Why The MongoDB Hate? - <AUTHOR> http://yourstartupsucks.com/post/12416816599/why-the-mongodb-hate A wise opinion on "MongoGate" haters. <comment><USER2> _"MongoDB is designed to be run on a machine with sufficient primary memory to hold the working set. In this case, writes finish extremely quickly and therefore lock contention is quite low. Optimizing for this data pattern is a fundamental design decision."_

Yeah, well, that's a problem. MySQL and Postgres perform dramatically better if you keep everything in memory, too -- but they _don't fall over if they have to hit the disk_. (And yes, they can handle lots of concurrent writes, even when the working set is larger than RAM.)

I have no particular bias for or against MongoDB, but arguing that it's peachy because its biggest limitations were designed-in from the start isn't a winner. Some of us want tools that aren't going to fail under reasonably expected application loads. Also, arguing that Enthusiastic Developers are Working Really Hard on fixing those limitations isn't especially compelling (I'm still waiting for Enlightenment 17...)

<comment><USER3> Sometime the best marketing for your product is stupid marketing of competitor's product. Those that worry about their data when they read what supporters are saying and they hear "writes finish extremely quickly and therefore lock contention is quite low" because "it is all in memory" will turn around and walk away.

Some who are nice will take the time to explain and criticize that is such a bad design (and those will be deemed as haters), most will just turn around and find something else.

> but arguing that it's peachy because its biggest limitations were designed- > in from the start

My beef with them is with the perceived dishonesty in their marketing (and it must be the 4th time I've said, sorry if you have to read this phrase again). They basically never made the trade-off obvious on their front page. So at worst it was dishonesty, at best it was just a bad thought-out design that wasn't fixed until a couple of months ago. Sorry, I cannot accept their product, because I have doubts in their competence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      "Why The MongoDB Hate?"

Very simple, because the product appears to be severely overhyped and underdelivered.

Your primary datastore is not something you want to be taking risks with. If you are looking for a toy you can use any DB you like, including Mongo. If reliability is important to you why would you want to serve as a guinea pig for some seriously buggy product?

NoSQL has its place where you have a very specific use case to be solved, but your primary datastore of record is rarely one of those. Mongo specifically is being positioned as a general-purpose datastore and because of that (for me at least) it fails to demonstrate any value whatsoever. Every time I ask any Mongo advocate for why it is a good choice the most compelling thing I hear is "schema-less DB" and "speed of development". Guess what, maybe if your database forces you to think about your schema, data layout and the query load you are going to have to develop a more reliable application. Having to think through your schemas in advance actually forces you to be disciplined and prevents you from making errors.

Once you are ready to confront the reliability issues SQL databases that had years of hardening against all sorts of risks look like a safe harbor. MySQL is not too bad for Facebook and Quora, what prevents you from properly tuning it to work for you?

</comment><comment><USER5> Probably because there is absolutely no mention of the limitations - especially the durability issues on the website.

People who want to store schemaless documents are going to approach MongoDB as a safe data store and get some very nasty surprises if don't have the proper configuration. You would expect a database to run slowly if misconfigured, but never to lose data.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's kind of missing the gist of the criticism that mongodb advertised itself as so much faster than traditional DBs and yet it turns out its not reliable.

And for all the painful stories of foursquare and others having meltdowns, it seems to be really unreliable.

<comment><USER7> foursquare seems to be doing fine <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203006>

<comment><USER6> which is strange since its hard to tally this: <http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/>

with what Harry says today about it never being serious and never losing money: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203223>

Or maybe he doesn't count the opportunity cost? Or reputation for that matter.

<comment><USER8> just thought I'd link the reply provided in the other thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3203887> Basically said the blame for that wasn't on Mongo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As Cloudera and ex-Facebook hacker Jeff Hammerbacher once put it, "I've never seen MongoDB used in anger against anything resembling real scale."</comment>


Poll: Rubyists, what server-side language should I learn in 2017? - <AUTHOR> I've primarily been a one-trick pony for years on the server-side with Ruby, but I'm curious what languages other folks are using on the server-side for production apps.<p>What are you using to complement Ruby in production? <comment><USER2> Elixir. Why? Because it has tooling that is up to the high standards you're used to using in Ruby and Rails. It has a great ecosystem, package manager, and build tooling. The documentation is fantastic and filled with examples. It also has type annotation and type checking and being built on top of the Erlang VM its really good at soft realtime apps which is probably most of what you're doing server-side anyway.

I've used other languages mentioned by others here in projects (Go, Clojure, Haskell, Rust) and although many are nice, for instance Rust has many excellent features and a sophisticated build and package management tool to go along with it, and Go can be somewhat useful if you want a UTF8-friendly concurrent and GC'd C, I still don't think they're good fits for the majority of server-side apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorite language, it's the best, trust me!

More seriously: what are your goals in learning a new language? If it's new skills or ways of thinking, go for something that's quite different from Ruby in some _educational_ way. Clojure, Elixir or Haskell will teach you rather more than Go will, each in their own way.

* All three are functional, so no mutability by default.

* Clojure has software transactional memory (as does Haskell, I believe?), and it's a Lisp so you can create macros and customize the language.

* Haskell has a very powerful type system.

* Elixir use Erlang's agent-based runtime and functionality, which e.g. lets you do hotswapped code upgrades on a running server.

Go has a stupid type system (e.g. Java's is much better) and a concurrency system that doesn't help with any of the hard problems in concurrency. On the other hand, Go might be a more marketable skill than any of the ones I recommended for educational purposes.

So it depends on your goals.

More ideas on choosing which technology to learn more broadly: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which- technology/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which-technology/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would vote JS or Clojure.

I like Clojure more, but Javascript seems more versatile and is a more employable skill.

</comment><comment><USER5> C, it is the only language you need.

<comment><USER6> What do you think of the claims that Rust is set to replace C?

<comment><USER5> If I remember right C++ was going to replace C. I don't think any language has truly replace another language. Some languages aged out of usage, but I still know the banks around here hiring cobol programmers. Plus while linux keeps using C I believe it will always have a healthy place in programming society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clojure. I guarantee - you're gonna like it.

<comment><USER8> Agreed! I started learning Clojure about 2 years ago, and it has become my favorite language!

The biggest complaint I have is about the error messages (and the laaaarge stack trace), but I've heard they are working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Node Js I have heard of a lot

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Rust

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> NodeJS

<comment><USER6> Why NodeJS instead of Go ?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Go

<comment><USER6> why Go instead of NodeJS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Elixir.</comment>


Combobox Coolness by Giva Labs - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/combobox-coolness-by-giva-labs

<comment><USER2> The actual release page from the developers is at:

[<http://www.givainc.com/labs/mcdropdown_jquery_plugin.htm>]

It looks like a very slick jQuery plugin.</comment>


New prosthetic limbs go beyond the functional to allow people to 'feel' again - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/new-prosthetic-limbs-go-beyond-the-functional-to-allow-people-to-feel-again/2019/12/13/ac2fac10-d4ca-11e9-86ac-0f250cc91758_story.html <comment><USER2> I used to work next to a group working on feedback for prosthetic limbs. It's a pretty hard problem and they went through multiple methods (twisting skin, pulling skin, electrical stimulation, etc).

They actually just released their product and honestly I'm impressed. It can handle weight lifting to egg pinching and you can feel it:

[http://www.psyonic.co/ability-hand](http://www.psyonic.co/ability-hand)

It uses vibration. Your brain adjusts very quickly, understanding what the sensory feedback implies after a few minutes really.

<comment><USER3> Sensory substitution [0] is amazing. There is (was?) a research group which created a belt that encoded the direction of north (or towards other points) in vibrations that always pointed towards north (the target) when the user turned. After a while, the users no longer perceived the vibrations but acquired a sense of north as entity itself. It is said to be very helpful to the blind as our sense of balance seems to be too imprecise for dead-reckoning [1], so things like walking unguidedly over a fields instead of following a track seems to be problematic. (I know no blind people myself, so I can not say if this is true in general). They founded a spin-off company that tries to commercialize the technology [2].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning) [2] [https://www.feelspace.de/](https://www.feelspace.de/)

<comment><USER4> I don't remember how well it worked and how far they went with the idea, but there was a team twenty-some years ago doing touch sensory research using a matrix of pins/dots that reacted to camera input, and attached to the back of blind people to make them "see".

<comment><USER5> Other research along these lines are "plotting" visual signals onto tongues. Here's an interesting article from 2009 talking about it:

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/device-lets- blind...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/device-lets-blind-see- with-tongues/)

"From the CPU, the signals are sent to the tongue via a "lollipop," an electrode array about nine square centimeters that sits directly on the tongue. Each electrode corresponds to a set of pixels. White pixels yield a strong electrical pulse, whereas black pixels translate into no signal. Densely packed nerves at the tongue surface receive the incoming electrical signals, which feel a little like Pop Rocks or champagne bubbles to the user."

It's been available in Europe since 2013, and the US FDA apparently approved the device in 2015:

[https://www.medicaldaily.com/fda-approve-brainport-device- wh...](https://www.medicaldaily.com/fda-approve-brainport-device-which-allows- blind-see-tongue-re-teaching-brain-overcome-339328)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a problem with the title of the article: I don't think this is "beyond the functional". Being able to get some form of touch feedback when handling things is very much a functional aspect and a pretty important one at that.

<comment><USER7> I agree, "beyond the functional" to me implies something else like aesthetics or design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Non-subscriber friendly link: [https://archive.is/zICt8](https://archive.is/zICt8)</comment>


There's plenty of room at the Top: computer performance after Moore's law - <AUTHOR> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/mit-if-chips-cant-get-smaller-then-coders-have-to-get-smarter/ <comment><USER2> This is a knockoff piece but it links to the paper: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PFCcP5WAE-64DlrRoZZE5NhC3cc...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PFCcP5WAE-64DlrRoZZE5NhC3ccy3zKD/edit)

The paper's URL is [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6495/eaam9744](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6495/eaam9744) but the text seems to be paywalled. We've put its title above.

<comment><USER3> Paywalled? No problem: [https://sci- hub.tw/10.1126/science.aam9744](https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.aam9744)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone unfamiliar with the title's origin, it is a play on words of a 1959 Richard Feynman lecture, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics".

[https://www.google.com/search?q=there's+plenty+of+room+at+th...](https://www.google.com/search?q=there's+plenty+of+room+at+the+bottom)

<comment><USER5> And Feynman's title was a play on Daniel Webster's comment "There's plenty of room at the top" when told that he shouldn't become a lawyer because the field was too crowded.

<comment> DC-3 I wonder if the author of this article was aware of the etymology or if it's a curious case of mutating references returning to the original?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anecdotal - One of favorite YouTube live-streaming personalities, Jon Gjengset[1] is a Ph.D student at MIT CSAIL. His talks are very detailed[4] and captivating[3]

[1] [https://thesquareplanet.com/](https://thesquareplanet.com/)

Talks

[2] [https://youtu.be/s19G6n0UjsM](https://youtu.be/s19G6n0UjsM)

[3] [https://youtu.be/DnT-LUQgc7s](https://youtu.be/DnT-LUQgc7s)

Rust Details(my favorites)

[4] [https://youtu.be/rAl-9HwD858](https://youtu.be/rAl-9HwD858)

</comment><comment><USER7> I always interpret the end of Moore's Law to mean that was once a curve of exponential growth, has shown where the inflection point is, and now we're on the other side of the S curve. Yes there's still gains to be had, but they're harder and harder in ways that aren't ameliorated by just increases in funding. There needs to be changes in how we compute, and a rejection of the idea that specialization is beat out by the economies of scale of generic solutions.

<comment><USER8> You want more ASIC's? Why do you assume there's an unmet need for more specialized hardware?

<comment><USER9> If you want something faster and more energy-efficient for any particular task, you do want an ASIC. You can try to tell physics that you'd prefer something else but physics is not a good listener.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Unfortunately, Feynman's "room at the bottom" is no longer plentiful.

There's plenty of room at the bottom. Another million times the transistors is hardly implausible; a thousand times is practically a given.

> Although other manufacturers continued to miniaturize—for example, with the > Samsung Exynos 9825 (8) and the Apple A13 Bionic (9)—they also failed to > meet the Moore cadence.

This just factually isn't fair; transistor density has been on an unwavering straight line since 1970.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NNOqbJfcISFyMd0EsSrh...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NNOqbJfcISFyMd0EsSrhppW7PT6GCfnrVGhxhLA5PVw)

<comment><USER3> Imagine being a CPU architect and being told to find a good use for yet another billion transistors. It is hard to get much benefit from the N+1th multiplier when the ones you have are already starved for input, so it's not hard to see why now we mainly get more cores and cache. Cache is good because most of it is idle at every moment, so doesn't produce much heat. Cores are easy to count, and people will pay for them even if whenever they all get busy, you have to slow the clock after a moment. Often a moment is enough.

Productive uses for a billion transistors that can be mostly turned off most of the time are hard to find.

<comment><USER11> I feel like more and more transistors will be dedicated to machine learning tasks. You'll eventually have phones and computers constantly running neural networks to accomplish advanced but relatively mundane tasks (e.g. text-to- speech, speech-to-text, facial recognition, human-seeming AI in videogames, neural rendering (see NeRF from Berkeley), and tons of other random stuff.

All of it is parallel and benefits from a sheer increase in transistors and density. Maybe in a few generations we'll see chips that are 99% ML compute and 1% traditional CPU.

<comment><USER3> In those chips, I think practically all the transistors have to be active all the time, so the density must be quite limited unless you have really serious cooling capacity.

<comment><USER11> I feel like there's a ton of unexplored area in the hardware space for extremely low power circuits used for ML. As we know, you can do ML with very low precision, which is why chips that can do fast INT8 and F16 are getting more popular.

However, these lower power chips are still designed like classical computers and are deterministic. What if you had something like a few thousand analog multipliers in parallel computing matrix products? An analog multiply can use far less power than a digital one at the expense of accuracy and determinism, which might not matter for some ML tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was always jealous of the stories about programmers in the 80s who wrote games in insanely small amounts of RAM. I kind of want that same kind of challenge needed to be overcome in my lifetime.

<comment><USER13> Expectations for what software should be able to do were quite a bit lower in the 80s too :)

I started learning to code as a kid in the 80s on 8-bit machines. Seemed like there was rapid progress in the availability of CPU power, RAM, etc., up until the early 2000s and then things seemed to... slow down.

Which is about the time everybody started to focus hard on horizontal scalability.

<comment><USER14> Were they? My recollection is that software back then had more features. Software today is neutered in comparison. (Compared Google Docs to Word Perfect from the early 1990s).

<comment><USER15> Google Docs isn't a great example. In WordPerfect's case, WordPerfect _was_ the product and there was an incentive to make it great.

Google Docs isn't the product. It's free. You're the product. And it only needs to be good enough to keep competitors from creating something so great that it removes their first-mover advantage. It's clear that Google has given up developing new features for it.

<comment><USER16> Grammar checking on Google docs had gotten wicked smart.

<comment><USER17> I can only remember a single time the bad grammar marker on google docs wasn't hilariously wrong, contorting a perfectly normal sentence into something weird. And that one time it was catching a doubled word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only at the scale of the big tech companies do the machine costs start to seriously stack up against the labor costs. (Well, also smaller machine learning shops, but they are in trouble anyways.) And I don't think they fsce enough competitive pressure to be forced to take the massive foundational and educational investments they would need to pull this off.

It won't happen with this generation of the industry.

<comment><USER19> The tooling infrastructure of code development itself needs to be optimized (not necessarily in speed terms) to provide coders with the information & tools necessary to write faster code. It seems like IDE's are currently optimized to facilitate rapid code development, but not development of rapid code.

<comment><USER20> The issue is, most code only runs so few times that it doesn't really matter. Only when the code requires so much cloud resources that it's worth to spend an engineer's salary for a few hours/days to optimize it you should do it.

<comment><USER21> Or if your software aims to be successful on end-user devices. Only because you don't pay for the electricity or the faster machines, that doesn't mean that no carbon is emitted for producing them.

<comment><USER20> Slack is extremely slow and sluggish. Outside of the hn bubble, people seem to care more about features than about speed or carbon use.

That being said, there are areas where users care about speed. For example, FPS is very important to gamers, so games are often highly optimized.

<comment><USER21> And cars are way too heavy. Just because users don't care about it, that doesn't mean that it's not important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> P-NP There is even more room at the top. The physical limits are as follows. A computer "with a mass of one kilogram confined to a volume of a liter" can perform at most 2:71 * 10^50 operations per second on 2.13*10^31 bits. See:

Lloyd, S. Ultimate physical limits to computation. Nature volume 406, 1047–1054 (2000)

Bremermann, H. J. Minimum energy requirements of information transfer and computing. Int. J. Theor. Phys. 21, 203–217 (1982)

Bekenstein, J. D. Energy cost of information transfer. Phys. Rev. Lett. 46, 623–626 (1981)

<comment><USER22> From what I recall, that ultimate computer would have to be exploding to reach 10^50 operations.

<comment> P-NP It would become very hot indeed. But that does not necessarily imply a runaway explosion. Just like the center of the sun won't explode anytime soon. Nevertheless, I'll take the much cooler model with only 10^44 operations per second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I quote from the Conclusions section of the actual paper linked by dang:

"As miniaturization wanes, the silicon-fabrication improvements at the Bottom will no longer provide the predictable, broad-based gains in computer performance that society has enjoyed for more than 50 years. Performance- engineering of software, development of algorithms, and hardware streamlining at the Top can continue to make computer applications faster in the post-Moore era, rivaling the gains accrued over many years by Moore's law. Unlike the historical gains at the Bottom, however, the gains at the Top will be opportunistic, uneven, sporadic, and subject to diminishing returns as problems become better explored. But even where opportunities exist, it may be hard to exploit them if the necessary modifications to a component require compatibility with other components. Big components can allow their owners to capture the _economic advantages from performance gains_ at the Top while minimizing external disruptions."

(My emphasis on " _economic advantages_ from performance gains.")

Databases are still getting faster. You don't get a faster DB by buying a new server and then running a 10 year old version of SQL Server or PostgreSQL on it.

Language runtimes are still getting faster. You don't get better Java or JavaScript performance by running a 10 year old release of the HotSpot JVM or V8.

3D renderers, video encoders, maximum flow solvers (one example examined in depth in the article): they're all getting faster over time at producing the same outputs from the same inputs.

The key is _incentives_. There are probably people in your organization who care a lot if database operations slow down 10x. But practically nobody in your organization cares if Slack responds to key presses 10x slower or uses 100x as much memory as your favorite lightweight IRC client. (I'm trying to make a neutral observation here. Looking at it from 10,000 feet, I get annoyed when I see how much memory Slack takes on my own machine, but that annoyance wouldn't crack the top 20 priorities for things that would improve the productivity of the business I'm in.)

The incentives problem is also why the Web seems slow. Browsers too are still getting faster. I used to run multiple browsers for testing and old Firefox and IE releases were actually _much slower_ at rendering identical pages than current stable releases. But pages are getting heavier over time. Mostly it's not even a problem of people trying to make "too fancy" sites that are applications-in-a-browser. It's mostly analytics and advertising that makes everything painfully slow and battery-draining. I run a web site that has had the same ad-free, analytics-free, JS-light design since the early 2000s. It renders faster than ever on modern browsers. It's not modern browsers that are the problem -- it's the economic incentive to stuff scripts in a page until it is just this side of unbearable.

For certain kinds of human-computer interaction, people will pay a lot to reduce latency. Competitive gamers will pay, for example. Sometimes people will invest a lot of effort to reduce memory footprint -- either because they're shaving a penny off of a million embedded devices or because they're bumping up against the memory you can fit in a 10 million dollar cluster. But the annoyances that dominate Wirth's Law discussions on HN -- why do we have to use Electron apps?! -- are unlikely to get fixed because few people are willing to pay for better.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yeah, (generally) we got lazy for sure.

<comment><USER25> I remember in the Windows 98 days, there was a program called GuitarFX that blew my mind. IIRC, it was only a couple MB in size, didn't use a lot of RAM, and was fairly low latency. I think I was running it on a PIII 500Mhz with 128MB of RAM.

Now we have apps that are like 40+ MB, eat RAM and CPU cycles to do fairly simple things.

<comment><USER14> What's mind boggling is the change in relative demand. Back in the 1990s, an IRC or AIM client was a little background app that took a tiny fraction even of a 64MB of RAM computer. But Slack takes a larger share of an 8GB if RAM computer.

<comment><USER3> That's garbage collection for you. Typical GC programs want all the memory there is, just to be able to sweep less often.

<comment><USER26> From my experiments with the JVM that is not really true. Keeping memory usage below 1GB is pretty easy. It's only getting tricky when you want to go below 200MB. You'll have to deal with the overhead the JVM introduces. As a result I often just use lua for really simple programs and I am rewarded by creating programs that use less than 2MB of RAM.

<comment><USER27> Which Lua kind/runtime you're using that give you such frugal programs? I'm intrigued (pun with your name intended).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A bunch of you seem interested in taking up the challenge: having to write smarter software, wistful for the old days when it was forced on you.

Turns out, you can! There's a big domain that needs your help, today: deep learning.

A lot of the software is currently crude. For example, to train a StyleGAN model, the official way to do it is to encode each photo as uncompressed(!) RGB, resulting in a 10-20x size explosion.

There's plenty of room at the top, and never moreso in AI software. Consider it! Every one of you can pivot to deep learning, if you want to. There's really nothing special or magical in terms of knowledge that you need to study. A lot of it is just "Get these bits from point A to point B efficiently."

There's also room for beautiful tools. It reminds me a lot of Javascript in 2008. I'm sure that will sound repugnant for a majority of devs. But for a certain type of dev, you'll hear that ringing noise of opportunity knocking.

<comment><USER29> Very heartening to hear. You think some of us tired enterprise/product devs that come from non-traditional (read: didn't study CS) background can make it? Any recommended starting resources? I've heard supposedly good things about fast.ai as a "guided tour".

<comment><USER28> Absolutely. I didn't study CS.

What you need is _determination_. There's no substitute for this.

If you have that, there are all kinds of resources. Here are a few...

Resource 1: a community. We've set up a discord server for AI dev. It has 360 users. At any given time, around ~50 people are online, of which ~10 are skilled devs. Come join! [https://discordapp.com/invite/x52Xz3y](https://discordapp.com/invite/x52Xz3y)

Resource 2: Find something fun _for you_ , and pursue that. I like generative AI, so for me that's been GPT-2 and StyleGAN. Gwern has some lovely tutorial- type articles on both.

GPT-2: [https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2)

StyleGAN: [https://www.gwern.net/Faces](https://www.gwern.net/Faces)

Peter Baylies' StyleGAN tutorial notebook is a hands-on resource. This was actually how I started, nearly a year ago.

github: [https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan- encoder](https://github.com/pbaylies/stylegan-encoder)

notebook: [https://colab.research.google.com/drive/179SPYbBC8pKDxVRjZep...](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/179SPYbBC8pKDxVRjZepIvIma8SITPJvU?usp=sharing)

(The original notebook was broken; this is a copy I've updated with some fixes.)

Lastly, follow a bunch of AI people on twitter. Here are a few to get you started: [https://twitter.com/i/lists/1160386581850730496/members](https://twitter.com/i/lists/1160386581850730496/members)

The reason to follow them is, whenever you see something that seems interesting or fun, tweet at them and say so! Ask questions. Ask how to get started. Everyone is shockingly nice and helpful. My theory is, the software is so crude and often hard to use, that we all like to celebrate together whenever one of us gets it working, and we're happy to share that knowledge however we can. (Twitter is a bit chaotic right now due to world events, but I imagine it might return to normal within a couple weeks.)

And yes, you're right about fast.ai and other courses. You can go that route if you like it. I found it more exciting to dive into the deep end, though, and try to tinker with stuff.

<comment><USER30> >> Absolutely. I didn't study CS.

But, have you achieved something singificant in the context of deep learning, as per your earlier comment? There's no information about that in your profile and a cursory glance at ddg and google results for "shawn presser" doesn't turn up anything very relevant.

So, I have to ask: without having studied CS, what contributions have you made in deep learning that are widely recognised?

I hope you agree this is a reasonable question to ask, and that you are not offended by it. Otherwise, I apologise because it's not my intention to offend you.

<comment><USER28> Certainly! Some highlights:

\- A Newsweek article [https://www.newsweek.com/openai-text-generator- gpt-2-video-g...](https://www.newsweek.com/openai-text-generator-gpt-2-video- game-walkthrough-most-tedious-1488334)

\- GPT-2 chess [https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/10/gpt2_chess/](https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/10/gpt2_chess/)

\- ... which DeepMind referenced: [https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1226916484938530819](https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1226916484938530819)

\- GPT-2 music [https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated- videogame...](https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame- music)

\- Swarm training (WIP) [https://www.docdroid.net/faDq8Bu/swarm- training-v01a.pdf](https://www.docdroid.net/faDq8Bu/swarm-training-v01a.pdf)

<comment><USER30> To be honest, and again without having an intention to be harsh, but those are not what I'd call "widely recognised contributions to deep learning". They're mainly articles in the lay press and a honourable mention in a DeepMind blog post. They certainly sound like contributions to Shawn Presser's reputation, but "contributions to deep learning"?

To clarify, what I was hoping to see is, at best, an article published at a reputable venue for AI research, a conference or a journal, or at a minimum an arxiv article that at least looks like it was meant to be submitted to a conference or journal. And at worst, a software tool that can be used in deep learning research. But it seems to me that your achievements are mainly having fun with and in one case finding an interesting use for tools that are already available.

Again, I'm not trying to be harsh, neither do I want to say that all this is not worth the trouble. But it should not be held up as an example of what people can achieve without studying CS. Because, I think you'll agree, they are kind of underwhelming when compared to what people routinely achieve who _have_ studied CS.

<comment><USER31> > But it should not be held up as an example of what people can achieve > without studying CS

You really need to get out more!

<comment><USER30> Excuse me, but is there a reason why you chose to reply to my comment with an insult? And six days after I originally posted my comment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am old. Computer hardware advanced 1000 times since 30 years ago. But computer software degraded at the same rate. We started with Pascal and C, and ended with PHP and JavaScript ... ughh.

</comment><comment><USER33> > "For tech giants like Google and Amazon, the huge scale of their data > centers means that even small improvements in software performance can > result in large financial returns,"

And really this is only for software that runs inside their servers. The costs for software running on client machines is just distributed to the user.

If google makes a change that makes Chrome run less efficiently that means I'm paying for it with my time and electricity. If I want it to run better I'm shelling out money from my own pocket for new hardware.

</comment><comment><USER34> FYI, I optimised the "python3" code by using numpy. Total runtime on a laptop CPU was 1 s.

This is why all classes for scientists I've seen teach numpy.

(Incidentally: total time to "optimise" and TEST is less than 5 minutes.

Total time to rewrite in Rust: ongoing after 2 hours, with issues filed on the best available crate for the task, whose documentation examples fail to compile. Not even going to try in bare Rust due to the issues with > 32 length arrays.)

<comment><USER27> This could also mean you're much better at Python than Rust?

</comment></comment><comment> code-faster Yeah, but computer performance isn't a bottleneck in most applications, engineer performance is.</comment>


Stockpiling Ventilators for Influenza Pandemics - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317169931_Stockpiling_Ventilators_for_Influenza_Pandemics <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: The article models on Texas for mild, moderate & severe pandemics. (Severe == 1918 Spanish Flu)

Recommended stockpiles depend on risk threshold, e.g., probability of a certain number of people that need a ventilator going without one.

Recommended stockpiles range from about ~300 (mild) to ~1100 (moderate) to ~15,000 (severe)</comment>


Open Whisper Systems partners with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption - <AUTHOR> https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/ <comment><USER2> Will the source code be available for auditing?

If not how is one to know whether there is a backdoor?

<comment><USER3> From previous discussions (note that this is from last year, so "old news"): No source code, you'll have to trust them. But as long as you get it from an app store access to the source doesn't protect you anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is from Nov 2014.</comment>


Denver man charged with felonies for handing out jury nullification fliers - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/denver-man-charged-with-seven-felonies-for-handing-out-jury-nullification-fliers-outside-courthouse/

<comment><USER2> " The practice has been used by juries in the United States since the 1800s to nullify anti-free speech laws and laws punishing northerners for helping runaway slaves. It has most recently been used in drug cases when juries have viewed laws as discriminatory."

Quite. It has also within living memory meant that in some places a white man could not be convicted of killing a black man (or a northern white).</comment>


Uber Partners and Drivers - <AUTHOR> https://partners.uber.com/#!/uberx/sf

<comment><USER2> What's up with the name? Uber? Is it supposed to be Über? And if so, how does that even make sense?

What do they even _do_? I had to go to their normal homepage to get a vague idea. They have a brand saying pretty much nothing.

This seems like a company prime for a future identity-crisis.

<comment><USER3> This comment just popped my Silicon Valley bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this it just one assault away from hurting Uber's brand big time.

<comment><USER5> The horse has sort of bolted on this one

[http://www.autostraddle.com/raped-by-an-uber-cab-driver- horr...](http://www.autostraddle.com/raped-by-an-uber-cab-driver-horrified-by- everything-152906/)

<comment><USER6> This article is terrible. There is no "rape", no "rapist", and no "survivor" until a trial has been conducted. Until then, there is only an "accuser" and an "accused". The article also links to a report that only 54% of rapes are reported to the police. Until there has been a trial, there is no way to know if there has been a rape. What they mean is that 54% of people who claim rape do not report it to the police. I don't know they know that even.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that is a shocking article. The site seems to be a hardcore feminist outrage blog with a strong prejudice to what they perceive, wrongly, to be the female interest. Even the use of the word "survivor" at all is highly objectionable, being a subtle attempt to raise the stakes, as if rape and attempted murder are synonymous.

The story itself sounds highly questionable. Even in the same blog post, the details are inconsistent (did she walk back to the cab of her own volition, or was she called?) Where was this jacket and why would she think she "might" have left it in the cab? Why would the driver wait until she left and returned to attack her? Why would an uber driver, in full knowledge that they are emphatically on record as having picked up and dropped off a person, basically lock themselves in prison and throw away the key by committing such a crime? Why would they then carry the victim's body onto the property!?

Seeing that the police have questioned the driver and not charged him, a more likely explanation might be: Deeply intoxicated underage drinker brought home by uber driver, wrongly believes she left something in cab, falls over and hits her head walking back to it, driver carries her back onto her property, she makes something up the next morning to explain things to her parents. Wouldn't be the first time.

Anyway, none of these reasonable objections slow the site down in whipping itself up into a self-righteous fervour as they declare the driver guilty and lament the "survivor" "will not see and has not seen justice in any real sense of the word".

Oops, there I go engaging in "wildly misogynistic and rape-apologetic discussion" again!

<comment><USER6> It's not even about whether the evidence as we know it is convincing.

Even if it is plainly obvious that someone did commit a rape, such as a video of it, a civilised society would treat them as simply an accused, just one side of a legal case, until the trial is complete.

If I could design society, I would remove the dock and in all court cases have two identical sides of the room - person A (person A could be the state or the Crown) says person B did something, person B says that person A is falsely accusing them of doing something. There's no defendant and victim, just two opposing stories and a trial to establish reasonable fact.

Every criminal case should be simultaneously a false accusation case.

<comment><USER8> > If I could design society, I would remove the dock and in all court cases > have two identical sides of the room ...

But that already exists -- it's called civil law. Contrast with criminal law:

In criminal law, the state has an interest and brings charges against a defendant, the sides are called "prosecution" and "defense", the standard for judgment is "beyond a reasonable doubt", and the outcomes include incarceration and (in some countries) execution.

In civil law, the state has no interest, the offenses aren't called crimes, the two sides have equal standing and are called "petitioner" and "respondent" (the names change in different locales), the standard for judgment is "preponderance of evidence", and the outcome is usually a monetary payment. Incarceration isn't possible.

> There's no defendant and victim, just two opposing stories and a trial to > establish reasonable fact.

This already exists, but it's not suitable for all cases. Any time the state has an interest, the rules change, and the word "crime" begins to be heard.

<comment><USER6> Why isn't it suitable? You say that the 'rules change' when it's criminal, but that's only because those are the rules we've got. There's no reason that we couldn't make all trials use the civil approach.

If Sarah wants to accuse Bob of rape, she petitions a court and has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it happened. If Bob denies it then automatically an opposite trial of false accusation runs at the same time. If Sarah has evidence that Bob raped her, perhaps the testimony of police detectives, Bob looses both cases and goes to prison. If there's not enough evidence, both sides loose. If it becomes clear that Bob definitely did not rape her, Sarah looses both cases, including the false accusation case, and goes to prison.

At the moment Bob would have to make a separate trial for defamation or whatever. I think it should be rolled into one.

In the case of murder, or treason, or grafatti of public property or whatever, it would be the state accusing. If it turns out that it was a malicious false accusation then the police or prosecutors would be liable.

<comment><USER7> While I definitely agree that false accusation should be treated far more seriously and consistently than it seems to be, I think this is going too far in the other direction. Why should a victim of crime be obliged to prove a case against their aggressor? Who pays? What if the victim doesn't have the resources or time to take someone to court?

And you need to make an exception for murder, attempted murder, disablement, etc anyway. No, the current concept of criminal justice works reasonably well, or would with consistent and serious enforcement of false accusation (and, for that matter, prosecutorial harassment).

I repeat myself over and over again but I maintain that the best thing we can do to fix the justice system is to enforce the bloody law. All the laws. Consistently. If the law is too ridiculous to enforce, revoke it. But enforce the ones we have. Discretion in enforcing the law leads to gaming the system, protected and taboo groups, corruption, and ultimately profound injustice.

<comment><USER8> > While I definitely agree that false accusation should be treated far more > seriously and consistently than it seems to be, I think this is going too > far in the other direction. _Why should a victim of crime be obliged to > prove a case against their aggressor?_ [emphasis added]

Wait -- that's already true. Do you think the present system relieves a plaintiff of the burden of evidence? In a rape trial, the plaintiff has to produce evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt", and the state can do little to help (most rape cases rely on circumstantial evidence).

And "innocent until proven guilty" is a cornerstone of Western legal systems -- this discussion isn't about that, and shouldn't be.

> Discretion in enforcing the law leads to gaming the system, protected and > taboo groups, corruption, and ultimately profound injustice.

Yes, and it's unconstitutional as well, therefore illegal and grounds for dismissal if it can be proven. But the suggestion being made here doesn't really address it -- both civil and criminal courts are equally likely to treat cases selectively, as do the police.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always loved this idea of business, it allows for you to make some extra money when you have time. I remember another product a couple of years ago that didn't do so well. It was located in Georgia, it has since closed down. The biggest problem they had was with the ability to scale this product to keep the attention to customers high while keeping costs low.

<comment><USER10> Russians have been doing this for years, without any company involved. Don't want to wait for taxi or trams? Just put your arm out, and someone will stop, and you tell them where you want to go and ask 'how much'? They call them private drivers.

Want to make some extra money on the weekend? Be a private driver. Hang out near tram stops and you will get customers..

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The second image in the rotator showed something I found interesting. Do drivers rate passengers as well as passengers rating drivers? What seems to be the name of the pickup at the bottom of the screen has a rating behind the name.

<comment><USER12> yes, I've seen an uber driver get prompted to rate me at the end of a fare

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Direct competition to Sidecar? (Lyft as well, but Lyft schedules the drivers a bit)</comment>


Adblock plus upset at IOS9 adblocking because it's too good - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/11/adblock-plus-apple-plan-stop-ads

<comment> noir-york What next?! You'll soon have people up in arms should Microsoft, Apple or Google ever bundle a browser... oh wait...</comment>


How people 'of no security interest' are keystrokes away in UK's spy databases - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/21/bulk_personal_datasets/ <comment><USER2> Credit to Privacy International for unearthing all this: [https://privacyinternational.org/node/843](https://privacyinternational.org/node/843)

If you want to help this sort of work consider donating to: [https://www.dontspyonus.org.uk](https://www.dontspyonus.org.uk)

</comment><comment><USER3> A search should automatically trigger a notification to the subject of the search in 12 months. Active investigations could maintain a list of people to whom notifications will be postponed. Investigators wanting to postpone notification by over 12 (further) months should be required to go to a judge for an extension.

In all cases, the default position should be that the subject of a search will be notified within 12 months.

</comment><comment><USER4> _collateral intrusion_ is a wonderful neologism.

<comment><USER5> My favourite is _parallel construction_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another reason to improve cryptography and get everything to use it

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that all of the databases described in this article were obtained via signals intelligence. Particularly because the article describes legislative authority to demand information from British companies.

Ubiquitous encryption is a great solution to wiretapping, but nothing that we can unilaterally deploy protects most of the other aspects of our privacy. One thing that would clearly help is being able to do more things anonymously, but that ability is often limited by laws or companies' business practices that crypto alone won't solve.

Sometimes crypto _offers_ a way to do something anonymously, but the counterparty needs to be willing to participate in the privacy-protective protocol (for example, privacy-preserving metering and tolling schemes). If the counterparty says "I'm just going to record your fine-grained usage data with a traditional meter" or "I'm just going to record with RFID whenever you cross the toll bridge", the fact that an alternative has been invented doesn't help you. If we invent a privacy-preserving presence mechanism that could allow mobile phones to be anonymous except when actively making a phone call, or a way to pay for mobile data anonymously without revealing the identity of the SIM or device, we still don't get a privacy win unless mobile companies are willing to deploy it on their networks. If ZeroCash is deployed, we still don't get a privacy win in any particular area of the economy unless sellers are actually willing to accept it.

Privacy advocates started worrying a lot about databases in the 1970s as database and storage technology improved. Privacy writers called them "databanks" back then, and they were probably the major privacy preoccupation of the day. All of these concerns sound super-quaint now that big data is so ubiquitous, but at the same time the concerns were largely correct! And the databank-preoccupied privacy advocates weren't necessarily thinking that the databanks would be filled up with data from wiretaps or spying on the Internet (which most people had never heard of at the time). They envisioned people stockpiling or obtaining a lot of transactional records, and making people register in order to do things, and linking one database to another by joining on common fields. And that's happened.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Create a simple SMS to-do list for your music. (alpha) - <AUTHOR> http://tasteplug.com

<comment><USER2> This is something I have been waiting for! Simple and actually useful. I was skeptical at first, but being able to build a list then later listen to the song is great!

Besides cleaning up the site and making it look pretty, the MVP is very well executed. What are your plans for monetization?

Also any thoughts on building in a playlist feature to run through my entire list of songs? How about sending songs to my contacts to-do list?

Good job though!

<comment><USER3> Monetization idea: allow n songs per day/week/month for free, more with a premium account

<comment><USER4> Nice! As far as I know Shazam sort of does the same thing and it is kind of annoying. The freemium model is very appealing but I would love to find a different way too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this, and I'll use it - and I've already told everyone I know about it. And I'm very excited to see how you build on the product. To that end, here's why this app doesn't - for me - solve the main problem of remembering music:

When I'm listening to the radio in the car, I'll use Shazam to identify a song. But the process of sending myself that song information for future reference is far too involved (and unsafe while driving).

So what I really want is a Simple Shazam: As soon as it identifies a song, it emails me the information. Otherwise I never remember to check Shazam for all the music I want to buy later.

I haven't looked into the feasibility of the above - except to discover that many other people wish there was an API of sorts for identifying music.

I don't know if the above is a pain point for you or others as well; but I figure if anyone would understand the need for Simple Shazam, it's you.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! We actually totally understand what you are saying. We have looked at both Shazam and Sound Hound (both top music recognition apps) but see not trace of a public API any time soon. However, we built this app in hopes to just see if people will use it as a tool. If we gain a large enough user base we will start investing in building our own recognition engine, but hopefully by then something public will be available.

In regards to that specific pain point, I do believe we understand that. It is def something that occurs when you are listening to a song in the car or have no idea what the name of the song is but you really want to know and download it later. We will do our best to provide a solution!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good start to a good idea. I guess music discovery can be though of as having 3 stages. 1) Hearing a song and not knowing its name 2) managing to remember the name of the song until I am ready to purchase/download it and put it on my ipod 3) and actually purchasing/downloading/getting the song on my ipod.

The closer you can get to solving/connecting all 3 of those the more useful your app will be to users.

good start though

like how I got a text instantly making it super easy for me to use the service

</comment><comment><USER4> bpeters thanks for the kind words! Monetization is not a key priority, though there is a small chance to make some commission from affiliate links (as you might see through our download links).

We do hope to allow a playlist feature, but currently are only able to provide 'previews' of the songs versus the full songs. And YES! Recommendations to friends' lists is def where we are heading next.

<comment><USER2> Have you looked into how Grooveshark streams songs? I am only pushing this because I would love a playlist I can build as I think up or find songs and then can playback at some later time. I am always forgetting songs I want to listen to when I get home.

<comment><USER7> Oohh, I like this.

I use rd.io and would love the songs I txt in to be added to a playlist there. Or really a playlist anywhere - grooveshark, pandora, rdio, amazon, last.fm, etc. That'd be cool.

<comment><USER4> The only issue I see arising is that of internet radio laws. I believe (and I am no expert so please correct me if I am wrong) there is no way to 'freely' search for a song and have it be heard. Last.fm only allows previews (or radio stations that play similar songs) and rd.io is a paid app. I would love some way to do this for free. Yes Grooveshark does offer it for free, and I am not sure how legal their practices are.

<comment><USER7> Good point. My thought was to build a playlist over in a service I am already paying for. The songs I submit via TXT get added to a playlist on Rdio. Then, next time I login there - those songs are there for me to listen to. <http://developer.rdio.com/></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Integrating Google Docs, Chrome, and IPython - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+KayurPatel/posts/P89KQiKdXBk

<comment><USER2> This is fantastic news - I spend about two-three hours a day in iPython. It's completely replaced my tool chain of awk/sed/wc/grep that I previously used to do analytics on various files - and not only allows me to do much more complex analysis, but also maintains "state" in a visual way so that I can quickly hop through a number of file load/analysis/report cycles.

Being able to do this _interactively_ is going to be a huge win.

</comment><comment><USER3> If anyone else is interested in real-time collaborative IPython environments, check out [https://coderpad.io/](https://coderpad.io/).

It's less focused on the data analysis side and more focused on collaborative coding for interview environments. You get a full IPython shell with most of the niceties (syntax highlighting, exception captures, etc).

<comment><USER4> I wish environments like that supported something like 'run with..' option that would allow for the entry of arguments which would be fed to the script.

I know it's not a big deal to get data another way, but it'd allow for the following of a tutorial like Learn Python the Hard Way totally in-browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > we don't have a GitHub or anything user's can download yet, but stay tuned > for more updates.

Crying shame.

<comment><USER6> That's true for the GDrive integration. All of the python-in-PNaCl code is available already as part of naclports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At SciPy this year, Kester and I will be giving a talk on this: [https://conference.scipy.org/scipy2014/schedule/presentation...](https://conference.scipy.org/scipy2014/schedule/presentation/23/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Brilliant. I'm a little surprised at how exciting this is. I can foresee some opportunities to make serious changes in how I communicate at work. Now I just need to figure out some Android support.

</comment><comment><USER8> An unanswered question in the G+ discussion is how libraries not in the default config can be added. Can I "pip install" into a NaCl IPython kernel?

<comment><USER6> No, not quite. It depends on if the library is pure python. If it is, then adding support for pip install is possible, but not implemented. If it's not pure python, it is a lot harder -- it has to be statically linked into the PNaCl executable, which sometimes requires a bit of patching the code. For example, to get pandas in, I had to modify how it included np_datetime, and to get HDF5 in I had to pre-generate how it managed endianness.

That being said, I've been working on making it easier for pure python importing, and one fun thing is that you can actually mount an HTTP/CORS- accessible endpoint as a file system and import that. I have done this with a pastebin; I turned on CORS, mounted it inside the NaCl kernel, and executed pastes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> will it be possible to have an email when it's ready ?

</comment><comment><USER4> wow, that's pretty neat.</comment>


I used Google Glass - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/22/4013406/i-used-google-glass-its-the-future-with-monthly-updates

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure why I haven't seen this addressed yet, but doesn't the widespread use of something like Glass portend the dramatic fall of the prevalence of street crime? Widespread use of CCTV cameras are one thing, but millions of eye-level recording devices (presumably automatically beamed to the cloud at some point), would seem to me to be a major deterrent to all sorts of street crime.

I can see this effecting not just things like person on person crime (muggings, rape, battery, etc.) but also burglaries, arson, or any other crime that requires a getaway. Police or citizens could issues statements like "We had a break-in at 9:30 at 555 Main Street. If you were in a 5 block radius of that address, click here to upload your video feed from 9:00 to 10:00."

Obviously this also has terrifying privacy concerns as well, but the extent to which this could completely transform society seems to be undersold here, doesn't it?

<comment><USER3> It's awful. For ages, we've worried about The Government mounting cameras everywhere until the only private space was one's own home, and away from windows at that. _1984_ famously envisioned a world where this surveillance extended to the domicile, but even then it was stationary and had blind spots.

Seems that in the near future, there will be little need for any of this, and there will be no coercion; rather, most of us will vie for the most powerful, feature-loaded head-mounted camera.

That's not to say that such an invention can or will only be used for evil. But there's no denying that this is huge progress for anybody dreaming of global surveillance or something like it.

<comment><USER4> Most of the evil that was thought to come from universal recording was because of the centralized nature of the recording. Widespread public feeds do not have the same inhibiting effect on desirable behavior, but might well have that inhibiting effect on undesirable behavior (where global society increasingly defines what "undesirable" means). Universal sousveillance is the best of both worlds! David Brin called this one early.

<comment><USER5> Being a dissident becomes harder with every passing day.

<comment><USER6> Getting your ideas out is getting much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Avid sailor here, and I like to race, typical race is ~6 hours, but longer races too, 24-48 hours. We are continually evaluating, speed over ground, radios, depth, AIS for marine traffic, tide flow (current), GPS, charts, race course, etc. We have many devices that give us a picture of what is going on. I love the idea of Google Glass as a heads up display [1] for everyday people!

Sure, we use a computer to compile most of this data, but imagine just peering into Google Glass, and having this compiled without moving around!

I'm not too concerned about fashion or image while out on the water. My main focus is winning, or coming close to it! I'm wearing a life jacket, and rain gear most of the time ;) I guess my point is, there is lots going on in life, not just walking around, getting coffee, and reading twitter and facebook. Wear Glass when you need it and it is applicable.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-up_display>

<comment><USER8> FYI there are HUDs that are made for snowboarders and skiers that you might be able to adapt for sailing if you don't want to wait for glass!

Like this: <http://www.reconinstruments.com/>

<comment><USER9> Second this; while they don't have a camera or the Glass software, they are goggle mounted (choice of goggles) and have barometer, thermometer, plus are Android devices all on their own. Also, they don't cost as much, plus, you know, you can get them _now_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm in the Explorer program, but practical issues like fashion/etiquette have had me reconsidering if I'd really be willing to spend money to put a computer on my face.

This review has gone a long way towards assuaging those concerns, but I wonder what they can do about anti-theft. Being pickpocketed on public transit is a very real concern in most cities with >500k people. Imagine how much easier it'd be to snatch a device you're not even holding and (hopefully) blends into your life so seamlessly you forget you have it on. It's been well-publicized that these things start at $1500.

<comment><USER11> Pickpockets depend on the fact that you won't realize what they've done until they're long gone. What you're talking about is more like the old 1980's-era- New York-type chain / purse grab, and that doesn't seem to happen as often any more because it's so blatant.

<comment><USER10> It depends. They also rely on the element of surprise. Everyone I know who's been mugged or seen one happen on public transit has had something grabbed right as the doors are closing, so the thief slips away before you have time to squeeze through the crowd to run after.

<comment><USER11> When someone does that, everyone on the subway car sees it. When someone gets pick-pocketed, nobody sees it. So there's a major sampling bias.

That said, I've also seen some NYT articles saying the true "pick pocket artists" are a dying breed, because younger criminals don't want to spend the time learning it and the potential take from a wallet has gone down as folks carry less cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everyone keeps saying that it will be weird for people to wear such glasses. I don't think that wearing them is what's weird, I think talking to them is the weird stuff.

I mean phones have been around for ages and some people still don't feel confortable talking in them in public spaces.

Siri is another example, have you ever meet someone talking to Siri on the bus ? on the metro ? on the street ? Not me.

Do you imagine people yelling in the train "Ok glass, show me the weather" ?

<comment><USER13> I really think the wearable glasses format is doomed. Its just clunky and lacks style.

I was just watching a video of Sony's newest smartwatch and how it integrated with Android. I could see myself wearing that. Glass? Probably not. I'm not even someone who is into fashion. I just want crap on my face and, my god, it looks super dorky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google should really make a camera-less version of the Glass.

Portable eye-level display is insanely useful. But if it's burdened with something that is viewed by many as a source of privacy concerns, it would just hinder the adoption. It will make the Glass banned from corporate environments, planes and basically every place that has "no cameras" signs. Like supermarkets.

<comment><USER15> Every single person I have talked to who has used glass for more than a few days has found the instant camera to be the most compelling feature of Glass. The author of this article did as well! In that context, I can't see how it makes sense to offer a camera-less version, at least not at launch.

<comment><USER14> > _Every single person I have talked to who has used glass for more than a few > days_

Are you on the project Glass team or something? :)

Have these persons commented on the actual display quality? The resolution, the color depth and so on. There's suspiciously ZERO in-use shots of the display as seen by the wearer. Makes you wonder why.

<comment><USER16> You can't really photograph it, it's so close to the eye.

<comment><USER14> You and I can't probably photograph it, but the Glass marketing people should be perfectly capable of doing that, don't you think?

I mean, c'mon, it's an interaction product. With no images of the actual interaction. How odd is that.

<comment><USER17> What? Have you missed the new Glass homepage? It's filled with GUI images and a video too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If someone is being photographed, is there any way for that person to know that Google Glass is recording video? I would feel really uncomfortable if a colleague had Google Glass on at a meeting or at lunch or in my office, unless I knew I wasn't being recorded. The privacy concerns on this are enormous in my view.

<comment><USER19> Yes, FTA: As soon as we got inside however, the employees at Starbucks asked us to stop filming. Sure, no problem. But I kept the Glass' video recorder going, all the way through my order and getting my coffee. _Yes, you can see a light in the prism when the device is recording, but I got the impression that most people had no idea what they were looking at._ The cashier seemed to be on the verge of asking me what I was wearing on my face, but the question never came. He certainly never asked me to stop filming.

<comment><USER20> Well that's just awful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I probably wouldn't use Glass in my everyday life, but I totally see it working for tourism. Getting directions is a pretty obvious use case. But learning about what you're seeing is the biggest win. See a building you like? Ask Glass what its history is. At a museum? Get more information about the art you're seeing. Learning while experiencing sounds awesome.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, Glass + Goggles seems an awesome combination.

But even awesomer would be Glass + Word Lens: <http://questvisual.com/us/>

(Assuming it works well, I haven't tried it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know if the visual component can be setup on the left side? I'm blind in my right eye and the product would be almost useless for me otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER24> The most important part of this entire project in my opinion is the ability of the Glass to function as a head up display. Imagine that you can now wear it while driving, and there's an app that will show you everything about the route and your cars' statistics right in front of your eyes. Heck, if it could project the phone's screen on its own display then applications that have already been written get a new life - Think Torque or CarHUD.

<comment><USER25> _Imagine that you can now wear it while driving, and there's an app that will show you everything about the route and your cars' statistics right in front of your eyes_

Unless you're in one of Google's Self Driving Cars this sounds like a recipe for disaster. If these things take off I'm pretty sure wearing them while driving will be pretty quickly outlawed.

<comment><USER26> Why? Seriously wondering here. I don't see it any different than having wireless phone, navigation, radio, and the countless other things we already have in the cars. Main difference is this would be right in front of us meaning we don't have to take our eyes off the road to change the radio station, check the nav or answer that call.

<comment><USER27> And it's voice activated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The thing I didn't get is how you operate glass? I understand you can use your voice, but surly there must be an alternative way: Google voice, as great as it is, is not really reliable enough to use it as its only driver. I also don't think Google will design a device that forces you to talk to it in public.

I think I read somewhere that there was some kind of touchpad on the side? But how do you enter text (like search queries) into the device? Or is this supposed to be operated from a connected smartphone?

Somehow related, I fear that this will take years until it reaches me here in Europe. Google Voice still only knows who's president of the united states if you ask it in english.

<comment><USER29> Its in the article. Theres a minitouchpad on the right side, you enter search queries through voice, and Glass connects to your smartphone through Bluetooth to use its 3G/4G/Wifi connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would love to be able to create apps for a device like glass. There could be many vertical applications for it. The ads don't provide any information regarding apps as they are focused in taking photos and videos, doing hangouts and interfacing Google.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why do people care so much about how they will look with it? I couldn't care less about that.

<comment><USER32> Because most people care very much about social relationships, and like it or not, other people just naturally tend to be put off by things that look strange or unattractive. You might decide you genuinely don't care what anyone thinks of you, but realistically speaking that's a somewhat unusual stance.

<comment><USER31> I get that, but the way people talked about it, I though it was something really horrible. And it turns out it is just a little different. I have used some way more strange stuff in this life of mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Consumer product by the end of this year?! Is there a startup focusing on this?!

<comment><USER34> I know these guys are in NYC but I think there's more of a game focus: [http://laughingsquid.com/meta-augmented-reality-glasses- allo...](http://laughingsquid.com/meta-augmented-reality-glasses-allow-you-to- control-virtual-objects/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is it just me or is anyone else bothered by the uneven design where one side has the display and the other side does not.

My mind wants the sides to be the same, they should put a fake one on the other side.

<comment><AUTHOR> that would be a really stupid idea honestly. No offence.

<comment><USER36> Not really. Having all that gear on just one side looks kinda cyborg-y. Symmetric is more natural.

Also, think of the possibilities for crazy 3D stuff if you have displays on both eyes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Google's X Lab initiative, the lab also responsible for... neural networks.

Wait, what? In what sense can google's X Lab be said to be responsible for neural networks?

<comment><USER19> I think they meant to say "Google's neural network": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X_Lab#Google_Brain_proje...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X_Lab#Google_Brain_project)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's understandable but unfortunate that Google has not been saying much about accommodating prescription lenses. Some of us wear glasses already and cannot wear contacts. Later releases may support custom lenses, it seems.

The accelerometer in it could be useful from a public health standpoint. Unlikne a phone in a pocket, the head is relatively stable. Glass could detect if someone collapses and then call for an ambulance.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very nice read, great stuff from the verge as always

</comment><comment><USER39> Is that really the whole device, or is the processing done elsewhere, like a phone or something? (I admit I only skim read the article)

<comment><USER40> > losing data or experiencing slow data on a phone put the headset into a > near-unusable state

This makes me think that the voice processing is done server-side. I wouldn't be at all surprised by this; that's how Siri does it, and I would be amazed if they managed to fit good enough voice recognition into even a phone, let alone this tiny thing.

<comment><USER41> Google voice recognition can be done offline on phones now.

<comment><USER42> Is there some way to activate this option? Sometimes it seems my voice input is bottlenecked by the connection when I'm driving in a low-coverage area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "...this might not be that great at a dinner party, or on a date, or watching a movie."

Well, that's rather obvious.

</comment><comment><USER44> Have we seen pictures of Glass sans human head before? I don't recall. I definitely agree that it looks like 2013 by way of the 1960's.

This is starting to look at least as interesting as a piece of hardware as it is as a product. Pity I don't have a few thousand dollars lying around . . .

<comment><USER45> There are quite a few pictures here: <http://www.google.com/glass/start/what- it-does/>

<comment><USER44> Ah, there they are. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> " Think of it this way — if you get a text message or have an incoming call when you're walking down a busy street, there are something like two or three things you have to do before you can deal with that situation. Most of them involve you completely taking your attention off of your task at hand: walking down the street. With Glass, that information just appears to you, in your line of sight, ready for you to take action on. And taking that action is little more than touching the side of Glass or tilting your head up — nothing that would take you away from your main task of not running into people. "

This scares me. I mean, notifications are already known to cause a great amount of problems, it is changing our brains, making our attentions spans shorter and more frail, I already hate even the fact I am carrying a mobile phone, it disrupts me, take away my attention from what I should be doing... SMS to me is even worse, it is very intrusive, distracting, and now that I got used in talking to girlfriends with SMS I noticed that I am getting "addicted" to devices, instead of people.

To me, Google Glass, and similar technology, is awesome, neat, interesting, but dangerous, very dangerous, it might have very serious consequences on how we work as biological beings.

<comment><USER47> If you are able to, try disabling notifications on your phone.

I predict there will be regulation of hudphone use, especially where the operation of vehicles is concerned. A notification pop-up sapping a person's concentration at the wrong moment could be dangerous.

<comment><USER48> That's not a problem when you got a self driving car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> After watching that video, I will now go around with the UNATCO theme in my head all day.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBPK_oXeJgA>

</comment><comment><USER50> I love the picture of the first prototype. Crazy to see how far it's come.

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder how long it will be before there are Google Glass porn sites.

(No doubt someone _already_ has proposed it as an "If I had Glass proposal.)

</comment><comment><USER52> What distracted me the most was not the glasses, but the weird gazing into the distance look that he did when "reading" the glasses. Kind of disturbing.

<comment><USER53> Exactly, I felt weird looking at the picture. It looks like someone totally stiffening up for a pose, so unnatural.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 What happens if someone standing next to you tries to give commands to your Glass?

Is there a way for Glass to determine whose voice is the owner's?

</comment><comment><USER54> A really interesting product, and pleasant looking laid out on a table, but just horrible as a fashion piece.

</comment><comment><USER55> "I kept the Glass video recorder going" yeah, these need a manual physical sliding camera lense cover

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there any reason to worry about brain cancer with this?

<comment><USER56> Probably not since it doesn't have a 3G radio, but not sure how safe or healthy the bone audio conduction is. I hope Google knows what they're doing there.

<comment><USER57> If it had a 3G radio, the cancer risk would be exactly the same.

<comment><USER36> That's far from proven. There have been a variety of inconclusive cell phone studies, but definitely none about having a 3G radio glued to the side of your head and active for most of the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm not much on telling the future, but I see a huge avalanche of Google Glass stories on the horizon.

I got into stereoscopic photography lately, you know, with two cameras. I'll probably be willing to try Google Glass, but I sure would like a version that captured stereoscopic images. We have two eyeballs, we should capture two image streams.

</comment><comment><USER56> I hope Google can put OIS for anti-shake and a good camera in there. You're probably going to need as good image stabilizer as possible, as you'll be moving and shaking (when walking) your head a lot more than with a phone that you can still keep more or less still.

<comment><USER59> I don't think optical stabilization would really do much for full-on head bobbing. It's more for finer-grained movements, like hands shaking. And I don't think our heads actually shake much.

That said, you could do digital stabilization on head bobbing and probably get a pretty good result by jacking up the size of the stabilization window, although you'd lose frame size.

<comment><USER60> Humans probably compensate for some movements, but they are nowhere near as good at it as birds.

For examples, see [http://www.cogsci.nl/blog/bird-brains-and-fish- eyes/177-stab...](http://www.cogsci.nl/blog/bird-brains-and-fish- eyes/177-stabilizing-vision-do-the-chicken-head)</comment></comment></comment>


Who's hiring remotely? - <AUTHOR>

I haven't seen a post exclusively for remote jobs.  Are you hiring (internships or otherwise) remotely? <comment><USER3> I've been thinking about an interesting model for working remotely - <USER2> that might be called micro-outsourcing. The paying party provides a set of automated tests (like unit tests, but with speed/space constraints) and a price. Coders submit code which runs against the tests. If it passes, the payer can pay their predetermined amount to buy the source. The idea is to make the turn around fast enough that it makes more sense to program even simple code by "micro-outsourcing" dozens of ~1 hr pieces every day. This way, you could get ~50 hours of code written in a day's time while still keeping the entire architecture of the system in your head.

PS: someone said something insightful, but for some reason deleted it, along the lines of "this will pinpoint the problems of relying on unit tests for correctness". This is very true - one of the Interesting Problems such a project would need to solve is a set of tools to let users quickly design useful unit tests. I'm in no way delusional about automated tests not being able to _prove_ correctness. But I'm not convinced mathematical correctness is all that often necessary, nor that this is a problem without a good-enough solution.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how this would work on closed-source projects. Coders would need to see the existing code that others have written to get anything done, 1 hour of coding could be 45 minutes of grokking how your system is setup and 15 minutes of work. It seems like "micro-outsourcing" would only work for micro- requirements.

You could maybe do something based off of Git where the hirer pays to pull from contractors who have already glanced at the project and can jump in and add a feature, but the hirer would have to expose his business source code to everyone. The alternative is to expose it to less people and have them work on it for longer periods of time to deliver a properly integrated product which puts you back at a regular outsourcing service.

I don't think micro-outsourcing would work because productivity returns from the coder might not start taking off until after 1 hour.

<comment><USER3> _It seems like "micro-outsourcing" would only work for micro-requirements._

Bingo. The role of the "programmer" then becomes to split a project into these micro-requirements, with minimal glue in between. This also yields a system of well-defined, loosely-coupled components... all things dear to my heart.

Even though I said ~1hr, I was thinking of one hour being the upper bound. If I can write testable specs in 3 minutes instead of code which would take 30 minutes to write/debug, I could increase my productivity at least an order of magnitude. But the point isn't even that, it's the kind of architecture one could create by "requesting" tons of custom built components throughout one's day, worrying about their whole structure instead of the bricklaying.

<comment><USER5> This is something I would love, for both coding and system admin tasks.

The thing is, I would want to 'retain' a few people for these tasks. For example, instead of one system admin, I would have four people who vaguely know my systems (have passwords, etc.) and if I offer an hour's worth of work, the first of the four to accept gets it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've seen this post every few weeks, and yet i hardly see any entries/offers and even though it gets decent upvotes (around 15-20).

For some reason, i get the feeling not a lot of startups prefer "hiring" remotely, or perhaps places like Elance are more suited for this.

I've worked remotely for 3 startups and i've grown to prefer it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I envy developers who can work remotely. I wonder if there's some model that can work for people like me. I'm not even sure how to describe my skill set other than something like this "a non-douchebag guy with top-tier investment banking and consulting experience who understands tech/dev/web well enough to be the glue between the two worlds and also synaptically chaotic enough to make people rethink positions on things and create order out of disparate ideas". I hate how corporations compromise thinking and genuine human relationships, so I'm going to quit things until I likely become an over- qualified barista serving my former employers coffee. How can I work remotely or for a grounds-up business?

Please sir, may I have some more?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you can try contacting the people at Banksimple ( <https://banksimple.net/> ) and see if you can help them out at all. If your description of your skill set is accurate, you might be able to help them. That's the only online banking startup that I could think of, although there are probably others that people can suggest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm an independent contractor, I work from home (often times with companies outside of my home city) and I doubt (from experience) you're are going to find many startup opportunities that cultivate remote working; I envision the startup experience as being something akin to a team based sport. You need to be _together_ to roll with the punches, so to speak; there's an immediacy of communication and deliverance of intent that happens when you are physically proximate to each other.

Established organizations have processes and they are _established_ , nothing changes too quickly, therefore making it more feasible to leverage remote workers.

<comment><USER10> We all work remotely here, also 37signals started with most people working remotely.

<comment><USER9> Are you accepting applications? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm looking to hire a ROR developer to help with an NHS project (familiarity with mechanize a bonus). Please email firstname.lastname@example.com for specs and chat.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not hiring, per se, but I've been playing with a project management app idea for a while (unoriginal, I know). I do UX/design, so I'm looking for a programmer to partner up with. I'm thinking Node.js would be fun--I'm trying to do something very responsive and fast with some real-time-y features. I'm in NYC but remote is fine with me. let me know if you're interested.

<comment><USER13> And how should people contact you?

<comment><USER12> email address in profile

<comment><USER14> You have to put it in the about box. The email address field isn't publicly visible, it's only for administrative use.

<comment><USER12> aha, got it. thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> yeah, i'd really love to see a list too.

personally, even though i fully acknowledge the whole "work with us and share the energy/dedication/soul" thing, i'm most productive when i have the freedom to swap up my view/environment every day (which is something you can't really do too easily inside an office)... inspiration, or something, i dunno.

i think it also forces people to be more thoughtful about the way they communicate/interrupt each other, which is pretty huge.

</comment><comment><USER16> I know a few people who have gotten awesome remote positions. They all started as on-site hires who had to move for family reasons, and the companies/startups were flexible enough to let them keep working remotely. I've not seen many (any?) Startups that consider remote hires from te outset.

</comment><comment><USER17> On a similar note, I am curious if anyone has experience starting a company where the founders were all remote, especially if everyone met over the internet. What were the additional challenges or advantages that the remote arrangement brought out?

<comment><USER18> The founders at our company are all remote, with developers spread across India, UK and USA. We are doing well, having won Seedcamp last year.

It still amazes me the visceral reaction people have against remote working. This would be fine as a principle, if the same people did not also complain to me that doctors do not embrace technology. But given that our platform is designed for doctors and patients to work together online (including online consultations) it behooves us to practice what we preach.

I will give the following tips: \- You need different habits to work online. In my case, I have a _lot_ of experience in setting up teams to work together virtually based on all my previous IT projects, including writing software for medical students to share their education across hospitals using Palm Pilots, and migraiting 300 employees to use a wiki. I also worked as a management consultant in a company that took pride in working with 2,700 hospitals but without traveling to the hospitals - all research was through phone and email. \- You have to teach the rest of the team these habits, few people know them already. For example, in a telephone conference, you have to explicitly laugh when you would have smiled, as you cannot rely on visual cues for bonding. \- Make use of wikis and document every meeting you have, as you have it, with everyone seeing what you type as you type it. \- my co-founders were either people I knew, or people I got to know in person through volunteer work I would ask them to do over coffee meetings before I asked them to join the company.

By far the biggest saving we have is time. It is not being cheap and cutting costs of office space, it is about slashing the time we spend on commuting and meeting, and I would definitely say that we would never have achieved as much as we did, as quickly as we did, if it was not for working virtually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm looking for someone who could build an generator similar to this one: <http://www.mensus.net/brain/logic.shtml>

It's not that trivial, so I don't think that using some random dude from a freelancing site would be viable.

<comment><AUTHOR> How should people contact you? There's no email address in your publicly visible profile.

<comment><USER19> I made this account because my other one was on non-procastinaio mode. I was also hoping that someone would reply to me and then I would contact him. Thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Collabora is hiring multimedia developers remotely. [http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2010/05/25/want-to-join-the- co...](http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2010/05/25/want-to-join-the-collabora- multimedia-team/)

</comment><comment><USER18> We are hiring. We want people with either backend J2EE and EJB expertise, or front-end expertise in Struts 2. We _love_ developers who know hot work remotely. Drop me a line on firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am looking for a senior level developer who knows either flex or java. The work is all remote and is for a major video game company, fun stuff! Email is in my profile.

<comment><USER15> hm, i worked at a major video game company (albeit i'm not proud to say i worked for THQ) building server tech for an MMO.

it was kinda weird that they gave me the freedom to basically build all the really important shit (ie: i got to pretty much lay the foundation and designed a bunch of distributed systems and algorithms as i went a long) despite me being the most junior member of the team, but it was all java stuff, plus i grew up doing flash/flex work.

i have a portfolio up at <http://www.lzimm.com>, not sure if i'm senior enough for you, but thought i'd throw that out there just in case :)

<comment><USER21> "We were tasked with turning one of the top rated strategy games of all time into one of the world's flagship tests of a new set of economics." The task itself sounds pretty cool -- kinda off topic, but could you describe it a little more? (I've been interested in virtual world economies for a bit.)

Great article (<http://www.lzimm.com/nov2009/purpose.html>), too!

<comment><USER15> Hey dude, sorry, almost missed your reply, but thanks for the comment :)

Anyways, I'm kinda stuck on what I can tell you.

I basically built a bit of infrastructure shit that let us build all the pricing and billing logic at scale. So my role was more "low level" than what went on with the actual transaction processing, which I think was pretty typical. That said though, I'm sure that's not your question, which is more resolved around the economics at large, so even though I'm probably not supposed to talk about this, I don't really care:

\- the entire gaming industry is struggling to make money in new ways (ie: piracy blah blah blah). \- one way to do it is subscriptions (ala WoW), but i think most the big publishers are finding that its pretty hard to actually do that successfully (WoW is a pretty rare phenomenon) \- the other big way to do that (online, at least) is the whole free-to-play thing, where you make money by letting people buy virtual goods and crap (ala all the facebook crap) \- the thing is, when you get into games that people take seriously, you have to be careful about the goods you let people buy, because all of that shit can really change game mechanics, so you have to either: restrict yourself to selling things that don't mean anything, like avatars and crap; be very careful that if you do sell items that affect gameplay, not to build strange new equilibria, or more importantly, prematurely alienate players before you get to those equilibria in the first place; or (taking the approach that we were taking.. i think anyways, i got pretty fed up at this point because it seemed like they kept focussing on incredibly moot details), make it so that you can't buy an advantage that you can't get by just playing the game (ie: only letting people buy items that you can get through random item drops that reward gameplay as opposed to debits from your bank account)

i have no idea why i did that in bullet points.

furthermore, i have an incredibly bad sense of grammar right now, so i'm not sure if that even made any sense. drop me an email if you wanna chat more :)

\--

edit: uhhg, i have to admit, this reply seems terribly uninsightful, sorry :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> the sponsor of the ubuntu linux distribution, canonical, hires people from all around the world (70% of employees working remotely): <http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/>

</comment><comment><USER23> No one hiring because they cannot switch their minds from corporate culture to the open source one.

Look at freebsd, apache *, webkit, and thousands other projects - they're growing up by the effort of hundreds of remote commiters, and managed somehow to follow the architecture agreements and the design decisions.

The idea is very clear - you cannot pay people on 'per hour' or even 'per line' basis - it works only for a full-time jobs where people are bounded by contracts, NDA, and other papers.

In contrast, in the open source world, people bound by idea, desire and the common effort, see the nginx project as an example.

But it is possible to pay for accomplished goals or milestones. Of course, you need to define the basic rules before - coding style, unit-tests requirements and so on.

So, if you like to hire people remote people, you need two things - idea and trust. Set up trac or code.google.com, write your ideas and requirements and pay for closed tickets/issues.

Update: To anonymous coward down-voters: It is better for everyone (even for you) to share your opinions instead of simply click the button. =)

<comment><USER24> You were downvoted because your response is off topic. Beyond that, remoting does work for proprietary software (see Stackoverflow), so your argument is shaky at best.

The reason the other downvoters didn't respond was that there's no need to pursue this thread of communication further, as it does not really relate. It's cowardice in the same way not fighting the guy who cuts you off in traffic is cowardice.

And I don't intend to turn this into any kind of debate or anything. Just my two cents on why you got downvoted.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Secure remote iSight viewing and motion detection for Mac, iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theoncueapp.com/#

<comment><USER2> I'm about to pull the trigger on this purchase (its only $3!) but I have this fear that anything recorded is going to be sent to a third party without my knowledge. Tell me I'm crazy for thinking this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the owner and only developer. Your image data is sent through a TURN server I operate on AWS in order to facilitate the remote viewing, and only if a synchronized device exists and is online. You don't need have to synchronize an iOS device to use the other desktop features. Aside from the TURN server, the app makes connections to another server I control for managing synchronization between devices.

The data is encrypted using two way TLS and the traffic is sent (without any processing or storing, or transmitting to third parties) to devices you have synchronized.

Your fear is probably not atypical, and as an indie dev it's maybe my biggest obstacle for this app's success. With that said, my number one priority for users is data security. I spent a great deal of time working on the security aspects alone, and if you have any questions about the details please feel free to contact me-- my information is available on the website linked.

EDIT: more clarity (I hope)

<comment><USER3> One question that pops up is: is the data transfer activated only if you pair the desktop app with the iOS app? (EDIT: re-read your answer and now I see that you replied to this already)

Can we remain sure that no data is sent otherwise?

As well: being able to launch a command on specific events would be nice for us hackers (if it's not already there, didn't check yet in depth).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, no data is sent otherwise. If you have ever synchronized an iOS device, the desktop app will make a quick connection to determine its external IP address upon launch and communicate that to my managing server, but this is only used when a synchronized iOS device wants to connect.

Thanks for the idea about launching on specific events, I will definitely look into putting this in a future release :)

<comment><USER3> Great - thanks for the feedback! Purchased, and congrats on launching this. This is a very specific pain point and it looks well treated.

PS: you could "market" the fact that no data is sent a bit better, maybe have a big switch in the setup that makes the current config clear (with bold "no data sent" by default etc). Hope this helps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You probably just got a whole load of crash reports from me, most of the time I get just a "Searching for connection..." message [1] but it also won't stay running for more than a few seconds.

[1] [http://drp.mk/i/BMzz](http://drp.mk/i/BMzz)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would have paid $30+ for this without hesitation. Just so you know :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazing app! Bought and added to my tumblr! :) [http://nclx.tumblr.com/](http://nclx.tumblr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Feature request: motion detection + record to HD.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, do you mean to the Hard Disk, or in High Definition? :) OnCue already does record to the disk when you configure it to, you can set it to record on either a motion or an audio trigger.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for pointing that out. I've purchased it.

Another question: Is it possible to run from cron? I don't want to have it running all the time. For example when run from the command line, is it armed by default or do I have to set it to arm manually from the menu?

If it's not armed when run, it would be nice to have:

      OnCue --arm-video --arm-audio

Thanks again.</comment></comment></comment>