The Riemann Hypothesis, explained - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JorgenVeisdal/the-riemann-hypothesis-explained-fa01c1f75d3f#.9hp0wrml3 <comment><USER2> There are some interesting statements that are equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis. What "equivalent" means is that if the statement is true then RH must be true, and if RH is true then the statement must be true.

Here's one I find particularly nice.

Let s(n) = the sum of the divisors of n, for a positive integer n. For example s(12) = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 6 + 12 = 28.

Let H(n) = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/n.

The RH is equivalent to the claim that for every integer n >= 1:

s(n) <= H(n) + exp(H(n)) log(H(n))

This is due to Jeffry C. Lagarias. Here's his paper showing the equivalence: [https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0008177](https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0008177)

<comment><USER3> Here's another one. You'll notice that typically there's slightly more numbers that factor into a product of an odd number of primes (i.e. 2,3,5,7,8,11,12,13,...) than into an even number of primes (4,6,9,10,14,15,...). If this is the case then RH is true. You can make this into a more precise question about the partial sums of the Liouville function and make it an equivalence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 3Blue1Brown recently did a video on the Riemann zeta function: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0NjbwqlYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0NjbwqlYw)

It's not as in depth but it has some helpful visualisations that I've never seen elsewhere.

<comment><USER5> Thank you, that was an amazing video. I literally hit the "Subscribe" button 2 minutes in!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shameless promotion: I published a book recently trying to explain RH, and my coauthor gave a great talk about it, which is here: [http://wstein.org/rh](http://wstein.org/rh)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I ask how many times a month (as a mathematics professor) you get 'THE solution' in your inbox?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great article!

One of the things about the Riemann Hypothesis is that the search space for a proof is more wide than it is deep. For each given idea or approach it doesn't take relatively long to get to the forefront of what is known, and an expert can often tell you right from the beginning that the whole class of approaches may not work due to some known phenomena, or that they would have to involve certain complications to not pick up on various almost-counterexamples. Furthermore, in these 150 years not only has the right path/approach not been found, but there isn't a truly compelling reason to believe that RH is true, aside from numerical evidence and a belief in beauty.

I think it'd be fascinating to put together an online resource to organize the possible approaches, list the knowledge prerequisites, show the potential counterexamples and stumbling blocks to each approach. This would help anyone interested in the problem, and once it is sufficiently developed it would allow non-specialists to contribute productively. This could be LaTeX on github, it could be more of a traditional wiki, but now I really want to get this going.

<comment><USER7> There was actually an entire conference in 1996 pretty much dedicated to talks about "How _not_ to prove the Riemann Hypothesis" to prevent people from wasting time on approaches that were known not to work:

[http://www.aimath.org/research/conferences/rh- conf.html](http://www.aimath.org/research/conferences/rh-conf.html)

<comment><USER3> Looks like a great conference, regrettably before my time (and unfortunately no videos of course). They look like fairly standard topics about the zeta function, where does "how not to prove RH" come in?

<comment><USER8> I'm not trying to be rude here, but academics in traditionally textual disciplines that lament lack of video media leave me totally agog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great introduction to analytic number theory.

I was expecting the standard dumbed down piece with no mathematical insight and far-fetched analogies. Instead, the post is mathematically rigorous and deep, and yet it manages to be completely self-contained and clear. Amazing work.

<comment><USER10> I bookmarked it for future reference study "if I ever get to it"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [nitpicking]

This version of Euclid's proof does not look like the one on Wikipedia, which is not a proof by contradiction. The article[0] mentions that:

"Euclid is often erroneously reported to have proved this result by contradiction, beginning with the assumption that the finite set initially considered contains all prime numbers, or that it contains precisely the n smallest primes, rather than any arbitrary finite set of primes."

[/nitpicking]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid's_theorem#Euclid.27s_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid's_theorem#Euclid.27s_proof)

<comment><USER12> Nitpicking indeed.

Euclid's proof: Every finite set of primes {p1,p2,...pn} has a prime, namely p1p2...pn + 1, not in the set.

Contradiction proof: The hypothetical finite set of all primes {p1,p2,...pn} would have a prime, namely p1p2...pn + 1, not in the set.

I'd hardly call the latter a different proof.

<comment><USER13> You made an error: p1p2...pn + 1 is not necessarily prime, but none of its prime factors are in {p1, ..., pn}. For example, 15 = 2 * 7 + 1 is not prime, but neither 3 nor 5 are in {2, 7}. I agree with your overall point though.

<comment><USER14> All primes. Not just the primes you choose. The set of the first n primes here would be {2,3,5,7}. The product plus 1 is 2 _3_ 5*7+1 = 211 is prime.

<comment><USER15> The product of the first n primes + 1 is not always prime, though. See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_number](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_number)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hm, except for using Gamma(n) = (n-1)! instead of Pi(n) = n!, this presentation seems to follow the notation of this book:

[https://books.google.ca/books/about/Riemann_s_Zeta_Function....](https://books.google.ca/books/about/Riemann_s_Zeta_Function.html?id=ruVmGFPwNhQC)

This is most obvious in the naming of the J function near the bottom, which I have not seen anywhere else. Riemann originally called that function a generic f.

At any rate, Edwards' book is great because it develops the theory from a historical viewpoint. It begins with a very well-annotated exposition of Riemann's original paper and the rest of the book goes on to explain other mathematicians' successive results in filling in all of the gaps that Riemann left in his paper. I recommend this book to any serious student of zeta.

<comment><USER17> Books used:

1\. Men of Mathematics (E.T. Bell, 1937)

2\. The Riemann Hypothesis: A Resource for the Afficionado and Virtuoso Alike (Peter Borwein et.al, 2007)

3\. Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (John Derbyshire, 2004)

4\. Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra (John Derbyshire, 2007)

5\. Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics (William Dunham, 1991)

6\. Riemann's Zeta Function (H. M. Edwards, 1971)

7\. Gamma: Exploring Euler's Constant (Julian Havil, 2009)

8\. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Hoffman, 1999)

9\. The Riemann Zeta-Function: Theory and Applications. (Alexander Ivic, 2004)

10\. e: The Story of a Number (Eli Maor, 2009)

11\. An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √-1 (Paul J. Nahin; 1998)

12\. Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula (Paul J. Nahin; 2006)

13\. Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis: The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers (Dan Rockmore, 2006)

14\. Infinity and the Mind (Rudy Rucker, 2004)

15\. The Riemann Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (Karl Sabbagh, 2004)

16\. The Prime Numbers and Their Distribution. (Tenenbaum and Mendès, 2000)

<comment><USER18> There is a video [http://library.fora.tv/2014/04/25/Riemann_Hypothesis_The_Mil...](http://library.fora.tv/2014/04/25/Riemann_Hypothesis_The_Million_Dollar_Challenge), and the book [https://www.amazon.com/Prime-Numbers-Riemann-Hypothesis- Barr...](https://www.amazon.com/Prime-Numbers-Riemann-Hypothesis- Barry/dp/1107499437)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who did not read it or missed it, at the end of the article there is a link to Jørgen Veisdal's 2013 undergraduate thesis paper.

[http://www.jorgenveisdal.com/files/jorgenveisdal- thesis13.pd...](http://www.jorgenveisdal.com/files/jorgenveisdal-thesis13.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm pretty awful at math and I found this explanation to be wonderful despite many parts of it going over my head. My brain naturally despises numbers (dyslexia)but your textual descriptions of formulas seemed to help me bridge the gap better than most texts.

<comment><USER20> Math is super interesting. The reason why most people don't like it and/or think it's hard is because they did not have a great teacher. Once you understand the notation and grasp the basics it's awesome.

So, it's more the language of math that makes it hard to understand than it is about the math itself.

<comment><USER21> which is really quite sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> here is a more technical discussion by Paul Bourgade @ NYU. I still re-read it from time to time for orientation.

Quantum chaos, random matrix theory, and the Riemann ζ function

[http://www.cims.nyu.edu/~bourgade/papers/PoincareSeminar.pdf](http://www.cims.nyu.edu/~bourgade/papers/PoincareSeminar.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> I went to a talk on the Reimann hypothesis with a physicist friend. The chair of our math department gave the talk. At one point he stated "Do you know why the Reimann hypothesis is important?, it's because it's the Reimann hypothesis". Suffice to say the entire lecture was waaaay over our heads.

</comment><comment><USER2> > The gamma function Γ(z) is defined for all complex values of z larger than > zero

What does "larger than zero" mean for complex numbers?

<comment><USER24> From your other answer it sounds like that you know what the OP means? I'll bite anyway ...

The Wikipedia article on the gamma function

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

states that "The gamma function is defined for all complex numbers except the non-positive integers. For complex numbers with a positive real part, it is defined via a convergent improper integral ..."

So maybe that is what the OP means: the gamma function Γ(z) can be defined by via convergent improper integral for all complex numbers of z with _real part_ greater than zero.

?

Wikipedia then points out that:

"This integral function is extended by analytic continuation to all complex numbers except the non-positive integers (where the function has simple poles), yielding the meromorphic function we call the gamma function."

<comment><USER2> > From your other answer it sounds like that you know what the OP means?

No, I had no idea what he meant. His statement about complex z larger than 0 came right after he gave a plot of gamma for real z from -6 to 6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For the curious, much of this is covered in depth in a graduate analytic number theory first course.

As fascinating as the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis is, I think something almost as fascinating is the works of Ramanujan - to this day, the genius Indian's work is studied in earnest, and amongst the most famous number theory work to this day.

</comment><comment><USER26> For a nice historical background on this, you can read "Prime Obsession", which is a pretty fascinating read.

</comment><comment><USER27> This article is about math.

In my ignorance, I mistook the article to be about the monitoring project[1] -- I expected some kind of proof/theorem behind the monitoring project.

This article is not about the monitoring project.

[1]: [http://riemann.io/](http://riemann.io/)

<comment><USER28> In fairness, the Riemann hypothesis is one of the most famous mathematical open problems, alongside the twin prime conjecture and P vs NP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great post, I have been reading [https://www.amazon.com/Riemann-Hypothesis- Greatest-Unsolved-...](https://www.amazon.com/Riemann-Hypothesis-Greatest- Unsolved-Mathematics/dp/0374529353) for over 10 years now ;-)

</comment><comment><USER10> I really appreciated the depth here.

</comment><comment><USER30> > The real valued zeta function is given for r and n, two real numbers

followed by a function of one real variable with an infinite sum of expressions containing integer r.

Sorry, but little things like these completely put me off in math articles.

<comment><USER31> Good catch! I read that paragraph the same way and I believe it is a typo. I've left a comment on the medium article asking the author to clarify that section.

If you don't mind me asking, what is so off-putting about these types of mistakes? I'd like to do more personal and professional technical writing similar to this but I find it a bit daunting, especially when I consider that my audience could know much more about a subject than I do. Do you have any suggestions on how I could or should write articles that may contain errors so I don't upset readers?

<comment><USER32> I came across that mistake (and it was pretty obviously a mistake to me, but that's because I already know quite a bit about the RH), and later was stonewalled by a different mistake -- the "Plot of the real and imaginary part of the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) in the interval -5 < Re < 2, 0 < Im < 60" plot is mislabeled; it's actually a contour graph of the condition "ζ(s) = 0" on the complex plane with real and imaginary parts plotted separately.

The problem for me is that my way of reading math stuff is to assume that whatever is said is being true and fit it into a growing mental model as I read. Many other students I know do that. Once you get into the flow of it this can get pretty fast without losing out on comprehension. When you come across mistakes, it leads to a speed bump, and you have to stop and re-collect your thoughts after this. This only happens to me for math and physics, not other kinds of technical writing, but it happens.

This doesn't turn me off an article, it's just super annoying.

Typos and stuff are fine, it's the "plausibly true" stuff that gets you. I suggest spending more time proofreading but not worrying more about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like his wording of Euclid's classic proof of the infinity of prime numbers. That's good exposition to start off the article.

<comment><USER17> Thank you! One of my favorites

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> ___META_ __

Why are people still posting things on Medium?

It's a platform that the founder knows has absolutely no clue about how to sustain it. After 5 years, and over hundred million dollars of investments.

 __ _end meta_ __

This is a good post, and it should be put somewhere that will keep it.

That said, "RH" stuff now:

Fuck Riemann. An entire school of music theory that has almost nothing to do with him is named after him. It's a ginormoulsy idiotic way to understand music.

The people who think of him as a great thinker as it applies to music are completely out of their minds.

/trolling, sort of. a little.

<comment><USER35> Bernhard is the number theorist - you are thinking of Hugo.

<comment><USER34> You are correct, and I was mistaken.

Rant redacted.</comment></comment></comment>


Being Poor - <AUTHOR> http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ <comment><USER2> No, this is not off-topic. You have just read an article on how you have to hack every system connected to money just to maintain continuity (let alone dignity). Did you miss those?

</comment><comment><USER3> "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic"

Does anyone feel that this might be stretching it?

<comment><USER4> >Does anyone feel that this might be stretching it?

After that thread a few days ago where everyone here thought that "62% of Americans Have Less than $1000 in savings" meant that 62% of Americans voluntarily forgo a savings account in favor of more lucrative investing techniques, no, I don't think this is stretching it. I think it's an enlightening and necessary reminder.

<comment><USER5> agreed. it's amazing how clueless having money makes you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this hits home big-time. I definitely fit into this category.

It's sad this doesn't have more upvotes :(

</comment><comment><USER7> This is why ad based revenue models and commoditising of hardware, enabled by great, forward thinking companies like Google, are so important. It allows the poor to at least have access to the "information age". Google is an incredible force of good in the world. Thank you Google.</comment>


NASA Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect [] Lunar Artifacts - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/library/reports/lunar-artifacts.html <comment><AUTHOR> It's a very long title, which in full is "NASA's Recommendations to Space- Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Lunar Artifacts", already 65 over the limit. It's also a pdf (although the link goes to its info page) and from 2011. Don't know how to best shorten the title.

I find it interesting to read since it's a mesmerizing topic, you can glean some interesting facts from it (eg how lunar top soil acts), and just by the fact that NASA has done this is very cool. It's interesting in a similar way to finding the service manual to some obscure tech.</comment>


The mobile Web isn't dying, it's being killed, slowly, by Apple. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@badnewsjohnny/2d79ab7dae66

<comment><USER2> TL;DR: Apple are in control of the feature-set available to browsers on their own closed OS.

This isn't a surprise, just as the fact that "Chrome on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari's Webkit" isn't a surprise.

If you want to use another browser engine, then use a different OS. You won't have this problem on Android.

Apple's iPhone isn't the "The mobile web", it's just a lousy window into "the mobile web" for a fraction of the users.

When developing any responsive (or _gasp_ mobile) site, I wouldn't check it solely on iPhone/iPad, that's crazy talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's like secretly poisoning the pot a great Sequoia tree would initially grow from, then standing around and brainstorming with people about how to create a better environment for it to flourish. So long people know it's disingenuous, that's all I can ask for.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here, first article. Hope it's worth the read.</comment>


Ask HN: Choosing open source project licenses when not legally-minded? - <AUTHOR> I have an idea for a really great open source project that I know there's going to be a lot of interest in, and no app already fills that niche. Before I open source it, I want to choose the right license, to allow people to use the app freely for whatever they want, to protect me from whatever they do with it (without forming an LLC), to allow other developers to contribute to it, but still allow me to maintain control over the project, and to protect my right to receive donations through Patreon if people become enthusiastic and excited about the app. But IANAL and have no idea what repercussions each license comes with. What are some resources where I can <i>quickly and reliably</i> choose a good license based on my requirements, without becoming a lawyer and without accidentally choosing a license that bites me later down the road? <comment><USER2> No open source license will allow you to maintain control over the project.

If you can imagine having any proprietary interest in the project --- some line of business or donation revenue stream built on your thing that will naturally go to you --- you probably want to GPL. GPL adds use restrictions that make it difficult (though not impossible) to commercialize open source software, and those restrictions will apply only to your downstream users (you are not bound by the GPL for code you own and can relicense it as you see fit). This is part of the business model for a lot of open source companies.

If you want to go really nuts with that, look at AGPL, which imposes even more restrictions. People are generally cool about GPL and less cool about AGPL.

If you don't care about any of that, MIT license is the most normal choice.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what the "most normal choice" means, but in this age of software patents, X/MIT (or BSD) is archaic to the point of being dangerous except for the most trivial of projects.

Select a license which has a patent release. Otherwise people will have a very good reason not to use your software. If you want to go the BSD-style route, the most normal choice here is Apache.

<comment><USER4> Is this still an issue if you don't own any software patents?

<comment><USER3> Yes. Because your licensees don't know that and they don't know you wouldn't obtain them later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Highly recommend [https://choosealicense.com/](https://choosealicense.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Also consider dual licensing as a solution. For instance, you can release code under a restrictive open source license (such as GPL or AGPL) and also offer the code for a fee under a non-open license that allows it to be used in closed-source projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a great idea for the app I want to make! It would let users create and ship apps that come with my custom runtime functions bundled in. I'm trying to figure out how to monetize it, and my only thought so far is to open up a Patreon for donations from any very enthusiastic users. But sublicensing seems like a good alternative! Or maybe I can do both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Besides the license think about registering a trademark. That way Docker, Linux or git manage not to dilute the name (see e.g. [https://www.git- scm.com/about/trademark](https://www.git-scm.com/about/trademark) ).

As for the code, if it's open source anyone can fork. But with trademark they'd have to rename the project.

<insert IANAL boilerplate here>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I was reading through licenses and saw some like Apache and Mozilla mentioned trademark limitations, but now that you mention it, that probably only counts if you trademark it first! I will look into trademarking without an LLC, great idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The easiest and safest approach is to choose the most restrictive license possible, like AGPL, and not accept contributions without signing an agreement, like Google does [1]. You can always switch to a less restrictive license later or sell under a different license, etc.

People will still be able to use your product freely, try it out, read code, contribute, but you will be protected from large corporations taking advantage of your work without paying you (like Amazon unable to use open source Mongo and Mongo unwilling to sell to Amazon).

[1] [https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google- individual](https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual)

</comment><comment><USER9> This website is a really good resource: [https://tldrlegal.com/](https://tldrlegal.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi dom96, it's so weird to see authors of big projects I really like just pop up in Hackernews comments like this! Thanks for the link and recommendation, it looks great, did you use this when choosing the license for Nim?

<comment><USER9> Actually I think we did. Nim used to be GPLv2 and we changed to MIT. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only open source licenses that make sense are the Free Public License 1.0.0 and the Zero Clause BSD License.</comment>


Making CSS saner (from Patrick of Auctomatic) - <AUTHOR> http://patrick.auctomatic.com/ <comment><USER2> This has already been done by SASS (<http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/sass).>

Ex. In SASS

!main_width = 10

!unit1 = em

!unit2 = px

!bg_color = #a5f39e #main

:background-color = !bg_color

p

:background-color = !bg_color + #202020

:width = !main_width + !unit1

img.thumb

:width = (!main_width + 15) + !unit2

yields

#main {

background-color: #a5f39e; }

#main p {

background-color: #c5ffbe;

width: 10em; }

#main img.thumb { width: 25em; }

(Edit: Is there some way to format comments here on new.yc like there is on Reddit? I tried using both pre tags and indenting and neither worked…)

<comment><USER3> This requires you migrate your stylesheets to a totally new syntax, which isn't a great solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The makefile rule will leave behind a .css file even if there's errors. Compare to "cc -c foo.c" and the existance of foo.o on an error; we don't do "cc -c foo.c >foo.o".

Things like this can cause hard to find problems further down the line in a big system build; after the error the target file exists and is newer than the sources.

Either don't use shell re-direction or do "cmd foo foo.tmp && mv foo.tmp foo".

<comment><USER5> Or if they can modify the script so if there's an error a return code of nonzero is returned which can be checked by the makefile.

<comment><USER4> Don't know why anyone's modded you down. I was thinking that either the interpreter, e.g. ruby, or the script itself already returned a non-zero exit status and the makefile detected that. That doesn't cause make to remove the target.

$ make foo

false >foo

make: *** [foo] Error 1

$ make foo

make: `foo' is up to date.

$

I suppose they could do "cmd foo >bar || rm bar" instead of the mv I suggested. But that causes no bar to exist whereas the mv leaves the pre-build one behind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't like this design binding CSS stuff and application vars, I could use as alternative a function that gets a CSS++ and turns it into a CSS, so that the CSS remains self contained. Something like this:

@define companyred #ff5000

@define warningborder border: 1px red dotted

h1 {

color: @companyred;

} ....

So that the CSS file makes sense by itself.

<comment><USER3> The are a few problems with this approach. First, it takes more work. Second, it makes it harder to share values between CSS files. (Of course, you could add an @include statement to the "CSS++" language -- but that's starting to get pretty heavyweight.) Lastly, having yet another language is kinda unnecessary and confusing, as compared to just integrating ordinary Ruby expressions.

<comment><USER6> First: you did the work just one time, it's a 10 lines of code function :)

Second: I use only a CSS, and only a JS file, it takes a lot of sense because the client will cache them both the first time, so even without include it's ok most of the times.

Lastly: It's semantically not more complex than your. Just @define to define and @symbol to expand.

But of course it's just a point of view like many things in design. I wanted to share my view about this because I planned to write the interpreter for this stuff and write a blog entry. Thanks for your article I'm happy it makes sense for others to extend in some way the CSS in order to have some kind of symbols.

CSS gurus and standard fundamentalists will usually reply that with inheritance you should never need this kind of stuff, but they lies ;)

<comment><USER3> Ah, misunderstood you first time round. The problem with just doing symbol expansion is that you can't have values that depend on other values (like the "Width + 10" example in the post). For us, this has been a large part of the gain.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps it's possible to mix this two things to get something like:

ruby {

.... ruby code defining stuff ...

}

attrib: @stuff

Self contained, not a new language, able to define stuff relative to other stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good work Patrick

<comment><USER3> thanks honey

<comment><USER8> _group hug_

<comment><USER9> haha - good to know the auctomatic love lasts well into the morning

<comment><USER10> No wonder it's taking you so long, you're playing with CSS. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> cool

if you're using rails there's also this:

<http://blog.airbladesoftware.com/2006/12/11/cssdryer-dry-up-your-css>

also, even if you are just using ruby, why not rake and erb instead of make and eval?</comment>


What laws should be created to improve computer security? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/law-security.html <comment><USER2> Just one simple would go a long, long way: vendor's responsibility for damage. All the provided points are just technicalities that _still can be implemented badly_.</comment>


The "Giving free cash to the poor will make them lazy" theory - <AUTHOR> https://econstuffs.wordpress.com/2018/07/10/the-giving-free-cash-to-the-poor-will-make-them-lazy-myth/ <comment><USER2> I wouldn't call it a myth, I'd call it a theory.

This is why basic income experiments like YC Research, the Ontario one, the finished Namibia one etc are all important. We need to see what happens in different cultures, in different communities, in different economies when we give un-earned income to people with no strings attached. We need to see what will happen.

You can absolutely bet if you give enough people free money, there will be ones that opt to do nothing but sit around playing their ninplaybox consuming their drug of choice. You can absolutely bet that some will use it to make positive life changes though like improving their diet or health care, seeking training, starting a side-hustle. We need to do these experiments for years and years in many areas in many populations to see though what exactly will happen.

I imagine if you took groups from the same state here in the US and gave those in a rural community money they're going to behave differently than someone living in an urban or downtown setting. Different if one group is in an economically depressed community and one is in a community full of healthy local businesses and corporate jobs.

I wouldn't call it a myth, I'd call it a theory with inadequate evidence to support or refute it.

<comment><USER3> > I wouldn't call it a myth, I'd call it a theory with inadequate evidence to > support or refute it.

I would call any theory that lacks adequate evidence to support it a myth.

<comment><USER4> Calling it a myth implies that there is adequate evidence to refute it.

By your reasoning we could also be talking about the Giving-Free-Cash-To-The- Poor-Will-Make-Them-Productive myth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> another-one-off No problem with UBI as a theory, for all I know it might be strictly better than the status quo. Handing money out seems to have worked out for the banking system, hahaha. :[

The issue is that the economy is outrageously complicated and it isn't obvious that the people who want to bring in a UBI are the same people who will be working to bear the cost of a UBI. If it turns out to be unfair and negative, as any ambitious economic policy can be, it could be politically very costly verging on impossible to unwind.

<comment><USER5> I always wondered: if UBI was reality for everybody, wouldn't then simply all prices go up by the UBI level and nothing changes after all?

<comment><USER6> Prices for what? How would anybody coordinate this?

<comment><USER7> Rent is a big one. For example, you charge your tenants $1000 a month now. UBI kicks in, everyone gets an extra $500. Why wouldn't a landlord up their rent charge to $1500, or even to just $1250? Who wouldn't want to do that?

<comment><USER8> > For example, you charge your tenants $1000 a month now. UBI kicks in, > everyone gets an extra $500.

They don't, though, because UBI isn't funded by magical outside injection of value; the maximum mean additional after-tax income in any plausible UBI scheme (ignoring gains by induced economic growth or tax policy changes not germane to UBI funding) is $0. In a sense, it's a means-tested program where the means-test is within the taxing structure rather than a separate bureaucracy.

More to the point, though, local and interregional competition on rent, the same thing that stops landlords from capturing all the gains in income from all sources, is what constrains this (or not, if it is absent); UBI presents no special features in this regard.

<comment><USER7> While this is true, it is not magically funded, consider the average person. Taxes historically are taken out every pay check. This person is now receiving $X dollars a month "for free", insofar that it doesn't require any actual input on their end to receive this money. Rationally, of course it's not magical free money, but and the end of the day they do ultimately have X more a month to spend.

<comment><USER8> > While this is true, it is not magically funded, consider the average person.

Yes, do.

> Taxes historically are taken out every pay check.

And witholding formulas will be adjusted to reflect the additional taxes to pay for UBI, so people with jobs or other income subject to withholding (with income high enough that, at the level of approximation provided by withholding formulas, they would pay some additional tax for UBI) will have their non-UBI regularly-received take-home pay commensurately reduced.

> This person is now receiving $X dollars a month "for free", insofar that it > doesn't require any actual input on their end to receive this money. > Rationally, of course it's not magical free money, but and the end of the > day they do ultimately have X more a month to spend.

No, even in the take home pay before filing taxes and settling up at the end of the year sense, not everyone will get equal (or any) additional income under a UBI scheme, and the mean will still be around $0.

<comment><USER7> >not everyone will get equal (or any) additional income under a UBI scheme

Why call it universal base income if you can price yourself out of it like you can with normal welfare? I thought that was the entire point of the system.

<comment><USER9> The point is to avoid any effort on deciding who really needs it, and not create perverse incentives not to work. If your tax bill exceeds your UBI, your income is a lot higher than your UBI so you don't care that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a pernicious assumption here in equating "recreation" with "laziness". _All_ of us deserve to have fun once in a while, regardless of socioeconomic status. Recreation can improve mental and physical health, provide great opportunities for social interaction, and exercise parts of our brain that don't otherwise get exercised.

<comment><USER11> The problem is often people who work, work hard and importantly pay taxes, don't have the time for this recreation.

So you can say that " All of us deserve to have fun once in a while, regardless of socioeconomic status." But for someone who is working too hard to take the time to have fun, this rings kinda hollow. And I can bet it stings a bit to have your taxes going towards paying for someone to do the things you don't have time to do yourself.

I went through a stint of working in cafe's recently, and one always had a group of people who would turn up after leaving the job centre (you have to go here to qualify for benefit money) in the early afternoon, and would just basically hang out. Frankly I had to fight the jealousy, I wish I could spend every afternoon hanging out with my friends. I had to remind myself how much it sucks to be unemployed, and how nice I have it. I can imagine this could seem unfair to someone in a more stressful position.

<comment><USER12> If you work a job that allows you no free time that is your choice. Whining that other people have leisure time is absurd, if you want leisure get a better job.

I am disturbed by people's aversion to taxing the wealthy. After WW2 the top tax rate in the US was over 90% and until the 70s it was over 70% but since then we have been systematically fooled by the wealthy to believe the absurd "Job Creator" story and income inequality has sky rocketed as a result.

<comment><USER11> Frankly if you can't see why someone working hard would be annoyed with their money going towards taxes that pay for people to enjoy a life that they are not enjoying, then you are no better than someone saying "Don't be lazy, just get a job". People do different things, some people want to make lots of money or have a 'good' career, and sometimes you have to suffer through the bad side of your choices. A bit of empathy goes a long way.

I don't think the place to aim for is income tax. Tax in the 70s was crazy (the Beatles wrote a pretty famous song about it, it was in the 90%s in the UK). Frankly I don't think income tax should ever be above 50%.

Taxing capital gains on the other hand should be higher than in the 20%s for people "making" millions a year this way. Not to mention how easily corporations dodge tax, or how people can inherit vast fortunes without doing or risking a thing. Aiming at raising income tax is just pointing badly off people against slightly better off people, all whilst the truly wealthy are ignored.

<comment><USER12> Even the most high power CEO in the world can take long extravagant vacations. Do you think he is crying because someone in Detroit can work part time and relax half the week? Your argument is bizarre.

<comment><USER11> But a doctor who's had an 80 hour week, saving lives, helping people, and spending time away from their family, can't feel it's unfair they have to pay for someone to stay at home and relax.

The world is more than CEO's and part time workers.

<comment><USER12> How is that any different from a CEO with long hours and high pay? No one is forcing this person to be a Heart Surgeon. They could do very well as a Suburban GP with basically 9-5 Hours and still high pay and prestige.

I actually think you are just one of those "Taxation is Theft" libertards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Instead of UBI, which many critics are fearful of, why not switch to a voucher system? The government gives everyone a voucher redeemable for $x for food, $x for healthcare, etc., whatever forms of welfare we decide to provide as a society. Then private companies can register with the government as providers of these services and consumers can spend their vouchers wherever they want. This solution seems like it eliminates bureaucracy by switching to a market based system, provides a safety net for the entire population, and makes it harder to freeload.

<comment><USER14> > eliminates bureaucracy

Okay -- so I register with the government as a "food provider", and I take food vouchers in exchange for non-food (like gasoline or something), and redeem them with the government for cash money. Who is making sure that I can't do that? We could have it strictly be an enforcement solution -- no bureaucracy, but a huge operational burden on the justice system. Or, more reasonably, I would have to submit to being regulated as a food provider, and would have to meet certain standards in order to do so, and would have to file appropriate paperwork to establish that I am doing so. Hell, as long as we're here, we might as well make sure that I only provide healthy food, according to what is currently thought of as healthy. Oh, and the cost of the food I sell has to be regulated; can't have me charging $20 for a hamburger, even if it is a "premium" one.

Anyway, long rant, but in the end, the suggested system sounds like a mountain of bureaucracy and would probably cost way more to keep running than just giving the money directly to people.

<comment><USER13> > I take food vouchers in exchange for non-food (like gasoline or something), > and redeem them with the government for cash money. Who is making sure that > I can't do that?

You can't redeem the vouchers for cash, only for the good or service the vouchers are designated for. So a food voucher would let you redeem it for food. A healthcare voucher would allow you to pay a healthcare provider for whatever services you received.

Edit: oh, you're saying you pretend to be a food provider. The solution to that seems simple. Lifetime ban from voucher funded industries for anyone caught doing that and forfeiture of 3x damages. That's just an example, but if you make the punishment great enough I doubt you'll have a problem with it. It seems like it's pretty easy to catch someone doing what you described. For one thing, you'd have to be registered as a business to even engage in the practice you describe.

> I would have to submit to being regulated as a food provider, and would have > to meet certain standards in order to do so, and would have to file > appropriate paperwork to establish that I am doing so.

Sure, but how do you think the welfare system works currently? You'll always have bureaucracy, but you can have it in greater or lesser degrees. I contend that my proposal would have less bureaucracy than what we currently have. You already have to register with several state agencies if you want to run a grocery store (at least in my state). Whole Foods doesn't find that too onerous.

> Oh, and the cost of the food I sell has to be regulated; can't have me > charging $20 for a hamburger, even if it is a "premium" one.

No, that's the whole point of switching to a voucher/market based system. You as the service provider can charge whatever you want. The population, as recipients of the vouchers, can redeem them anywhere. If you charge $20 per hamburger you'll go out of business or change your prices.

<comment><USER14> > You can't redeem the vouchers for cash, only for the good or service the > vouchers are designated for

You are misunderstanding the scenario. I am a food provider. Someone buys food from me for vouchers -- what do I do with those vouchers? I assume I exchange them for cash from the government, otherwise, I can't pay my rent or my employees or for cleaning products.

The problem with not regulating the $20 hamburger is that I sell a $1 hamburger for $20 in vouchers, and slip the customer $18 in cash (that I replenish by redeeming the vouchers, as above). Yes, I'm committing fraud, and yes, if I get caught I'll get in trouble. But if fraud is widespread then it becomes impossible to detect.

Yes -- this is how food stamp and EBT programs work now, but they work with huge amounts of bureaucracy, a stated non-goal in your system. So I don't really see a differentiation here between what you're offering and what food stamps already do (poorly).

<comment><USER13> I realized that while you were replying and added an edit to my comment.

Yes, I agree that's a problem, but you can reduce fraud by making the punishments severe enough. For instance: commit fraud, lifetime ban from the industry.

I don't believe UBI is palatable to a majority of the population, but I believe a voucher based system could be if marketed appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands It's easy to do some research and say, "Hey, this works! Look at all the places that did it!"

Here in the US, we already have a complex network of safety nets to take care of the people who UBI is really targeted for. This begs the question, if you give people a basic income, what social services people already depend on will you get rid of?

There's no way you can keep all of the social services AND give people a basic income, it's just not economically feasible.

<comment><USER15> To implement basic income without raising taxes, the USA would have to trim something like 10% from our defense budget.

I think you mean politically feasible. And political feasibility is something that changes with the popular will.

Not to say we'd want to keep all our current welfare type benefits with UBI

<comment><USER16> 10% of the defense budget would fund a $15 a month UBI.

edit: bad math

598 billion per year * 10% / 325 million people / 12 months/year

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am quite interested in UBI and look forward to seeing more empirical data on the various experiments being conducted.

Having said that, the "danger" of UBI is that it's a big, fat slogan that can mean damned-near anything -- and there are a ton of people who both support and oppose it because of the way the idea makes them feel. That makes for a terrible environment for productive public discourse.

The only half-ass real world data I know about is the independently wealthy. They get money every month and don't have to work. In general, people who become that way suddenly ruin their lives. And the numbers probably aren't so good for those who earn it and then stop to enjoy it.

This example sucks, however, as the goal of UBI (as far as I know) isn't to replace all income. It's to cover the basic needs of people so they can be free to study, improve their lives, and not have to spend all of their energy in the day-to-day struggle of existence. I have no idea how it will play out in that scenario, and I suspect that the long-term effects will be much more pronounced than the short-term ones. This will be, after all, a major culture shift.

I like the idea. I just don't know enough about it -- and it doesn't have enough definition -- for me to _support_ the idea.

<comment><USER18> No matter which version of a UBI you support, there's one key feature that I just can't imagine happening out here in the real world. A UBI should REPLACE most existing forms of social assistance. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, some kinds of pensions, some kinds of child support, etc etc etc. Each one of those is a massive public sector industry with a lot of political weight behind it.

I live in Germany, where every market has some form of social assistance connected to it. The task of dismantling that bureaucracy would be outrageous... And quite a lot to spend on a relatively untested scheme like any UBI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One argument the article forgot is that efforts to help the poor with goods or services rather than cash entail building a bureaucracy, and inevitably the iron law of bureaucracy asserts itself, more and more of the funds are diverted to the bureaucrats rather than the ostensible mission.

</comment><comment><USER20> Giving away cash won't make people lazy; rather, it will motivate them to maximize their take of the action, while minimizing someone else's. Scores of people claiming to be poor will suddenly appear out of nowhere, with outstretched empty hands.

<comment><USER21> It being "Universal" means that people don't have to claim to be poor. Now, because we have progressive taxation, claiming to be poor would indeed be advantageous - but that's true even today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Increased enrollment isn't the same thing as increasing work %. Some of these other studies are testing "cash transfer for specific thing" and find that "specific thing" increased, somewhat. That's not really what people are arguing when they argue broader cash transfers, like Basic Income.

The _work disincentive_ of basic-income-like cash transfers, in studies so far, is actually somewhat consistent at around 10%. Some papers referencing this approx figure:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/r19npwc30trejb6/Basic_Income_in_a_...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/r19npwc30trejb6/Basic_Income_in_a_Small_Town_Understanding_the_Elusive_Effects_on_Work__Calnitsky_Latner_Social_Problems_BI_in_a_small_town.pdf?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/oi0kv3vcya9o0ad/The_Rural_Income_M...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/oi0kv3vcya9o0ad/The_Rural_Income_Maintenance_Experiment__sr10.pdf?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/hkd489vcarcrorg/Findings_from_the_...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/hkd489vcarcrorg/Findings_from_the_Gary_Income_Maintenance_Experiment__Gary%20Income%20Maintenance%20Experiment.pdf?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/5m2k5qzgv699dfe/THE_TOWN_WITH_NO_P...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/5m2k5qzgv699dfe/THE_TOWN_WITH_NO_POVERTY_Using_Health_Administration_Data_to_Revisit_Outcomes_of_a_Canadian_Guaranteed_Annual_Income_Field_Experiment___forget- cea%2520%282%29.pdf?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/dsucn7jone74g65/New_Jersey_Graduat...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dsucn7jone74g65/New_Jersey_Graduated_Work_Incentive_Experiment__ED099531.pdf?dl=0)

I've had these sources handy since last year when I was doing research on my own UBI-skeptic piece: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/after-universal- basic-incom...](https://email@example.com/after-universal-basic-income- the-flood-217db9889c07)

</comment><comment><USER23> If you are on an island where a third of the population is struggling, e.g. bad crop yield, the whole population on the island will experience the negative effects as a whole.

Solutions? 1\. Build a wall around the less fortunate and allow some of the more able ones to work for less than you would otherwise pay.

2\. Share the resources of the more fortunate with the less fortunate until they are back on their feet and are able to prosper.

A persons good fortune isn't made in a vacuum.

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel like UBI in general is a bad idea. If you give me free money, I'm just going to spend it or use it like any other money. If my landlord, mechanic, etc. knows that certain people are getting extra Income, what stops them from just raising the prices? If the landlord knows that a tenet is getting $300 a month and extra income, what's stopping them from raising the rent $300, completely negating the UBI concept?

<comment><USER25> Exactly the same thing that's stopping the landlords from raising the rent by $300 right now - supply and demand.

If the people receiving UBI are universally spending that money on something other than rent, then the landlords who raise their rent by the UBI amount will become noncompetitive and fail to attract tenants.

To presume that 100% of the UBI will simply be absorbed by the landlords is absurd, not only because of the above argument, but because for many people, the UBI will be significant enough to swing them to home ownership instead of renting, putting additional pressure on the landlords not to raise prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is very culture dependent and depends on the values of the recipients. There are cultures of entitlement where none of that money would go to education or entrepreneurship, just to greater levels of indulgence.

</comment><comment><USER27> Question for conservatives: Do you really think that if your rent was a few hundred bucks cheaper per month you'd start smoking crack?

<comment><USER28> > Question for conservatives

Are you sure UBI would actually be _against_ "conservative" interests?

With UBI, it's hard to justify salaries for much of the redistributive bureaucracy.

With UBI, it's hard to have open borders as well.

<comment><USER27> > Are you sure UBI would actually be against "conservative" interests?

No, but the most common objection I hear to UBI is that people will just spend the money on drugs. But I have yet to actually hear anyone say that they'll start smoking crack or whatever if their rent went down a few hundred bucks a month. So either I should start hearing people admitting that they will, or else this objection should get dropped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We could also review prior experiments.

1970s MINCOME experiment. Dauphin, Manitoba Canada [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome)

Briefly: Adults continued to work, excepting mothers with newborns. Public health improved. Higher graduation rates. Welfare related stigma reduced.

TL;DR: Many benefits, positive ROI, no discernible downside.

Adopting UBI really is a no brainer.

<comment><USER30> From the article:

However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary.[6] This represents an important limitation to the knowledge of the impact of a guaranteed annual income; little is known about the long term effects on willingness to work.

<comment><USER29> Your point?

We shouldn't try UBI because initial positive results may not prove durable?

I'm also struggling to understand how willingness to work, especially with our current labor glut, is more important than public health.

\---

I forgot to add:

The sole concern I have about UBI in the USA (vs Canada) is our lack of universal healthcare. Single payer or otherwise. I can't imagine UBI working without it.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pdf.js-based real-time collaborative viewer for Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable-docs-%E2%80%93-pdf-viewer/ecnphlgnajanjnkcmbpancdjoidceilk?hl=en-US&utm_source=hn <comment><USER3>
        <div id="fucking_intro_video_wrapper">
        <video id="fucking_intro_video">

Classy!

Form aside, this looks like a very interesting product, as others I wanted to work on something similar too. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> ... this is what happens when you finally get something working at 6am :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the benefit of creating a web app that only works in 1 particular browser? Or is this not a web app?

<comment><AUTHOR> The extension is currently only available for Chrome, but all the functionality is available at [http://web.notabledocs.com/web/viewer.html](http://web.notabledocs.com/web/viewer.html) \- If you share your document, that's what the other people get. We actually work offline (including making comments) if you install the extension.

<comment><USER5> Cool stuff! Something I've been thinking about too. Open Source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not right now, but it's something we're considering - we certainly owe a lot to Mozilla's PDF.js, which is doing the PDF rendering for us. It's just tricky to decide to give away the code when you don't yet know what part of your startup is (hopefully) going to be valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is EXACTLY the product I wanted to make, thanks!

I think a use case for which you could sell it is collaborative class note- taking. My teachers distribute PDFs of their lecture slides before class which students use to take notes on (so that they don't have to recreate figures, etc). I have always thought it would be great for this PDF-markup process to take place live in some sort of Google Doc interface. This looks like the best solution I have seen so far!

If you really wanted to run with the student use case, you could then allow students to publicly/privately organize the annotated notes by class and lecture slot so that other people could benefit from the notes.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually made that product first! - [http://www.notable.ac](http://www.notable.ac) is similar, but made specifically for students, documents are organized by course and notes can be made public/private/shared with friends.

It does take a bit more work to setup, because you have to upload the documents to the site first (we process them into images on the server, and support Word/Powerpoint as well as PDF).

We had trouble getting traction in the education space - So we built the Chrome version, which works much better for single documents and for uses outside education. But we're still keeping notable.ac running so feel free to give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We are working on open source project, quite similar to this: [http://peerlibrary.org/](http://peerlibrary.org/)

[https://github.com/peerlibrary/peerlibrary](https://github.com/peerlibrary/peerlibrary)

</comment><comment><USER8> its kinda "funny" how pdf.js is used for Chrome in a way that only works with chrome. (given that it comes from firefox)

thanks for walled gardens google!

<comment><USER9> Huh? How so?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This app caused me a lot of trouble. I tried to save some PDFs and they were impossible to open in any reader. I opened them with Notepad++ and they were now HTML files. Also, there is security issue of giving full access to your PDF downloads away. Sometimes financial institutions generate PDFs with account and identiy information; this app by default doesn't ask you if you want to give it to them, it just automatically does so.

I like the concept and hope to download a future iteration. Just some feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry you had trouble with saving PDFs - I'll look into it and see if we have a bug there.

We don't actually upload the PDFs to our servers unless you explicitly use our 'share' function. This is something we consider critical to the product, for the privacy reasons you mentioned. We do send a fingerprint of the document to our servers to check if anybody has added comments to it. (The comments you make are saved to our servers however).

Hope this answers some of your concerns, feel free to email us at email@example.com if you have any other feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We have an extension (for chrome) and a bookmarklet (and ipad app) that use pdf.js to add comments to pdfs and save specific pages from pdfs. The extension and bookmarklet allow commenting on any page that can be rendered on a web page (including Pdfs!). We are now targeting it for education. Will love feedback (provided our site doesn't crash) [http://www.surfmark.com](http://www.surfmark.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> Hah, the layout is almost exactly like a thing I'd developed last year: comment threads on the right, callouts into the document on the left.

Pretty cool--if anyone's interested, I'll try to get the source code released.

<comment><USER5> Yes. Would be a great starter for a project I am working on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can this app be an item in the "chrome://apps/" page, and use my google credentials for logging in? Or some form of OpenID?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on adding Google Login at the moment. You can install the App version from [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable- docs/iljoj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable- docs/iljojpiodmlhoehoecppliohmplbgeij?hl=en-US&utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher) , although it doesn't support offline at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> pdf.js is great. we used it at surfly to implement purely web-based collaborative pdf viewer that works on any modern browser.

</comment><comment><USER15> Actual project link (OP just goes to Chrome/NSA app store): [http://notabledocs.com/](http://notabledocs.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The listing on the Chrome store is more up to date, so I linked to that - <USER2> the landing page works too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very useful!

</comment><comment><USER17> How long take to make it? How many persons are in your team? Is it a kind of side project?

<comment><USER18> The MVP took about a month, and probably 3 months to polish. Working full time with 2 hackers, hipster and a hustler.</comment></comment>


How Facebook Was Founded - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3 <comment><USER2> Bored of this story. While all this doesn't paint Zuckerberg in a great light, the idea that he stole the idea for a social network is stupid. Half the CS majors in the country were talking about something like this when they saw Friendster. Boring boring boring

</comment><comment><USER3> These story is part of an exposé series. The other two stories:

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg Broke Into A Facebook User's Private Email Account [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked- in...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the- harvard-crimson-2010-3)

How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked Into Rival ConnectU In 2004 [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked- co...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked- connectu-2010-3)

</comment><comment><USER4> Zuck is quite the character.</comment>


Ask HN: What process should I use to find SMB prospects for a B2B SaaS product? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently trying to build an outbound sales process for our SaaS product. One of the biggest challenges I'm facing is figuring out how to reach out a large number of SMBs. I have previously tried marketing focused approaches but they have been very slow and expensive to do. I'm currently trying to follow the process described by Aaron Ross in the book Predictable revenue. One of the main things I'm trying to figure out is different sources for obtaining highly targeted prospects with contact information.<p>What are the some of the ways in which you prospect for your B2B products ?
What's the best way for me to completely automate the entire process ? Do I hack several products together or go is there some solution out there which already does this ? <comment><USER2> Why not just call on people in the traditional ways?

Buying leads for a SAAS seems a bit absurd in so far as nobody has ten years of data on SMB's buying SAAS products. And nobody has more insight into your potential customers than you.

Yeah, it's hard work and it won't scale from 1000 customers to five million customers worldwide overnight. Scaling anything from 1000 to 100000 will require completely new systems across the organization anyway. And that's a good problem to have relative to never getting to 1000 customers.

Generally, the best thing to do for sales is to get out of the building.

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> Brudgers is right. You have to get out of the building and actually talk with prospects. It will not only help you understand the pain points your product/service solves, it will earn you credibility with your customers.

Recommend reading Guy Kawasaki's book, The Art of The Start. I believe his best advice is to work with customers and get paid to solve problems as a consultant first. That way, you're earning money at the same time.</comment></comment>


Barns & Noble Purchased Borders' Email List - Going to Spam the Hell Out of You - <AUTHOR> http://www.wcbracken.me/2011/10/28/barns-noble-purchased-borders-customer-emails-preparing-to-spam-the-hell-out-of-you/ <comment><USER2> I drew a different conclusion when I got that email from Barnes & Noble. While I dislike B&N buying Border's customer list, B&N was transparent about it and pre-emptively offered a clear opt-out before they started sending advertising material. The opt out process tried to convince you that being on the list was worthwhile, but also made it clear about how to finish the process.

B&N did something shady, sure, but in very plain language told you what they'd done, how to be removed, and during the process suggested why it would be worthwhile to be on their list. Their transparency is respectable.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. At least they let you know that they have the data and the opt-out was easy enough (I also did it).

Organizations share gtheir mailing lists ALL THE TIME. If I pay a membership to museum for a year, I suddenly have five similar museums sending me their marketing info in the mail.

I used to work at a non-profit where this happened constantly. Sure, it wasn't a lot of data about what I have done, but it was basic demographic stuff. To me it made no sense, you'd think that you'd want to protect your donation base at all costs, but this is how deals/partnerships are made between organizations.

Who knows what Facebook is doing with all of that data. If only they were as transparent as B&N with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To put things into better perspective, here is the letter from the B&N CEO that was sent out some weeks ago informing Borders' customers of the acquisition of some assets. The sale was approved by a federal bankruptcy court.

<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/container/stores.asp?PID=39742>

I think that they've done a fine job with disclosure and much better than many companies have done.

</comment><comment><USER5> It was my understanding that they bought Borders, and the list came along for the ride. As one of the assets of the company, and since everyone opted into the list, it doesn't violate CANSPAM.

They are now giving you a very visual notice that you can opt out.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a bit tin foil hat. They're a book store, borders was a book store. Cross business customer relevance couldn't be higher. They offer a simple opt out.

</comment><comment><USER7> It is illegal to transfer personal data from the UK to the US; they may have fallen foul of that little Data Protection Act.</comment>


AMS-IX Breaks 4 Terabits per Second Barrier - <AUTHOR> https://ams-ix.net/newsitems/218 <comment><USER2> "... underlines AMS-IX's leading position within the global Internet Exchange Point market."

Yeah, i.e. DE-CIX is constantly hitting the 4 Tbps barrier for quite some time now and is trending towards 5 Tbps.

[https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/](https://www.de- cix.net/about/statistics/)

<comment><USER3> And the gap will only increase if the proposed intelligence services act (Wiv20xx) is passed by parliament. The act allows the intelligence services to mass surveillance all electronic communication and forces all service providers (not just telecom providers) to pay for surveillance equipment.

Besides being morally wrong to mass surveillance everyone when the current act already allows the intelligence services to monitor the few thousand potential terrorists and spies, it would also hurt the Dutch economy. International companies would move their European cloud infrastucture to e.g. Germany and Dutch startups providing a communication service (i.e. almost any startup) would be less trusted by their users and run the risk of paying for expensive surveillance equipment.

If you are Dutch i recommend reading the reaction of Nederland ICT [1] to the proposed act.

[1] [http://www.internetconsultatie.nl/wiv/reactie/828d2159-cf3c-...](http://www.internetconsultatie.nl/wiv/reactie/828d2159-cf3c-4003-83d6-09be63bedf11)

<comment><USER4> The MP who proposed the law has lost support of his party recently (The Labor party) to keep on pushing the law in current form.

Also the CTIVD ,the organization that supervises the AIVD (The dutch NSA) has told the law isn't possible to implement in current form.

So the chance that it will pass it pretty small. Though they'll probably juggle around some words and try again so we should stay alert. Luckily it has gotten quite some media attention and people seem to be aware that the law is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By way of historical comparison, consider that in 1992, the ULCC's transatlantic "fat pipe" was a 1.5Mbps circuit:

[http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/grap...](http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/graphs/1992-Fig5-UK- US-Fat-pipe-Connectivity.gif)

Or that the total traffic served by the University of Bath's website across all of 1997 was 63MB:

[https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+His...](https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+History)

<comment><USER6> Is... is that figure correct!? Conservatively, taking the number of requests at the start of the year, we get 6 million req/year.

63 _1024_ 1024 == 66060288 bytes. 66060288/6000000 == ~110bytes/request. That seems too small. The overhead of the HTTP request alone (without content) would be greater than that!

<comment><USER7> Something does seem funky. The website looked like this in 1997: [http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath...](http://web.archive.org/web/19970418234503id_/http://www.bath.ac.uk/) [This page is 3,780 bytes.]

In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: [http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac...](http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac.uk/About/Usage/WWW/Monthly/1997-05.html)

This says that it transferred "3 599 Mbytes" and there were "728 506" requests. Interpreting "3 599" as 3.599 gives 4.94 bytes per request, which is absurd. It must be 3.6 GB, making each response just under 5 kB. This seems much more reasonable.

So the number on that page should probably be interpreted as 63 GB, which is reasonable if we assume the site became more popular later in the year, as the original source suggests (3.6 GB*12 = 43.2 GB, and the stats are from May).

Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!

<comment><USER8> it reads as if by order of magnitude jump you mean "megabyte to gigabyte" but (obviously, now that I point it out) that is 3 orders of magnitude jump!

<comment><USER9> I think he is correct. An order of magnitude change for (most) SI units is a change by a factor of 10, while it is a change by a factor of 1024 for bytes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yay. More peering at Internet Exchanges makes internet faster and cheaper. Europe has the lowest effective cost of bandwidth:

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of- bandwidth-a...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth- around-the-world/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is really interesting to see the 19h -> 24h increases in traffic. Most likely due to online streaming, this is a predictable sharp increases on the Hamburg and Munich POP[0] for DECIX.

[0] [https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/](https://www.de- cix.net/about/statistics/) (scroll a bit down)

<comment><USER12> More likely due to the release of iOS9. A couple of other European Internet exchanges also peaked last night [0].

In the past few years Apple have been embracing public peering much more - according to PeeringDB they are at 37 locations with many having multiple 100G connections.

0: [https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html](https://stats.linx.net/aggregate.html)

<comment><USER11> If you look at the weekly statistics, you see the bump everyday. If iOS is putting a concentrated load on the network from 20h to 24h, they could redesign a bit their update system to spread a bit more during the day...

<comment><USER12> It's not that easy.

The peak at that European time is due to people getting home to unrestricted Internet access - which means their device can phone home and update.

I don't believe in coincidences ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Those numbers seem very low to me, I feel like something doesn't add up. Indeed, 1 GBits FTTx offers from FAI are getting more and more widespread, so that would mean that the peak traffic is around only 4000 simultaneous users?

<comment><USER14> Usage vs capacity. I have Gbit service at home, but I'm not saturating the link 24/7.

<comment><USER15> Genuine question! Have you ever been able to saturate your connection with a single TCP stream or did it require multiple streams (possibly from multiple devices)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?

<comment><USER17> Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is.

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

<comment><USER16> I would be surprised if, practically speaking, 8bits <> 1 byte for 99.99% of all general applications. My feeling is that the .01% can do the math so the other 99.99% don't have to.

<comment><USER18> Yeah but specifically for networking, error-detecting and error-correcting codes can make a byte at the app level > 8 bits on the wire, transparently. The capacity of the hardware is independent of that, so they talk in bauds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks to the launch of iOS 9 :) Funny to see the big bump after 19:00

</comment><comment><USER20> How is this a "barrier"?</comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone using OpenStack Solum in production? - <AUTHOR> Solum[0] is Basically an OpenStack PaaS, but it's been limping along with not much development being done besides bitrot maintenance to keep it working with the rest of OpenStack's projects. <comment><USER2> I'm not a fan of OpenStack. Have had nothing but awful experiences with it.</comment>


Google Apps Script - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/script/start/ <comment><USER3> I have used this fairly extensively in helping a large volunteer organization manage a staggering array of Google forms, docs, and so forth.

As another commenter said, it is like VBA except you get to use JS which is nicer. You can do quite a bit with these scripts. More than you might think. But... It has serious drawbacks.

1\. The script implementation has been changing often and without warning.

2\. It fails unpredictably with no indication of what the problem is (the built in log is limited and it is difficult to tell where the source of trouble is -- Google Docs? the spreadsheet you're working on? a bug in the code?)

3\. Undocumented bugs are rampant. Real example: you add a small script in the responses spreadsheet to send e-mail confirmation to people who submit a Google form. It uses the built-in onFormSubmit trigger. By all appearances, this will start to e-mail everyone going forward. Instead it e-mails everybody who has ever submitted since the form went live.

4\. Sometimes runs incredibly slowly with no apparent reason.

Like everything else in Google Docs, there are lots of things you just can't do -- some by design, some not.

<comment><USER4> I'd definitely have to agree with the caveats having used App Script a fair bit w/ various Google Spreadsheets.

The documentation is thin and you'll find lots of long-standing issues only through digging through various support/group threads, the debugging is obtuse and unsuitable for triggered actions - there's no logging.

The killer though is that the performance/rate limiting is crap - as your document gets bigger, your functions will fail and time-out semi-randomly, even if you're not making a significant # of API calls. Presumably this is because of the way that GDocs are XML streams internally - but even doing single getsheets in calls (no cell iterating) seems to cause problems.

I couldn't find good caching/global storage mechanisms in the past - <USER2> hadn't seen ScriptDB before, so maybe that can help (storing in scratch sheets doesn't help since you need to use the API calls to get that stuff)

Anyway just some of my experiences for those who are interested in working w/ App Script for Google Spreadsheets. It's been years since I touched any Excel Macros, but they worked a _lot_ better than my experience w/ App Script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been around for yes, but new features were announced yesterday:

[http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-apps- scr...](http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-apps-script- features-at-google.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Unless Google has dramatically improved performance, this is not good for anything beyond toy examples. Apps Script seems to suffering from the NotLovedByImportantExec syndrome, hence the lack of serious development resources.

Till about a few days ago, saving a script before running used to take 5 min or so.

Plus you run the risk of getting the rug pulled out from under you when some big shot at Google decides that it 'distracts' from some $important 'core mission' and does not 'align well'.

</comment><comment><USER7> The biggest plus about Google Apps Script is it runs on .google.com, which means you can do things like set calendar appointments, programmatically access Gmail etc, with the user's authentication cookies.

The biggest minus about Google Apps Script is it runs on .google.com, which means they can't do anything that would let you steal people's authentication cookies. This means all your HTML and user-facing JavaScript needs to be run through a sanitizer (Google Caja), which means the performance really suffers, and there are a lot of things you can't actually do.

It's possible to build a full web application on Apps Script - someone has even ported Bootstrap to it, and most things work - but most people who try quickly hit the limits and move to Google App Engine.

</comment><comment><USER8> Made a simple, but not that trivial, app with this. A management system using four spreadsheets with 80+ worksheets in each. It worked sometimes, sometimes didn't. I suspect there was some bug, but couln't find anything, the logs are difficult to find.

The spreadsheets aren't a reliably way to store information. Can't query spreadsheets to get information, had to do it by very slow processes.

Everything is slow.

I love the idea, but will not try again until some working large-scale app appears.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I correct to think of this as a VBA for Google Apps?

<comment><USER10> > Am I correct to think of this as a VBA for Google Apps?

It is kind of like that, except that its JavaScript and not Visual Basic, and you can use it for "standalone scripts" and "web apps" in addition to scripted functionality for Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Sites).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> App Script is great for knocking together ad-hoc spreadsheets that pull in data from your company's HTTP APIs.

It's the best thing I've seen so far for giving non-technical colleagues visibility into whatever organisation data you have that's programatically available. They already understand spreadsheets, so there's no complexity to overcome when they come to play with them. It's trivial to base the output on a few user-defined cells, so you can put together fairly powerful features without ever having to build a user interface. You even get to do stuff with the logged in user's Google account. And since the toy apps seldom get too big, JS that you write in your browser is the perfect low-friction development environment.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great concept but I have a few concerns.

1 - how well can you integrate. As macarthy12 asked can you add links or other changes to gmail.

2 - what's stopping google from looking at the products that work well and just copy them. Basically stealing what you spent 6 months or a year to built and then offer it as part of a built-in feature.

Google started as "do no evil" however, it seems like you can't be a dominating company and not do evil.

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems useful, How long before it is canceled? ;-)

<comment><USER14> If you're curious, a model I built ( <http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns> ) gives Script a ~25% chance of surviving the next 5 years.

<comment><USER15> Do you plan on keep this up-to-date based on new data?

<comment><USER14> I'm collecting data for another update in 5 years when the full period has elapsed (to check the performance of the original model and build a new model based on that and the new entries found in the 5-year interval), but otherwise no, I don't plan to produce rolling 5-year estimates or anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would love a gmail script that automatically selected your "from" email based on the tag/folder the email was sent to.

For example, if you receive an email from firstname.lastname@example.com then it would automatically select firstname.lastname@example.com (or whatever you set it to) as the "from" field.

I'd be willing to pay for this as I don't think this is possible with Google Apps Script

<comment><USER17> I think I could do this for you. My mail is firstname.lastname@example.com (UK TZ for responses)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really impressive. It seems to have much of the functionality needed to create a pretty rich web service.

<comment><USER19> you obviously never tried to script a spreadsheet in google drive with it... sorry but it sucks period. The only thing that is impressive is people paying for that. It simply doesnt scale when you have large spreadsheets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks great to me - didn't take all that long to automate on of my everyday tasks - check out my experience here: [http://blog.nimblegecko.com/using- google-apps-script-for-aut...](http://blog.nimblegecko.com/using-google-apps- script-for-automating-small-tasks/)

</comment><comment><USER21> How long before GMail is supported and products like Streak (<http://www.streak.com/>) can be built on top of it and sold in Google's marketplace? This is a game changer and Microsoft should be very, very worried.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is interesting enough but describing it as "a JavaScript cloud scripting language" just makes me think their marketing person is throwing the word "cloud" in at random points.

<comment><USER23> Well, if there is anybody who can claim to have "cloud" services, that's Google...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks like a neat tool for setting up personal reminders, but it seems like it'd be great to learn javascript on.

Also there are no tabs :(

</comment><comment><USER25> Trying to figure out if you can add custom menu/actions to Gmail ?? That would be great

<comment><USER26> AFAIK it is not possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> May be someone can now crop up a quick and simple Google Reader alternative?

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone really want to code in the browser?

<comment><USER29> People probably said the same thing about email and office apps 10 years ago.

<comment><USER30> Most people I interact with still don't want to use Office Apps in the web browser, so it doesn't seem like much has changed on that front.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> not yet deprecated?

</comment><comment><USER32> Can this be used for non-google apps ??

<comment><USER33> Chack webshell.io for this. It is an open AppsScript like. Still in beta.</comment></comment>


Wallaroo (stream processing in Python) 0.6.0 is now available - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WallarooLabs/wallaroo/releases/tag/0.6.0 <comment><AUTHOR> There are some cool new features in this release, including a streamlined Python API. If you have any questions or want to talk about stream processing in Python I'm happy to do it here.</comment>


Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Cthulhu - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/07/any-sufficiently-advanced-tech.html <comment><USER2> [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

<comment><USER3> This exemplifies my love hate relationship with HN. I love that I now have something new to read that is extremely interesting, but I hate that you've just destroyed my productivity for a time span of not minutes, but hours, or even days depending on how deep I go into this rabbit hole.

<comment><USER2> It's been a week and you may be in danger of becoming productive again, so I thought I'd link you to the LJ that the author kept before starting SlateStarCodex: [http://squid314.livejournal.com](http://squid314.livejournal.com)

You're welcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "[...] in order to survive, we need to supplicate ourselves to horrible entities whose motivations we are literally not capable of understanding."

Feels familiar. I am trying to protect my privacy to the best of my knowledge but I feel that I'm losing it to several entities whose identities and ends are rather... cloudy...

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed so.

I feel a follow-up piece coming on entitled

"Ia, ia, Google fthagn..."

<comment><USER5> Networknomicon, the Facebook of the Dead, written by the Mad Student Mark Zuckerberg...

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, the Facebook of the Dead is an interesting concept...

<comment><USER6> People have their profiles, and then they die. It's inevitable.

<comment><USER5> > _then they die. It 's inevitable._

Pessimist!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The description of the genre reminded me of Cabin in the Woods. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259521/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259521/)

Is it the beginning of a geek take on horror? It was a fun film, and felt very original when it came out, but it was also a bit of a gimmick. I'm not sure it's ready to become an entire genre without becoming very quickly stereotyped.

<comment><USER8> With perhaps humor being the exception, it seemed like his description of this new genre almost summed up the themes from Frankenstein. I think horror has always been a "geek" thing. (If that word with its modern meaning can even be retroactively applied)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that's a very interesting point.

Particularly since I think the "geek" moniker could definitely be applied to the Shelleys. Byron, less so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A friend presented "Reflections on Trusting Trust" this weekend, and that right there is some downright edlritch shit:

[https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...](https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf)

The C2 article on it is basically a bunch of mere mortals trying (and failing) to come to grips with it:

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheKenThompsonHack](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheKenThompsonHack)

<comment><USER3> That paper has been one of my favorites since I first read it. That said, assuming a bounded level of complexity in the bug/hack, there are ways to jump from an infected toolchain to an uninfected toolchain, it just requires quite a bit of effort. If you can't assume a bonded level of complexity, well, it then becomes a debate on theology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A tangent: I strongly encourage anyone who is a fan of Cthulhu, Lovecraft, this quote, and video games to try Bloodborne for PS4. It's the best blend of these four elements I've ever experienced, and it still sticks with me months after I finished it.

<comment><AUTHOR> God dammit. OP here - I'm a huge fan of the Dark Souls games too...

But I'm trying to hold off on buying a PS4 until there's more than one game I want to play on it.

<comment><USER11> For what it's worth, I bought a PS4 solely for Bloodborne and I think it was absolutely worth it, plus we have Dark Souls 3 coming down the pipe next year too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Snowcrash and a bunch of Ted Chiang's works seem to be in a similar but possibly unrelated vein.

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh, interesting point - I'd not considered the horrific element of Snowcrash in the same light.

<comment><USER13> I'd always thought of the snow crash as Stephensons' Cthulhu ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On a related note - I've thought for a while that Charlie's _Laundry_ series would make an excellent TV series - if for no other reason than it allows me to speculate on who could play Angleton.

<comment><USER5> I hereby posit that any choice other than Bill Nighy is a symptom of irreparable madness.

<comment><USER15> I always pictured him a Peter Capaldi myself.

<comment><USER5> I've never seen him in anything (not a Dr. Who fan here)

<comment><USER16> You needn't be; "In the Loop" is a British political satire starring Capaldi in, I think, one of his better roles, and besides which is a cousin of "Veep", easily the most on-point US political satire of the last fifty years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting. I currently fiddle around with a little game [0] to brush up my Javascript. It is exactly about this theme: Seeking knowledge to save mankind and Cthulhu. Alpha-quality warning! [https://qznc.github.io/IncCth/](https://qznc.github.io/IncCth/)

[0] assuming you consider Cookie Clicker et al "games".

</comment><comment><USER18> One of the common elements of the Lovecraftian Mythos is that the gods of it _do not care_ about humans and cannot be appeased or swayed or what not. Perhaps this isthe primary takeaway we should focus on when comparing these vastly influential technologies and the people behind them to Cthuloid horrors.

</comment><comment><USER19> > the Lovecraftian universe fits extremely well with the universe as > understood by geeks. It's a fundementally science-driven place, where all > magic is indeed just sufficiently advanced technology.

Call of the Cthulu starts with a shared dream, so where's the technology? Several other stories involve dreaming too. Lovecraft is more about programming (programming people and peoples programming) than science. Most Lovecraft characters are introverts much like the geeks, and selfie takers of our auspicious era (meh).

<comment><USER13> Is a website nothing but a shared dream?

<comment><USER19> Are you referring to healthcare.gov and the young people who made it possible? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857662)

<comment><USER13> All literature, no matter how mundane, is a shared dream ..

<comment><USER19> Everyone reading Tolstoy might fall asleep in boredom and share a dream?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/cthulhupunk](http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/cthulhupunk)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm reminded of A Study In Emerald, a Sherlock Holmes style detective story in a Lovecraftian setting (with a licensed board game which I hear is quite good).

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this another thread about rogue AI?

</comment><comment><USER23> Apocalyptic narrative is as old as writing. Human understanding also grows with technology - the British Empire only banned slavery around 200 years ago.

Dystopian stuff has the same problem for me as horror. All I see is Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd saying "Oooh, scary!"

The only horror movie I ever liked was "Alien". Because it was credible.

So meh.

<comment><USER19> Yep horror is just sci-fi with an even more hackneyed magic system.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Opera stagnating? - <AUTHOR>

I feel if there was ever a time for Opera to break into the mainstream, it would have been these past few years. Internet Explorer's market share has gone nowhere but down since 2009, Chrome usage doubled in 2011, and Safari is always making steady gains. [1]
I ask because I am an Opera user. Over 2011 I have experienced imperfect support for Google+, Google Docs and Twitter. I've seen Unite, which I feel is still ahead of its time, fail to take off. The Widgets seem all but dead. The extensions development community seems much less robust than for other browsers. One would have expected Opera to benefit from the gains made by Firefox and Chrome in recent years. Yet Opera market share always seems to be just under 2%. In fact, their market share has been shrinking of late. [2]
Is Opera going to be forever stuck under 2%? If so, doesn't that mean Opera will never have success with features that depend on community involvement such as widgets, extensions, and Unite?
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser_market_share
2: http://insights.chitika.com/2011/web-browser-market-share-november-2011/ <comment><USER2> Opera still commands a large & growing market share of browsers on mobile phones with Opera Mini. This is evident in Asia / developing countries where partnerships with mobile operators are helping them stay relevant. But as these countries switch to mass adoption of smartphones, I sense they will struggle to keep up the momentum. See <http://www.opera.com/smw/> for current growth story of Opera Mini.</comment>


AWS Start-Up Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge/ <comment><USER2> Not trying to be negative here, but if you just have an idea, forget it. All of the companies selected last year seemed to be already launched and profitable. Even if you are in the alpha or beta stage, I get the impression that you won't even be in the running.

Amazon touts this as though teams with great ideas have a chance, but they are really looking for companies who are already writing large checks to Amazon.

YMMV and I could be wrong, but last year I was astonished and disappointed by the lack of real, early stage startups.

<comment><USER3> Just dash off an application and get the $25 in free AWS credit. Spend less than 10 minutes on it and it's a pretty good rate of return.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You have to be from the US, UK, Germany or Israel to qualify. That sucks. You'd think that Amazon would at least cover the countries they are selling in.

<comment><USER4> No, I wouldn't think that actually. Can you imagine how much legal wrangling it would take to understand the law in 100+ countries? I don't make any guesses as to the size of amazon's legal team nor to their scope in terms of country coverage but really - that's a massive job. Just take the USA for example - Amazon's legal team is working overtime dealing with taxes. Should they hire 60 new attorneys just so that they can make this content utterly global? At that point, they'd probably say, "Let's just forget the entire thing. If people are gonna complain about it, then we just won't do it."

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are selling something in another country, I would understand your point but this is a startup challenge. The onus is on the participants to see if their country will allow them legally. I would say that this would apply to over 90% of the civilized world.

<comment><USER5> > The onus is on the participants to see if their country will allow them > legally.

You typically can't shift liability that way. In particular, Amazon can't. If there's a problem and someone has the choice of going after Amazon or some local little guy, Amazon gets it, especially if said someone is said little guy.

Plus there will be arguments like "if you just changed {rule}, everything would be okay", and different groups from the same country would name different rules.

FWIW, this is an example of the constant yet mostly invisible drag of "consumer protection".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your chance of winning is tiny, but unlike other competitions, the $25 in free AWS credit is a nice bonus for all applicants.

We submit an application pretty much every year, and it covers a good chunk of our S3/Cloudfront costs for the rest of the year :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the real deal - my company works with one of last year's finalists, encoding.com, and they are pretty great. Not perfect, but it's a small company using AWS as their infrastructure - and everything has worked so far.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it alright to have internal Javascript on a 1 page website? - <AUTHOR>

The site in question is TimeForZen.com. It relies heavily on JavaScript and there 3 javascript files:<p>- 1st one is Jquery which loads from Google so it's most likely hosted and cached on the user's computer. - 2nd one is 5kb and minified - 3rd one is 33kb and minified<p>Should I just include them in the index page (32kb non-minified) internally so that there are less server requests? I'm just getting into JavaScript and am a complete noob when it comes to these things. I know it's best to keep JavaScript external so it can be cached and used on other pages, but this is a ONE page site. It will NEVER expand past one page. <comment><USER2> 4 (5 including the favicon) isn't that bad, especially if it's done in parallel.</comment>


On Mastodon and Nazis - <AUTHOR> https://blogghoran.se/2019/07/12/on-mastodon-and-nazis/ <comment><USER2> I've joined most of the social networks that pop up and check them out. Gab was bad at launch with crap, but trolls get tired when after awhile. Gab isn't even close to racist posters like voat hazing new people with crude/racist shock posts.

I think Gab offered a censored version to appease google store, but was still refused.

I find it amusing, that people create opensource software use diversity open source licenses, then exclude people that disagree over anything.

I find the best censorship is one that follows US law, because death threats will get you banned, and racists/trolls normally end up making one.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 Yet another person using the word Nazis for people with different (and sometimes tasteless opinion), diluting the word.

Alt-right, conservatives, even racists or xenophobes for some, but Nazis really doesn't help pushing the point across.

I mean, stuff like this [1] (I pixelated identifying info, I don't want a witch hunt), attacking an alleged nazi by hoping them all sorts of accidents or mishaps and threatening to harass someone is not okay no matter on which "side" you stand.

[1]: [https://i.imgur.com/ifI5spa.png](https://i.imgur.com/ifI5spa.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> Banning Nazis but allowing communists, conservatives, "SJW"s, etc. is such an arbitrarily defined policy that I can't take these people seriously.

If you want to have an echo chamber, that's perfectly fine and understandable, but don't go around pretending your decision is based on some virtuous moral principle.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure if you asked any given 8th grader what the difference between a neo-Nazi and a conservative is, they could give you a cogent answer.

<comment><USER3> Of course they're different. But the four ideologies I mentioned can be considered violent ideologies in different realms. Allowing 3 of them but banning the other one is based in nothing more than the opinion of the censor, not in an objective principle.</comment></comment></comment>


An Indian doctor who is in Jail for 6 months for protesting against govt - <AUTHOR> https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/uttar-pradesh-doctor-kafeel-khans-detention-under-national-security-act-extended-by-3-months-2280306 <comment><USER2> This is a very sad state of affairs. Government muscle is being used to silence dissenting voices. No wonder India ranks so low in the world free press index.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, I always think what can ordinary people do to protect the democracy.</comment></comment>