New Delhi Locked Down to Douse Rape Protests - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324660404578198473010757116.html?mod=WSJINDIA_hpp_LEFTTopStories <comment><USER2> I fear there are people with a lot of vested interest (yes I am looking at the opposition parties as cliche as it my sound) in a topic that an ordinary Indian feels very passionately about.

</comment><comment><USER3> not a technology/business news is it?

and as 3825 said, it has been taken over by hooligans. the culprits were caught in 24 hours of the incident, there is eyewitnesses, concrete proof, and brutal nature of the case, on the victim's side. The protest is over the head now.

besides, calling it a lockdown is wrong, as their is no martial law imposed or complete shutdown anywhere, only transport towards the city center was shut, to control the crowd.</comment>


Pirate Bay Founder Arrested Again On Suspicion Of New Hacking and Fraud Offenses - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-arrested-again-on-suspicion-of-new-hacking-fraud-offenses-121110/

<comment><USER2> So, someone is being detained in solitary confinement on mere charges, and all this for making a site that lets you download movies without paying for them.

The world is fucked up.

<comment><USER3> The charges are _not_ related to The Pirate Bay, it seems: "Gottfrid was arrested under suspicion of being involved in a second hacking case along with accusations of four instances of serious fraud and four attempted frauds."

<comment><USER2> Sure, but does anyone have a doubt that he would have gotten the same treatment if it weren't for the Pirate Bay?

Plus, I'm pretty sure that the people involved are aware of the intense scrutiny and probably even avoid parking tickets.</comment></comment></comment>


CodeBrew - Scala worksheet in your browser - <AUTHOR> https://codebrew.io/?1 <comment><USER2> Amazing thing. Much better than having to use the full Scala IDE just to sketch some concepts. There is also a Sublime package, but it just isn't on par.

</comment><comment><USER3> These things should get more upvotes... much more interesting than another Amazon drones article I can find at techcrunch</comment>


For a Bit of Colored Ribbon - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/for-a-bit-of-colored-ribbon.html <comment><USER3> Our power company does this too.

I sat down and calculated it costs them roughly a million dollars per year in postage to print and send those out.

I emailed the managers insisting they just put it online and use the million dollars to fund low income people from getting their power turned off and avoid the $50 fee to reinstate power.

All they would offer to do is take me off the mailing list.

If they insist on snail mailing stuff, they should only mail the worst offenders and radically reduce the cost. I use less than 200kwh per month in the winter and I still get those things.

The super stupid thing about those graphs is they include landlords with vacant apartments and houses that keep the power on for maintenance and easier new tennant move in (they just read the meter and change owner on the bill).

<comment><USER4> This is not really true - I worked for the company that generates these reports. It's true that the default product is snail mail, but this has been shown to be highly effective at driving down consumption and is a net savings for the power company.

Further, the company in question does A/B test various ways of sending the report, including email-only to find the most cost-effective way to drive down consumption.

Finally, the neighbor selection criteria DOES account for empty homes and other demographics, where that information is available.

<comment><USER3> Since I once got the report when I only used 150kwh and was saying there were other people more efficient than me, I assure you it's looking at vacant apartments and houses.

Also it's downright stupid to waste resources and postage to mail people who aren't offenders and can do little more to optimize their power use other than turning off the mains.

Just mail worst offenders, people above the averages and save hundreds of thousands of dollars on what becomes junk mail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've read about an experiment somewhere where they found that doing this lead to Democrats trying to save more energy, but for Republicans it lead to them using more energy. They figured "hey, my neighbors use a lot, so I should be allowed to use more, too - otherwise I miss out" (I suppose that was for cases where people saw that they use below average).

Sorry I am too lazy to Google for the paper. The point is: careful with such experiments, the outcome might not always be what is desired.

<comment><USER6> This plays too much into the dumb Republicans stereotype to be believable. "We-ell, if I'm not usin' as much 'lectricity as Jimmy down the road, I must be missin' out on the 'Murican dream!" It's hard to believe that this mentality is prevalent enough in any group to affect overall energy consumption meaningfully.

I could believe that a few people who are in the "below average use" bucket might take these reports as a confirmation that they can relax their energy conservation efforts, but I can't believe that any meaningful number of people would actively increase their usage to "catch up" to their neighbors.

<comment><USER5> Yeah well science sometimes is surprising, otherwise, why even bother to do it? I am tempted, but I'll resist for now to google for the article.

Must resist... :-/

Edit: damn it... Luckily it was the second hit [http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2010/04/nudges_gone_wrong.html)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link. I have some doubts about the validity of the conclusion, though. The only Republican group that showed the increase seems quite narrow. "Registered conservative, does not pay for renewable energy, does not donate to environmental groups, and in bottom 25th percentile liberal block group". How many people are actually in that group? Maybe it's a large percentage, but I kind of doubt it. If it's only a small percentage of Republicans that fell into this bucket, then it's inappropriate to claim that the conclusions apply to Republicans as a whole.

I'm also having trouble parsing the tables in the original paper, but it appears that there are groups with a worse treatment effect (e.g. college educated with above-average use) that the authors did _not_ highlight. Perhaps this is a misreading on my part?

<http://www.econ.ucla.edu/costa/Nudgew15939.pdf>

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if the article I linked to was even the same one that I read a while ago, it was just the second thing that popped up in Google. I regard it more as a curiosity anyway.

I think it would have been better if they had made that experiment in a more neutral setting (psychology students perhaps), the aspect of the political parties is distracting. The main point is that nudges can go wrong.

<comment><USER6> That's fair enough. It's just misleading to paint in broad strokes with terms like "Republican" if the evidence supports only a narrow slice of that. It turns into spin at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I noticed this to, and noticed that they lie. Well perhaps not lie but they cherry pick the other homes, and they can be 35 - 40 miles away in a 'similar' area. The only funny part was when I got my PV solar system, which I turned on "to test" prior to them getting through all the paper work. (we were one of, or perhaps the first, people in our general area to get a 'large' PV system (a bit over 5kW)) Our house came in at like 1/10th the numbers of the 'efficient' house but all the wording was written to tell us how we could improve to get closer to the "efficient" house (which in our case would have meant leaving on a few lightbulbs 24/7 :-)

Anyway I realized then that what ever program generated those reports, the programmer had been told that there wouldn't be any 'good' houses so that text never got into the code. I stopped paying any attention to their propaganda at that point.

As that was 9 years ago I'm sure they are much better now than they were but still.

<comment><USER4> The report Jeff mentions could not have been made nine years ago as the company that generated Jeff's report (a company hired by PG&E) didn't exist nine years ago.

<comment><USER7> As far back as 1998 I've got letters from PG&E that put my power bill in 'context' with the 'baseline' and 'typical' home in my neighborhood. The format has always been the same

Part 1, here are the base lines

Part 2, here is where your power usage puts you

Part 3, here are all the things you can do to reduce your energy usage including, if active, any rebates for various programs.

The funny part was that Part 3 was always created on the assumption that part 2 was significantly higher than part 1. It made me wonder if they were fudging the numbers in part 1 to make that always true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"[I] design massively multiplayer games for people who like to type paragraphs to each other."_

That is an amazing insight and much more interesting than power bills.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not surprised Jeff's energy use is through the roof. Doesn't he have a massive workstation and home server running all the time? Not to mention charging all of the tablets and phones he must have around.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure Jeff specifically builds his machines for low energy use. He's written about that before. Keeping device batteries "topped off" doesn't use much energy, either.

More likely is that Jeff's house is poorly insulated relative to his neighbors. Or that the "average" presented is extremely skewed and not actually representative. (Is Jeff's house actually <1200 sq ft?) It might be interesting to see how many households get reports indicating that they are "above average".

<comment><USER10> >I'm pretty sure Jeff specifically builds his machines for low energy use.

It doesn't matter how low energy your servers are they are still servers than most people don't have.

<comment><USER6> That makes no sense. Obviously the efficiency of any appliance will play into how it impacts your energy bill. Having a server that your neighbor doesn't have won't automatically make your usage greater than theirs unless they happen to have identical usage in all other respects.

Jeff's recent server build (which I believe is going to a colo and not sitting in his house anyway), uses 31 watts at idle and 87 watts at full load. Assuming the middle is typical (and this is likely a serious overestimate), you're looking at 59 watts, or 10kWh/week. You could offset this with a more efficient furnace, or better insulation. You could also more than offset this by hanging 3 loads of clothes per week instead of putting them through an electric dryer (~5000 watt).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The points system on Consumating encouraged me to become social to a degree I had never been before or since. It wasn't all bad. I met my wife on the site and now we have two kids.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would suggest to debug the gas and electric installations. That means monitor if there is any abnormal consumptions or leaks.

Changing light bulbs types is like a blind hit.

My brother installed solar panels and could thus monitor consumption. He noticed abnormal consumptions and with his kids search the origin. They found a useless heater left on in some basement room. Problem solved. The nice thing is that it turned out as a game for the small kids and at the the same time they became more careful about devices consuming electricity for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER13> The cynic in me has to ask: what does PG&E stand to gain from making houses more energy-efficient?

<comment><USER14> Not sure about the US energy market -- but here in Aus -- the profit is in the baseload kilowatts and not in the peaks. Your cheap Coal plant can produce electricity really cheaply - but when demand spikes you need to fire up the higher cost on-demand generators. You can still sell this electricity - <USER2> you may even make a loss on it at the margins.

<comment><USER15> In fact, one quarter of electricity bills goes to _40 hours_ of peak demand _per year_!

[http://theconversation.edu.au/air-conditioning-is-peaking- ou...](http://theconversation.edu.au/air-conditioning-is-peaking-out-time-to- rethink-cool-comfort-10598)

<comment><USER13> Having stayed in Melbourne for a while, I am honestly not surprised. Melbourne's climate is normally rather mild, but their short summer periods are _brutal_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You should always check your bills to make sure that the estimated usage matches the actual usage. It's not uncommon for them to "estimate" based on the average for the neighborhood/city/state/country.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was amused to read that he bought LED bulbs for everything.

I don't deny that they're efficient, but are they so efficient they're worth spending 3-5x the price of a standard energy efficient bulb?

<comment><USER18> I was just looking at this, seem to be 2-3x the price, and, in theory, last 6 times longer, so you win without the cost savings, which are about $1/(hour/day)/year/100W (incandescent equivalent, so 4 rooms with 100W lighting each on for 3 hours a day saves $12/year, compared to CFL, so worth replacing CFL with LED as the CFLs die.

<comment><USER19> One thing I'm interested in seeing with my new LED bulbs is the potential failure modes.

If an incandescent or CFL goes - it's done for. But a quick check of my LED bulbs shows 22 emitting diodes. When it fails, is it more likely that the controlling circuitry goes or that an individual diode goes and it carries on at slightly reduced output? I'm waiting to see, but they've already outlasted the average lightbulb in my house by a long way - so I don't know how long I'll have to wait to verify.

<comment><USER20> It depends.

LEDs use current-regulated power supplies. Lets say your bulb had two chains of eleven LEDs in parallel. When one LED burns out the whole chain is lost and the regulator would increase the voltage across the remaining chain until it was using enough current for two. Naturally this will greatly shorten the life of the remaining eleven LEDs.

This is the worst case scenario and probably won't happen. Two ways around it.

1) Since current is (non-linearly) proportionate to voltage, the regulator need to increase the voltage to compensate. But all regulators have a maximum output voltage. If the regulator is cheap and running near its limits, it can't increase the voltage high enough to damage the remaining chain and the bulb will run a little hot but be fine.

2) LEDs get warm and should not operate above 85C. A good regulator has a thermistor connected to the LEDs and will automatically drop the current to safe levels. The bulb will once again run a little hot but will be mostly fine.

If there are more than two wires connecting the regulator to the LED it might have over-temperature protection. Or if the regulator is physically connected to the heatsink.

The regulators themselves are pretty reliable. I work mostly with low voltage DC lighting (12V-48V, 20W-100W) and there is nothing in the regulator that would wear out easily. Line AC might be a different story, those probably have large filtering capacitors. If the caps are electrolytic they might dry out eventually from the heat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not from US, so can anyone tell me why some months have low energy consumption compared to other months? (electricity - may vs july)

Also, do you guys use natural gas for heating too?

<comment><USER15> The biggest proportion of household energy goes towards temperature management -- heaters, air conditioners, or in some climates, both!

<comment> j-g-faustus Space heating, water heating, refrigeration and air conditioning add up to 75% of the energy used by households in USA: [http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=us_energy_...](http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=us_energy_homes)

Although I was slightly surprised that "lighting and other appliances" is as much as 25% of the home energy use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In my experience, heating and cooling is the bulk of residential energy use. If you live in an older home, make sure to get an energy audit from the utility company (usually free - maybe you just need some additional insulation.

Also, thermal curtains (aka, black-out curtains) can help if you have a lot of window surface area.

</comment><comment><USER23> That totally works btw - statistically. If you notice you are being taken for a fool (or your customers notice it) then expect there to be hell to pay.

</comment><comment><USER24> The only problem is that they're motivated to reduce your consumption to mask their price increases and reduce their costs to maximise their profits.

Just like petrol/gas, spend your money to buy fuel efficient cars, petrol costs more, no noticeable difference in the bank. Everyone has to get on the wagon or be priced out. It's like an armed robbery, but the gun is an increasing cost of living, with the threat of jail if you can't pay.</comment>


Why Silicon Valley is Not Where You Should Launch Your Next Startup - <AUTHOR> http://loopshot.com/blog/?p=11

<comment><USER2> _Perhaps the most important reason to not launch in Silicon Valley is that your city needs your entrepreneurship. Here, I'm assuming you actually like where you live._

Although I agree with that sentiment, so often the policymaker is the one who decides the fate of the startup community. Silicon Valley is progressive in that sense, and it will always be a home for entrepreneurs looking to accelerate their ideas/careers/success.</comment>


The Horrifying Apple Super Bowl Ad That Time Forgot, 1985 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/tech-time-warp-lemmings/ <comment><USER2> Both this one and 1984 ad could be made into great spoof ads about Mac and iPhone users today. How the world has changed.

<comment><USER3> [http://static.fsf.org/nosvn/stickers/DBD- Sticker_002-jmt.svg](http://static.fsf.org/nosvn/stickers/DBD- Sticker_002-jmt.svg)

CC-BY-SA if you want to reuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The tone of this advert was not that different to the big government advertising campaigns of the era, whether they be warnings about AIDS, drink driving, not locking up your house or buying shares in a once government owned utility.

When viewed in that context it is not that out of the ordinary, and it was probably put together by the same fear-mongering creatives that worked on the government campaigns.

I was wondering what the Mapple Office product was, wondering if it meant Word was out on a Mac, but no, they meant the fileserver plus printer. Wasn't it Canon that actually made the printer?

<comment><USER5> _Wasn 't it Canon that actually made the printer?_

The internals at least, the original Laserwriter used the same Canon LBP-CX print engine as the original HP LaserJet. Both had unique control hardware / software, and somewhat different cases.

Quite a lot of printers seem to share the same Canon guts: [http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/reference/pcr/engine/1311](http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/reference/pcr/engine/1311)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Those ads are a little ironic, considering Apple's design philosophy now.

</comment><comment><USER7> It shows the deep roots smugness has in Apple culture.

<comment><USER8> Actually Apple's advertisers, Chiat/Day, pushed them into running "Lemmings": neither Jobs nor Sculley was particularly happy with it. And to be fair, when Chiat/Day made "1984" Jobs had loved it but the rest of the Apple board hadn't liked it and had wanted to cancel it. (Source: Isaacson's /Steve Jobs/.) Another example of what Nigel Tufnell observed about cleverness...

<comment><USER9> John Sculley said the same thing in "From Pepsi to Apple".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of the Pink Floyd MTV The Wall. Where lines of students followed each other into a meat process machine.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't imagine what it feels like to witness first row a whole stadium being dead silent by an ad that you designed ( or at least were involved with). Even for someone like steve jobs, that must have been really painfull.

<comment><USER12> What other response would be expected from a very quiet commercial? It's not really a scream and cheer inducing spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who has forgotten about this?? It's probably in the top three of all-time most memorable Super Bowl commercials. Not a fan of this luring/phishy title..

<comment><USER14> I'd never seen or heard about it before. I think it has been overshadowed in pop culture history by the 1984 ad the year before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The irony is, the IBM PC was a very open machine. The Apple folks were the secretive ones.

<comment><USER16> Very open indeed. The Technical Reference Manual for the PC actually included circuit diagrams and the source code for the BIOS. Here's the version from the PC/XT (warning: huge PDF file):

[http://www.retroarchive.org/dos/docs/ibm5160techref.pdf](http://www.retroarchive.org/dos/docs/ibm5160techref.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Here's the AT one, it was the last one that was open in that way (and closest to what the modern PC is based on): [http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_AT_Technical_Reference_Mar84.pdf) It's an even bigger PDF than the XT one :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand. In what way was that ad "horrifying"?

<comment><USER18> Might be the whole mass-death thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's easy to forget how many missteps Apple made at the time and how easy it was for the company to push Steve Jobs out the door.

</comment><comment><USER20> Very dystopian and moody. I've never seen an ad so dark.

<comment><USER21> Come over to Australia or New Zealand. Our PSAs tend to be dark and in your face eg [http://youtu.be/ZgkwYyPUMsU](http://youtu.be/ZgkwYyPUMsU) and [http://youtu.be/bvLaTupw-hk](http://youtu.be/bvLaTupw-hk)

<comment><USER20> Well, I'm okay with those ads. They are just the real deal.

The Apple ad, on the other hand, is pure fantasy, but uncomfortably creepy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Easily one of my favorites. Comments about it are painfully predictable and get split into two basic camps. People try and read all types of bullshit about current Apple into it, and those who make the very simplistic underdogs/countercultrualists-turned-authoritarians observation.

However, for those who simply take it for what it is, it's genuinely creepy which is so unusual for advertising. Strange creepy you get every so often, but scary/dark creepy is pretty rare in advertising. With the obvious exception of scared straight PSAs and political ads. Rarely does a business trying to simply sell you a product take such a freaky approach.

Sorry, I'll let you return to your glib observations and poorly thought out conclusions about Apple users, "Apple culture" and whatnot.

<comment><USER23> Talking about glib observations....

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand all the irony people keep pointing too. The point as I understand it is that people were miserable using the business products of that day.

Nowadays you could make an argument that people are lemmings for using Apple products just for the sake of them being Apple products, but judging from both anecdotes and high customer satisfaction ratings, I highly doubt the majority of Apple product users are miserable with their iPhones etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> it might be controversial, but horrifying ?

<comment><USER26> Some people find portrayals of mass suicide by jumping off a cliff horrifying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Criticizing a commercial from 1985 as being representative of anything Apple is doing today is a little much. Sure it sucked but it was memorably sucky. How many squeeze the charm in ads are still talked about?

<comment><USER28> Well if an ad from 1985 is not representative of today's Apple, then people should also stop praising the 1984 ad, since that is also not representative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> When the announces announces "The Macintosh Office", the implication at first seems to be that the people _buying_ the Macintosh Office are the lemmings jumping off a cliff.

Terrible messaging all around.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well they got the office market share projected right!

(yes this is sarcastic).</comment>


Show HN: Shorty – A dead simple URL shortener service (with analytics) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shorty/ <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/shorty/](https://github.com/shorty/) is a user with no repository from UK. Are you sure that the url is correct?

</comment><comment><USER3> Correct URL - [https://github.com/PadamSethia/shorty](https://github.com/PadamSethia/shorty)

</comment><comment><USER4> Love the simplicity. What is the "Tag URL"?

</comment><comment><USER5> Just curious – was there any particular reason to use MySQL directly, instead of eg. SQLAlchemy?</comment>


Hacking Ruby's Syntax - <AUTHOR> http://www.leonardoborges.com/writings/2010/02/03/hacking-rubys-syntax/

<comment><USER2> This strikes me as a terrible, terrible idea. There are already two ways to declare a method private in Ruby (as the author of the post says). They are both simple, easy to remember and not especially verbose.

He has small quibbles with each method ('small' is his word, by the way, not my characterization), but still, to tweak the parser and create a special _def_p_ keyword of his very own? How does he plan to share code with anyone else?</comment>


Bitcoin expert scams a scammer, donates the money to charity - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ben-perrin-bitcoin-1.5238225 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a scam in a game called Ultima Online I saw where someone would pretend to be an NPC and say 'I shall double thy gold if ye trust me' and if you gave him 5 gold pieces he would give back 10. After a bunch of transactions someone would inevitably attempt to give him 100,000 gold and then he would stop working ha

<comment><USER3> Years ago when one Bitcoin was worth less than $20, individuals would run doubling games on shared Google spreadsheets.

The operator would publish a Bitcoin address and the spreadsheet. Participants would send whatever amount of Bitcoin they wanted to this address. The operator would add deposits to the spreadsheet in the order received.

Starting from the top of the list, as soon as the total deposited was enough to double the first deposit, the operator would send double the amount to that participant.

Then when total deposits grew enough to double the second deposit, it was paid out. This continued until there weren't enough new deposits to double the next in line.

Could be illegal, but it's definitely not a scam because everyone could see from the beginning that the pyramid must eventually collapse. Many of these games were actually called "Ponzi" in the name of the spreadsheet.

Some of these games ran a surprisingly long time, months in some cases.

And in the games I played, the anonymous operator never pulled an exit scam. They profited naturally when deposits eventually dried up and the remainder was their reward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He scammed a scammer for $50, that's it?

<comment><USER5> I wonder if he committed a crime himself? Would this be prosecutable?

<comment><USER6> Depends. In some places public prosecutor could take interest, but it's unlikely for a single act.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got scammed once, in the early days of the crypto craze. I was selling a video card on Reddit, and the person sent me a forged btc escrow email. I was naive enough not to pay attention while in a rush, and promptly shipped the card. Days later, he messages me throwing it in my face how stupid I was, even posted images of the card in his computer.

Probably thinking I was too stupid to follow up, I began the manhunt. He used a lot of very similar aliases on Reddit, and the identical email around the internet tied to publicly displayed IP addresses while scamming others. Tracerouting those IPs all zeroed in on the same exact town. He also foolishly used a real mailing address(his friends). The images he posted showed the serial number of the card I had on file. During this time, he continued to berate and taunt me from all of his aliases, even asking me tech support questions on how to fix the undervolting mod I had done to the card. I remained silent.

My favorite quote. "being a scammer dosen't make someone a bad person, it just makes them smart for being able to outwit other people into handing over free money. Thanks for all your help I really appreciate it. Fuck you, and have a nice day. Next time you shouldn't throw your money around like it's a boomerang causes it's not gonna come flying back to you every time something dosen't go your way. i know my morals and taking money from people who have nothing better to do with it than throw it around like it's nothing on the internet dosen't seem like a crime to me."

At this point I was ready to board a plane and confront this punk.

Instead I compiled all of the information I could find on this dude, and created a 20 page document of evidence. That's when I contacted the police in his local hometown. It was met with a luke warm response, so I contacted the local news station and explained everything to a reporter. A day or so went by and I was contacted by a local officer that was friends of the reporter.

Fast forward a few days, the officer had visited the homes of both this kid, and his friend. The kid emails me crying, WHY DID YOU SEND THE COPS, why would you do this to me? Shortly after that I begin getting emails from his 'father', on how it's my fault that I didn't verify his age, and I'm forcing his child without permission to trade money for a video card, and contributing to video game addiction. How it's not their responsibility to pay for people selling "stuffs to child" without parent's knowing. "Are you still trying to finish trade with children?". On and on. So I press full charges with the police.

End of the story, Mom gets involved, apologizes, and sends me the full amount in Paypal + shipping and fees. Best part is I actually got WAY more than the value of the card, because I had set the original MSRP as a starting point. Done.

I wish you guys could read the entire email saga, and all of my documentation. But hopefully that's enough to get the gist :)

<comment><USER8> If I may tell a "me too" story...

I used to run an IRC channel; it kept getting hacked. Every few days. None of the folks in my channel could stop it, nor could the IRC admins. I had no idea why this person was doing this or why he only seemed to attack us.

Someone knew someone at IBM security, he somehow got us the guys phone number and called it. It turned out our hacker was a 16-year-old. We talked to his father for a bit, and never heard from him again.

<comment><USER7> Awesome! Justice feels sweet doesn't it?

<comment><USER8> Humbling too. Being p0wn3d by a teenager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"In this case, every 24 hours, they guaranteed me a doubling of my bitcoin, and said that if I would just send them some bitcoin I could start seeing returns."

Flashbacks of ISK doubling in Jita

<comment><USER10> you send IT

*ISK

and i send double ISK no scam

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Original: [https://www.btcsessions.ca/post/scamming-bitcoin-scammers- fo...](https://www.btcsessions.ca/post/scamming-bitcoin-scammers-for-charity)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Police would not comment on the case, and they don't recommend trying the > same response.

So--did they comment on it, or not?

<comment><USER13> They did not comment on the specific case, but they commented regarding scamers in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wondered why this was in any way newsworthy when I found out it was a whole $50...then I read that this dude was the 'marketing director of a btc firm' and it all made sense. This is garbage PR bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER15> Do people actually use BTC to buy food in Venezuela, or do they just claim to, to beg for BTC donations?

<comment><USER16> The last time I tried to look into this, it seems like there are generally three things happening:

\- Venezuelans using Bitcoin mining as a way to arbitrage their subsidized below-market electricity rates into money.

\- People suggesting Venezuela as a hypothetical case for a flight to cryptocurrencies in a place undergoing hyperinflation.

\- Bitcoin boosters confusing the two (perhaps deliberately) and claiming on thin evidence that Bitcoin use is widespread in Venezuela.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't found anything to indicate that real use of Bitcoin is widespread in Venezuela.

<comment><USER17> The Open Money Initiative [0] has done qualitative research to help pin this down- from what I remember of talks they've given, the answer to real usage in Venezuela is somewhere in between. Crypto has certainly been helpful for capital flight, since smuggling eg gold outside the country is quite a bit more difficult to get through customs than a private key seed.

[0] - [https://www.openmoneyinitiative.org/](https://www.openmoneyinitiative.org/)

<comment><USER17> Some more details

[https://twitter.com/LorePach/status/1159459121722097666?s=19](https://twitter.com/LorePach/status/1159459121722097666?s=19)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish I could have done that. I lost 33 btc.

<comment><USER19> Well, you may as well tell us how you got scammed.

<comment><USER20> Probably forgot his password.

<comment><USER21> Worst.. Scam.. Ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tangentialy related: allegedly, North Korea is behind attacks on Bitcoin exchanges, trying to fund its nuclear weapons: [https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/10/26/report-north-korean- elite...](https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/10/26/report-north-korean-elite-behind- scams-targeting-crypto-investors/)

<comment><USER23> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd0p96miSK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd0p96miSK8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I highly doubt this was $50 of the scammer's own money.

More than likely, it was money he received by scamming some other victim.</comment>


Show HN: I failed for a weekend project, here is my 5 days side project - <AUTHOR> I was wondering whether it's possible to successfully create a weekend project and if so, with which quality. Here at HN I've read many stories of random people (to me they are like teachers) creating "Show HN" projects in 48 hrs which are amazingly awesome and also hit the top site of HN.
So here I'm presenting mine: http://keepandplay.com. This is actually not a weekend project, I tried for it to be, but I failed. It actually took me 5 days to have it as it is right now. So I'm still profoundly skeptic on how to realize a 48 hrs side project with the look and feel and quality I would be satisfied with.
Here is how I spent most of the time. I worked between 8 and 14 hrs a day (I'm on vacation) - Searching and choosing a keepandplay.com domain - 2 hrs.
- Keepandplay backend - 1 day
- Logo design 6 hrs. I created 18 different prototypes
- Frontend design - 3 days. Even though this site looks really simple, designing it was really hard for me. Sometimes I found myself spending more time on design than on code. I basically took screenshots from similar sites (youtube, courser, onreplaytv, soundcloud, vimeo, vine, itunes, vevo) put them on an Omnigraffle page and compared all of them. Keepandplay is a combination of Soundcloud, Vine and OnreplayTV.
- Dealing with not required but necessary settings - 6 hrs
+ It's hard to believe, but developing a "simple" (48 hrs) website has a lot of stuff going on:

	    - Responsive design from 320x480 to 1920x1080, not forgetting portrait and landscape

	    - Favicons - which sometimes requires different logo design since the image is not big

	    - Setting some analytics tracker. i.e. register, generate code…

	    - Register site on Google SEO site
 Now it's already really late over here… I'm glad I'm finished now and I hope you guys like the outcome. If you do like it, do find it awesomely handy, then share it with all your friends and after that come back here and give some feedback. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Nice! Very useful! A blog post on how you did this and maybe a link to the repo would be a great addition if you want to frame this in the context of a weekend project.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Sometimes I found myself spending more time on design than on code." \-- it's frustrating that sometimes it can take as long to write an entire screens worth of code versus getting 1 element to line up just right.

</comment><comment><USER4> > \- Logo design 6 hrs. I created 18 different prototypes > \- Frontend design > - 3 days

This is why people can do things in 48 hours. They just pick stock designs and go with them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I choose to believe many of these "weekend hacks" took much longer than a weekend for the sake of my self esteem.

</comment><comment><USER6> I need to go through my youtube watch later list and download them all for my commute.

Great tool.</comment>


How we interview engineers at CircleCI - <AUTHOR> https://circleci.com/blog/how-we-interview-engineers-at-circleci/ <comment><USER2> I interviewed at CircleCI many months back. Overall I thought the process was done very well until I got to the stage before the onsite and I was simply sent an email that said that while everybody like me and thought highly of me they were not going to move forward at that time. I followed up asking for more specific information and never heard back.

This process is never perfect, but I think when you don't hire someone it is always nice to provide something solid the interviewee can go off of. Even if the response is simply that we felt we had stronger candidates for whatever reason.

<comment><USER3> This has been covered in previous discussions, but basically anything they say can be used against them in a lawsuit:

[https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-companies-give-interview- feed...](https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-companies-give-interview-feedback)

<comment><USER4> Why isn't there a waiver process so an interviewee can sign off that they won't use the feedback in a lawsuit?

<comment><USER5> Waivers aren't legally binding. The company gets nothing by providing feedback, and even if there's a small chance of a lawsuit, why take the risk?

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that the company does get something back, potentially. Many companies will say to come back after 6 or 12 months to re-apply. If they like a candidate well enough to really mean that, wouldn't it help the candidate to learn what they were otherwise weaker with so they can work that out before returning?

But that's a fair point about waivers not being legally binding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Out of any group of 1000 applicants [...] Fewer than 3 will pass the on-site > interview and receive offers.

> Our ultimate goal is to have the best people here, doing their best work.

I feel like everyone is so afraid of hiring a 0x or -1x programmer that they don't want to take a chance on a mere 1x programmer.

If I ran a company (I don't!) on the scale of hundreds or thousands of developers I'd be very choosy about who I let into senior/leadership type roles, but be rather accepting of individual contributors, the hope being that many of them would grow and develop their skills.

Am I just vastly underestimating the overal strength of a random sample of 1000 candidates? Are there really only 3 worthwhile developers?

<comment><USER3> No, I don't think you're underestimating their strength - I think it's more that you're vastly underestimating how expensive it can be to make a bad hire and how difficult it can be to fire someone in California, even at the individual contributor level.

A few companies do manage to do it, but as far as I can tell you have to set up your corporate culture, HR department etc. from the outset to be prepared and ready for firing people frequently, and that's not something many startups (other than maybe Netflix?) were/are really well prepared for...

<comment><USER7> Um, is it really that hard to fire someone in CA? It's an at-will state and you can get rid of someone that day for any reason under the sky (that isn't 'discriminatory').

Firing doesn't seem hard but I think your point does stand that the cost of having to do so is kind of great. Find, hire, onboard and train a new employee, one that you hope does better than the bad hire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How would you feel about there being some sort of standardized credential certification, similar to a BAR or trade skill licensing, that proved a candidates technical chops ahead of time? Do you think this would help reduce the number of candidates that gets turned down during the initial screen?

It seems to me like if there was some standard of proving technical skills, both parties could save a ton of time and go back to regular culture-fit style interviews.

Of course, for the highest paying/most demanding jobs interviews would have to be tailored - but I don't really see why junior/mid level roles need interviews that last 4-8 hours on site plus any pre-on-site screening that needs to happen.

<comment><USER9> This exists in the form of the NCEES Professional Engineer exam ([https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/software/](https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/software/)). The exam specifications for software are here: [https://ncees.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/SWE-Apr-2013.pd...](https://ncees.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/SWE-Apr-2013.pdf).

The PE exam is traditionally taken by people in the physical engineering disciplines; mechanical, structural, civil, and the like. By passing this exam you earn the right to use the 'Professional Engineer' title. Many (all?) permitting jurisdictions require non-trivial construction projects to be reviewed and approved by licensed PE's - this is not a joke certification.

In the physical engineering world (structural, mechanical, civil) the PE exam is seen as a mark of a competent engineer, and usually comes along with a significant pay increase, even if the engineer is not using their license to review and approve projects.

Seems to me like the PE exam would be an appropriate exam filter for software hiring.

<comment><USER10> The trouble with this is that to have an exam to be an fooist, you have to have an agreed canonical body knowledge that constitutes the craft of fooing.

Mechanical engineering has that because it's been going on for a very long time, and has had time to converge on such a canon, as have many other professional disciplines. But programming hasn't.

This is why the few successful certifications in our industry are issued by a body which controls a specific canon - Cisco can certify you as a network associate on its switches, Microsoft can certify you as a solutions expert on its development platform, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Candidates pair with members of the engineering team, and work together on > problems/projects in the actual CircleCI codebase.

Are they compensated for this work?

<comment><USER3> I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Are you asking if they should be? Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates?

If I were betting on this I would wager that something like 95% of the time, the existing employee would be able to solve the project or problem much faster without the candidate's input at all, but the point is to try and approximate a more realistic work experience and environment.

I think that's a reasonable goal and I don't think CircleCI should be vilified for it.

<comment><USER12> > I feel like this is a disingenuous question.

Not at all.

> Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering > team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates?

Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338) That was on the front page three days ago.

The GP's concern is legitimate; job interviews should not be an excuse for unpaid labor.

<comment><USER3> > Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the > time

That's fair. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible, and especially given what I've heard from friends who've worked in freelance web development there's a huge long tail of scummy opportunities out there.

I more meant to suggest that it was unlikely this was CircleCI's motivation.

Also an important distinction between these two situations is that in the example you point out, someone is being assigned a specific task to produce some new IP which the company can then simply steal, whereas in the CircleCI case I am assuming the "problem/projects" they have you pair on are something in the neighborhood of e.g. "let's go analyze some page load performance data together and see if we can fix some low hanging fruit" or "let's figure out how to set up an alert in our Slack channel for this signal we have in some logs".

Yes it's still true that a candidate could come up with some brilliant insight that saves CircleCI real money in this scenario, but it just seems unlikely and not something they could profitably build a development strategy around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Our ultimate goal is to have the best people here, doing their best work.

Yet you have to tailor your ad language so more women apply because they get scared by words like "objectives"?

I don't even know where to start here.

<comment><USER14> I do worry that this is deeply circular logic. Words like "challenging" are considered strongly masculine by the Gender Decoder they linked to. I don't see how calling that word masculine is doing anything other than entrenching gender stereotypes even further.

<comment><USER15> I'll take a company trying to be cognizant of such things, and over adjusting, over not at all.

I think it's great that Circle is trying to do their part in being as inclusive-minded as the can be from the research they've collected.

If at the end of the day that is somewhat misguided, I'm sure they'll readjust, given that they have already proven they will, where many others have either explicitly not cared, or never even thought to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 2\. Micro-skills take-home problem. The candidate completes a coding problem > and reviews it with the interviewer. Talking through the problem with the > candidate helps us assess ability as well as the candidate's thought > process, and how their priorities and values in writing software line up > with ours.

This is generally a lousy experience. I've been places that want me to build a 'simple' (single entity) fullstack CRUD app (angular w/ASP.NET core backend.)

So what is it that they want prioritized? UI skills? Backend dev skills? I can do both, but I'm not going to spend a week making it enterprise-production- ready. The hiring engineers all have things they are looking for and these things are never well defined for you up-front, so no matter what you do (unless you spend way too much time on it,) someone may use it to disqualify you (without you ever knowing it was important.)

<comment><USER5> Your experience isn't the norm. All the take-home exercises I have ever done are specific to the position, and take a few hours to finish.

<comment><USER16> "full-stack developer" is fairly norm these days in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The fact that they use a pseudo scientific "Gender Decoder" is a red flag. It leads me to think Circle CI has unfair prejudices against men and masculinity in general.

By the way, "Objectives" and "driven" are neither feminine or masculine, they're just words. Can you imagine if every word in the Oxford English Dictionary had a gender classification?

<comment><USER18> If it's true that using "female-coded language" results in more applications from women, without reducing the number of men who apply, what's the harm?

If it's not true, then I would agree that this is probably a waste of time.

There's at least one peer-reviewed study (Gaucher et al, 2011) which supports the idea that these words make jobs sound less appealing to women. Do you know of a study which challenges these findings?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> CricleCI has 100-250 Employees, which at 1000 applicants per 3 employees means over 30,000 interviewed applicant? Seems high.

<comment><USER20> Seems like bullshit, to be frank. It smells like a culture that has progressively thought more highly of itself over time than it should.

<comment><USER21> Or more likely, it's just a process that was born out of necessity due to them getting more and more applicants for a limited handful of positions. How else could any company handle that situation other than making their process more and more selective?

And it would seem self-evident to me that not all of their 100-250 employees were hired at that 3/1000 rate, as number of applicants will grow over time due to increased brand recognition, increased spending on sourcing/outreach, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Candidates pair with members of the engineering team, and work together on problems/projects in the actual CircleCI codebase.

This seems like it'll bias to those who can quickly ramp up on a new code base in an unfamiliar environment. Which, in my mind, is a distinct skill from being able to contribute quality code to a code base you already know. I wonder if this is known and acknowledged bias or not at CircleCI.

<comment><USER23> While this is true, one could come up with similar arguments for any task put to the interviewee. Not to demean your point, but the interview process _is_ one of elimination after all, and biasing the task to favour certain traits and skills is but one of the ways you can go about it.

<comment><USER22> I totally agree that everything introduces bias, I was more wondering if this was intentional/understood bias or accidental bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There's a basic problem with posts like this. Finding the right people to associate with is a hard problem.

Finding friends is hard. Finding a significant other is (ideally, anyway) a once-in-a-lifetime challenge. Finding people to hire is even harder: you're still trying to establish chemistry, only now there's a lot of money involved and the actors are big groups of people with complicated internal dynamics.

So I think what's wrong with this post is that CircleCI seem so self- satisfied. They seem to think they have a handle on this problem, when anyone who's been through a job interview in the last year or so will tell you it's a shitty, capricious, random experience even when they take you.

</comment><comment><USER25> CircleCI's hiring process had 1000 people enter their funnel as new candidates and 3 emerge as employees. Others have tabulated the rate of candidate->screen, screen->onsite, and onsite->offer. If we make a conservative estimate of 1 hour of company time per considered resume (averaged across all steps, higher for those who get far into the process, lower for those pruned earlier), they burned at least half a head of employee time to hire 3 heads. That's way too high an interview cost per hired head.

</comment><comment><USER20> Only 3/1000 will receive offers. Does this strike anyone else as an extremely flawed and stringent filter? They claim to only want to hire the best, but in my opinion, they will end up hiring the lucky, with similar opinions and skillsets to the interviewers.

<comment><USER26> After reading this, it sounds like applying to CircleCi would be a waste of one's time.

<comment><USER27> That seems a bit harsh, even if CircleCI scores below average on some steps in their funnel. You know going into any company's hiring process that they're going to extend an offer about 1-2% of the time from the very top of their funnel. That doesn't mean you'll go around talking to 100 companies before you get an offer, but the numbers on the company's side will almost always look grim to a candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you get 1000 applicants and only make 3 of them offers, those better be some very good offers.

</comment><comment><USER29> How many positions were you _actually_ hiring for though?</comment>


Die With Me – The chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery - <AUTHOR> http://diewithme.online/ <comment><USER2> I believe this to be a marketing stunt for Silicon Valley. Look at the carrier in the iPhone image...Hooli.

<comment><AUTHOR> hahaha yes maybe :)</comment></comment>


Everest's Darkest Year (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.outsideonline.com/1924596/everest%E2%80%99s-darkest-year <comment><USER2> I have a weird fascination with everest climbing season, which some pretty conflicted feelings about the people who travel to climb it these days.

Essentially the only draw of Everest that is truly unique is "it's the tallest." That's not very meaningful; it doesn't translate into "best views" or "most challenging" or even "most significant to summit." Yet this bucket- list task of "climb the tallest mountain" is leading to traffic jams of rich westerners all trying to shuffle their way up the peak at once are making expeditions extremely dangerous for each other, and the sherpas.

Honestly, I don't think anyone really has any business up there. I think if you have a natural talent for mountaineering, you can find better, more challenging climbs that are still safer. I do think I recognize the draw, but I'm also repulsed by the selfishness. And I don't accept the echo-chamber consensus opinion of mountaineers that it's all worth it in the end.

<comment><USER3> > And I don't accept the echo-chamber consensus opinion of mountaineers that > it's all worth it in the end.

I'm not sure what mountaineers you've talked to but most I know don't like the current state of Everest and how its become a tourist attraction. Most I know support the restriction Nepal is considering of restricting permits to those who have climbing experience on other significant peaks.

> Honestly, I don't think anyone really has any business up there.

Well, no one has any business being up on any mountain; yet we do it.

> you can find better, more challenging climbs that are still safer.

Yes and no. Though your statement is true I'm not sure you realize how safe Everest is. Everest has about a 4% death to summit ratio. Though its not the lowest rate among the 8000m peaks considering the masses of inexperienced climbers who climb Everest the fact its so low is amazing to me. If Everest was climbed by the same type of people who tackle K2 or Nanga Parbat (26.5% and 20.3% death:summit) I'd imagine the ratio would be significantly lower on Everest. Even so, Everest has a low fatality rate.

However, it is also not technically challenging (the challenge is the altitude not the climbing) so because of that finding something more challenging and safer shouldn't be a problem.

Its also worth mentioning that there is more than one route up Everest, the Southern Col is the most popular and easiest and thus sees the traffic jams up Lhotse face and at Hillary's Step. Other routes don't see the same traffic.

<comment><USER4> Are you describing these ratios correctly? A 20% summit:death ratio would mean 1 person summits for every 4 who die, right? Is this really death:summit, or is it summit:attempt?

<comment><USER5> Probably death:summit -- IIRC K2 is about 1:4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everest out did that in 2015 with 19 killed on the day the earthquake happened. I guess there will be risks.

<comment><USER7> Also, _nobody_ will summit Everest in 2015 ([http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150513-everest- cl...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150513-everest-climbing- nepal-earthquake-avalanche-sherpas))</comment></comment>


Think iBooks Looks Familiar? You're Not The Only One. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar-youre-not-the-only-one/

<comment><AUTHOR> Another news with the story I've heard before.. independent developer develops a cool app.. Big company sees it thinks "This is cool".. Rips it off!</comment>


Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JonathanLink/PDFLayoutTextStripper <comment><USER3> For those interested in converting PDF tables into CSV, there's also Tabula ( [http://tabula.technology/](http://tabula.technology/) )

(Used by many journalists to analyze the data in PDFs)

<comment><USER4> I find it absolutely ridiculous that we have to resort to these kinds of tools :/

We have digital formats, and we decided to standardize document distribution on the one that makes it as hard to extract data as if it were on physical paper.

<comment><USER5> PDF is a perfectly fine and rich digital format. It also allows you to do proper copy and paste, which is much saner than anything paper offers.

Sure, PDF is a light on context clues for automation and is targeted purely at humans. But formats targeted at both computers and humans consistently fail (XML with accompanying XSLT comes to mind), and/or only have terrible tools for creating files (easily parsable, pretty HTML).

Either there is very little real demand or we consistently fail at making alternatives viable.

<comment><USER6> > _It also allows you to do proper copy and paste, which is much saner than > anything paper offers._

Technically it does that, yes. Rarely do I see people taking advantage of it, though; most of the times I tried to copy some text out of PDF, the result had to undergo a significant cleanup before becoming usable.

<comment><USER7> I've had similar experiences, as well as worse; one PDF I got from a bank about my student loans a year or so back had ostensibly only text content, but none of it was even able to be selected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is important for (al)pine users ... when reading email in a terminal it is very useful to be able to open a PDF attachment as text and view it in the (terminal) mailtool ...

Yes, (al)pine is my mailtool in 2017.

<comment><USER9> Also mutt, which I've switched back to recently. I've got a little Atom powered Chromebook converted to Linux that just does not like modern heavy webmail clients(even GMail when it was still running ChromeOS, and this is one still on the market, Acer CB3-131) so a combination of mutt, mbsync, and msmtp is a much nicer combo. Mutt is a terrific mail reader but its internal SMTP and IMAP handling can be a bit iffy, hence mbsync and msmtp.

Though I can generally open attachments just fine, this text rendering of PDFs would be useful for when I'm SSH'd into my home machine and reading stuff remotely(usually from work where I don't want to download my personal email).

<comment><USER10> Mutt + mbsync + msmtp is my setup too. I'm using Neomutt, since that's being actively maintained by a sizeable community of friendly people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Curious if this works better than the pdftotext utility that comes in the Debian poppler-utils package.

That has a --layout option that works really well sometimes and really terrible other times. Doesn't seem to be related to document complexity either.

<comment><AUTHOR> During the development I compared my results with the ones of pdftotext utility and i obtained more or less similar results. The objective of my code was to have an equivalent tool easily embeddable in any java/android project and to learn more about apache pdfbox.

<comment><USER11> I imagine it's not an easy task guessing about proportionally spaced fonts, overlapping bounding boxes, columns, tables, wrapping, and so forth.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, definitely not easy but fortunately pdfbox offers a solid base to start with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fairly frequently, OCR engines are posted here. But almost without exception, they lack layout analysis, which renders them largely useless.

Is this something that could be combined with those OCR engines? (e.g. TesseractOCR...)

<comment><USER13> I would not call these services useless ;) - but I wonder the same... Some apis like [https://ocr.space](https://ocr.space) return the coordinates of each converted word. Can that be a used input? (I have not tried it yet)

<comment><USER14> ephesoft seems to use this for classifying and data extraction from documents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> who would be interested by an online website doing the job?

<comment><USER15> if you really want to rake it in, serve, at static speeds (meaning instantly, I swear, boot a ramdrive (Tmpfs) and serve static html from nginx all from RAM), text versions of the top 10,000 web sites. there is so much crap on most sites. re-crawl hourly.

monetize via Google adwords.

EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. I am not suggesting serving PDF's. I am suggesting serving tiny text renders of top sites, that otherwise are much too bloated.

the hard part is getting the text and layout right. many people read many sites for the text IMO.

So I am suggesting you make an all-text version.

As an example, the front page of the New York Times right now, copied into Microsoft Word, is 2504 words. When I save from the word I copied into into .txt - I get a 16.4 KB file.

By comparison, when I put the site into a Page Size Checker -- [http://smallseotools.com/website-page-size- checker/](http://smallseotools.com/website-page-size-checker/) \-- I get 214.23 KB. That is impressively small, and it's a fast page.

If I try their competition, the Washington Post, I get 237 KB. If I try the Wall Street Journal, I get 938.15 KB -- nearly a full Megabyte. (This is actually more what I was expecting - I'm impressed by the Times.)

Suppose someone desperately wants to glance at the Wall Street Journal from a poor connection where they barely get data. The difference between 12 KB and nearly a megabyte is huge. Its the difference between 4 seconds and 312 seconds: 4 seconds as compared with 5 full minutes.

So there is a large need in my opinion for such a service in case someone desperately wants to see a text render. Preserving any formatting at all, helps hugely.

<comment><USER16> You can use the SHA-1 of the PDF's to avoid serving the same pdf twice.

<comment><USER17> You've been away from HN a few days? The SHA-1 collision example uses PDFs in its demo. Hence other commenter saying SHA 256

<comment><USER18> The OP was almost certainly being sarcastic.

<comment><USER15> For clarity can you edit your comment to add cozzyd (the OP you mention) - <USER2> am sometimes sarcastic but not in this case. I'll then delete this comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ahh this will be useful for my kitchen receipts. Thanks. Now I just need to roll that with an auto translator too.(I guess I have my day off project now :-) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to know it could help you. Good cooking to you!

<comment><USER19> Both I and my accountant thank you haha.

<comment><AUTHOR> glad to hear that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fun, I did the same thing as a clojure repl exploration to pipe PDF text to a bare Swing GUI (I know, a little absurd in a way).

The deja vu made squint for a minute.

ps: pdfbox is nice

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice. I recently got very familiar with PDFBox and parsing complex layouts - it is a great library.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there a PDF to HTML converter which can consistently get line breaks right?

<comment><AUTHOR> could be a nice feature but not easy task. I'll give a try, though.

<comment><USER23> Please update us/me when you do. I'm also working on the same problem, would love to chat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Although I haven't tested this yet, these utilities tend to fail when fed a table with empty cells.

<comment><USER25> The first example image in the linked article shows a conversion from a table with some empty cells. It looks fine.

<comment><USER24> Those are at the end. I meant empty cells in the middle. The ones I tried don't account for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> It works also with empty cells in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> But does it keep both the layout and Sha-1 hash? Not sure it's HN worthy otherwise.</comment>


The College Rankings Racket - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/opinion/nocera-the-silly-list-everyone-cares-about.html

<comment><USER2> From the article: "Yes, The Washington Monthly's rankings are yet another list compiled by magazine editors, inevitably flawed. But the point the magazine is trying to make is that this is the model of higher education we should be encouraging. Can you really disagree? I have no doubt that you can obtain a very good education at Texas A&M. As you surely can at many other institutions that don't crack the top of the U.S. News rankings."

I happen to like the Washington Monthly rankings and the assumptions behind them quite well. When I think about colleges for my four children, I consider a variety of sources, and don't give a privileged bit of mindshare to the always controversial U. S. News rankings. A really useful tool for college applicants themselves, or for parents who will be asked to pay part of their children's expenses for higher education, is the College Results website

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

which is a user-friendly interface for searching up data reported by all United States colleges and universities to the federal IPEDS database. If you look up Harvard and then ask to see similar colleges

[http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=16...](http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=166027)

there, and compare that with looking up Texas A & M and comparing similar colleges,

[http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=22...](http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=228723)

you are given a whole bunch of sortable data columns, grouped under different tabs, by which you can compare colleges. I especially like to use the Finance and Faculty tab and then to sort by Instructional Expenditures / Total FTE to see the stark differences among colleges in how much they actually spend on student instruction. In a few rare cases, the spending per student is ABOVE full list price for all students enrolled at the university (because the university has endowment funds and other sources of revenue besides tuition payments from students). In a dismayingly large number of cases, even after "merit aid" (bounties offered to desirable students) and other "scholarships" (discounts from list price offered to price-sensitive applicants) the net out- of-pocket price for a student and the student's family is still ABOVE the actual spending of the university on student instruction. It's worth looking at this kind of comparison when comparing actual financial aid offers from universities after being admitted to more than one.

Of course the radical thing that U. S. News and World Report began doing a few years after I finished my undergraduate degree was RANKING rather than just publishing ratings. By forcing all "national universities," on the one hand, and all "national liberal arts colleges," on the other hand, into a single strictly ordered ranked list, it set up a fratricide among colleges that has students wondering, "Why shouldn't I go to that higher-ranked college if I get admitted to more than one college?" A lot of colleges used to survive on strictly local reputations in the olden days, but now most colleges are part of a national market of applicants, and have to step up to national reputations. This is not wholly desirable for the colleges or for the applicants, and shouldn't be the last word on anyone's college choices, but it has reduced the isolation in which many colleges used to form their reputations in my generation.

Of course in September 2007 Paul Graham wrote an essay, "News from the Front,"

<http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html>

in which he wrote, "A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college."

A lot of people still think that is a radical idea. They still think it is crucially important to go to a better rather than a worse college, and certainly important to go to college rather than to enter the workforce before gaining a college degree. Maybe, maybe not. It is undeniably important to learn how to be curious as an adult and how to learn new knowledge each year for all of one's life, and if college helps with that process, that's wonderful. But the learner attitude of taking responsibility for learning throughout life is more important than the degree, don't you think?</comment>


Show HN: I made a React Hook to use Tensorflow.js easily - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/use-tensorflow <comment><USER2> Pretty amazing this is even possible! I haven't used tensor flow before (so please excuse my ignorance) can I train it to recognise a certain thing and use this package too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure! That would use the default _import useTensorflow from "use-tensorflow"_ mentioned in the docs:

[https://github.com/franciscop/use- tensorflow/blob/master/rea...](https://github.com/franciscop/use- tensorflow/blob/master/readme.md#usetensorflow)

While the _syntax_ for that import is still experimental, it'll definitedly be supported one way or the other. I have only implemented very simple NN from scratch and used the official tensorflow models, so I'm also not sure how to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been playing around with Tensorflow.js, loved it and decided to create a library to save someone some pain (including future me). It's still fairly early, I want to add other models but would love some feedback with it so far:

\- Please try it and let me know what you think of the current API.

\- If you have other usecases please let me know, would love to add more examples. So far covered loading static images and realtime video feed right.</comment>


What's Anycast and why would I use it? - <AUTHOR> http://damianzaremba.co.uk/2013/01/what-is-anycast-and-why-would-i-use-it/ <comment><USER2> I think a neat experiment with the any cast feature of ip6 would be to write a simple CDN that uses it to provide the locality. Would likely not be a terribly performant CDN (there's a lot more nifty bits going on with a good cdn) but it'd probably be a great way to really understand the precise practical tradeoffs and value of anycast in practice.

IP networks are some of the most complex (and interesting) systems humanity has ever built, so at some point complex systems need to be experimented with to see how they'll actually behave!

<comment><USER3> > ... a simple CDN that uses it to provide the locality.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you mean to tell the end user where the host (being reached via anycast) is physically located?

This exists as part of the AS112 Project[0], assuming server operators have created/edited the appropriate resource record.

From a machine in my data center (Midwest):

      $ host -t txt hostname.as112.net prisoner.iana.org | tail -n 2
      hostname.as112.net descriptive text "ICANN DNS Operations"
      hostname.as112.net descriptive text "Culpeper, VA, USA"

From a machine in One Wilshire (L.A.):

      host -t txt hostname.as112.net prisoner.iana.org | tail -n 2
      hostname.as112.net descriptive text "ICANN DNS Operations"
      hostname.as112.net descriptive text "Los Angeles, CA, USA"

Those of you in other geographic areas will likely hit other servers.

On a side note, if you manage your own DNS servers, consider adding the relevant .in-addr.arpa zones to them and help alleviate some of the load. Or, if you have bandwidth to spare, bring up your own AS112 server. I work for an ISP and will bringing one on-line in the near future.

[0]: <http://public.as112.net/>

(Note: After lurking for a few years, I finally created an account here so I apologize if the formatting of this "first comment" is wonky.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice article.

For users of AWS, Route53 supports anycast. <https://aws.amazon.com/route53/faqs/#Route_53_anycast>

<comment><USER5> Same with OpenDNS, Google Public DNS, DNSMadeEasy, etc.</comment></comment>


Implications of the Third Industrial Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/jeremy-rifkin--2/9652-implications-of-the-third-industrial-revolution

<comment><USER2> For a more realistic view on this subject:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/03/16/12632/](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/03/16/12632/)

<comment><USER3> Ad hoc I would say he is wrong, zero marginal costs are a problem for capitalism. Zero marginal costs imply no labor involved, no wages earned, no prices payed, no profits made. So how are you now going to acquire the capital for the initial investment?

<comment><USER4> I don't see how you get there from here. If a product requires fixed costs there will be prices paid and profit even if marginal costs are negligible. That's the software industry in a nutshell.

<comment><USER3> You are looking at it from the wrong side - selling software does not provide an income to anyone. Lets take the nuclear power plant example again. You have high initial costs F building it and then you are trying to produce x units of electricity without additional costs and sell them for a price per unit P. In this scenario you will provide incomes on the order of F to the people building the power plant but later you ask for x * P to pay for the produced electricity and x tends to infinity. So unless you just throw away your perfectly good nuclear power plant at some point or lower the price to zero, you will suck in money you will never hand out again.

The heart of the problem is that at zero marginal costs nobody has to work, nobody has an income, nobody can pay the price. And more realistically having very small but non-zero marginal costs does not really improve the situation either, because it will still only provide an income to very few workers compared to the large group of potential customers.

<comment><USER5> You still have to pay taxes, at least property and payroll taxes, and comply with laws; and the government can still print money, tax people and corporations, employ people, give/lend money to institutions at low rates, and pass laws and regulations/obligations which cost labor to fulfill. Likewise, people and organizations owe rents to each other, have covenants they need to fulfill. Your nuclear power plant will never be a money black hole in the way that you mean.

<comment><USER3> But then again the marginal costs are non-zero due to state intervention. But let me change the example, I can probably make a more convincing case with software.

You have developed the perfect office suite and it is used all over the place. No further development needed. You request a daily license fee of $1 per user. You have also bought and payed for a fully automatic solar powered license server on your private island processing credit card payments and handing out new license keys.

Now you have essentially enslaved the people - everyone has to directly or indirectly work a tiny bit harder, produce a tiny bit more goods and services, to pay your license fees and therefore finance your consumption. This is not a big deal if seven billion people have to finance only you, but it is obviously nothing that scales to an entire economy.

Even at $1 per day you will collect $140 million per month assuming 0.1 % of the population is using your office suite every working day. That is enough to also pay for your family and your friends, 14,000 friends at $10,000 per month. It still is a pretty tiny portion of the entire population but we are already in a region where only thousands of such businesses would have a significant impact.

<comment><USER5> Is the state going away sometime soon? Or it's going to stop intervening?

Good luck with your $1 a day, "enslave the people" software tax. World of Warcraft generates ballpark the numbers you are throwing out there, although they have some server costs and the game is getting a bit long in the tooth. If you want to keep your slaves you probably need programmers and designers continually improving the product, fixing bugs, maintaining compatibility with and fully utilizing OS and HW upgrades; otherwise, competition (both free and paid) will likely overtake you. If you are immune to competition, you could get hit with anti-trust action on three continents.

Your hypothetical 4.67M subscribers surely aren't going to pay $365 a year unless they have an expected payoff in excess of that. When you buy something, does it make it less valuable to you that there are no serfs working hard, endlessly and forever to make it? If that's the case the Beatle's catalog shouldn't still be a multi-billion property, since "the Band" isn't hitting the studio any time soon. Is software less valuable than music, videos, books or other forms of content?

Even if magically this never-updated software somehow keeps generating stable revenue forever without any ongoing costs (marketing? accounting? legal?), it still has a finite Net Present Value, with all its costs in the development phase. Are you suggesting there's a catastrophic limit on the allowed gain (NPV / total cost)? Why are investment bankers allowed unlimited upside on their investments without it posing an existential threat to the economy?

As soon as you earn your nut, that's it, you're done spending money and engaging in new economic activity? You won't invest, start new projects, buy stuff? Start a spaceship company or solve malaria, maybe run for office or fund election campaigns?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article was a waste of time, it only tells us that the robots will take our jobs just like numerous times before. Technology have always changed the labour landscape and old professions vanish and new one show up.

Petition of the Candle Makers

Ironically, French economist Frederic Bastiat lampooned protectionism back in 1845 when he penned 'Petition of the Candle Makers', mocking the sun's "unfair trade advantage" over candle-makers.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us."

Read more at [http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/11/too- big-t...](http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/11/too-big-too- powerful-too-free-google-vs.html#RloSqtC36lsgf79Q.99)

[http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.no/2014/11/too-big- to...](http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.no/2014/11/too-big-too-powerful- too-free-google-vs.html)</comment>


It's Crazy How Much Money a Startup Can Waste on Bad Hires - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/money-wasted-on-bad-hires-2014-02-24

<comment><USER2> New site, old content. Previous discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7215196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7215196)

Also flagged. This guy's practically spamming us to get pageviews.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting article, but I question hiring people that you fire after 4-6 weeks - to me, the whole hiring process at this company is way off.

Out of 19 hires, 6 were bad hires, and had to be let go or quit on their own after 4-6 weeks. For some reason, the company thought they were good enough to hire, possibly leaving stable jobs with other companies for better opportunities, and this turned out to not work. Now they have a pretty big stain on their resumes - a 6 week (full-time) job doesn't look good.

With respects to the 1 hour commute - did the company consider remote working at all?

</comment><comment><USER4> Some of the points are good, but I challenge the 3 make-or-break assertions. As a developer, I care about

1) Competitive salary, 2) Good co-workers who understand dev and care for others, 3) And good top level management who do right by their employees

I don't think this is too much to ask for. I have no problem enduring rough spots like crunch time, but it needs to be counterbalanced appropriately and things planned out as best as possible.

Too many companies get #1 & #3 wrong.</comment>


Drugmaker transfers all patents for its billion-dollar drug to Mohawk Tribe - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/08/allergan-does-patent-deal-for-restasis-with-native-american-tribe.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm.... part of me think "wow, this is pretty brilliant", but another part of me thinks "I'm not sure Allergan really thought through the potential blowback from the public."</comment>


Restify 1.0 for Node.js is officially out - <AUTHOR> http://mcavage.github.com/node-restify/

<comment><USER2> I'm confused as to why these frameworks don't use the full delete identifier and instead opt for del. delete is a completely valid property identifier for objects and can be accessed identically to del and is significantly less confusing.

If you are using full verbs for everything else, stay consistent please :-/

<comment><USER3> So even though it's a reserved keyword, it's ok to use as a property name?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks interesting. I've used <https://github.com/visionmedia/express-resource> for similar purposes.

</comment><comment><USER5> In terms of a RESTful web service, is an object's id supposed to be passed in as a parameter in a GET request, or be a part of the core URI, e.g. api.test.com/teacher/1234 would retrieve the teacher of id=1234 or api.test.com/students/1234 would retrieve that teacher's students.

Is api.test.com/teacher?id=1234 more kosher?

<comment><USER6> The pattern used in Rails would be something like api.test.com/teacher/1234/students

<comment><USER5> I was just reading up on the Graph API Facebook uses and its pattern is just api.test.com/1234/students. There seems to be very little standardization. The tutorial I'm reading right now wants me to pass the id in as a parameter. Weird.

<comment><USER7> Facebook's REST APIs seem pretty casually designed. "api.test.com/students/1234" is better URL design than "api.test.com/1234/students". You could then naturally guess to use "api.test.com/students" to get a list of students whereas with "api.test.com/1234/students" you'd end up having to do something weird like "api.test.com/all/students".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thing about all of these Sinatra-like frameworks is there is a lot of code repetition. Instead of passing in a function for each http method for a given uri, it would be nice if I could pass in an object for the uri once, then have the framework call the object's head, get, put, etc. functions.

<comment><USER9> You can already accomplish this in Express by creating middleware and abstract routes for CRUD stuff.

app.all('/users', middleware, routes.user);

If you're just doing CRUD on a route, that can be abstracted fairly easily. It can also help better organize your code on a larger project (a la MVC-ish), rather than the Sinatra-like feel.

Too many "beginner" express examples show everything in one big file. With all the route logic, etc all in one place, without any CRUD abstraction. Generally these demos are so small that they don't need any abstraction. It takes 20 minutes to write the whole thing, and it's not meant to do much in production. In a production environment, where you have a bigger app, you'll want to abstract away as much of the boilerplate code as possible. Luckily it's fairly trivial to compose abstract higher order functions in javascript to do just that.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing this tip. Do you by chance know of any tutorials on writing middleware that does this sort of thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats!

1\. Small aesthetic thing - in the menu, there are 2 items named "Server API", which are both hi-liting when either is in context.

2\. Your intro might benefit from listing not only why/when to use it but what kind of use cases are better suited - eg. which use case brought you to begin building it?

Looking through the rest!

</comment><comment><USER12> I've just ported Stick from RingoJS to Node, which does the same thing but lets you write code in a synchronous manner: <https://github.com/olegp/stick>

<comment><USER13> i fail at seeing the point in forcing javascript to act synchronously

<comment><USER12> You end up with less code that's easier to maintain, in my experience. Check out this presentation I gave on the topic: [http://www.slideshare.net/olegp/server-side-javascript- going...](http://www.slideshare.net/olegp/server-side-javascript-going-all- the-way)

<comment><USER13> thx, i'll have a look

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I keep hoping to see more PATCH support in REST frameworks like this, but it doesn't seem to be getting much traction. Perhaps we need to include it with the CRUD operations... CRUPD?

</comment><comment><USER7> Another project with similar aims:

<https://github.com/marak/webservice.js>

</comment><comment><USER15> I have been looking for something like this, but I still miss support for building a streaming API. Expected in version 1.1? :)

<comment><USER16> are you saying restify doesn't allow piping?

<comment><USER15> Not sure what you mean with piping, but all examples in the documentation are fixed length responses.

<comment><USER17> A restify response is a standard node ServerResponse, which means you can call .write() to write to it without closing it. Works fine with responses of indefinite length.

[http://nodejs.org/docs/lates/api/http.html#http.ServerRespon...](http://nodejs.org/docs/lates/api/http.html#http.ServerResponse)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is not possible to scroll on the documentation from an iphone :(

<comment><USER19> Yeah, scroll is very odd behaving on Android 2.3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Will this work as a drop-in replacement for express?</comment>


Mount cloud storage (S3, Backblaze) using SMB/NFS directly to your file system - <AUTHOR> https://couchdrop.io/gateway <comment><USER2> Important — they will see every file you upload and download, because they are acting as a proxy and will be able to fetch any file stored with same credentials without you knowing.

By using this you will violate contractual obligations to prevent leaks. That includes majority of NDA agreements.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't rclone mount offer a bigger selection of cloud storage providers? [https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/](https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/)

<comment><USER4> I've used s3fs to permanently mount S3 on a server. Is there any benefit to using rclone instead?

<comment><USER5> My $0.02: rclone is very stable and reliable, and nice to use on top of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Couchdrop's Cloud Gateway provides easy and direct access to your cloud > storage like Dropbox, using the tried and proven Windows File Sharing > Protocol SMB/CIFS.

> Fire up Windows Explorer, and connect. No software installation is required, > making cloud migrations, backups and using your cloud storage so simple its > a little scary.

Is Dropbox particularly complicated? From the pricing page it appears to cost $35/month for the cheapest plan - $10 for Standard+ and an additional $25 for Gateway. Is there a big market of people paying $420/year to access their Dropbox account?

But rest assured, "Couchdrop Standard+ is almost the cost of a coffee every month." That's some expensive coffee, but how is coffee related to this?

<comment><USER7> Dropbox requires all of your data to be synchronized to the local computer, which an SMB gateway to the service would not require (and makes the idea of a service like Dropbox infinitely more interesting to me, not that I would ever want to use some random third-party hosted "gateway" unless it came from someone like Microsoft or Amazon).

<comment><USER8> > Dropbox requires all of your data to be synchronized to the local computer

This isn't true at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of people mistake S3 for a filesystem. S3 and other object stores have very different characteristics, both in terms of performance (latency, troughput) and access patterns (seeks, atomicity). All abstractions on top of objects stores have been really painful for me at work, because people would just ignore the differences between a local filesystem and an object store and were wondering why their perf was terrible.

<comment><USER2> Not only that, by using this you will increase your S3 bill, by definition of how this works.

If you are going to use windows explorer and enter a directory full of images — windows explorer will fetch thumbnail for _every_ image. If you have 50000 files there, that's 50000 requests + bandwidth for 50000 files.

Same for video or audio. Getting metadata isn't free.

But the worst case scenario if you have a big big file, let's say vhdx disk image, that you mount and keep modifying every minute.

S3 protocol doesn't have 'modify', it will _have_ to reupload entire file every time even if a single byte is changed. For a 10G file changed 1000 times that's 10 terabytes of traffic.

<comment><USER10> Also executable prefetching in windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is not a standalone client that talks directly to the S3, Backblaze, etc.

This is something that uses Couchdrop service (whatever it is) as a proxy for accessing these services.

Also, the OP should've probably disclosed their affiliation with this service.

</comment><comment><USER12> A good offer which is hardly usable due to the suggested deployment method: "very simple to setup through our web interface. There is no software to install and it just works".

It would just work if it could be installed on a machine.

Big Brotheresque deals from Mainframe era? No, thank you. I have my own computer for that.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are several minor grammatical issues in the copy. Not a big deal, but I suggest fixing them as they can make you come off as less professional.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an ad :c. The user only posts about their product

</comment><comment><USER15> What is the value proposition for S3 over the carefully constructed caching and batching layer implemented by AWS's File Gateway?

</comment><comment><USER16> I would very much recommend something like MountainDuck (mounting/syncing "cloud" storage as a local volume, a sister project to CyberDuck) as a better alternative to this "solution"

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there an on-prem/AWS AMI version?

<comment><USER15> There's File Gateway, an AWS service filling the same niche which you can deploy on prem or in EC2 (or both, with concurrency considerations)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Create evidence for your Bitcoin prediction - <AUTHOR> https://www.markmywords.email <comment><AUTHOR> what is your prediction? And feedback please!</comment>


Quantum Soccer (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gregegan.net/BORDER/Soccer/Soccer.html <comment><USER2> Is this useful in order to develop quantum-mechanical intuitions, or just a fun game? If the former, what should I be paying attention to?</comment>