Ask HN: Are you paying for access to a private community? Why? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to understand paid-for and private social networks and communties and would like some input from those who use and appreciate them.
What communities are you part of? What makes it worth the money for you? Why not just use free alternatives like Reddit or FB?
I'd really like to understand this because it's such a foreign concept to me - I don't think anything could convince me to sign up for something like that, yet loads of people do.
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> I pay ~$10 for membership on a niche dating website (for a community that is not served well by the likes of Tinder / Match.com / etc.). The emphasis is on meeting IRL, and the biggest problem they solve is to offer a large and dense (geographically speaking) network of like-minded real people who are ready to meet. Paid subscription is not the only trick they use to weed out fakes, but it goes a long way. Money is pretty much the only constraint that keeps the site from being flooded by bots and spams.

</comment><comment><USER3> Membership quality is the most important part of a good community. Cash is a good filter.

Something Awful bans a lot of people, quite often. Cash keeps them from simply signing up to get around the ban _and_ acts as fine to remind them to behave and read the rules.

<comment><USER4> > _" Membership quality is the most important part of a good community. Cash > is a good filter."_

That's true, but in some cases _cash_ can act as bait, to lure members in with a false sense of security.

The Ashley-Madison leaks revealed that a large percentage of their female users were just bots, made by the company to increase engagement...

You can't always trust private walled-gardens

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not easy to run a good forum; helping the people that do so earn a living seems like a great idea. Such communities often benefit from the filter of having everyone there having a stake in wanting to be there, or a good reason to _not_ want to be there when its no longer fun.

Those aspects make a forum fertile grounds for cultist tribal social bullshit, which often kills the community. It's like setting out fresh baked bread; it _will_ grow mold eventually; but for the period before that it's a lovely wonderful warm comforting thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Financial Times. Articles relevant to work and comments section makes for good reading i.e. often well informed commentators and debate, usually the journalists chime in too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I spent $10 on an internet forum :|</comment>


Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/ <comment><USER2> Main work seems to be two years old from the github time stamps?

The generation of images using GANs has improved a lot since then. It would be interesting to see what the latest and greatest methods can do given this data set.

<comment><USER3> The purpose of this work isn't to generate realistic NSFW images. The purpose is to visually represent what a neural network "looks for" when classifying NSFW content. It is very interesting that these generate images strike the viewer as grotesque even though there isn't anything specific in the images that could be called vulgar. This indicates there is some similarity between how a neural network and our brains classify things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder where the line is drawn on obscenity for most people? On the NSFW, you can make out some the textures or shapes of different body parts, but none of it is clearly obscene. But there's a general feeling that it is obscene. I wonder where we would draw the line.

<comment><USER5> Ultimately we draw the line at what 5 Supreme Court justices would subjectively consider to be obscene.

[https://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/movie- day-...](https://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/movie-day-at-the- supreme-court-or-i-know-it-when-i-see-it-a.html)

<comment><USER6> > for most people I think it's really dependent on the individual. Also those > 5 judges preside over a nation of only 250M people (1/23rd of the world > population)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (2016)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22open_nsfw%22&sort=byPopular...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22open_nsfw%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER8> Thanks; added. Previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12756462](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12756462)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The first set of NSFW images make me think the NN was trained on Cannibal Corpse album covers.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is the stuff of nightmares.

<comment><USER11> Very H.R. Giger.

<comment><USER12> Not sure why you got downvoted, but Giger would love it I imagine. His were much more explicitly sexual but these are more ambiguously so. And those generated beach scenes were very reminiscent of Dali and Whiteley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-localhost Interesting you posted this a few days ago, because I think it's relevant with yesterdays news of tumblr banning adult content and as a result, lots of images of trivial content (beaches etc) got flagged as porn. See also: [https://www.jakeelwes.com/project- MLPorn.html](https://www.jakeelwes.com/project-MLPorn.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> The concert NSFW set is amazing. The network just replaces people with giant penises. There's some real art somewhere in there.

</comment><comment><USER14> my recent comments about how important having some systems like this open with self-hosting options for webmasters and user's privacy issues: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525758](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525758)

Glad to see this was released and hope some kind of cloud efforts can be used to make it better.

</comment><comment><USER15> Welcome to the future, where computers can generate dick pics for you.

</comment><comment><USER16> worst. porn. ever.

</comment><comment><USER17> Needs some adversarial training...</comment>


Inside evasi0n, the most elaborate jailbreak to ever hack your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/02/05/inside-evasi0n-the-most-elaborate-jailbreak-to-ever-hack-your-iphone/#

<comment><USER2> Having quite a bit of background in reverse engineering (Win32 mainly), I'm left speechless by the complexity of the hack.

This is are amazing, especially beating the ASLR part.

</comment><comment><USER3> Aren't jailbreaking methods illegal now?

<comment> guard-of-terra Why should they if it's entirely your phone bought with entirely your money?

<comment><USER3> I think it's because you're violating the copyright they have on the software, but I'm not sure.

<comment> guard-of-terra So now I can't use the device I bought however I want?

I state that any law preventing me from using the device I bought however I want violates human rights and therefore void.

<comment><USER3> You're also legally prevented from impaling another human with your smartphone.

<comment> guard-of-terra This is where I interact with another human being. However if I'm not interacting with another human being, this argument doesn't apply. On my own I can do what I want with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Intellectual Yet Idiot - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.p88rb423m <comment><USER2> I am torn. On the one hand, I agree with a lot of the criticism. But in other places, it just becomes plain anti-intellectual.

<comment><USER3> It's petty anti-intellectualism, pure and simple, and written by a very frustrated individual.

The author shows himself having an axe to grind regarding educated individuals, and commits a long series of logical fallacies just to be able to criticize those who benefited from going to school and cultivating themselves. The author describes the cumulative result of having an education as "pass exams written by people like them", and proceeds to go on a rambling tirade regarding replication of scientific experiments, as it meant anything to him.

The article is a complete waste of time. It's nothing more than ramblings of a frustrated idiot with a heavy inferiority complex whose complains boil down to not being the one in charge because others actually know best and are better prepared than him. He refuses to acknowledge that and took the initiative to put his ill-thought out ramblings in a blog post. It reads precisely as it is expected to read.

<comment><USER4> > It's nothing more than ramblings of a frustrated idiot with a heavy > inferiority complex whose complains boil down to not being the one in charge

The author is Nick Taleb, and has achieved more than most OxBridge grads.

And from working with a lot of ImpBridge folks (being more CS relevant), while they're lovely people with (sometimes multiple) CS degrees, many can't make a complete product, can't deploy software, use a server OS, understand basic networking concepts, or sell something they've built.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm struggling to understand "ImpBridge". An impedance bridge of some kind? Contract bridge scoring?

I think Taleb's article could have benefited from some better editing. I haven't read him before, though, and I think I'd understand him better if I read more of his articles.

<comment><USER6> > but I'm struggling to understand "ImpBridge"

["impbridge" -"imp bridge"] returns these articles (with the Guardian article in first place).

[https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2014/sep/16/...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2014/sep/16/imperial- college-cambridge-britains-best-university)

[http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/7436](http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/7436)

[http://thetab.com/uk/cambridge/2014/09/24/why-impbridge- will...](http://thetab.com/uk/cambridge/2014/09/24/why-impbridge-will-never- happen-38185)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scaling AFL to a 256 thread machine - <AUTHOR> https://gamozolabs.github.io/fuzzing/2018/09/16/scaling_afl.html <comment><USER2> I am excited to learn about afl-launch!

</comment><comment><USER3> AFL == "American Fuzzy Lop"

</comment><comment><USER4> Now try fuzzing on multiple machines.

<comment><USER5> Distributed fuzzing?</comment></comment>


Omni.js - Easily build realtime Backbone apps - <AUTHOR> http://omni.kevinbedi.com/

<comment><USER2> Is it me or is anyone else having problems scrolling down the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Works for me, what browser?

<comment><USER3> I am having the same issue as well. Firefox 21 on Windows 7.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay scrolling on Firefox should be fixed now.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> it is working on Chrome. Very nice tutorial, including video.</comment>


Sagging Pants and the Long History of 'Dangerous' Street Fashion - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/09/11/347143588/sagging-pants-and-the-long-history-of-dangerous-street-fashion <comment><USER2> I heard it originated in prison, but differently. Wardens would give out ill- fitting clothes to humiliate the inmates. So people on the outside made saggy clothes "cool", that way the badly-dressed people on the inside would feel normal. It was just solidarity with ill-treated prisoners.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I was a kid bullies pulled your pants down to your knees to embarass you, I guess now they pull them up :-)

But more seriously kids get to an age where they want to declare they are not their parents, the go to method of choice has been clothes since well since forever. The cycle is that the kids wear it, its shocking, then as they get older they are wearing it as "adults" which then makes it establishment, so the kids behind them make up some other fad. Rinse and repeat. I think making dress code laws is both absurd and hopeless.

<comment><USER4> A corollary: everyone detests looking like his father, nobody minds looking like his grandfather. My brother and I would not under any coercion worn shorts with dark socks and dress shoes, as our father routinely did in warm weather. Some kids don't mind that now. Think also of the "Teddy Boys" of the 1950s, wearing the clothing of the Edwardian period ca. 1910.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really care what people wear, but a zoot suit or an afro isn't the same as exposing most of your underwear in public.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty much the longest ongoing trolling effort in existence.

<comment><USER7> Well, that's sartorially normative, isn't it? Check your privilege.

<comment><USER4> Do I get a receipt?

More nearly seriously, am I supposed to check my privilege the way I might check my fly, or check it the way I might check my raincoat or my baggage?

<comment><USER6> The way you check Google, before you look like an ass on Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always thought wearing baggy clothes meant it was easier to conceal weapons.

<comment><USER9> Check for symptoms of moral panic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" [For the wearers,] it's a mechanism to reclaim dignity that's been taken away from them," he said._

Uh, you're doing it wrong!

<comment> qu4z-2 You may only reclaim your dignity in one of the following pre-approved fashions?

<comment><USER10> Do you really think wearing your pants down over your ass is going to reclaim your dignity? If so I got news for you - it's going to do the opposite. If that's a surprise to you then I'm surprised myself. If you object to it then yell at the sky, because it's just as likely to change things. Welcome to the real world, where these things matter.</comment></comment></comment>


Fedora 25: Wayland vs. Xorg - <AUTHOR> http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/fedora-25-wayland-vs-xorg.html <comment><USER2> > And you see, that's part of the problem. Stuff should not be designed to be > easier to developer or maintain. That can be a beneficial by-product > provided all other customer requirements are met. But if they are not, then > it does not matter how hard or simple it is for programmers to hammer code. > That's their job. The whole purpose of technology is to support the end > state - in this case, a seamless and smooth user experience.

Sadly that horse is long gone. After the XFree86 fork Xorg decided to split the X11 code into 1001 sub-projects. Yes, it had some benefits, like being able to add/replace drivers without compiling the whole of X11.

But one benefit from the XFree86 "monolith" was that one could do configure and compile dance once, and get a working X11. Now i have to find just the right piece of everything to get it compiled. And if i complain about it i am likely to be told that i should not compile it myself but use one of the major precompiled distros.

Never mind that with the move to DRI/DRM if there is too large a mismatch between kernel and X11 driver the kernel panics.

Frankly the whole Wayland vs X11 thing is a distraction. The real problem is that the DEs, Gnome in particular, has gotten too much say in what happens to the lower layers. And all in the name of eyecandy and "UX".

Build something stable and they will come. Polish a turd and they will smell the stink and stay far far away.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best resources to start learning C? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> K&R's "The C Programming Language" would be my vote, if you are smart and eager to learn. Might be some better, newer content, but you could do a lot worse.</comment>


A distrust in police leads to lynch mob culture - <AUTHOR> https://latinamericareports.com/how-a-distrust-in-police-leads-to-lynch-mob-culture/1546/ <comment><USER2> Social media was a mistake.

</comment><comment><USER3> India is uncannily similar to Latin America in that way. AFAIK, Indians haven't yet dared to storm police stations and extract prisoners for a lynching. Usually WhatsApp forwards lead to lynchings before the police are even aware of anything weird going on.

The police are distrusted here, often, with good reason. [https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-bengaluru- students...](https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-bengaluru-students- took-moral-policing-cops-got-their-attention-99148)

</comment><comment><USER4> Blockchain and total surveillance on the whole juristic process accessible to everyone ? Also surveillance should reduce mob forming due to accountability.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a warning to those who would make punishments less brutal and to those who would make it harder to convict a criminal. People won't stand for it. People will fall back to instinct, and the instinct of _Homo sapiens_ is deadly violent in many cases.</comment>


Wikipedia's list of lists of lists - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists <comment><USER2> I was sad to see that List of lists of lists of lists was created, but deleted. Arbitrary limits on tree depth make me a sad coder.

Given that this is clearly a tree, I'd prefer they just have a WP:Lists, with each of the relevant groupings of lists listed there, and so on.

<comment><USER3> I've always thought that the last step should be "Lists of non-list items" to ensure that, among other things, lists don't contain themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm still waiting for the list of lists that do not contain themselves.

<comment><USER5> Here it is, hiding inside the Russel's paradox article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox#Applied_ve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox#Applied_versions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised it doesn't yet include this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledges_Taxonomy)

I guess this is a list of lists of things who do not belong to the Emperor.

EDIT: now realized it's a list of lists of lists. Somebody should create a list of Borges' lists, then, including the aforementioned.

<comment><USER7> The apostrophe has been deleted from your link. I suspect some anti-SQL- injection code ate it. %27 should be the appropriate escape character.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge%27s_Taxonomy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, the awesome Yvain (aka Scott Siskind) must be mentioned here, since he made years ago a list of lists of lists of lists.

<http://www.raikoth.net/lololol.html>

Please heed the warning in the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER9> Of course, that set contains itself: scroll to L and there's a self-reference.

<comment><USER10> But it's a list of lists of lists, so it should only contain lists of lists-- well, by the strict definition, a nested list is still a list. So, _technically_ I suppose it can be there, but it reads as list of (lists of lists), where the depth of each level is clearly shown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is all fun and games until Russell's paradox rears its ugly head.

</comment><comment><USER12> In other news, data can be listed in a hierarchal manner.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lists, yes, but what about categories?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chefs_who_committed_su...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chefs_who_committed_suicide)

<comment><USER14> Well, there is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Categories>

"Not to be confused with Category:Category-theoretic categories."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this page exist in the other languages? Can we go a level up?

<comment><USER16> As someone else in this thread mentioned, the page has a link to itself in the L section, which means that we can't (and don't need to) go a level up. Like any good metalist, this list contains itself.

<comment><USER17> Next up: a list of lists that do not contain themselves

(Punchline drumroll.)

<comment><USER16> Ha. That's actually pretty funny. To state the obvious: that's impossible. If the list omits itself, it's incomplete. It it includes itself, it's invalid.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, Bertrand, for clearing that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> But where's the page that contains a list of links to all pages that don't contain links to themselves?

<comment><USER20> I just came here to write that. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> List of lists of lists of lists:

<https://www.google.com/search?q=lists+of+lists+of+lists>

</comment><comment><USER22> One of my favorites was missing from the Animals section: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulent...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulent_diplomas)

<comment><USER23> That's just a list though, not a list of lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> While you're all punning away in a recursive delirium, I think it's worth noting the distinct absence of science topics: lists of proteins? lists of genes? lists of algorithms? lists of particles? lists of reactions? And, my favorite: lists of catalysts?

<comment><USER25> Not to mention the lists of lisps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let's start a [edit: complete] list of lists of lists that don't contain themselves

<comment> iso8859-1 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/List_of>

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wish someone would compile a list of links to these sorts of pages...

</comment><comment><USER28> Yo dawg, I heard you like lists!

</comment><comment><USER29> google page rank v.s. wikipedia... round 1, FIGHT!

</comment><comment><USER30> what is it about ?

<comment><USER31> basically everything on wikipedia is ordered into lists. many of those lists are further organized into lists of lists. those lists of lists are organized in this article and its a list of lists of lists.

for example one of the lists of lists on 'list of lists of lists' is 'lists of american films' and one of the lists there is 'list of american films of 1900' which contains, among others, 'Clowns Spinning Hats'.

I actually found one list of lists of lists on 'list of lists of lists'. 'Lists of Americans' > 'Lists of African Americans' > 'List of African American Jurists' > 'Dennis Archer'. Going to see if I can find another and create the epic 'list of lists of lists of lists'.

<comment><USER32> You can put the list of lists of lists on your list of lists of lists of lists. Also, 'Isotope lists' > 'Isotope lists, 0-24' > 'Isotopes of Helium' > 'Helium-2' though I don't know if that counts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That is so incredibly meta.

</comment><comment><USER34> Contains a "List of lists of national institutions and symbols" - listception.

</comment><comment><USER35> ... is as incomplete as most lists are. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drug-related_deaths> is missing, for instance.

<comment><USER36> That's not a list of lists though. So it shouldn't be included in a list of lists of lists.</comment></comment>


Causal Inference Book - <AUTHOR> https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/ <comment><USER2> Also in the recent and upcoming releases in "causality" department: The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie) [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/business/dealbook/review-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/business/dealbook/review- the-book-of-why-examines-the-science-of-cause-and-effect.html)

<comment><USER3> Judea Pearl also wrote a summary of The Book of Why here: [http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r481.pdf](http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r481.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Jamie Robins and I are working on a book that provides a cohesive > presentation of concepts of, and methods for, causal inference. Much of this > material is currently scattered across journals in several disciplines or > confined to technical articles. We expect that the book will be of interest > to anyone interested in causal inference, e.g., epidemiologists, > statisticians, psychologists, economists, sociologists, political > scientists, computer scientists...

I'm a bit surprised that there isn't already a "cohesive presentation", both for teaching and as a resource for practitioners. (Of course, that seems to be when books are written, when the need suddenly seems obvious.) Would any scientists, etc. comment on how the topic is currently taught and what reference is used? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the topic, such as its significance or generality? Has something changed?

<comment><USER5> Typically, stats seems to have different usage and teaching by field. Psychologists have their flavor, physicists another. Econometricians, epidemiologists, nutritionists, etc, all different. They're pretty much all asking causal questions, but they're coming up with different techniques to solve the specific weird questions that are unique to their field.

Some fields get to randomize everything. Causal inference is is as simple as asking "is this difference real" when the difference in your experiment would be causal by design. This is what is taught as stats 1 to everybody who starts learning stats.

Many fields don't get to randomly do things :(. Maybe you want to know the effect of a disease, but we as a society have decided that harming people to learn for the eventual greater good is bad (hello "rush out the self driving cars!" proponents!). Or maybe randomizing would involve merging a few multi- billion dollar companies and grad students don't have that budget. For whatever reason, you can't intervene in the same way. I give those two examples because epidemiologists and economists have really extended the state of the art of causal inference because their data doesn't look the same as many other fields. Inference is harder (but still possible!).

Those niche developments have been happening for a while, but haven't been cohesively un-niched. Big (non-randomized) data is becoming a big thing and everyone wants to use it to make decisions. Decisions require causal statements and most people only know how to make those statements for cleanly randomized stats 1 stuff. People seem to be picking up on the fact that some of this previously niche stuff is much more broadly useful.

<comment><USER4> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Causal inference (Causal reasoning) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference) ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_reasoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_reasoning) )

</comment><comment><USER7> I bet someday we realize that "causality" is about as real as the ether or force at the subatomic level. That is, something that seems fundamental and obvious but is really just wrong.

<comment><USER5> It may be wrong in the sense that free will is wrong, but a lack of free will doesn't stop me from making decisions. Causality is all about counterfactuals, and the admission is right there in the name counter-factual. We are already aware.

The most popular framework for causality talks about potential outcomes. If I took my blood pressure meds now (all else equal), what would my blood pressure be at noon? If I skipped my meds today (all else equal), what would my blood pressure be at noon? That tells me the casual effect of the meds on my blood pressure today. But I either will or won't take the meds. One of those branches is simply wrong on a fundamental level, like you say. "What would happen" is in some sense meaningless. But it's sure as shit useful to think about, and that's the whole point.

Said differently, even in a toy model of the universe where everything is deterministic and causality is meaningless on a physics level, causality can be usefully defined on a practical level. Counterfactuals are counter factual, but that's ok.

<comment><USER7> In a toy model, the ether and Aristotlean mechanics worked ok too. I am not saying we should give up the notion altogether, but that causality as we intuit it may not be the best way to understand the universe.

<comment><USER5> True. Causation is less useful for fundamental physics than it is for the other sciences. The intent of my comment is that even if causation is nonsensical at the physical level, it may be usefully and sensibly defined at higher other levels. Just like how "true" randomness isn't a prerequisite for usefully defining probability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great book, much more practical for the applied researcher than anything written by Pearl.</comment>


LibreOffice 5.2 "fresh" Released, for Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux - <AUTHOR> https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/08/03/libreoffice-5-2-fresh-released-for-windows-mac-os-and-gnulinux/ <comment><USER2> [opinion-disclaimer]

I've often been drawn to testing out LibreOffice (and OpenOffice), but every single time I open the apps, they _always_ look terrible.

This isn't 1990 anymore - if the kind of UI design that the devs have gone for (have settled on?) alienates a tech-friendly user such as myself, there isn't a hope in hell of people like my parents using it regularly.

Does anyone know why the style they use has persisted for so long? Is it just a case that no one cares about this sort of thing on that project?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for mentioning it... I always feel bad for thinking it.

Open/LibreOffice are basically the index case for what the Open Source community is really bad at: design & UI. Three explanations I see:

\- The talent pool of designers working on OSS is too small.

\- Design is a problem that is less accessible to a distributed, bottom-up workflow than code.

\- The UI is actually 80% of the workload of a software project and therefore the area where OSS's lack of resources is most obvious.

<comment><USER4> First explain what is wrong with the LO 5 design? I find the ribbon gui horrible. The fact that the buttons and menu haven't changed that much since ten years, so what? It does the job.

The only office gui better was the Lotus Suite one, where the layout options were much better with palets like in Photoshop, onces that you could move around.

<comment><USER5> > I find the ribbon gui horrible.

You're in the minority. Context aware UI is superior to most since you only see elements when they're relevant rather than constantly. This creates a much less cluttered interface, but without actually sacrificing any power/functionality.

Plus LibreOffice 5 lacks legitimately useful things like real-time previews of font/size changes (via hover), graph previews, text style template saving (e.g. set up a custom title style, and you can quickly re-use that style later in that same document inc. size/font/color/etc), et al.

Back with Microsoft Office 2003 I'd agree that the then OpenOffice was a legitimate competitor. And Office 2007 had some legit problems that kept that true, but by Office 2010 LibreOffice was bested and 2013/2016 only worsened its position.

I cannot see why I'd use LibreOffice on Windows today. Cost perhaps?

<comment><USER6> Part of what concerns me about the UI discussion with LO is that the choices are held up as either Microsoft ribbon-style UI, or the current UI, as if because Microsoft adopted it and there wasn't a complete mutiny, it was a good idea.

Remember that Microsoft Word is entrenched in lots of places for various reasons, and it would take a major screw up before people wouldn't continue using it. I think what happened with the ribbon is that there were somethings that were better, and other things that were not, so people shrugged and went on with their lives.

This doesn't mean the ribbon was better.

Personally, for me, the ribbon is inconsistent. The context-aware part is good, but it's implemented inconsistently. So for me, I prefer the current LO UI even as I see room for improvement.

The upshot is that these discussions of LO "being so far behind the times" strike me as odd, because they come across as assuming that change is necessarily good for change's sake.

There are more serious problems with LO in my mind, such as the equation editing markup system--it's something that used to be light-years ahead of Word with, and now is lagging significantly.

<comment><USER7> I suspect a lot of times what people are picking up on when they say that LibreOffice looks antiquated is less the underlying UX choices than the actual _aesthetics_ of the application. The last time I looked at LibreOffice (about a year ago) it had the look and feel of an Office 2003 competitor. As silly as it may sound, it can be hard to get past that perception. A (relatively) simple design refresh might do wonders.

Having said that, I don't really like LO's actual UX choices. Every time I try to use it, I get infuriated trying to do something relatively easy. (Take setting up different headers/footers on the first page of the document. I appreciate that making these "page styles" is theoretically more flexible, but just about _every other word processor I use_ simply gives me a checkbox labeled "Different First Page.")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> New features:

[https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new- features/](https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/)

Video demonstration:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EshNTl23liY&list=PL0pdzjvYW9...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EshNTl23liY&list=PL0pdzjvYW9RFM_RjJhUhOO0OH8uVoRn3J)

</comment><comment><USER8> Under the hood:

[http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2016-08-03-under-the- hood...](http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2016-08-03-under-the- hood-5-2.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Troll question, but also really curious: Does the import from MS Office works already? (At least as good as in OSX's Pages). That was the single reason why I couldn't use LibreOffice so far... it just couldn't open files I've got from the "external world", like Microsoft Word, as soon as the document was a slightly more complex.

<comment><USER10> Please file bug reports for each file that has problems: [http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/](http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/)

Do also try searching for existing reports before filing, so you will save me and the rest of the QA gang some work.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your contributions and awesome work. :)

<comment><USER10> I became a contributor by accident: I thought it would be interesting to see, if bug reports other than mine also got "silently" fixed.

The bar for joining QA is really low. If a person can use their computer as a working tool and control their emotions most of the time when typing comments on the Internet, they can contribute. I am trying to boost the awareness of FOSS QA in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's such a shame that OpenOffice and LibreOffice won't merge together again after it's not under Oracles control anymore.

So many wasted manhours...

<comment><USER13> On the bright side, competition may be helpful for open source projects. Example: postfix and exim. Other example - squid: no competitors, slow development and ugly bugs.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't say OO competes with LO, it's way behind.

<comment><USER15> More than merely way behind, AOO is nearly stopped. The few commits it has seem to be almost all trying to fix build issues.

<comment><USER16> Which then begs the question, why does Apache even bother? Can't they just re- gift the trademarks, etc over to TDF? Or at the very least be upfront and honest that OpenOffice is now abandon-ware?

<comment><USER17> OpenOffice is a better and more accessible name, although it does have some trademark issues, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Honest question: is LibreOffice still relevant? In the days of Google Drive and MS Office being available on pretty much any OS and device, do we still need an old school desktop office suite?

<comment><USER19> Depends on how passionate people are about keeping their information out of the hands of Google & Microsoft. I would say that, for anyone using linux as their daily driver, LibreOffice is still very relevant.

<comment><USER20> I'm on a personal mission to get my stuff off Google which is why I use LibreOffice on my home computer, but for work, there are some documents I could get in trouble for uploading to the cloud. I've used nothing but LibreOffice for over a year and haven't had to fall back on Office even once. To be fair, I don't usually author spreadsheets or docs for other people to see, so I can only attest to how well it opens files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A little off topic but I've been in the market for a libre standalone desktop calendar with an API similar to what Google Calendar has. I've been surprised to see that no other Office-like suite of products (including MS Office) has added calendars to their stack. Is there just no demand for such a thing?

<comment><USER21> Office has a calendar in Outlook.

<comment><USER20> I know, and it's not like it's just a simple date picker, so I'm sort of surprised they don't break it out into a standalone app to compete with Google Calendar. I wouldn't use MS's calendar either but if they made one I think LO would follow suit and then I'd get my libre calendar :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> irq-1 TSCP is interesting. Document management through federated identity, that's being used by NATO and the DOD.

[https://www.tscp.org/about-tscp/](https://www.tscp.org/about-tscp/)

<comment><USER22> What I find interesting, is that I can't find any references to Microsoft Office having that functionality...

<comment><USER23> Because TDF highly targets one market, MSO isn't that interested about at anymore: government agencies.

In the time a lot of European governments become more open (open data, mandating the use of true open standards etc.), TDF has correctly recognised this as their competitive edge. Also, because they very often are willing to (at least partially) finance that work.

For the benefit of all LO users!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those on MacOS, what do you think about it vs Office?

</comment><comment><USER25> Libre Calc has better features for reading/writing csv files than Excel. With large files it however seems to be much slower than Excel.

<comment><USER23> Please file a bug report if you encounter this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would feel more comfortable about LibreOffice if it wasn't a "suite".

<comment><USER23> You can select the modules you want when installing. Just deselect then in the NSIS installer or don't run the package files (in Linux). It's that easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there a web version?

<comment><USER28> In the works: [https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...](https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_Online)

<comment><USER29> They are using GTK+ Broadway, which renders GTK applications inside the browser: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8eo4RlPw4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr8eo4RlPw4)

Not sure this is the most performant way to do it, but the project itself sure is impressive.

<comment><USER10> LibreOffice Online does not use Broadway. The server side uses LibreOfficeKit and the client side tile rendering is based on [http://leafletjs.com/](http://leafletjs.com/) (heavily modified).

<comment><USER29> Mh, got it from the parents wiki link and thought it was interesting that they chose something like this.

<comment><USER10> You are right, that wiki page is confusing. I'll ping devs about it later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You know how good a open source project is by the price it drives its competitors towards. Word is not free yet.

<comment><USER30> I still dont get how a solid fact of reality stated is down voted. This should be a point of discussion.

Open Source mainly works by maintenance and "gardening" \- aka cutting away unwanted growth. Instead of finding a UI-Approach that is compatible with this development form, just ignore it and go on with business as usual?</comment></comment>


Memory efficiency of parallel IO operations in Python - <AUTHOR> https://code.kiwi.com/memory-efficiency-of-parallel-io-operations-in-python-6e7d6c51905d <comment><USER2> Honest question.

Can somebody explain to me why async IO is so important and why it is better than using the operating system scheduler?

If process A is blocked because of IO, then then thing that needs to be done will need to wait for the IO anyways.

Of course, in a server context, process A cannot handle new server requests while it is blocked. But luckily we can run more than one process, so process B will be free to pick it up. I will need to run a few more worker processes than there are CPU cores, but is there a problem with that?

EDIT:

I'm thinking now the problem is maybe that running more workers than there are cores will mean that the server accepts more concurrent connections than it can handle? If I use async code and run exacly as many workers as I have cores, the workers will never blocked. But then, I have the scenario where multiple async callbacks resolve in short sequence, but cannot be picked up by a worker because all workers are busy.

So, in both scenarios (no async but more workers than cores VS async with as many workers as cores) it can happen that the server puts too much on its plate and accepts more than it can handle.

I have a feeling that this is a fundamental problem that manifests itself differently in both paradigms, but exists notheless?

<comment><USER3> I have an unpopular opinion. Non blocking IO is useful when we want to scale to lots and lots of parallel IO channels. If we don't have lots, only dozens, there is no strong need for non blocking IO. You don't actually need anything like coroutones or event driven frameworks to use non blocking IO, just loop through the sockets and tend to the ones that are ready, though event driven frameworks can make it much nicer (though still significantly more awkward than writing code in a synchronous paradigm).

Within the world of "we want non blocking IO", the world has gone crazy. JavaScript has created a whole generation of programmers who think inside out callback / yielded code is how everything should be done, and that threads are "too hard". They hardly understand the original purpose of non blocking IO and conflate the fact that they can conceptualize event driven code better than they can threads with "well that's why it's so much faster" (which usually it isn't). I can't retire fast enough from this industry.

<comment><USER4> I think many people agree that speed is not a reason to choose non-blocking IO over threads.

However, many people do believe that async/await and event loops make reasoning about non-blocking IO much easier. Has your opinion changed since [http://techspot.zzzeek.org/2015/02/15/asynchronous-python- an...](http://techspot.zzzeek.org/2015/02/15/asynchronous-python-and- databases/)?

<comment><USER3> > However, many people do believe that async/await and event loops make > reasoning about non-blocking IO much easier.

they do, until their program is mysteriously having MySQL server drop their connections randomly because something CPU-bound snuck in and the server dumps non-authenticated connections after ten seconds. Three days of acquiring and poring over HAProxy debug logs from the production system finally reveals the issue that never really should have happened in the first place because the server is only handling about 30 requests per second, and of course the fix is to switch that part of the program to threads.

asyncio certainly makes it easier to reason about non-blocking IO but it also means you have to construct your own preemptive multitasking system by hand, given only points of IO where context can actually switch. We're coding in high level scripting languages. Low level details like memory allocation, garbage collection, and multitasking should be taken care of for us.

<comment><USER4> Threads are a leaky abstraction, so it makes sense to explore other solutions. To cite another low level detail from you list: I don't think Rust is less usable because there is no garbage collection.

But keep in mind asyncio has many issues of its own, which is why I'm happy that alternatives like [http://trio.readthedocs.io/](http://trio.readthedocs.io/) are possible in Python.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is also a drop-in replacement for asyncio called uvloop [0]. It claims to be faster than asyncio, gevent, node.js, etc. and comparable to golang.

[0] [https://magic.io/blog/uvloop-blazing-fast-python- networking/](https://magic.io/blog/uvloop-blazing-fast-python-networking/)

<comment><USER6> More precisely, uvloop is an "asyncio.AbstractEventLoop" implementation using libuv.

It can be used instead of the default asyncio.SelectorEventLoop[0] on Lunix(? not Windows at least: [https://github.com/MagicStack/uvloop/issues/14](https://github.com/MagicStack/uvloop/issues/14)).

You will still, for better or worse, use the asyncio standard library when writing code running on uvloop.

[0]: [https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio- eventloops.html#av...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio- eventloops.html#available-event-loops)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In my case, there was a ~40% speed increase compared to sequential > processing. Once a code runs in parallel, the difference in speed > performance between the parallel methods is very low.

But they didn't actually present the total processing time for all of the methods - I assume all of the parallel methods were about 17 seconds? (Compared to the sequential baseline of 29 seconds.) And how were the threaded frameworks configured? How many threads were they told to use (or just the default?), how many threads can they use, and what kind of parallel hardware did they run on?

This blog post presents the decision as one-dimensional; it claims all parallelization methods are the same, so the only dimension to choose on is memory efficiency. But I'm skeptical that all parallelization methods _are_ the same, and the experimental design gives me no information on that front.

<comment><USER8> I had a squint at the ThreadPoolExecutor code on github and it uses the default parameters. Exactly how many threads you get depends on which version of python you are running:

> Changed in version 3.5: If max_workers is None or not given, it will default > to the number of processors on the machine, multiplied by 5, assuming that > ThreadPoolExecutor is often used to overlap I/O instead of CPU work and the > number of workers should be higher than the number of workers for > ProcessPoolExecutor.

Not knowing how many things are happening in parallel means it is difficult to draw conclusions from it.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for pointing this out. I updated the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Title should refer to concurrent IO, not parallel IO.

<comment><USER11> On the interpreter side, most of the I/O read time is waiting for an OS buffer to fill with the right amount of data. Waiting happens to occur "in parallel" when using async I/O.

I suppose that sending is similar: you pass the OS a buffer, and wait for completion. Sending of the data occurs while you wait.

So, if you can parallelize waits, the OS could be doing strictly parallel I/O for you (e.g. via two network interfaces, or network and disk), even though your code is concurrent but not parallel, and you don't run two sync OS I/O calls in parallel.

<comment><USER3> > Waiting happens to occur "in parallel" when using async I/O. > and you don't > run two sync OS I/O calls in parallel.

you can run sync IO calls and wait for each in separate threads. the GIL is released for IO. the waiting is "in parallel" just as much with a threaded / blocking approach as with a non-blocking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Something seems off here - they mention using 100 workers (a worker for every request). I would expect that to perform way more than 40% faster unless there's a ton of overhead in creating those workers.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you have a lot of RAM I highly recommend you look at Plasma + PyArrow

</comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like a good job for Go :)

</comment><comment><USER15> tl;dr

If you want to parallelize[1] network I/O, use async. Otherwise, don't.

[1] Technically: not parallelize, but overlap.

<comment><USER16> Concurrent is the technical term:)

<comment><USER15> Overlapping is a technical term, too, just not from the Unix world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use gevent + gunicorn, it improved by API's latency and throughput by 10x.</comment>


(SearchMe?) Coverflow results, Django backend, Yahoo API, 45 minutes. - <AUTHOR> http://www.80concepts.com/sillyme/?q=diamondback

<comment><USER2> That is pretty awesome for 45 minutes. Although any search other than the first one didn't return pictures.

<comment><AUTHOR> apparently got rate limited by websnappr with the traffic. cached requests seem to work.. 'paris hilton' seemed to be a popular request. heh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool. Could launch that into a full blown social networking site and many people would be happy with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> i actually think the whole concept is dumb. just spent 45 minutes doing it to prove a point. too bad websnappr is throttling requests for the preview images.

<comment><USER4> In case anyone wants a simple way to take screenshots of webpages (on Ubuntu):

        aptitude install xvfb xwd firefox netpbm

        Xvfb :4 -screen 0 1024x1024x24 &
        sleep 1
        firefox --display=:4.0 -width 1024 -height 1024 &
        sleep 10
        firefox -remote "openURL(http://news.ycombinator.com/)"
        sleep 5
        xwd -root -silent -display :4.0 | xwdtopnm | pnmcut 1 125 800 600 | pnmtojpeg > screenshot.jpg

Of course these commands can be automated in your language of choice. The only problems: firefox opens a new tab by default, so you can't close old ones; and there's no way to find out when a page is done loading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow! Thats pretty cool. The website, and the fact that you pulled it off in 45 minutes. Great job earle.

</comment><comment><USER6> This would be especially cool in an application like Google's image search. And @Readmore above... this definitely has a lot of potential as a mobile device app, and everyone knows the mobile internet is growing fast!

</comment><comment><USER7> Gorgeous, I love it.

<comment><USER8> Yes. Cool use of Javascript. I thought it was Flash until I looked at the source

<comment><USER4> JavaScript is way more capable than people give it credit...

<http://tlrobinson.net/misc/3d.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Site down? (404)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> anyone got a URL categorization database? websense perhaps?</comment>


Apple Patent Reveals Pseudo-Holographic Display - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/12/27/apple-patent-reveals-%E2%80%98pseudo-holographic%E2%80%99-display/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like the eye tracking we saw using the Wii-mote awhile back, just using front-side cameras. Heck, you could do that now with a simple app and some eye tracking.

<comment><USER3> I had a snarky reply about how anything could be patented, but this invention is actually different than the (extremely cool) Wiimote thing we saw earlier.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Have you used a pass-through agency? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently working through an agency that found me and charges their customer god know how much for my services.  Yes, they have the inside track on the available positions at this company and have its trust.  But is it really worth as much as they charge, which I assume is more than it should be or it wouldn't be a secret.
One is probably better off marketing to companies directly.  What's the best way to do this?
Do you have any insights on doing contract work w/ pass-through agency that handles all the taxes, insurance, etc? <comment><USER2> For this reason [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misclassification_of_employees_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misclassification_of_employees_as_independent_contractors) due to this law [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21shulman.html?_r=...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21shulman.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y) (but it's not entirely honest, e.g. it doesn't tell you that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the Congresscritter who slipped it into the bill in the dead of night at the behest of several pass-through agencies) it's going to be nearly impossible to achieve what you want.

At best you might start up an independent consulting firm, but you'd have to have multiple clients and spend a _lot_ of time on sales and marketing (of yourself). Gerald Weinberg recommends you make your hourly rate 5-6 times what you want to earn just to allow for all the overhead ([http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting- Succ...](http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting- Successfully/dp/0932633013/) or get it new from the publisher: <http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/soc.html>).</comment>


Steve Jobs to Obama: "You're headed for a one-term presidency" - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/20/jobs-to-obama-youre-headed-for-a-one-term-presidency-because-the-us-cant-build-factories-and-us <comment><USER2> An 11 month school year would be a nightmare and screw up summer activities. Plus, the misalignment of HS and College schedules will hurt advanced students. School going to 6pm in the northland is a non-starter and dangerous.

(getting a little sick of the down votes without comment)

<comment><USER3> Fair enough on the 6pm thing. However, there seems to be evidence [1] that the typical 2 month summer break is hurting student performance - especially for poorer students whose parents can't afford to put them into enrichment activities in the summer. How, exactly, would 11 month school years be a nightmare? Misalignment already exists - Colleges get 4 months off, don't they?

I also recall seeing a talk about this exact topic, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

[1] [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/education/lear...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/education/learning/students- in-year-round-schools-do-better-study-shows/article1663859/)

<comment><USER4> Here in Australia kids get 6 weeks off in summer, plus 2 weeks in autumn, winter, and spring. This seems much more sensible than getting everything off over the summer.

<comment><USER5> Here in France kids get 2 months off in summer, plus 1 week in autumn, 2 weeks for Christmas, 2 weeks late winter, 2 weeks in spring. The best of both worlds from the kids point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the subject of _"You're headed for a one-term presidency because the US can't build factories"_ :

[http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds- car...](http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds-cars- finland/story?id=14770875)

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government stimulus loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

"There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."

<comment><USER2> It would seem that for $529 million they could build one. Isn't Tesla building cars here?

<comment><USER7> Money is one issue, time is another.

In most US jurisdictions, dozens of entities have the ability to say "no" to a development project. In states that are actively hostile to business, like New York or California, there may be hundreds of people or groups that can slow down projects.

Examples: Local Zoning Board; Whomever controls permits for running utilities; State/local environmental boards (Lots and lots of $$$ permits); Land speculators ("building a factory in this industrial park will ruin the views from XXX piece of land that we own"); Historical preservation maniacs. ("That collapsing house was was rented by Richard Nixon's maid"); Local politicians ("Oh, you need to build a 200,000 square foot building? Our master plan was modified last week -- buildings are capped at 150,000 square feet.); Local politicians in neighboring municipalities. ("Your project will generate too much traffic"); Local real property tax boards.; State politicians; Local construction unions. (Who will sabotage your project if you don't play along.); State Labor Departments, acting as agents for the construction unions.; Environmental pressure groups. ("Your stormwater mitigation strategy is insufficient, you're getting sued"); Federal regulators.

In New York, things are so bad that any significant project is essentially done under the aegis of the state government, usually via a public authority. The government provides funding, and can cut through some of the red tape, since the State is not subject to local zoning law. But there are usually strings attached, and the process takes years.

In China or Brazil, you basically partner with a connected local, and build your factory in a few months.

<comment><USER8> >n states that are actively hostile to business, like New York or California

If you think things are easier in Finland, then you're wrong. Turns out this is a specific case looking for a specific type of factory that could make a specific car on a specific contract. Your right-wing screed is not as convincing as you think it is. I'm not even going to point out how huge NY and Cali economies are.

>n China or Brazil, you basically partner with a connected local, and build your factory in a few months.

Replace "regulatory bullshit" with just as much bullshit except involving bribes, shakedowns, and forced contributions to political parties and dealing with a level of corruption and labor conditions that are staggeringly awful and depressing. My gf does work with BRIC economies all the time and the lesson I want to somehow teach you is that civilization and labor/environmental protections are worth it. They are waaaay worth it. I'm afraid people like you purposely refuse to learn this basic lesson and are otherwise spoiled by the Western privilege you refuse to share.

<comment><USER7> You've declared me a right-wing nut and then stuff words in my mouth. Thanks.

I'm not an expert in California, but I happen to live in Upstate NY and pay careful attention to what is (or isn't) going on. The size of the New York economy is an illusion in many ways; New York lives and dies on the back of a single industry -- Finance. That wasn't true 30-40 years ago. The valleys and lakefront between Buffalo and Albany were industrial powerhouses well into the 70s. In the early 20th century, Buffalo was one of the nations great cities, today, it's more like Detroit.

I'd also suggest that you read about the major economic development project going on in New York right now, the construction of a multi-billion dollar chip fab for Global Foundries just outside of Saratoga Springs, NY. Total cost of that project is something like $7 billion, with just under $3 billion being provided by the State of New York under various guises. That's what it takes to do manufacturing in the US today -- even with high-end manufacturing which requires extremely skilled labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >keep schools open until 6

Sounds great, how do you fund it?

>keep school in session 11 months out of the year

Ditto.

>let principals hire/fire based on merit

Seems legit, do we really have to BREAK the unions to do that? The teacher unions have many legitimate reasons for their existence regardless of some of their negative attributes.

>relax regulations on building factories

Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here? It's not the cost of labor and providing benefits to workers? I can see how the additional costs of creating factories here might make it slightly harder to manufacture things in the U.S., but I find it highly dubious that Apple would suddenly start manufacturing its machines here even if all zoning/health/environmental laws were scrapped.

>turning Jobs down on making campaign ads

Crazy. Seriously. David Axelrod is a schmuck.

<comment><USER10> "Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here?"

While I also have various ideological preconceptions about the source of the economic problems in the US and elsewhere, I would observe that when someone like the CEO of Apple is expressing an opinion about what makes a factory easier to open in China than in the US, someone who has actually been the guy- who-can-say-yes to actual factories for which that decision was actually made, it's probably worth listening to that opinion. Even if you can somehow prove he's objectively wrong on the merits, his perception would still be a useful data point.

On the other hand I wouldn't expect any particular insight into our school problems from him, beyond what any reasonably skilled businessman could present.

<comment><USER11> Jobs was a businessman, not an economist.

There is a good reason regulation makes it more expensive to open factories in the US: our regulations force companies to internalize the negative externalities their businesses create. China effectively subsidizes industry by forcing its citizens to bear the costs of pollution, injuries, etc, inherent in such activities. US regulation forces companies to bear some of these costs (hardly all of them).

In its retrospective study on the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA estimated that the benefit of pollution control over the 20 year period was on the order of $22 trillion. Relative to the "so-called 'no-control' case, an additional 205,000 Americans would have died prematurely and millions more would have suffered illnesses ranging from mild respiratory symptoms to heart disease, chronic bronchitis, asthma attacks, and other severe respiratory problems... the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have resulted in major increases in child IQ loss and adult hypertension, heart disease, and stroke." Meanwhile, "the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits."

What's good for business isn't necessarily good for the economy. The things that businessmen push for: deregulation, limitations on tort liability, etc, create more in costs to society then they create in benefits to businesses. Indeed, our measurements of things like GDP are so fundamentally flawed that they encourage politicians to adopt such measures. If a factory's poisonous emissions causes you to have lung problems, that doesn't count against GDP, but when you seek medical attention for those problems GDP goes up!

<comment><USER12> > In its retrospective study on the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA estimated that > the benefit of pollution control over the 20 year period was on the order of > $22 trillion.

$22T/20 years is over $1T/year. US GDP in 1990 was under $6T. US GDP in 1970 was just over $1T.

> the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have > resulted in major increases in child IQ loss

Oh really? Why would leaded gas in 1980 cause more problems than leaded gas in 1950?

> Meanwhile, "the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed > over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated > monetary benefits."

Just as the benefits are not limited to the money not spent on medical care, the money spent on pollution controls are not the only costs.

<comment><USER13> GDP does not account for the externalities that the study took into account.

<comment><USER12> > GDP does not account for the externalities that the study took into account.

Externality estimates and valuations are notorious for reflecting the biases of the estimators.

Estimates that are a large fraction of GDP are very suspicious.

Do you seriously believe that the clean air act "saved" 1/6th of the US economy?

<comment><USER13> I hear what you are saying, but I think you're mixing units. Since the study is accounting for things that are not accounted for in GDP, It doesn't seem to make much sense to compare the dollar figure reached in terms of GDP. If GDP devalues human health as part of its basic assumptions, an analysis that does not devalue human health will come to different numbers. It's almost a tautology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Conservative" or just gets shit done? Maybe the real reason why we don't get shit done in this country is because we're so preoccupied with these worn-out ideologies. What if Jobs was right? What if it's too damn hard to build factories in America?

<comment><USER15> Worn-out ideologies? Pretty much everything that Jobs is credited with saying in the article is a worn-out ideology.

Bust unions! Remove regulations and cut workers' rates! Government needs to be more business-friendly! And what's more, I don't like the menu!

Hardly fresh thinking, let alone innovative and non-ideological.

<comment><USER16> When many regulations and unions that won't fire bad teachers are the norm, it's fresh thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps most relevant to the current United States political climate:

 _Steve Jobs was infuriated by "[Obama's] focus on the reasons that things can't get done."_

</comment><comment><USER18> I really hate all these politics links polluting the frontpage lately. If I could flag again, I'd do so quietly and not comment, but this is a little ridiculous.

Perhaps I need another long break from HN.

<comment><USER19> This isn't a political post. It's a "Steve Jobs yada yada" post. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Shouldn't have asked for Steve's opinion if you didn't _really_ want it.

<comment><USER21> It doesn't say anything about how Obama reacted, besides continuing the conversation with him. Who is to say he didn't appreciate the candor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's interesting to see that Jobs treated Obama like a peer.

<comment><USER23> Yes. For Jobs to treat Obama otherwise seems somehow anti-republican: the fact that Obama is Jobs' peer---and indeed yours and mine---is, I think, a notion deeply rooted in American political culture. Considering the possibility of Jobs showing deference certainly raises my hackles. At the same time, it's natural to be overawed by a man like Obama, with so much political authority (and however much remains of the tremendous moral authority he had when elected).

<comment><USER15> Jobs was one of the captains of US industry - who else should the head of government turn to for specialist advice on business? If your head of government _isn't_ talking to the captains of industry, then there's something wrong - it's not just a US thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _Jobs exhibited his notorious attention to detail, telling venture capitalist John Doerr that the menu of shrimp, cod and lentil salad was "far too fancy"._

Attention to detail and a certain bluntness has been attributed as part of Steve Jobs' immense success, but this come across as plain rude. It doesn't matter if Jobs is right or not, it's bad etiquette to criticise another's work in this context.

Of course, I am assuming that his opinion wasn't asked, and I know nothing of the relationship that Jobs and Doerr shared.

</comment><comment><USER25> hey people, do a spinoff <http://stevejobsoldquotesne.ws> and give hn a break.

</comment><comment><USER26> _Jobs proposed … that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year._

"He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity."

</comment><comment><USER27> Regarding China factory regulations vs US factory regulations, does anyone have a good point of view regarding working conditions at Apple's factories in Asia? ie, [http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hexyl-hydride-n-hexane- pois...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hexyl-hydride-n-hexane-poison- factory,12256.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, if staying in school longer (till 6pm, 11 months/year) is such a great idea, why didn't he stay in Reed longer?

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow, what Jobs really loved was getting in charge, a control freak. It became the face in the 1984 wall telling everybody what to do.

If you want to send your children to boarding school so you don't have to educate them, more power to you.

But if you want the state to become your nanny and top-down micromanaging how children gets results I beg to differ, specially when the person that want to control it is a dropout and risk taker but wants anybody else to get into conformity.

</comment><comment><USER30> What goes unstated is that Jobs' put his social beliefs above business. Obama is far from the ideal candidate to support if you'd like unions abandoned. And yet that is who Jobs' seemed to be rooting for.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here's what I'm reading: Jobs, like many salesmen, tries to instill fear in Obama then offers to help with his campaign

It's super sad that will never happen. It's crazy imagining what a Jobs final product towards a political campaign may have looked like.

<comment><USER31> Re: what it would look like? I am guessing just like a typical Apple ad?

* white or blurred background, putting the focus on product or user * clean graphics and visuals * montage of products in use, in real situations * subtlely snarky towards the competition</comment></comment>


DevOps Team Assistant, 1.59.10 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yegor256/rultor <comment><USER2> Since most of the headers on this github are TBD, what is Rultor?

<comment><USER3> It's here: www.rultor.com

<comment><USER2> Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


SvN: Design Decisions: The new Highrise signup chart    - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1496-design-decisions-the-new-highrise-signup-chart

<comment><USER2> Once again, more wild-west driven design from Jason Fried. He may be a great gunslinger, but walking into town unannounced and starting to shoot isn't always the best way to clean up the home front.

What I mean to say is that while Jason is damn good at clean, usable, good looking design, he is also very "gut-feeling" driven. Though some people -do- have killer instincts, you always should "trust, but verify". A little unbiased data collection thrown behind the redesign wouldn't hurt.

<comment><USER3> Yaw, I think that testing a lot of the ideas they threw out would be worthwhile, but that might take more than 4 days a week. ;-)

And, honestly-- they're keepin' it Real. Focus on low-hanging fruit, don't work too much, work on the stuff that you WANT to work on. They could instrument the hell out of it with A/B testing or they could move on to other products/ideas.

They're probably leaving a few bucks on the table by gunslinging, but I bet they enjoy their jobs more than if they went the other direction.

<comment><USER4> Oh no, collecting data is so droll and boring. I'm a decider!

(Sorry, your comment really bugs me. I don't actually adhere to running A/B testing for everything, but come on, everytime I look at analytics data doesn't make my site less "fun".)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI from the comments:

"JF: While the lack of a free plan lead to increased paid signups, we decided we'd bring it back because we'd be missing out on a lot of upgrades from free -> pay. That's a lucrative pay path for us."

</comment><comment><USER6> I've done some reading on split testing, where you show two different designs and analyze the results over a period of time to determine which design performs the best. Has anyone here done anything like this and if so can you elaborate on your findings? If not, I'm going to try it with a new product we're launching in about 2 weeks (hopefully!)

<comment><USER7> Anyone who considers themselves a professional designer or user experience expert has done this. Google Website Optimizer makes it easy for anyone to do, and there are more advanced systems like Omniture's offerings that provide more options and more data on the results.

This is how a lot of "best practices" are determined. I know I've found out changing button colors or icons can increase conversion rates on email newsletters and changing a sign up process can vastly decrease the number of people who bailout at some point. Testing designs is very important.

I am guessing if 37signals conversion rate dropped significantly, they'd redesign the page again - it's kind of like a rudimentary way of split testing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is meant as a comment about personality types, not in any way to disparage the blog post:

Considering:

1\. My unusually high level of apathy over the discussion.

2\. The level of detail others about it care here.

3\. My own lack of skills in web design.

I'm definitely going to have to look into hiring a right-brained designer for any web startup I do in the future :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think all of the designs look nice. If I were interested in that product, I'd buy it from a page that looked like any of those.

It would be nice to have some data on what actual users thought, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> They should have done A/B testing with all these different designs, no?

</comment><comment><USER11> While I like this change, it's more pleasing: it really just looks like a stylesheet change with a very touch and go markup alteration. That's not to say it's a bad thing</comment>


Building Rust - <AUTHOR> http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2011/10/24/building-rust.html <comment><USER2> Note that we're planning to make LLVM a git submodule, and most of the strange LLVM configure flags will go away with the x86-64 port (which is due to land Real Soon Now). So this will become significantly easier.</comment>


How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash - <AUTHOR> http://jya.com/nsamint.htm

<comment><USER2> I've been thinking very hard about this topic lately and actually went ahead with writing some code. Then I found <http://www.opencoin.org> who already did some of the work.

I think there's a lot than can be done in this field - not with micropayments, which everybody seems to think about first when they see this. What I find a lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing Internet currencies not tied to any national one.

How about turning HN karma into a currency? Probably no mass-market appeal... what's lacking is a killer application for digital money and when it comes, it'll probably be in a form that doesn't seem like money to us now.

<comment><USER3> _What I find a lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing Internet currencies not tied to any national one._

Would you also find it interesting to be indicted for money laundering? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold> <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/e-gold/>

<comment><USER2> Well, it would probably be an interesting experience... not that I would care to find out. That's why I said the killer application would probably not look like money to us.

Take Youtube, for instance: people go to considerable lengths to create videos that others find interesting. Then they sit glued to the screen watching the view counter go up. There's a currency: people paying with their time (which everybody only has a fixed amount of) for someone's work creating videos.

Now have some ISP give extra bandwidth to people with Youtube videos over x thousand views. It doesn't cost them much "real" money since bandwidth is more or less a fixed cost but you have turned "virtual" money into a currency.

Granted, the example is a bit contrived but you can see where I'm going with this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Despite being an old article, I've seen few references to it in the wild, and thought it was very relevant after seeing <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777283>

<comment><USER4> There was a dutch company called DigiCash that was quite far with developing such a concept.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash>

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also ECache: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECache>

Very, very interesting stuff.

<comment><USER4> The first party to create a universal micropayment system for the web that is really usable is going to make it very big imo.

It would be a viable alternative to the ad supported model.

Most websites operate on very small fractions of a cent per pageview, you would have to have an extremely low overhead to make it work.

Say you pay a monthly subscription to the payment service provider, they then do all the bookkeeping based on a .js tag that is embedded on the page that you visit.

If you don't have an account the .js redirects you to the signup page for the payments service provider, you register, pay your initial fee and continue to browse.

You might even end up saving online newspapers in the process.

<comment><USER5> . . . which falls apart for people who don't allow JavaScript to execute in the browser. This would definitely impact some Websites more than others.

<comment><USER6> The number of pepople who don't allow JS in the browser is vanishingly small and are probably (mostly) the paranoid type who wouldn't use an internet payment service anyway. IMO.

<comment><USER5> Ah, yes, the old "I like to turn away certain classes of customers because I don't think well of them!" approach to market share. That works well.

<comment><USER4> I don't have one opinion or another about the customers, all I know is that you can build a viable business without catering to everybody. 92+% of the visitors to the sites that I look after have java support, 97%+ have javascript.

I don't think the remaining 3% are going to be the ones to make or break such an application.

Try using facebook, youtube or any other number of sites with flash, java and javascript shut off.

<comment><USER5> > Try using facebook, youtube or any other number of sites with flash, java . > . . shut off.

Actually, I _do_ visit those sites without Flash automatically playing in my browser. In fact, I use a script to download YouTube videos and play them locally with a media player. I'm not sure what Java has to do with being able to use Facebook or YouTube at all.

JavaScript is pretty ubiquitous, but stuff like Google Maps still degrades usably for those who aren't using JavaScript (for instance), as do the sites and Web applications I design.

I think that explicitly throwing away 3% of your potential users is pretty short-sighted, especially when it's for something as lame as "Well, they don't use JavaScript, and I could do this stuff with other technologies too." I wonder why people don't think of, for instance, the blind using screen readers when they utter platitudes about how the 3% don't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neal Stephenson has some things to say about this in Cryptonomicon. Great book.

</comment><comment><USER8> Your e-cash for the Internet must be transferrable in and out of your pocket as well. The same money you use on eBay should be usable at the convenience store. Mondex, etc. were the right idea (though tied to local currencies) but ahead of their time for the technology. Maybe time to start thinking along those lines again?

</comment><comment><USER9> The question is, is there anything else that is universally useful that we can use as a basis for the currency?

How about something like Amazon Turk? Except you don't get paid in cash, you get paid in points. All points had to have been generated by somebody doing a small, useful service for somebody else.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been thinking about software to create economic instruments from information (e.g., source code) that you could exchange for micropayments. Can you recommend open source packages that might be useful for issuance and trading?</comment>


Scientists Find Brain Hormone That Triggers Fat Burning - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2017/20170127srinivasan.html <comment><USER2> Worth adding that finding is in worm brains.

<comment><USER3> I no longer get excited over such findings. Over the past 6 or 7 years I can't think of a single "discovery" that has changed anything medicine-wise.

<comment><USER4> I would be really shocked to see a hormone treatment to go from initial research discovery to full human trials in just 7 years, especially for something that's not an crucial medical issue like fat burning.

<comment><USER5> It's not crucial, no, but I can't think of a single other medical issue that people would be willing to pay boatloads of money to solve. Nobody wants to lose weight the old fashioned way. You can cut a gut in thirty days, no kidding. But most people don't have thirty days of willpower. They have plenty of money they would spend on a lazy alternative, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Altogether, the newly discovered fat-burning pathway works like this: a > neural circuit in the brain produces serotonin in response to sensory cues, > such as food availability. This signals another set of neurons to begin > producing FLP-7. FLP-7 then activates a receptor in intestinal cells, and > the intestines begin turning fat into energy.

Correct me if I'm wrong but, what if I look at some juicy foods for hours - without eating any - would I burn fat this way?

<comment><USER7> Based on their description, it seems so, but what if your body builds an immunity to the effect over time? You could end up gaining weight long term or experiencing some sort of strange, painful side effects if your body eventually ceased producing or reacting to the hormone when it should. I wouldn't risk it until they study it more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome finding. I was thinking about similar thing, how, if we didn't store energy as fat, but instead burn it... what kind of changes that would entail for us.

I imagined that while too much food would make you sick, in a lot of instances it would give you a lot of energy and it would be awesome if we could use more of the energy we collect.

It was just thought experiment, however I did read something later, that makes this whole idea not as great. Essentially it isn't as simple as burning all the energy. However increased rate would definitely be welcome.

<comment><USER9> > what kind of changes that would entail for us

Sadly I would suspect a "flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long" trade-off so premature aging and early death!

<comment><USER10> Uncoupling proteins (of which there are now 5 known types, up from one when I was a medical student 4 years ago) increase basal metabolic rate. The effect of increasing metabolic rate includes a raft of other metabolic changes (some of which may be because fat is an endocrine tissue by itself and so reducing visceral fat - which has a 'bad' endocrine profile - leads to a systemic improvement in 'healthy' endocrine signalling) that globally improve health.

Essentially exercise without exercising, so generally these are good discoveries - but we as yet haven't harnessed it in a useful (ie drug) form

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the ways to get serotonin is by exercising -- so apart from calories burn (which is typically not that much in a normal work out), the benefits of serotonin can also help us. Great.

</comment><comment><USER12> * Original article: [http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14237](http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14237)

* This is research on nematodes ([https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nematode](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nematode)), an organism that has all its 302 neurons mapped.

* The orthologues of the neuroendocrine peptide FLP-7 and its cognate NPR-22 are the tachykinin / neurokinin family.

* Tachykinin peptides are one of the largest families of neuropeptides [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tachykinin_peptides](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Tachykinin_peptides).

* In "Neuropeptides: regulators of physiological processes (Strand), H15" some more background info can be found.

* Kinins form of a group of peptides that cause vasodilation, increase vascular permeability, cause hypotension, and introduce contraction of smooth muscle.

* The tachykinins (tachys, swift) evoke a sharp contraction of the smooth muscle of the gut.

* There are at least three types: Substance P, Neurokinin A, and Neurokinin B. The last two have been only discovered in the early 1980s.

* The genes are also called Tac(hykinin).

* Human tachykinin genes are called TAC1 and TAC3 and are equivalent to Tac1 and Tac2 of the mouse.

* Connection between Tac1 in mouse and adiposity is known [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4398763/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4398763/)

* Or Tachykinins and lipid metabolism in drosophila: [http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247(14)0073...](http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247\(14\)00736-0)

* Here is where you can buy tachykinins: [https://www.scbt.com/scbt/browse/chemicals-Nucleotides-Pepti...](https://www.scbt.com/scbt/browse/chemicals-Nucleotides-Peptides-Proteins-Amino-Acids-tachykinins/_/N-13mzg8z)

* Note. As layman (I've only studied regulatory networks for the purpose of evo-devo algorithms) it is likely that diversification of neuropeptide function across the peripheral system (different functionality in heart vessels vs intestines e.g.) means that it is also likely that the evolutionary function has not been preserved.

* Note. Why do tachykinins have the right structure to play a role in this pathway?

* The study is still interesting because tachykinins are an "evolutionary preserved" family of peptide neurotransmitters.

</comment><comment><USER13> when do we expect the commoditization of six-packs</comment>


Is there such thing as the beginning and end of time? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/07/there-such-thing-beginning-and-end-time

<comment><USER2> > In autumn, we travel forward in time by one hour, and in the spring, we > travel back in time by one hour.

It is time that we abolish the biannual time travel tradition.</comment>


Awesome UX designer needed - <AUTHOR>

I need an awesome UX designer to redesign the look and feel of mcserverlist.net. I have a decent budget, and am focusing on a CSS/HTML over images approach.
I don't want some college kid who does it for "the love of design", I want someone who's tried and true, knows what they're doing, and can provide examples.
My budget sits around $1,500 for the entire design, and time isn't too much of an issue.
Is anyone out there able to step up to the challenge?
If you feel up to the challenge email us at firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> <http://dribbble.com>

Look around and contact those with "Hire Me" button in their profiles.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, your budget limits you to "college-kid" level. But then again major city cost of living does not apply everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> What budget would attract the more professional people?</comment></comment>


Google's biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/01/googles-big-news-today-was-not-a-phone-but-a-url.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> Hasn't Europe and many parts of Asia been like this for years? World's first = US' first?

<comment><USER3> It's not really new in the US either. You can buy most phones unsubsidized. iPhone 3GS is $599 from AT&T with no service commitment for example. Same problem with incompatible 3G frequencies though. The big problem is US carriers charge you basically the same amount if you take the subsidy or not. The only flexibility you gain is no service contract but due to competing wireless standards and frequencies you're still very limited in carrier choice. Google is using the same business model as everyone else.

<comment><USER4> You can get a 3GS without a service contract from AT&T but won't the phone still be locked?

<comment><USER3> Yeah probably but more importantly you're functionally locked into AT&T if you want 3G and anyone spending $600 on a phone presumably wants 3G service. So you're stuck with AT&T or stuck with T-Mobile if you get an "unlocked" Nexsus One.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 This becomes pretty obvious when you read their blog announcing the URL/store/Nexus One carefully.

Notice that they mention the online store prior to the Nexus One:

 _Well, today we're pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google's online users with selected Android devices. We also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up.

The first phone we'll be selling through this new web store is the Nexus One ... It's the first in what we expect to be a series of products which we will bring to market with our operator and hardware partners and sell through our online store._

(quoting this here because I didn't see it directly quoted in the Ars article)

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/our-new-approach- to-b...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/our-new-approach-to-buying- mobile-phone.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> This also might reveal why Verizon's continued support of the CDMA island effectively exempts it from having to compete with carrier-unlocked phones.

It's frustrating as a consumer that Verizon is incompatible with the massive hordes of unlocked GSM phones, but it might be a business advantage in the short-term for Verizon. In the long term, people who want phones like Nexus One will just switch carriers.

<comment><USER6> Sprint also uses CDMA.

From the very beginning, everything I read convinced me that it's a superior transmission mode, both for me, the end user, and for the carrier.

As much as heavy-handed regulation makes me cringe, perhaps if we legislated modular rf sections, this would become a non-issue. Phones are small enough for that, now.

<comment><USER7> Traditionally carriers like Sprint and Verizon, that use CDMA have been the more draconian as far as rules go on their network (e.g. locking down phones, only allowing ringtones through their service, disabling bluetooth OBEX on phones, etc). That's why people tend to see GSM carriers in a better light (also because GSM phones are compatible with carriers around the world).

<comment><USER8> YEah I tried to take an old Sprint phone in to Verizon to get it activated when my wife lost her phone. They said technically it would work, but they were not "allowed" to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How long before google launches their own mobile carrier?

There are plenty of smaller parties in Europe they could gobble up to get a foothold, gain experience with the tech and the roll out on a much larger scale.

<comment><USER10> Remember the FCC auction of spectrum? Google was outbid. But if they had not been, they probably would have launched a carrier.

<comment><USER11> Google didn't really want to buy spectrum. Schmidt even publicly stated they had no intention to buy the spectrum. They were just after open access to the "C-block" of the spectrum which they got as a stipulation to them making a slightly higher than minimum bid. They got what they wanted, and it wasn't to own the spectrum.

With that said, I don't think google has any real interest in being a carrier, as that isn't where they make their money. They can leverage the mobile network much like the internet and continue to make their truck load of money via targeted ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really hope this article is spot on and we'll soon see carriers adopt this trend in the US as they do overseas. I've long lusted after various Sony phones (if only for their aesthetics), but I've never actually bothered to look into how good they are. You can't get them on Verizon and it's the only carrier I'll deal with at the moment. I would love to be able to choose nearly any phone I wanted to use on Verizon's network.

Surely there are larger cell phone manufacturers that could've forced this issue a long time ago, but none of them have stepped up to do so, or so it would seem. So I'm all for Google giving it a shot and I'll keep my fingers crossed that others follow suit.

</comment><comment><USER13> > In short, what Google announced today wasn't just the Nexus One, but the > world's first carrier-independent smartphone store; the Google store is now > the only smartphone store in the US where, for every phone on offer, you > first pick which phone you want, and then you pick a network and a plan on > that network.

Except for all the other stores that do the very same thing. What a strange article.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder why Verizon is coming soon but Sprint is never mentioned. Is Sprint going to lock the Nexus One out of its network even when a CDMA version is available?

</comment><comment><USER15> This article is hype. There's nothing overly special about selling an unlocked handset anywhere on planet earth.

<comment><USER16> The US is typically quite a few years behind when it comes to things like this, so maybe it's news to some Americans.

<comment><USER17> In the case of the Nexus, the two prices are $529.00 and $179.00, and on the basis of that number alone, I know which I'd rather pay.

That article is all hype because the people this is news to, and the target market for a $500 cellphone don't have that big an intersection. I think everyone with a cellphone by now has been exposed to a carrier's store and seen prices for an off-contract phone. Hell, I'm guessing a lot of people have broken phones and been forced to pay off-contract prices - forcing the savvy to at least price out similar phones via alternate channels _cough_ ebay. Pre- iPhone, they'd have a bigger point, but I'd think by now, the consumer smart- phone market (vs big-business' blackberries) is aware of certain things.

Am I being too hopeful?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Is_ the iPhone a big hit? I thought it was a relatively small proportion of the total phone market.

<comment><USER19> Yes it's a big hit, and yes it holds a relatively small proportion of the total phone market

This is because the iPhone holds a significant portion of the smartphone market, but the smartphone market makes up only a small percentage of the total market

<comment><USER20> The recent Morgan Stanley reports on "Mobile Internet Trends" (15. Dec. 09) portray the rapid growth in pretty much detail:

\- [http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/mobi...](http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/mobile_internet_report122009.html) [List of Reports]

\- [http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs...](http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/2SETUP_12142009_RI.pdf) [PDF, 92 Slides]</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Marketing Todo Checklist - <AUTHOR> http://www.mouseandman.com/startup-marketing-checklist/ <comment><USER2> Great list - especially the news sources toward the bottom!</comment>


'Processing' - programming language for animation, images and interactions - <AUTHOR> http://processing.org/

<comment><USER2> Processing is pretty cool.

If you're on a Mac, there's also NodeBox ( <http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home> ) which lets you use Python.

<comment><USER3> Processing is also the development environment for the Arduino ( <http://www.arduino.cc/> ), a very cool open source hardware platform for small-scale electronics projects/prototypes.

I use both of these pretty heavily at work and at home and they've proved to be immensely useful for whenever I want to test out ideas that pop up in my head from time to time.</comment></comment>


2015 Angel Resource Institute Halo Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.angelresourceinstitute.org/research/halo-report/halo-report.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> Note, the link is an infographic - the full report is here: [http://www.angelresourceinstitute.org/~/media/Files/Halo%20R...](http://www.angelresourceinstitute.org/~/media/Files/Halo%20Report%202015%20Annual%20vFinal.pdf)

Nothing too surprising in here if you've been reading the news, but even then, the 53% jump in median valuations still makes me raise an eyebrow.</comment>


Ask HN: What Is the Next Plastic? - <AUTHOR> I was just wondering – is there any new research you folks can point me towards? Really interested to see how the material science on polymers is going. <comment><USER2> There are plastics being made from non-petroluem base chemicals. For example, biodegradable rigid 'plastic' golf tees have been around for a while. I think they can make flexible 'plastic' bags from cassava.

There are other types of materials being researched which could replace some plastics too, like mushroom packaging that can be composted or corn based styrofoam that dissolves in water.

</comment><comment><USER3> Assuming you don't mean exactly like plastic, graphene seems pretty promising.</comment>