary school. If 0.9 repeating is not equal to one, name the number between them.

<comment><AUTHOR> (1+0.9999...)/2

<comment><USER9> Sigh. Here we go, a definition of the real numbers. I'm only doing this once.

Let's look at the set of all cauchy sequences of rational numbers. A sequence of rational numbers is just a map N->Q. We write a_0, a_1, a_2, ... for the sequence which maps 0|->a_0, 1|->a_1, 2|->a_2, ... Such a sequence is called "cauchy" if it has the property that:

      For all epsilon > 0 there exists an N such that n,m > N => |a_n-a_m|<epsilon.

Basically, this means that the tail of the sequence bunches together.

Now, we define an equivalence relation ~ on the space of cauchy sequences. We say:

      a_0, a_1, a_2... ~ b_0, b_1, b_2... if:
      a_0-b_0, a_1-b_1 ,a_2-b_2... converges to zero

(A sequence a_0,a_1,... converges to zero if, for every epsilon > 0, there exists N such that n>N => a_n < epsilon.)

Now, the real numbers are the set of equivalence classes of rational cauchy sequences under ~, as defined above.

Clearly, .999... is (the equivalence class of):

      0.9, 0.99, 0.999, ...

And 1 is the equivalence class of:

      1, 1, 1, ...

So are these the same? Well, we have to check if our representatives are equivalent. Does this sequence converge to 0?

      1-0.9, 1-0.99, 1-0.999, ...

Yes, it does. So 1 = .999...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet, I've not seen this approach before.

It still doesn't convince my colleague, because he says that the sequence never gets to zero, but now I know where I stand. He can't deal with the formalisms of convergence and limits.

It's also interesting to try to prove this via the Dedekind Cut construction, rather than the equivalence classes of Cauchy Sequences. I'll have a go at that later tonight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The naive perspective on this issue is because people intuitively perceive the hyperreal numbers. In the hyperreal number system, .9999999999999999999999... and 1 are different. But in almost all phrasings of this question it is implied to be talking about the real number system.

Specifying it gets rid of all ambiguity. The real numbers .999... and 1 are equal. The hyperreal numbers .999... and 1 are not.

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

reply

<comment><USER11> This seems to be the only comment here written with a little mathematical sophistication.

Whether 1 and .999… are equivalent depends on how you define 1 and .999…

<comment><USER10> I find these threads deeply ironic (the 400 page ones, anyways) because both sides arguing are ultimately wrong because both perspectives are correct. People with the naive perspective aren't wrong for not specifying they aren't talking about the hyper real numbers, because the other side doesn't specify they are talking about real numbers.

At a philosophical level, the answer is that .999999999999999999999999999... is different from 1. The difference is real enough to let you rigorously define calculus.

This is one of those subjects that makes an online community go insane (with 400 page threads), because it's possible for the math people and the philosophical people to go on and on without figuring out the right answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone once trolled an objectivist form with something like this: how do you square 'A==A' with '.9999...=1'?

</comment><comment><USER12> power series.

0.999... = sigma 9/10^n n=1 -> inf = 9 * sigma 1/10^n n=1 -> inf = 9 * ((sigma 1/10^n n=0 -> inf) - 1) =

power series sigma 1/10^n n=0 -> inf = 1/(1-1/10)

= 9 * (1/(1-1/10) - 1) = 1

qed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also the poll at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692383>

</comment><comment><USER13> I like this one:

      1/9 = 0.1111...
      2/9 = 0.2222...
      3/9 = 0.3333...
      ...
      8/9 = 0.8888...
      9/9 = 0.9999...

yessir

</comment><comment><USER5> _Ad. OP's link:_

OMIGOD, just noticed, its a 389-page thread!

And I thought 1st page was already pretty epic..

</comment><comment><USER14> some people seem to have a problem with the idea that two different looking representations of something can represent the same thing.</comment>


JRuby Nailgun Support in 1.3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.headius.com/2009/05/jruby-nailgun-support-in-130.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Slow startup time has been an Achilles' Heel for JRuby for a long time now. Being able to get <100 msec startup times could help a lot in making JRuby a reasonable option for short-lived systems automation scripts, cron jobs, etc.</comment>


I Took 9 Different Commercial DNA Tests and Got 6 Different Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.livescience.com/63997-dna-ancestry-test-results-explained.html <comment><USER2> Somewhat clickbait:

 _process is imperfect and clearly doesn 't work the same way every time the companies run the tests, he said — though the errors aren't hugely significant._

<comment><USER3> I'm with your assessment. I was expecting to see more than the minor differences that were reported, which would have made it more interesting and damning to the processing firms. But a headline like "I took nine DNA tests and got approximately the same results" wouldn't have generated so many clicks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to solve chicken and egg problem? - <AUTHOR> I created an app during my spare time and although it's a great idea and people have praised it, I am having a hard time getting over the chicken and egg problem.
What is it and why I made it?
It's an app to buy and sell stuff at your workplace. It's different from local sell since you only see stuff which s posted by people who work in the same building as you. I believe it's safer than local sell since you don't have to interact with strangers. I know a lot of people post flyers in their office's break rooms to try to sell stuff and I thought it will be great to make an app for this purpose.
My problem: I am getting a lot of random users from different cities but having a hard time getting multiple users from the same building. The app can only be successful if multiple users in the same office download this app and post items. If it's just one user then there will be no one to buy their stuff. The purpose of the app is to buy/sell with your co-workers, therefore I can't post items at other offices.
How can I get over this problem?
My apps:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/breakroom-buy-sell-stuff-at/id1143880147?ls=1&mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joinbreakroom.androidapp&hl=en <comment><USER2> 1- our company has offices all around the country and all around the world. So add a routing layer (eg. using DHL), to let us buy/sell amongst colleague even if not in the same building!

2- ex-colleagues are working in other companies, but they're not strangers, so let us also buy/sell across companies!</comment>