Researchers implement 3-qubit Grover search on a quantum computer - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-01-qubit-grover-quantum.html <comment><USER2> Two reminders, for anyone reading this and wondering about the implications for cryptography:

1\. Grover's algorithm is applicable to symmetric cryptosystems, like AES. It searches for secret keys in a quantum-optimal manner. Shor's algorithm is the much more serious threat which endangers asymmetric (public-key) cryptosystems like RSA. It uses the quantum Fourier transform to attack integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems.

2\. This 3-qubit implementation corresponds to 2^3 items; it is still extremely far off from being practically usable against AES-128. Moreover, Grover's algorithm can't be credibly used to break AES-256, as it improves the search time by approximately halving the number of items to be searched (i.e. AES-256 is reduced to 128 bits of security, AES-128 is reduced to 64, etc).

<comment><USER3> > it improves the search time by approximately halving the number of items to > be searched (i.e. AES-256 is reduced to 128 bits of security, AES-128 is > reduced to 64, etc).

No, "halving the number of items to be searched" would be a constant factor (1/2) change, which would be trivial. Computers get that much faster in a year.

Rather, using Grover brute search to crack a hash reduces the effective number of items to try by a square root. Each bit of AES increases cracking time by a factor of 2, which is why decreasing the cracking time by a square root is equivalent to halving the number of bits of security: sqrt(2^N) = 2^(N/2)

<comment><USER2> I'm confused by your comment, because it doesn't seem like we're disagreeing. The end result of Grover's algorithm is that a 2^ _N_ keyspace can be searched in a worst case of 2^ _N_ /2 steps instead of 2^ _N_ steps. So yes, it _does_ halve the number of items to be searched.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you've just used "items" in a non-standard way? The number of bits (N) is indeed being halved, but the standard way of talking about Grover's search is that you're searching for an item in the "database" of bit configurations (i.e., keyspace), which is 2^N. No one would refer to the bits as "items".

<comment><USER2> Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, I didn't intend to refer to the bits themselves as items; rather I was referring to the bit-security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm) describes the search algorithm in more detail.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's the Big-O factor for the initialization step? Seems it's at least o(# qubits) which should be O(log n) where N is the database size, but the story acts like it it's O(1) overall.

<comment><USER6> If I remember from when I worked on this, Grover allows searching N=2^n items with complexity O(sqrt(N)). Even if init was O(log N), this would be much smaller than O(sqrt(N)) for large N, so can be (almost) ignored.</comment></comment>


Livejournal now #10 site in Russia - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/livejournal.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed the high number of Russian images posted to Livejournal from their 'live feed', and was wondering why this was happening.

It seems that LiveJournal, which was all but dying in the face of the combined facebook/myspace/twitter onslaught has found a new niche and gotten a new lease on life.

It's an interesting phenomenon because most of the times in the past when a social networking site was on the way down it was for good, LJ seems to at least for the moment have found a way to get another round to play.

Alexa figures, take with grain of salt, yadayada, but at this scale they're not going to be off by much.

<comment><USER2> In fact, LiveJournal got so popular in Russia that a Russian company bought it: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUP_Fabrik>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I must have been completely asleep when that happened.

Interesting how the rest of the world can be 'done' with something and yet it has strong appeal to a single regional demographic.

<comment><USER3> The "Friendster Effect", perhaps?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Intel Chips Contain Back-Door Processor, Hackable Even When Computer is Off - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularresistance.org/new-intel-based-pcs-permanently-hackable/

<comment><USER2> I pay extra for machines to have IPMI support. Remote power up and down, console access, all via a separate IP and SSH.

Unfortunately, I also trust the BMC less than the main machine, since I'm not fully in control of it. Separate VLANs and firewalling away from the main network can help.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I'm aware, the 3G comment is uncorroborated. The anti theft system only works if the user has installed a 3G card. The chip can then access this card, decrypt the kill SMS and shutdown the chip.

Also think about it - you're locking the processor onto a board which mostly made of metal, under a big block of metal to cool it and then you're surrounding it all in a metal box with more metal around it. A 3G signal is no match for a Faraday cage.

<comment><USER4> The manufacturer can hide a 3G module on the motherboard and use audio out cables for an antenna.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not news. vPro is a system administration facility on some Intel processors aimed at enterprises and has been around for years.</comment>


Ask HN: Will work end? - <AUTHOR> Interesting article about the future of work...<p>http://blacksheepvalley.com/2016/11/the-end-of-work <comment><USER2> "AI" is a buzz word... I saw a video of marissa mayer explaining her first days a google, she said she was doing AI already

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say deep learning will definitely kill our jobs...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What apps on your phone do you completely swear by? - <AUTHOR> Recently I've discovered Life Cycle an app that automatically tracks where you spend your time. It's IOS only unfortunately, but its has had a big impact on my life as it's allowed me to realise and optimise where and how I spend my time.
I'm looking for similar apps that have changed your life for the better in some way, no matter how minor.
Link to the app here https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/life-cycle-track-your-time/id1064955217 <comment><USER2> Things is a sleek todo/reminder app that I've ended up using to jot quick notes. The great thing is that you can write first, categorize later, as there's an "inbox" where your items go before you've categorized them. Also often highlight interesting words and quotes from ebooks to Things to remember them later.

</comment><comment><USER3> I completely swear by the app that my employer provides so that I can photo and submit my paperwork for pay. :-)

Also Snapseed, an image processing app, that I use to increase the contrast and readability of paperwork images when the original is on flimsy paper and hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER4> Daylio - It's a journal/mood tracking app and I've been using it since march 2019. Other than keeping a track of my moods it also help me keep track of all my goals I want to achieve.

Google keep - I've tried all the popular/unpopular apps for note taking but I keep coming back to G.Keep, it's really very easy to use type that is why I use it for taking all kind of notes. The only thing I think it's missing is authorization/password protection.

Money Manager - Helps me keep track of all the income and expenses. It really heped me a lot in managing my expenses.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 Solid Explorer ( [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.solidexplor...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.solidexplorer2) )

It can connect to all the services I need and/or hosts, and it even works with SFTP servers using keyfile authentication (elliptic curve as well).

The only thing I don't like is that it make its own encryption format for encrypting file. I wish it used a format like Cryptomator instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't really have any life changing apps but I enjoy Instapaper, Google Keep, Podcasts & Reeder. All on iOS.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google Keep, Google Podcasts, and YouTube!</comment>


Show HN: Image Classification Demo Using TensorFlow, Keras, Flask, Nginx, React - <AUTHOR> https://www.dataformsjs.com/examples/image-classification-react.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Client JavaScript Code (React): [https://github.com/dataformsjs/dataformsjs/blob/master/examp...](https://github.com/dataformsjs/dataformsjs/blob/master/examples/html/image- home-react.jsx)

Client JavaScript Code (Vue and Handlebars): There are 3 different versions of the same demo to show the app being built with different client side tech. [https://github.com/dataformsjs/dataformsjs/blob/master/examp...](https://github.com/dataformsjs/dataformsjs/blob/master/examples/image- classification.js)

Server Source Code: [https://github.com/dataformsjs/website/blob/master/app/app.p...](https://github.com/dataformsjs/website/blob/master/app/app.py)

Server Setup (Ubuntu -> nginx -> Gunicorn -> flask -> [keras, tensorflow, sklearn]): [https://github.com/dataformsjs/website/blob/master/docs/Pyth...](https://github.com/dataformsjs/website/blob/master/docs/Python%20Webserver%20Setup%20for%20AI_ML%20Functions.txt)</comment>


Linux Tip: Don't use kill -9 - <AUTHOR>

No no no. Don't use kill -9.
It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:
1) shut down socket connections
2) clean up temp files
3) inform its children that it is going away
4) reset its terminal characteristics
and so on and so on and so on.
Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't work, send 2, and if that doesn't work, send 1. If that doesn't, REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is badly behaved!
Don't use kill -9. Don't bring out the combine harvester just to tidy up the flower pot.
Credit: Randal L. Schwartz
Source: http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#uuk9letter <comment><USER2> As mentioned, SIGTERM can be caught and gives the process a chance to clean up. SIGKILL, the nuclear option, cannot be blocked.

Related: Solaris tip for Linux admins: _killall_ does exactly what it says and not what you think.</comment>


Serotonin and brain function: a tale of two receptors - <AUTHOR> http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0269881117725915 <comment><AUTHOR> Some discussion: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/10/ssc-journal-club- seroto...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/10/ssc-journal-club-serotonin- receptors/)</comment>


What It Costs to Open a Restaurant in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://sf.eater.com/2017/6/27/15733554/cost-open-restaurant-robin-adam-tortosa-san-francisco <comment><USER2> During a team review last year, I remember mentioning that I wasn't "excited" by work per se, but that I didn't expect nor desire excitement from work. For me, books, traveling, and music are exciting, and I get a sense of value and self-worth from the relationships I build with other people. But I work in a big tech firm. A coworker of mine actually questioned whether I was in the right field, saying that a lot of the successful people in our industry are excited by work. I can't remember his exact wording.

Maybe I'd be able to work harder if I wrapped my self-worth up in my work, but I saw what that kind of attitude did to my father. He would come home drained and tired, and wouldn't be available during the week to do something like watch a TV show together. On the other hand, my mother had a fulfilling job, but she didn't have the same kind of emotional stake in it. She turned down a promotion because while it would have advanced her career, it wouldn't have served her interests as an individual.

"I understand it's very unhealthy, but I base my self-worth off the success of my job." That's the quote at the bottom of the article. There's a gulf between knowing something is unhealthy and building a healthy life for yourself, something I wish more people would respect.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I think it's healthy to not view work as part of yourself - but I think the people who do, know that as well.

I've got a job offer for a very nice job, doing software development next month. The pays great, the people, the are great. However, I'm desperately looking for a product design job - because it's 100% my dream. I am fully aware that it's not healthy to tie my self worth to my job, and I should focus on financial stability, and work / life ratio.

But i'd just feel so unfulfilled, and at the end of the day, I just can't help it. Being excited to get up in the morning and go to work, also means getting hurt when it goes wrong.

<comment><USER2> It's a perfectly valid decision to make, but I have a couple reservations.

First, when you say that it's 100% your dream, I can't accept that assertion at face value. Maybe this is cynical on my part, but the fact that your dream lines up so neatly with our cultural definitions of what it means to be successful is too suspicious to be a coincidence. So my cynical take on it would be that much your dream was given to you by other people, and only a small portion of it is truly yours. (There are rabbit holes here, for sure.)

My second reservation is that it's meaningless to "accept" that something is unhealthy without a solid understanding of the consequences of unhealthy behavior. I can accept the unhealthy consequences of eating a donut, because they're broadly familiar to me (an expanding waistline, elevated risk of heart disease in my future). I know people who have had heart attacks, I know people who are too heavy to comfortably hike the trails I love. But it's meaningless to accept that pouring yourself into your work is unhealthy unless you understand what the consequences are. I have friends who can barely enjoy being retired, even though they didn't really "enjoy" working, either. I have friends who have been depressed and unable to enjoy life for months after project failures. And I know people who have had panic attacks at school or work, panic attacks bad enough to call an ambulance.

There is no definition of free will that everyone can agree on, but in my book, understanding the consequences of our actions, and the ability to change our decisions as our understanding of consequences changes, are requirements for exercising free will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "A fire department permit worker told Tortosa that it would take him two to four weeks to even look at Robin's paperwork — or, for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), Tortosa could pay for him to look at it right now."

Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

<comment><USER5> > Can someone please explain to me how this isn't extortion and bribery?

Easy: it's part of the "pay per use" idea that a lot of people seem to think that government should have. Just like express toll lanes or a $7 express bus along side a $3.25 local with three times as many stops, if you want _something_ and don't care how long it takes, choose the low- or no-cost option. If you want it RIGHT DANG NOW, choose the high-cost option.

It's not bribery, it's just business...and people seem to think that government should operate like a business, so we get this fee-for-service setup.

<comment><USER6> >It's just business

It would be that if your tax money wasn't already paying for the guy's job. I see it as blatant bribery.

<comment><USER7> Tax dollars are paying for the regular work on the FIFO queue; satisfying the expedite request without impacting the regular work on the FIFO queue requires additional hours of work to be done in the same time, which costs money that the taxpayers, through representatives, have elected _not_ to pay for. Rather than prohibiting such extra work outright, they permit it to be done, at the requesters expense.

It's a two-tiered system that favors those with more resources to expend, but it's not bribery.

<comment><USER4> I'll be very surprised if anyone is actually pulling overtime to get your paperwork done. My guess is they just put it to front of the line and work continues as usual, overtime or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a programmerby trade, but I own a restaurant in Vancouver. A friend owns 3. Several other friends own several other restaurants. It's a restaurant town.

Anyways, it costs from about $50,000 to $1,000,000 depending on the brand and the size of the room. Averaging around 100k for a non mom-n-pop sit-down place

Mine was about $40k, but it's tiny

Boneta (which was award-winning and loved) was cheap at around $70k

A big Boston Pizza, which is not a great place to eat, is gonna cost $200k+ or so, and a big Cactus Club could hit a mil

A higher price doesn't mean a better restaurant. In fact, I'd say a strict budget can make it more appealing due to creativity

<comment><USER9> I am used to think in cost per square meter, 700,000/116 sqm makes 6,000 US$ per square meter (if you prefer 700,000/1,250 makes 560 US$ per square foot).

That is a very, very high unit cost, even if SF is costly (but the US$ 8,000 month of rent seems to me like "appropriate" and all in all in line with "common" market values).

There is no reference to the number of seats for the new restaurant that I could find, but judging from:

> In the end, the 24 burnt orange leather chairs, 13 wood sushi bar stools, > and nine tables — finished with the Japanese wood burning shou sugi ban > method — set him back $19,760.

It should be 24+9=33 seats, which makes it an extremely small restaurant.

More than 20,000 dollars per seat is more than "high" as I see it it borders to "crazy".

<comment><USER9> Re-reading, mistake, my bad, 24 chairs + 13 stools =37, anyway almost 19,000 US$ per seat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The best starter restaurant is those little lunch places with no seating: just a counter and a long line, you see them around downtown. Less risk on many levels. Every desk in those office towers is a person who needs to get lunch.

A friend in the business says that's usually the second restaurant business someone opens.

<comment><USER11> >Every desk in those office towers is a person who needs to get lunch.

Do you have any insight into why so many people buy lunch instead of bringing it? I've had a desk job for about 20 years now and I think I've bought lunch maybe 10 times when for some reason I wasn't able to make my lunch that day. It seems to me that buying lunch is more expensive and a person will probably eat more calories. I can't imagine it is a time issue, I probably spend less than 5 minutes putting a lunch together every day. That is far less than the time required to go somewhere for lunch. I assume it also isn't an issue of wanting to get away from the desk - most office places I've seen have lots of places a person can go and eat.

<comment><USER12> I go out for lunch basically every day.

Price: Within reason, who cares? I don't have a wife or kids or any obligations really. What good is a six figure salary if I have to micromanage what I'm spending on _food_?

Calories: Diets don't work, so who cares? If the meal is too big to finish then I'll take half home for dinner, like I did today.

Time: IDK if you eat a cold turkey sandwich for lunch every single day or what, but it would probably take me 30-60 minutes to make the things I often eat for lunch, if I even had the ingredients. I don't have the benefit of hours of kitchen prep before the restaurant opens.

Getting away: This is a big part of it actually. Not just leaving my desk, but leaving the office entirely. Walking around the downtown, remembering what it's like to be a human being in the sunlight.

I realize these answers may not match your lifestyle but I'm just trying to give the insight you asked for, from a person who does this.

<comment><USER13> > _Price: Within reason, who cares? I don 't have a wife or kids or any > obligations really. What good is a six figure salary if I have to > micromanage what I'm spending on food?_

This mentality always blows me away and I am genuinely curious.

Has it not occurred to you that if you spend less, you can work less? (i.e. part time or retire sooner)

I cut things like this out of my spending, now I work a couple of years then travel a couple of years, first time I drove to South America, now I'm driving around Africa.

<comment><USER14> Unless you are eating $20-30 lunches every day, the difference really isn't that great. It really boils down to: spend money to save time, or spend time to save money?

A typical week of lunches for me is one meal out with coworkers (~$15), three meals at the work cafeteria ($6-8, we'll assume $8), and one day WFH that we won't count. Average cost of $9.75 per meal, and no time invested. If I was taking my lunch, I'd probably be looking at $2-3 worth of food per day, and at least 15 min of prep time per day; more if you count extra time needed for grocery shopping and so on. I'm not pulling in a fat SV 6 figure salary, but even so my hourly rate is upwards of $40 per hour, so the meal prep time alone is equal to what I'm spending on lunch.

Personally, I'd rather have the time than the money. YMMV.

<comment><USER15> Even if you value your time at $40/hr doesn't mean you're going to GAIN any income for the time spent prepping food. Since I don't get a paid lunch break, I prefer to eat at my desk and work through lunch. This way I can leave an hour or so earlier each day.

I figure I've been able to save an extra $25,000 since I started consistency bringing my lunch ten or so years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This guy should have hired someone else to design the dining space. There entire experience is disjointed and not appetizing. The walls make me think that there is a plumbing problem from the tenant above, all of the furniture is geometric while the dinnerware is handcrafted and asymmetric. He spent a lot of money custom making chairs that belong in a 60's airport lounge, that all of his friends also dislike. For the amount of money spent, he could have had a beautiful restaurant.

<comment><USER2> "Lizarraga hand-poured the rose gold resin that drips down the main room walls, a technique she has never used with this medium before."

Presumably she will never use that technique with the medium again.

A couple golden quotes about the same subject:

"I was very excited when the chairs came and then everyone I showed them to hated them. Like everyone. They either hated the color of leather, or they hated the design, or both,"

"A lot of people are going to hate the design. It's not for everyone, and I understand that. But the feeling of the restaurant is so important to me and I wanted to be 100 percent involved in every aspect,"

It's not a flattering article... laid bare, it seems to depict a man who obsessed over decisions outside his competency, and paid out the nose for self-indulgent decoration.

<comment><USER17> "But the feeling of the restaurant is so important to me and I wanted to be 100 percent involved in every aspect,"

I hate to be this guy, but it feels like a perfect #1 example of why startups fail -- he basically designed restaurant for HIMSELF.

I honestly wish him good luck of cloning himself 100,000 times and being happy to eat at his own place and pay for each bill to return $700k of initial investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hearing all about dealing with the government permitting process and government workers made me so mad. Government should help business, not get in its way.

<comment><USER19> Yet nobody mentions the far higher rent.

<comment><USER18> The rent is an entirely separate issue. The delays with permitting and the 14 different departments can be solved without dealing with the highly complex issues surrounding high rent.

<comment><USER19> Yet once the restaurant is in place the rent continues month after month, year after year. The permit delays / fees are less pernicious. And less $$.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This sounds like an opportunity along the lines of @pud's DistroKid:

 _" By paying a company $5,000 to secure his beer-and-wine license, Tortosa was able to skip the work himself of that particularly involved process, which includes minutiae like mailing notices to every single resident within 500 feet of the restaurant. For Robin, the company mailed out 586 notices."_

<comment><USER21> It's hard to scale, liquor license rules vary a ton from city to city and state to state, and many jurisdictions personal connections matter a great deal.(Not to mention out and out corruption). And some cities have a license cap, so you have to know of someone who's selling an existing license to even be able to bid on one.

Plus you have to deal with the fact that some of those residents might actually object to your business opening. Even if they don't, your company probably still needs somebody who can show up at a meeting, greet the people in power by name and convincingly reassure everyone you're not secretly trying to open a nightclub and pretending it's a sushi spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, this is like a how to guide on how to not run a business.

Raise a bunch of cash, go into a location that has so much wrong with it, blow literally all the cash plus $1k just setting up furniture and permits...

Why wouldn't you find a restaurant that just went under and buy out the lease? Take over the kitchen in place (buying the equipment from the bankrupt owner who just wants out), do a revamp on the sitting area, and spend pennies on the dollar compared to this? Added advantage that all the zoning and permits are already complete?

<comment><USER23> Despite what you've probably heard, restaurants actually fail far less than other types of start up businesses. In a booming economy there will be very few built out restaurants available to buy, and they'll probably have some sort of fatal flaw. Plus, you get TI money if you take over an empty space, and as you can build out how you want, the rewards are potentially better too.

<comment><USER22> Restaurants may fail less often than other startups, but the potential upside is microscopic compared to other startup type businesses. Restaurants are the opposite of scalable: costs scale basically linearly with revenue, but worse complexity of managing the business scales not linearly, but still very poorly with revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There's a menu here: [https://sf.eater.com/2017/6/23/15864260/robin-sushi- menu-hay...](https://sf.eater.com/2017/6/23/15864260/robin-sushi-menu-hayes- valley-san-francisco)

Omakase courses $79-$179. The profit margin of a _successful_ restaurant is around 5%, so he's going to need >100,000 customers at $100/head just to pay off the $700k he's put in.

<comment><USER25> Is the margin that thin even in that price range? I would think the 5% number is for cheaper restaurants but not for higher prices ones.

<comment><USER26> The most profitable restaurants are typically the ones with cheap food. It is counterintuitive, but true.

<comment><USER27> There's a difference between profit and profit margin. A cheap restaurant with a low margin can be more profitable due to volume.

<comment><USER26> Yes, and fine dining is typically worse in every metric imaginable. That's why there is no McDonald's of fine dining. Besides being an oxymoron, the business model is terrible.

You turn over fewer tables with more expensive food, more staff, more real estate, more everything. Then the landlord raises your rent, sucks out all the profit, and you're done.

<comment><USER28> Exactly. The part where the owner raises the rent and eats the profit is a horrible thought. But it made me think. Take a look at the World's 50 Best Restaurant list Top 10 [0]. 4 out of the Top 10 are located in cities that I expect the rent to be below national average. I myself have dined at Azurmendi, which currently sits at a hill top somewhere in the Basque countryside, really remote. Maybe they can afford to be remote and pay less rent because they are on this list or strive to be on there.

[0] [http://www.theworlds50best.com/list/1-50-winners](http://www.theworlds50best.com/list/1-50-winners)

<comment><USER29> I find it absurd to rate restaurants from best to less best. I prefer the michelin rating star.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >A fire department permit worker told Tortosa that it would take him two to four weeks to even look at Robin's paperwork — or, for $536 ($134 per hour of overtime with a four-hour minimum), Tortosa could pay for him to look at it right now.

This makes me very angry. This is approaching the corruption say in India that Modi is trying to get rid of where every local official requires a bribe for them to do their job. I hope this kind of behavior is severely punished.

<comment><USER31> It's a pretty standard practice. You can wait the standard amount of time for the work to be done in queue, or you can pay for the additional time required to get it done faster. The government has to pay that worker overtime to do additional work, and if it's that important to Tortosa he should be the one to bear that cost, not the taxpayers.

<comment><USER30> I am fine with the government charging an expedited fee officially. Individual officials charging expedited fees soon turns to a culture of bribery.

Edit: A commenter posted [http://sf-fire.org/file/2156](http://sf- fire.org/file/2156) which shows that this is an official policy. I can't edit my parent comment now, but I am fine with this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> All of that $ and a shit website, [http://robinsanfrancisco.com/](http://robinsanfrancisco.com/), that has poor on-page and off-page SEO...

<comment><USER6> Ugh [http://robinsanfrancisco.com/img/](http://robinsanfrancisco.com/img/)

<comment><USER31> PDFs in the img directory makes me sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This should be titled "What it Cost to Open _My_ Restaurant in San Francisco". Costs are ridiculously variable in SF, depending your location and what kind of restaurant you build.

A couple years ago I invested in a new restaurant in SF. I believe the total amount spent as of opening ended up around $400k, maybe a little more.

Sadly, it folded after about a year. Restaurants are difficult, especially in a hyper-competitive market like SF. I probably wouldn't invest in one again, even if it was being built by a team with previous restaurant successes. There are just too many variables, and SF is over-saturated with restaurants.

</comment><comment><USER34> Was expecting more of the operational costs of running a restaurant, rent, utilities, food, labor etc. This article focuses on all the stuff he bought to get to day 1...interesting, but not that useful.

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't the tile for such an article be "what it costs to run a restaurant"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone know: What kind of numbers (revenue, expenses, profits) are typical for a medium-successful restaurant of this size in SF? I'm just curious. I know zero about the restaurant business, except that I've heard that the failure rate is high.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think those gold stained resin walls look great, however it also depends on the background wall color. If they don't keep the wall clean enough, those stains would look cheap.

Honestly I'm excited by the crockery and interiors. The chairs don't look comfortable but I would give this restaurant a shot.

What I don't understand is the overzealous budget Mr Tortosa has in this project. In my opinion it would be wiser to spend a lot less on the restaurant and slowly upgrade it over the next couple of months or years. Also, by the looks of it they could have easily shaved off couple of 10 grand just by properly planning and anticipating the license wait period.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you're looking for a chart of the breakdown, I made one with Canva here: [http://i.imgur.com/nK56ERu.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/nK56ERu.jpg)

<comment><USER6> I would've considered a different color palette.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> He doesnt even have a full bar, that would have been another 300k for the full bar alcohol license.. Restaurant looks amazing, just the right location. I think he is going to make a killing.

</comment><comment><USER39> For another, IMO much more interesting take on the nitty gritty of opening a restaurant from scratch, Serious Eats had a series from Tyson Ho on opening his Brooklyn BBQ restaurant Arrogant Swine: [http://www.seriouseats.com/building-a-bbq- restaurant](http://www.seriouseats.com/building-a-bbq-restaurant)

</comment><comment><USER40> What it costs to open a _fancy_ restaurant with top quality finishes including walls dripped with _rose gold resin_.

<comment><USER24> He spent half a mil on rent, construction, kitchen equipment, permits, etc. Artwork, furniture, plates etc (= the "fancy" stuff) came in at "only" $100k.

<comment><USER41> I can't believe that half the time and about 15% of the budget were all due to permitting delays. That is totally nuts.

<comment><USER42> And you wonder why the rent is expensive

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Delayed because of a permit application's font size? Is there a regulation on the proper font specifications?

Why do people tolerate this kind of government? It seems like this ridiculously Byzantine process is filled with too much discretionary power, ripe for abuse.

On another note, why is paper being used at all?

</comment><comment><USER44> I chatted to a guy from Chicago who'd opened a successful rib place in Saigon. Apparently it would cost over $1m, which he couldn't afford, to do in Chicago but cost $30k in Saigon. Not that operating in Vietnam is without it's difficulties.

</comment><comment><USER45> Tl;dr Amount Spent to Date: $701,095

Final total: $701,095

</comment><comment><USER46> A more interesting read is the continuing trials and tribulations of DNA Lounge, DNA Pizza, and the (now defunct) Codeword.

Seeing the city of SF totally fuck up over and over on things as simple as "when is the street outside going to be under construction" is absurd.</comment>


HN: Minneapolis Meetup Tonight - <AUTHOR>

The Minneapolis HN Meetup is tonight at 6pm at the 5-8 Club.  If you're interested and not already on the email list, send me an email at bradleyt (dot) marsh (at) gmail.  Right now it looks like we're going to have a pretty good crowd.<p>Map:  http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=5-8+Club,+Minneapolis,+MN&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=51.488837,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=5-8+Club,&hnear=Minneapolis,+Hennepin,+Minnesota&z=12&iwloc=A <comment><USER2> I really appreciated you setting up the meetup. Unless I'm mistaken, you were not there, while a total of ten of the local HN participants were there. I learned a lot from the conversations, and I hope we do meetups regularly, moving them around the metro area to try out different places to meet.

<comment><AUTHOR> No I was there. I'm Brad if that helps.

<comment><USER3> There wasn't a Brad in the group of people we were with. Where were you sitting in the 5-8 Club?

<comment><USER4> There wasn't enough room for all of us inside, so we went outside to the terrace. We were sitting at a huge table. Sounds like we had 2 different HN meetups going on at the same location. We'll have to consolidate next time.

<comment><USER2> Ah, that's it. I was with a group of ten HN participants on the inside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree, had a great time. However, no one showed up with a black Purdue hat... ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Meetup went great! We didn't see you there, though.</comment>


OO Design Principles Compilation - <AUTHOR> http://mmiika.wordpress.com/oo-design-principles/ <comment><USER2> Notice the number of shoulds. A list of what you should do is like training wheels: useful for beginners but not as much for the advanced.

Instead of thinking in shoulds I like to think in terms of causes and effects. If you don't follow the law of demeter then these will be the effects. Then the programmer realizes they have a choice: even though the law of demeter usually brings about desirable consequences, maybe in a particular situation the effects of not following the law of demeter bring about the better set of consequences.

Thinking in terms of causes and effects also loosens potential dogma.

<comment><USER3> Someone please add this to the top of the list.

There is little value in following programming rules that you don't understand.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Most of software 'methodology' is really software ideology. It's just cargo cult programming. For me the key consideration in building software is whether it produces more money than it consumes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer to think of these as rules of thumb rather than principles. I agree with the spirit of pretty much all of them, but to me, "principle" sounds like one of those rules you're never supposed to break. There are often trade-offs to following these sorts of rules, and sometimes the cost is too high or the process too idealised for real world projects.

</comment><comment><USER6> This list is very useful. It's 2011 now and you have no idea how many people don't know more than half of the list.

<comment><USER7> and also how many programmers are extremely effective and know perhaps none of the list.

<comment><USER6> The number of programmers who practiced Object Oriented mainstream languages and don't know at least a single item in list and are extremely effective is probably close to the number of unicorns that exist in this world :).

People don't just suddenly know how to write good programs. They read materials, they write code and continue to learn from other people.

Sorry, I don't buy the myth and folklore. I used to about 3-4 years ago before I realized that many stories were hyped up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> following the same topic... [http://www.barbarianmeetscoding.com/blog/2011/2/23/best- prac...](http://www.barbarianmeetscoding.com/blog/2011/2/23/best-practices- principles-of-object-oriented-design-classes)

<comment><USER9> Looks like the server has been hacker news'd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's only one rule to OOP: All instance variables should be private.

<comment><USER11> there's more to it than that.</comment></comment>


Meritocracy or Bias? - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/13/white-definitions-merit-and-admissions-change-when-they-think-about-asian-americans <comment><USER2> What difference does it make? "Affirmative Action" vs. "Meritocracy" are principles. "White people are in favor of it" isn't a valid argument for or against either.

The fact of the matter is that through "Affirmative Action", Asians generally receive a handicap, whereas it's the opposite with "Meritocracy". The opposite is true for Blacks.

Pick your poison.</comment>


Let's talk about Python 3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/05/python-3000/ <comment><USER2> Amen. It's going to be a huge pain the ass to convert stuff, but worth it for a much needed language "cleansing."

<comment><USER3> Because as we all know, "clean" code outsells "working" code every time.

<comment><USER4> Why not have both?

<comment><USER3> Because you don't have a time machine, and you do have features to build.

<comment><USER5> But if nobody ever cleans up, you end up with a horrible place to be.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this article has aged well:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

because it chose a really bad example. But the points it makes are where I'm coming from too. "Cleanliness" is highly overrated.

<comment><USER6> Joel's article is about scrapping your existing codebase and starting from scratch. The discussion here is about a new version of the Python interpreter which was made from the old one by means of a bunch of incremental changes, and which will require a bunch of incremental changes in old Python code to run the old code. How is Joel's article relevant here?

<comment><USER3> Because the argument here is that it's worth breaking code to make it "cleaner", and Joel's argument is about why "clean" code is overrated. I agree that it's not a perfect match for the discussion, but it is relevant.

<comment><USER7> "Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."

"You may want to refactor a class to make it easier to use. That's fine, too. But throwing away the whole program is a dangerous folly..."

Joel is talking about rewrites, not refactorings. Py3k is more like a refactoring. You can still argue that it is ill considered, but it is not the same as what Joel is referring to.

(I suppose, technically, it is a forced refactoring for anyone who wants to use Py3k with their existing code. But still very different than a complete rewrite from scratch.)

<comment><USER3> I see where you're coming from; this discussion just reminded me of the value Spolsky seemed to put on sweeping up ugly old code in that article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a flaw in the analogy: Very few of the original monkeys have been removed from the Python community. What Python programmers think are annoying has always simultaneously bugged the hell out of the people working on the language.

<comment><USER9> I think the author was targetting the analogy at the people who are complaining about the changes: they don't want things to break, even if it means a subpar implementation, because _that's the way it has always been_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been meaning to learn Python for a while, and this seems like a good chance to jump in. Are there any books out on Python 3.0 yet?</comment>


It's time for better capitalism - <AUTHOR> https://app.newsoveraudio.com/article/4286 <comment><USER2> I continue to think that, by default, a company should be a Public Benefit Corporation [1] and have to explicitly choose not to be, indicating the kind of company they want to be.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public- benefit_corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation)</comment>


Can we stop Covid-19 using Bluetooth? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AVICOT-APP/Documentation <comment><USER2> Not sure OP is the same as the GitHub developer, but I want to applaud whoever took the time to write out this idea in a professional yet understandable manner. I had fun reading the paper.

Unfortunately this idea is (mostly) dead in the water if it sticks with its current implementation. The reason is that both Android and iOS now engage in MAC address randomization _specifically to prevent_ being tracked by their unique IDs. This "feature" was previously commercialized by stores and private surveillance to track people moving around in a city or indoor building.

Fixing this is not impossible. Instead of Bluetooth tracking, the app could simply just record your location every poll update and save it locally. There is no invasion of privacy if the location file is never uploaded to the cloud. When someone tests positive, they could just have their location file uploaded (anonymously) and every device could cross check its location history with the infected person's.

Technology is likely not the barrier here. Notifying and training medical personnel to effectively use the app is, and getting the general public to "buy in" will cost an absolute fortune (in advertising dollars) for little to no return. This is one of those network paradox problems where you need lots of people for the network to be useful, but the network has to be useful to attract lots of people. How do you solve that?

<comment><USER3> > they could just have their location file uploaded (anonymously)

Anonymity is going to be hard, even with traditional methods, but I don't think a person's location history can ever be anonymous. Especially when presented with timestamps and spanning days. People generally spend a lot of time, or at least their night, in their home.

> This is one of those network paradox problems where you need lots of people > for the network to be useful, but the network has to be useful to attract > lots of people. How do you solve that?

Bake it into an existing app that already has the network, I.E. Facebook.

<comment><USER4> I think you can get around this. Break the physical space up into blocks, say 100' square. Break the time component into 1 hour blocks. Concatenate the space and time components and hash them, then upload the hashes. If someone wants to see if they've potentially been exposed they can just hash their own time/location history and see if it gets a hit against the database.

<comment><USER5> If you are able to check whether you've been in a "dangerous" space-time box yourself, then you are probably also able to check where these boxes are, I suppose? One way would be brute force hashing all possible space-time blocks and comparing with the public hashed list. This mechanism was why I abandoned the space-time box approach to begin with - but if you have an idea for a workaround, please get in touch!

<comment><USER4> You could make it a bit more robust by requiring clients to upload a minimum number of unique hashes with their query then respond only with an "exposed" or "not exposed" response. Then you can check for clients that are repeatedly uploading the same hashes to weed out brute forcers.

I think it would be pretty impractical to brute force _all possible_ space- time blocks. Even if you just wanted to look at the state of California over 24 hours you're looking at 1.0952599e+12 hashes [0]. Say your rig can try 500k hashes a second, that's still almost a month. So now you know the rough locations of every infected person in California over the course of one day, you still have to disentangle the movements of overlapping users. You can make this even harder by requiring people to loiter in a space box for a minimum amount of time before creating an entry, so travel by bike/train/plane/automobile wont be tracked at all.

Clearly the scheme is resistant against mass de-anonymization, but if you knew some specific locations where you thought a specific person might go you could target those space-boxes and, assuming there are not many other infected users in the area, get a sense of when that person was at those places.

[0] 163,696 sq miles = 4.563583e+12 sqft = 45,635,830,000 100sqft space boxes * 24 = 1.0952599e+12

<comment><USER3> Ah good point about overlapping location data for sick users, that would add ambiguity.

This approach still puts a lot of trust in the server. Every client needs to upload their hashes to the server, so if the group running the server wanted to reverse the hashes they'd get everyone's location, not just sick people. The server would also know which hashes were popular, indicating that they are crowded areas like a city or event center. From a tracking perspective the fact that two people were in the same location is useful to start making inferences, even if the location isn't known.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, I'm the developer behind [https://github.com/AVICOT- APP/Documentation](https://github.com/AVICOT-APP/Documentation)

Thank you all for your valuable input - and sorry for the late reply: I posted under my own account ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22462696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22462696)) - but this thread initiated by a friend was the one to be picked up.

I'll try to address some of the issues brought up under each comment later, but here is a few things to consider first:

The MAC address randomization is a key issue here. For the "level 0 list", though, it might not be that much of a problem: If the app also keeps track of its own actual MAC address(es), then these are what would be published in the "level 0 list", along with the corresponding time-index. I'll update the GitHub description to take this into account, but please help me answer some of these questions first (or, better, write me an email, so you can contribute directly to the AVICOT/Documentation repo) :

Does the randomization happen at each new invocation of Bluetooth?

Is it coupled with the "location services" as suggested by jackweirdy below?

Another important point is that of using location tracking instead, as suggested by c22. I had this exact scheme as the initial AVICOT concept, but abandoned it because even with one-way hashing of the coordinates of the space-time boxes, the locations (and thus identity) of the infected person can easily be calculated if the (hashed) "dangerous" space-time boxes are publicly available.

One really good point of using space-time location boxes is, that you can assign an infection risk to being at the same location, say 3 hours later (e.g. use an exponential risk decay with some suitable half-life parameter). This is not possible with the Bluetooth IDs. But unless we solve the anonymity issue in some way, I think the Bluetooth way is easier.

<comment><USER6> > Does the randomization happen at each new invocation of Bluetooth?

Doesn't matter. [https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2019/3/arti...](https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2019/3/article-p50.xml) \- note that this is seemingly aptly published in a conference on privacy. Yes, what you want to use bluetooth for would likely work but we've worked a decade or so to prevent it.

You'll likely realize from my other comment that I dislike the general idea of this but honestly, I don't get the approach from a technical perspective. The idea is an app for smartphones, right? You have all kinds of sensors on those besides BT, e.g. WiFi, GPS. Comparing timestamped movement profiles would give you much better matching than approximating this stuff via BT environments, which these days at least theoretically are designed to explicitly prevent your use case and just seem to limit yourself artificially. The reason you dismissed geolocation is perfectly valid but that also applies to Bluetooth identifiers if you treat them as reliable indicators. If I get a (hashed or not) BT ID of infected persons, I can identify those - at the very least if their device is in my vicinity. And not only while this issue is active but afterwards. You would have to protect that data just as much, putting another ding in the "potential privacy implications" of the approach.

<comment><USER5> The privacy issue is complex. My take on it is quite simple:

I personally wouldn't mind if my (possibly randomized) BT address was made public, potentially identifying me as currently COVID-19 infected - heck, we will probably all have been on that list in a year or two as things stand today.

What someone (not me, of course) would probably mind, however, is if the geolocation data was used instead - and it showed what clubs I went to during the last 14 days.

<comment><USER6> > What someone (not me, of course) would probably mind, however, is if the > geolocation data was used instead - and it showed what clubs I went to > during the last 14 days.

And my point remains that, from a privacy perspective, that distinction is artificial and misleading. Your phone in this mode is seeing BT/BTLE devices all the time, which is why this (or WiFi / GPS profiling) work. On my route to work I pass by dozens if not more BT devices with static location, somebody with detailed log data over a few days will be able to mark both locations in a pretty fine grained manner. The proposed process is not and can not be anonymized sufficiently. Correlation is cheap these days, with big enough adoption a company with enough incentive or something like wigle.net for bluetooth devices will appear and the data will be misused. That might not present a viable problem in the short term during the current outbreak but the long term implications of tracking like this need to be discussed before releasing such a tool to the public.

There's other issues, e.g. a more direct and immediate scenario where Alice knows Bobs bluetooth MAC, as well as an infected in likely proximity, and dumps fake data into your service in order to quarantine him.

<comment><USER5> Your comments are very interesting, and I'd like more input/thoughts about such issues.

However, from your description of the Alice/Bob part, I'm still confused whether you realize that nobody is (or can be) quarantined in the proposed scheme?

The case you describe would, as I understand it be: "Bob is then advised by his own app not to visit his parents and be careful about not infecting others". A bad joke, sure, but not something that can "send him into quarantine", since nobody on the server side knows that he is in any danger.

I may be missing your point here - but if I am, please clarify and bare with me;-)

<comment><USER6> The point of that scenario was that, if the app takes off it it could quickly turn from a bad joke scenario to one with real impact. Either by Bob taking the reasonable step of self quarantine, unnecessary test + fearful waiting time, or in the worst case the app could be, like it's Chinese equivalent, used to restrict Bob's movement by others at checkpoints. Severside knowledge is pretty irrelevant if an armed guard or angry mob wants you to show the app before letting you get your Sunday brunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have another app idea. Quite a bit less sophisticated than what's proposed in the article. But still technically challenging: it's called FaceWatch.

You use the accelerometers in a smartwatch to detect a hand getting closer to the face. If a threshold is breached an alarm is raised on your phone. The pavlovian response is to avoid touching your face and potentially spreading diseases from you hands.

Downsides:

You would need two smart watches.

You would need to code an "eating mode".

<comment><USER8> I've written such an app, which was originally designed for Eczema sufferers to stop touching/scratching their face. I am about to release a beta version (free) aimed at reducing face touching for the Coronavirus. Would you mind if I used your proposed app name "FaceWatch"?

<comment><USER7> It's yours!

<comment><USER8> Great, thank you. I'll comment back here with any updates. The app is very simplistic but I thought it might be worth getting it out there sooner rather than later in case it turns out to be useful to someone. Even if one person can help themselves learn to avoid touching their face and reduce the risk of COVID-19 it will have been worth doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This idea reminds me of Apple's approach to Find My offline device: [1]

> Find My can help you locate a missing device — even if it's offline and > sleeping — by sending out Bluetooth signals that can be detected by Apple > devices in use nearby. These devices then relay the detected location of > your device to iCloud so you can locate it in the Find My app. It's all > anonymous and encrypted end-to-end so no one, including Apple, knows the > identity of any reporting device.

[1]: [https://www.apple.com/icloud/find- my/](https://www.apple.com/icloud/find-my/)

</comment><comment><USER6> @sunemai:

Just fyi, here in Germany a medical uni and some companies seem to currently do the geodata approach:

[https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Medizinische- Hochsch...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Medizinische-Hochschule- Hannover-und-Ubilabs-entwickeln-Corona-App-4680487.html)

[https://www.geohealthapp.de/](https://www.geohealthapp.de/)

</comment><comment><USER10> You can't.

The Chinese Government already deployed Health Code, which pulls data from cell towers to check for cross paths with confirmed or suspected patients, and shows on screen as green, yellow or red colored QR code.

To have this Bluetooth idea effective, you need to have sufficiently numbers of installation, and which can be insanely difficult if it weren't pushed by big corps or the government

<comment><USER11> I agree -- I would say the government should recognize the utility of the idea and request an emergency technical team from both Apple and Google to join up in a public-health emergency response consortium (to ensure interoperability) and brainstorm this idea. And Microsoft too, if they are still making windows phones.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry but are you literally asking governments to cooperate with Apple and Google to backdoor all of our devices or do so and bully the population into submitting their data? There's a point where we need to talk about trade-offs between tracking potential disease contacts and what this does to our society. China isn't supposed to be a role model in this regard people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a fantastic idea for retrospective infectious disease contact tracking. I hope this concept is picked up by WHO/government or at least put on a local trial.

Why don't phones already keep a local log of recent Bluetooth device IDs?

<comment><USER6> > Why don't phones already keep a local log of recent Bluetooth device IDs?

Because embedded hardware like phones usually only persistently store the information for which an actual use case exists. "recent BT device IDs" amounts to quite a bit of information (that is occasionally pretty useless in the case of unknown devices) and would require frequent scanning when you are on the move with little practical purpose outside the tracking space. There's enough approaches to create these profiles from the IT security and ad space but I consider myself lucky in living in a jurisdiction where such tracking is likely considered illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is basically just a more invasive StreetPass, as seen on Nintendo 3DS.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how the section on GDPR actually answers the question it poses. "Any technological solution that tries to mimic the contact tracking performed by medical authorities will automatically break GDPR. Or will it really?" The former has little to do with the latter. If you track PII that's a potential GDPR issue, no matter how humanistic the purpose of your app is. NAL but from the legal side this use case does not seem any different from ad tracking companies doing the same thing. What is the fictional "rephrasing" of what this does supposed to change about the legal implications?

<comment><USER5> The point is that, currently, people are "tracked down" by medical authorities and put in quarantine.

The AVICOT-APP concept is opposite: People would (should) like to know if they represents a danger to, say, their elderly parents, who may die if infected. Thus, there is no need for "the system" to be able to track or identify them at all. Only you, the end user, will ever know if you are in high risk.

<comment><USER6> People are infected by contact with another infected person. There's a middle ground between "ineffective tracking by authorities through Excel sheets" (as seen in Germany) and giving up privacy and this proposal honestly can't be it.

> Only you, the end user, will ever know if you are in high risk.

In it's current iteration the protocol you propose contains this:

"3\. Regularly, e.g. every 6 hours, the AVICOT-APP checks the public "COVID-19 level 0" list on a WHO-organized AVICOT-SERVER. Entries in this are Bluetooth IDs of devices owned/used by officially diagnosed COVID-19 cases, who have given their consent to this publication. The list may be regionally organized, to limit mobile data requirements."

If it is regionally organized this seems like a technical gimmick. If it has a larger scale, there remain privacy implications that would have to be carefully investigated, even with user consent - which dismisses it completely for any form of rapid deployment. Take the above, you either risk exposing Bluetooth hardware identifiers of those consenting known infected or, rely on me uploading my data to whoever it is that runs this. A better model for that part would be something like what HIBP does for password breaches but my point is that the proposal does not address this and since puts doubt on the "anonymity" part of the title. Even if it did, a large part of HIBP is that I can't control that HIBP has the information in the first place. The submission calls all this "sufficiently anonymous" and I would argue that there is no such thing, especially in this context.

Or point 4. "The server then evaluates the data with an algorithm designed to estimate the infection risk." why? We have people that can do that, more effectively than a hastily written algorithm. This just adds unnecessary fluff. Point 5 is just redundant with point 4.

I have no doubt that this is done with the best intentions in mind but the road to privacy hell is paved with those. We would be better off if we used our collective tech knowledge to build something that makes us more prepared and facilitates collaboration on the authority level for the next time we might need it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unless you love fascism this is a train wreck of awful.

It's also full of incorrect statements.

This is not true. The medical community does not agree with this for many diseases and many levels of "non-negligible virus threat"

> Every responsible human being should be interested in knowing if he or she > presents a non-negligible virus threat to family, friends, colleagues and > thus – ultimately – society in general.

<comment><USER15> Wanted to chime in. We currently OEM a product to Purell (GOJO) on exactly this concept. Albeit additional hardware is required, we have been extremely successful locating staff and monitoring of dispensers with BLE.

Our goal has been to prevent the spread of infection in hospitals by monitoring hand hygiene compliance.

'[https://www.gojo.com/en/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2019/GOJO- Ex...](https://www.gojo.com/en/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2019/GOJO-Expands- PURELL-SMARTLINK-Portfolio-with-Individual-Monitoring-Solution')</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any machine learning task to solve? I'll try to do it for free. - <AUTHOR>

It's an experience and fun for me and a good chance for you to get a working prototype. I'm a NLP engineer and my passion is sequence processing. But all other ML tasks are fine. I'll try to solve it in several hours / few days and send you the results.
I am comfortable with Python (+numpy/scipy/sklearn/theano) and C (+blas/lapack), nvcc (cuda).
Please send me a description (and data) to: lightcaster _at_ gmail.com
You lose nothing. I give no warranties but I'll do my best. My current timezone is GMT+4. <comment><USER2> The UH Office for the Communication of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has a survey about data use. ([https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ochadatasurvey](https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ochadatasurvey))

Here's their website: ([http://www.trust.org/?show=alertnethumanitarian](http://www.trust.org/?show=alertnethumanitarian))

You should be able to come up with an interesting idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you seen [http://www.datakind.org/](http://www.datakind.org/) ? - connecting Data Scientists to data problems faced by non-profits.

<comment><AUTHOR> No I haven't seen it before. Thanks for the reference!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I might have something for you - will check with the boss on Monday about potential privacy issues.

If I don't get back to you by Tuesday then please send me a reminder email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you tried Kaggle? There are some interesting projects on there.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes I know. My motives are a bit different. Usually kaggle competition is like a sport - fighting for hundredth of a percent in a long run. Sometimes this is not really practical. Instead I would like to grab something from real life and make it work good enough (as it usually the case for a startup).

But kaggle is a cool place anyway.

<comment><USER6> That's how I think too. Find the low-hanging fruit of real problems, instead of competing for a rounding error on constrained and slightly artificial problems.</comment></comment></comment>


Machine Learning vs. Statistics: The Texas Death Match of Data Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.svds.com/machine-learning-vs-statistics/ <comment><USER2> > To a Statistician, Machine Learning may look like an engineering discipline, > rather than science

This must be the best way of looking at it I've ever seen</comment>


What are the best-kept secrets of great programmers? - <AUTHOR> http://brianknapp.me/best-kept-secrets-of-great-programmers/ <comment><USER2> This is something more people need to see since it's obvious most people, at least that I have met at university, don't get.

They ask me how I got good at this and I just tell them that I kept programming. They don't understand that concept, I get a strange look back every time.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is totally true, the more I built the more I learned and stuff I never got in university just came to me after simply trying it in a small project.

You also have to know, what you can't do that takes looong time to learn. Stuff like distributed systems and cryptography is hard, so don't think it comes as easy as writing you first CRUD-app.

</comment><comment><USER4> One more thing, they reflect upon what they do. It is not just constant practice, it is also about reflecting upon that.

<comment><USER5> Right. Not just building your own but MAINTAINING your old code.

Me in 2014: This seems like a good idea.

Me in 2016: What idiot wrote this crap!</comment></comment>


Quebec jailbreak: escape by helicopter was 'well-planned' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-jailbreak-escape-by-helicopter-was-well-planned-1.2668763

<comment><USER2> Inspiring stuff.</comment>


Show HN: Host your status page on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pyupio/statuspage <comment><USER2> I use Github Pages for my status page too.

Not something I use for websites/web apps I develop for clients, but for my own irrelevant website, I go as far as to cheat and use the following:

        <img src="https://des.tination.server/img/1px.gif"
             onload="statusOk()"
             onerror="statusDown()"
             alt="">

        <script>

          function statusOk()
          {
            // do something involving green and check marks
          }

          function statusDown()
          {
            // do something involving red... and crosses
          }

        </script>

(Obviously you have to prevent caching)

<comment><USER3> People usually don't go to a status page to see if a page is reachable from their computer. They know that already. They want to know if it's a global issue, and if the company is aware that it's down, and when it will be back up.

<comment><USER4> good point, in our situation people check to see if the mail server is down etc

<comment><USER5> for more complex usecases you could load an api status json endpoint instead

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You could also poll the Github API direclty on the client side via Javascript/jQuery (without giving the client an access token obviously) to display the status information, like that you could simply update issues on a public Github repo and the information would change accordingly on the site. With proper E-Tag checking, Github won't even count repeated API queries against the rate limit, which means that you could have the client automatically update the information in the frontend every few seconds.

With Gitboard I use the Github API in this way to display issues in a Kanban board, which works really nicely: [https://adewes.github.io/gitboard](https://adewes.github.io/gitboard)

<comment><USER7> Very cool idea!

> ... With proper E-Tag checking, Github won't even count repeated API queries > against the rate limit ...

Does this behavior rely only on the browser side? Did you add something in javascript?

<comment><USER6> You need to pass the ETag header in the Ajax request, though jQuery might do this automatically (have a look at the utils.js in Gitboard: [http://github.com/adewes/gitboard](http://github.com/adewes/gitboard)). As long as you set it and the data is unchanged you can poll for it as often as you want, which us perfect to watch for changes.

<comment><USER8> jQuery doesn't automatically attach the ETag, but the browser does.

<comment><USER7> So etags should work with JSONP call...

I found that:

[http://fitzgen.github.io/github-api/](http://fitzgen.github.io/github-api/)

<comment><USER6> I think you don't even need JSONP, just make sure to set the cross-domain headers and it should work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Github recently is more offline than my Servers. Not sure if that would really help.

<comment><USER10> At the exact same time, too?

<comment><USER9> Well given the amount both are offline recently, it could have happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jon-wood Keep in mind this is at its core just a static site generator, there's nothing stopping you from pushing the generated site to S3, or even just a random server, and hosting it there instead if you don't like Github's uptime.

<comment><USER11> There is one thing. Updates to S3 files are not atomic. That is, if you update a file, you may still get an old version of it for a time. Same with deletes. The only atomic operation it supports is creating a new object.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure you mean atomic, unless you've seen cases where the file you get from S3 is a mix of the old and new version. Did you mean consistent (which is what you describe)?

<comment><USER13> If you update index.html and style.css, GitHub pages will apparently publish them simultaneously (atomically), but with S3 you upload index.html, then style.css — one of them will be "published" later than the other.

(Analogy: GitHub pages is like creating a new directory, putting files there, then renaming the directory to the old name; S3 — putting files into the old directory.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Personally I prefer a service like [http://status.io](http://status.io) \- it's one less thing I need to maintain/etc.

Not to mention GitHub has had more than its fair share of outages.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow...

This looks _very_ similar to Cachet [1]. Did you take inspiration from it?

[1] [https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io)

<comment><USER15> Anyway, it's a clever idea but GitHub itself suffers a lot of outages. Is this a good idea?

<comment><USER16> 99.9% uptime for the last month [1] doesn't qualify as "a lot of outages" in my opinion.

[1]: [https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month](https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month)

<comment><USER17> They seem to be a significant target for DDOS attacks, which seem to have been quite frequent.

That uptime measure is for the application server, which I suspect does not include GitHub Pages which is hosted separately on static content servers.

Lastly, 99.9% uptime over a month means 43 minutes of downtime. To me, that sounds like quite a lot.

<comment><USER18> The likelyhood that you have downtime at the exact same time GitHub does is fairly low though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are there any decent open source status page systems that do the monitoring for you? I'm just looking for a basic ping or JSON response to automatically update the page for me. I'd like for the page to show there's a problem before I manually work it out for myself!

<comment><USER15> If you install Cachet [1] you can install Cachet Monitor [2] which can monitor URLs for you!

[1] [https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io)

[2] [https://github.com/castawaylabs/cachet- monitor](https://github.com/castawaylabs/cachet-monitor)

<comment><USER19> Nice, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> But seriously - statuspage.io is amazing for this and super cheap.

<comment><USER21> StatusPage.io is nice but they charge $99/mo for custom CSS and $399/mo for custom HTML. I don't see that as being cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I built a static status page that you can host anywhere. I use it for various systems. Its ugly, but works as required. Uses bootstrap and jquery. so you can go crazy with it. Everything is self contained. No need to maintain it. Does need an endpoint for the status page to ping. YMMV.

[https://github.com/bliti/status-page](https://github.com/bliti/status-page)

</comment><comment><USER23> And here it is a follow-up post with some shared experience: [https://medium.com/@stanbright/how-to-set-up-a-free- status-p...](https://medium.com/@stanbright/how-to-set-up-a-free-status-page- on-github-5fc92f63d0f6#.amipcrr73)

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice "hack". I'm using statuspage.io for the notification side of things but can see why this is a very decent free alternative.

</comment><comment><USER25> Host my status page on a site that is down about half the time? Hah

<comment><USER26> 0.0899% == half

<comment><USER25> Yeah, that's several orders of magnitude closer to half than I expect it to be.</comment></comment></comment>


Sale of Second-Hand E-Books Infringes Copyright, Rules CJEU - <AUTHOR> https://www.worldipreview.com/news/sale-of-second-hand-e-books-infringes-copyright-rules-cjeu-19049 <comment><USER2> If DRM infringes consumer rights, well that's just technology for you. But if technology erodes corporate profits - surely the law didn't mean to allow this! Quick, reinterpret it!

</comment><comment><USER3> What happens if you put an ebook on a USB memory stick and sell it like that?

</comment><comment><USER4> A cynic would say that quite a few of the books on the non-fiction best-seller lists are never read, and so cannot deteriorate through use. I can pick out four or five at least on the list at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Non- Fiction...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Non- Fiction_Best_Sellers_of_2018) that I doubt may purchasers or recipient have read past page 50. Should it be forbidden to resell them?

</comment><comment><USER5> They've never heard of bit-rot in Europe

</comment><comment><USER6> And the race to the bottom continues...</comment>


Ask HN: Copy protection? - <AUTHOR>

My employer is worried that our clients will steal our application, and so want me to research copy protection methods.
The application is all client-side, must run without access to the network, and is written in Ironruby.
I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of a solution that I wouldn't be able to break. I know that it's impossible for it to be totally unbreakable, but could someone give me an idea of a pretty good solution?
Apparently cost is no object either.
Edit: Dongles are apparently cheaper than I thought, in the $200 range for a starter kit with five of them. Has anyone worked with them before? What do they do, just give you a small storage area that's somehow hard to access? <comment><USER2> Depending on how much 'cost is no object', hardware dongle's (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle>) are very much still used for copy protection on larger, professional software packages. <http://www.safenet- inc.com/> and <http://www.marx.com/> are two that I know of.

Another method I've seen is to lock the software down to a particular hardware instance. In this method, the customer has to run a program on the computer that the program will be installed to, which grabs all sorts of unique things, like MAC address of any network devices, hard drive serial numbers, etc. The customer then sends the resulting info file back and a unique unlock key is generated.

But at the root of it, the protection is still done in software, which is very much still crackable to a skilled enough attacker. But for software you cannot download from the internet without a company provided password, skilled attackers are harder to come by. Compare that to something like winzip which was used as a teaching tool for how to write cracks.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the problem I've been running into. At some point, in a piece of code we ship them, we will have to have a thing that checks a license and then decrypts the code and runs it. They can just edit that code.

<comment><USER3> You're thinking too hard. Use a dongle, and if people crack it then it's not your problem (blame the dongle vendor).

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been looking at a dongle that allows you to run code on it, so you'd be able to pass it an encrypted program and it would encrypt it for you (without putting the key on the host machine). That should be as secure as the dongle is.

My problem is that I've been thinking of a dongle as a secure-ish way to store a key, which still leaves the responsibility for using the key on my code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're serious and "cost is no object", you probably want something dongle based: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle#Copy_protection>

Note that the objective probably isn't something _you_ can't break, but something that raises the bar high enough it's not worth it for any/many of your customers to pay someone to break.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some kind of dongle is definitely required, but wouldn't someone be able to read the code to our app, remove the dongle-checking part, and then copy it all they want?

We do have a way to keep the code encrypted until we run it, but we have to ship the key with the code...

<comment><USER5> so you're shipping the code with the product or is the code the product (website/app)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the code is the product, it's a program to do physical simulations of a certain industrial process (actually more interesting than it sounds!)

<comment><USER5> and why dont you just ship compiled versions and add some sort of licencing into your program? or does the contract state that you have to give the sourcecode along with the programm (that would make it "some software you built on contract for a company" and not "your product"!)?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main problem is that we want to do time-based licensing, so they can only use the product for a month or whatever before buying a new license. Anything we do in the program to check that license, they'll be able to edit the program to remove.

<comment><USER6> Just include an audit clause in the contract which allows you to audit them for licence compliance. Add a comment in the code around the check which says "If you report your employer for illegally using our software we will give you a $10,000 reward anonymously".

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually a pretty good idea. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessons Learned From StartupBootcamp 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/14104/Lessons-Learned-From-StartupBootcamp-2010.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Alexis' talk was still my favorite. His slides are here: [http://www.slideshare.net/kn0thing/alexis-ohanian-at-mit- sta...](http://www.slideshare.net/kn0thing/alexis-ohanian-at-mit-startup- bootcamp-2010-east-side-story)

If you go through it enough there is a picture of pg's head photoshopped on to 2Pac :)

<comment><USER2> Indeed. It was a great session.

And, I (@dharmesh) must not have bought Alexis dinner recently enough, because my head is photoshopped in on one of the slides too. But, I'm in good company -- @cdixon is there too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great summary. I look forward to the talks going on youtube, especially Metcalfe's, which I missed.

My notes and pictures are here: <http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings- startup/2010-09-11>

</comment><comment><USER4> Great post, but there were a few typos (e.g., under George Bell, "thousand time that" -> "thousand times that") and the use of "I" was very confusing -- was that Jason, or the speaker? One example is under Alexis' section, there was the sentence, "I suggest raising revenue over raising capital..." Is that Alexis saying this? Or Jason's commentary?

The use of different fonts would greatly help distinguish commentary from summary.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you :)

The use of I was my interpretation of a lot of what was said and summing up how I saw the information in many cases. I didn't want to do a straight blow by blow / regurgitation of quotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> spent the day working, but made it to the afterparty. seemed like a great event/crowd. thanks for the summary of the talks.</comment>


Show HN: Paste My Taste for Last.FM, share your music taste - <AUTHOR> https://pastemytaste.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I built this over the last two weekends to play around with VueJS. It's open source and on Github: [https://github.com/dewey/paste-my- taste](https://github.com/dewey/paste-my-taste)</comment>


Freedom in the Fifty States - An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmercatus.org%2Fsites%2Fall%2Fmodules%2Fcustom%2Fmercatus_50_states%2Ffiles%2FFreedom50States2011.pdf <comment><USER2> See [http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/06/12/243047/a-follow...](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/06/12/243047/a-followup- on-the-mercatus-freedom-study/) . "The Mercatus Institute's freedom score was significantly linked to (by state)- lower educational attainment (measured by percent of Bachelor degrees or higher), lower population density, lower per capita GDP, increased infant mortality, increased accident mortality, increased incidence of suicide, increased firearm mortality, decreased industrial R&D, and increased income inequality."

<comment><USER3> So? Correlation is not causation. The publication has nothing to do with quality of life or income and everything to do with freedom.

Another study investigating the link between the two would be interesting but is a non sequitur here.

<comment><USER4> It may also be interesting to study whether freedom is a leading (or lagging) indicator of prosperity, as it is likely that laws have a gradual impact, not an immediate one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you don't want to read the whole thing, basically in the authors' viewpoints: smoking, motorist, mandatory health care, and gun laws lead to a state being less free. To make states more free, get rid of any such laws. If you don't agree with how the authors measure freedom, then you probably won't agree with the conclusions they came to (I certainly don't).

<comment><USER3> It's impossible to take into account every law. Many of those issues impact personal freedom. Government regulation of personal freedom is a fine gauge for overall freedom.

How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?

<comment><USER6> "Government regulation of personal freedom is a fine gauge for overall freedom."

Some of us disagree.

"How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?"

The most important things I would look at are education outcomes of the first and second quartile (of household income) and the diversity of employment available.

I would also look at pollution levels, highway fatality rates, incarceration rates, certain crime rates, certain disease rates, services received for those dreaded taxes, entertainment and cuisine options, we could go on...

Big towns don't become cities and cities don't become big cities and big cities don't turn into metropolii through coercion. They're big because people run away from South Dakota and never go back. Freely.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be listing a variety of quality of life issues, which I don't think is quite the same as 'freedom'. I'm not suggesting that it wouldn't be worthwhile to investigate those issues, just that it seems to be a different focus than the linked report. Your focus would seem to compliment rather than refute the goals of that report.

<comment><USER6> I think you're totally missing my point. Not only the government encroaches on your freedom. You can't just look at the highway regulations as encroaching on your freedom without also looking at the guy slamming into your car* as encroaching on your freedom too.

* which may be the direct result of a lack of regulation. See: Montana.

The corporation polluting your water source is encroaching on my freedoms. People that break into your house encroach on your freedoms. People that breath smoke in public areas that give other people cancer encroach on our freedom.

More saliently for me freedom involves fundamental choices. People want to say what they want, read what they want, go where they want, do what they want, eat what they want. Kids that are undereducated have their choices (read: freedom) massively curtailed. People that live in an area where everyone is a farmer have their choices (read: freedom) massively curtailed. If I want to get thai food for dinner and there's no thai restaurant for 300 miles my choices have been curtailed. If the local library doesn't stock Harry Potter my freedoms have been limited. If the internet is too crappy for netflix my freedom is limited compared to elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that equating "choice" with "freedom" is all that helpful in understanding choices or freedom.

They aren't the same thing and insisting that they are just makes it hard to talk about either concept.

Generally when people talk about 'freedom' in a political sense (which is what the original report was about) they are talking about the way _government_ limits actions and not about how your particular circumstances are different than someone else's.

<comment><USER8> I don't see a freedom listed anywhere in these comments that doesn't come down to the ability to make a choice. In fact, I think a pretty good working definition for "a freedom" is "the ability to make a choice".

Furthermore, the government plays a big role in _increasing_ the number of choices available to people in the first and second income quartiles, as Steko suggested. Looking only at limitations that government places on freedom reveals your bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a very interesting report. I would add one anecdotal piece of information: having lived and visited all around the US, the places I would consider living permanently (California, Washington, New Mexico, Maryland, New York) all rank as significantly less free than their neighbors. I have no idea what this means.

<comment><USER6> This is not a freedom index. This is a freedom from government index.

Apparently it's cool if you're oppressed by your neighbor playing loud music all night or the company upstream dumping toxic waste into your water supply but we've stepped over the line if the government steps in and tries to actually price negative externalities like you know Hayek[1] and Friedman[2] endorsed.

[1] <http://businesspublicpolicy.com/?p=1186>

[2] [http://www.angrybearblog.com/2007/10/friedman- externalities-...](http://www.angrybearblog.com/2007/10/friedman- externalities-and-difference.html)

<comment><USER10> All freedom can be understood in terms of the authority that is displaced [1]. The net amount of liberty, strictly measured, is always conserved [2].

Individual freedom is a restriction upon xenophobic groups; economic freedom shifts the needle in favor of those with the capital; emancipation grants rights to slaves and strips them from slaveowners. The water flows the other way too: you can talk about the "freedom" of Kim Jong Il or Stalin to murder their own people.

The entire political discourse in this country (and, to some extent, HN) will be frozen until we can move past merely reciting mechanically that helping one group comes at the expense of hurting some other group. If we put half as much energy into either throughly examining the moral underpinnings of which groups should be elevated or abased[3], or empirically studying the possible utilitarian effects of this[4] as we spend reciting talking points at each other, we would have a great many of the world's problems already solved.

[1] Understand that I'm trying to be morally neutral here, "freedom" and "authority" are being used descriptively, not prescriptively. Obviously a great many of us have strong opinions that slavery is bad, etc.

[2] By this I mean in any individual exchange, you are taking freedom from one group and are assigning an equal amount of freedom to another group. Human perception can differ a great deal: punishing a murderer has an enormous negative burden upon an individual, but it has an equal and opposite impact to society at large, albeit amortized over a great number of people. This can be hard to see in some cases. Also, I am not claiming that a policy in the long run cannot raise all ships; that is a function of tenth-order consequences, and I (and the parent) are talking about first-order ones.

[3] And by this I mean: is it right to take something from this group and give it to this other group? Under what circumstances? Is inequality bad? Is it bad in proportion to the amount of inequality? Is it still bad if everyone has a sufficient floor of resources that meets their basic needs? These are interesting questions; our current political discourse is not.

[4] And by this I mean: What are some local maxima and non-local maxima for economic output as a function of regulation? If we plot creative output as a function of IP law, what will the graph look like? Can we do empirical studies to confirm or refute the underlying basis for legislation (controlling phenylephrine reducing methamphetamine production, for example)? These are elevating questions that inspire us to learn about our world. We are nowhere close to having this kind of conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Want 100% freedom? Move to an uninhabited area and live by yourself.

I think it goes without saying that when you have relationships with people, you give up a little bit of your own freedom. It's not surprising that areas with higher population density are scored as having "less freedom".

</comment><comment><USER12> No thanks. CA is 48th. They can keep their definition of freedom. I appreciate the no smoking bans and the gun control laws and short term disability (which I had to use this year). They dinged the labor laws, but in CA you can move from job to job without being sued for a non-compete clause. If we are so unfree, how come we have Silicon Valley.

This is off topic in the worst way.

<comment><USER13> I read their state summary of Cali and their "solutions" were just weird. They prescribed to just out-right cut spending, without specifying anything in particular, just the typical "cut spending". Also, gun control being a limit to freedom? What a strange way to view the world.

Politics presented as research are not useful for anyone really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for posting this. I may be able to tie it into something I've been thinking about lately. Here's a link to my previous post. May seem like it's off-topic, but to me it's dead-on. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625009>

</comment><comment><USER15> Clearly South Dakota and they should be killing it economically and culturally and yet shockingly, this is not the case.

<comment><USER16> South Dakota has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and during my few visits to the state I didn't find any problems with the culture there. Why do you think it isn't doing well culturally and economically?

<comment><USER15> It is in the bottom 50% of GDP per capita in the United States (26th).

If economic or personal freedom were any indicators of success, I'd expect it to at least be better than average (it is quite a bit below, $47,275/person for the whole US and $37,375 for South Dakota).

<comment><USER17> There's a loose correlation between freedom and economic/cultural attainment. It works on large scales and explains the difference between, say, the United States and North Korea.

On smaller scales though, such as comparing different states within the US, other things tend to dominate -- in particular the presence of big cities, which are positively correlated with economic and cultural attainment and negatively correlated with freedom.

Honestly, if this graph were the best case we have for the proposition that freedom is nice then it'd be a pretty weak case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lisp Game Jam 2019: Results - <AUTHOR> https://itch.io/jam/lisp-game-jam-2019/results <comment><USER2> There's a really interesting and active sub-community of Lisp game developers. Baggers, Steve Losh, mfiano, borodust, dto, and 3b are but a few of the recurring names. There's even a start-up game company building a large non- trivial game in Lisp [0]. A list of games written in Lisp is here [1]. Baggers has a huge amount (>100 videos!) of youtube content on programming the full graphics pipeline in Lisp [2] and he continues to post week to week.

If you have the impression that Lisp is only used by a bunch of academic knuckleheads like myself, check these folks out!

[0] [https://defungames.com/](https://defungames.com/)

[1] [https://github.com/lispgames/lispgames.github.io/wiki/Lisp-G...](https://github.com/lispgames/lispgames.github.io/wiki/Lisp- Games)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/user/CBaggers](https://www.youtube.com/user/CBaggers)

<comment><USER3> Is clojure welcome in these communities? It's my first lisp, but after 3 years of using it, it's become quite dear to my heart. I've been learning about roguelikes while diving into a pixi.js interop.

<comment><USER4> >Must be written in any dialect of Lisp. This includes, but is not limited to Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, and Clojure.

from [https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game- jam-2018](https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2018)

From the last 2-3 Jams, IMHO, you can see a tendency towards exo-lisps as many entries were done with Fennel or some in Urn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's been a game changer for me observing the elegance and productivity of the Fennel language ([https://fennel-lang.org/](https://fennel-lang.org/)) combined with Love2d (love2d.org) and LuaJIT. Thanks to Phil Hagelberg for his documenting of his experiences ([http://technomancy.us](http://technomancy.us)) and his work on a decent emacs mode for Fennel. Check out his previous winning entry, particularly the code that drops you in a repl and lets you live change a running Love game here: [https://technomancy.itch.io/exo- encounter-667](https://technomancy.itch.io/exo-encounter-667)

<comment><USER6> As a guy who has primarily only used lisp to script AutoCAD, but has used Lua for ML, is this language just for Lispers who need Lua libraries or is there something implicitly better about it than just using, for example, Lua?

<comment><USER5> It's not implicitly better than using straight Lua, no. It just seems to hit the sweet spot of Lisp, game library and interactive development for me.</comment></comment></comment>


Soylent 1.3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.soylent.me/post/104937168407/soylent-1-3-shipping-today-we-are-pleased-to

<comment><USER2> I think fixing their back order problem is more crucial than constantly announcing new versions at this point. I ordered before 1.0 and still waiting...</comment>


Elite team needed for New Social Network for businesses. Crazy Lifeterm project. - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I'm searching for elite team, co-Founders. I believe you are really experts in what you are doing.
I'm located in San Francisco, recently moved from Moscow to  realize idea. - I'm driven and motivated.
I've got idea for a million and millions dollars, but I don't care money at all, I want a big community.
Potential as huge as Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist or whatever.
What I've got idea for  NEW SOCIAL NETWORK for people to communicate with organizations they use to work with, every time, every day!  With brilliant monetizing system with motivating advertisers..
It does not exist anywhere. It's new, it's system, it's crazy.
-really huge concept of service - people would use really often. -service has unbelievable potential. when I think of new features - they come really fast you can't even imagine! -project can be used all over the world, but best to start from U.S. Every city must be in this service.  -iPhone and iPad apps can really rock it too! -after project is on top - service can add shop and sell related products.  -... you can't even imagine how many other features  in my head.
Sounds really crazy.
Searching for elite team to build a huge network.
It's not just a words.  It's time to make business.
'think fast or you gonna lose your potential' - my mindset.
-- All the best, iLgar firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><AUTHOR> I can't wait to start it. Tomorrow I'm meeting VC.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anybody bro?</comment>