Apple patents system for iOS devices to prevent image and video capturing - <AUTHOR> http://www.9to5mac.com/70193/apple-patents-infrared-system-for-ios-devices-to-prevent-illegal-image-and-video-capturing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+9To5Mac-MacAllDay+%289+to+5+Mac+-+Apple+Intelligence%29

<comment><USER2> Yet another reason why replacing general purpose computers with locked down appliances would be extremely bad for freedom and innovation.

<comment><USER3> Bad for freedom, great for innovation. If you lock me down I will find a way around to root/jailbreak/whatever you.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now just imagine it being used at political events or to suppress collection of evidence of abuse at demonstrations.

Edit: Probably worth noting that were this to take off it would probably also be embedded in every TV out there.

<comment><USER4> _Probably worth noting that were this to take off it would probably also be embedded in every TV out there._

If it's infrared, you can always find and cover the emitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. In your home yes, but not everywhere.

<comment><USER4> In which case you could cover the receiver on the phone instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want this to go into the iPhone 5. If it does, I can think of about a million ways to troll the general public with it.

Imagine, little solar-powered IR LEDs that you could ninja-drop in places (like...an Apple store) that would broadcast "Hello, you are photographing a copy of The Hurt Locker". This would make the best hidden-camera show ever (though you'd have to record it with a non-iPhone).

<comment><USER6> Agreed, my first thoughts too. This is ripe for abuse.

I honestly would be less concerned about "legit" or "publicly known" use (concerts, sports, political event etc.) since it would lead to public dissent towards of the offending performer/venue. Not saying it wouldn't be used, but there would be a significant PR liability if they imposed sanctions on photography.

If I were a criminal, first thing I would do is get a few of those IR transmitters to wear on my ski mask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really scary. I'm a total apple fanboi. But no way I'd buy a phone with this baked in.

I don't like to think apple would bow this deeply to the recording industry. Maybe the government. Either way it turns my stomach.

"At block 950, a record function can be disabled. For example, if the encoded data includes a disable command, the device can temporarily disable its record function for a period of time after receiving the command (e.g., 30 seconds or 30 minutes). After the device's record function is disabled, the device may not be able to store images detected by the device. In some embodiments, after the device's record function is disabled, the device may not be able to even display images detected by the device (see, e.g., system 500 shown in FIG. 5). In some embodiments, a device may even delete one or more of the most recently stored images (e.g., the first image detected at block 910) when disabling the device's record function."

<comment><USER8> > But no way I'd buy a phone with this baked in.

Don't worry. It'll come bundled in a firmware update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The patent was filed December 2, 2009 when the 3gs was the latest and greatest iPhone. I'd be surprised if you see this on an iPhone near you anytime soon. And if the powers that be try to use it to repress Apple users, there are tons of other devices out there. No need to get alarmed.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately there aren't any other smart phones that I could recommend for my mom in good conscience. I haven't tried WP7 yet which actually looks like it's made for humans. Unlike my Nexus One which is no good for mom yet for a number of reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh god, I don't like the sound of that. I wonder how Apple's going to spin this to make this sound in any way acceptable, when and if this does get released.

Note, though, that a patent does not mean the feature is coming. Most companies patent everything their R&D departments come up with, and only 10% of those ever make their ways into products.

<comment><USER12> If they actually did this, they would obviously focus everything on the the value-add cases: the shopping assistant, tour-guide apps, etc. And there's really no indication they would include the 'copy protection' feature even if they implemented other parts of it.

Personally, I can't see anyone bothering with it. You'd set up some proprietary transmitter that would only work on a subset of devices, that is based on a technology that the wider market wouldn't be interested in adopting (why would Nokia or Nikon care to adopt such a standard?) and ultimately it could be defeated by a cheap piece of IR filtering glass or plastic.

What would be the point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Different take: this would allow people to carry iPhones into company buildings (eg. service centres belonging to banks, government offices) and areas where camera-phones are banned for security reasons. The bank I used to work for banned camera phones from their offices, I imagine many other companies do the same. I would think twice about buying a phone I can't take to work. Or, corporations might rule out iPhones when choosing a model for the company phone. This would let Apple back into that (fairly large) market. Possibly.

<comment><USER6> Interesting take, hadn't thought of that at all.

Something along those lines would definitely be boon to AAPL or others penetrating that sort of market. However, we all know the software on smartphones are if not trivially, at least often manipulated. This may be able to skim a little of the market, but if I had a business where I couldn't trust camera phone now, I wouldn't trust this technique against even a slightly educated and motivated individual.

<comment><USER13> True enough. A more likely solution would be to just sell a 'corporate' iPhone with no camera (and support for some other stuff to sweeten the deal).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can see police officers affixing this to their gear....

<comment><USER15> That was my very first thought, too - "wow, this is going to be a boon to criminals in uniform!"

Think of it the way Bruce Schneier would: what could a malicious person accomplish with this technology? There's no effective way to keep it out of their hands, so you need to know what happens when someone tries to use this technique for malicious ends. The security implications of this are just nasty, nasty, nasty.

<comment><USER16> Hear, hear! I wonder how Apple will spin it when I can't photograph a police officer abusing someone with my iPhone? Is that a feature? Or is Apple trying to tell me that 'photographing abuses of power' is not one of the intended uses of the iPhone and if I want to use it for such a purpose, I shouldn't buy one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This gives me a giggle. Around ten years ago, a few friends of mine put together a system for Palms to receive IR annotations next to physical objects, and one of the use cases was for museum guide information.

Never ended up commercializing it.

They were calling it the iPod...

</comment><comment><USER18> Infrared filter, anyone?

<comment><USER19> Most CCD-based cameras alread have an IR filter film behind the lens. There are lots of people that hack them _out_ to turn their webcams etc into night vision cameras.

<comment><USER20> True night vision is a bit different than just adding near-infrared, unless you plan on using an IR illuminator. It's more like cranking the ISO to ridiculous levels, and if it's thermal the wavelengths are much much longer than any digital camera (or optics) can pick up.

In any case, the first poster is right, an additional IR filter would remove this.

<comment><USER19> My point was that consumer CCD cameras filter out short-wavelength IR to enhance the image, so how does the Apple patent expect to get around that without removing the filter and making the visible light camera worse?

<comment><USER18> I don't think Apple has an IR filter; IR blasters show up as bluish-white - handy for testing remote controls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The technology described kind of reminds me of the "Ugly T-Shirt" in Gibson's _Zero History_.

</comment><comment><USER22> Software patents are bad, right? EVERYONE should be able to build this capability into their phones!

</comment><comment><USER23> Vote with your wallet!

<comment><USER24> So by voting with your wallet and not purchasing an Apple product, you are sending the message that you won't purchase products that _don't_ incorporate technology from patents that you don't like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a purely defensive act to keep some company from producing a device that blocks Apple devices, but they can still make one for WebOS/Blackberry/Android/WP7.They're doing it to prevent someone else from producing/selling a similar device.

<comment><USER8> If that's the case, they should donate the patent to either the EFF or the ACLU.

<comment><USER24> No, I think they should license it to HTC and all the other Android handset manufacturers, giving them one more bullet point in their long list of features that the iPhone lacks.

There's a patent. That much is (apparently) fact. Everything else is speculation. Is it really worth getting worked up over things that haven't happened and may never happen?

Finally, if this were to come to pass, there's a very easy solution: a filter. You will see cases that cover the lens with an IR filter. Problem solved. Yawn.

<comment><USER25> | edw: No, I think they should license it to HTC and all the other Android handset manufacturers, given them one more feature bullet point in their long list of features that the iPhone lacks.

What are you talking about? To follow your absurd scenario, you think if Apple gave this bizarre patent away, but none of their others, that the EFF should then turn around and backstab the inventors and license it to their rivals? Yeah that's real classy and makes a whole lot of sense..

Why do so many people see the world in these binaries? Good/evil, black/white, red/blue.

<comment><USER24> For what it'a worth, my comment ends on a very "Meh, who cares?" note. I don't know where that puts me in the context of your agonizing over our society's depressing descent into Manichaean dichotomies.

P.S. My suggestion was intentionally absurd. I think it's more likely that, like someone else suggested, this patent would be used to _prevent_ people from exploiting such systems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A really hard problem - <AUTHOR> http://250bpm.com/blog:62 <comment><USER2> "They're making it so that the _real_ lines are easier to use."

At least, that's what the other lines are _supposed_ to be doing. As to whether they succeed or not, I suspect that opinions may differ...

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by "use"? It has nothing to do with the functionality. That would work well even if all the scaffolding was removed. It's not readability, a code with scaffolding is harder to grok than the code without. I guess you mean ease of maintenance, but even that is highly dubious, especially in a well-aged codebase where the actual behaviour have diverged far away from the original abstraction.

<comment><USER2> I mean "use in the context of a much larger application with the minimum possible pain". If done right (a big if, I admit), all the other lines make it _easier_ to use the "working" code than it would be if all the other lines weren't there. "Easier" means "over the scope of the whole project (or multiple projects)", not just "in this one place".

There's lots of ways to do the surrounding lines that _don 't_ actually do that, but that's the intent.</comment></comment></comment>


Rethinking the Multivitamin - <AUTHOR> http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2010/10/11/rethinking-the-multivitamin/ <comment><USER2> > A 2010 study of Swedish women found that those who took multivitamins were > 19% more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer over a 10-year period > than those who didn't. A 2007 paper in the Journal of the National Cancer > Institute found that men who took multivitamins along with other supplements > were at increased risk of prostate cancer.

I wonder how much of this has to do with the kind of people who are health- conscious enough to take multivitamins being more likely to get cancer screening?

I take a couple of Flintstone Vitamins a day, not to try to improve my health, but rather (1) to hopefully make up any gaps in my diet, and (2) their pleasant taste covers up the horrible taste of a prescription I take at the same time.

<comment><USER3> I think this might have something to do with the ineffectiveness issue: <http://www.jigsawhealth.com/resources/myth-multi-vitamin>

As far as the supposed dangers I find their argument hard to swallow. If the increased chance of breast cancer and prostate cancer was really that high I'd think we'd be seeing massive fallout. Multi-Vitamins are a 4-billion a year industry meaning they're pretty wide spread and have been around for way longer than 10 years. If the female population was truly 19% more likely to get breast cancer it would create an impossible to ignore societal phenomenon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The first, a review of 63 randomized, controlled trials (the gold standard research method) on multivitamins, published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, found that multis did nothing to prevent cancer or heart disease in most populations (the exception being developing countries where nutritional deficiencies are widespread). In the second paper, published last year, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center followed 160,000 postmenopausal women for about 10 years. The researchers' conclusion: "Multivitamins failed to prevent cancer, heart disease, and all causes of death for all women. Whether the women were healthy eaters or ate very few fruits and vegetables, the results were the same," says the lead author, Marian Neuhouser, PhD. read more from MSN Heatlh…

So basically, a multivitamin is a waste of money!"

According to who? The person fears naught but death? What about injury in athletes, general well-being, and mental performance?

</comment><comment><USER5> Nonsense. It's in the pharmaceutical industry to get people to stop taking cheap vitamins. They more money when people are sick.

I've lost all confidence that people in the pharma industry wouldn't act like that. Those same people have watched a whole lot of people in Africa and the 3rd world die from illnesses that could easily prevented with a few cents of medicine.

They most certainly do act that way.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you go about learning new stuff? - <AUTHOR> When starting to learn something new, I often look for books, courses, guides or how-to's on the topic - on google, HN, reddit etc. - even directly asking knowledgeable people. What does the community here do in this situation to find learning resources. <comment><USER2> The procedure I usually follow then tackling a new subject isn't a one-shot approach but an iterative process. The process consists of the following steps:

1\. survey key topics that represent either basic aspects of the subject of interest that are required to understand it or have important practical uses

2\. organize these key topics as a project by breaking them down into individual tasks based on interdependencies and key productivity goals (i.e., I want to be able to do something and add a skill to my technical tool belt)

3\. compile a list of reading material that cover the key topics

4\. while reading on each topic, write a monograph of sorts on the subject. The monograph is intended to help you track the progress, evaluate what I know and don't know, synthesize what you do know and refresh your memory (particularly useful if it's a medium/long-term project), and help understand where to guide the learning project to better reach milestones and mitigate potential shortcomings.

Step 1 and 2 are updated based on what I've covered in the monograph. The monograph is updated as I progress, and If I didn't added the monograph then it's as if I didn't covered the topic yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> The easiest process to learn anything quickly. 1\. Choose a specific skill that you find useful and that intrigues you. 2\. Break down the skills into basic, practical steps, find the most important steps to practice first. 3\. Gather up books, videos, articles and podcasts related to your skill. Find out somebody who is already expert at the skill you want to learn and get help from him. 4\. Deliberate practice will always result in improvements. Stop reading. Start doing. The more you practice, the faster you learn. 5\. Set a deadline. 6\. Don't multitask at all.Turn off any kind of distractions. 7\. Get feedback instantly to know what success looks like quickly.

</comment><comment><USER4> I try to find a couple of books on the topic. I filter them mostly based on Amazon reviews.

Then start reading. I also look for talks on the topic and watch and repeat them at random.

Finally I have a pretty strict schedule to do that from 6am to 8 am.

This chunk of time is for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've found that nowadays just Googling for appropriate tutorials can be just as good as reading an O'Reilly book. Text tutorials are the fastest, but when you get stuck it can help to watch a YouTube tutorial around where you get stuck. Especially useful for anything which involves having to click on stuff in a UI (for example when learning Interface Builder).</comment>


The travails of Germany's rail passengers - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/01/26/the-travails-of-germanys-rail-passengers <comment><USER2> > Surprisingly to many, among Europeans only Romanian, Bulgarian and Italian > passengers are unhappier with their trains.

Sure Germans are unhappy with their trains but that is more a sign of their high standards than the quality of their train services.

It is true that in rankings that compare the delay statistics of train services in various European countries Germany is always in the lower part of the list. These statistics are usually based on the percentage of trains being late in a particular country. The threshold for being considered late is 15 minutes in all EU countries except Germany (6 minutes) and Portugal (5 minutes). Again, high standards, not low quality.</comment>


CSS Mint-Lightweight and simple to use UI Kit. Fully responsive just 3KB gzipped - <AUTHOR> http://arunmichaeldsouza.github.io/CSS-Mint/ <comment><USER2> Good find. My favorite lightweight frameworks are PureCSS and Spectre. Writing code for countries with poor connectivity is challenging, good to see more options.</comment>


I hate to steal a format from Reddit (A Call to Facebook Employees on HN) - <AUTHOR>

...well actually I'd love to.
You see, lately when a post comes up about Facebook I've noticed, with a remarkable amount of consistency that someone will come along and say "I work at Facebook, that's not the case" or something equally nonsubstancial to the conversation.  Every now and then someone will maybe post something more, but usually it's an attempt to set some sort of record straight without actually saying why or how.
That said, I'm openly calling for any capable FB employee to rise to the ocassion and please indulge the HN community in an Reddit IAmA style QA session.
For those who don't know, the IAmA trend on Reddit is where someone who has extensive experience in something not as easily attainable (architects, civil engineers, surgeons, war veterans, etc) and the community basically launches questions at them.
Is anyone willing to do this? <comment><USER2> I'd prefer the AMA's stay over on reddit. Everyone here knows what it is, and the good ones get linked, but its not really appropriate for the discussions here.

Besides, there have already been a few facebook employee AMA's there. The discussion that comes from the employees is usually germane to the topic, rather than just karma-whoring or easy to game (which is what 99% of the AMA format is).</comment>


These First-Year MBAs Are Trying to Solve America's Food Waste Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-25/mit-sloan-students-build-startup-to-help-solve-u-dot-s-dot-food-waste

<comment><USER2> Oh, MBAs seeking to reduce waste eh? I'm sure this'll turn out well.</comment>


Ask HN: Need advice to avoid a precious website to shutdown - <AUTHOR> A megpie's nest provided me for almost a decade an invaluable source of information and depth on the music composed by Howard Shore for the Lord of The Rings Trilogy. It's incredible how it became a "wikipedia" basically, mainteined by one person only. I read the sad notice about it's shutdown and it seems the author cannot afford costs of hosting anymore...
Looking at the assets it's quite static, isn't out there some cheap or free solution for websites like this?<p>http://www.amagpiesnest.com/ <comment><USER2> Github Pages is free. You can use "wget --mirror" to capture the website.

<comment><USER3> I've got the ball rolling at [https://gitlab.com/amagpiesnest/amagpiesnest.gitlab.io](https://gitlab.com/amagpiesnest/amagpiesnest.gitlab.io)

Please sign in and request access to contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They list a gmail address. This should entitle them to a free blogpot blog. They would just need to migrate the content.

Though audio files are not supported, AFAIK. If that is part of the content, they might need to put those on a service like Sound Cloud.

</comment><comment><USER5> Haven't seen this site but if it's static please take a look at netlify.com. Their service is incredible and has a free tier.</comment>


The Scientist Who Predicted 2020's Political Unrest on What Comes Next - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3e4p9/peter-turchin-cliodynamics-political-unrest-2020 <comment><USER2> I remember reading years ago about how 2020 was going to be a very significant year of economic havoc and social upheaval.

There were studies from MIT and others that made these predictions based on different models at least 5 years ago. I remember one interesting study that used some kind of model based on predators hunting prey. I think it may have been wolves. Anyway, for the life of me I have searched high and low and just can't find any of them on the Internet anymore. It's like they all disappeared. I have tried to find them because they also spoke of how long this period may last and it would be interesting to see what they said (sadly I have forgotten.

The search will continue.....

Here is a related article but not the one I'm looking for...

Feb 2010

Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade

[https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a](https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a)</comment>


Mike Lee (Formerly of Tapulous) attempts to explain fundware... - <AUTHOR> http://www.atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/936A84EF-C252-495F-B22E-92576A1BB06B.html

<comment><AUTHOR> ... but doesn't do such a great job explaining it.

Mike Lee formed Tapulous, one of the more successful iPhone development shops, but left after a dispute a while back.

Links of note: <http://tapulous.com/> <http://unitedlemur.org/> <http://fundware.info/> <http://puzzllotto.com/>

</comment><comment><USER2> First, the funding here is metaphorical. What we're trying to do is capitalize a company as if it were angel funded.

The metaphorical return on that investment is a company vetted by an established member of the community that will produce good products.

The other option is to let all good companies be forced to compromise their vision to meet investor expectations, or operate slowly to be drowned by crapware.

</comment><comment><USER3> the problem with this model, is that there's no value return for the people "funding".

a true investment delivers some sort of equity stake in return for investment. if say, you bought a fundware game, and got the next game free, that would be a valid fundware type argument.

here's how that would work. I need money to fund my endeavor, i release something with a slight entertainment value for more than its worth, with the guarantee that anyone who purchases it will get the product i'm developing with the money for free. sales happen and i reach the level of funding i need for the second product, i stop sales on initial product (make it free) and sell second product and let people who have "invested" receive their copies free of charge.</comment>


Plastic Straws Aren't the Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-07/plastic-straws-aren-t-the-problem <comment><USER2> The plastic straw boycott is not meant to fix the problem, that's been acknowledged [0]. It's to help drive a message and teach awareness. The hope being that people shift behaviors that impact other areas.

Everything helps at this point. Because something helps less shouldn't mean we bash it. Collectively we should do more.

[0] [https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17488336/starbucks-plastic- str...](https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17488336/starbucks-plastic-straw-ban- ocean-pollution)

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's true that "everything helps." I think many of these grandstanding initiatives are received with open mockery and I think they serve to undermine the credibility of the larger environmental effort.

Recently we have had some rather large political shifts which move the needle considerably further away from our ecological goals. If you look at what people are saying within these political circles you will see derisive phrases like "virtue signaling," referring to exactly this sort of thing.

When you "send a message" you take work which might be perceived as mutually beneficial and you turn it into a fight. You should expect the response to be the inverse: People will begin to _intentionally destroy_ the environment to send you a message in return. This has been part of Trump's schtick over the last year. This is why there is a culture around "rolling coal." This is actually happening.

This is extremely bad policy and it hurts the environment.

<comment><USER4> I find myself sort of in that camp. I think rolling coal is stupid, but when I saw people wanting to ban straws, I just had to roll my eyes. I think the larger goals of environmental protection lose some credibility when obviously inconsequential stuff like that becomes the message of the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A problem with directing people toward ineffective solutions is that it may "use up" people's limited willingness to be pro-social. Scott Alexander described a few studies on this phenomenon at Less Wrong: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r8stxYL29NF9w53am/doing- your...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r8stxYL29NF9w53am/doing-your-good- deed-for-the-day)

Briefly: people manipulated into buying environmentally friendly products shared less of their money in a Dictator Game, and were more likely to lie for financial gain. (Beware that this is from 2009, i.e. pre-replication crisis, so the studies might warrant careful checking.)

Alexander: "If this is true, then anything that makes people feel moral without actually doing good is no longer a harmless distraction. All those biases that lead people to give time and money and thought to causes that don't really merit them waste not only time and money, but an exhaustible supply of moral fiber"

</comment><comment><USER6> Just the other day I went to throw a plastic straw away and as I opened up the bin was faced with a load of un-recyclable plastic film, wrappers for fruit and veg and plastic punnets etc. The straw was a tiny fraction of the problem.

At that point it really felt like the focus on plastic straws was just a token gesture. Some small gesture to make people feel good about themselves and the people in power while the main problem, the tons of other plastic we use, isn't close to getting fixed.

</comment><comment><USER7> I view this like software performance optimization. First thing you do is profile the application.

Would anyone suggest spending a lot of effort to speed up the part of the program that is taking 0.03% of the time?

There definitely is environmental fatigue. I know someone that always unplugs her microwave when she leaves the house because she is concerned about phantom electricity usage. She feels like she is doing her part, but then ends up running the air conditioner all the time which uses way more.

</comment><comment><USER8> Surprise surprise, corporations (in this case commercial fishing) are doing major damage to the environment, and even after realizing that straws make up only 0.03% of the oceans plastic waste, the attention is still (even in this comment thread) pointed at the consumer.

The free market will not save the environment, regulatory action will.

<comment><USER9> Will it tho? Or rather the free market won't? Isn't a majority of the push for more environmentally safe products a result of the market demand?

<comment><USER8> Yes, you are correct that "a majority of the push for more environmentally safe products [is] a result of the market demand", but as we read in the parent article, environmentally safe products are not making a significant difference. This is a bit of an assumption, because the article only speaks of straws, and I'm extrapolating that to _all_ consumer goods. The article then goes on to highlight what _would_ make a significant difference: fishing net cleanup.

What I'm saying is that the significant mess made by commercial fishing should be cleaned up by commercial fishing - or prevented in the first place by regulating the practice.

If we look a little further down the line at consumer behaviour again, I will make the anecdotal assumption that the vast majority of consumers does not care in the least about the packaging of their products (or the number of plastic straw it comes with), as they are too busy budgeting their lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Plastic straw isn't a problem. It's a movement to demonstrate how dependant we are on plastic, that even something trivial and mostly luxury & low impact item as a plastic straw is hard to get rid of. Whole point of stopping plastic straws is not to reduce plastic waste, because it's negligible comparing to, say, plastic bags, but to start a conversation and rise awareness of what materials are used where and how they are recycled.

Planet Money had excellent podcast with people who came up with whole "Ban Plastic Straw" idea.

[https://www.npr.org/2018/07/19/630589386/how-the-campaign- to...](https://www.npr.org/2018/07/19/630589386/how-the-campaign-to-ban- plastic-straws-got-its-start)

</comment><comment><USER11> Plastic Straws are irrelevant in the greater picture, and the global boycott has nothing to do with _them_ \- but the broader picture of responsible resource management. Reducing, Re-Using, Repurposing, Redirecting(compost, energy), and finally Recycling are habits which the straw ban is meant to _strengthen_.

No serious person thinks banning plastic straws, in and of itself, has any purpose.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Using surface samples and aerial surveys, the group determined that at least 46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets._

One more reason to stop eating seafood. It's not like there's going to be any left soon at current rates of overfishing anyway.

<comment><USER13> You could switch to longline-caught fish, which is a good thing for other reasons too.

<comment><USER12> That's a step in the right direction for sure but why not just cut it out of your diet entirely? There's nothing in fish you can't get from plant sources and with current ocean pollution levels even line caught fish are going to have a lot of heavy metals and PCBs in them.

<comment><USER13> Plant based vitamin D & B12? Do tell.

I don't eat a lot of fish or anything, but empirically it is shown to be a healthy thing to eat (well, certain species at least)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey people are talking about trash, so that's better than nothing... but the big message people should be taking home is PICK UP TRASH AND SHAME OTHERS FOR LITTERING. It doesn't matter if you didn't leave it there, if you don't pick it up it's probably going to end up in the ocean.

The vast majority of plastic in the ocean is washed out through rivers and storm drains.

Much of this comes from countries with poor waste management... but the US is still an embarrassingly large source despite being in the first world. There's no excuse. We can not take waste management for granted.

</comment><comment><USER15> Every time this topic surfaces in my various feeds, I do a Ctrl+F/Cmd+F// for car/motor/driv/vehicle. To date, I've found no articles that mention plastic and excessive motor vehicle use (often single-occupancy) in the same article.

I don't really understand why no one ever seems to make that final step in logic. How many plastic straws-worth of oil do we waste on private motor vehicle mileage each year?

<comment><USER16> This topic is primarily about the accumulation of physical waste (ie. garbage), not about the oil usage. Of course, the oil usage is a valid problem that needs to be solved, but that's not why people are caring about the straws.

<comment><USER15> I see the article highlighting the community's continual misplacing of priorities. This doesn't mean that I don't think plastic straws present any problems, but I believe most aren't thinking rationally about the cause of the problem (excessive consumption, etc).

A similar hysteria has recently been occuring with dumped bikes while the ongoing issue with motoring addiction goes on unaddressed: [https://slate.com/business/2018/04/astounding-photos- capture...](https://slate.com/business/2018/04/astounding-photos-capture- graveyards-of-unused-dockless-vehicles-in-american-cities.html)

To borrow what I believe is an unfair phrase, the article as I see it is about "bike-shedding".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I mean, you'd probably be better off just not going to the bar/restaurant in the first place. Plastic pollution is sort-of orthogonal to greenhouse gas emissions, and orders of magnitude easier to solve.

A straw is like what 0.01 lb CO2e (CO2 equivalent). The trip to the bar creates something like 1 lb of CO2e pollution PER MILE if you drove a car. The math is pretty simple but I think most people just don't like being told their lifestyle has an impact and they ought to make changes for the good of the planet. I'm not sure if a straw ban is an effective way to create meaningful discussion about reducing impact. In any case, efforts to enact it probably represent and opportunity cost which might be better utilized pushing for something like (at the city level, at least) electric car charging stations at all city owned parking garages. Here are some other, unsolicited, out-in-left- field, "fun" ideas I have for reducing climate change.

\- Create a Strava-like reward system for people who bike to work. Make it cool and adventurous to bike to work every day, NO MATTER WHAT!

\- Have cities pay employers to have employees work from home some days of the week. Preferably on a coordinated schedule so that highway volumes are reduced as well. This would reduce the need for highway infrastructure and reduce GHG emissions at the same time.

\- Subtly encourage people to just buy fewer things and travel less. Maybe you could accomplish this by setting up more community events (potlucks, movies in the park, recreational sports, etc). People wouldn't feel the need to buy stuff or get away so much if they were busy having fun closer to home.

This is kind of fun: Other people should put their "fun" ideas for reducing impact here, I'd love to see them!

</comment><comment><USER18> A more general article on plastic waste by the same author:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-25/how-to- so...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-25/how-to-solve-the- plastic-crisis)

<comment><USER19> A good thread on this subject regarding the article you've linked to. I don't think "it's just eight countries"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067350)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Banning plastic straws may not directly reduce the plastic waste problem itself, but it HAS had a very high profile with almost all major media outlets talking about it.

Anything that keeps reminding people that we are destroying our home with use- once plastic is a good thing in my opinion. Today it's plastic straws and shopping bags, tomorrow hopefully it will be larger use-once plastic items and from there we may actually start making an impact.

<comment><AUTHOR> > all major media outlets talking about it.

The issue is that, when it's (easily) demonstrated it's an exaggeration, the credibility of all major media outlets gets questioned, and rightly so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We should outlaw single use non recyclable plastic everywhere. If not across the US, at least in California. The idea that we just throw plastic into a landfill is simply stupid. Our descendants will look back on us and think we are on the level of apes to just throw stuff into landfills and believe it solves the problems.

<comment><USER22> What problems remain unresolved when plastic has been buried in a landfill?

<comment><USER23> At some point we will need a bacteria that can break down polypropylene/polyethylene chains. This will bring an end to plastics usefulness, but the alternative is going to be a continual buildup of inorganic molecules in the environment with unknown consequences.

<comment><USER22> That's not quite what I meant. It does seem clear that the plastic littered throughout the environment is a problem. The bit that isn't obvious to me is why the plastic in landfills is a problem.

The first step to picking a solution is understanding the problem, and I'm not there yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> After reading the really good Donna Meadows essay on leverage points, perhaps we should have taxed straws when theyre purchased and used that as money to pay Fishermen to haul in unused / found nets.

</comment><comment><USER25> Plastic straws are a problem indeed. They are hard to sort out, end up in the drains, crumble and contaminates the land everywhere. Can't get rid of them soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER26> > estimated that lost and abandoned crab pots take in 1.25 million blue crabs > each year

I can't even catch a single crab doing that on purpose. I think I'm doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why don't they apply Amdahl's law to this kind of problem?

</comment><comment><USER28> The plastic straw ban seems like an entirely unforced error on the part of liberals: disability-rights folks on the left are rightly upset that the removal of plastic straws makes life worse for people who physically need them in order to drink, environmentalist folks on the left who have actually looked at the data have concluded that a plastic straw ban is at best useless and at worst more harmful (e.g., Starbucks' new sippy-cup top uses more plastic than the old top + the old straw put together), and the right is having a field day with "You'll take my plastic straw from my cold, dead hands" jokes and calling liberals stupid - and they're not entirely wrong.

Is there something people in California can do to convince Gov. Brown not to sign the bill? (Do governors' offices typically listen to phone calls?)

<comment><USER29> >>e.g., Starbucks' new sippy-cup top uses more plastic than the old top + the old straw put together

This tells me you misunderstand the problem.

It's not about the _amount_ of plastic used, but rather the _shape_. Plastic straws are very conducive to getting stuck inside various cavities of wild animals, which eventually kills them.

<comment><USER30> Couldn't we make spiral straws?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ahahahha.

The pro plastic Astro turf begins, study this article for the major markers of FUD.

First, ensure that the data is debatable. Then use it as a stepping stone to shift the focus to something logically more sound, while ignoring one of the core premises of the system.

But wait! this doesn't really do anything to make plastics more appealing!

Correct, which is why the final step is to push the blame and responsibility to someone else and to other shores.

Keep using these talking points till you have a group of people who think it's reasonable, and use them as a staging ground for the next level of FUD.

you may think that the article is reasonable - and it is! It just makes minor errors or shifts focus, fairly to other places.

But the fact is that per capita plastic consumption in the West is much higher than developing nations.

China was the one who was taking everyone's trash in the first place, which is why it got worse.

Not to mention, Third world countries will DEFINITELY do worse on recycling, because of how hard it is to get passably right.

And this does nothing about the current rate of trash dumping, or production! It just pushes the problem out to tomorrow.

I'd give the author the benefit of doubt, but this is a business journal.</comment>


Ask HN: We just migrated from SQL Server to MongoDB - ask us anything - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I have two customers (I am a consultant) who use MongoDB - one uses paid-for support from 10gen (which seems very good, BTW) and one doesn't. Just curious: are you using paid for support, or investing instead on learning everything you can about MongoDB?

BTW, I like your choice: MongoDB is a great developer experience, if you can lighten up on needing immediate consistency.

Also, re: backups: why don't you run a slave that you take offline a few times an hour to snapshot? Low ceremony doing this, and I would feel better about the safety of your data. It is pretty easy to run a cron job that cleanly shuts down a slave, ZIPs a backup to S3 (or where ever), and restarts the slave.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are currently not paying for support, although 10Gen is a pleasure to work with even when you are not paying them anything - they are very helpful!

Thanks for the tip, we might do that eventually :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing your experience. Having performed a sort of reverse migration (mongodb -> pgsql), I'd have a few questions.

Is it possible to know the use case of your setup? Which size (storage, load etc.) are you currently operating at? What is the projected growth in the medium term? What is main the benefit of this migration? Is MongoDB solving a specific problem that could not have been addressed by mysql/pgsql (or some document oriented/nosql other than mongo)? Are you using any ORM and/or middleware to interface to MongoDB?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am actually just finishing writing an article with all the details, I will post a link as soon as it is online :)

We are not using any middleware and all our queries are hand-sculpted to make sure we are never causing more I/O impact than we need to.

I am sure everything we do could have been done with mysql/pgsql with enough consideration for the performance characteristics of either database.

Ultimately, a document-based storage was simply a better, more natural fit for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you have extra costs due to more memory requirements? Any other costs? What about savings?

How long did it take to train the team to MongoDB?

Did you have a rollback plan if MongoDB is not good enough?

What were your requirements that made MongoDB better than SQL Server and the other DBs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we did had to invest on new servers. Not only we need more RAM, we also needed more storage (which as expensive because we use SSDs). All things considered, SQL Server licences are not cheap either (6K-7K each) so in the long run I believe we will be saving money.

Our training was very much hands on: (1) we migrated a piece of code, (2) tested against a full-sized database, (3) profiled performance under load, (4) learned from the results, moved on the next piece of code (1).

Our plan if MongoDB wasn't good enough consisted basically of: (1) crying ourselves to sleep, (2) drinking heavily, and (3) contributing to MongoDB's development to make it good enough.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone for the incredible feedback. I have just published the article here: <http://www.wireclub.com/development/TqnkQwQ8CxUYTVT90/read>

I hope you will find it useful!

</comment><comment><USER5> Why? What prompted you to move off an RDBMS in general and to MongoDB in particular? Did you move your entire data tier to MongoDB or just particular parts of your data model?

<comment><AUTHOR> We always felt that using a relational database to power our service was a bit like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Every application is different but in our case, we would gladly trade off consistency for performance and schema flexibility. I am not saying that Microsoft SQL Server is slow, because it isn't, but it does impose a more formal relationship with your data and that wasn't the best fit for us.

We moved our whole data tier to MongoDB because we were not particularly interested in paying for more SQL Server licenses as we scaled up our operations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll start the ball rolling with an easy one...

How did it go?

Can you talk through some of the changes you had to make, both from a library perspective, as well as any architectural changes that were required?

<comment><AUTHOR> Overall, it went well, bumpy at first because we had to learn about Mongo's performance characteristics. Having a full-size database to work with made it a bit easier to identify friction points early on.

To make the most of it, we bit the bullet rewrote the whole application. You can't join results from two collections in MongoDB so we had to denormalize quite a lot.

<comment><USER6> Can you elaborate a bit more on the scope of the rewrite? I'm assuming you didn't have much front end work to re-do, mainly middle to back end code?

Did you have anything you could re-use, such as your high level business logic classes, or (and this is meant non-judgmentally) was your code too deeply wrapped around the existing data store, or the idea of the data store as a RDBMS, to make any of it reusable?

Was your logic primarily in Stored Procedures, or (and again i'm assuming here, this time that yours is a .NET environment since you called it 'SQL Server') did you make heavy use of LINQ to handle those kinds of things?

Can you talk about those performance issues, and how you handled them? (For my third assumption, i'll go with Indexes)

Looking forward to reading the in depth article. Thanks for fielding these questions

<comment><AUTHOR> We practically rewrote the whole application. Some code was spared, but I would say that less than 20% of the original source was reused. This was not just because of the migration to MongoDB but more because we decided to take the product to a different direction.

Fundamentally while we could have migrated without a full re-write, SQL Server was only one of the technologies we wanted to replace. One thing led to another and eventually we decided to re-launch the product instead of iterating on it.

As for the performance issues, most of them are stemmed from MongoDB's current locking strategies. I heard 2.0 handles it a bit better but we haven't rolled it out to production yet. Planning your indexes carefully so they fit in RAM is very, very important to assure a high throughput with MongoDB.

<comment><USER6> I just had one last question:

Did you evaluate any other "NoSQL" DBs, such as Riak? If so, what was your main impetus for choosing Mongo? Did you go with mongod or mongos for your environment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we evaluated several other alternatives. Ultimately, we felt that MongoDB's was at the sweet spot of best fit (to our needs) and maturity.

We tried to run Mongo on Windows and that was a bit of a disaster so we are running it on Linux.

<comment><USER6> I've only ever run it on a linux environment, I have not heard great things about the windows version.

Are you guys using Mongos (for running several nodes) or just standalone Mongod?

If Mongos, can you talk a little about your experience in setting that up? If not, can you speak to why you chose to run it in a single node?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I forgot to answer that, we are running mongod :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We just migrated a large production database for an existing website to MongoDB. I am currently writing an article to share the lessons learned, in the mean time I would be happy to answer your questions!

</comment><comment><USER7> With SQL Server (or any RDBMS) there are known backup and recovery strategies and a WAL as added security. What kind of disaster recovery strategies are you employing with MongoDB?

<comment><USER8> Worth noting that you can define a slave as hidden:true (so it never gets promoted to master), and run it with slavedelay of X hours..it's a great way to keep a rolling backup

<comment><USER7> Good to know, I wasn't aware of both of these features. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What do you use for reporting if any? Do you use still use SSRS? If so how? Would love to hear about how your reporting needs are met.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have never used SSRS, instead we have been slowly building an in-house analytics suite that reports all the information we need in real-time.

Our analytics package is also based on MongoDB and it currently aggregates over 60 million events daily in real-time and with a negligible performance impact.

It is a lot like Mixpanel, but on the server side.</comment></comment>


How to update a desktop app - <AUTHOR> http://bvckup2.com/wip/#14022013

<comment><AUTHOR> Took me a couple of days to figure this out, so I thought I'd share.

I also looked at the option of launching the program in a way that doesn't lock the .exe. For one, it's complicated. It requires creating a process in a Suspended state using a different executable, then basically gutting the memory of that process and replacing it with your own process copy, which needs to be fully preped with all imports and relocations taken care of, etc. In other words, it's pretty complicated.

But what's more important, the only type of software that employs this sort of process launching is the malware. In fact, the above method is derived straight from one of the viruses that made rounds a couple of years ago [1], and it was used by the virus to masquerade as a legit Windows process. So, in other words, you employ this sort of hackery in your program - you will quickly end up talking to anti-virus vendors about taking your software off their blacklists. It's a cool stuff, too bad it's off limits.

[1] <http://blogs.avg.com/news-threats/puppet-process>

</comment><comment><USER2> I have an application that has an update process, but it's complicated by the fact that the application is really just a COM DLL that's loaded by explorer.exe to run as a toolbar next to the clock. I'd have to shutdown and restart explorer.exe, which closes the user's desktop and start menu. Dropbox seems to have found a way around this but I have no idea how they did it.

<comment><AUTHOR> They probably use a proxy/stub process that uses the .exe that doesn't change often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I did this a while back, and everything I tried was a series of horrible hacks to get it sorted. With Windows whilst it maintains a lock on the process so you can't do anything nice like replace it, but you can actually just rename it to 'someapplication.old' then deal with it on relaunch. Made me miss Sparkle very much.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does your re-starter program which listens on the named event have any sig checking or similar?

First thing I thought when reading it was _Hmmm ability to run something as another user_.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no point in checking it. If another user is running an executable that you have full control over, then you can make him run anything you want anyways.

<comment><USER4> But its not control over the binary executable file, its the control over the event?

Or am I really missing something here, and you set up the object with the security token used on the binary file?

My question (sorry if it's super dumb and I'm missing something) is what permissions are needed to communicate via the event?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome post. There's some real talent behind those UI designs.</comment>


Getting Your Product Into the Habit Zone - <AUTHOR> http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/09/habit-zone.html <comment><USER2> Looks like the original post is down, however, this article was featured on TechCrunch on Sunday if you want to read it

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/02/getting-your-product- into-t...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/02/getting-your-product-into-the- habit-zone/)

</comment><comment><USER3> 45 minutes, zero comments, and the site is down. Overdose?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Should be up now. Sorry. <http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/09/habit-zone.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> Great post (and blog). I would love to see more discussions on this topic.</comment>


Steve, Gizmodo and the untold story of the lost iPhone. - <AUTHOR> http://thewirecutter.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-was-always-kind-to-me-or-regrets-of-an-asshole/

<comment><USER2> He's ashamed and should be forgiven.

But a journalist should never ever use "I have to do what's right for the public and readers" as an excuse for failing ethics. We don't have "the right" to know everyone else's secrets.</comment>


The Left Is Now the Right - <AUTHOR> https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right <comment><USER2> I've been on the "right" since my earliest political memories (going back to about 2006). I just don't see that much having changed. It sounds like this myth of Republicans/right being super evil crazy people was foundational to his politics. Now that it's being challenged in his mind for whatever reason, he wants everything to go back to this blissful state. Note how he doesn't really say much nice about the Right. To call the Left Right is the greatest insult to him.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm old enough to remember being ostracized for defending a closeted lesbian couple in highschool, and the people today who attack for defending people with centrist/mildly conservative opinions seem very similar..

E.g. from "Omg you're queer too." to "Omg you're a hater too."

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, in as much as someone who was seriously right wing ten years ago should be voting Democrat today, he's right. But nah, it's some groupthink tosh that only makes sense if you don't actually understand any of the things he refers to.

</comment><comment><USER5> Taibbi's been at this his whole career: everybody is dumb, this is all a big joke, I'm going to cover the 2004 election on acid and in a gorilla suit, I'm the bad boy frat guy of journalism, I will never wipe the smirk off my face.

<comment><AUTHOR> He's a media critic, and has a particular concern with groupthink and a stifling of ideas. Your criticisms are curious character ad hominems exactly like one would expect. No one bothers countering with reason anymore, it's all just a zinger or hot take. Again, exactly as expected because that is the new norm.</comment></comment>


Irregularly shaped parks reduce mortality risk - <AUTHOR> https://neurosciencenews.com/park-shape-mortality-15269/ <comment><USER2> This is what dressing nonsense up as science looks like.</comment>


Where do you host your API? - <AUTHOR> Looking for reliable and cost-effective ways to host / deploy APIs in 2019. <comment><USER2> Wherever my boss thinks of first

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks an unfortunate reality that hits too close to home

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Google Cloud, GKE

</comment><comment><USER4> azure vms with accelerated networking</comment>


Facebook in legal fight for its future - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/businessheadlines/ci_9682260 <comment><USER2> "The worst case scenario is that Facebook doesn't own its core code and that it's been using someone else's code for the foundation of its company. That could lead to damages that are catastrophic," said Eric Goldman, assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and director of SCU's High Tech Law Institute. "In the worst case scenario, this could be a fight for Facebook's life."

I am pretty shocked that Silicon Valley's most prominent newspaper is so helplessly uninformed.</comment>


Facebook banned my "beat-up" Mark Zuckerberg ad - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/hipsterCEO/posts/255633321270993:0

<comment><USER2> Speaking of Facemash.

<comment><AUTHOR> Permission to steal your comment for advertising purposes, good sir? :D

<comment><USER2> please!</comment></comment></comment>


Oracle ordered to pay $3bn damages to HP - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36682598 <comment><USER2> > high-end Itanium chips

My sides.</comment>


Katy Perry, Rihanna sign ad attacking Pandora for copyright proposal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/katy-perry-rihanna-sign-ad-attacking-pandora-for-copyright-proposal/ <comment><USER2> Summary:

Satellite radio currently pays dramatically lower royalties than internet radio. A congressional proposal would lower internet radio rates to be in line with Satellite. Artists are opposed b/c they get less money.

An RIAA proposal would instead raise Satellite royalties to be in line with Internet, and for the first time charge royalties for terrestrial radio.</comment>


NSA Officers Sometimes Spy on Love Interests - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-sometimes-spy-on-love-interests/

<comment><USER3> "Clearly, any case of noncompliance is unacceptable, but these small numbers of cases do not change my view that NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place," - <USER2> Feinstein. Good choice California.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always wondered what kind of privacy safeguards are in place for any organization that holds big data on users.

A few years ago, a Google engineer was fired for spying and accessing accounts of some teenagers. Google investigated and fired him after one of them complained.

Here is the article: [http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer- stalked-tee...](http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked- teens-spied-on-chats)</comment>


Productivity Applications: 5 That Rock, 5 That Don't, and 5 That are Underrated - <AUTHOR> http://howtogetfocused.com/uncategorized/productivity-applications-5-that-rock-5-that-dont-and-5-that-are-underrated/

<comment><USER2> "Evernote is an application that allows you to take pictures of objects that you wish to remember, and then search for that object later. Guess what else does this? A camera."

There's just one problem: Evernote is a _note taking_ application that happens to be able to OCR images and allow you to search the text. Seems that someone is reviewing a tool that he has never used?

Remember the Milk has primarily picked up steam (IMO) because Google hasn't pushed/facilitated third-party adoption. Google Tasks is great if you're using Gmail, in a browser. Not so much if you want to access tasks from another application, mobile device, etc.

And when did Twitter claim to be any form of productivity app/tool?

This article seems to compare brainstorming apps to task trackers and a variety of other tools, claiming that some are "better" than others. It's not that I disagree with all of the points, but it is hard to follow/swallow.</comment>


Web usability guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://www.userfocus.co.uk/resources/guidelines.html

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one that can't read a list like this without looking for how the website posting it fails?

\</comment><comment>----

On the menu:

"Navigation and IA"

But...

Under "Writing and content quality":

"Acronyms and abbreviations are defined when first used."

\</comment><comment>----

They say "Pages are free of 'scroll stoppers' (headings or page elements that create the illusion that users have reached the top or bottom of a page when they have not)." But the site has THREE footers, any one of which could be the end of the page.

\</comment><comment>----

They say "Things that are clickable (like buttons) are obviously pressable." But the text "Usability Training" in the third footer is inexplicably clickable.

\</comment><comment>----

One that counts as an epic fail... they believe there is such a thing as a "standard browser width window."

<comment><USER3> On the very first page that was linked, all of those headings are expanded, including: "Navigation and IA: 29 guidelines to evaluate navigation and information architecture.". This is further used as tooltip text when you point at the actual link with the abbreviation.

As for scroll stoppers...it is very clear to me that the page's main content has ended when I reach even the "first" footer. It hardly seems like a principle violation.

"Usability Training" might be a subtlety in the footer, but it is also one of the major headings (which are obviously buttons).

And while I'd agree that browser widths shouldn't be assumed, their advice in #29 is with respect to _reading_ , and there is definitely research to suggest that there is a maximum useful width for a column of text, ~60-70 characters. [See for instance, "Readability of Print" (H. Spencer, 1968).]

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As an fun exercise, go to

<http://www.aa.com>

and watch as they break every single one of these guidelines. I use aa.com as an example of crappy usability so often that my definition of "good web development" is becoming "the opposite of whatever aa.com is doing".

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614703></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Paying it forward: Free day of consulting  with marketing guru - <AUTHOR>

Actually, I'm not sure guru is the right word.  I don't like the word "expert," and don't get me started on "maven."
Anyway, here's the deal. The holidays are here so, I thought I would spread some cheer with 10 startups by providing a day worth of marketing consulting. I normally charge between $300-$500 an hour, so you're getting a good deal.
Here's the things I can help you develop: Market Assessment Go-to market strategy Branding/messaging Viral marketing tactics SEO/SEM
PR plan
It all depends on what your particular needs are.
Here's what I expect from the folks I work with: Be a small founding team: 2-3 engineers Have some traction: alpha product or angel money or VC meetings Be prepared to spend a whole day to work with me Must be in Bay Area or (if you spring for Southwest) Seattle/LA
About me: 12 years of marketing experience Worked in social media, mobile, security, consumer electronics and SAAS Launched companies at TechCrunch Disrupt Secured coverage in Advertising Age, NYTimes, USA Today, etc. Former co-founder of venture-backed startup
If you think your startup would benefit from a free day or marketing consulting, shoot me an email:
freemarketingday at gmail
Please send a short note with a few details about your startup, traction and founding team.
Happy Holidays! <comment><USER2> What about startups based in NYC, can we do this via Skype?</comment>


Product Launch Post-Mortem: Primitive for MacOS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fogleman/product-launch-post-mortem-primitive-for-macos-2eee316134ad#.ji5h712v6 <comment><USER2> Never once in the whole article do you mention what your app actually does.

Maybe that was a marketing ploy to try and get the reader to seek it out on the app store, to find out. If so, it didn't work (on me)</comment>


Effects of CPU Caches - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@minimarcel/effect-of-cpu-caches-57db81490a7f <comment><USER3> There are a couple of issues here and there but I'm just glad another software guy is looking into hardware and not just assuming the compiler can figure everything out automatically.

<comment><USER4> I had a Go course (Ultimate Go from William Kennedy) and basically he says he's not going to teach you the language, it's simple enough if you've got a bit of programming experience. Instead, the first day was mostly about the pretty much 1:1 relationship between code and hardware, using show instead of tell, e.g. going through a 2d array row-based or column-based and showing the difference (memory is row based), and also a lot about CPU caches - <USER2> there he gratuitiously showed us a lot of footage from a great presentation from an Intel guy.

<comment><USER5> Any chance the Intel guy presentation is public and you can share? I'd like to take a look myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Few people realize this, but completely random RAM access can have lower throughput than e.g. large linear reads from SSD. That's one of the reasons why I don't trust languages which give me little to no control over data locality.

<comment><USER7> Pages from disk are resident in memory when retrieved, so linear reads from ANY disk (not just an SSD), may be faster than random RAM access at some point (the curves will intersect after you pay the initial seek cost). If you're smart about queuing additional page fetches while traversing existing pages, you can accelerate this even more.

<comment><USER6> Not even when pages are resident in memory. I mean after it gets going, ignoring the initial latency of access, which is indeed staggering by CPU standards. To dramatically slow down memory access it's enough to just miss the cache every time. Here's another thing most people don't know: missing cache results in at least 100-200 cycles of delay to fetch from main RAM. People don't quite get how long that is. A good demonstration is to count aloud to 200. And then realize that if it was L1 hit, you'd be doing several operations simultaneously per every single count. As CPU frequencies increase, this number trends upward. All of a sudden your ~26GB/s of memory bandwidth turns into a pumpkin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQs6IC- vgmo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQs6IC-vgmo)

<comment><USER9> Nice. I was thinking about this lecture too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Because the point of this experimentation was to iterate over a list by > accessing the memory and so to measure the time for each iteration, I had to > be sure every executed operation at each iteration was the most stripped- > down set of instructions. Hard to be shorter than one cpu instruction for > the given loop:

I'll wager that the author didn't look at the generated assembly as if that loop has only one CPU instruction, that instruction would be an increment, making the analysis of cache effects moot.

<comment><USER11> In a handrolled assembly loop, the array pointer can be the iterator itself. In fact, this would be the ideal to compare the linked list version to, as the linked list would not have any kind of incremented iterator except for the pointer itself..

<comment><USER12> Yes you're right! Since I was using the benchmark tools of go test, I had to use this increment. The main goal was to compare exactly same operations between each benchmarks.

However, in the last test I ran, where I was walking indefinitely over the linked list, I guess I was closer to the behavior you're pointing out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the effects first noticed in CS papers maybe 20 years ago is that binary heaps should NOT start from the beginning of a cache line, which is what most programmers would assume would be a wise thing to do. We're always told to align to cache boundaries. If you don't move the root node to the end of a cache line (or at least toward the middle, depending on line size and node size), traversing the heap will touch more lines, since the sibling nodes you need to compare will often/always be in separate cache lines.

<comment><USER12> Hi! I'm sure I misunderstand your comment, but correct me if I'm wrong.

For instance, if each item has a size of 64B (for N=7), which is the size of a cache line, then whatever the position of the first element into the first cache line, the next item will necessary be located into the next cache line. Did I miss something?

<comment><USER13> In a binary heap, there's a single root, but after that, there are pairs of nodes. In your case, the item has the same size of a cache line, so things are not too bad. During traversal, you'll always read two whole lines for each pair of nodes. You could still worry about the CPU cache's n-way associativity, but either that requires a lot of control over memory allocation layout or it will provide diminishing returns.

Anyway, the interesting case is when items are smaller than a line. Look at an array-based implementation of a heap:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_heap#Heap_implementat...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_heap#Heap_implementation)

Root is item 0. Assume it's aligned to a multiple of 64 bytes and you have two 32-byte items per line. When comparing array items 1&2, 3&4, 6&7, etc., notice how the two items are always in different cache lines. Item 1 is in the same line as item 0, not item 2. You're always crossing the line boundary. If the root were at item 1 in the same array (or, equivalently, item 0 in case the array started at a multiple of 64, plus an offset of 32), then each pair would be always in the same cache line.

In case it wasn't clear, I was pointing out a similar phenomenon with other data structures; it wasn't about linked lists.

<comment><USER12> Ok yes!! This is perfectly clear now, thanks. I didn't know, very interesting and a smart optimisation of cache lines use!

I've also read that the processors are able to ask words (of a cache line) in different orders, and so ask for hot words first. It may help a little if this kind of structure was not aligned in an optimized fashion. Doesn't work for HW prefetch, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This dissertation goes into great detail on this topic: [http://people.mpi- inf.mpg.de/~tojot/papers/TowardBetterCompu...](http://people.mpi- inf.mpg.de/~tojot/papers/TowardBetterComputationModelsForModernMachines.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> > The hardware prefetch is not really efficient when N>7, because each list > element is spread over several cache lines, plus the prefetching is not able > to cross page boundaries.

Could you explain the first part of the sentence (about the list elements spreading over several cache lines)? It's true that the elements do not fit into a cache line for N>7\. But is that important for the prefetcher? Shouldn't the regular access pattern to the "en.n" be detected by the streamer prefetcher (without shuffling, of course)?

<comment><USER12> Hi, thanks for your question.

You're right, this is exactly why a few paragraphs later I doubt about that statement, saying that the prefetcher is certainly not reading the entire array and may act exactly like N=7. I think that this is more about the fact that the prefetcher can't cross page boundaries.

That's still right for N<7, though. I still have to dig on this part :)

Thanks again!

<comment><USER15> This page [http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/37989-intel- core-i7-3770k-...](http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/37989-intel- core-i7-3770k-22nm-ivy-bridge/?page=2) claims that i7 CPUs have a "next-page prefetcher". I don't know how different i5 and i7 are. Do you think your i5 CPU doesn't have it?

<comment><USER12> Sorry for the delay, I took some time to perform additional researches.

What I found is that my i5 has the code name "Products formerly Haswell". I don't exactly know if it has the "next-page prefetcher", but I would say yes.

Looking at the document that a reader on Medium linked to me [https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/9e/bc...](https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/9e/bc/64-ia-32-architectures- optimization-manual.pdf)

it looks like the NPP has been introduced into the IVY Bridge family (paragraph 2.4.7), and the paragraph 2.3 says: "The Haswell microarchitecture builds on the successes of the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge microarchitectures.".

That said, how the NPP is working is not really clear. I'd say it's maybe more about prefetching the next page to avoid a TLB misses. In this document I didn't found any statement about crossing a page boundary during data prefetches.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Setting up a mail server and client on Ubuntu using postfix and mutt - <AUTHOR> https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/08/03/ubuntu-postfix-mutt-gmail <comment><USER2> Wow. I almost forgot that Mutt was primarly designed to read local mailbox instead of IMAP, even though I use Mutt every day.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you remember things without tests? - <AUTHOR> I find it hard to remember things that I'm not tested on later. For example, I'm currently reading a fascinating textbook about compilers. I would like to remember the information later on, but without a formal test and the deadline it poses I don't remember anything. How do you deal with this problem? <comment> eigen-vector Take generous notes. With practice, you'll develop your own _language_ for taking notes. Personally, for me, the act of writing down—or typing if that works better for you—is almost as if reading the content twice, which in some sense it is. I go back to my notes every now and then. After years of doing it, I've learned to subconsciously devise an index of my own which is useful for me to remember a gist of what I learned, and also lets me figure out where to go look for if I need a deeper look into it.

Like other comments have mentioned, applying what you learn is also important for recollecting information after any reasonable period. If something's not used by at a later point, is there really a point to remember it? Of course, there's the joy of remembering things just for the sake of it which I'm not discounting. But party trick trivia for some reason has always lasted longer in memory than essentials :-) beats me as to why.

</comment><comment><USER2> I would put the information into practice - in your case, by attempting to build a compiler. The exercise makes the knowledge concrete. Think of it as setting yourself a test.

<comment><USER3> I second this. In order of efficacy:

1) doing a project 2) taking notes 3) simply reading

Best if you can do all 3 in reverse. There's just no substitution for the creative spark and contact with hard reality that doing a project gives you. Any ambiguities, misunderstandings, and missed information are almost guaranteed to be ironed out with a wisely chosen project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They key to memory is spaced repetition. I do it like this:

\- Read the content \- Make 1 / 2 sentence question, or just write the title \- Do something else (coding) for 10 mins \- Come back to it, if you cant remember it, read it again, if I can remember it, keep reading.

At the end of the day, review the notes, and move all the bullet points to another list.

Come back to it tomorrow.

Keep sorting and moving content up and down the lists until your remember it.

I use the mac notes app for this, because then it auto-syncs with my ipad and phone. If I'm on the train, or in the uber, I can get my phone out and do a quick memory jog

</comment><comment><USER5> As noted in other comments, if you build something as you learn the material you'll remember it. My learning strategy is usually:

      Think up idea
      No idea how to implement it
      Look at university lecture notes for background material
      Read lecture notes, read assigned text
      Implement idea while I read the text and notes
      Notice my implementation is poorly inefficient
      Read more advanced notes/papers to optimize
      Rewrite idea, success!

This is exactly what I did when I read _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_ by Andrew Appel. This was the course I used [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~janh/courses/411/17/schedule.html](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~janh/courses/411/17/schedule.html) though it was an earlier version. Afterwards I collected a lot of compiler optimization notes, like here [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15745/syllabus.html](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15745/syllabus.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> On the topic of spaced repetition, have a look at Anki. It's a great tool for aggregating all the stuff you want to remember.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think what you are describing is really how to learn. It's not that you require a test in order to remember material, you just need to implement what you have read in order to reinforce what you have read into memory. Humans remember things a lot better when you have an experience to associate with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> This may not be the answer you're looking for but I'm going to give my 2 cents. This is actually the same with every book we read or subject we study. It is impossible to remember everything all the time. It is actually the deductions we do while studying / reading. That is what improves our brain and thinking ability.

Thing we call knowledge will go away, we will always check books and websites if we are not using it frequently. I really like what Einstein said: Never memorize something that you can look up!

</comment><comment><USER9> I've always found the key to learning is to make the information relevant to you (although in most cases the information is relevant to me before I learn it). Personally, I don't find formal testing / deadlines have helped me learn things, other than as a reason to study.

In the case of compilers, I recommend you build one, or at least deeply consider how you would, as a driver to put the information into use. An an exercise, you could think about what language would put as many concepts in the textbook into use as possible.

</comment><comment><USER10> Summarize in your own words (and drawings) without looking into the textbook. Even better, explain to someone else what you have learned. Best would be to find a study partner, if that's not possible try to write for the public.

Learning occurs when we relate new material to what we already know. Build your own internal knowledge map.

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't a better question how do you remember things after the test? When I was in school on the day of the test I might get x% , two weeks later same test would have been x/2% and probably x/4% the week after. The reinforcement is key, rather than any test it's working on personal projects that apply the knowledge that does it for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Read a section of it. put it down. and then think about it. would you do it that way? what would you do different? how can you benefit from this? where could this be useful?

You really want to know it. Do a project with it.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://nywkap.com/learning/effective- learning.html](http://nywkap.com/learning/effective-learning.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> > How do you remember things without tests?

I study... It's not the tests that help me remember things, it's the studying and working with them.

</comment><comment><USER15> There are very good answers here. One way I think about it is this : if is not needed, it will be deleted.

</comment><comment><USER16> Being curious, what's this textbook?</comment>


Young Grads Are Right to Choose McKinsey over GM - <AUTHOR> https://vanities.blog/entry-level-programs-consulting/ <comment><USER2> While many here will jump to the knee-jerk commentary that yeah, yeah, McK and other consulting companies sell services to companies that are just the obvious MBA bullshit, downsizing, revenue-at-all-cost, etc. there is something good about working for these companies:

The training it gives you is really useful. If you came from a highly technical or non-fast-talking-cut-the-bullshit kind of educational background (or simply haven't worked in a practical, business world), it really does give you training in how to talk, how to present clearly, how to think, and how to organize work. When you're confronted with a complex problem that seems like you should immediately dive into the details and get lost, the kind of training you get teaches you how to think about the output goal, describe the sufficient set of work necessary to prove/disprove the hypothesis, and get the right answer in a set amount of time. Usually it's not rocket science (or the problems where consulting is properly applied isn't rocket science).

The organization and push for productive answers is (often) something that people will look up to you for after you work at one of these companies. (Unfortunately, as a byproduct, you also start to get impatient with people who can't think efficiently, and/or can only describe things by showing you lines of code and an disorganized brain dump that they've never taken the time or effort to clarify in their own mind in a way that's explainable to other people).</comment>


H2 in space explains dark matter and redshift - <AUTHOR> http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/hydrogen/index.html <comment><USER2> Discussion of why it probably doesn't.

[http://www.thephysicsforum.com/astrophysics- cosmology/5948-h...](http://www.thephysicsforum.com/astrophysics- cosmology/5948-h2-dark-matter.html)</comment>