Ask HN: Is technology evangelism really helpful for the companies? - <AUTHOR>

These days I see lots and lots of tech evangelists particularly from companies like Microsoft, AWS etc. What is general opinion among HNers about this new trend of tech evangelists. To me they are all words, no substance. I am very much skeptical about their impact and ability to promote product and technology for the company - or may be that's just me. Recently I went to a Microsoft workshop, most of technical sessions were simply overshadowed by one technology evangelist, in fact he hacked away the whole workshop. No one from technical team was able to speak out about their experience as this guys was popping every here and there. I was very annoyed. In past, I met several evangelist and one thing which I noticed is they all like talking to an extent where you really want to run away from them. I am not saying it is bad thing, but I am not convinced this is necessary. Why companies like Apple or Google don't have tech evangelist, or do they have? <comment><USER2> I'm sure Job's reality distortion field has won a few million sales, although I do agree that to someone on top of tech, a lot of this evangelism for (often mediocre) products comes off as inane.

That's okay, though. Although we at Hacker News would probably call ourselves enlightened, I hate to say that this stuff is probably marginally swaying people's wallets, which is all these companies seem to care about. (I'd know, I work for one of them)</comment>


Developing Embodied Familiarity with Hyperphysical Phenomena (2019) - <AUTHOR> http://www.graycrawford.com/thesis <comment><USER2> > Modern computed environments can now receive and provide a wider set of > sensory channels

> more powerful ways of thinking

> The body itself now becomes a designable structure

This reminds me of a novel called "Diaspora" by Greg Egan. The virtual human- descended main characters were trying to communicate with an alien species extremely different from humans - different to the point where their very thought processes were incompatible with any shared method of information transmission.

As a workaround, they created a chain of copies of themselves, each one slightly more like the alien from the last, but similar enough to be able to communicate with its neighbors. In this way, they created a way to communicate with the aliens through the chain of proxy-entities.

\----

It's really interesting to see these kinds of ideas come up in experimental VR research. I do believe that that's the end-game of VR-style technology: not perfectly replicating reality and making the virtual world indistinguishable from the real world, but opening up the human mind to a broader set of senses/thoughts/experiences than are available through the corporeal human body.

> [...] designers will hamper themselves and their users by perpetuating old > UI mechanics, turning VR etc into a rough simulacrum of the constrained > physical world rather than the means for its transcendence.

I think that the human mind is an incredibly general thing and that it would be capable of existing in an environment completely separate from the body. I'm excited to see what kind of advancements we'll see in our lifetimes in the area of expanding consciousness through technology and moving past the previously insurmountable constraints of the human body within which we spend our lives.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to see the computed environment that can reliably reproduce smell and taste. Or the sensation of touch. Or the hairs raising on the back of your neck when someone is staring at you.

As for the repetitive usage of "hyperphysics":

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

> HyperPhysics is an educational website about physics topics.</comment></comment>


Boiling the machines when they needed to just chill - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/04/28/boil/ <comment><USER2> Once upon a time I worked a contract gig at a credit union in the US. My first day in the datacenter (ground floor), I noticed the grill from a late 90s/early 2000 Ford F-150 pickup truck hanging on the wall above the door frame. I pointed it out and asked "why is that on the wall?"

The building was like many bank buildings, 4-5 stories, all glass exterior, off a busy main road. In particular, this building was parallel to the busy main road.

Turns out, the busy main road was perpendicular to another road, which lined up almost perfectly with the datacenter on the first floor. One Saturday night, a drunk driver ran the stop sign on the side street, blasted through the field leading up the datacenter, and drove their truck straight into the building, right through the offices surrounding the main server room. The force of the crash blew bricks across the room in all directions and missed the raised floor by maybe 3 meters.

Surprisingly, nothing went down. The datacenter now has "bulletproof" glass on that portion of the exterior, poles installed into the ground in front of the glass, and an earth berm raised above the road.

The sysadmins found the truck grill inside one of the offices under a desk. They kept it and hung it on the wall as a reminder to plan for any sort of disaster.

</comment><comment><USER3> At one of my early jobs I was sysadmin for a local office of a small company that wrote simulation software. We had procured some rack-mounted servers that sounded like jet engines, so when we expanded to the office across the street, the boss took the opportunity to knock out two closets and make a server room. I remember having a conversation with him where he asked my advice on the size of A/C to buy. Despite having no knowledge on the subject, I had opinions, and I recommended getting the biggest A/C.

That all got installed, and it was great, we no longer had a jet engine in the room next door, and I felt awesome because not only was I managing 10 Linux machines but now I had a compute cluster. In a rack. With a little slide-out KVM thing that switched between the machines!

Well, several months later I started noticing mold on the side of the closet, and a thin condensation on the rack sometimes. So I got a temperature monitor and wrote a script to create pretty graphs, and between the low temperature and the central Texas humidity, we had a problem.

So the boss (who was in the New York office) had me talk to someone who actually knew something about A/C (because I had no idea why this was happening). Apparently I had spec'ed out an A/C large enough to cool the entire building, and that the problem I was experience was why one matches the A/C to the heat load. The solution was to add a heater to the A/C. So we ended up cooling a building's worth of air, then heating it up, and then sending it to cool 2U's of servers.

<comment><USER4> That reminds me of a time I was working at a site delivering a big project.

They had put up a big temporary building next to the project building to hold a lot of additional engineers. The temporary building seemed to be the commerical equivalent of 10 double-wide mobile homes side by side with the side walls removed. There's probably a name for it. The end result was a ramp from the main building, leading up and turning into a long room maybe 200' long and 40' wide filled with lots of desks with engineers.

There were also columns every so often for network and power drops.

There was also a thermostat every 20 feet or so. (see where this is going?)

I happened to be working late one night and entered this room after everyone was gone. And the funny thing was, even though it was cool outside, all the AC units seemed to be running and making a lot of noise.

Walking down the middle of the room and looking at the thermostats I realized what had happened. Everybody had their own "comfortable" and they were all set to different temperatures. The result was at night you had heating and ac running, sometimes right next to each other, in an epic battle.

I went to each thermostat and set it to the same value, and within a short time equilibrium was reached and the entire room quieted down as the compressors and fans wound down.

Thinking back, I wonder how long my fix lasted.

<comment><USER5> based on personal experience. if you didnt install a lock box over the controls... about 10 minutes into the next work day. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a great story...

I worked for a startup in the back of someone's house. They had built an extension on the back of their house which was basically a greenhouse (it was like a steel and glass construction). The glass was supposed to be thermally coated but apparently it was installed backwards, with the thermal coating on the inside not the outside.

So the story goes, we had our server room and workstations all in this addition. During the summer it was routinely at or above 100 deg air temperature. I had a small portable AC unit we ran 24/7 and eventually they got a dedicated AC unit for the room. We also ended up covering the glass roof with tarp to try to block out the sun.

It was a pretty insane setup, but it was a cash strapped thing and the owners didn't want to do more than what they did. I was a naive kid fresh out of school, and thought it was so cool to work at a startup - even if it was sweating constantly in a noise filled environment working nights and weekends.

That said, the startup succeeded and grew into a company.

There was also that one time there was a rain storm and the "greenhouse server room" was not sealed against the side of the house, and the rain poured in through a crack. I will never forget when my colleague called at 1AM to let me know the server room was flooded, and that one server, which had it's case open, had the case fill with rainwater - while it was still turned on and running. And it kept running as most of the water collected at the base of the server chassis.....

If you think this sounds crazy, you're right, but I'm sure somebody else has a story just as crazy or even more so!

Ah, the early days, before the cloud... when we did it all ourselves. Yup, I had to wear the HVAC hat too.

</comment><comment><USER7> A few years ago, I worked for a hospital system which had their datacenter in Phoenix. We had a large (tens of thousands of square feet) datacenter in supporting a few dozen hospitals and its HVAC system was marginal. On a hot day it could barely keep the datacenter below 80 degrees. This was a facility with hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, I don't think there were any systems which affected patient care, but pretty much every other type of hospital system was in that building.

When the AC did fail, the building temperature spiked up over 90 degrees within half an hour and eventually climbed up over 100. We spent most of the afternoon shutting down the least critical systems so the most important ones would stay online. Then slowly bringing them back online after HVAC was back online and the building started to cool again in the evening.

I was stunned that they didn't install some kind of redundant HVAC setup after that, or at least one that kept the room at 70 degrees on a hot day.

The other huge facilities failure at that facility was when electricians were working on the (ironically enough) backup power system. They accidentally cut power to the entire datacenter for about 30 seconds.

I've seen more server down-time due to facilities errors than computer hardware by a good margin.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had an instructor for a class who had a similar story. He had requested a day off of work to take a short vacation, but because it was a small company, it meant that no IT personnel would be available for that day. He came in on Monday and was immediately called into his manager's office because apparently all the servers went down on the day he wasn't there, and they had to call in the other IT guy to fix everything. Turns out, one of the other managers in the office had turned off the dedicated AC to the server room because he thought IT was wasting money by running the AC when nobody was there.

Luckily they sided with my instructor when he said that it wasn't his fault and ended up firing the other manager for trying to cover up his own mistake.

<comment><USER9> 30 ago I worked at a place where we had a server room full of Sun boxes and a Symbolics Lisp Machine. The server room was a repurposed office to which some A/C had been retrofitted. On one occasion the machines started randomly glitching. The first clue that the A/C had failed was the Symbolics printing 'help I'm getting hot' (I paraphrase) to a console I was monitoring out in the main open plan.

<comment><USER10> That reminds me of the "lp0 on fire" messages which some Unix/Linux systems can generate:

[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/drivers/char/lp.c?h=v5.6.7#n239)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked as research staff for an OS research group at a university in the 90s. We had a new building, with a nice new machine room. However, the machine room had tightly controlled access which was limited to department IT staff only, and we wanted our grad students to have physical access to our machines. So we took over a "lab" that was never intended to host machines.

By the time I left, we had 2 racks with networking gear (Myrinet and 1Gb/s ethernet, which was a big deal in the 90s), and probably 40+ 1U servers, plus several tables full of larger pedestal storage servers (one of the projects was a cluster filesystem).

Just like in Rachael's story, we would have times where the HVAC would go out. I remember dragging giant 4' fans up from the basement to put in the doors of the room to cool it off during HVAC failures.

Oh, and we had a fume hood too!

</comment><comment><USER12> My last client had their main nationwide server, that their company depended upon, in a stuffy closet under a fire sprinkler. No it never went off, but dang.

Anyway folks in Enterprise can forget, any organization under a certain size doesn't have _any_ special consideration for their computer systems. They just grew from some PC on a desk to whatever server/router/firewall situation they are in now.

<comment><USER13> My favourite of that was when we grew from "some PCs plugged into extension leads from a floorbox" to four full racks of 2U servers, without ever upgrading the power distribution. Until someone noticed that one of the consumer-grade extension leads powering the whole setup had gone brown ...

Oh, and if there was a power cut you'd have to disconnect the racks and bring them back one at a time or the inrush current would trip the building breaker again.

<comment><USER14> I recall hearing years ago of someone modifying, I believe, the BIOS on a fileserver to spin up the hard drives one at a time so that the inrush current didn't cause brownouts (on the PSU or on the building circuit I don't recall)

<comment><USER15> Facebook went a bit farther.

[https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/under-the-hood- facebook...](https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook-s- cold-storage-system/)

> The biggest change was allowing only one drive per tray to be powered on at > a time. In fact, to ensure that a software bug doesn't power all drives on > by mistake and blow fuses in a data center, we updated the firmware in the > drive controller to enforce this constraint. The machines could power up > with no drives receiving any power whatsoever, leaving our software to then > control their duty cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the mid-90's, I worked at an early ISP that had most of its network and dialup equipment in a small retail / office plaza. It was in the basement of a unit that they had rented to someone else.

There were about 100 individual phone lines coming off the wall, each going to its own modem. Basically, a river of phone cables. Each modem had its own power supply and serial cable. "Power distribution" consisted of power strips chained 2 or 3 layers deep.

There was no cooling to speak of. I remember going down there in July or August and it felt like the place was going to melt down. Some modems, quite literally, had melted: the plastic was warped and discolored.

Fun times...

</comment><comment><USER17> I had a client that didn't like to use passwords on their server because he could never remember them when he wanted to check something. His security solution was to put the server in a steel locker with 1 hole just large enough to pass a cord from a power strip and a CAT5 cable out of the side. Then lock the locker so no one had physical access to the server.

He did all this on his own on a Friday and then he left the CRT on all weekend. I got a call on Monday letting me know that "my" server had failed and I needed to get out there immediately. And of course, when I got there he was gone with the only key to the locker.

<comment><USER18> I wonder how much situations like this contribute to the high frequency of lockpicking being a hobby in IT/sec circles.

<comment><USER14> We were going to move a server one evening and we told the head of IT ahead of time we needed to move it at 6. He agrees.

At 5:45 we roll into the server room area and he has gone home for the evening. Server room is locked.

Someone as a Hail Mary asks building security, and they surprise us by saying of course we have keys. So they come in and try the doors (the server room had been expanded to fill several offices, so there were 3 doors). No luck with any of them. Which upset the security person because they were supposed to have keys.

So security wanders off before we start trying to jimmy the locks, and it turns out that the middle door accepts Mastercard. It was never mentioned again and the IT dude never asked (which he should have, really).

I don't know that I'd play it the same today. Back doors are put in or tolerated primarily because of fear of, or the reality that, someone isn't doing their job or some group is making a power grab (or typically, both). It costs political capital to call someone out on that but the alternative is to have people lying (even by omission) about known security issues with the system or facilities.

Personally, I'd rather have a couple people who have credentials or keys they are sworn 'never to use', except in extraordinary circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > How do you deal with a tech who leaves a system in a state where it will do > nothing but dump hot air at full speed all night long?

Well, this is why organizations no longer keep server fleets in random on- premise used-to-be-copier repair rooms. (Or do they? I wonder if school districts might still be doing that...)

<comment><USER20> Speaking from my friend's experience, school districts _totally_ still do that. Their uptime only has to be good, not amazing. I don't think he's ever run into any HVAC issues, though.

<comment><USER21> My experience backs this up as well. Schools don't have the budget to do it right or to care, so they make do.

<comment><USER22> yet they always seem to have enough to casually drop several grand AstroTurfing their football field

<comment><USER21> Yes, because kids care about football, but nobody cares about a schools IT department. For schools (and many businesses) IT is just a utility.

<comment><USER22> I didn't care about football, I cared about computers. My entire school district didn't have a hint of CS more advanced than learning how to use Microsoft Office. Additionally, there are ways to play football outside of a school team, I played soccer for many years outside of school and enjoyed myself well enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Quick fix" by a sysadmin at a previous job: [https://imgur.com/a/REwK1HP](https://imgur.com/a/REwK1HP)

Yes, that's a Walmart window A/C sitting on a filing cabinet with a box fan teetering on top. No, it's not vented to the outside. So the temperature in the room continued to rise.

</comment><comment><USER24> One of my early jobs, I worked for a group of remote sensing scientists that analyzed weather satellite data and the equipment I was responsible for was in an improvised raised floor room with probably the smallest unit Liebert produced. I found out one weekend why there were huge fans scattered about the office - the Liebert sometimes failed for various reasons and times and the 5x 52U racks of Dell PE and Sun E3800 servers and storage got super hot super quick.

I had to rush in the office with my boss, a brilliant remote-sensing PhD who flew into hurricanes with P-3 Orions to make sure the data they were gathering was accurate with what they were getting from the microwave scatterometer on the satellite, helping him setup fans and shut down equipment that wasn't absolutely necessary.

After that, I resolved to be alerted proactively and scared up a setup with some Sensatronics temp sensors, cacti and nagios so I could get data over time as well as alerts when over a threshold. I also enabled the openmanage alerting and found you could get the ambient temp at the air intake of a poweredge so I got that into SNMP and setup alerts on that as well. Fun times.

Side note: when I first walked in to the server room, I saw some Apple Xserve RAIDs and thought that was odd next to some Dell stuff and he said, those are the only storage units that can handle the G-forces we experience in hurricanes. "The Powervaults just fall right over"

They still had Sun equipment since RHEL was still at v4 and was not fully 64-bit, while Solaris + SPARC had always been 64-bit, and the dataset sizes they were crunching required being able to access RAM-per-process of more than 4GB. MUCH more than.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it common to have sysadmins to be ad-hoc HVAC service admins too?

<comment><USER26> Yes, because the ordinary HVAC service runs on a "best effort" basis where some downtime or reduced capacity is acceptable and you can try and fix stuff if someone complains; but for a datacenter you suddenly need 24/7 99%+ uptime with rapid response in case of failure, because losing AC is only just a bit worse than losing power, and it's easier to have redundant power than truly redundant AC.

<comment><USER27> You mean having two windows with AC units isn't redundant enough? I kid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Many years ago a brand new server room with its own dedicated HVAC systems being used for electronic home arrest nationwide started having all the machines fail each night every weekend. As you can imagine this was a panic mode situation and they had some of the sysadmins stay overnight. It turns out that the HVAC people despite knowing what it was used for, told the and having in fact been in the room setting up the underfloor programmed the A/C to shut off over the weekend to save electricity. When drama flows downhill from the Feds no-one is happy and the resulting meeting was almost as uncomfortable as the one after Qwest deliberately cut both sides of a fibre ring and then tried to sell us service.

(We later found out Qwest's field people didn't want to cut a different carrier's fibre so they called back to confirm and were told to cut it or not come back in the morning.)

</comment><comment><USER29> In the 90s, I worked at a little place that was crammed full of PCs and other electronic equipment. It got uncomfortably hot in the summer. A couple of us went around to all the PCs and changed the settings - instead of a screensaver, turn off the monitor after 10 minutes of inactivity. Problem solved. The age of CRTs...

</comment><comment><USER30> I used to call it spidey-sense. In reality it was being always on and never off, not really a healthy way to live.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have lived this scenario. I should write it up sometime. Also fun: Sprinklers and failed UPS batteries.</comment>


Uber IPO underwriter so certain IPO was overpriced they shorted it themselves - <AUTHOR> https://abovethelaw.com/2019/05/uber-ipo-underwriter-morgan-stanley-was-so-certain-that-it-overpriced-the-uber-ipo-it-shorted-uber-shares-right-before-the-ipo/ <comment><USER2> That's a very misleading headline. The 'short' in this case is the fact that Morgan Stanley had additional leverage in addition to the 15% Greenshoe option to stabilize the stock.

Even a basic understanding of incentives (let alone stock shorting) shows the absurdity of the headline. If Morgan Stanley purposely overpriced the IPO and then shorted it - it would tarnish their reputation and future IPO prospects.

<comment><USER3> The headline is entirely correct, and I don't understand your claim otherwise. No one is arguing that Morgan Stanley overpriced the IPO on purpose. They knew they had a dog on their hands and opened a short position in hopes of propping it up (though it didn't hurt to know that failing to do so would mean big profits).

<comment><USER4> > They knew they had a dog on their hands and opened a short position in hopes > of propping it up

How does MS taking a short position help the stock?

My (naive) understand is that a short would add more sellers, typically driving the price down.

<comment><USER5> They went into the first day of trading >115% short so they could buy more in the open market. As they cover the short they are adding buying pressure, but if the stock is down from the offer price, also making a handsome profit on each share

<comment><USER6> > As they cover the short they are adding buying pressure

But the short added selling pressure.

Essentially as they cover the short, they are just removing the extra selling pressure they created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As always, I'll shamelessly advertise Matt Levine's column:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wework...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wework- separates-buildings-and-beer)

The second story is (again) on Uber and definitely worth the read if you want to understand more

<comment><USER8> From Levine's story this morning:

"If you were...inclined to be critical...you would characterize this as Uber's underwriters talking up the stock to their investing clients, telling them that there was lots of demand at $45, and then pricing the deal there, while at the same time quietly betting their own money that the stock would fall immediately. They sold stock to their customers while betting against that stock, and then that bet turned out to be correct and they made many millions of dollars on it. I cannot stress enough that that was not the subjective experience of Uber's bankers, who undoubtedly—for their own careers, for their relationships with investors and issuers, for their reputations as skilled bankers—wanted this deal to go differently. But it kind of is what happened, oops. At least they got the money."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't make sense. Naked shorting a stock drives down the price in the market by increasing the supply of the stock. It in no way supports the price of the stock. In fact, it's the exact opposite. It's a bet that the price goes down below the IPO price. Sell today at the IPO price of $45 in the hopes that you can buy it for less than that before you have to return the share.

More realistically, Morgan Stanley makes money as a middle man and just want to sell as many shares as they can.

<comment><USER10> Yes, they made money from the commissions as well as shorting the stock and later buying it back for cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm very happy with my impression that Uber has to sleep in the bed they made - but I think there will be plenty of friction and disappointment coming out of this IPO.

Specifically, if Morgan Stanley had come up with, say $38 as the share price for IPO, Uber would have found a new bank for their IPO. Morgan Stanley (or Bank X) can provide different IPO services, but the bank is not really responsible for the stock price.

</comment><comment><USER6> Matt Levine (money stuff [http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s...](http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff- signup) ) said:

And yet more Uber Huh. Here's Leslie Picker at CNBC:

"Uber's underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley, were so worried the company's initial public offering had run into trouble, they deployed a nuclear option ahead of the deal last week, so they could provide extra support for the stock, four people with knowledge of the move said."

This level of support, known as a "naked short," is a technique that goes above and beyond the traditional help a new offering can get.

In every deal, there's an overallotment, which allows the underwriters to sell 115% of the available offering to investors, effectively opening a short position. The excess 15% can be purchased by the underwriters in the open market — covering the short position — to support the stock if it goes down. More colloquially, this is known as the "greenshoe."

But in rare cases, bankers will use a strategy called a "naked short," which allows underwriters to sell shares in excess of that greenshoe portion and then buy them back in the open market to provide even more firepower in the event there is significant selling pressure.

The naked short,[5], is a fully at-risk way to support the deal: The underwriters sell even more stock short at the deal price, and then buy it back in the open market if the stock goes down or up. If it goes down, they make money. If it goes up, they lose money. If it goes up a lot, they lose a lot of money.

Most IPO stocks go up in their first few days, and many go up quite a lot. Underwriters generally price IPOs for a nice early pop. So naked shorts are fairly uncommon. Underwriters only go naked short on an IPO if they are pretty sure that it is a dud, one of the minority of offerings that will quickly trade below the IPO price.

But it is hard to communicate that. While Morgan Stanley was deciding to go naked short the Uber IPO, it was also putting out happy noises about how much demand there was and about how the deal would be priced conservatively to ensure a nice pop. There is a fine line to walk here: None of those statements seem to have been untrue (surely the underwriters had at least three times as many orders as they had shares, which is actually not that great, and the deal was priced near the low end of the already conservative-seeming range), but the overall implication was that they were confident that the stock would go up. They were not confident that it would go up. In fact, they were so confident that it would go down that they put their own money at risk on that bet. But they didn't lie to anyone. They were just marketing; the underwriters were doing what they could to make people excited about Uber's stock, so that those people would want to buy the stock, so that it would go up in the aftermarket. An IPO is a sentiment-driven process, and the underwriters' optimism or pessimism is contagious; if you want the deal to go well you have to say that it's going well. Without lying, I mean. The worse it is going, the harder that is to do.

On the other hand:

"Some of the bankers tried to console market participants prior to the opening of trading by telling them that there would be additional support from the naked short, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing private conversations."

If you're telling some people "buy as much as you can at $45, this deal is hot," and telling other people (in "private conversations") "this deal is a dog but at least we have a naked short," then that is awkward.[6]

The other awkward thing is of course that the underwriters made money on their naked short; the more the stock went down, the more money they made. (And the bigger their naked short was—the more sure they were that the stock would go down—the more money they made.) This is not the point of the trade; as far as Uber's underwriters are concerned, the naked short was a noble and self- sacrificing effort, done at considerable risk to themselves, to stabilize the stock and protect the interests of their issuer and investor clients. But, yeah, they made money on it. Depending on how big the naked short was and when they covered it, it's quite plausible that Uber's underwriters made more in trading profits than their $106.2 million underwriting fees.[7]

If you were … inclined to be critical … you would characterize this as Uber's underwriters talking up the stock to their investing clients, telling them that there was lots of demand at $45, and then pricing the deal there, while at the same time quietly betting their own money that the stock would fall immediately. They sold stock to their customers while betting against that stock, and then that bet turned out to be correct and they made many millions of dollars on it. I cannot stress enough that that was not the subjective experience of Uber's bankers, who undoubtedly—for their own careers, for their relationships with investors and issuers, for their reputations as skilled bankers—wanted this deal to go differently. But it kind of is what happened, oops. At least they got the money.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for this clear description. It _feels_ like in this case they made a naked short out of fear but with a hedge. "As long as we don't lose more than 100M if it pops, we'd straddled the fence quite nicely. We make money either way and have some ability to protect people buying it at $45." They don't want to stop doing IPOs so this is the only perspective that makes sense to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is nutty. I believe abovethelaw that this is legal, I just don't understand how.

</comment><comment><USER14> The float was also over sized at 290M shares while Lyft's was at 15M shares.

</comment><comment><USER15> How did these "naked shorts" clear the trading floor if there was no one selling them? What is the real technicality here as "naked shorts" are not illegal per se.

<comment><USER7> MS as the underwriter sold more than 100% of the shares, which means it was effectively shorting.

Also worth noting "naked shorts" and "naked shorting" are two different things... [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wework...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wework- separates-buildings-and-beer#footnote-5)

<comment><USER15> Interesting tidbit. I was not aware of the difference

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wall Street firms don't have "customers", there are only marks.

</comment><comment><USER17> since the company has no profits and no prospect of making a profit (save from the wild claim that it is waiting for autonomous cars) what is the difference on sizing it on $1 or $50? both are overpriced in a pure analysis (i.e. ignoring market excitement)

<comment><USER18> >since the company has no profits and no prospect of making a profit (save from the wild claim that it is waiting for autonomous cars)

Really tired of reading this - its thoroughly debunked in the S1, which nobody seems to have read.

<comment><USER19> The S1 does say:

> We have incurred significant losses since inception, including in the United > States and other major markets. We expect our operating expenses to increase > significantly in the foreseeable future, and we may not achieve > profitability.

> We have incurred significant losses since inception. We incurred operating > losses of $4.0 billion and $3.0 billion in the years ended December 31, 2017 > and 2018, and as of December 31, 2018, we had an accumulated deficit of $7.9 > billion. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels and > decrease proportionate expenses in future periods to achieve profitability > in many of our largest markets, including in the United States, and even if > we do, we may not be able to maintain or increase profitability. We > anticipate that we will continue to incur losses in the near term as a > result of expected substantial increases in our operating expenses, as we > continue to invest in order to: [...]

So I can under why people keep saying that, even if it is a gross exaggeration.

But Uber is clearly profitable, in the sense that they charge more for rides than said rides cost, but they do have a negative EBITA and are going into debt to fund necessary expansion.

It's silly for people to claim they have no prospect of making money, but Uber is certainly a risky investment at this point.

<comment><USER20> _But Uber is clearly profitable, in the sense that they charge more for rides than said rides cost_

Cool, so if Uber had no employees, infrastructure or marketing costs it would make money?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Give your Visitors an awesome experience with Vizitor - <AUTHOR> https://www.vizitorapp.com/ <comment><USER2> 6 votes in 15 minutes? For what is essentially an ad?

Mods please remove this for vote manipulation

<comment><USER3> @montenegrohugo I think you are taking it on the wrong note. One can get these many upvotes even if they tweet about it or discuss about it with their friends.</comment></comment>


Merck's AIDS vaccine fails, trials halted - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070921/ap_on_he_me/aids_vaccine_fails

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know the details of how this particular vaccine worked? The problem is that most companies are STILL approaching it as though it's a traditional virus like chicken pox. HIV-1 has a defective DNA polymerase, so everytime it replicates it introduces errors/mutations. This is why it changes so quickly.

Most of these vaccines try to get the body to produce antibodies that recognize the envelope protein. The envelope protein though is free to mutate without changing the action of the virus. People who somehow naturally produce antibodies making them immune to HIV have antibodies that target the active sites of gp120 or gp41. In other words, they need to mimic the receptor that HIV binds to in order to enter the cell. This area CANNOT mutate or else HIV will cease to be infectious.

There are problems tricking the body into producing one particular antibody (it's complicated, but it's based on how antibodies are generated). Therefore, I think synthetic antibodies should be mass produced and injected. These will target HIV-1 for destruction while also preventing it from being able to infect CD4+ cells. The problem with this is that producing mass quantities of antibodies is still very expensive.

<comment><USER3> Will the immune system accept a foreign antibody?

<comment><USER2> It depends. I would think that as long as the antibody is human, it SHOULD recognize it. If it doesn't, there is no harm, it won't cause an allergic reaction or anything. However, by targeting this region, the binding of the antibody prevents the HIV from binding to the CD4 receptors. So even if the immune system doesn't recognize it, it still disables the virus.</comment></comment></comment>


Work on the largest Node.js installation in the world - <AUTHOR>

Voxer looking for several Node.js engineers to join our team.
Voxer have grown massively in just a few months. We are now the fastest growing voice application in the world and we need your help to keep growing. We are solving really hard problems at massive scale with Node.js, Riak, and Redis. We use continuous deployment and run on Joyent Cloud.
You'll get to work on:
- Likely the largest Node.js installation in the world.
- One of the largest Riak installations in the world.
- Many very large and hot Redis instances.
- Write code that touches millions of users every day.
- Scaling and monitoring busy Node.js clusters with HTTP and JSON.
- Work closely with the core Node and DTrace teams (we're on Joyent and that's where they work), as well as Basho and Redis core teams.
Some of the things we look for are:
- Some formal education in Computer Science or equivalent, but the exact degree or number of years of professional experience you have isn't as important as your enthusiasm and ability.
- Generalists with experience of many parts of the server software / hardware stack.
- Experience with Node.js, Riak, and Redis is very helpful. We depend on these technologies every day.
- Experience with DTrace, Hadoop or Splunk is a plus. We are starting to incorporate these technologies into our operation.
- If you don't have experience of above - ability to pick it up quickly.
- Signs of an entrepreneurial or intellectual exploration.
- Hacker-mentality. You're scrappy and want to get things done.
- You want to be part of the team building the next generation voice platform for hundreds of millions of people.
Voxer
We're changing how the world communicate. We launched Voxer in 2011and have since become the fastest growing voice application in the world. What we've built is already an important part of the daily lives of millions of people. We're making voice communication faster, more efficient and more social. Our goal is ambitious - we're building the next generation communication service in the intersection between phone calls and SMS.
We're a surprisingly small team doing this. Only about a dozen engineers who previously worked at Heysan (YC07), Danger, Android and Apple. We helped build things like redis for node.js and are contributors to the node.js community. Voxer is built using node.js, Riak and Redis.
We try to stay out of the spotlight and focus on building something amazing. We're hackers. The problems we're facing are at a scale only seen at companies like Twitter and Facebook and we're looking for exceptional people who can help us tackle them.
Apply here: http://voxer.theresumator.com/apply/zfpjQ9/Nodejs-Infrastructure-Engineer.html
Popular like Voxer http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/popular-like-voxer/ <comment><USER2> We're also hiring interns — doesn't say so yet, but apply anyway!

<http://voxer.com/jobs>

</comment><comment><USER3> I would love an opportunity to contribute my Solaris, OSol, OI knowledge and would happily pounce on an opportunity to use Dtrace and Node.js, certainly two of the more amazing technologies, with Dtrace being unlike anything else really out there for deep understanding of systems.

</comment><comment><USER4> I work with these guys. Totally professional, know their stuff. +1

<comment><USER5> I just want to second that. I work closely with Voxer (I'm at Joyent), and these guys are both very sharp and dealing with some very interesting problems. Add in the kicker that this is a commercially relevant problem (I am an avid Voxer user as well), and I don't know what else you could ask for in a startup. For whatever it's worth, I worked with Twitter in a similar fashion way back in the day [1], and I can say that Voxer is every bit as exciting and promising -- but with a much more technically talented team. If you're a whole-stack software engineer in San Francisco, you owe it to yourself to check these guys out!

[1] [http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/04/24/twitter-is- going...](http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/04/24/twitter-is-going-to- scale-twitter-is-going-to-scale-w00t/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like fun, wish I lived in SF.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's never too late! :) we're thinking about remote employees - might be ready for it at some point soon.

<comment><USER7> If you guys do start looking to pick up remote I would be interested. While I don't have a lot of direct Node experience, I have a lot of JavaScript experience and I have designed some of the largest travel exchange systems out there, so I am familiar with load. I could pick up your stack pretty quick as I am a generalist, I would really like to get in with a growth company out in the valley area, but due to personal reason I am stuck in FL for a while. Hit me up if you guys change your stance on remote, I have been doing contract work for IBM remote for 3 years now and have a really good process down for remote development. At the very least, I could give you guys some pointers on how to seamlessly integrate remote developers into your team, so you are ready when the time comes.</comment></comment></comment>


Hack Pinterest - <AUTHOR> https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=javascript <comment><AUTHOR> I completed the challenge. Can share solutions if anyone wants.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Step 1:

~$ ls -a

~$ cd .HRHack

~$ cat notes.txt</comment>


32 million people watched the League of Legends season 3 finals - <AUTHOR> http://www.ongamers.com/articles/over-32-million-fans-tuned-into-lol-season-3-world-finals/1100-151/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am looking forward to the day when I can come home from work, make some dinner, sit down and turn on Twitch.tv to catch "the game".

Since getting rid of my cable box I have sorely missed live sports and eSports have the potential to dig their claws in pretty deep.

<comment><USER2> Why can't you already do that?

<comment><USER3> I already do it and it's great! Many of my favorite games are on Twitch, Starcraft, Path of Exile, League of Legends, and the best is probably Magic: the Gathering which has awesome tounament streams from StarCityGames and the Magic ProTour all day pretty much every weekend. Combined with a 52inch TV as a monitor, I have yet to plug in the cable into my TV that Comcast forces you to buy!</comment></comment></comment>


The Right to Be Rude - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8609 <comment><USER2> What does the OSI actually do nowadays?

They were important in the past for advocacy and awareness, but open source is now a household word, so what is the actual purpose of OSI, and is it even useful?

Does being on their shitlist prevent you from contributing to open source projects? No.

Would open source projects die without their support? I doubt it.

So is it any wonder that in their loss of mission they've become ossified and bureaucratic, doing the modern day equivalent of arguing over how many angels can dance on the end of a pin?</comment>


Here's $100. Can you win $800M at Powerball? - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.latimes.com/powerball-simulator/ <comment><USER3> A lottery ticket doesn't buy a chance, it buys a pleasant daydream. It buys a mental escape hatch. It buys the 'what would I do' game for another week.

A movie costs $12 in a theater for 2 hrs of enjoyment. A lottery ticket costs $1 for a week of intermittent enjoyment. For certain segments of the population, a lottery ticket is a downright bargain.

Math problems are easy. Real world problems are difficult.

As an aside, it's so important that people who care enough about a social challenge like the lottery/gambling addiction are able to find the ACTUAL root cause to address. I'm not blaming the LA Times. I LOVE content like this - <USER2> not all content needs a purpose. BUT - if the purpose was supposed to be helping people who play the lottery see their folly, this probably isn't the right tack.

<comment><USER4> What do you think of [http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/)<USER2> [http://lesswrong.com/lw/hm/new_improved_lottery/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/hm/new_improved_lottery/)?

<comment><USER5> I don't know what he thinks of it, but everyone should give these two pieces (especially the second one) a read. I was absolutely ready to hate it given the title of the first one (I, too, am in the "buying a dream" rationality camp), but the second piece especially was just too damn good.

<comment><USER6> We have lotteries that give you this hope over period of time (albeit shorter).

It's radio lotteries. You send them text (paid). And they pick few people to call back and to inform them that they won.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't this the wrong problem? It lets you enter X dollars, then it simulates if you played $1 on X numbers of sequential drawings... which would have terrible odds. Wouldn't it be better to simulate X numbers on Y draws, which would lead you to know the number of times/people would have to play to win.

I don't think probability is communicative, is it?

EDIT: It would also be neat to simulate the number of winners you would have to share the prize with, based on numbers entered in the form from users.

<comment><USER8> Its not exactly the same but its pretty close when the chances are so low anyways.

Playing 10,000 times in 1 drawing gives you the probability of winning the jackpot:

0.00003422297813=10000/292201338

Playing 10,000 times in 10,000 drawings gives you the probability of winning the jackpot:

0.00003422239258=1-((292201338-1)/292201338)^10000

The difference gets more significant if you play more. For 10 million plays its:

.0342 vs .0336

If you play only 100 times the probability of a jackpot is the same to 7 significant digits.

-edit I put it on $1M and let it run. I hit the 5 numbers, $1M prize, at some point around $150k spent.

<comment><USER9> If you play quickdraw you could get the same numbers twice. I think with that caveat the odds should be the same.

<comment><USER10> To be fair, wouldn't the odds of QuickDraw picking the same numbers twice (even if there weren't a built in limit against that) be the same odds as winning the jackpot in the first place?

<comment><USER8> Only if you are only picking two sets of numbers. If you are doing 10k sets, the last set has a 9999/292M chance of being the same numbers as one of the other sets.

<comment><USER9> Right, that's the birthday problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started with their $100 "gift", then moved to a paycheck, then to my annual salary. By the time I was in that deep I decided what the heck and got a second mortgage on my house. TIL I have a gambling problem.

<comment><USER12> Don't worry, your luck is bound to turn around. Any day now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Buy a $2 ticket for entertainment, not "investment."

Spend 10 minutes imagining what you'd do with $496M. It might be fun.

<comment><USER14> Join lottery pool at work. Might lose $2, but won't have to kill myself if everyone at the office wins and I have to show up everyday remembering that fact.

<comment><USER15> I find that it's more enjoyable to not join the pool and then buy myself a lunch when the participants inevitably lose. I make sure that everyone knows that it's a celebratory lunch. And then I wonder why I don't have any friends.

<comment><USER16> I'd like to see the mathematicians ascribe an expected value on the bitter, icy glare of your envious colleagues as you eat that sweet victory lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm genuinely surprised by the popular opinion that people play lotto only to win a nearly impossible jackpot. I rarely play, but when I do it's during the big frenzies like this just for kicks but with decent chances making my money back with a bit extra. I spent $3 (powerball single + multiplier). I won $4 last night by getting just the multiplier right (1:39 odds).

The Mega Millions games has 1:14.71 odds of winning. I'll play both Powerball and MM once or twice a year and my loose accounting on my winnings lands me around +$4. Basically nothing over the years but I have enjoyed the frenzy.

I don't think I fall into "stupid tax" territory and I _do_ understand the probability of a jackpot win. I just don't care about it and enjoy the little rush of the chance.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a fascinating sentence:

 _While the large jackpot prize may be tempting, it 's extremely hard to have that one ticket in 292 million._

I think my favorite part is that _extremely hard_ isn't a very accurate description of how unlikely it is.

<comment><USER19> This image removed any temptation for gambling once and for all, because after all, a 1:292,201,338 chance really isn't anything one can grasp easily:

A car goes from San Diego to New Orleans and the driver throws a quarter out of his window at some point in time.

Now you drive the same route. You get the chance to stop once on this route. If your front tire comes to a halt at the exact same spot of that quarter, you hit the jackpot.

How likely does that feel?

<comment><USER20> Very likely if 292,201,338 took the challenge.

People do win lotteries at times, don't they?

<comment><USER19> Sure, someone will probably be stuck in a traffic jam right next to the quarter at some point, but does that help anyone to win this challenge on purpose? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently purchased a OneRNG trng and decided to give it a chance at guessing the right number with its quantum-noise super powers. Reading from it overnight produced 24 million guesses and no winner. Though several were just one number off. Too bad so sad.

I'm really curious what RNG the registers use when people say "let the computer guess for me". I'm pretty sure they don't all have a TRNG installed on the circuit...

<comment><USER22> Is there reason to believe that a TRNG would somehow select numbers with a better chance of winning than any other method?

I can see the method impacting the number of dollars you win but surely any valid set of numbers has the same chance to win as any other.

It's not like your TRNG is actually emulating the behavior of the balls in the machine.

<comment><USER21> I can't say if a TRNG has a better chance, but I don't think I'm leaping too far to say a broken, predictable RNG has a _worse_ chance of winning.

<comment><USER23> Maybe worse over the long term, but wouldn't you have the same odds for any given draw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think most of us realize that they're not going to win, but when the jackpot becomes a national event every 6 months or whatever, there's usually some joy in buying a ticket anyway

<comment><USER25> There's more joy in giving $2 to a person who needs it.

<comment><USER24> Those things aren't mutually exclusive

<comment><USER25> Unless your goal is to maximize joy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Free YC 2016 application:

Build website to crowdsource $292,201,338. Buy all the lotto tickets. Pay back investors 150% of their investment. Make ~ $69.5M.

(assuming lotto tickets are a $1) (someone else can figure out the break even point after taxes)

<comment><USER27> Would not work unless it ballooned into 10 figures. Lump sum taxes would take most of the gains away and that assumes you are the only winner.

<comment><USER28> And the advertised Jackpot isa 30 years annuity. The lump sum is ~62% of the advertised Jackpot before taxes.

<comment><USER29> Used to be, the lump sum wasn't offered -- you had to sell your legal rights to the annuity to an investor to get it. You could still do this -- perhaps have open bidding on it; might net more than 62%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Question: With a jackpot of $800mil and the chances of winning 1 in ~300mil, could you not buy 300mil tickets? (Excepting, of course, the risk that someone else wins and the cost of taxes).

<comment><USER31> The cash payout is ~$500 million, and after taxes you _may_ end up with $309 million.

So, yeah, probably not a winning strategy.

<comment><USER32> Well, it sounds like you'd be at least $9 million richer than you were before. And gambling losses are tax deductable, up to the amount of your winnings, so if I understand tax deductions correctly wouldn't you be taxed only on about $200 million of the cash payout?

[https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419.html](https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419.html) [https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax- tips/Taxes-101/Can...](https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax- tips/Taxes-101/Can-You-Claim-Gambling-Losses-on-Your-Taxes-/INF14370.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The comment on the site where some people play when it's a high payout more for wanting to participate in the cultural event (i.e. go see Star Wars in theaters) than the expectation that they'll win makes a lot of sense.

I think that's mainly why I get a few tickets sometimes when it gets super high, even though I know my chances of winning are significantly worse and my chances of winning at all are almost nothing.

<comment><USER34> More people buying doesn't change your chances - it potentially lowers your payout.

Makes me wonder if getting more people to play higher jackpots ends up evening things out in the end.

<comment><USER35> It may even out from an expected value for the purchaser point of view, but the profits keep climbing for Powerball the more people that hop on the bandwagon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The awful paradox of lotteries is that every week somebody wins, but every week that will not be you.

</comment><comment><USER37> I ran the $1000 simulation, and then just before running a $100,000 simulation I stopped myself because I'd be distressed if my simulated numbers came up and I didn't actually get the prize.

I'm bad at maths.

</comment><comment><USER38> Here's some interesting insight into the random numbers behind this toy, if you're on Chrome: [http://v8project.blogspot.com/2015/12/theres-mathrandom- and-...](http://v8project.blogspot.com/2015/12/theres-mathrandom-and-then- theres.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> The obvious equivalent for the HN crowd:

"Here is $50k. Now quit your job and start a start-up"

Difficulty bonus -- startup idea is generated by a Markov chain and could be anything -- "Uber for dogs", "Taxidermied pets as drones" etc.

<comment><USER40> 1\. The odds of succeeding at a startup are a lot better than 292 million to 1.

2\. You get a paycheck, even if it's less than market rate.

3\. It's fun and exciting to use someone else's money to try to come up with a new business type.

<comment><USER41> 4\. You're much more likely to learn and grow professionally tackling problems you likely wouldn't otherwise face (or at least at a higher rate).

<comment><USER12> 4A. Buying a $2 lottery ticket is faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Sooo I hit the $50,000 after only $2,000. Apparently that is almost 1 in a million. Scary

<comment><USER43> Whoa, I'm still working on spending $100k...

Spent $62,630 Won $5,793 Win/loss $56,837

Hovering consistently just below losing 90 cents on each dollar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm sure if you put $100 in stocks, you get much better odds to make a fortune!

</comment><comment><USER45> I clicked "play $100" 4 times and lost. So I clicked "bet paycheck" and entered $10,000 (no I don't really make that much).

And boom, I won $1,000,000. So I guess I should start playing the lottery?

(I suspect there's a bug).

<comment><USER46> I am in the hole 250k

<comment><USER6> 500k down the drain

91% of invested money lost

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is this an article or an attempt to harvest paycheck information?

<comment><USER7> If it is, it is going to be skewed. I just put in $292,201,338 (the 1 in .... odds for the jackpot).

<comment><USER35> And funny enough this doesn't guarantee that you'll even hit the jackpot in that total. Man the lottery can be fun!

(to be clear I'm not implying that you said that total will guarantee a jackpot win)

<comment><USER7> I suspect the simulator will run until well after the actual drawing (it just doesn't play fast enough to burn through that much cash).

<comment><USER48> And it chooses new winning numbers every time so you likely will never win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I saw the headline and thought it was a startup parable with the $100 representing VC money and $800M a huge exit. I need to be less cynical!

</comment><comment><USER50> I better approach is to pick numbers and then show how those numbers would have never hit a jackpot since lottery's inception.

</comment><comment><USER51> Given the long odds, I find that just imagining winning the lottery is still fun and decidedly cheaper than the real thing.

</comment><comment><USER52> If only real life had chrome dev tools console such to modify global vars like "winTotal = 100000000".

<comment><USER53> Well, kinda: [http://www.fox5ny.com/news/63367774-story](http://www.fox5ny.com/news/63367774-story)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Little more than 90% of money lost. Still beats some of my stock market investments.

</comment><comment><USER54> Here's the year 2016, can you make a site that works on mobile?

</comment><comment><USER55> I lost my entire paycheck.

</comment><comment><USER56> I won!!

</comment><comment><USER57> yes we can!

</comment><comment><USER58> Lottery is a progressive tax on stupidity.

<comment><USER59> That's a pretty reductive way of saying it.

<comment><USER58> I agree though if you've worked in the casino industry as long as I have there's precious few other ways to reason about what's going on in the minds of people who don't understand gambler's fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Spent $115,698 Won $10,598 Win/loss $-105,100 Balance $0

ROI: ~10%

<comment><USER61> The ROI would be (10,598 - 115, 698) / 115,698 = ~-90%</comment></comment>


Glimpse into the Future of AI Customer Service: The Next Frontier of Support Ops - <AUTHOR> https://thinkrelay.com/blog/future-of-ai-customer-service/ <comment><USER2> I remember Peter Thiel was big on AI assisted in his book. I think it does make sense because as advanced as bots are getting with customer support there exists potentially catastrophic errors due to lack of context that only a human would have.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really interesting stuff! Will share.</comment>


Asking for help finding an article - <AUTHOR> This is a shot in the dark but I'm trying to find an article once posted here. My recollection and google-fu is coming up short.
The context is a researcher is working hard but there is a different researcher in the same facility that is the golden boy. He goes to his boss and tries to commiserate and his boss basically says, "don't be jealous, imagine if you worked as hard as him."
The rest of the article is a breakdown of the compounding effect of hard work. It's a great read and I need to hear it again.
Please let me know if you have any luck. <comment><USER2> Hamming - You and Your Research...

[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

> I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous > drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that > John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly > was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody > my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put > his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be > surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did > that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

<comment><AUTHOR> Gratitude. I've been searching for that for some time.

<comment><USER2> of course. It's a great talk. My favorite part is how Hamming goes to other tables and asks them if they're working on the most important/impactful things in their fields...</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: You Write. We Quantify – thoughtly.co - <AUTHOR>

I created Thoughtly because many of my hobbies and interests - things I spend a lot of my time learning and writing about - are not reflected in my resume or in any single online profile.
Written discussions online are generally insulated within specific communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Blogs, etc.), making it difficult for users to retain their credibility as they cross platforms. So we set out to quantify written discussion online and display them in a centralized portfolio. By enabling people to quickly display the extent of their involvement in a field, we provide context for online discussion. Your Thoughtly signature is a link to your online profile - which displays a summary of your written contributions online.
It took a better part of a year to spec out everything and build a tool that sufficiently processes and accurately aggregates written content. We also think that natural language processing is a hole in the quantified self movement. Words can be valuable data too.
Thanks and I'm excited for feedback. :-{
thoughtly.co
Update: It currently takes a few minutes for the server to process connected accounts and issue credentials to your profile! However it is working, hang with us for a few minutes. <comment><USER2> This touches reputation, authority, credibility. Quantifying the corpus of individuals, across sources, is a tremendous undertaking. Very cool concept and I'll be checking out your execution following this comment. I'll post feedback here or via dm if I don't see another preferred mechanism in your app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, thanks for checking us out. While we avoided grandiose statements like "we quantify you," a person's performance and engagements overtime if carefully quantified add tremendous value to depicting the essence of the person. For example, I read and write significantly on science related issues but have no hard science background. Without quantifying my online discussions, that aspect of me is essentially lost when creating a resume or profile.

Make sure to check out your webprofile (via Thoughtly signature), as it supports data visualization, which is coming very soon to iOS.

I'm pumped to hear your thoughts!

Feel free to email me directly perkins[a]thoughtly.co

<comment><USER3> Is your analysis able to answer the questions "Is a sentence true?" and "Is this paragraph true?" That's something I'd like to have.

<comment><AUTHOR> We want to avoid subjectively stating what is definitively true, as this can be a moving target and we encourage dissent. Fields grow and horizons broaden, however our algorithms do sort what is/isn't applicable to a field and the quality/relevance of the content to a specific category!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been craving for something like this for Facebook. I've had so many interesting conversations with friends over the years, I wish I could extract all of that stuff and use it as drafts for essays. Cool work you're doing.

<comment><USER5> Right there with you. I love the fact that I can now pull together the metrics for all of my shared posts and content. This can really make it easy for people to quickly gauge someone's topic authority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do you envision your users will use their Thoughtly signatures? Can the signature feature be used anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two obvious uses, but many we have yet to consider.

The first is on resumes, where context for life experience and outside interests is missing. As we move away from degrees to skills, the importance of quantifiable involvement in an area is increasingly valued! Secondly in comment sections and social media. It's easy to throw around statements online, but I think it would be great to be able to demonstrate both conventional (scholarship) and unconventional (Blogs, Q&A, Reddit, etc.) experience to speak with authority everywhere...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clickable: [http://thoughtly.co](http://thoughtly.co)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great idea. Glad someone is pulling this together

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting idea, but why is it an iOS app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and that's a good question. Well Thoughtly is just starting as an iOS app, we are about to launch the fully functioning web app.

The main reason it's on mobile is so people can just one click, copy their signature (which is a link to their quantified profile) from the app and paste it into any other platform, forum or app they communicate on. Since no one wants to engage in long conversations on a phone, it's simply easier to drop in their signature wherever they like to display experience.

Furthermore, Thoughtly has an activity feed that is really just a discussion board. But it allows you to browse for content/news in categories you find interesting (like flipboard) and see the objective experience and interests of the people who shared the content/involved in the discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is basically the idea behind Google authorship.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. While Google Authorship touches on the same problem, a comparison however is not accurate.

Our natural language processor identifies the category of each specific contribution, issues credentials if the contribution is sufficiently relevant and aggregates an individual's involvement in various fields. So instead of reading a list of the person's written work like you would on Authorship, Thoughtly displays a summary of their involvement and turns their words into actionable data - allowing users to forgo displaying specific work (like on Reddit).</comment></comment>


Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN: A sixty-year report (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://walden-family.com/bbn/bbn-print2.pdf <comment><USER5> I worked at BBN from 1996 to 1999. Not mentioned within the PDF is the role that BBN played in the Information Security space - a large portion of the L0pht (L0pht Heavy Industries / L0phtcrack / @stake, etc) worked at BBN. 4 out of 7 folks worked there. Peite Zatko (Mudge), myself, and later Chris Wysopal (Weld Pond / VeraCode) all worked in the IT Security department and were responsible for just about all things security related. Brian Oblivion also worked at the L0pht as an electrical engineer working on RF & satellite related work. Hobbit, author of netcat, also did some stints there in the late 90s. A large number of l0pht advisories came out the research and work we did to secure internal systems/software. We had some early access to Marcus Ranum's new venture at the time - Network Flight Recorder and wrote some of the first modules. In early '99 I left BBN to work full time on the L0pht to write a set of hybrid protocol analysis/IDS signatures for NFR to help it become a true IDS system.

BBN was an amazing place; if you had a question about a protocol for example, you could track down one of the original authors of the RFC - sometimes they were located right down the hall.

BBN believed in employees and looked for people with passion, honesty and the desire to continually learn. I met my late wife at BBN. With a masters in Italian Literature and some scattered technical experience (satellite internet uplink/downlink stuff) she applied for a position at the company. They looked at her resume, lack of experience, and asked what Italian lit had to do with the Internet - "absolutely nothing" she replied, but expressed her interest in understanding how the Internet worked. They hired her in the CSC - <USER2> Support Center and slowly gave her training. She had great mentors and quickly jumped into becoming a Network Analyst, from there Infrastructure Engineer and finally to one of the peak technical groups (on the BBN Planet / networking side) - Network Engineering. Prior to BBN being sold out to GTE, she was one of two people that worked on peering arrangements for customers and other network providers. She knew the main backbone like the back of her hand and would haggle with companies to ensure that peering arrangements were fair and not one sided. Before the downfall, she argued internally as well - <USER3> salespeople under the bus when they'd over promise bandwidth from a local POP that was already approaching capacity. She started off with minimal technical experience and networking knowledge, but left with deep technical knowledge of Cisco router internals, BGP, and all things Internet/peering related. BBN believed in her, saw promise and invested in her - as they tried to do with everyone.

BBN was an awesome place - there was a hydro-acoustic submarine testing tank, some anechoic chambers, an amazing library, and some really cool technology. There was a meeting to show off "bullet ears" which involved a hidden sniper in a garage. The technology could identify the path of the bullet as well as the location of the sniper. For the 90s, it was an amazing place to be.

.. it always broke my heart when we were sold off to GTE to become GTE Internetworking. It eventually was bought by Verizon and spun off to become Genuity, which tanked. Level3 swooped in like vultures and picked over the remaining folks - you could keep your job if you moved to Denver or Atlanta from what I recall. Of the folks that moved, most of them were laid off in a few years. Sadly, BBN had ASN1, which Level3 scuttled in favor of their ASN - 3356.

It was a great place.

-Paul

<comment><USER6> We overlapped there. I worked in a different security team in 97-98, the one that sold a certificate solution and where Stephen Kent was designing IPSec. Wish I'd spent more time learning from him, bright guy.

The GTE acquisition occurred one month after I moved to Boston and started there. Definitely a weird time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great find. Right before college I had the chance to sit in a lab at BBN for a few of the summer months. I believe at the time they were owned by Verizon. I remember thinking that I was walking on hallowed ground - <USER4> many computing "firsts" had happened. But they were a bit of a shadow of their former self... In some sense I feel that is true for a lot of tech. Govt or defense funding planted the original seeds for a lot of the great tech we have today. Now bleeding edge tech is mostly driven by rich guys and their pet projects...

I still have a mug and a t-shirt from BBN. My wife almost threw the mug out once. Umm... NOPE!

</comment><comment><USER8> One of the cool things I saw while in the USAF (but didn't realize just how cool it was at the time) was the installation of a BBN Interface Message Processor at McClellan AFB in 1986. It was probably one of the last ones to get installed on the ARPANET.

</comment><comment><USER9> I worked at bbn for 10 years. Wonderful culture. I got to learn hardware, software and systems as a jnr engineer working across the world. Amazing people who developed technology from first principles. Thanks for sharing, great memories.

</comment><comment><USER10> Every time BBN gets mentioned, I'm reminded of the book, "Where the Wizards Stay Up Late", where they get some mention and credit.

Unfortunately, a garage flood took out my copy, shortly after a move. But as I recall, I rather enjoyed the read.

<comment><USER11> There seem to be a few formats on Amazon, including an unabridged audiobook [1] :

[http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up- Late/dp/06848326...](http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up- Late/dp/0684832674/)

Kindle edition sells to US-only accounts though, which is a bit annoying :-(

[1] The Kindle version + Audible upgrade is nearly always cheaper than Audible alone. Not sure why.

<comment><USER12> I bought it for Kindle from Sweden, and it doesn't look unavailable to buy for me now.

<comment><USER11> Ah, maybe it's just the UK :-(</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chibikart: MIT electric go-kart - <AUTHOR> http://www.etotheipiplusone.net/

<comment><USER2> This is the kind of crazy stuff you get to do in college with all these resources around you. Take advantage, no matter what your project may be, because after you graduate, it's gonna be infinitely harder.

<comment><USER3> Amen. I worked at a TV station for years, and the thought of borrowing a camera (literally asking my boss for permission, because I wouldn't do it without,) was enough to have him checking up on me for months.</comment></comment>


JQuery Webcam Plugin - Communicate with a webcam directly from JS - <AUTHOR> http://www.xarg.org/project/jquery-webcam-plugin/

<comment><USER2> "to communicate with a camera directly in JavaScript."

"error: Flash movie not yet registered!"

Some people seem to have a different definition for "directly" than I do.

This works -through- Flash. Without Flash, you get nothing. It's not "directly" with Javascript at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love jQuery, but I don't see why it is required here. Wouldn't this code work just as well with a couple of element IDs, and add library independence to the bargain?

<comment><USER4> jQuery sells.

<comment><USER5> odds are, in this instance its because it looks nice on a resume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it interesting that JavaScript can apparently determine what video camera you have connected to you PC even without the acknowledgment of the Flash Approve/Deny access dialogue.

<comment><USER7> That's exactly the problem why our plugin (<http://api.alii.tv>) doesn't add the webcam output. I cannot figure out a good way to acknowledge user about the use of webcam and the potential security risk turns me down. Obviously, another problem is how to transmit the decompressed data in real-time to browser. I am interested to see their solution to the both problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The W3 are working on standardising a proper (i.e. non-Flash) audio/video capture API for JS to interact with: <http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media- capture/>

</comment><comment><USER9> directly from JS! (and flash)

<comment><USER10> Which means no phone cameras, though that could conceivably work on Android some day.

<comment><USER11> If you're talking about Flash, note that at the last Google device convention they promised that soon they would have Android JavaScript access to the cameras sans Flash. I'm sure that will carry to ChromeOS and Chrome as well.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2953865/javascript- camera...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2953865/javascript-camera-api- android-froyo)

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's Flash they're using, but rather the HTML5 <device> tag. Expect that in Chrome very soon, and in IE16, probably by about 2021.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I suppose I worded confusingly, however I was offering that as a non- Flash option. My point being that if they assume that Android will offer that soon because of Flash, it will also offer it natively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is really useful - as a non Flash developer I love it when people release neat, unobtrusive scripts that make Flash-only capabilities available through JavaScript.

It's not clear how this would work in older browsers that don't support canvas though.

Anyone seen anything like this but for audio instead? I'd love a way to record audio from JavaScript and stream it to a server.

<comment><USER14> Uh, this is flash.

The jQuery and JS parts play only minor roles.

<comment><USER13> I know that. I'm asking if anyone has seen a similar unobtrusive Flash widget that provides a JavaScript API for accessing audio input.

UPDATE: After a bit of searching around, it looks like there are no convenient APIs within the Flash player itself for recording audio to any kind of object that could then be uploaded - instead, you need to have an open network connection to either Flash Media Server or Red5 (the open source equivalent) and then get the server to encode to MP3.

<comment><USER15> There is also Wowza.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like this alot but the technology is still not there to be able to stream video and audio without flash. I wrote the site <http://www.squarechat.com> and try to use as much javascript as I can and only flash where it is necessary but I would love to be able to ditch flash and have video and audio streaming support.

<comment><USER17> Got an API for that? If not, build one and people like me will pay you to embed video/audio chat in our apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Uses a very non-optimized way to generate the JPEG. This is the way it was done in 2007, but now there's a built-in JPEG compression function in the API available. He's using Adobe's example AS3 JPEG code.

</comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately, it doesn't work with flashblock. Even when I enable the flash, the javascript doesn't pick up on that and doesn't work. I guess it only checks on document load.

</comment><comment><USER20> Id like a simpler feature - to be able to upload a photo from the iPhone via Safari Webkit [upload file form field]. Its such a pain to have to work around this in web apps.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is it fast enough for real-time modification of the data? What if I want to do image recognition and want to ad, let's say sunglasses, to the person's face?</comment>


Documenting source code - <AUTHOR> http://erik-poupaert.blogspot.com/2012/12/documenting-source-code.html

<comment><USER2> Well, well. If your "undocumentation" is in form of

        /** nTuple class */
        class nTuple {
        ...

... or

        /** creates copy of nTuple */
        static function copy($nTuple)
        ...

... or

        /**  Creates a string representation of an n-tuple. */
        static function toString($nTuple)

no wonder you will not be seeing the value of documenting. (Hint: just leave such trivial comments out. In case of "copy" function, you might want to tell us why would one need to create a copy, or why it's important. Or probably it's so obvious you should not bother at all!)

Document what's surprising. Document "why" instead of "what". And don't just repeat yourself in comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> The documentation standards seem to be insisting on that kind of things. The "why" can only be clarified in the location where it is used; which I did: Changing an array value, changes the original object, while the creation of countering n-tuples requires the creation of new objects mostly equal to the original object.

<comment><USER2> If you say that documentation standards are mostly bullshit, I will agree completely. It follows that documentation produced following the standard will also be mostly bullshit. However this does not mean that documentation in general is useless. At this point in time, you just have to use your head, use your own common sense...</comment></comment></comment>


U.S. troops guarding nuclear missiles took LSD - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-air-force-airment-lsd-cocaine-warren-air-force-base-wyoming-nuclear-missile-sites-records-show/ <comment><USER2> Ok this micro-dosing trend for adults is starting to fall into the tide-pod category. People LSD doesn't make you smarter, it simply makes you think crazy things are more plausible.</comment>


Show HN: Meme generator for hipsters - <AUTHOR> http://www.pinwords.com/?s=hn

<comment><AUTHOR> Spent three weeks on this. Uses HTML5 canvas, fabric.js and GAE. Learned a lot of interesting tech along the way. Any feedback?

<comment><USER2> I see this fitting really well with Instagram.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you see this hooking in with it? I don't use Instagram.

<comment><USER3> On Instagram, "picture talking" is very common since the service is completely geared towards pictures but people still want to use words from time to time.

So to express a thought or thank friends, Instagram users have to find a way to put words onto a picture. The most common is to write a note in Notes, take a screenshot and upload that. But on the stylish communication medium that Instagram is, it can look a little gauche. So people will often upload pictures of handwritten notes, etc. which have some class but not everyone wants to go to that much effort.

The easiest thing is to offer a 612x612 template and the ability to show a PNG that users could then save to their Camera Roll and then upload to Instagram. If you can connect with the user's Instagram account and let them upload from Instagram like Chute does, even better!

Disclaimer: been totally cranking on my own words-on-pictures app for the last few weeks — congrats!

<comment><USER2> Exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for putting it in words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love it. I'm sure lots of people will like it too. Very polished. I like it that you provide dummy images so impatient people like me don't have to upload an image to test it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should probably do a better job of highlighting that. If you click on one of the textures at the bottom, you can start one without uploading. Here's a direct link to the wood texture for example: [http://www.pinwords.com/start/032fb4c570bf11e18ae1e7074e371e...](http://www.pinwords.com/start/032fb4c570bf11e18ae1e7074e371e4c)

<comment><USER5> That part was clear to me immediately. All in all it was really easy to use.

What might be confusing from a UI point of view, is that the example images on the top right look like a banner you are supposed to click on to get to the main site (to me at least).

If you would have done eye-tracking on me when I was using this, I was first drawn to the face (people always look first at faces), then I went down to where it said "No images? Click on one of these.". That might be because the woman in the picture is sort of looking in this direction. After that I looked to the where the logo is "pinwords, instantly ...".

<comment><USER6> I had instinctively clicked on the images at the top before going to the textures. Might have been nice to catch these (ED: clicks) (or maybe even hover ?) and highlight them (ED: images at the bottom) in something like the "MacBook sleep light" style. Just the background of the block - glow from the current (dark) to white and back. Would make it even friendlier, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a question about Pinwords (good job, BTW), but...

I noticed that this is a repost of a submission originally titled 'Show HN: My side project helps you add beautiful text on pinterest images '. That post garnered just five upvotes and no comments.

Clearly, you've garnered more attention with this post. What prompted you to try this particular verbiage instead? Do you think timing played a factor?

<comment><AUTHOR> The title is everything apparently. The first post was also early in the morning. I have a bad habit of being impatient with these things.

<comment><USER8> This would be an interesting project: Finding a way to make the time of posting irrevelant. Probably impossible in today's super short span internet. But maybe with a different frontpage and "new page" sorting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could someone explain how the original content source is kept?

Seeing that you cannot link to a page but must hot-link to the image then I am failing to see how the source is kept.

For example, here is a regular pin for [http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/on-the-street- somewher...](http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/on-the-street-somewhere-in- the-rive-gauche-paris/), <http://pinterest.com/pin/189151253069642005/>. The content is shown as coming from thesartorialist.com

Now trying with pinwords.com, I must upload the direct image (which makes sense, how else would it work to mark up the image) which results as <http://pinterest.com/pin/189151253069642015/> The content is shown as coming from thesartorialist.com The content is shown as coming from pinwords.com. Though going into the original pin at pinwords there is no mention of thesartorialist.com in site.

I understand these are how previous bookmarklets have worked for other apps, yet I hate this so much. Not only does it make easier for users to mark up content they may or may not own, it makes it harder for Pinterest to remain mostly true about keeping content creators (the ones who actually produce the content) copyright concerns in mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can upload by clicking the "web" button or using the bookmarklet. The source should be kept in the resulting page.

<comment><USER9> That is indeed what I did, there is no source shown here [http://www.pinwords.com/pins/e68d21f0720b11e1aaccfd54b73b70c...](http://www.pinwords.com/pins/e68d21f0720b11e1aaccfd54b73b70c4). Try it [http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/on-the-street- somewher...](http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/on-the-street-somewhere-in- the-rive-gauche-paris/)

> The page at www.pinwords.com says: Not a valid image.

Which to me, means it's either not able to scan the page for images or only accepts direct links to images.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. That's a bug! I'll fix that tonight. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do you have more examples than the ones in the page header?

Would be nice to quickly see what this outputs, i.e. browse what people are doing with it. Too lazy to test myself...

</comment><comment><USER11> Spent a couple of embarrassing seconds clicking on the text on one of the sample windows until I noticed that I had to push the "Next" button to get to that stage…

<comment><AUTHOR> I was definitely debating with myself on that particular behavior. On the one hand it lets you preview themes more easily, on the other, it adds more friction / confusion. I'll play around with a "click once" theme browser. Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER12> I had the exact same problem. Make it editable from the get-go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> angry-hacker Uploaded a small picture to test it (the first one I found, about 200x200), the text was so small so I didn't even understand I can re-size it. The words would fit on the image if every word or two goes on each line.

Just something for you to think about, maybe your future users run into this problem also.

</comment><comment><USER13> After you choose a template and press the continue button. There should be a back button if you change your mind. I realize that you can go back clicking on the tip of the template on the top. Which is cool, but not the most intuitive thing in the world.

Overall looks very well polished, GJ and GL.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is that bootstrap.js? Looks great! Barley looks like bootstrap, but after I worked with it on a project, I recognize some characteristic elements. How much work was it to make it look like this?

EDIT: Sorry for editing a question into my comment after you already answered. It's a bad habit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Caught me. This is a side project (doing a real startup as my day job), but I basically put in 20-30 hours a week for the last 3 weeks working nights and weekends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really nice. I've been working on a very similar project in fabric.js this past week (captioning a picture, dragging text around on it and posting to facebook and pinterest).

The live updating as you type is a really nice feature, one that I hadn't even considered yet.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice one. I would love to have such a tool to build presentations. Any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting but I had a few issues (in Firefox). Using the default text resulted in an image with no text and trying to go back and use a different text caused the Continue button to lock.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. What version of Firefox were you using? It sounds like your browser was still trying to load the fonts.

<comment><USER16> I'm using Firefox 11 on Linux x86_64.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meme generation you say? Well there just might be a simpler way...

> curl <http://www.reddit.com>

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks beautiful - congrats!

How did you like working with Fabric.js?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was the lightest weight canvas library I could find. Primarily used the interactive features of it. I had to write my own text extension because Fabric's (canvas's) is pretty primitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Make an API that would plug into Carrierwave and you will rule the world!

</comment><comment><USER20> This is going to be huge.

</comment><comment><USER21> Totally Tumblr, wait til that crowd get their keyboards on this!

</comment><comment><USER22> Cool. How does it turn the HTML into an actual jpg image?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/934012/get-image-data- in-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/934012/get-image-data-in- javascript)

An important caveat is if you have any images in the canvas, they should be hosted on the same domain or you have to resort to CORS workarounds <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a great idea. Congrats on launching.

</comment><comment><USER24> can use more templates .. and also how about showing memes generated by users ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely working on that. This is my MVP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice domain, too! Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER26> simple, yet so useful - look forward to more font themes!

</comment><comment><USER27> nice!</comment>