2 pivots, an accelerator, funding, and launch in 16 weeks. Here's the product. - <AUTHOR> http://ooomf.com

<comment><USER2> The primary tagline is really confusing since App Creation implies some sort of PhoneGap competitor. The secondary tagline, on the other hand, really communicates the essence of what you're providing to the consumer:

"Discover the best apps, curated just for you"

I was ready to "bounce" from the page until I read the secondary tagline and clicked on one of the (poorly written and not at all descriptive) buttons like "Geeks are Sexy" to figure out where that button led me to.

My recommendation is to continue building the app but also test copy heavily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments! The goal of our primary tagline is to try and highlight the "Participate & Discovery" aspects of the service. I agree that it needs more work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> May I suggest an 'About' section? Trying to understand how ooomf fits/positions itself compared to other App sites.

(So you guys hand pick apps? While the site is visually appealing, it's hard to make me want to download the apps from your site when it offers only 1 line description of the featured apps - unless you guys are trying to show that the hand picked app are so great that a detailed review/description isn't needed?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the suggestion. How It Works page is coming up soon and we'll make it clear how ooomf fits into the app landscape.

Yes, I agree. There could be further explanations for each app. We should have mentioned somewhere that we manually test every app that is included on the platform (with the exception of the ones that are "coming soon"). Thanks again for the comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discovery is the new search! And with curation the app reccos are even better. Congrats to ooomf on the last 16 weeks. Has been intense!

</comment><comment><USER5> Oompf is awesome! I have had the pleasure to meet the team and these guys will go far! Go Oompf go!

</comment><comment><USER6> i checked out the site, and still don't know what it does. participate and discovery are buzzwords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. We didn't get a How it Works page up for the launch but we're working on that now. We're also working on making the value prop more clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title says it all—the team's amazing and can clearly execute! Looks and feels great, big ups

</comment><comment><USER8> Proof that with a great team you can do anything! Good Job Ooomf!

</comment><comment><USER9> This concept is very promising ! Congrats to the team !

</comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations and best ongoing success to the team.

</comment><comment><USER11> Only iOS? If so, you may want to say that someplace.

</comment><comment><USER12> beautiful design ... what exactly is it?

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks great! Congrats to the team!

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks amazing. Nice work

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


The havoc the XML purists wrought - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/05/19/theHavocTheXmlPuristsWroug.html <comment><USER3> _They say that XML is too complicated, but that's wrong. Just ignore everything but elements, attributes and namespaces. That's what RSS does, and it's very simple. [..] I don't trust would-be platform vendors who won't accomodate all possible developers, esp those who use a language that's so deeply installed as XML is._

He talks as if JSON is somehow "hard" for developers to grok. It's about as simple as you can get. I don't think it's noble to support a subset of XML, where regular JSON would fit better, merely to placate some developers used to doing things the hard way. If anything, API developers should be leading us by the nose to do things the best way.

Even if you "ignore" much of XML, as Winer suggests, you can still stumble into trouble. I've written (and used) a few RSS parsers in my time and dealing with broken XML with a regular XML parser is a gigantic pain in the ass. Many developers don't sanitize their input properly or dump source HTML or XHTML verbatim into their <description> elements. Try throwing _that_ through Expat without thinking about it.. You can screw up JSON too, of course, but it's almost entirely down to quote marks alone.. not tagging, erroneous character encodings, non-existence namespaces, and more.

 _In contrast, Amazon supports XML in their web services, quietly and competently. I can't imagine them saying one day "It's too much work for us to keep supporting XML so you all have to rewrite your code now if you want to keep paying us for the web services you use."_

Amazon's Web Services are good/unique enough for people to put up with the bullshit of XML in order to use it.. though their command line and Web interface tools are good enough that I suspect most users never need to get down to dealing with XML anyway.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of complicated things that aren't complicated anymore if you ignore the complicated parts. (For example, the global financial system.) I don't think that line is a valid argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> XML is more complex than it needs to be, but this article is just ridiculous. XMPP isn't complicated because it uses XML, it's complicated because it's a modern IM protocol. If anything, using XML makes implementing an XMPP library significantly easier than if it had its own wire format.

A better comparison than RSS v. XMPP is RSS v. Atom. And in this comparison, RSS is _by far_ the loser. It's incredibly difficult to write an RSS parser which can handle even a small fraction of the RSS published today, mostly because the standard is absolute garbage. In contrast, an Atom parser can be knocked out in an afternoon.

I'd be happy with a "reduced set" of XML, which excludes stuff like DTDs, named entities, and references. I've never seen these features put to any significant use in real life. But most of XML is quite sane (if a bit verbose).

</comment><comment><USER6> If we follow Winer's advice and use just a simple subset of XML, what does XML buy us that JSON doesn't also provide with less overhead and better readability? (Yes, I know JSON doesn't have namespaces, but I'm not persuaded that namespaces belong in any subset of a data format that can be called "simple".)

<comment><USER7> XML Schema is hilariously painful but it at least exists and is in fairly common use. JSON Schema is still an Internet-Draft that almost nobody seems to be aware of, so JSON-based systems are still at the "garbage in, garbage out" level and will only get worse with maintenance.

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zyp-json-schema-02>

<comment><USER8> XML Schemas are well established in areas like insurance. I worked on a insurance portal in 2001-2002 that made extensive use of the Origo schemas - <USER2> realized that XML is really huge in some areas. To the non-enterprise / HN startup / web dev types it seems that XML can be wished away, but they have no idea of how well entrenched it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I've designed XML files in the past, I use the "tags and attributes" principle. The entire file is tags, and ignored whitespace between the tags. All the data is in attributes. Looks a lot nicer IMO.

What I don't get, with XML in the real world, is why people prefer this...

1<C>2</C>

instead of my preference...

With the first form, you need to write out each tag name twice, and there's ambiguity when whitespace appears between tags. Yet that's what most XML out there looks like. Maybe I'm just odd,

<comment><USER10> A choice between a node and an attribute is not always clear, but there are helpful guidelines out there. A search for _xml nodes versus attributes_ will give you a list of articles to ponder -- sorry for not being more detailed, but I am away from my archives, or else I could have given you links to the places that helped me to visualize it better. Here is one classic, though, from as far back as 1992: <http://xml.coverpages.org/attrSperberg92.html>

EDIT: ok, the first link is to an IBM Research article which I recall having been useful: <http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-eleatt.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always use the same example as why I dislike XML so much

            hi

is not the same as

        hi

But Erik Naggum makes the argument against XML so much more fun

<http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML>

<comment><USER12> How are those two examples different? Every XML system I've used would see those as the same.

I, however, really enjoyed this line from the link. _"I once believed that it would be very beneficial for our long-term information needs to adorn the text with as much meta-information as possible. I still believe that the world would be far better off if it had evolved standardized syntactic notations for time, location, proper names, language, etc, and that even prose text would be written in such a way that precision in these matters would not be sacrificed, but most people are so obsessively concerned with their immediate personal needs that anything that could be beneficial on a much larger scale have no chance of surviving."_

This wonderfully, succinctly explains why efforts like the semantic web are doomed to failure.

<comment><USER13> Technically, they are different. In the first example, there's whitespace between  and  as well  and . Most applications ignore whitespace but they're not required to - whitespace is not ignored in XML.

<comment><USER14> I just died a little inside. Knowing that there are people out there that would inflict this kind of nonsense as a standard for others to use makes one really lose faith in humanity.

<comment><USER7> That's the only way to distinguish

      an emphasized word

from

      anemphasizedword

<comment><USER15> Which makes perfect sense for documents. So why do we use a markup language suitable for documents for general data? Whitespace matters in a document, but does not matter for data. (I'm not accusing you, I'm actually curious if you know the answer. I've never had to deal with XML.)

<comment><USER16> It may matter a lot for some data... When you send a binary file, would you like all of the zeros stripped? Your insignificant data from one perspective is possiblely significant from another perspective.

<comment><USER17> It is not possible to ship binary over XML. Regardless of encoding used, XML rigidly forbids the bytes corresponding to non-whitespace ASCII chars below 32: <http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#charsets> This makes arbitrary binary impossible. You have to base64 encode it or something.

Not entirely relevant to your point, but worth bringing up. (XML doesn't ever mangle binaries, because it simply forbids them.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dynamic graph of occupations in the U.S. (1850-2000) - <AUTHOR> http://flare.prefuse.org/launch/apps/job_voyager

<comment><USER2> I didn't notice at first, but if you start typing in the search box in the upper left, it pulls out individual professions. Pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> One trend I see is towards more specialization i.e,. less big blocks as you go to the right.

It's neat to see how farming has gone from a major percentage of workers to almost nothing. I kept hoping to see some big block of jobs in our time that could go away in the next 100 years. But nothing jumped out at me.

<comment><USER4> Truck drivers maybe

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know what "operative" is?

<comment><USER4> operative ( _plural_ operatives)

      1. An employee or other worker with some particular function or skill.
      2. A spy, secret agent, or detective.

I'm voting for number 2.

<comment><USER3> wow, I've never heard that word yet 7% of the population lists that as their job. Strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The most interesting thing might be the fraction of workers that are male. There is a large jump in female employment around 1960, which isn't surprising. But apparently, there was also a big jump in 1860!?

<comment><USER6> The civil war killed a lot of dudes.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If hackers fall into "Engineer" category, there's only around 0.25% of them

</comment><comment><USER7> This is so great. If only it had more granularity, a longer tail of obscure occupations. There's a lot to be observed here about terminology, too: compare 'constable' and 'police*'.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, that "Manager/Owner" is the most stable occupation. And all the other (larger) occupations are coming and going.

<comment><USER9> Also carpenters and general artisans. Fairly constant % of the population for the last 100 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Growing I can see only Manager/Owner, Clerical worker, Nurse and Cook. Oh, and Professional.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bus drivers in 1850?? Unless 'bus' is taken as a generic term

<comment><USER7> Same then as now: a mass transit vehicle. Pulled by horses back then, though. And usually a private business.</comment></comment>


CentOS 7 Public QA Release - <AUTHOR> http://seven.centos.org/2014/06/centos-7-public-qa-release/ <comment><USER2> It looks like the EPEL repo is slowly getting populated as well [https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/](https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/)

</comment><comment><USER3> In case you're overeager like me and are frantically searching for ISOs to try out:

> Currently, we only have RPM packages online, but will be bringing > installable media online as soon as we have it ready.

</comment><comment><USER4> Has CentOS made the switch to MariaDB with 7? (I'm assuming so, since CentOS 7 is based on RHEL 7, correct?)

<comment><USER2> Yes they've switched to MariaDB 5.5.35 [http://buildlogs.centos.org/c7.00.03/mariadb/20140610212439/...](http://buildlogs.centos.org/c7.00.03/mariadb/20140610212439/5.5.35-3.el7.i386/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm eagerly waiting for Scientific, but there's no word on when to expect it that I know of</comment>


Captured DNS Requests from a Huawei P30 Pro Purchased Brand New in Thailand - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19723940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19723940).

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3685669](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3685669)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://hn.premii.com/#/article/19723940](https://hn.premii.com/#/article/19723940)</comment>


Magic Leap trying to sell for $10B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/magic-steep/ <comment><USER2> I had a chance to use one of the Meta headsets (Magic's primary competitor) a few months before they went under. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty cool to walk around a 3D model wearing a headset, but the UX was nowhere close to practically useable and the picture quality was too faint to do anything serious. There's undoubtedly some kind of value in the tech and IP, but I can't see these things being used for much anytime soon. VR is light years ahead in terms of practical potential, and it's not really getting off the ground either. I can't see them getting anything remotely close to $10B.

<comment><USER3> > VR is light years ahead in terms of practical potential

i agree VR is light years away (it's been just around the corner for years), but i don't even understand its potential. what are the big applications? i just can't get around its usefulness for anything but maybe video games.

<comment><USER4> Gaming will be big in VR once the price / quality ratio reaches a reasonable level. I kind already did.

In 11 days Valve will release Half Life: Alyx which is the most awaited VR game ever. I suggest you to tune in, it might shed some light on why it's so cool.

<comment><USER5> The games are honestly trash right now, at least for the Oculus. You play them for about 15 minutes, and it becomes stale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chase, google, and a ton of others (I think even pichai personally) put big bets a few years back. ML portrayed the aurora of Snapchat, but ultimately their secrecy killed them as well.

Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)

I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could tell

<comment><USER7> No, it wasn't secrecy that killed them. It was incompetence. Gross incompetence all throughout the company. Source: I worked there for a little over a year as a techlead/unofficial director -- even relocating to Florida.

<comment><USER6> Was there a reason why ML was in Florida?

<comment><USER7> Because Rony wanted it to be, and no other reason. From a hiring perspective, it was an absolute nightmare.

<comment><USER8> This is an anecdote, and I don't want it to come off as rude.

I know a person who is currently a director at ML. The simple fact they were hired and placed in an administrative/managerial role is enough to tell me never to work there. Shame too because I think the tech is cool and I'm fairly well qualified for the jobs this person posts incessantly on LinkedIn.

Don't mind South Florida either, go canes. Also 20% off the salary of most regions, but also no state income tax and relatively cheap home prices if you go up to Broward.

<comment><USER9> Doubtful their location ranks high on the list of reasons they couldn't hire. I interviewed there and one of the major reasons I was excited was that it would give me a good reason to move back to Florida. The interview was, to put it nicely, unusual. The highlight of it was trying to have a conversation with a director who sounded like he was driving down I-95 in a convertible, and was getting frustrated that I couldn't understand a word he was saying.

<comment><USER8> I absolutely think the region is high on the list of reasons they can't hire. They pay less for worse jobs at lamer companies and don't have money flowing to startups. Magic Leap was very much the exception, and it's kinda cool because it's there because the founder liked it, just like Shockley thought NorCal was dope.

And much like Shockley semi I think ML is a flash in the pan. But unlike Shockley Semi, Abovitz didn't hire an equivalent of the traitorous 8 because they already worked out here and got paid way more money to hang out at a FAANG or startup.

Everyone I'd want to work with from my time in South Florida is either out of the area or trying to leave. It pays like shit, and there is no money or companies down there to make cool shit to make up for it. Besides ML. But it appears that is shifting.

<comment><USER10> I moved from San Francisco to South Florida as an experiment in being fully remote. It's been pretty good so far, but if I was looking for another job, I'd hit up everyone I know in SF for a remote position first.

There aren't many like-minded people here, and that's kind of nice for a change. I still love San Francisco, but it simply priced me out of living there. I'd rather retire in 5 years here than work another 30 there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny because I'm still getting probed by their recruiters almost on a monthly basis for several of their positions. Perhaps because I live 5 minutes away from their HQ. ;-)

It's a shame but not a surprise. I have friends and acquaintances that have worked or still work there, and yet I wouldn't vent details of what I know here, everyone knows they have been struggling with their technology, overpromise and growth. Archetype of the "too much money in too little time" syndrome, and a despair to deliver and build a successful company. Be careful with what you wish for.

I don't know Abovitz personally, though I have worked with people who worked with or under him since the early Z-KAT days and he is well regarded. Contrary to what most think about engineers in South Florida (or Florida in general), we have some very capable people here. Companies complain that they can't find good talent. However most of the time they cannot put their money where their mouth is and commit over the local "market price", which is comparatively low, to secure a good hire. It has certainly been an issue in my career, indeed. But guess what? We faced the same difficulties in one of my companies finding the right people when I lived in the Bay area a couple of years ago. The answer is not that simple.

Having worked mostly in startups through my life, from the outside it amazes me how they were trying to spread out so early. When I first heard about them they were pitching movie producers, but after they got their first $50M things started going crazy. I once dated a girl who was a writer producing fancy literary content far before they had shipped anything. This was way before they hired Stephenson. I have experience in medical devices and robotics, and their recruiters have contacted me offering positions for healthcare applications, and also a very pushy one was trying to convince me to move to their Sunnyvale office where they have a robotics team. Think industrial manipulators. Then they go out and sue their once employee Gary Bradski for doing his usual Bradski things and for which he is lauded in the valley... but not here it seems. Certainly they have management problems due to lack of experience.

It would be painful if they fail. They have been the most funded tech company in the state and at least they managed to ship, something many startups are unable to demonstrate.

<comment><USER12> I am also close to their hq. Would love to get together and talk tech. Email in profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The company isn't just magically worth billions because they want it to be and want to exit. That may have worked years ago but those days are over.

They're worth something relative to the revenues they've been able to generate. The IP is also worth something but given the cold shoulder from the FAANGs of the world probably not as much as they'd like.

At some level these sales start to look like a stubborn buyer that's asking far too much for their house. It will sell but a painful reset of valuation expectations is clearly required if one wants a sale to close.

<comment><USER14> Ultimately, companies are not sold, they are bought. Without a willing buyer, they have no hope

<comment><USER15> > Ultimately, companies are not sold, they are bought.

What does that even mean? Companies are both sold and bought. One implies the other. There are always willing buyers for entities with non-negative value. Hell, I'm a willing buyer for Magic Leap, at the right price.

<comment><USER16> > What does that even mean?

It means the number of potential buyers for a company is generally small. That it's a buyer's market: [https://www.redfin.com/guides/buyers-market-vs- sellers-marke...](https://www.redfin.com/guides/buyers-market-vs-sellers- market)

> Hell, I'm a willing buyer for Magic Leap, at the right price.

You almost certainly aren't. Magic Leap is burning money at an incredible rate, reportedly $50 million/month. Even if you could buy it for $1 over their cash on hand, you'd be a fool to do it, as you'd have to spend the next several months laying people off, negotiating with creditors, liquidating assets, and fending off lawsuits. It would be miserable, and there's a good chance you'd have little to show for your time.

Any serious buyer would expect to put another couple billion in cash in just to get it to where it has a product people will actually pay money for. I'm guessing that isn't you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The more bad news like this is coming out, makes me wonder _what did they show to the initial investors_ \- it MUST have been something incredible, that was probably too bulky to wear and that they didn't manage to miniaturise.

I really hope someone talks about that after they either go broke or get acquired.

<comment><USER18> >makes me wonder what did they show to the initial investors - it MUST have been something incredible

Cocaine.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel like this is the new WeWork, and I almost guarantee Matt Levine will write about this tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm thinking early investors have largely written this off in their mind. They would probably be happy to take small fraction of $2 billion they put in at this point. Realistically, would they even get $200 million?

<comment><USER21> The device is pretty good. It really achieves some tremendous stuff and has a highly polished user experience, so I'd say that just by the merit of its IP it's worth at least $200 MM.

I think their problem is basically timing. Nobody wants this thing right now. Nobody wants it in that specific form factor. And nobody wants to create content for a platform with such a high price point and unexpected future.

It's an egg and chicken situation. I can see why Facebook doesn't want them or need them since they probably have been developing parallel IP in their Oculus division.

Apple may be also very deep into the development and exploration of its own AR (which is already evident by accelerated development of ARKit).

Microsoft has its own competitor for years (Hololens).

So I think is really a problem of who might want all this IP and who can use it meaningfully to create a solid pipeline of AR products.

Again. Their problem is definitely timing. Consumers, content creators, and companies definitely want this type of technology. But not until they can have something with the same footprint as a pair of reading glasses. I think we are still very far from that.

<comment><USER22> I would think Google would want it, instant visual product search using the cameras is probably one of the killer apps for this on the consumer side. And oh, the data collection opportunities about the real world would have them salivating.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, that was the promise of Google Glass. And they killed that off before they got _really_ into killing things off for fun. Nobody wanted it.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, solving the glasshole problem is still kind of the crux.

<comment><USER24> Stamp "Mega Brand Name(tm)" on the side, charge $10,000 for it, and pay a bunch of NBA players and rap stars to wear it around in public.

Now it's a fashion accessory that everybody wants.

<comment><USER25> They are selling these for ~$6000. They already tried this marketing approach with Shaquille O'Neil. It's just not that cool to wear googles on your head.

<comment><USER22> Eh? The ML One is ~$2-3k. Or are you talking about something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> By the way, it's not a secret in the electronics circles here that Apple is still working on its own version of Magicleapy VR goggles.

For example, they made an entire new semiconductor unit just to make microled displays for it.

They also been hiring, and buying companies in light field imaging field for years now, and they may add a light field imaging/display into the mix.

I think Magicleap knows now that Apple is miles ahead of them, and tries to sell while they still can

<comment><USER27> This probably is going to come off the wrong way, but there has not been an "innovative" product to come out of Apple that truly impresses me since Steve Jobs died. It feels like the company has learned how to optimize what they already have, and its innovations are fueled by fumes.

<comment><USER28> Neither AirPods nor Apple Watch come off as impressive? That's pretty pessimistic. I'd say both were highly innovative and impressive -- further pushing miniaturization both of the physical hardware and the user interface.

<comment><USER29> Except that neither of which were invented by Apple?

<comment><USER30> Apple didn't invent the smart phone or the mp3 player either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess the word "magic" is cursed. General Magic, GetMagic.com, and now this (not that we didn't see it coming)...

<comment><USER32> Magic the Gathering still going strong in its 26th year. Performing alchemy transmuting cardboard into gold.

<comment><USER33> Magic the Gathering Online Exchange isn't, lol.

<comment><USER34> Well duh. Collectibles are basically non-fungible by definition. How are you going to have an automated exchange for them?

/s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This was the outcome for a long time now. They had a lot of infighting to begin with. They couldn't agree on who leads and where the development needs to happen. I predicted that they will sell back to google for a discount a while ago and it still might happen.

</comment><comment><USER36> I am going to do a reality check that will probably be unpopular, but it doesn't matter...

While MS had products like hololens out, Magic Leap was still "in stealth". This is the same company that was "worth billions" before they even released a product or before they had made public whatever product they wanted to sell. The marketing videos they produced early on (which were impressive) look _nothing_ like the technology that was released years later. Look up the expectation vs reality videos of if you want a laugh.

Now they want out at a crazy valuation.

When the economy is "good" and there is plenty of dumb cash lying around (think these past years of bubble build up), an expert sweet talker is able to command money away from the vision fund type of folks. However, then the situation is like we are right now, we go back to the basics... things like market-fit, income, revenue, growth, sustainability... the healthy business.

We need the bubbles of the Magic Leaps, WeWorks and all the other unsustainable unicorn startups to burst. This is what will bring us back to industry sanity. The first dotcom bubble burst made our industry better. I hope this one does, too.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've sold some AR projects to customers. Just product visualizations for trade fairs etc. nothing too fancy. It's cool and fun to work with but my takeaway was that for many practical applications it's pretty cost/time intensive to work on the non-technical parts of the projects (tuning the models and scenes so they look photorealistic). The devil is in the details. For example our typical projects involved getting CAD data from customers and turning it into a fairly simple AR-App. Most of the time was spent on fixing the models in various ways (and that's fairly hard to automate imo). UX is also really tricky.

Reminds me a bit of the cost of working with data vs. the actual models in ML. The models and tuning them and playing with them is the cool stuff but most of the competitive advantages (imo) come from mastering the data part.

I learned a lot from my ventures into AR and it was fun and I've kept a mindset of pretending there was an AR device in contact-lense form to brainstorm what one could do with this breakthrough every now and then. But there's really not much beyond "novelty effect" and gaming I see as interesting products today. Even in areas where AR solutions are deployed in industry (warehousing and logistics), I feel that less glamorous solutions would provide similar benefits.

All that being said, long term I'm quite optimistic that the technology will bring very interesting changes and things I cannot imagine right now.

</comment><comment><USER6> Chase, google, and a ton of others (I think even pichai personally) put big bets a few years back. ML portrayed the aurora of Snapchat, but ultimately their secrecy killed them as well.

Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)

I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could trll

</comment><comment><USER38> This is just going to a We Work in headset category. Along with the end of bull market today, many startups burning cash will go kaput. Their tech is not worth more than a few hundred million $. It would have been it worth a lot had it succeeded, unfortunately didn't. Maybe hololens/quest have a shot.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does Neal Stephenson still work for/with them?

<comment><USER40> Page is up on his website, but no content there: [https://www.nealstephenson.com/magic- leap.html](https://www.nealstephenson.com/magic-leap.html)

<comment><USER41> Chief Futurist? kek

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have both a Magic Leap One and a HoloLens 1. I've done work on both. I also have every major VR headset, which I have also written software for each. I've been working in AR for about 10 years, and VR for almost 6.

And honestly, with the latest OS updates, the HoloLens 1, even today, is still the better device. You can compare specs on a sheet of paper all day long, but there are fundamental flaws in the Magic Leap hardware and software that prevent it from being a good user experience. The HoloLens, on the other hand, is just old.

Magic Leap's battery/compute pack turned out to not give it an appreciably longer battery life, while also making the device uncomfortable, as the cable constantly tugs on the back of your head. The HoloLens isn't comfortable, either, but that's mostly because the vast majority of people completely ignored the little, rubber strap that came in the case that you attach across your to take the bulk of the weight of the device.

The WiFi and Bluetooth an my ML are constantly failing. I've used three different units and have had the same experience on all of them.

The controller _constantly_ loses tracking. It uses magnetic tracking and it just doesn't do well. Also, the sensor is on the right side of the headset, and it is legitimately worse to use the controller in your left hand. It's also way too complicated for just-a-pointer, while not being complicated enough for a bespoke user input device. HoloLens has a clicker instead. It's superfluous, but it does the job and doesn't fail.

The hand tracking is too broken to actually use. HoloLens' hand tracking isn't anything to write home about, but I've never encountered it doing something _blatantly wrong_. It's just slow. Magic Leap's is similarly slow _and_ often wrong.

This goes hand-in-hand with the ML SDK being poorly documented and rather incomplete. One way HoloLens gets around its rather limited user input capability is by giving you voice recognition out of the box. And in writing software, it's incredibly easy to setup. It's also relatively easy (though takes some thoughful design) to create a speech-based UI that works reliably. Magic Leap, on the other hand, talks about how great it would be to have speech-recognition, but offers nothing in their 1st-party demos to demonstrate it and nothing in their SDK to implement it.

The operating system on ML is a hacked-up Android system. I'm sooooo over trying to do 3D graphics on Android systems. All the standalone VR headsets are also a gigantic pain for developing software. If you've ever developed software for the HoloLens, it's a joy in comparison.

And Microsoft did a lot to make 2D applications an integral, usable, and useful part of Windows Holographic. While Magic Leap has its own version of that feature, they bury the documentation and don't provide any good samples. Whereas, on HoloLens, you can basically run any pure UWP app, whether it was made for the HoloLens or not.

<comment><USER43> Your point about the software ecosystem is very good. I think the advantage you're talking about stems mostly from how Hololens is a first-class Windows 10/10X platform now, serving as one of their flagship new platforms for their new OS. It was clear from early on they wanted Windows Holographic to be clear extension/continuation of their goal for UWP to be the new write-once, run- everywhere platform (even if that goal was a bit aspirational/unrealistic).

That positioned Hololens as a more competent general-purpose computing platform. That's a valuable perspective to have on what AR/XR is supposed to look like: new, but not entirely new, and flexible enough to be able to run the old software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The writing was on the wall for a few years, to me it is the WeWork version of VR.

<comment><USER45> They're into AR, not VR. It seems that these two markets will remain separate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> They'll be lucky to get $500M

</comment><comment><USER47> I've got news for Magic Leap. Nobody is spending $10B on anything as speculative as AR/VR right now, with the macro environment being what it is. Maybe $1B.

</comment><comment><USER48> Do we have any reporting on their runway?

</comment><comment><USER49> Try 1 Billion

</comment><comment><USER50> just like Playground Global, Andy Rubins VC firm taking over CastAR and trying to pump valuation without releasing any product, ending in whole thing burning to the ground with IP sold off for pennies on the dollar back to founders and original IP creators.

</comment><comment><USER51> The keyword right there is without a doubt "trying" (^_^)

</comment><comment><USER52> Trying to find the flute meme. Has Winston Smith removed it?

</comment><comment><USER53> In _this_ economy? Bahahahahahahaha

</comment><comment><USER54> people won't get into wearable AR until its a contact lens

</comment><comment><USER55> Not in this market

</comment><comment><USER56> Shocker

</comment><comment><USER57> What is there to sell? What's the product?

</comment><comment><USER58> AR has no use case. None. Feel free to name one.

So better than VR, doesn't need generic human level artificial intelligence, and wouldn't work as well from just talking in your ear.

<comment><USER16> I agree it may not have many consumer use cases, but there are a fair number of industrial ones. Boeing has been experimenting with AR for decades [1], and they're still working on it: [https://www.boeing.com/features/2018/01/augmented- reality-01...](https://www.boeing.com/features/2018/01/augmented- reality-01-18.page)

And I think that points at some consumer uses, too. Basically anything where people are already using their hands has AR potential. When I still owned a car, I would have loved to have the repair manual info overlaid on whatever I was looking at. But so far I don't think anybody's found much compelling enough to pay what AR systems cost.

[1] See "Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality" ch 14.

<comment><USER58> AR won't get you manuals.

There will be less AR manuals since they will have to produce both paper and AR.

To recognise parts will take pretty good pattern recognition, but possible, what can a phone do now?

But the next step will take AI at a fairly high level if it's guiding you through a process.

If a camera can look at a motor and 'see' what to do, then just a voice telling you want to do will be close to brilliant and useful now, camera and speakers are easy.

True a overlay would be better, but the underline tech is AI, if you can make this AI then no need for AR at this stage, sell it now if it's possible.

<comment><USER16> Nah. I don't want a voice telling me what to do. I want what manuals give me: supplementary information related to what I'm looking at.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why does the MacBookAir feel better than the MacBookPro? - <AUTHOR> http://uxhero.com/blog/why-does-the-macbookair-feel-better-than-the-macbookpro/ <comment><USER2> >Expectations about computers have changed. What matters now is heft, portability, battery life, how it fits your bag, and how cool it looks at the coffee shop. Not how fast it is, but how fast it feels. It's not about specs, it's about the experience.

For most of the consumer market, this has been true for a very long time. Those who don't know much about computers will buy what is visually appealing over how it functions and those who do care more about how well the things going to hold up.</comment>


Dotfiles and dev tools provisioned by Ansible - <AUTHOR> http://palcu.blogspot.com/2014/06/dotfiles-and-dev-tools-provisioned-by.html <comment><USER2> Several months ago, I became pretty interested in the idea of a unified computer setup. Between my home computers and work computers, it began weighing on me mentally to have to switch contexts all the time. I'd forget which machine had `wget`, which `fish` functions were installed on which host, etc. The most tedious thing was the process of setting up a new computer: painstakingly finding each and every little configuration I had on my other machines, and copying them over. I'd spend half a day just setting up a new machine. I wanted something better.

I first tried Ira's [mackup]([https://github.com/lra/mackup](https://github.com/lra/mackup)), which syncs files to Dropbox. Its catch-all approach scared me, though, as it backs up `fish` history by default. I decided to move to something different.

I ended up basing my dotfiles setup on the GNU [stow]([https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/](https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/)) utility. Here's how it works:

\- In `~`, I have a git-managed directory `dotfiles`

\- For every new app I use, I make a new directory in `dotfiles`. For example, `vim`, `fish`, etc.

\- I run `stow` on all these directories, and it symlinks everything into place

I ended up rolling my own update script, but it's pretty trivial. I also made heavy use of Homebrew brewfiles, which can be used to define what commands you would like to run through Homebrew. I also use [Homebrew Cask]([http://caskroom.io/](http://caskroom.io/)) to install apps.

In the end, I now have the exact same configuration on all my machines. For work, I have a separate branch, which has other fish functions / utilities. I recently got a new computer, and I ran the `update.sh` script while I went to lunch. When I came back, my machine was ready to go.

Take a look at my setup [here]([https://github.com/peterhajas/dotfiles](https://github.com/peterhajas/dotfiles)).

<comment><USER3> I think it would be better to use the "\--no-folding" argument to stow in your update.sh script, otherwise stow will do something which I find undesired:

\- let's say you have a file ~/dotfiles/vim- powerlinefonts/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/10-powerlinefonts.conf and you don't have the ~/.config/fontconfig directory

\- when you do "stow vim-powerlinefonts" in the dotfiles directory it will create ~/.config/fontconfig as a symlink to your ~/dotfiles/vim- powerlinefonts/.config/fontconfig directory so now you can't add other fontconfig files in ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d

\- if instead you do "stow --no-folding vim-powerlinefonts" in the dotfiles directory it will create ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/ and there it will symlink 10-powerlinefonts.conf to ~/dotfiles/vim- powerlinefonts/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/10-powerlinefonts.conf, which is usually what you want.

<comment><USER4> I generally prefer xstow[1] to GNU Stow (if for no other reason than that it doesn't require perl) -- and I couldn't find a reference to --no-folding -- however, at least xstow appear to do the right thing:

        stow $ find ..
        ..
        ../stow
        ../stow/a
        ../stow/a/c
        ../stow/a/c/a
        ../stow/a/c/b
        ../stow/b
        ../stow/b/c
        ../stow/b/c/c
        ../stow/b/c/c/a

        $ xstow b
        $ ls -l ..
        total 4
        lrwxrwxrwx 1 e12e e12e    8 Jun 22 16:47 c -> stow/b/c
        drwxr-xr-x 4 e12e e12e 4096 Jun 22 16:44 stow

        #drumrolll...
        $ xstow a
        $ ls -l ..
        total 8
        drwxr-xr-x 2 e12e e12e 4096 Jun 22 16:48 c
        drwxr-xr-x 4 e12e e12e 4096 Jun 22 16:44 stow
        e12e@stripe:~/tmp/stowtest/stow $ ls -l ../c
        total 0
        lrwxrwxrwx 1 e12e e12e 13 Jun 22 16:48 a -> ../stow/a/c/a
        lrwxrwxrwx 1 e12e e12e 13 Jun 22 16:48 b -> ../stow/a/c/b
        lrwxrwxrwx 1 e12e e12e 13 Jun 22 16:48 c -> ../stow/b/c/c

So as long as the symlink is managed by (xstow) -- subdirs will be created as needed. If your point was more about mixing (x)stow'ed and non-stowed files in directories, then you would still want to make sure (x)stow makes the directories, and only symlinks files.

I'm not sure if there's an (easy) way to make xstow do that.

[1] [http://xstow.sourceforge.net/](http://xstow.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, I was thinking specifically about mixing stowed and non-stowed files in directories, that's why I chose the fontconfig example: it's likely that I will want to add files there that I don't want to stow/sync to other machines. I also find it cleaner using --no-folding and easier to reason about. I remember feeling surprised and not understanding what stow did the first time I used it without --no-folding. Some people might actually prefer the folding behavior, I just wanted to highlight that the default behavior might not be what one would expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why ansible? I'm storing my dotfiles in a private git repo and sync across multiple laptops. Works fine so far.

Put the dotfiles and directories into git. Symlink from ~/.vim to ~/dotfiles/.vim and be done with it. (~/dotfiles would contain the git checkout of course).

<comment><AUTHOR> I was also using a simple bootstrap script and I too felt I was "killing mosquitos with a bazooka" using Ansible.

But I wanted to symlink my Sublime settings. That meant tinkering with shell code and separating the files in different dirs. Then I wanted to preinstall my Brew apps, but only for Mac.

So these tasks pilled up in shell scripts and became ugly. So Ansible, with it's easy YAML configs, is the perfect tool for a dev like me that wants to setup machines and maintain the configurations synced.

<comment><USER6> You should take a look at GNU stow. I also felt the same frustration as my bootstrap script got ugly and uglier. And then I shifted to stow. And now its just a single line:

        stow * --target ~

With respect to ansible, I've been thinking of managing my laptop using just ansible to install new packages, and update configuration (apache, sshd and so on). Kinda like chef-solo, but using ansible. Has anyone done anything like that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip about Stow, never knew about it and I will research it.

Ansible can be used for your local machine without any central server by default. I use this[0] playbook to update my packages daily on my DigitalOcean machines.

[0]: [https://github.com/palcu/dotfiles/blob/master/playbooks/task...](https://github.com/palcu/dotfiles/blob/master/playbooks/tasks/ubuntu.yml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That has to be the worst webdesign I have seen this week. Not only does it require JS to show anything but a blank page but it displays an "inner-window" window. Dear web gods, why?

[http://i.imgur.com/qBHLCac.png](http://i.imgur.com/qBHLCac.png)

<comment><USER8> FWIW, Google Cache can serve you HTML for these Dynamic Views blogs; just prefix the URL with [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache):

e.g. [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://palcu.blogspot.com/2014/06/dotfiles- and-dev-tools-provisioned-by.html)

Incidentally, it's the _only_ place you can get HTML for these blogs, and I suspect that Blogspot has special-cased Googlebot to give it HTML instead a pile of JavaScript.

For convenience, I have this bookmarklet bound to my 'c' keyword in Firefox:

      javascript:(function(){window.open('https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:'+(''+window.location));})();

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the tip. I'm using NoScript/HTTPSwitchboard and have long been frustrated by javascript being required to show even simple posts on blogspot.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your monitor set up? - <AUTHOR>

I'm using a 28" monitor at 1920x1200. I get to see a lot of text, and the text is as big and clear as it gets. I used to work with a dual 19" monitor setup, but now I don't have space on my desk for an extra monitor... <comment><USER2> At home, 15" laptop set to 1440x900 and external 22" set to 1920x1080. At work, 15" laptop set to 1680x1050 and external 19" set to 1440x900.

Obviously I use two different laptops, but I'd rather go with my home setup than my work setup.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a desktop w/ a 19" next to my pc laptop - 15", next to my macbookpro 13" with external 23" its a lot of monitors, but I like it a lot.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dual 24s set up horizontally</comment>


Last U.S. Tank leaves Germany 68-Years after VE-Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.stripes.com/news/us-army-s-last-tanks-depart-from-germany-1.214977

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't help but think that they should have left some of those tanks in, say, Poland, just to keep Putin honest. Just' sayin.</comment>


Ask HN: Review their startup - icount.com  - <AUTHOR>

A startup I worked closely with over the summer just launched and is looking for feedback. I've talked to them about the HN community and told them to sign up but haven't seen them do anything yet. Hopefully some good feedback would encourage them to join us!<p>icount is a social network for politics. They help you find the issues that matter to you and help you connect with your representitives. From what I understand, they are working directly with many politicians to make this their main communication platform. <comment><USER2> The core idea is certainally a good one. Creating a closer connection between the voters and the politicains is needed. If politicians are willing to take it seriously then it has great potentional.

Some initial impressions is I wold second it dosn't seem fully polished. The left menu wasn't actually links in IE8 and the most apparant search is a search for other users. It would seem most beneficial to have it be searching for Elected Officials. I did see the search in the top right that would search Officials, Candiated, and users which is of help. I also noticed that the summaries on Legislations is showing as straight text so you are seeing HTML code.

It also would be beneficial to have some filtering options. Such as sorting by Legislation Type(what it effects), Where a candidate/Official is located and what level of the Government are they apart of.

With a little UI work it can grab the users and has great potential. However these little things can stop from getting a more casual group which is what the site will need to reah that potential.

Just some initial impressions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea! Hope this means politicians will start listening to their voting base rather than special interest groups.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the idea is interesting, I just want to see the UX developed. It's all really rough right now. The y definitely didn't wait to release before it was fully polished ;)

The big thing I see is that it's really hard to figure out what you're supposed to do on the site - or what they even expect you to do.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clicky - <http://bit.ly/icount>

The link will auto connect you with me. Follow some issues and say hi. They could really use feedback on the registration process, UI and usefulness of the idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> The UI needs some work. Especially on the "left navigation" area to make it more useful. But I really liked finding my elected officials when I validated.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting idea. Something needs to happen to get politicians listening better.</comment>


CERN opts for open-source software in light of Microsoft price hikes - <AUTHOR> https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/06/cern-opts-for-open-source-software-in-light-of-microsoft-price-hikes <comment><USER2> Additional discussion of the project announcement with 73 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166070)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there an open source version of Comic Sans?

<comment><USER4> I do love that my kids' birth certificates from King County (which Redmond is within) is printed in a Comic Sans variant. Reap what you sow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do they have a complete list of alternatives required? Because official MALT link requires authentication.

<comment><USER6> a link from the other thread (20166070) to reddit links to this image: [https://i.imgur.com/ey47BlL.png](https://i.imgur.com/ey47BlL.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder who at Microsoft handled this relationship and what pressure are they under now.</comment>


Demystifying the TechCrunch effect - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/demystifying-the-techcrunch-effect/

<comment><USER2> On the plus side, you are now As Seen In TechCrunch, and if you think your customers care about that I would mention it on your front page and sales pages. if in doubt, I suppose you could find some way to do an A/B test :)

Plus it goes in every solicitation for coverage from here out, until you get better social proof (like a NYT article).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, still recovering from TC effect. Now it is time to start leveraging it!

I don't have it on the homepage (yet), but should A/B test it for sure :)

<comment><USER3> I would suggest less text on the homepage too, or at least get some kind of better image-text ratio going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since 2006 I've had four separate sites and two separate companies covered by Tech Crunch, a couple of them with multiple stories. The effects of each crunch were slightly different but I'd call almost all of them positive.

The biggest thing Tech Crunch provides is not traffic or users, but awareness within the industry. In every instance the traffic that TC sent was fleeting at best and our sites, while technologically impressive, had nothing to do with a tech audience, so we never gained users from them.

Over the years I've noticed that the actual traffic sent is less than before. This has very little to do with a change of influence with them, but in the fact that they now have more writers and more blog posts. The stories don't live as long as they used to. 3k uniques though is generally on the low side.

The awareness that TC provides though is great. In the first years especially it helped provide some easy networking for a couple nerds that were very unlikely to leave their code dungeons. Don't discount the ego boost of attention which gives you the thought you're working on something that might actually be a success.

Also don't forget the baffling amount of lazy biz-dev guys at VCs who have very little in the way of drumming up new companies other than calling up every company featured on TC with a decent design and idea. Never bet on these kinds of calls, it's just something that is part of the business.

Concentrate on your product above all else.

</comment><comment><USER5>
       "No, we are a proof that the TechCrunch club is not
        hyper-exclusive and if your startup has a good product
        or service, they will eventually cover you."

I actually got the opposite impression. You had to beg and plead to get covered...made posts asking for community support and you only got covered because you just became too big of an annoyance. And let's not forget that you actually got yourself established with paying big name customers first.

Meanwhile the YC company got coverage just for launching.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't call it begging but demanding. There is a sea of difference between these two terms.

That's why I said the club is not hyper-exclusive. Yes, it is difficult to get covered if you aren't funded but not impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, if any one else has other data points it will be great to know if their experiences match mine (as far as getting covered by TC is concerned).

My key lessons:

* Sent less traffic than I expected

* Converted less than average site traffic

* Engaged with site more than average site traffic

* Generated some indirect interest in the company/product

<comment><USER6> I got 5k visits for a little project (aggregator) which got covered in a different time of the week, so I expect the traffic sent is about par for the course. I was surprised there wasn't a bigger 'techcrunch effect' too; I guess not many of those 4M subscribers are particularly engaged!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, a lot lower than I would of thought it would be. Do you think the quality of the article is also a factor of the amount of hits? Or just time of week?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think time of week could have been the greatest factor. But definitely if the article included a video or a screenshot, that could have piqued interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The same thing happens with all major news sources, the benefit is in the incoming links that don't have nofollow on them and the various sources that then reblog and retweet about that post again sending more links back to your site. The traffic boost is fun but it is the long term link back benefit that is actually good.

I get traffic all day long from stumbleupon and that is useless traffic if you want to talk about horrible conversions.

<comment><USER9> You forget the rubber-stamp effect. "As seen on TechCrunch" is a good thing to put on your site, for most businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We recently got our company posted on techcrunch and the numbers line up almost exactly only off by 4% and our traffic has fallen off exactly the same way.

Our post went up on a Monday so day mattered little in at least these two instances.

</comment><comment><USER11> Prepare a network effect before hand if possible. As one person pointed out to me as a critic to our own project: "so what is the multiplier effect, once 1 person signs up? How many more can he invite or get to come?" so that the bump gets feeded back. I don't have the answer yet. Anybody?

<comment><USER12> \+ give some incentive to invite others, like the extra storage space dropbox gives.

<comment><USER2> I would be interested in hearing from startups who have used this to positive effect. My experiment with it was a failure - total flop, got me less new users than $5 of AdWords. This tracks with the experience of a couple companies I have talked with. I am sure there are better ways to do it, and would love hearing some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://upload.imghostr.net/941stats.png>

For anyone interested this is the traffic on instantise.com from the last 2 days. Techcrunch and HN were the main contributors but as you can tell HN kicked TC's ass completely.

Just based on me measuring the time that it happened i'd assign a good 80% of the "Direct" hits to HN. The google referrer is google reader so thats mostly TC.

My estimated breakdown: TC total uniques: 3.5k - 3.8k HN: 7k

<comment><USER14> You actually show much higher engagement from the TC audience than from the HN audience. Highest time on site and lowest bounce rate you got was from TC.

The other note on TC is that it is a brand impression to a lot more readers than what click through. ie. ppl read/scan Techcrunch and will remember brands, only to recall them later. This is part of the '6 impressions' rule that marketers talk about.

There are a lot more stories on TC now though, so your own share of those eyeballs is lower, and is competing with the other companies and startups featured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> TC's 4 million feed subscribers gave you just 3k visits, much much much lower than I'd have expected.

<comment><USER16> I've heard that explained by this: as more stories hit the front page, each individual one stays on the front page for a shorter amount of time, meaning that even though TC is more popular than ever, it actually sends less hits through for each story.

<comment><USER17> Not to mention people can just hit reload and read a new story instead of following a link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. I don't seem to find value in getting covered by TC. At least not if it takes two months that could be spent increasing conversion and retention rates.

Good luck though, looks like a decent tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> The total time investment (over a period of two months) would be a couple of hours. So, in my opinion it was totally worth it.

Thanks for appreciating the tool!

<comment><USER18> Oh :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its also simply quite cool to have Techcrunch - the leading Startup news site - feature your service, if you think about how many startups there are ... congrats!</comment>


You can now officially start using Dogecoin - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361813.0

<comment><USER2> I think this is a parody/satire of bitcoin... hard for me to tell if there's anything of value here. They've set up their own proof-of-work currency with their own website and posted source code for mining daemons, wallets, etc.

<comment><USER3> Of course it is a parody. And have to say, a great one.

It's target at ($someRandomWord)Coin coins which emerged recently. Most of them guarantee to be "gpu, asic and fpga resistant" and what not.

After BTC got mainstream, there is a number of people now mining some random coins (which are not listed in any cryptocurrencies exchanges) in hope that one day they will be worth $1000/coin. much dreams. so rich. much fast money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Difficult to take it seriously. But a good parody, if any, I must say.

<comment><USER5> How is it a good parody? It's just bitcoin + a 4chan meme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Already created facebook page [https://www.facebook.com/Dogecoin](https://www.facebook.com/Dogecoin)

</comment><comment><USER7> DGimmieR7Q3tCwxcoCkqrCCx6Xnjm4f4vA DCoinxzobuWP9WdJWFg5AwmtyLYRN45LAZ

such address

</comment><comment><USER5> Uh, who cares?</comment>


Proof That Facebook Is Surpassing Reddit's Audience Share - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-reddit-traffic-share-stats-data-numbers-2014-1

<comment><USER2> If Facebook can launch a product like Reddit with current user base, it'll be huge! It will a massive engagement done by real people and submission by publishers themselves all the time.</comment>


Google promised not to scan Gmail for targeted ads–but for how long? - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/google-promised-not-to-scan-gmail-for-targeted-ads-but-for-how-long/ <comment><USER2> Google must really make a crazy amount of money to be able to provide "free" 15Gb for each Google account. I don't know how many Google Account there is total, but that must be huge. To compare, Apple is giving 5Gb per iCloud account. Same thing with Microsoft.

I was thinking about this the other day. We're in 2017 and the amount of storage needed for Fb, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc is likely to be gargantuan and more and more people are getting online every year. Now imagine in 2030, 2060, 2090...

We'll reach a point where we, our children, their children, etc, will be dead and all of our stuff will still be archived in servers somewhere for God know how long.

<comment><USER3> Not too concerned about that volume.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center)</comment></comment>


Show HN: HR code – Designed to be recognized by humans and OCR - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hantuzun/hr-code <comment><USER3> The problem with this is that it's prone to error (doesn't have error correcting bits). Unfortunately, that combined with speed of scanning is really what's key for codes.

I have worked in the space, making some strides in speed & error correction.

Some of my public work is here: [https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/](https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/)

Your best bet is actually an overlay of two codes. A regular image (for humans), plus a code embedded in a color space (see linked post for how to do that).

<comment><USER4> The whole point of having human readable code is to help avoid being scammed, so having a code embedded that a human cant read but is what actually used for the link defeats the purpose

<comment><USER5> So what happens when someone makes an image that appears like one url but scans as a different url? goDgle.com?

<comment><USER4> Then that is a failure of the protocol

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of the E-13B font [1] seen on checks since the early 1960s, but in a square format. The goals are similar, produce machine readable and human readable text. There have been attempts to also make a version with alphabetical characters as well in OCR-A [2] in the late 1960s.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition) [2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A)

<comment><USER7> Checks are now often scanned optically, with the MICR line, the courtesy amount field and the legal amount field all being read by software character and handwriting recognition. There is a small security deficit, since a fraudulent check with a non-magnetic MICR line would not be detected.

<comment><USER8> Since it came up.. I've always wondered how mobile deposit (cell phone photo of a check) is remotely secure?

<comment><USER9> It's nearly as secure as going to the ATM to deposit the check and most banks are OK with the increased risk because they have extra identifiers (phone/app info) when you 'scan' the check. Which is to say the whole process is not terribly secure.

History wise it came about with the removal (or reduction) of check float when checks began to be processed electronically (turned into an ACH transaction with images of front & back being taken by the submitting bank). In the last TOS I read about check scanning what is actually happening is that your scanning of the check replaces the bank's scanning and they are using extracted data to create the ACH transaction. In the meantime they extend credit to you to match the amount they would normally advance you (varies by account and amount). It's been a while but I recall it being specifically credit as opposed to the usual 'available funds' at an ATM; this seems a distinction without a difference.

In the end - it's not secure or at least not much less secure than going to an ATM to deposit the check. The difference is that the ATM keeps the physical check for some small period of time such that if there is a problem with the ACH the bank might have physical possession of the check to assist in a fraud investigation (not that I think they'd need it as the law enabling electronic clearance I believe made the electronic images equivalent in all ways to the physical check).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems to be the worst of both worlds. It's not easy for a human to read a square (compared to a line of text). The pixellated font is also not easily readable compared to a vector font. It's also not easy for machines to read an optical coding with no spatially distributed redundancy.

QR codes and bar codes are brilliant for machines because misreads due to some spurious reflection or spec of dust is mitigated by error correction.

I feel like this problem is already well served by bar codes which have a human readable text representation below them (e.g. serial number stickers).

That said, I can see the security advantage of the computer reading the same representation as a human, although this is probably not the best place to enforce security. As there's no integrity check, there's little guarantee the computer will read what you see though. Maybe linear OCR combined with a barcode checksum would be a better way to achieve these goals.

<comment><USER11> The problem this is addressing is a code being impenetrable by a human. If your solution is adding a second (human readable) code beneath the machine readable code...you haven't addressed the problem. The user must still trust their reader to parse the code.

QR codes' reconstructability is a major strength that this lacks, but I'd bet there's a way to expand this to include ECC around it, much as QR codes can.

BUT...OCR is quickly advancing, so the need for a specialized code a specialized machine can read will diminish over time anyway.

<comment><USER10> As I suggested at the end, you could still employ OCR and have a barcode checksum. The checksum would ensure a misread of the human readable text would fail. As long as the checksum was not error-correcting (so could not be engineered to augment a correct OCR read), it doesn't matter that it is incomprehensible to humans, because the OCR is authoritative.

You could also implement the checksum as OCR-able text, although it wouldn't be as dense, and probably wouldn't help human readability.

I think ultimately it should not be trusted that a machine will read what a code appears to be. That should be enforced on the device: "Are you sure you want to visit malware.site?". It's also easy to manipulate computer vision; you can engineer patterns which will read as one thing to humans, but another to machines. In some ways it's better for these codes to not be human readable, such that trust is not misplaced, and the machine is used as the best source of truth.

<comment><USER12> I can imagine that it would not take long until someone comes up with patterns which are innocent in one orientation and malicious with a ±90 deg. rotation...

<comment><USER13> Not with QR codes, they read the same from any side

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the app you are using to scan the QR code doesn't ask you for permission before opening the web page that's the problem with the app not the QR code...

<comment><USER15> Most QR codes are use to open a website and you do get a prompt for that at least on iOS so I don't see an issue there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I need to ask, is this in response to the discussion in [1]? I see that the initial commit happened _after_ that discussion started.

If so, that's an impressively fast prototype.

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417433)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I've made this after reading the post. Thanks.

I haven't read that particular comment though. It is obvious that QR codes are a security concern. First, QR code readers are required to ask for permission to open URLs. They might as well not implement it or could have malicious codes for misrepresenting the URL in specific cases. Second, I wouldn't be surprised to see some bugs exploited in QR code scanning code by giving them strange codes to scan. These would not look like valid HR codes but would look like just another QR code.

<comment><USER17> > QR code readers ... could have malicious codes for misrepresenting the URL > in specific cases.

So could an HR code reader. It could just as well, when it scans a google.com HR code, prompt "do you want to go to google.com" and then open "phishing.free.hax"

That specific threat is ridiculous.

In addition, talk of exploiting strange looking QR codes seems silly too. HR code readers could also have bugs in their OCR code which would result in memory corruption or such.

Any type of encoding can have interpreting tools that contain security bugs or malicious behaviour. The only way to remove that is to create something that is not intended to be processed by any tools at all (e.g. a paper that users have to manually copy the text from by hand).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The biggest win with QR codes is their error recovery capability, though. This will just corrupt data if there's errors.

</comment><comment><USER19> If OCR is required, then why not just put the link in plaintext? Makes it even easier to be read by humans.

<comment><USER15> That would be the next logical evolution from QR code once CV becomes more accurate for reading plaintext.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some characters can be easily turned into others - c into o, C into D - <USER2> addition. I think it would be a good idea to make priors have an additional pixel or two to the font glyphs to make this impossible. Maybe even touching the border instead of the character.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if there's a font with the same idea of being easy to OCR. I mean something that one can write full pages of and be easy to read for both the human and the machine.

<comment><USER22> That's probably [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B) \- developed in the 1960s. (OCR-A might be more common but I'd say less human readable).

<comment><USER21> Interesting. I was expecting something with more machine visual aids, like square markers to easily determine the start, size, and angle of the text. I wouldn't be able to guess that this font was designed for OCR. I wonder what design considerations they took. From the look at the applications, maybe they assumed perfect/consistent reading conditions, instead of e.g. a casual photo of the text with little consideration to alignment or using a prepared format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> IMO, the easier and better solution would be for your device to pop up a _"Open <URL>?"_ alert.

That way, the detection of the URL will be more robust against dirt and damage, and the text can be displayed in a more ergonomic way (a QR code might be 5x5 cm, at two meters height, for example, making reading it by short humans with bad eyes a challenge)

Or are there use cases where the device reading QR codes doesn't have a display?

<comment><AUTHOR> User confirmation is a feature in most of the QR code readers. But it's an optional feature. We are also depending on QR code scanners not to use an ambiguous font for URLs or misrepresent URLs in certain cases maliciously.

By encoding possibly malicious URLs in QR codes and scanning them we try to mitigate the security concerns by having not enforced or even not specified requirements from the QR code clients. Such as a display, user prompt, a fitting typeface in the UI. All this could be optional with a solution like HR codes, with the added benefit of deciding whether to scan a code nor not by simply reading it first.

<comment><USER23> But making QR code's readable by users doesn't protect against that. Whatever the QR code looks like, you have to trust the scanner. It could open "evil.com" every tenth time you use it, roll a die to determine whether to do so, contact its host to ask _"user u scanned QR code q. What URL shall I open?"_ , run a quick auction for the URL to send the user to, etc.

What _does_ help is just printing the URL in text, and requiring the user to type it in their browser's address bar (assuming they trust their browser)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The qr code has three distinctive squares on the corners, which makes detection in images accurate. However, the proposed approach is missing that feature. Thats why I wouldn't call it an easy ocr problem, more like scene text detection, which is acctually a hard problem.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is awesome! Feels like there's a kernel of a very interesting idea here. Could see how this evolves into a successor for QR codes. Looking forward to see where it goes.

</comment><comment><USER26> The name is bad. "HR code" is immediately associated in my mind with "HR" as in Human Resources. You should pick a better name.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, I had the same expectation that it was something related to Human Resources, and it's not like the H replaced a word that means "machine" or anything. It could have been "HQR code".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like the idea. Having symbols is hard because you have to know the generally accepted name for that symbol in order to tell it to someone.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is pretty awesome! I just read a related thread on HN a few hours ago on this very issue, so big kudos for the time of execution.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is it possible to make a valid QR code that is human readable by manipulating the size, weight, greyscale?, and positioning of letters?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I didn't expect this post to have any traction. Many thanks for the diverse feedback.

This is just a PoC of an idea I've created after reading [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417026). But who knows, a human readable QR code alternative could born out of this.

When I looked up for this idea, I have found out [http://hrqr.org/](http://hrqr.org/) but didn't find it much readable. Thanks to the comments here I came across OCR-A, OCR-B, and MICR just now. From these I've found Westminster typeface: [http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-48273.html](http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-48273.html)

Do you guys think using a font inspired by Westminster be a better choice than the prototype we have now?

In any case, the font should be resistant to malicious tampering such as creating an "o" from "c". Manual tampering could be also prevented with trailing checksum images that could be more information dense than the characters.

Error correction concern is the most common among the comments here. Yes, HR code readers would need to have error correction implementations to be reliable. Since each 7x7 grid of 2^49 binary options could only encode one of the 85 valid characters, HR codes could be recognized with even large chunks missing. On the other hand, implementations would be much more complex than the QR code error correction algorithm.

I reduced 3 corner blocks of QR codes to 1. This would make detection of HR codes much harder.

OCR, image recognition from video feed and average phone camera and processor has advanced so much in the past years that I think these technical costs could be favored for a human readable QR code alternative.

> If the app you are using to scan the QR code doesn't ask you for permission > before opening the web page that's the problem with the app not the QR > code... (wfdctrl's comment)

You're right. If the protocol is not secure enough, then the layer above must be secured enough. But it's better to have the security at the protocol level. Here's the other reply of mine under this thread where I speculate about possible security issues with QR codes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21424988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21424988)

I'm open for a better name than "HR code" by the way. It is too silly that makes it recognizable though.

</comment><comment><USER30> The font and the way to break words is not quite human readable IMO …

<comment><USER31> I guess the keyword here is "recognizable". The goal isn't to make it extremely readable, but make it both readable by a machine and sufficiently readable by a human.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r What problem does this solve that MICR couldn't do better?</comment>


Glymphatic system clears toxins in the brain during sleep (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/3956/to-sleep-perchance-to-clean.aspx <comment><USER2> Really interesting 3 part podcast with an MD and a neuroscientist sleep expert [https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/](https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/)

They dicsuss the glymphatic system's role in sleep, the many many detrimental effects of sleep too little sleep, the link between sleep and Alzheimer's, and all sorts of awesome stuff.

I actually got a sleep study and was diagnosed with sleep apnea after I listened to this episode and had the wits scared out of me about my sleep hygeine. :)

<comment><USER3> I was suffering from extreme daytime sleepiness that was impacting my job, and I got a sleep study and was told I _didn 't_ have sleep apnea and melatonin was suggested which didn't have a perceptible effect.

Even prior to that, for all of my adult life, my sleep habits had not been normal; I always felt like staying up longer and sleeping longer, and waking up for scheduled things was painful, but having commitments like work or appointments was the only way I _could_ force myself to get up.

By accident, I found out my friend was taking bupropion, and I asked my doctor about it, and once I started taking it, my sleep cycle is practically normal. I have no idea why, but it was almost magical. Bupropion is sold as both a smoking cessation drug and an antidepressant, and it seems to do something to nicotinic receptors (of course) and to norepinephrine.

Edit: and caffeine never helped me; I only developed a tolerance and then when I stopped drinking coffee on weekends I would feel even worse than usual.

<comment><USER4> Something that really bothers me about coffee culture is that coffee is seen as a solution to being tired when really all it is is just an alertness booster. The main neurological cause of sleepiness is the brain's desire to do memory optimization which can only happen by sleeping at the right time. Correct timing is really important and it seems to me like you have DSPS (delayed sleep phase syndrome). Most people's circadian rhythms are a bit longer than 24 hours (usually between 24.5-25.5 hours) though external signals like exercise or bright light in the morning reset it to being closer to 24. If you have DSPS, yours isn't reset well (you can try the aformtentioned morning bright light and exercise to change this) and you have a tendency to wake up later and later each day. The problem is that if you have to wake up at 7 every day and you think you need 9 hours of sleep you'll try to sleep at 10 to get enough which backfires. The reason it can backfire is that for good sleep you need both strong homeostatic sleep signals (tiredness from thinking a lot or doing a lot of effort in the day) and circadian (sleepiness goes and comes cyclically). If you sleep at 10 and have DSPS, even if your homeostatic signals sleep, it is likely that your circadian isn't which means you end up tossing and turning throughout the night. If you slept maybe an hour later you'd get full circadian and homeostatic sleepiness giving you good quality sleep but if you have to wake up at 7 you have to cut short sleep with an alarm clock which isn't great since your brain can't complete all the memory optimization it wants. I would say though that sleeping later more restfully for shorter will do you better than sleeping earlier restlessly. (Sorry for the essay, sleep is something I care about a lot. I hope this was a little helpful.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes after sleeping, especially after a good night's sleep, I have a feeling that my brain has been scrubbed clean. It physically feels "fresh", similar to the feeling of having brushed my teeth. Not totally sure if it's not just my imagination, but I like to think there's some science behind it :)

<comment><USER6> If I sleep really long I get a buzz in my head. I've never done drugs, but it kind of feels like what I think being high would be. Sort of like a brain- orgasm.

It feels really good for about 4 hours, then disperses.

<comment><USER7> I am assuming "never done illegal drugs" is probably what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does this "waste" accumulate indefinitely if you are constantly lacking sleep, or does it get flushed out in full every night you get a good night's sleep? So say I had a crappy sleep schedule for 3 days, but on the 4th day I slept a lot and feel very rested. Did the last night's cleaning take care of all the accumulated waste?

<comment><USER9> Articles and studies I've seen suggest that it takes more than one night to get caught up and that some things become seriously intractable if you are routinely short of sleep.

<comment><USER10> That's interesting, I wonder if this harvard study on "catching up on sleep" accidentally shows in some way how much sleep is required to flush out the toxins? They stated, "10-hour sleep opportunities consistently restored vigilance task performance during the first several hours of wakefulness."

[https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/14/14ra3.abstract](https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/14/14ra3.abstract)

<comment><USER9> I looked at the link. They actually were also having people stay up longer, so I don't think you can conclude that.

The brain also "resets" during sleep. As part of that process, it shrinks substantially.

Aa you do stuff during the day, synapses swell as they see repetitive use of the same pathways. This reinforces those ideas or actions, crowding out other things. In order to restore short term memory formation and the ability to learn new things, your brain has to reset at night.

There's also interesting research on two proteins, amyloid and tau, that accumulate faster when people are sleep deprived. They are both associated with Alzheimer's.

One of them rapidly resolves when you get caught up on sleep again. The other doesn't.

<comment><USER11> Do you have any references for synapses changing size with use? A quick google indicates the opposite, if anything:

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/06/08/br...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/06/08/brain- bigger-in-the-morning/)

Brain expansion (not contraction) overnight is unexplained, but may be due to fluid retention. That definitely affects the spine - causing us to be slightly taller and less flexible in the morning.

<comment><USER9> _Striking electron microscope pictures from inside the brains of mice suggest what happens in our own brain every day: Our synapses – the junctions between nerve cells – grow strong and large during the stimulation of daytime, then shrink by nearly 20 percent while we sleep, creating room for more growth and learning the next day._

[https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-brain- reset-6047/](https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-brain-reset-6047/)

Sleep Shrinks the Brain--and That's a Good Thing

Without a nighttime reset, synapses could burn out like an outlet with too many appliances plugged in

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sleep-shrinks- the...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sleep-shrinks-the-brain- and-thats-a-good-thing/)

 _The sleeping and the anesthetized mice had a 60% increase in the volume of fluid, apparently because brain cells actually shrink to allow more space in the channels. When the researchers woke the mice up, the flow of fluid into the brain abruptly slowed._

[http://m.nautil.us/blog/sleep-when-brain-cells-shrink-- neuro...](http://m.nautil.us/blog/sleep-when-brain-cells-shrink--neuro-trash- is-flushed-away)

<comment><USER11> Interesting, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sleeping on one's right side can exacerbate acid reflux (which can increase your risk for throat / esophageal cancer).

So, taken together with this, sleeping on the left side seems ideal.

<comment><USER13> Particularly if you suffer from diverticulitis as I do, putting pressure on the left side seems to lessen or calm spasms.

<comment><USER14> Most diverticulitis occurs on the left side in the West and the right side in the East.

<comment><USER13> Really? I thought the lower sigmoid colon was in the same place on everyone. Does that mean some other part of the digestive tract is stressed to the point of forming diverticulae in an Eastern diet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To maximize glymphatic toxin clearing the lateral sleeping position is currently recommended.

1\. [https://neurosciencenews.com/lateral-sleep-position- neurolog...](https://neurosciencenews.com/lateral-sleep-position- neurology-2363/amp/)

2\. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524974/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524974/)

<comment><USER16> That's the side position. Lucky for me I sleep that way to make my head comfortable. I wonder if it is more refreshing to sleep that way too then?

<comment><USER17> If I sleep anywhere but my side, my throat tries it's darndest to choke me to death, on behalf of the sleep apnea. So it works great for me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am not an expert, so I might be missing something, but is this related to the finding that was reported in 2014 [1]? Is it the new development that now they have actually observed the glymphatic system at work?

[1] [[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/goodnight-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/goodnight- sleep- clean.html\]\(https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/goodnight- sleep-clean.html\))

</comment><comment><USER19> I've believed this to be true for a while now, as I've gotten older this has gotten obvious to me.

When you're younger everything works so well you don't notice the subtle differences often times. But as I've rounded 40 I've realized just how big a difference good sleep can make.

</comment><comment><USER20> After having three concussions in the past two years, one just recently—I've taken a keen interest in learning as much as I can about mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI).

Impairment of glial-lymphatic function is thought to play a role in all manner of neurodegenerative disease, including TBI and mTBI.[0][1][2]

My potentially incorrect layperson oversimplification:

mTBI in particular is broadly characterized as a loss of homeostasis within the brain, more specifically metabolic dysregulation secondary to primary mechanical injury. When you suffer a concussion, an inflammatory response occurs within the brain. This is useful in the acute phase of injury, but can lead to chronic neuroinflammation if not properly mediated. Oxidative stress secondary to the primary injury can interfere with this process, and what you end up with is a complex biochemical cascade that furthers metabolic dysregulation and loss of homeostasis, resulting in latent neurodegeneration (brain damage). Among those systems impacted by said dysregulation is the glymphatic system.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) by contrast is a term used to describe brain injury more severe than that of a simple concussion. It's basically everything mTBI is and then some: compromised blood–brain barrier, immune cell infiltration, necrosis, sometimes direct mechanical destruction of brain tissue in the case of open head injuries. It's typically quite horrific.

In researching the topic, I've noticed many papers suggest pathologies from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to CTE may in fact stem from chronic loss of [metabolic] homeostasis within the brain. Whether that's from chronically poor sleep, or hits to your head, the end result is disturbingly similar.

In my own experience, the number one thing that has helped me recover after a concussion has been sleep. Usually following an injury I need more of it than normal. It's not hard to imagine the glymphatic system plays a critical role in healing.

[0] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6261373/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6261373/)

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6034172/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6034172/)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28859995](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28859995)</comment>


Using Play framework to implement a feature in 15 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://java.dzone.com/articles/play-framework-now-officially

<comment><USER2> You have software that you write once, then use, then throw away (scripts). For that sort of thing the time to write the software is relevant.

For all other software, which lives for years if not decades, most of the time is spent on maintenance, not on writing the first version. Reducing time in maintenance is much more important than reducing the time to write the first version from scratch.

I'm not saying Play is bad, or that a piece of software written in Play is not easier to maintain than software written in other frameworks. I'm just saying that the time to write the first version of a piece of software, which is what this article is about, is mostly irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagged for completely misleading, linkbaity headline.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not my headline, but I agree

Edit: headline was: "The Play Framework is Now Officially an Embarrassment" - which is the original article's title (sarcasm, the author praises the framework as "an embarrassment to other frameworks")

I accept your comment and changed the title to something a bit more informational</comment></comment>


Would Google Make More Money If They Charged 1 Cent per Search? - <AUTHOR> https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/1387/would-google-search-make-more-money-if-they-charge.html <comment><USER2> nope! they have lots of money, they dont need more. seeing as this would be electronic payment, token 1cent per search, would likely intersect with a data grab as a brass ring. It would create one more reason to do "other than google"</comment>