Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API? - <AUTHOR>

I'm marveling over the new whitehouse.gov and thinking that the government should have an API. I imagine it would create a thousands of government jobs, boost every sector of hardware sales, foster the creation of thousands of start ups and bring accountability and transparency to government, among other things. I'd say my first request would be this function:
getEveryDollarSpent, which would accept as parameters paidTo, authorizedBy, minDollars, maxDollars, dateFrom and dateTo.
What's yours? <comment><USER2> This isn't quite getEveryDollarSpent, but check out <http://usaspending.gov/>. The site tracks all federal contracting dollars spent. It has an API and a fairly detailed set of data.

Rather than one giant government API, we will probably see each agency slowly create more meaningful ways to get at their data. I expect there to be some exciting open data initiatives from the Obama administration.

<comment><USER3> jcarbaugh won't say this, but the Sunlight Foundation to which he works for is pretty much pushing the government to adopt API standards. They were the folks who were partially responsible for this great link among other amazing products.

<comment><USER2> I've been outed! And there goes my plan to covertly push my radical government transparency agenda. Damn you, ALee!

I've only been involved in this for a little under two years and it is amazing to see how quickly the government has become interested in open data. There is still a LONG way to go, but I think we are going to see some great things in the coming years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How about letting me give the government my email, and then they could email me instead of snail mail, or let me see government correspondence with me online.

A friend of mine got a traffic ticket that he paid incorrectly, and had a wrong address on file. A year later he got arrested during a random broken- taillight stop with a ridiculous amount of late fees. He asked if he had any other tickets outstanding, and they said they couldn't tell him - there was no system for lookups like that. He could only make sure he had the right address on file and wait for further mail. That's a pretty ridiculous system.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about e-mail - I've been locked out of several accounts, and have had a few scary false-positives with my spam filter.

On the other hand, I doubt any spam is going to come from a .gov domain...

<comment><USER6> Email _in addition to what we have now_ would only help, even if 30% of the emails sent weren't received.

<comment><USER7> I think the dangerous part is when _other_ people receive them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would like to see a "profile" style portal which can be linked to any relevant Federal programs I am involved with, from Social Security to my tax burdens with the IRS.

Primarily I would like this to be a single-service type situation where I can choose to go paperless and conduct all correspondence electronically (if I still need to send in the occasional signature such as you do when you e-file your tax returns, so be it). I'd like to see timeline or email based metaphor for interacting with this correspondence. It should include IRS, passport, immigration, the entitlement programs, the VA, whatever your interactions with the fed cover, it should cover.

There is no reason this couldn't share authentication with my state & municipal governments as well. I would like to see a seamless portal for interaction with government at all levels, while each level retains their own autonomy of implementation. If this is 10 years out on the timeline, that is fine, but I do want to see progress made. Start small if you must, but start.

</comment><comment><USER9> I vote for the API equivalent of "svn blame".

<comment><USER10> It would be easy to implement:

return (DEMOCRATS == current_administration) ? REPUBLICANS : DEMOCRATS;

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> i'd be glad to have an API at all. right now, if you want to get donation reports on attempted congressional members you have to go to d.c. in person and individual print each report on their printer and _pay_ for it. it is effectively impossible for any one to accomplish without thousands of dollars plus hundreds of hours. oh yeah, and the reports are images, so then you have to translate them into data.

the more APIs the better. definitely tracking money is vital, since we've all come to assume the government is in evil corp's pocket.

</comment><comment><USER12> shutdown()

<comment><USER10> I'd say it should be:

taxes shutdown()

but I have a feeling it would be void shutdown()...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see citizens issued with official public/private cryptographic key pairs. I think this would have the potential to hamper identity theft, enable legally meaningful electronic signatures, and bring encrypted/authenticated communication to the public.

<comment><USER14> It could be like a driver's license for the internet, and a post office franking mechanism at the same time.

Although seriously now would you want every blog comment tied to you with a digital signature, provably yours forever?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > I imagine it would create a thousands of government jobs, boost every sector > of hardware sales, foster the creation of thousands of start ups and bring > accountability and transparency to government, among other things.

The money you need to fund this stuff has to come from somewhere; hence destroying thousands of non-government jobs, slowing down every other sector of the economy and preventing the creation of thousands of startups.

</comment><comment><USER15> Full Text Search

<comment><USER16> and permalinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A congressional api. Pass either a lawmakers name and get their voting record. Pass a zip code to get the lawmakers for your area. Pass a bill # to get relevant data, etc

<comment><USER18> Something like this?

[http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the- con...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-congress- api/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A live feed of who gives funding to campaigns or any politician would be great. Thanks.

What if ALL contributions were reported on a public twitter feed-ish service? (and a timeline)

Oh, and an api for that data would be sweet too.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm all for accountability, but I also think added bureaucracy is a waste of money. Someone has to pay for these new jobs, and I can't tell whether this will return more than it costs to set up.

<comment><USER15> the way I read it, the OP's "new jobs" would be jobs created in the private sector by people making use of the data. I don't think he was referring to the cost of creating the API itself.

The API could be created as a F/OSS project and be done with that line item ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At a different level of government, I'd like a real-time public transport api. Tell me where all the buses and trains are right now, and let me make sense of it for my website's visitors.

<comment><USER22> For the bay area, this exists. <http://transit511.org>

<comment><USER21> You mistyped the link? That seems to be a spam domain.

In London we have <http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk> but there is no api and the user interface is shoddy.

<comment><USER22> I missed a dot. It should be <http://transit.511.org>. Past the edit deadline unfortunately.

<comment><USER21> Thanks.

There doesn't seem to be an api mentioned anywhere on that site. It appears to be for end users only. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> voting records, and USGS information would be nice too

</comment><comment><USER24> Law. Location. I want to search what the Law says about the keywords/phrase I submit. This way next time a cop is trying to bs me, I can pull the phone, and double check what's the law in regards to it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Before we worry about an API, how about some decent blogs?

</comment><comment><USER26> bullshitMe, which takes as parameters my SSN and returns a load of political crap geared especially for my demographic.

Could eliminate a lot of political grunt work and save money come the next election. It would also provide excuses for practical things, like why the potholes aren't fixed or the budget is still unbalanced.

I'm also all for simplifyAgency, which takes an Agency name and returns a list of functions that the agency does. So I could call simplifiyAgency("IRS") and receive a list of APIs the IRS exposes.

Or how about something extremely practical? Give us access to all of that GIS and USGS data in a simple format. You know, the data that is in the public domain but companies make a killing re-selling us.

</comment><comment><USER27> You're already doing it wrong. Camel caps? Eww.

uglyAsFuckAndAlmostUnreadable -> fail. acceptable_using_underscores -> better. using-hyphens-as-lisp-does -> great.

<comment><AUTHOR> heh.</comment></comment>


Facebook to patent the word 'face'?	 - <AUTHOR> http://news.bioscholar.com/2010/11/facebook-to-patent-the-word-face.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone planning on having or sharing opinions on intellectual property law should really master the basics first, like the difference between "patent" and "trademark".</comment>


Supreme Court sides with tech company in patent dispute with Postal Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/SpK9IoiRrI-acWR0VMVU1g2 <comment><USER2> >The Postal Service then petitioned the Patent Office to review the patent, and the Patent Board agreed with the Postal Service that Return Mail's patent was ineligible to be patented, and it canceled the claims underlying the patent. A divided panel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit then affirmed the Patent Board's findings and invalidated Return Mail's patent claims.

>In the most recent June 10 ruling, however, the Supreme Court said that a federal agency is not a "person" who may petition for post-issuance review under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. The Supreme Court reversed the court of appeals' ruling and remanded the case for further proceedings.

This seems weird, so the postal service can't ask for a patent to be reviewed, but I can?

If the Postal Service can be at the mercy of some patent owner it should be able to ask for the patent to be reviewed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link to the opinion [https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-1594](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-1594)</comment>


Buffer Acquired Social Media Customer Service Tool Respondly - <AUTHOR> https://open.buffer.com/buffer-acquires-respondly/ <comment><USER2> This is a perfect fit. Both products are really well done and incredibly polished. I've repeatedly asked the Respondly team to build Buffer-like scheduling into their product so I'm really excited to see them combine.

<comment><USER3> > I've repeatedly asked the Respondly team to build Buffer-like scheduling > into their product

Respondly brands itself as the "The _Fastest_ Way to Tackle Twitter as a Team" so not sure when it makes sense to schedule replies.

I'm just wondering what use case you have in mind for this. Like, when do you not want to respond instantly to a customer?

<comment><USER2> As a team, we all are tweeting all the time, not just replying. I want our original tweets and our responses in a single place. Bigger teams may be more specialized (support vs. marketing) but we're small and like single tools that serve multiple needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your team lives in Slack, you may want to consider responding to tweets (in real time) via [https://sameroom.io/attend](https://sameroom.io/attend)</comment>


Lucidity – visual data debugger - <AUTHOR> http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd <comment><USER2> Yea, saw this too just now, in a comment to another post here on HN by the creator.

I have only been able to scan the surface but initial reaction one of utter awe. I have not seen anything similar anywhere, have I missed something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not seen anything like it either. The idea at the bottom of the page was especially thought provoking for me:

>>Our problem is that we have too much data, too rapidly evolving—and we need ways of automatically eliminating less relevant subsets of that data, retaining only the most essential parts. Lucidity is an attempt to build one of these 'abstractoscopes.'

It is somewhat strange to me that we as programmers have tools to instrument our production systems with metrics, so that they can be monitored and their behaviour understood through visualizations, while at the same time, we use printf and debuggers that show mainly textual information while developing. It is said that a picture is worth more than a thousand words (which describe the same picture).</comment></comment>


Lessons for startup founders from Baseball home run stats? - <AUTHOR> http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/09/home_run_hittin.html

<comment><USER2> A lesson for those in consumer electronics: make something as good as your market can handle, and there will _still_ be something better in Japan. :P

This guy actually holds the record, with 868 home runs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukuoka_Softbank_Hawks></comment>


Deepfakes for dancing: AI to fake those dance moves you always wanted - sahin-boydas https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/26/17778792/deepfakes-video-dancing-ai-synthesis <comment><AUTHOR> While these results certainly have drawbacks, it does set a prescient as to how we can use video evidence.

In ten or twenty years, can video evidence be considered legally binding? If someone else can make someone else do virtually any movement, how do we know that someone else committed a crime? With voice and facial synthesis, virtually anyone can do anything. Photo evidence can be easily faked (via photoshop), videos can be faked, audio can be faked; do we continue to create methods of identity verification that are continually complex?

<comment><USER2> Video and audio recording evidence is already considered low grade evidence exactly for these reasons in criminal cases where there is enough reason to believe it could've been faked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't want to sound like a luddite but as an older person, I can't see how we get through this "truthy" phase.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get how they enforced the temporal coherence criterion on the GAN. How do they evaluate temporal coherence?

</comment><comment><USER5> Man. It's sad to me to see that the people who are building these technologies do it in some bland institutional setting.

The potential here is absolutely world changing. Give an intelligence agency this tech and itll be more deadly than a gun. Who cares if the presidential urine tape is a myth or not when it can be made real?

If you're building something that can tear the world apart, you should be compensated in a similar fashion. You should be able to do your research in a retreat in the alps, in absolute luxury and comfort.

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, because what we need more of is exorbitant reward for building things more deadly than guns that tear the world apart.</comment></comment>


Twitter employee, transit advocate dies after getting caught in SF shootout - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Twitter-employee-transit-advocate-dies-after-15248295.php <comment><USER2> Paywall</comment>


Pass the snooper's charter now, or London will be next - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11996968/Pass-the-snoopers-charter-now-or-London-will-be-next.html <comment><USER2> This is exactly the response to this tragedy that I was fearing in the UK. What the article fails to mention is that France passed their own sweeping surveillance law earlier this year [1], and it clearly failed to stop this attack from happening. That isn't to say that increased surveillance never aids in intercepting terrorism, but to sell it as a golden bullet is highly disingenuous. Now is precisely the wrong time to be making rash decisions and passing reactionary legislation which will have serious ramifications for privacy and cyber-security for years to come.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/05/france- passes-n...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/05/france-passes-new- surveillance-law-in-wake-of-charlie-hebdo-attack)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sickening political exploitation of a tragedy. Bad Telegraph, no cookie.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if anyone has explained how looking at everyone's internet history would have prevented the attacks in Paris?</comment></comment>


France Has A PRISM-Like Program With Thousands Of Trillions Of Metadata Elements - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/04/france-has-a-prism-like-program-with-thousands-of-trillions-of-metadata-elements/ <comment><USER2> Non-blog-spam story by the french newspaper that outed it: [http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2013/07/04/revelations...](http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2013/07/04/revelations- on-the-french-big-brother_3442665_3224.html)

<comment><USER3> Why are you calling it blog-spam? They rewrote the story to readable English and offered it to the Tech community. (Who reads Le Monde? ;-));

<comment><USER4> Le Monde is actually quite good. I try to keep a multi-angle view of politics in Europe, so I frequent a few newspapers/sites from different European countries. After shopping around a bit, I settled for Le Monde as the IMO best among the French daily newspapers.

<comment><USER5> > The best among French Daily newspapers

Seeing how crappy the french daily newspapers are, that's a pretty meaningless claim. Over the past few years most of the "quotidiens" have been doing nothing more than rewriting the AFP reports. They don't do investigative journalism anymore, and even the published articles are full of spelling mistakes, something you didn't see 20-30 years ago.

The level has dropped significantly for the press in France, and that's also why no one buys them anymore. All these french newspapers are heavily State- subsidized for survival. Let's not wonder a second about their independence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Of course they are, because if you could, why wouldn't you? The potential is too useful for anyone in power to not exploit.

I love the hypocrisy of French politicians at being outraged at PRISM and wanting to offer asylum to Snowden, when they're doing the same shit.

<comment><USER7> The politicians that want to offer asylum are also against this.

The politicians that like this thing, are the same ones that stopped Evo Morales plane thinking Snowden would be on it.

<comment><USER8> They thought Snowden was on the Morales' plane because of the intel they received from the bugs they planted in the Ecuadorian embassy in London that were found weeks ago. The Ecuadorians announced they discovered the bugs within 24 hours of the forced landing of Morales' plane.

<comment><USER9> Source, please?

<comment><USER8> The connection between the bug and Snowden is pure speculation on my part. But here's a link to an article about the bug.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23179431](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23179431)

I just find it a little coincidental that Snowden is working with Wikileaks, which is led by Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, where news has just been uncovered that they discovered a bug a few weeks ago, and that this news was released within 24 hours of the diversion of Morales' plane.

Personally, I think the news release of the bug was intended to send a message to the US & UK intelligence services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I suspect that the only countries that are NOT secretly doing something like this fall into two groups:

• Those who make no secret of it.

• Those who don't have the technology to do it.

<comment><USER8> And the Germans. The Germans haven't been party to most of the post-WWII spying, if I understand geopolitics correctly.

<comment><USER11> Where did you get that idea? Germany spends something like half a billion every year on signals intelligence.

<comment><USER8> It's all relative. The US spends some $75 billion: [http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa- surveillanc...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillance- cost/index.html) . I don't think Germany's budget will go a long way towards sweeping up global communications and analyzing them.

<comment><USER11> They also spend on their military a tiny fraction of what we spend on ours. Would you thus claim that there's no German army?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The phrasing is that much more confusing because France is a long scale country, so "one thousand trillion" is the valid way to say 10^21. If 1 byte = 1 metadata element (unlikely), that's a zettabyte. Which is probably not what's meant.

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

<comment><USER13> The headline of TFA says "Millions Of Trillions"

The headline of TFA's TFA (the source article) says

"La DGSE collecte ainsi des milliards de milliards de données".

That translates to 'millions of millions' pieces of data, or on the order of 10^12 (trillions in short scale) pieces of data.

<comment><USER14> No 'milliards de milliards' translates to billions of billions. So that would be 10^18

<comment><USER15> Could this be translated as "billions and billions" or "billions upon billions"?

<comment><USER16> Literally it says billions of billions, but in context it most likely means billions upon billions.

<comment><USER17> Why? Petabytes seems like a more likely order of magnitude than gigabytes, doesn't it?

 _eta_ : From the article: "capable of managing dozens of petaoctets of data, in other words dozens of millions of gigaoctets"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Previous discussion of the topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5990016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5990016)

</comment><comment><USER19> Thousands of trillions? At what point do we start expressing numbers in terms of the number of known atoms in the universe? This is big data. Civil liberties aside, this is awesome.

I'd express this as .19, or 15/78 due to the French dataset containing 10^15 and the number of atoms in the universe, at a speculated lower bound, being 10^78.

The one good thing that could come of all this surveillance, maybe we get a better version of Sim City that actually does need cloud computing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Isn't it obvious to everyone by now? We have to wake up, basically every developed country has a program like PRISM that varies but the whole premise of capturing information isn't anything new. This is something that the US and other countries have been doing since World War 2 in some shape or form.

I could easily write a script in Python through some crafty Google searches, the Facebook API, Twitter API, LinkedIn and simple scraping could compile a report of a person and or persons activity on the Internet throw in some natural language processing and I could paint a vague but nonetheless somewhat accurate representation of a person. Capturing phone meta data and tracking locations via cell phone towers would obviously only be only something those supplied with such information would be able to store and have access to.

The difference between a surveillance scraping network that infringes upon your privacy and one that walks the grey line very closely is what information it is given. The technology behind PRISM like programs is largely the same, perhaps fluctuations in how fast information can be retrieved, sorted, tagged and stored are the only difference.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the surprising part about this is the following statement: "The DGSE entirely designed the program and no data protection representative is overseeing it." I differentiate between these programs more with "It's not what you collect, it's how you use it." :-)

</comment><comment><USER22> Also known as quadrillions.

</comment><comment><USER23> Holy millions of trillions, Batman !

(later edit: with all due respect for the seriousness of the topic, I loled when I read the title; seems like the submitter also noticed the alliteration and changed it to "thousands of trillions", which made me laugh again)

<comment><USER7> post-napoleon french number system is quite... peculiar.

Some places kept pre-revolution French (like Switzerland) and there they use "normal" numbers (ie: 79 is seventy nine, instead of sixty ten nine, and 84 is eighty four instead of four twenty and four)

<comment><USER24> "Normal" according to who? :-)

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

And then there's Danish...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I recall reading on a newsgroup sometimes in 2001 (prolly long lost since then) that the french internet was being monitored by french the government. So kind of old news to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> With all this talk about metadata, it would be wonderful if these agencies published and standardized their ontologies.</comment>


3D-print records for your turntable - <AUTHOR> http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4947970>

It sounds pretty good, similar to an old tape recording.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if it would have higher audio resolution if phonograph cylinders were the recording holding device. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder></comment>


Navigating Code on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://help.github.com/en/articles/navigating-code-on-github#jumping-to-the-definition-of-a-function-or-method <comment><USER2> Meh.

I would use sourcegraph.com/${GITHUB_REPO_URL} for navigating code. Much nicer than Github's and supports more languages.</comment>


FaceBook Stocks Now Stable ~$31.00 - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:FB&lol=haters

<comment><USER2> It crossed $30 at the close of trading Friday.

Perhaps you mean "up".</comment>


Ubuntu Web is an upcoming Firefox-based web OS to rival Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> https://liliputing.com/2020/07/ubuntu-web-is-an-upcoming-firefox-based-web-os-to-rival-chrome-os.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is exciting. Something I have wanted to work on myself for a long time. I hope Ubuntu Web's UX is influenced more by Jolicloud Joli OS and Palm webOS than Chrome OS. Chrome OS always seemed like such a disappointment after using the other Web-centric OSes.</comment>


Federal Reserve slashes rates to zero, restarts QE - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/federal-reserve-cuts-rates-to-zero-restarts-quantitative-easing-qe-210001968.html <comment><USER2> Prediction: this creates more panic and the market will sell off again tomorrow.</comment>


Analysis: "Cybersecurity" bill endangers privacy rights - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/analysis-cybersecurity-bill-endangers-privacy-rights.ars <comment><USER2> This is one of the better analyses I've seen of CISPA. I'll save tptacek some time and quote liberally from the article:

"It's unclear why new legislation is needed to allow this kind of uncontroversial information sharing to occur. Network administrators and security researchers at private firms have shared threat information with one another for decades. And the law also allows information sharing between private firms and the government in many circumstances. For example, a private company is already free to notify the FBI if it detects an attempt to hack into its network."

[...]

"The "notwithstanding" approach to cybersecurity is fundamentally flawed because it's almost impossible to predict which parts of US law might be effectively changed by the new law, or to prevent unintended consequences from unduly broad sharing. It would be far better for Congress to figure out which specific privacy laws (if any) prevent effective network security responses and explicitly reform those provisions."

[...]

"Given the roaring success of the Internet's backlash against the Stop Online Piracy Act, CISPA opponents have an irresistable temptation to compare the two bills. Both bills represent attacks on the rights of Internet users, but the similarity largely ends there.

A better analogy is the 2008 FISA Amendment Act, which granted major telecommunications incumbents retroactive immunity for their participation in warrantless wiretapping and eliminated judicial oversight for a broad category of government surveillance. CISPA is likely to further erode the already weak legal restraints on government surveillance of Americans, and there's no meaningful judicial oversight of information shared under the "cyber threat" program."</comment>


Microsoft announces Windows 8.1 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/05/14/windows-keeps-getting-better.aspx?

<comment><USER2> I found this announcement frustrating to read because it contains little useful content. Almost all of it is about how supposedly awesome Windows 8 is and how well it's doing. The relevant part could have been summed up as: there's a free upgrade coming out sometime later this year called Windows 8.1.

<comment><USER3> This sums up my experience with MS in general; conversations driven by marketing and nothing else. For many other tech companies it's a much lower marketing:info ratio. Google is fairly good about it, and Mozilla is pretty good, while Apple is just as bad as MS.

<comment><USER4> I disagree about the Apple part. If Apple tells you something, they will generally tell you what you will get, but not how it works.

Microsoft, in this example, tells you neither. The three items of information are "it's Windows 8.1", "it's a free update", and "we will tell you more" (that third one is counting liberally)

With Apple, this would either be a new OS X release that gets a page showing its new end user features, or it would be an update that simply showed up in System Update.

<comment><USER3> Yes good point, for announcements Apple typically won't divulge a whole lot, but it's strategically important to drive the message (i.e. key features/capabilities), and then saving the rest for later. At least that's my observation, and I can't fault them on that basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "We now have more than 70,000 apps in the Windows Store (the online app store for Windows) – apps such as Twitter, ..."

Did anyone else chuckle that he felt he had to describe parenthetically what the Windows Store is?

<comment><USER6> And he didn't mention what percentage of those apps are of any decent quality. They're ruining the experience by pushing quantity over quality.

<comment><USER7> Have you seen some of the horrific efforts that populate both the App Store and Google Play now? Let's not pretend that either Apple or Google are curating anything beyond "meets requirements/guidelines/rules", certainly not "brand-positive User Experience".

<comment><USER6> No, I haven't really, but this doesn't surprise me either. I have a feeling that Amazon is doing the same thing with their Android app store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _will be a free update to Windows 8 for consumers through the Windows Store_

This could be to get more people to link their Microsoft ID with their Windows user accounts so that they will be more likely to use the store in the future. The alternative would be to release it through Windows Update like every other Windows patch for the last decade+.

<comment><USER9> i think it will be interesting to see how this works. I'm not 100 percent sure, but i think the store basically cannot update apps and functions outside its modern UI jail, right?

<comment><USER10> The store can do whatever Microsoft wants it to be able to do. Updating and installing apps necessarily involves more permission than the apps themselves have access to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like a service pack just got rebranded as a point update.

<comment><USER12> Service packs typically don't contain new features, though, while this update is expected to.

<comment> k-mcgrady I haven't used Windows in a few years but I remember XP SP2 included several new features. Security Center was a major one but I know there were a few others too.

<comment><USER13> I believe the wireless networking support was majorly beefed up for XP SP2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some updates on the way:

1\. Start menu 2\. Tile size

(source: [http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380713/windows- blue-8-1-release-...](http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380713/windows- blue-8-1-release-date-screenshots-features))

<comment><USER15> Ugh. I don't actually miss the onscreen start button (although I can imagine the discoverability hit to casual computer users). I miss the actual _start menu_ , which was vastly more useful than the gimmicky thing they replaced it with.

<comment><USER10> What about it was _more useful_? I didn't change any of my habits after upgrading to Win8. It was only a cosmetic change as far as I can tell. I still just hit the start key and start typing to launch things, search for apps and files, or run commands. Meanwhile the new start menu also lets me search any app that registers itself as a search provider (i.e. search through my Kindle books, my Netflix account, etc), which is handy.

<comment><USER15> > What about it was more useful?

Universal search: I didn't have to choose "Files" "Apps" "Settings", etc. It just floated whatever answered the query.

Outlook Integration: I could search emails, files in email attachments, and files on disk with one query in 7. As far as I can tell, Outlook 2013 wants nothing to do with the TIFKAM search at all.

Not full screen: I would routinely transcribe something onscreen or drag something out of the search results into a window.

If there was any upside to the weird new menu _at all_ , I could deal with these changes, but as far as I can tell it's pure regression. Windows 8 has lots of tiny technical advances, but the shell changes are just a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste." (S. Jobs)

The reports of still insisting on Metro for big monitors and computers instead of keeping it only on phones and tablets confirm this. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

(And forcing people to get an OS update over the Windows Store is as spammy as it can be.)

<comment><USER17> Can you clarify what you are saying here? That Metro is ugly? Or that it's only ugly on Big Monitors?

<comment><USER18> It's a touch-centric paradigm forced onto non-touch devices.

<comment><USER19> That brings up a good question. With newer laptops and monitors being touch, how long do we have left before touch display become the norm? Is Microsoft trying to have a solution before the problem?

<comment><USER20> I have a laptop with a touch screen and even while using programs it conceivably makes sense in (read: not a webbrowser, terminal, text editor / word processor, video player....), I still don't use it. My hands are at rest near the clickpad so why would I?

As long as computers ship with good pointer devices, as far as I can tell there can be no problem to solve.

<comment><USER10> If you are a kid today growing up with smartphones and tablets, the fact that you can't touch things when you're old enough to start interacting with computers would be weird. That you naturally default to using the mouse is a learned habit. It's not one the next generation will have when they grow up; give them only a pointer device and they will not buy your device. If Microsoft weren't positioning itself to work the way _they_ will be accustomed to just as well, it'd be ensuring its own demise when they become the next generation of workers and computer customers.

Microsoft is trying to play the long game, as always; whether they're doing it well is up for debate. They want Windows to work for you with your mouse, for Bob who wants a tablet to watch videos and check e-mail on, for Stacy who wants a tablet to seamlessly switch between working in Office and entertainment, for Josh who only uses a smartphone, and for Johnny who's just growing up and will be a potential Windows customer in 5-10 years.

<comment><USER20> Lets say I'm in a webbrowser, like I assume 99% of the population is 99% of the time (locally running games excluded). What am I going to touch? Unlike on a phone the pinch/zoom gesture that makes clicking on links practical isn't comfortable in the slightest (I have to bend my wrist uncomfortably to put both my thumb and index finger on the screen at the same time). Even worse, desktop browsers aren't going to fetch mobile versions of pages that are meant to be used with touch.

The one place that I've ever seen it being a decent input choice on my laptop is clicking through the menus in minecraft. Unusually massive buttons that only need a single tap of the finger to use. I don't think anything other than minecraft or other _"low-fi is cool"_ style games could really get away with doing that though.

Even if they make all of Windows "lo-fi" like minecraft, which I suppose is what they are aiming for with windows 8, it won't matter. The things people actually use windows _for_ won't/can't follow suit.

I don't know, maybe I'm just an old grump.

<comment><USER10> You're not forward-looking enough. 2012 was the beginning of the end of the laptop form factor. Windows 8 needs to last a good decade or so for Microsoft, so it better be ready for the form factors that will be popular in the coming years. That's going to be tablets of all sizes you can dock to a keyboard for laptop-like work. With a hard hinge or kickstand, they look and work like the laptop you're used to. They're otherwise undocked or have the screen flipped down over the keyboard for tablet-like interaction.

There's no wrist contortion when using the same computer if you can move the screen flat in a split second to switch modes of interaction. If you're not convinced that using the full internet on a touchscreen PC can't be as fluid, easy and enjoyable as it is on your mobile device or Android tablet, find a store with a Surface Pro tablet on display, hold it in your hand without the magnetic keyboard attached, and tap Internet Explorer 10. It feels like the future, man. If your phone feels fluid, pinch zooming on an Intel Core i5 feels like you're in an Iron Man movie working with Jarvis. No mobile sites required; the only thing that you'll have trouble doing just as easy and accurately as if you had a mouse is menus that have hover states.

<comment><USER20> We've had laptops like that for a decade. Tablets make sense, I don't doubt that, and laptops that can turn into tablets are fine, but the technology is just silly in regular laptops.

If Windows 8 is all about Microsoft getting ready to ditch regular laptops let alone desktops entirely... well besides thinking that is a mistake I think they should have manned up and never pretended it was for regular laptops in the first place.

I've used a surface briefly. I walked away from it with that _"gee wiz that was neato... but adds no value to my life"_ vibe that I got years ago from Beryl/Compiz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This will totally blow if you have to install Windows 8 just to install Windows 8.1. I hope we are talking about a stand alone installer.

</comment><comment><USER22> I frequently hear that 8 should have a start menu, and should be able to boot to desktop. Although I agree, I've found a solution that serves me well.

<http://www.classicshell.net> gives a start menu, and boots to desktop.

I'm mainly a Linux user, but I upgraded from my xp drive to 8 because the upgrade was only 40 bucks at the time, and I couldn't find a copy of 7 in stores nor online.

With classic shell, I'm content for the limited uses of windows I need. And all of my programs written for xp run correctly, which surprised me.

</comment><comment><USER23> What are the new features?

<comment><USER24> A start menu.

<comment><USER9> Press "Windows" key. Get full screen start menu with improved search function.

<comment><USER25> Actually, as a user of Windows 8 in Parallels I find activating the start screen to be difficult because the Apple+C keyboard combo maps to Copy rather than to Win+C. And activating the corner of the screen is difficult because the mouse leaves the virtual machine window to go to the host OS. So having a Start button will improve usability for virtual machine users.

And it will help the usability for my parents too on their Windows computers. My mother has become confused with her Windows 8 laptop (that has a touch screen) about how to switch between modes.

<comment><USER9> Is it a tablet? If yes, show her the "swipe with the right thumb from right to left" to open the charms bar. It is pretty natural, because both thumbs should also be in the correct position if she holds the tablet in landscape mode.

With Parallels, I agree. Sorry, it was a reflex for the usual "Win 8 has no start menu" trolling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious if this will be delivered as a service pack or as a new OS. It seems like they are announcing it as a new OS, I've never seen this much news over a SP before.

<comment><USER10> > Tami Reller shared with the audience that the update previously referred to > as "Windows Blue" will be called Windows 8.1 and will be a free update to > Windows 8 for consumers through the Windows Store.

I wouldn't call installing a free update from your OS's app store a new OS. It's mostly just minor cosmetic changes from the sounds of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll wait for 8.11 for workgroups.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm disappointed to see no mention at all of Windows Phone in the post. This is supposed to be the update that finally unifies Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, which are currently quite separate from each other.

</comment><comment><USER29> All I want too know is can you now easily make Metro not the default GUI and can the start button menu now appear easily. ALl without hacks and addons and mods by third parties. If they have done that, I'll bite, that alone stopped a laptop sale for a friend who stuck with windows 7 laptop as not even a salesman could demo/handle it. Tried a few shops as well and all and myself and friend just could not handle it, was messy. Now touch screen laptops, whilst much more compfortable with metro, still only suitable if you use it as a tablet with keyboard

</comment><comment><USER30> Is this Microsoft's official Windows blog? What a piece of garbage.

Who labels their feeds (Atom??) as "Syndication"?

I don't know who works at Microsoft anymore, but it's a really weird culture.

</comment><comment><USER31> All those jokes about how Windows 8 resembles Windows 3.1 and now this...

</comment><comment><USER32> Does anybody know whether they are going to fix the INT_MIN / -1 bug in the kernel? This code below (compiled and linked with gdi32) crashes fully patched versions of Windows 7 and 8 (32 bit), I didn't try it with 64bit versions.

#include <windows.h>

#include <limits.h>

int main() {

HDC dc = CreateCompatibleDC (NULL);

SetLayout (dc, LAYOUT_RTL);

ScaleWindowExtEx (dc, INT_MIN, -1, 1, 1, NULL);

}

<comment><USER33> why isn't this treated as a serious security issue?

<comment><USER34> Is it exploitable to gain elevated privileges?

Typically a user with the ability to make those calls can shut down the machine anyway. But Terminal Services/Remote Desktop may be an exception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm feeling like the Windows 8.1 upgrade, available on the Windows Store, is just a way to force Windows 8 users to finally register for the Windows Store?

Speaking from personal experience only, I've never used the Windows Store, and I don't know anyone who has.

I'd love to see the numbers of Windows 8 installs vs Windows Store accounts.

</comment><comment><USER36> I hope they add a feature to change the Start Screen wallpaper. I have to use Decor8 just for that, but it's worth it in my opinion. The Start Screen looks much better when you use the same wallpaper as your desktop, but blur it a bit.

</comment><comment><USER37> So SP1, but "SP" = "." because we "why not".

</comment><comment><USER38> Story seems to be getting flagged and is going down the front page.

Looks like some HN folks with good karma can't stand a Microsoft story that is not super critical and bitching about them. Those stay on the front page for days.

<http://i.imgur.com/wFN21wY.png>

Even announcements are not spared. Can anyone who flagged this post care to tell us why? I suspect the answer is "lol M$'.

<comment><USER39> Are you speculating or do you know it's being flagged? An alternative could be that only people with low karma are voting it up which is what's keeping it from having more staying power.

<comment><USER19> Thats news to me. I din't know someone with a higher karma gets a better voting rank. Reminds me of what Digg wanted to achieve and it backfiring.

<comment><USER39> I _think_ HN uses a weighted Karma system for voting but I don't know for sure. It would make sense to give certain people more weight than others. At least in a primitive way with something like "new user" VS. "trusted user".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Benford's Law and the Decreasing Reliability of Accounting Data for US Firms - <AUTHOR> http://econerdfood.blogspot.com/2011/10/benfords-law-and-decreasing-reliability.html

<comment><USER2> Auditor, and very soon to be CPA, here. The author "downloaded quarterly accounting data for all firms in Compustat, the most widely-used dataset in corporate finance that contains data on over 20,000 firms from SEC filings." Quarterly reports are unaudited by an independent CPA firm (most often KPMG, PWC, EY, Deloitte), while annual reports (10-K) are audited. I would be curious if the the sum of squares analysis is as significant in the latter set.

</comment><comment><USER3> The figures could be still be reliable if this reflects an actual change in distribution of business.

Speculation: Perhaps in 1960 businesses were really distributed according to a power law but have reapportioned a bit over time. Trends like consolidation and dominance of a few large firms might skew things.

<comment><USER4> He studied 43 _different variables_ on 20,000 firms.

That's like measuring the heart rate, LDL, HDL, blood sugar level, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, height, weight, hair length, number of children, salary, home value, and total miles driven on all of the cars... of an entire football stadium worth of people.

And it's not like he's _correlating_ these numbers, that your salary is proportional to your home value, or your weight is proportional to your blood pressure.

No, these are statistical properties _of the numbers themselves_.

The hypothesis of the paper is that statistical deviations correlate with financial crises. You doubt that correlation, but you think all of thousands of other numbers can credibly show a statistical correlation? :)

<comment><USER5> Not all measurements are subject to Benford's law. For example, a list of people's heights isn't going to follow the distribution. You can't just arbitrarily take values and expect them to fit into this mold.

Basically, Benford's Law works where the values are an open-ended count of something. When it's a measurement within a bounded domain, all bets are off.

<comment><USER6> >>a list of people's heights isn't going to follow the distribution.

Try centimeters.

<comment><USER7> Benford's law is base independant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a soon to be CPA, these recent articles on Benford's Law fascinating. But it's funny that there's extreme skepticism around Moore's Law, but Benford's Law seems to get a free pass. Just like Moore's Law it's a law matched to empirical observations - meaning it works until it doesn't.

<comment><USER9> That is not true, Benford's law has rigid mathematical theory behind it, it is not solely empirically grounded. It is a property of numbers.

<comment><USER10> Ref: Terence Tao: [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law- zipfs...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-law- and-the-pareto-distribution/)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Schiller: iOS 6 Passbook works in place of NFC - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/09/13/apples-schiller-ios-6-passbook-works-in-place-of-nfc/ <comment><AUTHOR> "And by virtue of it being built into the operating system, not the device, Passbook will have a much larger potential installed base right off the bat, when iOS 6 is released next Wednesday."</comment>


Your company name matters, a lot – J. Currier - <AUTHOR> http://essays.nfx.com/your-company-name-matters-a-lot/ <comment><USER2> I thoroughly believe this.

I had a business partner at one time who believed that names mean nothing.

I believe that a great name can - as this post says - lift you up. A bad name can be a real problem. A middling name won't be a problem but won't accelerate you.

I just put alot of "wasted" hours into renaming a product in development because I thought of a better name.

</comment><comment><USER3> The name of your company makes you think about your business every day. It's just your first name - the insight to a great company name is already the insight into a market. Thanks for sharig

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The language you use is the THING, while building your great company. But, we don't remember it all the time</comment>


Workday to put employees through a Big Data analysis - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/workday-to-put-employees-through-a-big-data-analysis/

<comment><USER2> _or increasing competitiveness for jobs_

This is code for: depressing wages and decreasing job security.</comment>


What products/apps/services you use for video conferencing/calls/meetings? - <AUTHOR> What products/apps/services you use for video conferencing/calls/meetings? What you like/dislike about them? What features you'd like to add/see in products that you currently or would like to use? <comment><USER2> Skype. Its easy, people (strangers) know how to use it. I would prefer not to use it and don't like the constant tray icon (I tend to only load it when I know I have a meeting).

I've used join.me which also seems straightforward and easy to share a code with someone at very short notice (don't have to link accounts before we have a meeting - you can just email a URL).

Whatsapp video if I'm on the go and want to talk to friends / family.</comment>


Lazy Loading JavaScript with RequireJS - <AUTHOR> http://www.joezimjs.com/javascript/lazy-loading-javascript-with-requirejs/ <comment><USER2> I hope I'm not the only one, but I really do feel lazily loading javascripts is an overkill and not worth it in 99% of cases.

Even if your concatenated .js file ends up being huge, well, you can set expires headers for a year, and then asynchronously load it on the login/landing page. By the time a user will log in, they will already have the js loaded and ready to fire - not affecting performance in any way.

Unless I'm missing something?</comment>


The math that killed Lehman Brothers - <AUTHOR> http://plus.maths.org/issue51/features/boedihardjo/index.html

<comment><USER2> Note: In a prior life I was a part of the CDO research group supporting the clients at Lehman's trading desk in NYC. I'm familiar with what happened there.

The article contains a few errors. One, the article claims Lehman owned lots of senior tranches, which lost value when default rates unexpectedly rose. That's incorrect. We could sell that stuff to pension funds and make money on it, so we did, and losses in that tranche didn't hurt us; it hurt the retirees.

Lehman got hit hard because they could not sell the highest risk tranches (referred to as "toxic waste"). But they made enormous fees on originating the CDOs, and the toxic waste paid high interest rates (20-30%), so Lehman reluctantly kept it on their balance sheet and constantly tried to sell it off to other people (most of whom were too smart to take it).

We tried to hedge the risk by shorting the mezzanine tranches (those were between the toxic waste and the senior AA or AAA tranches). If default rates went up, and we hedged correctly, the gains from the synthetic shorts would make up for the losses on the toxic waste subs.

But for a variety of reasons this wound up not working as well as expected. Particularly, the correlation of default rates between subprime and quality debt decreased substantially and unexpectedly, which means these shorts did not generate as much cash as was lost when the equity tranche tanked.

Also, for an amusing tangent, we had bomb-proof windows to the outside world on the trading floors. A fertilizer bomb could go off in Times Square and we'd still be trading. Unfortunately we were not so well protected from the bomb that went off inside the trading floor.

<comment><USER3> For an amusing tangent to your amusing tangent, Blizzard's offices have bullet-proof windows and doors to prevent disgruntled World of Warcraft players from going on shooting rampages.

(<http://pc.ign.com/articles/662/662143p1.html>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a hard time reading an article about why CDS instruments are to blame when the author doesn't know what they are. CDS = Credit Default Swaps, not Credit Derivative Swaps. All it takes is putting CDS into Google, five seconds tops.

I also take issue with the fact that the unconcern for subprime risk was the insurance--that ignores the risk model they had that showed real estate value going up. They didn't care if subprime defaulted because they'd get the property which would be worth more than the note and they'd make even more money. They knew the gig would be up if the CDS had to be executed en masse, they just didn't think that would ever need to happen. It's not that they drove drunk because they had insurance, they didn't know they were intoxicated (only had one drink, I swear!).

So much for child prodigies.

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap#Description> The terms are synonymous, apparently.

<comment><USER4> No, that just says that a credit default swap is one type a credit derivative contract. Derivatives can have many triggers, default is the one talked about here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this article leaves more questions than it answers. how does the author know the contents of an "investment plan" that was on the CEOs desk? where does the 3% number come from that is the bulk of the assumptions about the housing market.. and more than a few others..

even worse though, its flat out wrong in other areas.. lehman absolutely knew the risk of its CDOs and in fact was trying to offload them as quickly as possible. in contrast to goldman, lehman was famous for making money packaging and selling its bonds on a fee based model. whereas goldman's model relied more on proprietary trading - actually making bets on the direction of bond moves, lehman would theoretically be profitable regardless because they were making fees from the beneficiary of the bond and taking a cut from placing the bond with customers. the problem that killed them was the turnaround time from when lehman received the assets and "commission" to create the bond and when they could offload it to customers. during this time the bond was actually on lehman's books. basically, wall street caught lehman holding a bad hand of these bonds before they could unload them to the rest of wall street. rumors were started just like they were for bear sterns and financing got pulled like a house of cards..

</comment><comment><USER7> 'math' killed? or stupid assumptions made by the analysts ?

<comment><USER8> _In English, however, the noun mathematics takes singular verb forms. It is often shortened to math in English-speaking North America and maths elsewhere._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Etymology>

The author goes to Oxford.

<comment><USER7> I was not talking about the usage 'math' or 'maths'. I was saying, it is not the fault of math/maths when we make wrong assumptions like 'house prices can't go down' or 'prices will always increase' etc. GIGO.

<comment><USER9> In the early 1980s in California certain prominent second mortgage lenders filed bankruptcy after advertising long and loud that "you can't lose on California real estate."

In theory, when you invested, you loaned your money directly to a California homeowner secured by a deed of trust.

In reality, given that the borrower was paying 15 points on the loan, plus 24% interest, the loan hardly fell into a typical "secured" category. These borrowers were in fact taking out 3rd, 4th, and 5th loans on properties whose only "equity" consisted of paper value generated by mass phony appraisals done by or in coordination with a whole set of players who had a stake in keeping the game going.

When it all collapsed, people were observing how naive all those investors were to invest in something that sounded too good to be true.

It looks like our Wall Street wizards fell victim to the same impulse. This led to the bad assumptions that fueled their greed and to their ultimate demise.

Nothing new under the sun, said Solomon. It is all too true.

<comment><USER10> Large gains always means you are assuming a large risk. No one has yet to come up with a way of removing (or greatly reducing) risk without also greatly reducing the gains.

Ignore large gains at your own peril.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Blind reliance on models killed Lehman Brothers. Math was just the tool they used to inflict lethal injury on themselves.

I have also seen strong arguments (but no concrete evidence yet) which suggest the government officials involved were pro-Goldman and anti-Lehman.

<comment><USER2> Dick Fuld was never 'one of the boys': Lehman had a tortured past, and grew up after its spinout from American Express as a bond house, not an elite investment bank, and only began rising in the M&A league tables in the 2000s. Until then they made money and were good but never had the social status of the GS execs.

To the other commenter: Lehman was too terrified of its own capital base to participate in the LTCM bailout, but yes they didn't win any friends with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article does little to show hows maths brought down Lehman Brothers. Rather, it shows how important assumptions about the future (and your uncertainty surrounding those assumptions) are for structuring financial contracts.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Therefore, investing on CDO is a riskier choice than betting for Manchester United."

Article is obviously watered down to make it more digestible, but how he came up with such flawed logic on this example is beyond me.

<comment><USER14> I think the point he didn't make very well was that CDOs and the direction of the stock market were correlated and most CDO participants also were stock market participants. Manchester United's chance for victory is presumably uncorrelated with either of those, so if you were a stock market participant who also bet on Manchester, you were better off than if you were a stock market participant who bet on CDOs.

<comment><USER13> I agree.

I think his point was pretty clear, but his subsequent conclusion regarding the risk factor just seems completely nonsensical to me -- I mean, you could bet on any not-correlated-to-the-stock-market-event, regardless of its probability or odds factor, and it would have yielded less risk than holding CDOs as per his assessment. He's just talking about diversifying, but with the assumption that a stock market crash / economic crisis is imminent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rather minimal "maths". There's no mention of the pricing models used for CDS and CDOs. That would have been more interesting.

<comment><USER16> I agree. And allow me to suggest this paper: <http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.1393>

It's not everyday that you see an algebraic geometer writing on CDOs ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love the candid bio at the end of the article.

</comment><comment><USER18> The same thing happened to Long-Term Capital Management. You can read up on it here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management>

They were bailed out when they failed too so that set the precedent for the bailouts we had recently.

<comment><USER8> An excellent book on LTCM is 'When Genius Failed' (not an affil link):

[http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term- Managemen...](http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term- Management/dp/0375758259)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excellent article, but the notion that we should believe that idiocy was at the heart of this seems quite wrong to me. At best, willful idiocy.

It seems more likely to me to fall under the Wall Street koan, "You'll be gone, I'll be gone", rather than bad math.</comment>


Foursquare + Your Business  - <AUTHOR> http://foursquare.com/businesses/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear some thoughts on foursquare's monetization.</comment>


Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/

<comment><USER2> The email is from 2003. The article is from 2008.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wasn't very ranty or epic ...

<comment><USER4> From your boss's boss? Naming you? Saying you trashed Windows? Depends on your context I think.</comment></comment>


The Most Soviet Park in Russia - <AUTHOR> http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/1/the-most-soviet-park-in-russia

<comment><USER2> Cool! Doesn't look much different from any state fairgrounds in the US; the bunnies and bulls, the monuments to workers and productivity.</comment>


Show HN: A study of Betteridge's law of headlines - <AUTHOR> http://nostopasking.com/nostop

<comment><AUTHOR> Put this together on a day off. It crawls major RSS feeds looking for headlines in the form of a question (e.g. 'Is this the Cure for Cancer?', 'Is Obama a War Criminal?', 'Can Pigs Actually Fly?'). Betteridge asserted that all such headlines can be answered 'No'.

Answer a few, and if I gather enough data I'll share the results!</comment>


About half of Americans OK with DNA companies sharing data with law enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/04/about-half-of-americans-are-ok-with-dna-testing-companies-sharing-user-data-with-law-enforcement/ <comment><USER2> > according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults

I feel like these results might be a bit skewed because most of the the type of people that would not be willing take a survey are also the type of people who are not OK with DNA companies sharing their data.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if facial recognition was similar numbers?</comment>


Nginx and SSL root key security - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kamalnasser.net/post/nginx-and-ssl-root-key-security

<comment><USER2> For a site that's (apparently) hosting an article about a security vulnerability, they _really_ need to turn debug mode off.

For those wondering what I'm on about when the site starts functioning again, I got an error page akin to a Django page with `DEBUG = True`, listing useful information as the full path to the PHP script being run, the user it's being run as, , etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am all for security in depth, but the www-data processes still has the private key in memory. Makes it slightly harder to get at, through other vectors though.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, good point. I guess it's a shame we can't pass TLS connection state between processes as easily as socket handles?

<comment><USER5> One approach is to let one process do the ssl termination, and only that -- that raises the bar some. That process might be nginx -- running under a different uid -- or one of the many ssl-proxies.

<comment><USER6> I guess that's a big advantage of terminating SSL at the load balancers – dedicated hardware which is unlikely to end up with exploitable RoR/PHP or SQLi vulnerabilites – is probably somewhat less likely to lose your private TLS certs to an automated WordPress/Rails/cPanel/whatever zero-day scan...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You are really protecting against local, non-root access to your box, especially when that user is the nginx child process. This can manifest itself in a number of ways, but most roads lead back to improper input sanitization and/or using user input in shell command execution.

Using the Unix file permissions to our advantage and the properties of fork'd child processes, you can scope your risk to a highly skilled adversary rather than the common adversary.

Note that not only is your SSL certificate at risk, but every file the web- server needs to read including configuration files containing passwords, API keys, and crypto keys.</comment>


CSS Terminal allows you to inject CSS rules directly into a live web page. - <AUTHOR> http://barberboy.github.com/css-terminal/

<comment><USER2> How is this different from tools like Firebug or Chrome Developer Tools?

<comment><USER3> It saves your rules in a site-specific cookie.</comment></comment>


Reconstruction of planetary gearwork in the Antikythera Mechanism (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/4/

<comment><USER2> There was a really good documentary by NOVA on this I watched a while back. Here's the link

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/ancient- computer.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/ancient-computer.html)</comment>


Keen On 2014: Apple, Apple & Apple - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/11/keen-on-2014-robert-scobles-big-three-tech-trends-for-the-new-year/

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would Robert Scoble compare Apple's iWatch & Google Glass together? These two things are totally different. One is smart watch where as other one is a wearable computer. I don't get it. Then he goes on giving everyone meaning Microsoft and Google fair chance of disrupting market with some if logic. And, finally he says there won't be any truly new-new things in 2014 which will be just refinement rather than revolution. But, what about other tech companies beyond these three biggies? They have as good as chance of disrupting the market with some new innovation.</comment>


Watch Google Map Edits Live - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/mapmaker/pulse

<comment><USER2> It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists.

If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company.

<http://www.openstreetmap.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say it is probably because Google makes it very easy to edit maps and it offers navigation. Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them. (At least not as far as I can tell.) Therefore if you are living in an area where you want that ability and your local area is not yet mapped, you will map it in Google, not in Open Street Map.

Additionally if you are a business owner you are going to add your business to the map that has more users and searchers. There is little if any benefit to having your business mapped in Open Street Map, whereas having it on the Google Map could potentially bring some customers to you.

<comment><USER3> OSM is the data. It is not the example map rendering on openstreetmap.org. Sad but true. I wish there was no map at all but instead a selection of nice looking and more useful maps listed.

For routing give these a try:

<http://map.project-osrm.org/>

<http://open.mapquest.com/>

<http://maps.cloudmade.com/>

<http://openrouteservice.org/>

Compared to proper editors the Google map maker thing is horrifying. I tried to use it once and gave up because it just did not do what I was trying to do (adding 3 simply streets).

<comment><USER4> <http://openrouteservice.org/>

The was the only one that opened upon a map over me :-)

<comment><USER3> That is bad (especially because I personally like that one the least). Could you share details about your configuration?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Watch OpenStreetMap Edits Live: <http://datenkueche.com/osmlive/>

</comment><comment><USER5> What I learned whilst watching this for 5 minutes, was that a lot of escort agencies use Google Maps and Google Earth to advertise.

I don't know how maps are classified, and whether data about businesses are adverts or just facts about places. But in the UK adverts have to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful, to the benefit of consumers, business and society".

As such, it opened up a whole new world of spam-fighting to me. Google must be scrubbing this dataset as quickly as others add stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope they replace the Google earth plugin with WebGL at some point. Kind of annoying having to install a plugin for this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it is incredible to see all the edits going on all around the world, and to see how Google is leveraging its huge reach to get its users to name roads and fill in businesses all over the world, even in remote areas.

<comment><USER7> And how sad it is that those edits are going to google maps instead of OSM.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is over-dramatic in my opinion. Google Maps is a good tool: it works well, and is already more complete than OSM is. Therefore I would rather see one extremely complete map than two half complete maps. In my opinion there is nothing sad about a good map getting better.

<comment><USER3> Think about it. OpenStreetMap is free data. You can make your own maps, your own selection of data, data analysis, your own routing, you can contribute and the changes are live within minutes, you can provide free maps to people, you can use open source software to edit.

From Google you only get whatever they decide they want to give.

Could you give examples what you mean by complete? POIs? In that case Google has a lot of leverage. Street/way-wise OpenStreetMap is vastly superior in many if not most cases at least here in Europe (not to mention countries where there is no monetary interest for Google).

<comment><AUTHOR> When I say complete I mean the entire system, from satellite imagery, to street view, to navigation directions. Additionally I am referring to the design polish that ties all these pieces together.

From what I have seen OSM is a lot like Android, open source, but fragmented because of it. Google Maps, while closed source, is much more polished and feature rich compared with anything I've seen based on OSM.

To be clear I certainly want OSM to grow to greatness, and it would wonderful if it was just as powerful and feature rich as Google Maps. I agree with you that OSM is a great project, and I like the open source aspect of it. That's not my argument though. My basic argument in the parent comment was that I think it is an over reaction to say it is "sad" to see the edits going to Google.

Whether Google's map is getting better or OSM's map is getting better people who use the systems are benefiting, so there is nothing sad about edits made to either system. And Google Maps has a much larger user base than OSM, hence it is more practical for business owners to tag their businesses in Google Maps, and people to add their streets to Google Maps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just ate a sandwich while watching this. It was stimulating.

If you ever have some time to kill when you can't use your hands, this is a cool thing to watch.

<comment><USER9> Hah, just did the exact same thing with a chocolate cupcake.</comment></comment>


Fed to kick off QE3 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/09/13/live-blog-fed-decision-and-bernanke-press-conference-2/

<comment><USER2> This is why politics are off limits on HN: its so I don't have to remind people that the Federal Reserve is not a government agency, cannot cover it's debts, does not have $40 billion dollars per month (or $40 billion dollars at all) to buy toxic assets, and holds like a trillion dollars in Federal Treasury bonds that were paid with using fake money.

It doesn't matter who gets (re-)elected President if this isn't stopped.

<comment><USER3> Think of it like a huge do over, so many people had opinions about whether or not the nascent Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression with more aggressive action. Now we get to see for ourselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank goodness too! Now I can afford that iphone 5!</comment>


Ask HN: Why does OS X Preview have print protection? - <AUTHOR>

I tried to print a PDF. "You don't have permission without entering the password".
Screenshot, opened, printed.
What the hell.. ? <comment><USER2> It is honoring the intentions of the author. PDF readers don't have a technical limitation, but they may have a legal or ethical one.</comment>


Chinese cities use "mist cannon" to shoot pollution from the sky - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/572954/chinese-cities-are-using-this-mist-cannon-to-shoot-pollution-from-the-sky/ <comment><USER3> Say what you will about China and its pollution, it's an interesting attempt at a solution.[1] Could you imagine something like that implemented easily in the US before caught within lawyer-string nets of liability?

China has many problems, but many HN readers bashing China have probably never set foot there and are formulating their understanding based off of western media and the socioeconomic + cultural dynamics of Chinese diaspora communities in the west (working in low-paying jobs, less seen as literary/communicative thanks to language barriers).

I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism - <USER2> shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation (in China's own way; see 'Shanzai').

All this is to say that - pollution sucks. China needs to get its shit together and pass clean air laws. But these devices are emblematic of a very Chinese mode of progress and innovation that I'm not quite describing properly.

[1] Yes, I know the technology is not completely new, and controlling particulates by deploying other media is common - when polishing/concrete, for example.

<comment><USER4> "I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism"

It is normal to fall in love when you meet a different culture.

It takes 6 months or so living on a country to start seeing caveats and "not so good things" in any country.

"the shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation"

It is called a "bubble", I traveled frequently to Spain(my native country) and Ireland while the shared assumption that everything was getting better was at full power and all media was talking about those "economic miracles".

When those miracles reversed it was not(and it is not) pretty.

My father lived the Japanese "economic miracle" of Japan, the country that was going to rule the world.

I lived 5 years in China at the beginning of the bubble. It is an entire world in itself, but they have BIG problems. I continue traveling and doing business in China, and it is getting worse day after day.

When I was there I could use a normal VPN without problems, and Chinese authorities could not care less, as it was necessary for the business. But now you have to use like 6 layers of VPN, change patterns of navigation...because people in power is desperate to control their own people.

<comment><USER5> > But now you have to use like 6 layers of VPN, change patterns of navigation

Please explain further.

<comment><USER6> Since Xi Jinping took power, the government has stepped up their internet censorship efforts, banning many well known VPN. According to some accounts, they also utilize some sort of dynamic filter to determine if you are accessing censored content or using non-blocked VPN.

How exactly they do that is unknown, but the fact is, it's much harder to visit censored websites now than before.

<comment><USER7> The otherbl commentor was probably using OpenVPN which is easy to target.

Most other protocols continue to work well as long as your provider is not being targeted.

<comment><USER8> You may also have problems if you're connecting through corporate firewall. I won't name a certain Chinese well-known corporation using certain McAfee shitware that managed to block ExpressVPN and VyprVPN within a week for me, making it _significantly_ more difficult to do my job there.

<comment><USER9> If you are flying in through HK get a china unicom hk cross border SIM. Somewhat expensive data but a life saver in those situations since there is no firewall.

<comment><USER8> I did for the second half of the stay. Absolute lifesaver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looking out my window right now at 2am in the morning, all I see is misty fog where I would usually see a city here in Beijing. I really don't see how more mist would help. They need a big giant freaking fan to create wind...powered by coal, of course, just for purposes of irony.

<comment><USER8> Aren't they building nuclear plants now?

<comment><USER10> A few, not enough to make a dent in coal usage. And I'm not sure how many self-heated homes in the villages can be converted from coal to nuclear (electric heating is too inefficient...but maybe they can use a waste core like they did in the Martian?).

<comment><USER8> Electric-powered heat pumps are much more efficient than any kind of coal burning - they run at 500%+ efficiency (they move heat around instead of generating it).

<comment><USER10> Seems like a nice solution for the future...efficient heat pumps are kind of new technology.

Also, more insulation would be nice. China housing is very substandard in the villages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's 6:30AM here in the Chinese city of Kunming. I just returned from a 5AM trip to a market to buy some herbs for Christmas dishes. On the way I passed one of our many street cleaning water-tank trucks, which basically drive around all Chinese cities spraying the road and nearby traffic with water and a fine mist (just what you want at 5AM on an e-bike in the winter morning!). While they most operate in the early mornings and are no doubt targeted at dislodging and collecting road-top detritus, they have been about for ages and are very much ubiquitous. A separate fleet of trucks drive about spraying water on roadside gardens, which in some kind of cuddly holdover from socialist central planning are in fact very numerous compared to most western cities (with the exception of the center of older French cities, perhaps). Despite the construction boom going on, it's all Himalayan blue skies here! I pity the poor people in those polluted east-coast cities, and those in the north with their wintery outlook, and particularly those in the northeast like Beijing where not only do you have _both_ problems, but the time dedicated to negotiating traffic every time you leave your house is soul-crushing...

</comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't this simply remove some of the symptoms instead of working with the root cause?

<comment><USER13> Autocratic governments aren't exactly known for their forward seeking vision. Problems come up and half assed solutions come down. There's no democratic element to demand a higher level of service, say with how the US had its environment movement which led to many laws protecting the land, air, and water and ultimately culminated into several state agencies, federal guidelines, the EPA, etc. These are large holistic changes brought about by the democratic process in Western states. Autocratic states don't have this mechanism so its a lot of basic face saving moves because politically this issue isn't that important and/or interferes with the CCP's ability to grow its economy. This creates a real victimization of innocents who don't have a voice because they're governed without consent.

Birth defects have increased about 70 percent in China over the past two decades, now reaching about 900,000 per year, according to the country's Ministry of Health.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soot-and-smog- put-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soot-and-smog-put-chinas- babies-at-risk/)

Study Links Polluted Air in China to 1.6 Million Deaths a Year

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/study-links- pol...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/study-links-polluted-air- in-china-to-1-6-million-deaths-a-year.html)

Air pollution is killing about 4,000 people in China a day, accounting for 1 in 6 premature deaths in the world's most populous country, a new study finds.

[http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/air-pollution- kill...](http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/air-pollution- killing-4-000-china-day-us-study-finds-n409516)

A "mist cannon" isn't helping with this.

edit: I have made fair cites and laid out my argument. Driveby downvotes just show how biased HN is towards China.

<comment><USER14> Per capita the US is still pretty lousy.

[http://www.wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain- world%E2%80...](http://www.wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain- world%E2%80%99s-top-10-emitters)

The US is still in the top "energy use per capita" countries.

<comment><USER15> _The US is still in the top "energy use per capita" countries._

Of course it is, the US is responsible for a huge percent of the world's output. How could you create things without energy?

<comment><USER14> But that's not what parent claimed; parent claimed that US democracy mean the US wasn't a passive polluter.

But since you're here: what's the US GDP per capita, compared to other less polluting countries?

<comment><USER16> Presuming no stealth edits, what the parent claims is

> There's no democratic element to demand a higher level of service, say with > how the US had its environment movement which led to many laws protecting > the land, air, and water and ultimately culminated into several state > agencies, federal guidelines, the EPA, etc.

So you've very effectively slaughtered that strawman detailed in your claim about the original claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a real-life ATSHCME air displacement effectuator. David Foster Wallace would be so pleased.

<comment><USER18> I assume the toxic waste catapults aimed at Tibet would be next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wouldn't spraying water into air with sulfur oxides just create acid rain?

<comment><USER20> Sure. With the mist, you get dilute sulfuric acid settling on buildings and streets and attacking the concrete, or maybe being washed away. Without the mist, the dilute sulfuric acid forms in the noses and lungs of your citizens instead, damaging their sense of smell and ability to absorb oxygen. The mist sounds like an improvement.

But this is mostly aimed at particulate pollution, not sulfur dioxide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why do the cities pay for them? Why aren't the coal-burning energy utility companies paying for them, out of pocket?

<comment><USER22> > Why aren't the coal-burning energy utility companies paying for them, out of > pocket?

Because no-one has the power to make them, I think. If it's easier (and probably cheaper) to take measures to address the problem yourself than it is to force compliance, then that's the sensible way to go.

<comment><USER23> Their customers stop sending them money? Would probably shut down most operations pretty quickly.

<comment><USER24> Why would their customers do that?

<comment><USER23> So that less coal product is emitted into the atmosphere? I thought that was the premise.

<comment><USER25> I think he wasn't being literal, and meant, "why wouldn't they want electricity?"

<comment><USER23> Well, if the production of your electricity kills or otherwise significantly harms you, you may not wish to have that electricity.

<comment><USER25> I agree, but it's not necessarily an obvious (or easy) choice to make for someone who's poor, for example...

And that's even if they can correlate them properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm in Beijing this week. The pollution here has to be seen (and felt, as you breathe) to be believed. I'm not surprised that all sorts of technical solutions are being discussed, just because it's so crazy terrible. Whether such proposals (such as a mist cannon) is a real solution is a good question, but it's worth trying lots of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> It occurs to me, after reading this story a second time and reviewing the latest comments posted to this thread, that this is a science story that wasn't reported by a science journalist. It's not at all clear--only a company spokesman is quoted on the point--that the machine even WORKS. It's also not at all clear, even if the machine is effective at reducing air pollution (where is the independent evidence?), that it is as good for that or as inexpensive for that as other measures that might be taken to reduce air pollution. The town I grew up in has much less air pollution today than it had when I was young. The newly industrialized countries of east Asia (I am most familiar with Taiwan, but the fact is the same in other countries in the region) have less air pollution today than they had in their worst years. There is a lot known about technology and a lot known about effective regulation for reducing air pollution. This story really needs an experienced science reporter, not a rookie in international reporting, to tell the accurate story about what's the best thing to do to handle China's horrific problem with air pollution.[1]

[1] "Study Links Polluted Air in China to 1.6 Million Deaths a Year" ( _New York Times_ 13 August 2015)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/study-links- pol...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/study-links-polluted-air- in-china-to-1-6-million-deaths-a-year.html)

Chinese version of story: "研究称中国每年有160万人死于空气污染"

[http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20150814/c14pollution/](http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20150814/c14pollution/)

Other recent QZ articles about China, by other authors:

[http://qz.com/on/chinas-transition/](http://qz.com/on/chinas-transition/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Reducing pollution in the air, by polluting the water.

<comment><USER29> It's going to land eventually... Just the water seems better than the water AND people's lungs

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if a bigger version of this could be built to inject a cloud of ash into the atmosphere to help mitigate climate change [1].

[1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change)

<comment><USER31> I think it would safer and more prudent to move away as quickly as possible from fossil fuels as primary fuel sources.

<comment><USER30> I totally agree. The ash injection approach seems like a temporary emergency solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Or you know, you can just like not pollute the shit out of the Earth. China is the worst.

<comment><USER33> [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/carbon- emissions-per-person-capita)

+

China 9,679.30 GHG emissions (MtCO2e)[1], United States 6,668.79 GHG emissions (MtCO2e)[1] - population China ~1.3 billion[2], population United States ~330 million[3]

Do the math!

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

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

[3] [http://www.census.gov/popclock/](http://www.census.gov/popclock/)

<comment><USER25> That's just CO2. What about sulphur oxides, particulate matter, and the like?

"Pollution" is a general term.

<comment><USER33> Better late than never: it's hard to get reliable data on such things, CO2 estimates are probably at least somewhat correct.

The larger point being that you have to take into account how many people live in a country, you can't just compare countries without that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Mist may be able to "catch" the visible particles and go to some length to then putting it into groundwater, but all of the dangerous stuff is in the small particulates that will remain in the air.

Out of sight, out of mind seems to the aim of this.

<comment><USER35> Even small particles will be reduced by misting/spraying water.

I have worked in industrial settings and water is surprisingly effective in reducing airborne particulates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Excellent, they can keep polluting as long as they add more mist cannons. Maybe gross polluters can buy mist credits!</comment>


In-app purchase recurring billing is coming to iOS. - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/02/news_corps_the_daily_launches_on_ipad_with_apples_in_app_subscriptions.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Also of note, Apple used to disallow any subscriptions less than 30 days. This, too, seems to have changed with Daily being a weekly subscription.

The changes are only for Murdoch for now, but it seems to me they will be introduced to general developers as well, perhaps with the next SDK release (iOS5).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "The Daily" already uses that, I have just installed it. Here's all the proof you may need:

[https://img.skitch.com/20110202-q7bd765qnjpwjb7c8bm89q7g6.jp...](https://img.skitch.com/20110202-q7bd765qnjpwjb7c8bm89q7g6.jpg)</comment>