Ask HN: wrist pain - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I'm working on a proposition for an inovation competition at work which is styled after the Dragon's Den TV shows (we develop an idea and get to pitch it to the CEO etc).  Our entry is a product which aims to reduce the chances of you developing wrist pain while using a computer, and to reduce the suffering of those who already have wrist pain. We would like to get a better idea of how people currently deal with this issue, so we've set up a quick survey (link at the end) and would appreciate it if you could help us by filling it out.
Secondly, as I suffer from wrist pain, I was wondering if there are any of you out there in HN land who also suffer.  How do you deal with it?  Does it affect your ability to run or work for a startup?
Thanks.
Survey link:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=JQn_2fz7zs_2ff7Dkdcp_2bP_2beNQ_3d_3d <comment><USER2> About 4 years ago, I was 22 at the time, I started experiencing pain in my right wrist and forearm. Once the pain became unbearable, I started using the mouse with my left hand. Almost immediately I experienced pain in my left wrist and forearm. Initially I thought it was Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I went to physical therapy 3 times a week for about 6 months with little or no benefit. I started reading books on RSI, trigger points, and myofascial pain. I was afraid that I would need to switch careers (I'm a programmer). My attitude towards work changed drastically and my want to use a computer outside of work became nil. I started cutting out of work early and going to more meetings. I did anything that would keep me away from the computer. Driving became painful. I had to quit lifting weights and playing sports since they worsened the pain. I then saw a surgeon who (you guessed it) said I needed surgery on my forearms. I left his office confused and psychologically broken. I decided surgery would be my last resort and I would try any noninvasive approach. I enrolled in physical therapy (different therapist) for another 3 months and stopped going. This round of therapy was actually making the pain and numbness worse. I tried wrist braces which also made the pain worse. My wife found a myofasical treatment center in Chicago (<http://www.myopain.com/>). After my 1 hour visit, the intensity of the pain decreased. I left armed with the knowledge to treat my pain. That was almost 2 years ago and I have been virtually pain free. I had a week where the pain started coming back about 6 months ago. I went back in for another hour appointment and she diagnosed my problem again. So to sum things up:

* I started experiencing pain in my wrists and forearms about 4 years ago

* After 6 months, the pain became so intense I started working less and avoided my computer as much as possible

* Went to physical therapy where they misdiagnosed my problem

* Stopped physical therapy after 6 months or so

* Was recommended to a surgeon who (big surprise) wanted to do surgery.

* Tried a different physical therapist

* Tried wrist braces

* Went to the myo pain center in Chicago <http://www.myopain.com/>

* I was able to treat myself after a 1 hour visit at the myopain center * Went from being able to work on a computer unbearably 35 hours a week to 70+ virtually pain free (when I worked for a YC startup)

* I now work from home and have made some ergonomic changes that have also helped:

 __The top of my monitor is at eye level.

 __I use a trackball and the Microsoft 4000 ergonomic keyboard.

 __I got an overstuffed thick pillow which helped support my neck when sleeping on my side.

 __I use this book to find and treat the trigger points:[http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self- Tr...](http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self- Treatment/dp/1572243759/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257359906&sr=8-1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that - I'll definitely give that book a look.

* Went from being able to work on a computer unbearably 35 hours a week to 70+ virtually pain free (when I worked for a YC startup)

That's definitely encouraging. At the moment I can manage about 40 hours a week. Any more than that (like I'm doing at the moment) and the pain comes back :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bizarrely, the flat Apple keyboards are the nicest and least RSI-inducing keyboards I've ever used.

</comment><comment><USER4> In 2003 I started experiencing wrist pain when using mouse. As it became unbearable, this is what I did: \- Went to see a doctor, without any results \- Switched mouse from right to left hand. It took around 10 days to come to speed with left hand. \- Right wrist continued to be painful as soon as I get a mouse with it. It took around 4 years to be able to take mouse with it without pain.

Recently I started to use mouse with right hand again and problem didn't reappear yet.

I am also more aware of the way how I handle the mouse - try not to use a ot of force when handling mouse. Switch to wireless mouse, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I tried switching the mouse to my left hand I just started getting pain in my left hand too! I found switching to a trackball mouse has helped a lot, as has using an ergonomic keyboard without a number pad on the right hand side. I use one of these at work: [http://www.goldtouch.com/p-65-goldtouch- adjustable-keyboard-...](http://www.goldtouch.com/p-65-goldtouch-adjustable- keyboard-putty.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I too developed really bad wrist pain - mine was from too much autocad and solidworks.

My secrets were to: 1\. Use a good chair and keyboard tray. always. 2\. train my left hand to mouse and switch off 3\. use an upright mouse. <http://www.evoluent.com/> It's a little expensive, but it's a good product. I now have one for each hand so i can switch off everyone once in a while. 4\. Also - wean yourself off the little mouse scroll wheel. Use window zooming for cad and hold down the middle button to scroll on web pages.

</comment><comment><USER6> I switched to a Logitech trackball for awhile, which helped. I am now happily back to a regular Logitech optical mouse (more precise control than the trackball for me).

<comment><USER7> A trackball took away all of my mouse-based pain and it has never come back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have had a bone graft on my right wrist from an injury when I was younger and find using a mouse for long periods of time quite awkward.

The best solution I have found is to use a Wacom tablet instead of a mouse. Using a writing implement is far better for my wrist than anything else I have tried (wrist rests, trackball).

</comment><comment><USER9> My "other" answers were:

Switched mouse to left (sub-dominant) hand.

Keyboard with "trackpoint" pointing device.

Dvorak keyboard layout, with caps-lock as an additional control key.

Prefer keyboard-driven software (bash shell, tiling window manager, vim text editor, QuickSilver and Gnome Do launchers, etc.).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: [http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=JQn_2fz7zs_2ff7Dkdcp_2...](http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=JQn_2fz7zs_2ff7Dkdcp_2bP_2beNQ_3d_3d)

</comment><comment><USER10> All my (transient) hand and wrist pains have gone away since I started doing pushups, crawling, pullups, etc. I think they were just weak, not an RSI problem.

</comment><comment><USER11> Get a pair of $3 sport wristbands to keep your wrist joints warm and flexible.

</comment><comment><USER12> make sure you don't bend your wrist when typing and you have proper keyboard form

</comment><comment><USER13> I injured a great many tendons and ligaments in my dominant hand/arm/upper quadrant of my torso (right upper extremity) while taking tennis in college at age 19. I had crippling pain on and off for many years. I got quite good at mousing left-handed and did that any time my right hand was just not functional. With getting myself generally healthier, my tendon problems have also cleared up.

I did "feed" my tendons for some years by taking gelatin as a supplement. That helped but didn't cure the problem. I have concluded that that there is infection involved and that killing infection is essentially what resolved my problem. I now wipe my key board and mouse down with peroxide every single day at the start of the workday, in part to help keep this problem from coming back.</comment>


Hitting the books: Ray Kurzweil on humanity's nanobot-filled future - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/03/hitting-the-books-Architects-of-Intelligence-Martin-Ford/ <comment><USER2> I deleted my full on rant, but I think a more temperate question deserves to be asked: why does anyone take Kurzweil seriously? What is happening at Google to justify the stature he seems to hold?

I think this article is psychobabble.</comment>


Machine Learning: Models with Learned Parameters - <AUTHOR> https://indico.io/blog/simple-practical-path-to-machine-learning-capability-part3/ <comment><USER2> I strongly advise everybody with one day free (and not much better things to do) to implement a basic fully connected feedforward neural network (the classical stuff, basically), and give it a try against the MNIST handwritten digits database. It's a relatively simple project that learns you the basic. On top of that to understand the more complex stuff becomes more approachable. To me this is the parallel task to implement a basic interpreter in order to understand how higher level languages and compilers work. You don't need to write compilers normally, as you don't need to write your own AI stack, but it's the only path to fully understand the basics.

You'll see it learning to recognize the digits, you can print the digits that it misses and you'll see they are actually harder even for humans sometimes, or sometimes you'll see why it can't understand the digit while it's trivial for you (for instance it's an 8 but just the lower circle is so small).

Also back propagation is an algorithm which is simple to develop an intuition about. Even if you forget the details N years later the idea is one of the stuff you'll never forget.

<comment><USER3> Quick question - what, _modern day_ tutorial/mooc would you recommend for this ?

<comment><USER4> I would highly recommend Andrej Karpathy's Hacker's guide to Neural Networks. A step by step guide with little math to cover the basics of NN. [http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/](http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/)

<comment><USER2> Wow, that surely is thought for programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is well-written and I applaud any step toward demystifying the sometimes scary sounding concepts that drive much of the ML algorithms.

Knowing you can pretty quickly whip up a KNN or ANN in a few hundred lines of code or fewer is one of the more eye-opening parts of the delving in. For the most part, supervised learning follows a pretty reliable path and each algorithm obviously varies in approach, but I know I originally thought "deep learning? ugh, sounds abstract and complicated" before realizing it was all just a deep ANN.

Long story short: dig in. It's unlikely to be as complex as you think. And if you've ever had an algorithms class (or worked as a professional software dev) none of it should be too daunting. Your only problem will be keeping up the charade if people around you think ML/AI is some sort of magic.

<comment><USER6> Excuse my ignorance but what do KNN/ANN stand for?

<comment><USER5> As mentioned, k-nearest neighbor, a x-dimensional similarity search algorithm (you can write this in python in like 25 lines, honest to god).

ANN, artificial neural network, which is what things like tensorflow were borne. Neural networks were kind of passe before they were revived by "deep learning"; their essentially a self-correcting, self-referencing set of logic gates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi folks, authors here in case you have questions.

This is actually part 3 in a series. For developers who are still getting oriented around machine learning, you might enjoy the first two articles, too. Part 1 shows how the machine learning process is fundamentally the same as the scientific thinking process. Part 2 explains why MNIST is a good benchmark task. Future parts will show how to extend the simple model into the more sophisticated stuff we see in research papers.

We intend to continue until as long as there are useful things to show & tell. If there are particular topics you'd like to see sooner than later, please leave a note!

<comment><USER8> Can you do anything on RL?! I feel this is a huge area since so many projects start with no enough labeled data and can be gradually improved

<comment><USER7> Reinforcement learning is definitely on the docket! But we probably need to cover more fundamental topics like optimizers, loss functions, distributed representations, attention, and maybe memory states first. RL seems to have all the things ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I took Andrew NG's ML class on Coursera. It was certainly interesting to see how ML works but I'm not sure what to do with this. Particularly, I'm still unsure how to tell beforehand if a problem is too complex to be considered, how much data it'll require, what computing power is needed.

Are there a lot of problems that fall between the very hard and the very easy ones? and for which enough data can be found?

<comment> gm-conspiracy You should take a look at Kaggle.com.

There are lots of interesting problems, but what really was enlightening to me, was to look at the solved contests, and see what the winning solution implemented.

[http://blog.kaggle.com/category/winners- interviews/](http://blog.kaggle.com/category/winners-interviews/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks, exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So this may be a place as good as any -- I've got a decent math background, and am self teaching myself ML while waiting for work to come in.

I'm working on undertstanding CNNs, and I can't seem to find the answer (read: don't know what terms to look for) that explain how you train the convolutional weights.

For instance, a blur might be

[[ 0 0.125 0 ] , [ 0.125 0.5 0.125 ] , [0 0.125 0]]

But in practice, I assume you would want to have these actual weights themselves trained, no?

But, in CNNs, the same convolutional step is executed on the entire input to the convolutional step, you just move around where you take your "inputs".

How do you do the training, then? Do you just do backprop on each variable of the convolution stem from its output, with a really small learning rate, then repeat after shifting over to the next output?

Sorry if this seems like a poorly thought out question, I'm definitely not phrasing this perfectly.

<comment><USER11> It turns out a convolution can be thought of like a special type of matrix [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toeplitz_matrix#Discrete_convo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toeplitz_matrix#Discrete_convolution) You could imagine do the backprop through the matrix multiply, and you are going to get several terms with the same coefficent, since the diagonals are the same - and you could just sum up all the gradients from the relevant terms and use that.

<comment><USER10> Huh, this almost got it for me after ten seconds of looking at it. Still have questions about the nitty gritty, but huge matrix multiplication clearly isn't how this is done in production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's been a couple of times where I needed to classify a large set of web pages and used a Bayes classifier.

I would start to get misclassified pages and it was so difficult to diagnose as to why these misclassifications were occurring. Bad examples? Bad counter examples? Wrong algorithm for the job? Ugh.

I ended up writing a set of rules. It wasn't fancy but at the end of the day, I understood the exact criteria for each classification and they were easily adjustable.

<comment><USER13> The best thing to do is compare your results to a widely known dataset with information about the accuracy rate for what you implemented. That will give you a baseline to figure out what, if anything, is going wrong.

> Wrong algorithm?

Almost certainly not, Bayes is a very solid classification technique.</comment></comment>


Can Google or Facebook ever have a true competitor? - <AUTHOR> I'm not talking about competition like DuckDuckGo or Bing. They might be good search engines, they might even write better search algorithms. Lets also assume that they achieved the monumental task of attaining the massive amounts of computational capabilities and data storage as that of Google, but they will never get the prime mover advantage that Google has, and you know why? Because you and me have already decided that whenever we want to search something, we will just visit Google.com. It has been this way since last two decades, but is it going to be the same always? If not, then what will cause us to move to a different search engine?<p>The same could be said about Facebook in the field of social networking. It is the major giant network commanding about 70% of all visitors. Most people will never leave FB because their friends are already on FB. Lets assume that a company XYZ creates a site which has lots more features than FB, but people will still say, "hey, my friends are already on FB, so I have to be on FB". Isn't this sort of unfair for that new entrant XYZ? What can XYZ make to cause people to leave FB and come to its network? <comment><USER2> Yes they could. It's always possible that another company could somehow do search or social networking better than Google and Facebook, find a really clever way of marketing their services and catch on before the former has any chance to catch up.

It'd help if either got much worse at their core business (since that tends to be what dooms a lot of companies nowadays), but even a strong Google could have a competitor that simply offers people a much better and more user friendly service.

But more likely is that they don't die to direct competitors. They die because they become irrelevant. Their 'true' competitor isn't another social network or search engine, it's something that completely replaces the need to have a social network or search engine.

For example, if a company came along and figured out a way to give people results based on what they were thinking about without any direct input required, that could make Google's typical search box and results page and ads completely useless. They'd be like a horse salesman after cars were invented. Same with Facebook.

<comment><USER3> I agree that it's possible, but I think the last point in your argument actually makes Google harder to displace than easier.

If someone came out with a better web search engine than Google right now, I probably wouldn't switch. This is because Google search is so integrated with other services that they understand intent way better, and you can perform searches with far less input that you would have to give otherwise.

For example, doing a search for "my flights" or similar does not only search the web, but also my gmail account, matches upcoming flights with data, and returns what is relevant to me. Similar arguments can be made based on phone data (locations, activity) and integration with products like Maps, Calendar etc. Google Now and On Tap are great examples of features and functions that cannot be trivially replaced by a better search algorithm.

<comment><USER4> I think he meant something really advanced like an ear piece that can directly connect your mind to the Internet. One wouldn't even need to look at a browser for search results. Think of a programming question, and you get the answer without doing any reading.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly it. And if something like this happens, Google's ad model is pretty much toast. That would be bad news for them in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What counts as a 'true competitor'? You seem to be asking if there's a chance that someone will upend Google at search, and Facebook at social networking.

But that's not how these companies pay the bills. They built massive ecosystems around their original businesses, and they use that ecosystem to mine data and serve ads. With this money, they've amassed social and infrastructure capital, so they can out-build competitors (Google Drive, Docs), branch out into other product lines (Google Cloud Services), or simply buy them out (Instagram, WhatsApp).

To compete against them, you need differentiation and feature that appeal to a passionate audience. Snapchat, for example, attracts people who've seen or heard how damaging it can be to publically post on Facebook. DuckDuckGo appeals to people who don't want trails of their web searches making it into ads they see on websites. Dropbox works for people because they put out a solid product and aren't trying to force you to be part of a large, monolithic ecosystem.

But it's an uphill battle. Facebook's preferred strategy is to buy out services before they become dangerous (they tried to buy Snapchat back when it was still known mostly for sexting), and Google's is to outbuild others. They form a very effective duopoly in a way.

</comment><comment><USER6> FB has a "network effect" the value of the network increases with the square of the participants (i.e. the number of connections you can have). Similar effects occur with human languages, telephones, and the internet. It's a kind of natural monopoly, because once one gets big enough, no alternative can catch up. That's why we have the internet, and not internets.

Google is different, because it's easy to switch search engines. One competitive advantage they have is "google suggest" \- this takes massive capital investment in server farms to be fast enough, which is difficult for smaller competitors to match.

NOTE: in Google's opinion, FB was a very serious threat (hence google+), because more information about users means better targetted ads. So _they_ don't think they're unassailable.

<comment><USER7> This is a fundamental aspect of introductory economics.

In fact, many professors use Facebook as an example of monopolies due to the network effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I distinctly remember when "whenever I wanted to search something" I just visited altavista.digital.com. And then, somewhat reluctantly, altavista.com.

Granted, they did not have anywhere near the deep and broad reach that Google currently has, but I would not think it impossible for someone else to come along and tilt things in their direction.

<comment><USER9> And there was Myspace and Friendster before Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Can Google or Facebook ever have a true competitor? Unlikely. But never say > never.Both companies, have built dominant market positions and have > advantages that competitors will likely be unable to overcome.Peter Thiel > even argues Google is a monopoly.

> but is it going to be the same always? No. If it were, then the future is > already fixed, knowable and stagnant.Unlikely :(

> If not, then what will cause us to move to a different search engine? What > can XYZ make to cause people to leave FB and come to its network?

Three things.

1.The company loses direction, is taken over by less competent management or implodes under its own weight e.g Walmart, GM, Apple. 2\. Government regulation or public pushback creates conditions for its dissolution. Think Bell, Standard Oil 3\. New competitors emerge. A giant slayer in this case, may initially not seem like a threat at all and may even operate in a different market space or industry from search or social media eg gaming, VR, IOT. Paul Graham has a good article on this.

Btw, I think FB is dying and that's part of the reason they acquired Whatsapp. It will be obvious in 5 years and they'll be gone in a decade or decade and a half.So is Apple,at least in its current form.

<comment><USER11> What makes you say that Apple is dying?

<comment><USER12> Their business is overly-dependent on the iPhone. The fact that 60% of their revenue comes from iPhones might leave them vulnerable to shifts in consumer behavior and/or market saturation.

iPhone sales drive sales of their other products and services. Apple is already facing heavy competition to iTunes; overall sales are declining and app revenue is making up a larger % of iTunes revenue in recent years. The decline of iTunes revenue is largely attributed to the glut of streaming services. I suspect their competing streaming service will need to be a loss- leader in the future in order to fuel grow for their cash-cow.

Now, I don't think that Apple is dying, not at all. But I can see how their situation is a bit more precarious than a heavily diversified company like Microsoft (whose failures demonstrate their impressive resiliency).

<comment><USER13> How is Microsoft that much more resilient, though? They're an absolute joke in the phone/device market. They're a market leader in the least exciting, fastest-declining market - the Desktop.

On the server side, they're hovering at 30%-ish, and are almost completely absent from the start-up scene as well as the high-end super-computer space. The startup scene, which, I know, I know, but still, it _is_ where the future is, is definitely not interested in anything MS, from what I can tell. Nothing bug a sea of MacBooks with people pounding away at Node/RoR/language-of-the- day. The hip 20-somethings pounding away at a thousand start-ups don't seem to be betting on the MS stack. And those _are_ the tech leaders of tomorrow.

Forget about the start-up space, fine. What about other institutions like banks/finance/airlines? That's all Java, running on some kind of Unix- derivative as well, most likely hitting a non-MS database.

MS is doing ok in the video game console space, but Sony is doing better. They're doing ok with Azure, but nothing spectacular, AWS and Google Cloud and Dig. Ocean and the numerous others aren't feeling too much pressure.

I guess really besides Office - what do they have that's a giant run-away success that will ensure their long-term survival?

<comment><USER14> Most of the markets you name are not winner-take-all! Add to your list enterprise/consumer cloud services (Office 365, Outlook, etc) and also the Azure platform (I don't know how competitive their Azure offerings are).

Just by being a significant "also ran" in those markets Microsoft ensures its survival in the medium term. They are diversified enough that the rug cannot suddenly be pulled out from under them and they are in a position to pump money and pivot into any of those markets where they see traction.

While Apple's situation is better today, their ability to respond to rapid changes in the business is under question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The one company I believe may be on a path to a position of true "anti- obsolescence" is Amazon. I consider the way people younger than me use it for _everything_. Then I consider my own Prime usage which is up perhaps 100-200% over last year. And even after that I look at the future innovation's Amazon is planning: 1-Hr delivery via drone, dev friendly alexa tasks from anywhere. And I can't think of anyone that can currently be termed a "true" competitor. And I am clearly not the only one to notice. $AMZN stock up %50 since Feb ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> Only if Google / facebook stops inventing. Yahoo made a mistake of stagnation. Microsoft made a mistake of stagnation from 2000 to 2009 (Balmer period). Motorola made a mistake of stagnation. Apple is again making a mistake of stagnation. As long as companies not sitting on their arses and let the competition overtake them they will be fine.

Also you can live without FB but cannot live without google. You can remain days not visiting FB but everyday you will search atleast one time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think No for both cases. Default monopolies can go out of favor very quickly, and new technologies can ramp up very quickly.

On Facebook: Remember that Google got the whole world to sign up for Google Plus with their circles. They didn't do anything with it, but it was a clear sign that you can sign up a good portion of the internet.

On Google owning search, if Apple goes downmarket in the phone market, they could crowd Google out of search on the phone. Or there may be some other new paradigm - searching out of apps, with a non-Google choice winning. And if the search algorithm is MUCH better, it could win. Bing doesn't need to be 5% better - it would need to be 500% better.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes. When I worked at Google, people were very aware that their market position is not a given and could change any time - eg as people are far less locked in to Google than they used to be to Microsoft in the 1990s. Eric Schmidt used to point to an article from the late 1990s saying "the search wars are over - Yahoo won"...

It wouldn't be easy obviously, but it is conceivable that someone comes up with something that is significantly better than Google/ FB, causing people to switch.

</comment><comment><USER19> Basically, I believe it will be much harder for a competitor to reach the same _capital_ as Google or Facebook.

Google and Facebook have massive networks, specialized storage strategies, proprietary protocols and hardware, and not to forget the actual data they have acquired. Lots of hard-to-acquire capital.

On the other hand, I do believe that both products could be better. Competitors could have better products, but not for a long time more capital.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Google and Facebook will face the same enemy that Microsoft faced back in the 1990s - the nameless and faceless, Open Source!

Maybe, if FOSS can build a self-syncing co-operating network spanning multiple nodes across the globe, they can solve the infrastructure/data-storage problem (we already have two precedents here, namely Bitcoin and Bittorrent networks).

Finally, if FOSS can also convince a good proportion of masses to crowdsource their efforts, they would have solved the data acquisition problem too!

<comment><USER20> >self-syncing co-operating network spanning multiple nodes across the globe

It's already there, see [http://yacy.net/en/index.html](http://yacy.net/en/index.html).

<comment><USER21> The idea is great and I wish them good luck. But, unfortunately, it isn't usable yet IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Every empire has its rise and fall. "To every thing there is a season ... A time to be born, and a time to die"

</comment><comment><USER23> Do you think a FB competitor that offered really nice encryption and privacy features would be successful?

I'm imagining an app that let's you choose where to store data, let's you store your data encrypted and offers message encryption, and of course allows you to sign up anonymously and permanently delete data.

I hate Facebook but I recognize it serves a useful function - I only use it because everyone else does.

<comment><USER24> > Do you think a FB competitor that offered really nice encryption and privacy > features would be successful?

> ...

> I hate Facebook but I recognize it serves a useful function - I only use it > because everyone else does.

I think privacy is a very niche interest for most users. It's very hard for non-technical users to understand and therefore appreciate online privacy in my opinion. Understanding what the padlock in the browser location bar is difficult enough for most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A year ago, I think you could have included Apple in this list and they have begun their spiral.

</comment><comment><USER26> Google and Facebook are not immortal beings infallible of mistakes. These two entities are companies comprised of people. At whatever level you look at inside these two organisations, you'll see people making decisions. Whenever there are people involved there are bound to be some inefficiencies and mistakes made on the way. These inefficiencies and mistakes can be masked however because of the size of the organisation and the actual impact of a single decision made. Nonetheless a series of compounding "mistakes" could lead to these companies being open to other competitors.

A strength of these two companies lies in the amount of talented individuals in these organisations. Google and Facebook both have a reputation to hire the best and brightest. If this is the case, then we can assume they'd have the raw ability to make right decisions. (debatable point) Given enough time and resources these people could do almost anything. This can be illustrated by the number of moonshots being attempted at Google.

Another point of strength of these large companies is the ability to diversify. Diversification comes in handy when you're in an ever changing world like we are in. Diversification comes in the form of external investments into potentially game changing industries and technologies (AR, BioTech, etc). Alternatively, change could come from within the organisations, albeit a little harder and riskier,

These are a few of the strengths of large companies like Google and Facebook. Despite these strengths new opportunities and new competitors will still arise. Google is a search engine, but it has moved into email and other markets. Google had existed before Facebook, and Google had more resources than Facebook when it got started. Why didn't Google takeover social networking instead?

The OP posed the question about if Google will always be the default search engine it has acted as for the last two decades. In my opinion, this can change. With the advent of Amazon's Echo and Siri, more and more searches are being conducted via these platforms. Both of these platforms use the Bing search engine. [1][2] If Bing did a better job [3], then it's conceivable that more marketshare can be had by Bing. As human computer interface progresses, the act of visiting Google.com will become antiquated. This leads to opportunities for other search engines to gain adoption more or less transparently.

Facebook is a social network we access via our web browser and mobile device. If VR becomes what is promised and more widely adopted, then social networking as a category will become redefined. Facebook is at an advantage because of the Oculus acquisition, but the VR space is still so young; There are no real experts in VR.

TLDR; A series of "mistakes" made by these people comprised organisations could lead to true competitors. Strengths, like talented people and diversification, could counteract any risk to competitors. New platforms like Echo, Siri, and Cortana abstracts the use of the Bing Search Engine. VR could redefine social networking which opens more opportunities.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Can-I-change-Siris-search- engine](https://www.quora.com/Can-I-change-Siris-search-engine) [2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/2lsg9n/amazon_echo_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/2lsg9n/amazon_echo_what_search_engine/) [3] [http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2015/07/08/alexa-y-u-no- answer...](http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2015/07/08/alexa-y-u-no-answer/#gref)</comment>


Ask HN: How many of you are working on eCommerce idea vs SaaS? - <AUTHOR>

Just reply saying eCommerce or SaaS. If you feel like giving more details then feel free to leave that info as well.<p>I just want to get a feel of how many of us working on eCommerce vs. SaaS based startups. <comment><USER2> SaaS. <http://dumper.io/> and <http://uptimer.at/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I really like the UI for both of your sites. Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Doing SaaS. <https://forgetfail.com>

<comment><USER4> I get a 502 error at that URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> SaaS. Friend of mine is making a living off of eCommerce.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you share the site for your friends eCommerce?

<comment><USER5> <http://www.elpamsoft.com/> Currently only has one product on sale (SSD Tweaker), and the second (TrackIT) will come out once I finish the front end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SAAS.

</comment><comment><USER7> SaaS

</comment><comment><USER8> eCommerce.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We are also doing SaaS. <http://jackpotbuddy.com> and <http://diglig.com>

Looking to work on third eCommerce business soon.

<comment><USER9> Nice original idea but what incentives do people have for sharing their possible winnings? Wouldn't that be counter productive?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lumberjack, thanks for the feedback. Our current phase only supports playing in our free lottery pools where users don't spend anything. We buy all the lottery tickets and put users in the lottery pool. If our lottery ticket wins then we will equally distribute the winnings among our users of that given pool.

In the next phase the biggest incentives users will have is to create their own lottery pools and play with their friends and family members by creating private pools. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on lottery ticket to increase their chances of winning users will be able to share the cost of lottery tickets with their friends/family members. Together they can purchase more tickets, increase their chances of winnings and keep low out of the pocket costs.</comment></comment></comment>


Meet the People Who Train the Robots (to Do Their Own Jobs) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/technology/meet-the-people-who-train-the-robots-to-do-their-own-jobs.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology <comment><USER2> Dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14218874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14218874)</comment>


The US Government Adopts OpenID - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openid_going_mainstream_us_gov_announces_pilot_pro.php <comment><USER2> _If you own a domain that's an OpenID provider, you won't be able to use that._

Aren't there OpenID users who host their own identities exclusively for themselves? Is there danger in letting people do this? (I seriously don't know much about OpenID practices.)

<comment><USER3> FTA:

Ten private companies, a number of US Government Federal Agencies primarily in the Health sector and the OpenID and Information Card Foundations will announce this morning in Washington DC the launch of a pilot program to allow members of the public to log in to participating government websites with their credentials from _approved independent websites_.

They're not allowing any OpenID cert, they're just blessing the big providers (presumably Google, Yahoo, etc...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "[W]hen we authenticate ourselves with Google, Yahoo, Verisign or whoever our Identity Provider of choice is, that website will pass a different, unique URL to the government site we're logging in to."

Sounds like Google, Yahoo, Verisign or whoever [sic] will have a lot of information about which government agencies you interact with and how often.

<comment><USER5> And they can also spoof you since they control their domain and know what your openid is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a step in the right direction. But I'm still wanting to use my own domain for my openid. The common attacks on open id (phishing, man in the middle when authenticating, etc) aren't mitigated by limiting the number of providers. I'd rather they come up with a security standard for openID providers then white list a few.

</comment><comment><USER7> "approved independent websites."

Lame.

</comment><comment><USER8> /me puts on tin foil hat

<comment><USER9> and i ready my gun</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ideas for simple SaaS products? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There are so many...

Personally, I'm doing a web service for image resizing + CDN aimed solely at Polish developers, with the premise that some will prefer having a service in Polish that focuses on Poland (more CDN PoPs in Poland, for instance—I have 2 instead of 0) and would use my service over existing ones. No idea if this is going to work.

I've experimented with the Google Vision API. I built a service to do OCR via an API in a few hours, and it's 100 times better than existing solutions that charge money (like [https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/mobile- ocr/](https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/mobile-ocr/)). Mainly, it recognizes really small text and handwritten/weird fonts. Of course, it's not me who's good—I'm just using better stuff, but if I made that a SaaS I would have the best OCR API on the market until someone does the same thing.

My girlfriend has a kid, and has to put up with being in a Whatsapp group chat with all the moms, just because every once in a while someone lets the others know that the school is closed for some reason or things like that. However, she constantly gets notifications for small talk, or things like "me too!", while there's nothing important going on. There could be a service that allowed participants to flag messages as "important", "medium", or "unimportant" (or up/downvote them?), and one could decide to receive notifications only for certain types of messages (for instance, "important" only, "medium" an up).

There are so many you can do. Just look around you for problems you can solve.

The best is solving an actual problem you personally have, or someone close to you has. This way you can gauge how important that problem is, and if your solution is good. Hopefully other people will have the same problem and will pay for solving it.</comment>


Commodore Nowhere Near the Edge or Commodore Before Commodore (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/commodore2.txt <comment><USER2> _Report of The Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire Into The Failure of Atlantic Acceptance Corporation Limited_ is available at archive.org, thanks to the Internet Archive.

Volume 1: [https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant01onta](https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant01onta)

Volume 2: [https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant02onta](https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant02onta)

Volume 3: [https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant03onta](https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant03onta)

Volume 4: [https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant04onta](https://archive.org/details/reportofroyatlant04onta)

</comment><comment><USER3> To be fair, one does get a flavor of Tramiel's character in On the Edge, despite the elision of this incident. I am always bemused when I come across some sentimental "tribute" to him somewhere on the internet, produced by some Commodore fan (and there are a few).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Via [https://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2020-07-00002-DE.html](https://amiga- news.de/de/news/AN-2020-07-00002-DE.html)</comment>


Prime Now's freezer bags: an environmental investigation - <AUTHOR> https://heated.world/p/prime-nows-freezer-bags-an-environmental <comment><AUTHOR> I found this article when I went looking for recycling information. Over the last month I started using Amazon fresh, and for a family of 5's worth of groceries, these silver bubble bags end up filling an entire garbage bag to dispose of each week. Normally I have 3-4 garbage bags a week, so this is an increase of 25% to 30% in raw volume of garbage produced.

It's weighed on me more and more as my use of Fresh has increased. I used it the first time when I was sick and couldn't get out and other services were both more expensive and had no delivery slots when I needed them. Fresh was also cheaper on the items. Not everything, but about 10% on average overall, even after a tip to the driver, plus I get 5% cash back by using my Amazon card, so it's upwards of $60/month saved. That's hard to overlook.

But the packaging is so excessive for something that, basically, is untouchable for any likely recycling option. That's on top of the usual bad packaging re: space and packaging waste. Among my order, I received a single 8oz package of quacamole. It was delivered in it's own full-size large brown bag and one of the large silver-lined bubble packaging pieces, by itself. It's about 5x5x1 inches in diameter: It easily could fit, without fear of crushing, in any 4 of the other bags I had which were also insulated.

I feels like Amazon is having to re learnd so many of the lessons it's already been fixing in its traditional business. 5-7 years ago, crazy wastage on packaging was much more common with Amazon, and they've done a decent job improving (not eliminating) that issue, but with Fresh it's being taken to an entirely new level. And there's no rhyme or reason to it either: It doesn't seem like an abundance of caution to protect food, there's no pattern to it. In fact in one order they put a gallon of milk and 1.5 quarts of orange juice _on top_ of a dozen eggs. Remarkably non broke, but this just evinces a pick-&-pack operation that either has little in the way of clear standard practices for this sort of thing, or if they exist the quality control for adherence is awful.

But it's the shear waste with those metallic bubble bags that's the worst. Literally a whole garbage bag filled by the 6 or 7 I receive.</comment>


This Is Important: It Feels Like 1995 Again - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.tes.com/post/1995/ <comment><USER2> Also similar to 1995: a nigh-unlimited supply of people who are 100% certain their pet technology will be the Next Big Thing that Changes Everything.

[http://www.businessweek.com/1995/24/b3428001.htm](http://www.businessweek.com/1995/24/b3428001.htm)</comment>


Will Apple Put the iPhone on Other Carriers? - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/will-apple-put-the-iphone-on-other-carriers/ <comment><USER2> I hope the iPhone doesn't come to Sprint, because it would increase demand on the network and result in in the introduction of metered data, especially if it's 4G. We have a good thing going with Sprint as the dark horse in the mobile race. The network is fast and reliable, and the plans are the cheapest of the major carriers for unlimited data, voice, and texts.

<comment><USER3> Why is it that everyone is so accepting of the excuse that carriers can't scale up to the usage levels imposed by smartphones? Are we really _that_ limited in available RF spectrum, or are carriers just not willing to spend the money necessary to keep up with demand? We know they _have_ the money, so how can a network like AT&T Wireless keep sucking for years on end?

<comment><USER2> The problem is that subscribers can sign up and increase data consumption at a faster rate than carriers can build out infrastructure. The fact that subscribers are under contract to pay whether or not the service sucks is a disincentive to spend money scaling the network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting to see the balance between Android and iPhone at AT&T where people are able to choose. Of course, a lot of those iPhone users went to AT&T solely to have the iPhone.</comment>


Show HN: Simplest flexible loginless JavaScript app for splitting bar bills - <AUTHOR> https://simple-split-bills.netlify.com/ <comment><USER2> If you want to make it more applicable, it would be good to let you enter multiple amounts per person (and maybe a fraction), e.g. Alice and Bob split a desert that Charlie didn't. Also rates for tax and tip.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good ideas. Thank you. I'll see how can I fit those without making it enormously complex.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Did this while learning Svelte! Source code is here: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/split](https://github.com/fiatjaf/split)

<comment><USER2> Awesome. Svelte's on my todo list.

Should've been in the title.</comment></comment>


Pic A Fight: Instagram meets FaceMash - <AUTHOR> http://www.picafight.com/ <comment><USER2> What's the purpose? Like, what are my votes to be based on? FaceMash was based on hotness, or something. What is this? I see a picture of a C3-P0 helmet versus a picture of a VoIP phone. Am I supposed to just vote for the picture that somehow touches me the most?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Nothing too serious, just some fun; which ever one is more visually appealing to you, or (as you say) touches you the most. It will be interesting to see which pics rise to the top this way.

<comment><USER3> It might be good to state that somewhere. When I looked at the site I felt like I was being called on to answer a question, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Led me to skip a lot of comparisons. Once I decided it didn't really matter it was a lot more relaxing.

Also, gorgeous layout!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi, I've a identical project but for flickr photos: elograde.com with over 200k comparisons so far and some very quality photos. tho the flickr community has not really taken to it too much. (been up about a year now)

<comment><USER5> kalendae: Nice site. I think the major thing that separates Paul & Chad's site and your's is that you can start voting without any sign up whatsoever.

Perhaps you three should collaborate or you could simply remove the registration portion and let people start voting from the homepage.

<comment><USER4> you are absolutely right, most hotornot sites have that kind of low barrier to entry. my problem is that people who vote but don't submit photos don't really add to the project (not an ad site like hotornot and especially if they vote poorly and are taken out, the votes have to double up for them to have meaning to prevent random voting etc), right now there are actually way more votes than needed in proportion to people who submitted their photos.

but yeah it might need some re-examining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, i was in the middle of making one of these. Ha. should i stop? i was almost done.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cute, I like the overall design a bit more than the voting to be honest. I did something similar over the weekend, plotting instagram pictures on a map. You can see it at <http://insta.notphil.com/map.html> \- click on a place on the map and then on the pins that appear to see pictures taken there.

<comment><USER5> notphilatall: I get "oops" on every click. :( But, I'd LOVE to see my Instagram photos on a Map!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Chad, you are a machine.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is fun. I'm curious; what technologies are being used in the backend?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing special.... rails 3, ruby 1.9.2 (this is my first rails app ever!), mysql, hosted on aws. stammy used Sass for the css styling. I wrote a few scripts to spin up more servers as load increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The idea isnt inspired imho. That being said, allowing the user to vote using the arrow keys is. The fact that I could vote with barely any hand movement got me through ~10 votes which is 8 more that I wouldve had I been required to click on each image.

Also, the design was simple, clean and effective. Good job.

<comment><AUTHOR> most ideas aren't, it's the implementations that are. we added the arrow key voting to reduce friction for exactly the reason you stated. Stammy did the design, all props to him for that. we hope you had some fun with it, that's what it was made for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do you limit the number of photos? Seems like if the number of photos in the pool far exceeds the number of votes coming in, each photo would only ever have a handful of battles. I've build a similar voting system before but the purpose was to find a winner amongst all entries.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey daniel, long time no see! we're probably going to cull the pics and delete the ones that fall below a certain elo/win/loss threshhold, so it should keep the quality of the pics high. and we can adjust the threshhold so that it keeps the total number of pics from getting too huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the design, very clean. I did something similar at <http://mugshotwars.com/>

Elo is a fun algorithm. You can read about my implementation at <http://campedersen.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> I had an idea of building a similar dueling site using memes. Actually, I even designed and built the site, but decided to ditch the project it just before paying for a domain.

The reason? I didn't want to turn into that guy who runs lolcats franchise.

<comment><USER6> bad call.

<comment><USER13> You may be correct, but aside from wasting 2 weeks to plan the site, 2 weeks to the design the site, and another month to build that site, I don't particularly feel any other regrets as looking from mine point of view, there isn't anything more important than to achieve inner peace with oneself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice! Give it a day then see how it compares to the Flickr interesting photos. I bet there's more off beat and a better variety of photos. Human vs. Machine.

Are you sharing what rises to the top via some feed? I'd love to plot them on a map.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks great. I've been working on something similar for iOS, but with themed challenges. There's a lot of potential here.

<http://photochallengeapp.com>

</comment><comment><USER16> > The site got twenty-two hundred hits within two hours? _Thousand. Twenty-two > Thousand._

Is this generated dynamically? If so, awesome. If not, still cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a quotation from _The Social Network_. It's static. However, at the current rate, we could easily be passing that number... yikes! According to mixpanel, we've processed nearly 18k battles in less than one hour.

<comment><USER17> Nice, though to be fair your potential user base includes all of the internet vs. just Harvard students.

<comment><AUTHOR> Quite true, but of all the Twitter/Social-related websites I've built (a lot), this one has seen more hits and buzz than all the rest already. Please allow me to be excited :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice concept - not only as a bit of fun, but as visual feedback as to what types of photos your followers prefer to see from you.

</comment><comment><USER19> One constructive criticism: it makes it too easy to just mash the left and right arrows. Take that feature away :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool stuff. Are you doing any face detection or do you just pick two random Instagram pics?

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely random at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool idea! Just out of interest, how long did it take you to build it?

</comment><comment><USER22> Do you have a particular algorithm when selecting pictures?

<comment><USER23> selecting is random, rating is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am surprised how people spend too much time on useless things instead of solving really interesting problems. You can at least use some machine learning to present a pictures of increased interest to each user. Or present pr0n pictures based on personal taste.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am surprised how many people spend too much time trashing other people's work. Also, I think the entire gaming industry would like to have a word with you.

<comment><USER24> I am gamer. Do you created any interesting game, or just this useless site?</comment></comment></comment>


Cron as a filesystem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gopheracademy.com/cron-filesystem/

<comment><USER2> Ahem, meaning "manipulate crontab entries in a vfs" and not "store files in cron".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I considered changing the title to "File interface to cron" or something similar, but that also seemed to leave some of the reality out. It's just another element of the "everything is a file" philosophy of Plan 9, which I find very interesting and pragmatic, and wish were more common in the directions Linux is evolving in, with stuff like systemd, firewalld, systemd timers, etc.

<comment><USER3> How about "exposing cron as a filesystem"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a Fox News title, where they expose cron to secretly be a filesystem. They'll call it "crongate".

<comment><USER3> "What you need to know about Cron. News at 0 22 * * 1-5."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find this an interesting experiment, as I am often struck by how much history seems to get forgotten. Plan 9 is pretty ripe for picking out lots of cool little things for integration into modern systems, but a lot of it doesn't seem to have resonated out into the world at large. It's unfortunate that Plan 9 wasn't Open Source from the beginning, as it might have been common enough to have inspired more stealing of ideas for other systems.

As it is, we've got a lot of reinvention of ideas happening, often without much forward movement.

</comment><comment><USER4> That reflects a mindset from an OS where the only data structure is a file system. When the only hammer you have is a file system, everything looks like a tree. Chrontab is a database and should be treated as such.

The "everything is a file and files have no locking" mentality of UNIX doesn't scale well to continuously running systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Chrontab is a database and should be treated as such."_

Why a database?

 _" The "everything is a file and files have no locking" mentality of UNIX doesn't scale well to continuously running systems."_

I don't understand what argument you're making here. UNIX doesn't actually have "everything is a file" semantics (cron does not, for example, in the sense proposed by the article). Plan 9 mostly does, and it's actually kind of awesome. What part of Plan 9's semantics of everything is a network- transparent file "doesn't scale"? And, what do you mean by "doesn't scale"?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I genuinely don't understand what you're suggesting instead. What is an alternative cron implementation that is implemented as a database that "scales" better than something like this, by your definition? And, what is "scale" in this context?

<comment><USER5> The problem with filesystems is that they don't usually support transactions. For example, it is not possible to atomically change two files, without resorting to ugly and dangerous hacks.

<comment><USER6> Plan 9 came close. You could create /foo/a and /foo/b at your leisure, then bind /foo over /etc. This atomically replaced /etc/a and /etc/b with /foo/a and /foo/b, for the purposes of open. The change could be atomically reverted with unmount.

If that wasn't good enough, then /etc/a and /etc/b could be virtual files served by the same daemon. This could look for change sets written to /dev/patch, and block reads and writes while it applied them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me somewhat of Debian's /etc/cron.{daily,monthly,weekly,monthly}</comment>


45 Astonishing Examples of Long Exposure Photography - <AUTHOR> http://www.noupe.com/photography/45-astonishing-long-exposure-photos.html

<comment><USER2> When I think of long exposures, fireworks and lightning come to mind. Those photos are absolutely amazing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this really belong here?

<comment><USER4> I found it impressive, and I've seen content here on HN that is less relevant than this.</comment></comment>


Microsoft has just registered bi.ng - <AUTHOR> http://whois.domaintools.com/bi.ng <comment><USER3> I wonder if this is just defensive. Given Nigeria's reputation for Internet scams and bit.ly's problems with Libya, would Microsoft really want to build a URL shortener around this TLD?

</comment><comment><USER4> The registrars rules said you had to pick a 3rd level domain (x.co.ng) - <USER2> they change this, or did Microsoft just get extra special treatment?

<comment><AUTHOR> it changed recently. [http://oonwoye.com/2010/12/30/first-ng-domain-name- registere...](http://oonwoye.com/2010/12/30/first-ng-domain-name-registered/)

<comment><USER4> Sweet, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Registration Url :

<http://www.webdomains.com.ng/cpanel.php?page=sldwhois>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm wondering why it doesn't point anywhere? Couldn't they point it to bing.com for the time being before they do something else (url shortener ? )

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought two letters domains are not sold anymore? (i.e 'bi' is 2 letters) Or this is a restriction only for certain TLD like .com, .org?

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been waiting for this for long, so which registry can we use to get .ng?

<comment><USER9> I tried hunting through the government website, and it lists a large number of registrars, but none of them seem to offer an easy way to sign up for one. Keep in mind the following things though:

(1) You need to have a business in Nigeria

(2) ccTLDs are subject to local laws, so be careful before basing your brand around a ccTLD name. Case in point: Bitly [http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3503/bitly-builds- busine...](http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3503/bitly-builds-business- libya-domain)

<comment><USER8> Very true, without the power of Microsoft it's hard to maintain that domain name... in such a remote place.. I mind as well just give up.

And likewise I searched the government website and none of its accredited registrars offer straight .ng registration

<comment><USER9> I saw another Nigerian company for which an "exception" had been made. Overall, I think it's risky business right now, especially if you manage to snag a desirable .ng domain. I don't mean this as offensive, but it's not unimaginable in Nigeria that a few greased palms could lead to an "exception" being made for re-assigning your DNS record if you don't have local interests there to back you up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 35k domains registered?

</comment><comment><USER11> They neglected to grab bu.ng while they were at it.</comment>


Most Americans don't have enough assets to withstand 3 months without income - <AUTHOR> https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/study-most-americans-don't-have-enough-assets-withstand-3-months-without-income <comment><USER2> When you're living paycheck to paycheck your IQ and decision-making ability is effectively handicapped from having to constantly worry about eating and security. Combine that with a system that can be brutal if you don't have the means, this stat is not at all surprising.

<comment><USER3> > Combine that with a system that can be brutal if you don't have the means

And there's the crux of it. "The system", when it's working towards a sustainable civilisation, must provide some level of protection for those who don't have the ability to make good decisions. Scammers and advertising as one example. Regulation and fines that are enforced and sufficiently discouraging.

It's too easy to profit off the bottom end.

Finding where protections intersect with personal freedoms / responsibility is the perpetual impossibility.

<comment><USER4> Correction: who don't have the _privilege_ to make good decisions, not ability :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone with unemployment insurance is classed as going to starve in a few months without a job. Except they paid into that. For the purposes of unemployment, insurance is saving.

Someone without retirement savings is declared to be unable to retire. Except for Social Security and Medicare. They paid into those. Those are saving.

What these miss is that plenty of saving is being done by people, but it is done through government programs so it does not get classified as saving.

</comment><comment><USER6> If I missed one paycheck I'd be hosed, so this isn't surprising.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is well known. The income inequality is high as is, but the number of below middle class to poor is also increased. Unfortunately there is no political will to help the situation. We are more than happy to provide trillions to wasteful spending but severely against spending on people. Decades of such behavior will of course hurt the country. The sad part is we stopped caring about fixing our house in prosperous times as well.

<comment><USER8> Not really: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrink...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrinking- middle-class.html). The percentage of households making below $35,000 (inflation adjusted) has shrunk since 1967, though it's up modestly since 2000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a misinterpretation of what the survey data says. It's a widespread one, and worth correcting.

A large fraction of people have debt, such as student loans, mortgages, car loans, etc. If they have a significant amount of extra cash, they'll use it to reduce their debt, because money sitting in a bank account makes less interest than the interest on a mortgage or any other sort of loan. So if you look at these peoples' bank accounts, they don't have any savings. Scary, right? But most of them _do_ have lines of credit, so if they have a financial setback, they won't lose the ability to buy groceries, they'll just take on additional debt.

<comment><USER10> likely additional "unserviceable" debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Couple of thoughts:

1\. Although I agree it's a problem, this isn't new news I don't believe. I don't have good references to point to right this second, but I swear I hear almost monthly if not more often that most people couldn't come up with $500-1k in an emergency, much less multiple months of expenses.

2\. The article points to COVID-19 exacerbating these findings, but on top of the cash every US tax payer received who made under the defined threshold, there were a ton of things put in place or implemented like aid, loan forbearance plans, rent extensions etc. as apart of COVID-19. It seems a little (but I guess not totally) surprising that this crisis is what brought to light this issue.

<comment><USER12> Dave Ramsey would say ANYONE can come up with $1000 for an emergency fund...

<comment><USER13> Dave Ramsey can say whatever he likes, he's the head of a massive personal finance brand. Having listened to a fair bit of him, and Mister Money Mustache, I can say it's a mix of decent advice and completely oblivious out of touch-ness, as well as a complete unwillingness to face how incentives actually work in the real world, despite an insistence, contrary to all evidence, that they are somehow hard-nosed realists dispensing truth.

As in, their advice is worthwhile, in as much as it helps you live your life in a way that makes you happier. Beyond that, they're just as stupid as everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you don't have an emergency fund of money, begin saving one now.

You don't want to get ill and have no emergency money left besides.

</comment><comment><USER15> > A new study from Oregon State University found that 77% of low- to moderate- > income American households fall below the asset poverty threshold, meaning > that if their income were cut off they would not have the financial assets > to maintain at least poverty-level status for three months.

Low-to-Moderate income, if defined by the median being moderate, would count up to 50% as a whole group.

77% of 50% of the population is NOT "Most Americans", another deceitful headline not supported by data.

<comment><USER16> How many members does a household have above 50% and below 50%? Further, the study is paywalled but some percent of the 50% above the median likely also fall below the asset poverty threshold.

The headline may be wrong, I'm unsure, but you aren't even looking at the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Even in the middle class people live unsustainable lifestyles above their means. We need to bring back a culture of living below means and self- reliance.

<comment><USER18> No one likes being poor, and most people learn to live as well as they can with the income they have. Our society encourages this because it makes workers happy with less pay.

Banks and businesses prefer consumers this way, and any attempt to get people to live "within their means" will fail because of the push back from that side as well as the general discomfort and distaste for living less well (and less healthily, at least in the US - quality food is expensive).

A far better solution is to address income inequality and to bring equity to the results of everyone's work. Wage growth has been too low for decades which has been great for corporate owners and investors, but bad for society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> And, what is worse, Americans have lost most of their non-monetary social capital: large extended families, neighborhood churches, civic groups, mutual aid associations, etc.

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

Things are never as good or as bad as they seem, but it sure seems bad right now.

<comment><USER20> The casualties of social justice are justified, not bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's so stupid. Spend less then you earn, save, don't buy the latest shit. So many people waste their money buying new toys like the latest iPhones or Androids, fancy ass cars and expensive vacations. All my neighbors make like blue collar salaries; $50k at the most, but they have the latest treager grills, fancy infinitis, audis in their driveways, new tvs every year; and guess what tens of thousands in credit card debt

<comment><USER21> > Spend less then you earn, save, don't buy the latest shit.

This logic breaks down when you get an unexpected medical bill, or the car you rely to get to your job breaks down and you get fired, etc.

The latest iPhones and Androids are quite affordable compared to healthcare and rent in this country.

<comment><USER22> It's not about the iPhone (or coffees, avocado toast, etc.) It's about the habit of unnecessary spending. _Many_ people (obviously not all) could handle unexpected expenses if they had better financial habits.

<comment><USER21> > It's about the habit of unnecessary spending. Many people (obviously not > all) could handle unexpected expenses if they had better financial habits.

What you call unnecessary spending is what actually floats the entire economy. If everyday folks' disposable income dries up, the whole country will suffer, even your bullshit startup in a converted loft in SOMA or whatever it is that you do that earns you a six figure living.

<comment><USER23> >> What you call unnecessary spending is what actually floats the entire economy

I get tired how this argument is used to justify so much BS.

I think this pandemic has debunked this. You forget the other part that is saving is what generates real capital to invest, not debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> apparently "huge" businesses/franchisees don't either : [https://moneywise.com/a/these-restaurant-chains-are- closing-...](https://moneywise.com/a/these-restaurant-chains-are-closing-2020)

</comment><comment><USER25> can someone please put a number on low-to-moderate-income? as in lower bound, upper bound. Couldn't find this in the article, and hence it makes less sense to me being a non-american.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've always been amazed that basic money-handling skills are not the top of the curriculum starting in elementary schools. Everybody should know how to manage money, yet only a few people do-- and they are self-educated!

There will always be a tiny percentage of people who are in financial trouble because they had some catastrophic illness, or they got fired repeatedly through picking bad employers, or something else. But the vast majority of people could learn to spend less than they make and invest for the future. It's completely simple.

But it also requires discipline. I think therein lies the rub.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's not most Americans, it's "77% of low- to moderate-income American households fall below the asset poverty threshold".

</comment><comment><USER28> The study focused on low-moderate income households and whether they had any financial assets like stocks/bonds and mutual funds. That this segment has low representation in this respect doesn't surprise met at all, given the level of education / discretionary income needed to pursue such investments. Also, Western capitalist society saturates the populus with consumerism (which to be fair supports the economy), so there's that force at play as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> > ... U.S. wealth inequality is more pronounced than income inequality.

This should be obvious? Wealth can grow exponentially and more or less indefinitely, but income does not _. Since 1990, median hourly wages are beating inflation by a slim margin. An investment in the S &P 500 in 1990, adjusted for inflation, would be worth 7x. With 4 companies now in the Trillion Dollar Club, that inequality seems to be accelerating.

Does that imply that Americans are not wealthy because they don't plan their finances for the purpose of growing wealth? Andrew Yang wants to help with UBI, but I wonder if people would simply spend up to their new income and be in the same 3 month boat. They'd have more stuff and more fun and eat better and live in a better location. But many would still 3 months from insolvency.

Personal financial management should be taught as a life skill in high school.

_technically, it does, but in practical terms, there is essentially no wage growth above inflation, 7% since 1990: [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up- front/2019/09/10/are-wages...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up- front/2019/09/10/are-wages-rising-falling-or-stagnating/#)

</comment><comment><USER30> But America does give unemployment allowance to the laid off, so no need to worry?

<comment><USER10> It is different from state to state, but when I found myself on unemployment many years ago, it was less than my already meager earnings. It helped float us, but each month was negative cash flow.

<comment> kube-system Isn't unemployment less than earnings just about everywhere? I think the typical approach to unemployment isn't really to make it like you never lost your job, but to provide just enough to get by temporarily.

<comment><USER31> Not less than _their_ meager earnings. They were saying that they weren't making enough already and this was less, not that it being less than what some people make is bad. If you make the absolute minimum for survival, it shouldn't be less than that.

<comment> kube-system Negative cashflow doesn't cause immediate death. Many (most?) people who suddenly lose income have a a negative cashflow in the immediate term (especially in consumerist societies) — many expenses take time to adjust. And people generally aren't planning to be on unemployment for the long term anyway.

<comment><USER31> To not be catastrophic does not necessitate being good or even acceptable. Our systems of insurance can treat people better and we should want this because any of us can end up in that situation due to unforseen and even unforseeable events.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nothing to See Here Folks – Critique of Media Reporting - <AUTHOR> https://heated.world/p/nothing-to-see-here-folks <comment><USER2> From the article:

Three major newspaper stories. Zero climate mentions. Section A, page 12 of today's New York Times contains a big story about the unprecedented weather pummeling California. Titled "Extreme Heat Turns State Into a Furnace," the piece contains more than 1,700 words of devastating detail about how heat, fire, and toxic air are affecting people in the state. But none of those details were about why things are getting so bad. None of those words were "climate change."

The Associated Press's article today is similar. Titled "Scorched earth: Record 2 million acres burned in California," it contains 1,100 words about the weather's unprecedented nature. It lists several different record-breaking data points, and quotes state officials saying how "unnerving" it is to have broken these records so early in the wildfire season. And yet this article—which will be re-published this morning in newspapers across the country—also does not mention the reason why these records might be happening.

The Washington Post also has an article about unprecedented climate change- fueled extreme weather on its front page this morning, but it doesn't mention climate change's role. It's about how 50 hikers are trapped inside a shelter within a rapidly-growing 130,000 acre wildfire, unable to be rescued. "This is one of the largest and most dangerous fires in the history of Fresno County," the local fire chief said. "I don't think everyone understands that."</comment>


Star Wars Battle Quads: Drones with Laser Tag - <AUTHOR> http://www.idg.tv/video/72061/stay-on-target-hands-on-with-propels-new-star-wars-battle-quads <comment><USER2> Want</comment>


Facebook reveals bug exposed 6.8M users' photos - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/14/tech/facebook-private-photos-exposed-bug/index.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18681772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18681772)

350+ points</comment>


Read My Tweets redesigned.  (Tweet exchange with reading comprehension check.) - <AUTHOR>

Hopefully it is easier to understand and looks a bit more professional now:<p>http://www.readmytweets.com <comment><USER2> Dude, seriously.

What is the point of this submission? Can you imagine if everyone who tossed up a "rate my webapp" post here then came back and posted again everytime they updated it?

No offense, but I think you should grow your userbase via other means.

<comment><AUTHOR> This hopefully will become the "other means". If Read My Tweets (or a text ad variant) becomes popular, then you can use it to direct traffic to your site.

The problem with paid advertising is that it doesn't really reach the early adopter crowd -- they have learned to ignore advertising altogether.

It's time for an alternative.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps it's just me, but I cringe at the idea of HN becoming a user harvesting site. That mentality is what has, IMO, drug Digg and Reddit and the others down.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean that my site or similar will become that means -- not HN.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Explains Recent Cloud Outage was Caused by Power Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/amazon-explains-recent-cloud-outage-was-caused-by-power-failure?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewhir+%28theWhir.com+-+Daily+Web+Hosting+News%29 <comment><USER2> Aren't clouds distributed?

<comment><USER3> Only if you design your application to be. A region (in this case US-East) has multiple Availability Zones (almost entirely separate datacenters). Amazon reports that a single Availability Zone went down, so if you only used that one zone, so did your app.</comment></comment>


Akira Kurosawa's hand-painted storyboards - <AUTHOR> https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/akira-kurosawa-hand-painted-film-storyboards/ <comment><USER2> More modern example, Bong Joon Ho apparently storyboards the entire film before shooting.

Parasite's storyboards: [https://www.indiewire.com/2020/05/parasite-bong-joon- ho-stor...](https://www.indiewire.com/2020/05/parasite-bong-joon-ho- storyboards-graphic-novel-1202232085/)

On the flip side, Terence Malick gives you an index card with an aphorism and lets you improvise: [https://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-lennon-terrence- malic...](https://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-lennon-terrence-malick- knight-of-cups-2016-2)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Criterion Collection has most if not all of Kurosawa's movies available.

[https://www.criterion.com/search#stq=kurosawa](https://www.criterion.com/search#stq=kurosawa)

<comment><USER4> If you havne't already done so, check out the wonderful commentary by 'Every Frame a Painting':

[https://youtu.be/doaQC-S8de8](https://youtu.be/doaQC-S8de8) (Composing Movement) [https://youtu.be/jGc-K7giqKM](https://youtu.be/jGc-K7giqKM) (The Geometry of a Scene)

I don't normally recommend YouTube channels for film commentary, but this channel is very good indeed.

<comment><USER5> The person running that channel was actually hired by Criterion.

<comment><USER6> Oh that's wonderful to hear. After they announced the end of the channel, I was hoping they would find a way to continue to contribute such excellence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kurosawa associates strongly with his black-and-white early work, so I was surprised at the strong use of color and contrasting hues in these. It reminds me of post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard.

<comment><USER8> Agreed about his early black-and-white work, but I'm also familiar enough with his masterful use of color in films like "Ran" and "Kagemusha" that this doesn't surprise me. Kurosawa really was a genius.

The YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting has an entire episode dedicated to Kurosawa's use of motion in his films. It's fascinating. I have to say that frames from even his earlier films look like paintings to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also really enjoyed Satyajit Ray's storyboards for the Apu Trilogy. Sketchier than Kurasawa's, but thrilling nonetheless and greatly increasing the pleasure of watching or rewatching the films.

Unfortuately I can't can't seem to find them online aside from a few thumbnails. They were published in book form a few years ago; maybe that's why.

</comment><comment><USER10> That looks more like concept art than story board

</comment><comment><USER11> Probably like most film school students I had a Kurosawa obsession. These are incredible to see. Would love a framed reprint of some.

<comment><USER12> I'm not much into television or big screen media but for some reason I really got into Kurosawa films. Right after watching Seven Samurai I went and got as many Kurosawa films I could get my hands on. I think there are only a couple I haven't seen now. They just ooze creativity and inspiration. Every actor is perfect for the role. Every shot is perfect for the scene. It all comes together to tell the story the way it was meant to be told.

The pacing is on point. The mood is on point. Kurosawa's films are really a study on how to produce quality.

One of my biggest complaints for modern films is how much they try and fit in each unit of time. It feels like they don't respect what they're trying to portray. There's value in pause. There's value in waiting and letting things sink in to the viewer. We don't need to rush everything. It takes time to appreciate.

<comment><USER11> And the composition of each frame!

Not to be that guy, but as a classic part of the college experience my first time trying mushrooms was my first time watching Dreams. Good lord.

I think I am going to need to do a Kurosawa binge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is so awesome for someone like me. I have been a Kurasawa fan and almost went through all his movies except for Dreams which I so wanted to see. To get more understanding into the process and imagination, to me is like a treasure land now.</comment>


High-stakes security setups are making remote work impossible - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/high-stakes-security-set-ups-making-remote-work-impossible/ <comment><USER2> I think it's completely sensible for critical infrastructure to be air gapped and for people maintaining it to go into the office. This should be in the same category of jobs that cannot do remote work as doctors, nurses, etc that just have to be on site.

This is not the time to do sweeping IT architecture changes.

That being said, I think lots of normal companies have horrible IT security infrastructures that focus on compliance and covering peoples asses in case things go wrong as opposed to actual security. Those usually also make it hard for remote workers (vs BeyondCorp), which is now coming back to bite them.

<comment><USER3> right now healthcare should really be considered _critical infra_ too.

<comment><USER2> I didn't mean to imply it's not (now or ever). I doubt that most healthcare systems need to air gapped though (actual medical equipment should be).

<comment><USER3> I didn't say you were :) my comment was just an additional complementary point to yours

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most companies that I worked for and which had troublesome remote work setup used the "security by obscurity" approach. The IT there were completely incompetent and the only way they knew to make systems "secure" is to limit outside access. And most of those crippled infrastructures were windows-based. As usually there were exceptions though.

<comment><USER5> At my employer the issue is the opposite. They don't value security so they disable all firewalls, encryption, 2FA and everything else in favor of ease- of-use. My concern isn't that people will have a hard time working from home, my concern is that whatever malware they have at home is now also roaming the company network.

<comment><USER6> Let's dig a huge gaping hole into that infrastructure with a VPN and BYOD. And when it doesn't work, blame IT support for not properly supporting my dusty old Windows XP installation. Sure.

What you want is separation, though for real work it quickly becomes impractical. So there are special rules for something, and suddenly, everybody are running on those not-so-special rules anymore.

IT security is still mostly about people and awareness at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of the issue here is not features or limitations of VPN architecture, it's the decision to completely air-gap certain systems, which is a common practice in both government and industry with critical systems. Just e.g. "doing BeyondCorp" does not address the problem that workers cannot interact with an air-gapped system without being in the special room in the special building.

</comment><comment><USER8> How do security specialists think about this sort of risk assessment? Not just for pandemics but anything that would make key people have to access these systems remotely.

<comment><USER9> I've done assessment work for utilities, exchanges, large health providers and similarly regulated/sensitive organizations.

The risk decisions (implied or explicit) being made here are sensible. These organizations simply aren't set up to operate in anything like a "BeyondCorp" all-remote model.

The middle of a national crisis is the absolute worst time at which to try to make sweeping changes to facilitate new models of work. In a very plausible worst case, you end up with IT disasters that not only force people to work on site, but force everyone to come in and work extra hours using paper and ad hoc spreadsheet processes, while essential services are compromised for customers.

The concern that "opening up" these organizations would pose security threats isn't just sensible, it's obvious: most large enterprises are set up in the same perimeterized model we used in the 1990s, line-of-business internal applications are almost never hardened against attacks, and most internal segmentation is handwaving; internal site-wide pentests never fail against big companies.

<comment><USER10> Exactly, IBM consultants will still wrap an engagement today with unencrypted telnet listening on all interfaces of your "AS400".

"It's not open to the world" is quite often justification for some really poor security decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting that preventing a cyber virus and a real world virus is mutually exclusive. Some things require connectivity, when it's virtual connectivity you're exposed to virtual viruses and when it's physical connectivity you're exposed to real viruses.

<comment><USER12> The only real network computer security is achieved by unplugging the network. And even then...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Staffers at power grids, intelligence agencies, and more often don't have > the option to work from home

Yeah I'm good with that.

<comment><USER14> I'd like the power grid staffers to keep doing their jobs thanks very much

<comment><USER15> They can keep doing their jobs... at the office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how many affected organizations have begun to turn non-office space into office space and shift work around? Imagine working at the NSA, you won't want a few thousand people coming through security and stuff every day, so you shift the work to be 24/7 and make people come in smaller shifts, then you can put people in closets with good desks and lights and stuff to separate them. If hospitals can turn non-ICU rooms into ICUs (I have seen them turn some doctor's offices into ICUs recently, even) then why couldn't a utility or secure organization do the same?

</comment><comment><USER17> Availability is actually also a part of security, complementing privacy and confidentiality...

</comment><comment><USER18> Back in the day this was done with a bunch of paired encrypted modems, and a multiple serial port, getty, and ISDN-PRI are all probably still a thing...

</comment><comment><USER19> I thought zero trust is the only reasonable approach.

<comment><USER9> This is a thing that people say because it's ideally true and an article of faith among cool-kid practitioners†, but it is absolutely not the reality in major enterprises, and wanting it to be the case doesn't make it so.

† _I agree with the cool kids that it 's a good thing!_

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> These types of orgs just need to staff for this type of thing and have work rules and facilities to manage.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was going to say "a Bond movie where he the biggest threat to his life is not being able to work remotely", but then that is generally the biggest threat to his life all the time. I guess these problems here are the actual ones that should be addressed in the Sam Altman investing in covid-19 startups thread.</comment>


Relationship Management Startup Accompani Gets Another $15M While Still in Alpha - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/accompani-15m-series-b/

<comment><USER2> That's a lot of money for a product that's still in Alpha. This seems like a complex problem with many use cases. Are you concerned about product-market fit or have you already done enough beta testing to know you're on the right track?

</comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see this problem tackled, it's something I either always wanted to solve myself or have someone else address for me. Should be incredibly useful for busy people who such at keeping in touch.

</comment><comment><USER4>
        Caller 1: "Hi, I'm calling from Accompani."
        Caller 2: "Ok, which company?"
        Caller 1: "Accompani."
        Caller 2: "Yes, I got that. Which company."
        Caller 1: "Accompani!"
        Caller 2: "Which one? What is the name of your company?"
        Caller 1: "Accompani!"</comment>


The gold Apple Watch Edition will start at $10,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/9/8161553/apple-watch-edition-price-how-much

<comment><USER2> I dont feel the intrinsic value. Silicone doesnt age well. I am having trouble with the idea that the bottom end watches will likely be trumped in a year or 2 with V2. I can appreciate the engineering and thought that went into these things, but ouch. I wish the folks at apple luck, but I cant see the draw here. I could be setting myself up for a Steve Ballmer moment though...

<comment><USER3> With the $10K version (that's functionally identical to the $350 version) they aren't looking for customers who are interested in value.

Also: > Silicone doesnt age well. probably isn't what you meant to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172792)</comment>


Y Combinator (and What Happened After) for Nordic Founders - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ihqkristian/y-combinator-and-what-happened-after-for-nordic-founders-62d500973532 <comment><USER2> Execution of idea and perseverance are two qualities of successful founders. Any investor or accelerator will only bet on founders based on these 2 qualities.</comment>


Doing consultant taxes in Japan - <AUTHOR>

I moved to Tokyo this year, and have been consulting for a company. The company will not be assisting me with my taxes unfortunately. HN probably isn't the best place to ask this kind of question, but I'm struggling to find resources online, and assume many of you are at consulting gigs and have the same lack of Japanese experience to do something as tense as taxes.
1) What is the best course of action?
2) Does anyone have recommendations for a cheap, English-speaking tax preparation office? <comment><USER2> Probably the best forum to ask for this kind of advice is the Tokyo HN meetup:

[https://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/](https://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/)

A lot of guys there are in the same boat as you are. As for me I've only been employed full-time here, so I don't know how to file my own taxes.</comment>


Ivy League research says there are only three types of friendships people make - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/819754/ivy-league-research-says-there-are-three-types-of-social-friendships-people-make/ <comment><USER2> Would be interesting to see some other stats for people in the study... anything around mental health, number of sexual partners, the length of relationships, academic performance, personality types, etc... Something that explained why people make relationships the way they do.

Looking at the graphs I think I would fall into the compartmentalized option, I had friends I would go to classes with, friends outside of classes, friends in my fraternity... it was rare that they all got together in the same place.

My goals were to get good grades, have people to party with on the weekends (on demand), and then have some people who I was actually close with -- the guys I played poker with. Post college I kept up with a few people from each group I guess -- certainly wasn't exactly as I planned though. People float in and out over time...

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a Chrome extension to remove these large headers that are so common these days?</comment>


What are the limits of human vision? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150727-what-are-the-limits-of-human-vision

<comment><USER2> I appreciate that this article doesn't over-simplify the color theory -- it talks about the complete spectrum of visible light and the fact that our cones preferentially receive short, medium, and long wavelengths.

What I've come to expect from pop science is the "lie-to-children" description that our cones receive red, green, and blue light, as if only three wavelengths existed, and as if our eyes were designed to look at computer monitors instead of the other way around.

<comment><USER3> But, aren't red, green, and blue just the names we gave to those short, medium, and long wavelengths?

<comment><USER4> That's dangerous because it starts you down the road of thinking of colors as having a wavelength. A color is just the subjective sensation we get because of different balances of stimulation between our short, medium and long wave cones. Light of a specific frequency creates a specific color response, but it doesn't _uniquely_ generate that response. The sensation of 'yellow' can be generated with light at a wavelength somewhere between medium and long, or light at both medium and long wavelengths with a gap between, or light with a broad spread of wavelengths from medium to long (just so long as there's not much short wave light in the mix). And there's no such thing as a 'purple' wavelength. You see purple when your long and short wavelength cones are stimulated, but the medium ones aren't, and that can't be accomplished with a single, narrow wavelength - only by a mixture of long and short wave light.</comment></comment></comment>


John Romero Is Releasing a New Chapter of 'Doom' - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59vjzx/john-romero-releasing-sigil-a-new-chapter-of-doom <comment><USER2> Official link: [https://www.romerogames.ie/sigil/](https://www.romerogames.ie/sigil/)

Romero did a (really good) Doom level a few years ago too.

It's E1M8, here's the link:

[https://twitter.com/romero/status/688054778790834176](https://twitter.com/romero/status/688054778790834176)</comment>


SlickEdit Inc. Defeats Uniloc USA Inc. in Patent Infringement Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/slickedit-inc-defeats-uniloc-usa-155900154.html

<comment><USER2> This sounds like am advertisement for the lawyer. This is just a paid PR page, and they don't go into any of the meat of what that patent claimed or how they defended it...

<comment><USER3> It really is. I think we now have proof positive that HN will upvote anything containing the word "patent" to the front page.</comment></comment>


Finnish PM calls for a 4-day-week and 6-hour-day - <AUTHOR> https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2001/S00002/finnish-pm-calls-for-a-4-day-week-and-6-hour-day.htm <comment><USER2> Whenever this sort of policy comes up I wonder about the effects at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

If you're in a position to opt-out of this sort of policy and become more competitive as a result, then this can be great for you because you improve your position relative to the others.

A bit like how people talk about capping incomes, seeminly not realising that this cements pre-existing owners of wealth further.

Right now I'm sort of in an OK position, but ten years ago I would have told you - I don't want a 4-day week, because you're ahead of me, and I want to catch up with you.

I mean, ultimately there's nothing stopping most people negotiating a 4 day week. It just seems to be the case that "most" people accept whatever job is thrown at them, so if you're unskilled, it's difficult to convince an employer of anything even slightly unusual. Fixing _that_ situation (e.g. giving people leverage of some sort) is the way to go, IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, one can say that about the current 2 day weekend too. And there are people who do 80 hr / 7 day weeks but that surely gets you burned out.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but it's not clear to me that the balance is further to the left unless you're already in a stable state.

If you're secure in your home etc and have enough then perhaps 2 days would be a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21938696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21938696)

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad!</comment></comment>