Give HN: Get a Free GPS Recorder for Your iPhone - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
I have recently been developing a cool GPS Recorder iPhone app. Besides just taking tracks, it also lets you download maps for offline use, has a vast database of waypoints, and has a bunch of other cool features.
My co-founders and I pushed this app to the app store last week, so it's polished and if you are a hiker like me (or runner, driver, or anything else), then I think you'd have a lot of fun with the app.
So, the exclusive HN offer is this: email me your Apple UDID at firstname.lastname@example.com, and I will send you a free copy of the app.
There are no strings attached, though we would appreciate any ideas, bug reports, or positive reviews when we go on sale in a couple of weeks.
I'm still working on the promotional website, but you can see screenshots of the app at http://www.gaiagps.com. Also, it basically integrates all the functionality, waypoints, and search index from http://www.trailbehind.com (which is our other product). <comment><USER2> <http://ibetatest.com/iphone/controllers/welcome/>

</comment><comment><USER3> All I see at <http://www.gaiagps.com> is "hello world"

<comment><USER4> It's fixed now. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks Andrew, I have emailed you. This looks like a useful app. Good luck and keep us posted about it.

Also, how can I post a review about this app on the appstore, if I dont buy it and use the adhoc?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't post a review if you only have an ad hoc build. You either need to buy the app or get a promo copy to do a review.

Hopefully, some of the folks who take an ad hoc copy from us will like the app enough that they download it to get future updates, and then they can review it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you also have an app for the S60?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, no, just an iPhone app and a website right now. We just have 3 people :)</comment></comment>


E.P.A. to Seek 30 Percent Cut in Carbon Emissions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/us/politics/epa-to-seek-30-percent-cut-in-carbon-emissions.html

<comment><USER2> Cap and trade is stupid. It's a form of "carbon credits" designed to create a market for the likes of wall street while allowing for politics to also play a role. The simplest thing to do is TAX the carbon coming out of the ground (oil or coal) or coming into the country. This cost will automatically be passed on to whomever uses that fuel in direct proportion to how much the use. However, we continue to subsidize some carbon producers, so you can clearly see that reducing emissions is NOT the primary agenda here.

<comment><USER3> More to the point: a carbon tax introduces price certainty, which (naively) allows efficient long-term planning. (Carbon _caps_ set volume by fiat; carbon _taxes_ set price by fiat. The other variable floats with the market).

You can look at the EU carbon market's total failure as an example. It's a cap system, where the price collapsed almost immediately, and so to date it has had zero effect of any sort [0]. The cap right now is way above what the market actually wants. It's useless.

The opposite -- price overshoots because of a too tight cap + demand inelasticity -- could also be a _really bad thing_. Both directly from the pain it causes, and indirectly from the predictable political backlash, which would screw up something else in a new & more creative way.

[0] [http://www.economist.com/node/21548962](http://www.economist.com/node/21548962)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure - how arbitrarily setting prices introduces certainty? Today the Congress or EPA decides the price is X, tomorrow Republicans take the Congress and the presidency and appoint the head of EPA which drops the price to Y, then next cycle Democrats take the power and rise the price to Z, etc. etc. - where's certainty in that? I don't see any objective way of setting such taxes, and as such - any reason why they would be stable is the price is purely arbitrary and thus subject to political games.

<comment><USER3> Well it doesn't, no. IF you have stable government policies, than a carbon tax would be a predictable cost, where a cap would be highly volatile. Obviously if the policies are changing too, then you can't predict much of anything.

" _I don 't see any objective way of setting such taxes,_"

How about: estimate the economic damage of a marginal kg of CO2 (external cost), and set the tax equal to that? [0]

As an order-of-magnitude guess: [total climate change damage] / [total CO2 emitted], both discounted to present dollars.

Not an economist.

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

<comment><USER5> > stable government policies

You're a funny one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Accounting for the damages [of unpriced externalities] conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated"

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x/abstract)

<comment><USER7> All of our lungs should breathe a collective sigh of relief for not having to deal with so many particulates from coal burning after these rules go into force. Not to mention saving our water from pollution of coal ash.

It will be pleasant to have less of these types of plants in operation:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer)

And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.

<comment><USER4> Is there any data that our lungs are seriously hurt by these particulates right now?

>>> And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.

We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't think so.

<comment><USER8> > Is there any data that our lungs are seriously hurt by these particulates > right now?

There's a lot. From a health perspective, PM is _way_ worse for human health than carbon dioxide. Here's two EPA fact sheets and a well-cited article:

[http://www.epa.gov/airquality/particulatematter/health.html](http://www.epa.gov/airquality/particulatematter/health.html)

[http://www.epa.gov/region7/air/quality/pmhealth.htm](http://www.epa.gov/region7/air/quality/pmhealth.htm)

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969799...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969799005136)

> We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative > on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood > about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut > energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't > think so.

Easy answer: natural gas. It's already a bigger source of electricity than nuclear, and it'll inevitably play a large role in the grid in the future as it neatly solves the dispatch problem (renewables can't really be controlled, but NG plants can be dispatched at a moments notice to make up for lost capacity).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_generation)

<comment><USER4> I agree that gas is more clean then the coal, but speaking in context of carbon emissions, does it really change that much? It's still burning hydrocarbons.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it's a huge difference, and all you need is high school chemistry:

\- gas is CH4 (four hydrogens for every carbon). Oil is approximately CH2 (in reality, it's slightly higher than two). Coal is approximately CH.

\- a CH bond has about 410 kJ / mol; a CC bond has about 350 kJ / mol ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond- dissociation_energy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond-dissociation_energy))

\- thus, you can calculate approximately how much energy is stored in each of the above fossils per mole of carbon dioxide:

\- methane = 4CH = 1640 kJ / mol CO2

\- petrol = 2CH + CC = 1170 kJ / mol CO2

\- coal = CH + CC = 760 kJ / mol CO2

This is obviously a gross simplification, but hopefully you'll see the outline of why gas is much cleaner than coal. Methane, since it's a gas, also burns much cleaner than liquids or solids since you can better mix the fuel with oxygen, so methane tends to produce much less particulate matter, soot, and other products of incomplete combustion.

EDIT: spenrose below has a great point about uncombusted methane in the atmosphere. Methane is a NASTY greenhouse gas, so it's absolutely worth taking into account how natural gas production affects methane levels in the atmosphere. Namely, there was a worrying metastudy a few months ago about how natural gas production is quite leaky, which has nontrivial greenhouse gas considerations: [http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/methane-leaky- ga...](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/methane-leaky- gas-021314.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I actually wrote something up on indirect carbon pricing in the US yesterday.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829683)

TL;DR

EU carbon is trading at $6.88/tonne. Working back from an enrollment mailer I found that TVA's green power program prices it at $42/tonne (in terms of lbs of CO2 emissions avoided by purchasing blocks of renewable generation).

</comment><comment><USER10> When it comes to coal these efforts and those who support them seem to always make the assumption that there is nothing that can be done to make burning coal "cleaner". After working with the utilities industries (mostly natural gas industries) I can tell you with 100% certainty that more than 80% of the by products from the burning of coal, including CO2, can be removed using scrubbing technologies and filters. In many cases the cost to install these technologies are lower than the costs to convert a plant to natural gas. The problem is that EPA regulations on coal are driving the costs up (by making it harder to mine and transport) to the point where in the long run natural gas is cheaper (though get a change in the US administration and that could sway the other way again)(Edit: Which is why a lot of coal plants are being converted to natural gas). My point is that if coal didn't cost as much as it currently does (because of federal regulation) a number of technologies could be installed that would enable coal plants to continue to be used with much much less environmental impact.

<comment><USER11> Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) of CO2 is still in very early development and pilot testing, so costs are quite uncertain, and it is not in use in any reasonably sized coal plant in the US. For all plants >60MW planned to have CCS, they are either still in planning or under construction [1] (note that 60MW is a relatively small power plant).

Quite separate from CO2, there are NOX wet/dry scrubbers and flue gas desulfurization units (removal of SO2). While having a very helpful large reduction in fine particulate (PM2.5) and ozone downwind health impacts (SO2 and NOX form PM2.5 and O3 downwind), it unfortunately does not remove CO2 emissions.

In talking to power companies, my guess is that natural gas is being switched out for coal for many reasons, some more subtle. In part due to new PM2.5 and ozone regulations, in part because in some years it has been cheaper than coal due to new extraction techniques (fracking), and in part because it is easier to dispatch natural gas plants (ramp up and down) to meet electricity demand or high variance renewable energy generation like solar and wind (large spikes in generation).

[1] [http://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index_capture.ht...](http://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index_capture.html)

<comment><USER10> Natural gas is not being switched out for coal. At least not in the USA. I think that might be a typo. I unfortunately can not site a fancy link like you have but from experience I can tell you that the actual costs I have encountered for projects showed that the price of scrubber tech/equipment (and installation) was less then the cost of a plant conversion from coal to natural gas.

The costs of coal are higher than they were before and are growing. This is a direct result of government regulation. The other problem is that these regulations and the continual call for more is causing a great deal of market uncertainty, which is also driving up costs (not just for the coal but for equipment). Natural gas is currently not in the same position, it is cheaper and less regulated (no mining regulations/legislation). Further, because there has been so much drilled for there is a surplus (supply and demand ==> gas costs are lower). This is mostly because of the lack of good, viable, stable export terminals. So when some terminals open in the future we will see higher natural gas prices.

<comment><USER11> Coal is being switched out for natural gas here in the US... as a specific example, in 2012, see Plant McDonough right next to Atlanta, GA [1]. As I stated before, the reason is in part due to the effects on air quality (an externality), not just price. For Atlanta with this switch over, it has proven air quality improvements (and no one was surprised by this since it was a coal plant operating full blast right there next to Atlanta!).

I actually agree with you on several points. Agreed that the economics are uncertain, and agreed that scrubbing is very useful, and is definitely worth the cost vs. a full switch over to natural gas (but that doesn't ignore the fact that a switch to natural gas happens for other reasons). And I agree with you that natural gas has higher variance (historically at the least), and higher future expected prices, particularly with exports.

[1] [http://www.georgiapower.com/about-energy/energy- sources/natu...](http://www.georgiapower.com/about-energy/energy- sources/natural-gas.cshtml)

<comment><USER10> I replied the way I did because you wrote "my guess is that natural gas is being switched out for coal for many reasons". That is not true. That is why I said it might have been a typo. This is clear because in your reply above your write the opposite, that coal is being replaced by natural gas. I agree with this, and as you wrote above, 100%.

<comment><USER11> Can't edit now, but you're 100% correct, my typo was overlooked by me... three (or more) times!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the deal with using 2005 as the reference date for the 30% cuts? Do we not have more accurate carbon measurements since then? Is it to make the cuts seem smaller since 2014's emissions are probably bigger than 05. There must be some specific reason to pick a reference date of almost a decade ago. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER9> A few things:

1\. Your intuition about emissions being higher now is wrong. For NOx and SOx: [http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15611](http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15611) CO2: [http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html](http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html)

2\. The recession messed with a lot of energy and consumption so that the years from 2008-2012 or so are something of anomalies.

3\. There have been significant rollbacks and cuts to getting datasets complete. It used to be we were only a year or two behind in lots of the published federal data. I've found it to be far more scattershot today, and sometimes just cross my fingers and hope they have managed to stay up to date. That said, the EIA has mostly managed to stay on top of their annual publications.

4\. Natural gas prices bottomed out a couple years ago, and we'll have a glut of it for a while, keeping prices much lower than they were in the early 2000s.

5\. Coal plants are getting replaced with natural gas combined cycle because of the fuel costs, and also because of new regulations on the new MATS stuff (also in the link above).

6\. "Clean" coal has mostly been a bust. Duke Indiana's been trying to get their gasification plant to full capacity for a while, and cost ovverruns has resulted in them asking for rate increases. Also, carbon capture still isn't up to snuff, and underground gasification never took off.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. Any idea why they picked the 2005 date to be the reference?

<comment><USER9> Sorry it took a few days, but I couldn't get the numbers to work (couldn't tell that they were using 2005), and now I know why.

[http://common-resources.org/2014/2005-vs-2012-in-epas- propos...](http://common-resources.org/2014/2005-vs-2012-in-epas-proposal/)

And here's a good general breakdown of the proposed rule.

[http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out- which-...](http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out-which-states- get-hit-hardest-by-obamas-climate-rule)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is not true at all, or at least it's only true from a narrow US view of the world :

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-31/obama-step- forward-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-31/obama-step-forward-on- carbon-undone-by-china-s-steps-back.html)

And let's not get any illusions. One of the main real changes in the world that make this possible is outsourcing of production to China, where instead of a mix of oil, nuclear and coal, goods will be produced with nearly exclusively coal. Obama is not an idiot and knows this.

His voters seemingly are not so aware.

So what it should really say is something along the lines of "in an attempt to improve earbon emission numbers in the US, the EPA doubles worldwide carbon emissions, in cooperation with it's European counterpart, moving the emissions where they are not counted on his report card".

<comment><USER6> Outsourcing manufacturing to China can increase emissions; closing coal plants in the USA does not affect in or outsourcing; therefore your summary is false.

<comment><USER14> Expensive energy here vs. cheap energy in China certainly would factor into outsourcing decisions.

<comment><USER15> Energy is going to get a lot more expensive in China from here on too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, by 2030 even if the US cuts emissions by 30%, aren't there going to be 2-3 billion people in emerging markets moving up the economic ladder who will use a lot more energy.

Sure 300 million Americans are currently using a lot of energy but we're going to be much smaller part of the problem by 2030.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't solve it all, so we shouldn't do anything?

<comment><USER12> That's a false choice. There are more options than either doing nothing or doing something predictably ineffective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know of a study on how effective such programs have been in the past (assuming it passes and isn't significantly overturned by the courts)? As in, what is the expected success rate of long-term plans of the US government (or other nations)?

<comment><USER19> Look at Germany and Canada (specifically Ontario). Not so good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good plan. Let's build some nuclear plants.

Oh, wait. Not politically viable? It should be: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy- so...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html)

<comment><USER21> Actually it is politically viable, we're building the first new addition to our nuclear fleet for 30 years: [http://www.ajc.com/news/news/breaking- news/a-65b-federal-loa...](http://www.ajc.com/news/news/breaking- news/a-65b-federal-loan-guarantee-jolts-ga-nuclear-powe/ndWgF/)

<comment><USER19> That plant broke ground before Fukushima. How many permits have been issued since then: 0. Perfectly good nuclear plants like Vermont Yankee have been shut down (decided not to renew operating license) due to "concerned citizens. We were headed to a nuclear power renascence until that accident happened and took the wind out of the sails.

<comment><USER21> If it had taken the wind out of the sales then we could have skipped the $6.5 billion federal loan guarantee we issued last February, which is mentioned in the article I linked to.

As for Vermont Yankee, the operating license was renewed in 2011 and remains valid until 2032, but Entergy said that a mix of price controls and economic inefficiency for a small single-reactor design made it uneconomical to continue operations: [http://www.entergy.com/news_room/newsrelease.aspx?NR_ID=2769](http://www.entergy.com/news_room/newsrelease.aspx?NR_ID=2769)

Vermont's senate voted against a future renewal of the plant's license, but since this wouldn't have been an issue for almost two decades I don't think it's that big of a deal: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_Pl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Controversy_and_operations)

The fact is that the federal government is putting its money where its mouth is as regards Georgia, and with the President about to announce a target of cutting US CO2 emissions by 30%, the door is open for other nuclear projects. A bigger problem for the industry has been the fall in power prices due to the huge surplus of natural gas that currently obtains in the US, with no sign of decline any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hypothesize that with two years remaining, President Obama is again delivering big for the Futuregen 2.0 project in his home state. I mean, if he was really looking to reduce carbon emissions he might make that a priority in his dealings with China and Russia and the developing world. This is politics, not policy in my opinion.

<comment><USER21> Why, so he can get re-elected? Absurd. the sticking point with getting the BRIC and other developing nations to cut emissions has been the US failure to lead in doing so. The recent Supreme Court ruling that the EPA is authorized to regulate pollution that crosses state lines is a sea change and has been a long time coming.

<comment><USER22> He is unemployed in two years. The BRIC sticking point is reality. Economic reality.</comment></comment></comment>


Things I Wish I Knew About Core Async in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://danboykis.com/posts/things-i-wish-i-knew-about-core-async/ <comment><USER2> This is a good post for anyone using core.async because a lot of this I had to discover by hand and it takes a long time to unearth this knowledge. Thanks for the write up!</comment>


PR Sucks Because You're Doing It Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://citizentekk.com/2013/10/18/pr-sucks-youre-wrong/

<comment><USER2> Selfish people are always and will be selfish. PR come from heart not from any book ,article, and lessons. Money is the main problem. Money and PR are inversely personal to each other. So we should start thin from heart and this is only the option make a good and trusty Public relation</comment>


AR Planes: Discover nearby planes in augmented reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.calstephens.tech/blog/announcing-ar-planes#main-wrap <comment><USER2> Looks pretty though I can't try it out since it's iPhone-only but a few thoughts:

1\. It's not a new concept, both the Planefinder and FR24 apps already have an AR point-and-tell mode on Android and iOS. The main difference is that this app seems to draw an orientated cartoon of each aircraft by type.

2\. What is its back-end data feed? From Planefinder or FlightAware APIs perhaps? Without knowing that we can't determine what aircraft will appear, though I suspect it's only going to work for aircraft which transmit full ADS-B output ( large airliners & really expensive modern smaller aircraft )

3\. In fact there's very little information about it at all. So it's not clear if it supports FLARM ( gliders ), PilotAware ( small private aircraft ) or Mode-S Multilateration. Does it implement the FAA's BARR list to elide corporate aircraft?

I don't intend to sound critical but being in this 'space' as a feeder to several tracking networks I've seen layperson friends rush-out to try these sort of apps and then become disappointed because they don't show the Cessna in which their son is doing his flight-training.

Addendum: also irritating that it displays the flight plan using the IATA three-letter codes. No-one files a plan using those, and they only cover a small proportion of all airfields.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I made AR Planes and I have a few follow-up questions. Could you email me at firstname.lastname@example.com so we can chat some?

Thanks! Cal

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too expensive to try. EUR 4.49 is too much for something without any kind of practical use.

</comment><comment><USER5> Works great. My passion is convincing people that air flight is environmentally wicked and you just shouldn't do it. One barrier I hit is people thinking "there aren't enough flights going on to make this a problem". This app gives a visceral, visual counter argument to that, and lets the user quickly see how very far those flights are traveling. Thanks for making it. (Don't suppose you'd add a feature to show how much fuel is being burned :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do the planes not move?

<comment><USER7> they're moving for me. at least i think they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> great concept. Too expensive.....

</comment><comment><USER9> An indispensable resource on a terrorist's toolset</comment>


Show HN: I made a GitHub stars manager - <AUTHOR> http://www.getstarboard.xyz/ <comment><USER2> this could be interesting, but I'm not sure I really get it. If I have repos with more than 500 stars, I can see that in the repo. How many people have repos with more than 500 stars? How many people are interested in regularly checking the number of stars on their repos?

Is that what you're solving for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I didn't communicate well, but I was trying to manage the repo you starred, instead of your own repo. You only need this if you have __starred __a lot of repos.</comment></comment>


YC's Winter Reading List - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-winter-reading-list/ <comment><USER2> If you like "The Rent is Too Damn High" and really want to dig in, I've been reading this:

Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation - [http://amzn.to/2gZQtqg](http://amzn.to/2gZQtqg)

It's pretty dry, but very thorough.

Some groups that are good for people who want to get into this stuff more:

* [http://www.strongtowns.org/](http://www.strongtowns.org/)

* [http://marketurbanism.com/](http://marketurbanism.com/)

It's an area where people can really make a difference: I've managed to chat with a couple of city councilors and our state representative here in Bend, and recently kicked off [https://bendyimby.com/](https://bendyimby.com/)

<comment><USER3> Have you read Marohn's two books? I keep putting them off, but I haven't gotten a recommendation yet.

<comment><USER2> No, I haven't. They look like "the blog's greatest hits" and I tend to be less enthusiastic about books like that. I'm curious too, because they might be good to recommend to people. Maybe I'll see if I can get the library to get them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In light of HN's (edit: temporary) ban on political content, I find it interesting that so many of YC's favorite books relate to:

\- religion (Going Clear, Zealot, Finding God in the Waves)

\- war and oppressive policy (War in a Time of Peace, Silence Once Begun)

\- conservative lifestyle (Strangers in Their Own Land, Hillbilly Elegy)

The first two are explicitly prohibited topics of discussion on this site, and the third is implicitly discouraged.

<comment><USER5> > _In light of HN 's ban on political content_

Please don't forget to mention this is just for one week. The intention is not "ban political content". It's to take a one-week breather from political stories that tend to result in flamewars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll second "A Guide To The Good Life", and would like to suggest "What's The Matter With Kansas" by Thomas Frank as a companion piece to "Strangers In Their Own Land."

<comment><USER7> "Art of Living" (Epictetus) is another great introduction to stoicism. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> Here is a great primer on stoicism: [https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/3a2bl4/stoicism...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/3a2bl4/stoicism_101_a_primer_on_how_to_be/?st=iwdybs1v&sh=c5214988)

I love the practice of stoicism, but I cannot do the negative visualization. It just gives me anxiety!

This is a great booklist. Thanks YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it interesting that this list of books includes a scholarly look at a man I believe to be God incarnate, written by a non-believer.

Does that not violate the temporary ban on "the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet"?

I'm sure it's an interesting book, and I'm all for people reading it, but is that really the sort of thing we should be discussing this week? Next week would be totally fine.

</comment><comment><USER10> For a "Winter Reading List", there is a ton of titles. I'll be lucky if I get to 5 books in the next few months. Can someone recommend a top 5 from this list?

</comment><comment><USER11> Flagged, as there is clearly political content here that doesn't comport with new Hacker News rules.

<comment><USER12> "new Hacker News rules"

I think this should read: current weeklong experimental policy on Hacker News.

I also don't feel like this list of books justifies getting flagged, even during this reprieve from political discussion. If loads of comments start flaming, maybe then. But right now it is just a list of suggested books to read.

<comment><USER9> That's specifically counter to the rules, though: it's a detox. We're supposed to get better as a community by _avoiding these topics entirely_. Flaming was already against the rules, and low-contribution (though non-flaming) comments were already subject to downvote.

<comment><USER12> Got it. I would have been happiest with this on the front page, but I just happen to really like reading lists. No matter.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball at 90% the speed of light? - <AUTHOR> http://what-if.xkcd.com/1

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who saw the picture with the plasmised air expanding around the pitcher and thought of Dragonball Z?</comment>


Much ado about something - <AUTHOR> http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/much-ado-about-something/

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitted as a more accurate and detailed treatment of the discovery discussed yesterday under the story "419-million-year-old armoured fish fossil resolves 'missing link' in evolution, scientists say"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6449235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6449235)

on the front page. Compare the two stories and decide for yourself.</comment>


Microsoft sniffed blogger's Hotmail account to trace leak - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57620658-75/microsoft-sniffed-bloggers-hotmail-account-to-trace-leak/?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=News-Microsoft&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter The company's legal department determined that it had the right to go through a private email account, citing a leak of proprietary Microsoft code <comment><USER2> Before anyone else comments that hasn't read the full article, here is the very end:

 _Legally, Microsoft appears to be protected by its privacy policies. The policy for Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail, states that, "We may access information about you, including the content of your communications...to protect the rights or property of Microsoft."_

This is the agreement that every user agreed to when they signed up for Hotmail or Outlook. It's not carte blanche for Microsoft to go through your email, but it seems to allow them to do it for a very particular purpose.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _This is the agreement that every user agreed to when they signed up for > Hotmail or Outlook._

No they didn't. Over 99% of them clicked through without reading. Some of them suspected Microsoft might one day read their email, but somehow shrugged it off, then forgot about it.

If people were truly informed, most would not give consent. Make no mistake: using a hotmail or gmail account means giving away a good chunk of your private correspondence. It also affects whoever you're communicating with, even if they have their own private mail server.

We need those Freedom Boxes. Fast.

<comment><USER3> "If people were truly informed, most would not give consent. "

I strongly disagree. Most would bitch about it, then do it anyway, knowing it may be a shitty deal for them. That is consent.

<comment> loup-vaillant In the current situation, sure. Because we don't have real alternatives. (I maintain my own web server, but that's impossible for most users.) But if people were informed, that would create a market for privacy.

<comment><USER4> > But if people were informed, that would create a market for privacy.

If people really cared, then that market would exist today. "Get your $5/mo. _much more private_ email from privateemail.com!!". This notional private email provider would be able to advertise Outlook.com, GMail, etc.'s privacy policies independently of those email providers to ensure that "click through" isn't the only reason people are unaware.

<comment><USER5> That market does exist today, Fastmail.fm is only one example I can think of off the top of my head (I surely got the ofs and offs wrong). I talk about them so much that I sometimes feel like a marketing goon ...

<comment> loup-vaillant They're not a viable privacy option. And it has little to do with their ethics: they are still vulnerable to subpoenas, many of their users don't even live in the same country…

The only viable privacy option is to host your mail at home. It doesn't have to be difficult. We "just" need a suitably tailored GNU/Linux distribution in a Sheeva Plug, or Raspberry Pi, that you just plug-in, then use as a web service. (Just one snag: your ISP must allow you to send and receive e-mail: many close off port 25, and some even ban home servers.)

Now to get your email, they need a search warrant and someone to knock on your door, which is inconvenient and costly.

<comment><USER6> Could you host your mail on a VPN instead? I wouldn't mind doing this except for the fact that I'm 100% certain I'd get something wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Off topic: The name _Office of Legal Compliance_ immediately made me think of _1984_ 's Ministry naming. Similarly to how the Ministry of Truth's job is to spread propaganda and falsify history in the novel, this Office of Legal Compliance department's job is to ask themselves, "How far can we push the envelope toward being illegal, but still remain within legal boundaries?"

Essentially their job is dealing with things that border on being illegal. Determining how far you can get to illegality, while remaining technically inside legality.

For the first time the notion of "newspeak" in real life has clicked for me. I'd never grokked the idea from the novel, other than as some fear mongering fantasy that Orwell invented for the sake of compelling irony. But now I see, names actually make sense, from a certain angle. They weren't purely ironic devices.

For the record, I'm NOT comparing Microsoft to Big Brother. Just funny to draw that parallel in naming choices.

<comment><USER8> _" How far can we push the envelope toward being illegal, but still remain within legal boundaries?"_

This would be better phrased as 'how far can we go in pursuit of our employer's legitimate interests, but still remain within legal boundaries.' As phrased, you're treating illegality as a goal in itself, but this isn't the case. All companies have interests, but the most obvious and efficient means of pursuing those interests may be odds with any of the many regulations governing corporate activity. Compliance departments specialize in making sure firms stay on the right side of that line, and in a complex economy with complex regulatory regimes that's a full time job.

As far as naming choices go, 'compliance' is the standard term in industry for ensuring that a firm's behavior is lawful, and it doesn't carry any connotation of pushing boundaries or circumventing the law. There's no 'newspeak' here except in your own mind, unless you actually believe that companies aspire to illegal behavior as a matter of course.

<comment><USER9> Companies like Microsoft leave the legality of their actions to the compliance team. They have interest in pursuing both legal and illegal actions and their compliance department has the task of ensuring even the illegal stuff can be bent into comformance to the letter of the law. It's not aspiring to illegal behavior for the illegality of it. It's only that the closer you get to the edge, the more advantages you squeeze out of the situation.

<comment><USER10> I think you're pursuing a fantastical notion here. It's more like, "hey we can get a great business deal and corner a market by doing this, this and this - legal team: are we doing anything wrong here?" They aren't cackling in a corner somewhere thinking about opportunities to toe the line. They're legitimately trying to beat the competition and some of those ways might potentially be illegal, so they need to get the okay or not before fucking up publicly and majorly.

<comment><USER9> More than once I witnessed questions to the effect of "how far can we go before we break the law" be asked. The person who asked had full knowledge his/her plans were illegal. He/She just needed to know where to stop.

<comment><USER11> This statement is completely nonsensical. If the person had full knowledge that the plans were illegal, why would he/she ask how far they can go before breaking the law? He/she clearly didn't know where the boundaries were.

<comment><USER12> Huh? A person can have a plan to go from 0-100 miles an hour and ask where the speedlimit is. Stories similar in a business environment are reasonably normal. "Compliance" is strictly a legal CYA department (as is anything relating to HR or "Ethics", btw.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is not the first time Microsoft had _actual employees_ look through their users' personal accounts. At least Google only mines the data algorithmically, but this is way worse.

[http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on- skydriveyou-m...](http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou- may-lose-your-microsoft-life/)

This is why I think Microsoft's "privacy attack ads" against Google are done in really poor taste - not necessarily because some or most of them aren't true, but because I know the company doing those ads is just as bad or _worse_ for the very same thing they're accusing Google of. I can't support that.

<comment><USER14> How do you figure actual employees were trawling through emails in that incident?

Here's Google nailing someone for child porn.

[http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/11/21/googles-role-in- wo...](http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/11/21/googles-role-in-woodland- child-pornography-arrest-raises-privacy-concerns/)

AFAIK almost all online storage services use automatic scanners to screen out items violating the ToS.

>At least Google only mines the data algorithmically, but this is way worse.

Really? How do you even know if the Google CEO read your Gmail today? What recourse do you have? None.

[http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked- tee...](http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied- on-chats)

<comment><USER15> >Really? How do you even know if the Google CEO read your Gmail today? What recourse do you have? None.

This is simply a risk you take with any company you become a customer of. You are willingly give that company certain power over you. Rogue employees will always be able to do things that are harmful.

There are many cases of rogue employees working for Comcast and AT&T who will look up someone's IP address and find their full name and address, and harass them or spread that information. Most of the time, some number of employees need access to information like that, and eventually one of them will end up going rogue or becoming mentally unstable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So you might have to make some logical leaps to get to this one with me but. Would you be willing to pay to have a email address provided my the US Postal Service? Based on a reading of the law correspondence "delivered" by the postal service would be federally protected. Maybe its time for the mail service to go digital.

<comment><USER17> And then the NSA would have an easier time reading our email. No thanks.

<comment><USER18> Why would it be easier for the NSA to monitor the USPS than to monitor a private company?

<comment><USER17> Because they are both branches of the government. The USPS has no incentive to tell taxpayers the NSA is spying on them. At least with a private company there is a profit motive, and they could lose customers over bad press.

<comment><USER8> The USPS is answerable to Congress, and that makes it rather more accountable to the public than a firm that's only answerable to its shareholders (who, in the US at least, have virtually no input into the governance of a firm).

<comment><USER19> The CIA is answerable to your Congress, too. How's _that_ accountability working out for you?

<comment><USER8> Rather better than it is for the CIA, apparently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I remember looking into Microsoft's Healthvault product a few years ago. I was astonished to find this:

"Microsoft may access and/or disclose your personal information if we believe such action is necessary to: (a) comply with the law or respond to legal process served on Microsoft; or (b) protect the rights or property of Microsoft (including the enforcement of our agreements)."

Note clause (b). I thought it was a little off that they can examine your health records to protect their rights and property. But it looks like they are not afraid to use it!

This ditty is still there. In fact if you go to the home page for Health Vault, it says:

"It's your HealthVault account You decide who can see, use, add, and share info, and which health apps have access to it. HealthVault won't provide your health information to any other app or service without your permission."

So as advertised it looks like you get to decide. You have to read pretty far down in their privacy policy before you find the clause I first mentioned. Now of course there are cases where your private information may be used without your permission, but most people would assume that requires some form of legal process... but not for Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER21> "The policy for Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail, states that, "We may access information about you, including the content of your communications...to protect the rights or property of Microsoft.""

<comment><USER22> Sure, but a policy doesn't change the law. If laws were broken - and I am hoping there were in accessing private communications of one of their users - then the policy is irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The way I understand it, this is a story about a reporter who had their personal email hacked in order to uncover the identity of a protected source.

<comment><USER24> That is correct. From the Microsoft statement: "As part of the investigation, we took the step of a limited review of this third party's Microsoft operated accounts. While Microsoft's terms of service make clear our permission for this type of review, this happens only in the most exceptional circumstances. We apply a rigorous process before reviewing such content. In this case, there was a thorough review by a legal team separate from the investigating team and strong evidence of a criminal act that met a standard comparable to that required to obtain a legal order to search other sites."

One might rephrase it as: 'The TOS allow us to read your data. We will choose to do so if it is sufficiently important to us. We can make this decision unilaterally.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope he can sue them and win.

What Microsoft should have done is obvious: Get the case before a judge and get a search warrant. Use the search warrant to access the communications.

Just because you own the email servers doesn't mean you get to play judge and jury.

<comment><USER25> On what grounds? IANAL (and I am a Microsoft employee), but this makes no sense to me. As far as I know, warrants are for government agencies, not companies. And assuming a civil case where they were demanding that the provider turn over the emails, wouldn't their conversation with the judge go something like this?

Microsoft: "Judge, we demand that Microsoft turn over these emails." Judge: "???"

(that is, can you even procedurally attempt to force discovery against yourself?)

Not to mention that the EULA seems to pretty clearly cover exactly this scenario.

<comment><USER26> While the EULA may "clearly cover exactly this scenario" do you think it would be as easy to extract the information if it was a google or apple trade secret? I kind of think MS would go to the mat for user privacy in that circumstance.

<comment><USER25> Well, as I tried to allude to, in those cases Apple or Google would file a motion to compel Microsoft to disclose the info. Is it even possible under the rules of civil procedure for Microsoft to file a motion to compel _itself_ to disclose something? Again, I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that a judge isn't going to hear the argument if there's no case, even if Microsoft did want the same level of scrutiny.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, the general rule is that you can't sue yourself, since you can't collect any damages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Would you rather have Google mine your emails to display ads without human involvement, or would you rather Microsoft personally read your emails? Don't get scroogled.

</comment><comment><USER29> existing thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7434584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7434584)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "The company's legal department determined that it had the right to go through a private email account, citing a leak of proprietary Microsoft code."

Judicial Mandate: Necessary or Superfluous?

<comment><USER30> At the time of the search, was he a Microsoft employee? At first glance, it appears that he was. This is Microsoft ordering a search of the email of one of its own employees, on its own servers.

Yes, there may be a distinction between private and company emails. But it seems like the lines are somewhat blurry, here.

<comment><USER31> Hotmail is a service offered to the public, and the person was accessing it as such. The hotmail account was his personal email account, not his company- provided email account.

Imagine if Ford motors said: Oh, we can look into the Ford cars that Ford employees have bought with their own money and drive to weekend outings with their families, because we made and service the cars.

I don't think this will fly very far.

<comment><USER8> _Hotmail is a service offered to the public_ by a private entity, subject to certain terms and conditions - one of which is that the private entity (Microsoft) is allowed to put its own interests ahead of those of the user when those interests are threatened.

Should webmail and similar services be regulated so as to put the interests of consumers ahead of service providers? Perhaps, and in many ways this is the approach taken by European regulators in many industries. On the other hand, it has been argued that the rather onerous data protection regulations in the EU are partly to blame for the lesser competitiveness of European firms in that marketplace, by imposing overly burdensome regulatory regimes on entrepreneurs and thus making the barriers to marketplace entry far higher than in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Scroogled!

</comment><comment><USER22> I think in the end we just need an entirely different infrastructure for all this stuff. Email should never be stored on servers unencrypted.

I have used PGP/GPG but it's not good enough. It fails the mom test (as in my mom couldn't use it, and by extension, it's not ready for the mass market).

If you designed a system from the ground up to be secure, you could do much better.

</comment><comment><USER33> For those wondering, this is probably the guy behind the wzor.net site: [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247091/Windows_leak_...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247091/Windows_leak_site_Wzor_goes_dark_a_day_after_feds_arrest_Microsoft_mole)

</comment><comment><USER5> Slightly OT: I see a lot of people here talking about EULAs. What about EULAs and Europan law, EU or national? I don't think they're compatible.

</comment><comment><USER34> If someone stole from me, and I knew how to find the thief, regardless, of the legality of the methods, I'd probably do it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Other email providers do this as well.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm sure his lawyers will pick this apart and the judge/jury will determine its legality.

<comment><USER14> I can't even fathom how it can be illegal. Those are Microsoft owned servers. Once your data is in someone else's cloud, you have no recourse. That's why it's better to have your business files under your own control with OpenOffice or even MS Office instead of Google Apps or Office Online. If MS patched Office to upload your local files to MS servers, you would have a very strong case against them for "stealing" your files. If you upload them to OneDrive/Google Drive, not so much.

In a similar incident, a Google employee accessed personal information, but Google was never penalized for it.

[http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked- tee...](http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied- on-chats)

As usual, Stallman was right when he called cloud computing "careless computing" and a trap. [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrom...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome- os-richard-stallman-warning)

<comment><USER37> _I can 't even fathom how it can be illegal. Those are Microsoft owned servers._

How would you feel about the postal service opening the letters it transports in a similar scenario? Do you think it's morally a-okay for them to unilaterally decide to read your mail without a court order?

I suspect that most people would say "no", even though it all happens on the postal services own premises, using their own resources. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if most people would think like you expressed when it comes to e-mail.

Clearly, more thought needs to go into this to determine in a reasoned and consistent way whether Microsoft's action were morally right in this particular instance. Value judgments are going to play a role, too. Still, I think it's fairly clear that the answer must be the same for physical and electronic mail.

Edit: I know you were talking more about legality than morality. However, as the physical mail scenario shows, there is already a legal precedent for an actor being prohibited by law from acting in a way that is analogous to what Microsoft has done; and ultimately, the law should follow moral considerations, so those are the more interesting questions anyway.

<comment><USER38> I always hate when folks make comparisons like this to the USPS for the simple reason that _the USPS has reams of laws, codes, and statutes it is bound to follow, full-stop._

These codes explicitly outline how I should expect my mail to be handled by the USPS. They also explicitly define how 3rd parties are handled when they violate your mail. It's all very clear in black & white.

We have expectations of the USPS because of a codified standard. Breaking those expectations is a totally different scenario than the MS scenario.

<comment><USER39> Earlier in this thread someone said, "Once your data is in someone else's cloud, you have no recourse."

As a more general matter, do you think that's the way it should be? Do you feel that your information no longer being yours once it touches someone else's server is the right way to do things?

<comment><USER40> I don't think that should be the case, but the solution should be more awareness rather than regulation. People should realize that they're giving up something to get a free service or subsidized products like Chromebooks rather than government interfering. Restricting people from searching their own servers will solve nothing.

<comment><USER41> It seems like it would solve at least one thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What did they smell in there?

</comment><comment><USER43> GMail Man!

Oh wait.

</comment><comment><USER44> Excellent cover story. They really pulled out all the tops.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why would you ever think they wouldn't? One of the many reasons that webmail is for jokers.

<comment><USER46> How is this related to webmail? That's just a choice regarding email clients. The matter of privacy and access are related to who has access to your email server.

<comment><USER45> "Webmail" generally implies that a large company owns and administers the server, and messages are stored on it indefinitely - in other words, completely out of your control and subject to the inherent corruption that centralization brings. Remember back in the day when you wouldn't take someone with a @hotmail or @yahoo address seriously? We shouldn't have stopped just because the domain changed to @gmail.</comment></comment></comment>


When a Resource Scheduler Is Not Enough for GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://www.logicalclocks.com/optimizing-gpu-utilization-in-hops-with-sparks-dynamic-executors/ <comment><USER2> We have a similar problem, however we are not using spark for machine learning (we use it further down in the pipeline)

The basis of our system is AWS batch, which with some wrappers is a reasonable scheduler. (we needed to make a monitoring framework, and a simple way of specifying jobs and relationships between them) from there we have a number of compute resources. If your job needs lots of CPU, then in the CPU queue it goes. Depending on how much cpu/memory you want it'll put you on a machine with other jobs.

If you need GPU, then you select the GPU queue. when you've finished with the GPU, your job should die.

Its really that simple.

The problem with the new crop of (non VFX) schedulers is that they handle arbitrary dependencies very badly. for the longest while trying to make sure that disk heavy jobs didn't land on a node hosting a DB in K8s was a massive pain (it might now be solved).

In managers like alfred from pixar which must be pushing 20 years old, it is fairly simple to tag arbitrary nodes with tags to limit job types landing on said box.

tl;dr:

AWS can provide this functionality out of the box, but its really not that full featured. these features and arbitrary tags exist already in VFX schedulers, and have done for many years. new wave managers are lacking compared to their VFX brethren

<comment><USER3> See inter-pod anti-affinity on Kubernetes to ensure "disk heavy jobs didn't land on a node hosting a DB".

[https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/assign- pod...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/assign-pod- node/#affinity-and-anti-affinity)</comment></comment>


Harvard Professor Matt Welsh: Working for Google - <AUTHOR> http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/06/working-for-google.html

<comment><USER2> [academia : toy boats in bathtubs :: industry : aircraft carriers] is the most memorable distinction between academia and industry I've heard. In the end, your slice of the pie will be as big as you can handle, but the overall size of the pie (and thus your percentage of control) determines whether you choose academia or startups or established companies.

<comment><USER3> At the risk of looking stupid, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that [academia : industry :: toy boats in bathtubs : aircraft carriers] ?

I would read this aloud as: "academia is to industry as toy boats in bathtubs is to aircraft carriers", which seems to make more sense to me as an analogy. So do I have it right, do I not understand analogies, or do I not understand the notation you're using?

<comment><USER4> I read it as "if academia were toy boats, industry would be aircraft carriers."

Edit - the blog post clears this up:

 _The way I think of it, being in academia is a lot like building toy boats and playing with them in your bathtub.

...

Whereas being at Google is like working on an aircraft carrier at sea._

<comment><USER5> Now I can see why mathematics is so formal

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As you can tell by the date, it's about a month old. He has a follow up blog post titled "First week at Google": [http://matt- welsh.blogspot.com/2010/07/first-week-at-google....](http://matt- welsh.blogspot.com/2010/07/first-week-at-google.html).

<comment><USER7> "There are few people over 40 wandering the halls. " -- Oh yeah. I wonder what happens to an engineer at google when he turns 40. Does he go to Valhalla or something?

<comment><USER8> He invents one of:

a.) A programming language.

b.) A distributed database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are no portholes on the poop deck! Every sailor knows that :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> What! And I was kinda angry with Google that after all my degrees they still consider me for "software engineering" position. This prof gets the same title. Hmm.

<comment><USER11> iirc, almost every technical person there who does coding is a 'software engineer' ... even ken thompson, rob pike, guido, etc.

EDIT: k nevermind about ken thompson and rob pike ... but there must be other big-shot hackers whose title is still 'software engineer'

<comment><USER10> Yep. It's like calling Michelangelo a painter. It's true, but...

AFAIK, their SW engineer positions have five levels, so not everybody's equal really.

<comment><USER12> Well, if Michelangelo had a business card, I think he'd write "painter" or "artist" on it. There isn't much else to say.

What should they be using besides "software engineer"?

<comment><USER13> Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead, Architect, CTO and many other buzzwords.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/how-hedge-funds-use-satellite-images-to-beat-wall-street-and-main-street/ <comment><USER3> As an occasional retail trader, it doesn't bother me at all that other market participants are trying to be better informed. In fact, it means that market prices are more likely to be properly-priced.

We should not aspire to drag hedge-fund research down to the Main Street level. If there is a place for government in this context, it is to fund the education necessary to help retail investors learn a) how to take beneficial approaches to investing and risk, b) to appreciate the realities of trading against professional investors, and c) to understand how to conceive, test, and implement their own hypotheses in the real world.

In general, an informed market is a healthy one.

<comment><USER4> > As an occasional retail trader, it doesn't bother me at all that other > market participants are trying to be better informed. In fact, it means that > market prices are more likely to be properly-priced.

What about companies that find out about your retail trade _before it 's even executed_, and are able to act on that information to profit from your very intent to trade?

<comment><USER5> This is called front running and is super illegal.

<comment><USER4> > This is called front running and is super illegal.

Are you sure it's illegal if it's a hedge fund with access to order flow from a third party?

"Front running is one of the easiest ways to make money. It's essentially insider trading, except the inside information isn't about corporate activity; the information is about client order flow. In this case, since the index investors are not their clients, it is legal for hedge funds and any independent traders to front run them. One could argue that the hedge fund managers are doing nothing wrong; it's the investors' fault for acting irresponsibly. The problem with that argument is that many of these investors don't have a clue about what is happening to them." [0]

[http://www.dark-bid.com/hedge-funds-front-running- investors....](http://www.dark-bid.com/hedge-funds-front-running- investors.html)

<comment><USER5> That article points out that "front running"(which it isn't) by HF may cost .2% a year. Its probably less than that. Bid/ask spreads are often around that percentage. This is just a trading cost. Nothing nefarious is happening here. The spread may go up if a large fund is buying, but this is only natural due to supply and demand. These HFs are just providing liquidity and "charging" a small fee for doing so. If nobody did this, trading costs would probably be even higher. There is extreme amounts of FUD about HFT and market making for some reason.

Now about the Russel indexes - the article has a point there. They are notoriously shitty indexes. Nobody should be putting money into those. But still - nothing illegal(nor should it be). This is yes, clearly a case of "investors' fault for acting irresponsibly". Nobody is forcing them to use these indexes and this information isn't hidden anywhere. Last thing we need is 100 more regulations.

<comment><USER4> > These HFs are just providing liquidity and "charging" a small fee for doing > so

HF traders provide liquidity and market-making when it suits them. Doesn't that stop when it doesn't?

<comment><USER6> People rarely do something that doesn't suite them:) What is the point?

<comment><USER7> This hangs on an assumption that people are rational, they are not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nothing new here other than satellites. Years ago (1990s?) Peter Lynch - <USER2> the time manager of the largest mutual fund followed his daughters into a shopping mall for back to school - his daughters didn't go into GAP stores so he went back to the office and sold as his shared of GAP. His fund beat everyone else by a large margin because GAP stocks dropped a month latter when they announced the earnings drop.

This is better of course, but nothing you can't do in some other way with a little work.

<comment><USER9> Where did you get this anecdote from? Googled it, couldn't find anything

<comment><USER10> Similar story from 1993

"Some of Mr. Lynch's best picks came from watching his three teen-age daughters shop at a nearby mall,..."

[https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs- xpm-1993-03-09-19930680...](https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs- xpm-1993-03-09-1993068075-story.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Something that is _visible from space_ \- the number of cars in a parking lot - seems to be the very antithesis of "non-public" information. I think Berkeley missed the thread on this one.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but it's not like the cars are ONLY visible from space. You are welcome to organize a large group of people to travel around to parking lots and count cars and then privately share your findings. What the funds are doing is just a more efficient version of that. It's all public information.

<comment><USER13> If the information is only shared privately, then it seems to me that it is by definition not public information; regardless of what the law says.

<comment><USER14> What is your definition of "public information"? It's trickier than you may think to define it precisely. For example, is any processed version of "public information" also public information?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article is very wrong to confuse "material non-public information" with hard to acquire information like counting cars in satellite photos.

Remember the Matt Levine test: insider trading is about theft, not fairness.

When a company insider uses private company information to trade (or colludes with an outside party to do so) they are stealing material non-public information from the company for their own benefit. Nothing of the kind is happening when a hedge fund (or anyone else) acquires and analyzes satellite photos.

There is no expectation of fairness in the stock market. All sorts of people work very hard and spend a lot of money to develop proprietary information in the pursuit of stronger returns. There is nothing at all wrong wit this, especially because it means that in the end we all get more accurately priced securities.

<comment><USER16> > _When a company insider uses private company information to trade (or > colludes with an outside party to do so) they are stealing material non- > public information from the company for their own benefit._

I must be dumb, but I don't understand this statement... How is that a "theft"? You knowing that I eat 2 eggs in the morning when I don't want people to know is not you "stealing" information from me.

<comment><USER17> You're stealing value by profiting on information which you had some duty to protect. For example, a company executive who knows that one of the company's products is about to be recalled generally owes a duty of loyalty to the company not to profit off of that knowledge to the disadvantage of the company.

<comment><USER16> From whom is it stealing value from? Random other potential investors on the stock market? Since the parent comment is specifically mentioning semantics, this is the distinction "theft" vs "fairness" that I don't really understand.

From an outsider perspective like me (I don't own stocks except through my 401k), Wall Street seems like a game of information asymmetry anyway where the only winners have an information edge at some moment in time. Now the question is about how "fairly" was the information obtained which seems pretty blurry to define to me.

<comment><USER18> From the shareholders (owners) whom they have duty to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's a whole marketplace where companies with so-called "Alternative-data" sell their datasets to quant traders. Satellite imagery of farms, passenger traffic through airports, all sorts of random, seemingly disparate data.

<comment><USER20> The reason your free weather app asks for your location data isn't for "local weather forecasts". Well, it is, but that's a cost for them. The income comes from keeping that location tracking on all the time and selling which stores and dentists you go to. Someone can link the NYT story from a few months ago when this came to mainstream attention.

Hedge funds also fly cesnas over refinery fields to look at the levels of those big tanks you see off the highway... most of them have roofs that move up or down with capacity, and those that don't you look at with an infrared camera to look at relative temperature differences.

<comment><USER21> Some employees of a credit card company got in trouble for this sort of thing a while ago. They were running queries against customer transactions to figure out sales ahead of earnings calls. For example, they figured out that Chipotle was going to beat expectations and bought a ton of stock just before the earnings call. (This very predictably got the attention of the SEC)

<comment><USER22> Previous discussion of that event on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8966817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8966817)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The same thing has been done with mobile data for many years, with higher fidelity. Unlike with satellite imagery, the measurement is almost continuous, you can accurately characterize which subpopulations are changing behavior, and you can sometimes characterize the change in behavior e.g. shopping more/less, spending more time at different retailers/competitors, etc.

Remote sensing like satellite is excellent for other similar types financial modeling applications, but I wouldn't use it for modeling retail as it is much too coarse.

</comment><comment><USER24> Reminds me of this article from Thasos Group that analysed smart phone signals at a Tesla factory to infer overtime work: [http://thasosgroup.com/blog/thasos-data-tesla- wsj/](http://thasosgroup.com/blog/thasos-data-tesla-wsj/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Not to duplicate other opinions, but I'll add my similar one..

This is _GOOD_ for the market(the practice, _not_ the article). Price manipulation is a real thing, and fact-based research such as this means prices are more likely to reflect reality. This type of analysis is what we need more of! It's not opinion-based drivel from a talk show or blog, it's empirical data, analyzed impartially.

edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER26> I went to a recruiting talk by Two Sigma a while back where they discussed the same thing as an example of "look at this cool stuff we get to work on". They had slides with satellite images of some parking lot and showed how they could segment cars, deal with car-like things on roofs, map regions of parking lots to the right stores, handle different conditions like snow, etc.

From a technical perspective it's actually an interesting problem because there are so many things to consider. Really makes you notice how disadvantaged retail traders are, though. I think traditionally a lot of hedge fund strategies are kept pretty secret, but this one is so out of reach and technically difficult for most people that they don't really care if it gets out.

<comment><USER27> How do they deal with underground parking in urban areas especially?

<comment><USER28> You can count cars going in and out.

<comment><USER27> Aren't they using LEOs for this? How do they get it to hover and capture traffic patterns?

Or you might be saying having alternative methods to count traffic like cameras or other ground based counters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find it somewhat interesting to what lengths traders go for profits. Cue people who explain how this makes the markets more efficient.

Something I'm wondering about though: The article makes it sound like this is some new unfair advantage of the big traders. But isn't this an old game? If you can afford to acquire and process the data you're likely going to beat the other participants. That was always true. I don't see what's qualitatively different here. Is there?

<comment><USER30> It increases the information that makes its way into the markets and makes it more likely that the price reflects the what's happening in the real world.

A world in which nobody bothered to check whether a company was actually producing anything would turn the stock market into a collective guessing game.

<comment><USER31> The stock market _is_ a collective guessing game. These stories suffer from survivorship bias. For every investor A you hear about who did X and was successful, there are investors B, C, and D who also did X and were not successful, and don't get articles written about them. There are also investors E, F, and G who don't do X and may be successful or unsuccessful.

Finding someone successful at stock picking and asking him what he did to be successful is like finding that 1 out of 1024 person who flipped a coin heads 10 times in a row and asking him what makes him such a great coin flipper.

<comment><USER30> By that argument, there'd be no successful insider traders, but clearly you _can_ beat make money if you're an insider. You know that the company is (doing well/doing bad) before everyone else does, you trade on that, you make money from the people who are in the dark.

The hard part is not regressing to the mean, and _consistently_ beating the market, which sure, nobody can do. But if I learn today that a stock is going to rise tomorrow, and I buy as much as I can, the stock will rise a bit today. So the market has become a little bit more efficient.

That I happen to then base all my subsequent trades on overconfidence and tossing darts doesn't retroactively invalidate that trade. You can even make a market more efficient on _losing_ trades- you short a stock, it goes down a bit, but you spend more maintaining the short than the stock goes down. Then, the stock crashes after your short expires. Oops! But your prediction was still _partly_ right, and that information was integrated into the price a bit earlier than it would have been without you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think i saw the same thing in the showtime series "Billions"? where Taylor uses this information , thought this is another level of technical analysis :)

Moral ethics aside, this looks legal?!, even if the shorts tank shares based on images of car parking lots..

<comment><USER5> Watching Billions to learn about what hedgefunds do is like watching Silicon Valley to learn how to make a startup.

<comment><USER33> But it's a good way to learn old cliches in both cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The tone of the article seems like it has an axe to grind. Is it really that much of a surprise that very well capitalised investors have significant advantages of "main street" investors?

That's always been the argument for index funds for regular investors, you're never going to compete with hedge funds, why waste your time?

</comment><comment><USER35> This article reminds me of tracking corporate jets and seeing if they were doing tarmac M&A talks. There are a lot of interesting opportunities for 'corporate information side-channel' attacks and it would be a great opportunity for a new information based corporation to corral this information and sell it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Hedge funds do a ton of crazy research like this. I remember reading about hedge funds buying new cars only to sell them immediately after. They were only interested in their serial numbers which they used to estimate the count of sold cars of a specific model using the german tanks method. Before the sales numbers are out, information like this is very valuable.

<comment><USER37> > about hedge funds buying new cars only to sell them immediately after

To get this data you wouldn't need to buy the cars. So it sounds like they did something that sounded like that as opposed to what you remember. Even w/o social engineering you could quite easily get some dealer to give you that type of information (or someone working there or otherwise).

<comment><USER38> You could walk the lot and look at the corner of the windshields...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." \--James Tobin, July 1984

</comment><comment><USER40> This was apparently a plot point in Billions.

There's market opportunity here. Off the top of my head:

1) Drone photos instead of satellite photos to get at the data cheaper

2) ML counting of cars

3) Some way to legally sense the number of cellphones within a given radius (can possibly be combined with a drone)

4) Simply aiming a network cam at the entrance/exit from across the street and counting the number of people that enter and exit via ML

All of these could get you at public data that highly correlates with retail sales

<comment><USER41> Why would drones be _cheaper_ than satellite photos? If they were, wouldn't the hedge funds already be doing that instead? They clearly seem not to me.

The issue, if there is one, is that it is not cheap to get this data on a large enough scale to be useful.

I suppose it's possible a sampling of just a few parking lots would be representative enough to be useful? In which case you don't need drones, you can just go to the parking lots. Which is apparently what Sam Walton did? I dunno. If that were good enough, again I'm not sure why the hedge funds would be paying for sattelite photos instead.

<comment><USER42> You're correct that drones are more expensive than satellite imagery at scale --I'm currently working on a startup in this space that cuts the cost of imaging by between 100x and 10,000x depending on the target location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think the most important part is this quote:

>"What we found is that it's a gain for large sophisticated investors who can afford the substantial costs of acquiring and processing big alternative data"

This is yet another example of wealth accumulating, of rich actors getting richer faster than poor ones. Without some controls on the behaviours that allow wealth to accumulate, it will further concentrate among the wealthy. I would argue that is a bad outcome.

<comment><USER44> Just invest in a Vanguard fund and you'll be fine. You don't need to start your own fund, just like you don't need to be your own doctor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> [https://secondmeasure.com](https://secondmeasure.com) is like "counting cars in parking lots" on steroids.

</comment><comment><USER46> This was a better story from 2016 on how they are deploying the satellites...

"A company called Planet Labs Inc. has launched a small constellation of what it calls "cubesats" that can deliver much more frequent imagery of economically sensitive spots than traditional satellites. Those spots include retailers' parking lots, oil-storage tanks or farmland"

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellites-hedge-funds-eye- in-t...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellites-hedge-funds-eye-in-the- sky-1471207062)

<comment><USER47> _sigh_

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> A company in my town, [https://www.descarteslabs.com/](https://www.descarteslabs.com/)

Is becoming a popular choice for Hedge Funds seeking this kind of data.

</comment><comment><USER49> So of course the next big business idea is large unrollable printed vinyl top- views of cars. Get your employees to move them around a bit every morning, company's stocks start to rise.

Anyone who ever considers this sort of thing to be "unfair" or "cheating" should also consider how comparatively easy it is to make a nonsense of.

Who wants to go halfs with me on a large-format printer?

</comment><comment><USER50> I almost worked for a satellite imaging company that does this stuff. It kind of bothered me that rather than providing farmers or the government with this extremely rich agricultural data, they were just contracted out to specific hedge funds that would use the data to give them an edge in trading. I feel like that's not the best use of that kind of data to society

<comment><USER51> If the farmers or governments were willing to pay the same as hedge funds I'm sure they would sell it to them too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> They've been using satellites for over a decade now. The fact that you're hearing about it means there's not much value in this type of data anymore.... I reserve some room for being wrong here.

This type of data is ultimately used to predict revenue for consumer companies. Cellphone data and wifi data is much better for that type of prédiction.

<comment><USER53> The information about the state of hedge funds takes time to travel, anyone that has been in the quant field knows about these practices. Now that data science and machine learning are becoming more accessible to the public, I'm not surprised that articles are being made on it. There is value in this data now that we have better data processing abilities. There was less technical value in the past and now there is less competitive value in the present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> There's also a YC company, ([https://secondmeasure.com/](https://secondmeasure.com/)), that sells anonymized credit card data to hedgefunds so that the funds can directly check the volume of trade happened at walmart, etc.

</comment><comment><USER55> I remember seeing stories about programmers with access to credit card databases getting indicted for trading on the information. This is a legal version of the same thing, and also probably any attempt to make it illegal would be unenforceable.

<comment><USER56> 'Outsider information'?

<comment><USER55> Precisely. It's unfair for the little guys, but lot's of stuff is unfair... such as most of high speed trading, and the people who use arbitrage to skim from the index funds that use predictable purchasing.

<comment><USER47> ...which doesn't make it any more acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Do hedge funds really consider themselves distinct from 'Wall Street"? I know they aren't always located in lower Manhattan, but as a metonym, Wall Street would commonly be taken to include all of high finance.

</comment><comment><USER58> I use discussions on the internet...

[https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/)

If it's "public" it's fair game for the stock market. My favorite example was the company Quandl[1] which was monitoring charted flight patterns of companies to determine if a company in the area was going to be purchased.

[1] [https://blog.quandl.com/corporate-aviation- intelligence/airc...](https://blog.quandl.com/corporate-aviation- intelligence/aircraft)

<comment><USER59> Of course you do. You developed that service. Maybe you should mention that in such posts...

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I remember reading years ago about similar data being used to monitor and track the recession (in the US) and potential recovery from.

Especially as it related to big-box retailers.

</comment><comment><USER61> Nothing unfair at all. Savvy investors have used many tools in the past as well. One analyst at Tiger Fund had got a job at Macy's in NYC in the cosmetics department before making a decision on whether to have a position on L'Oreal. Unless they have time to do their homework etc.. main street investors should stick to index funds or bonds.

</comment><comment> lil-scamp This example of counting cars has been around the geo industry forever, and satellite imagery is pretty cost prohibitive to get on a regular basis. I'd be surprised if hedge funds haven't already moved on to purchasing location-based data (ie mobile phone data) to get even more accurate counts of people in box stores.

<comment><USER62> That seems to be the case:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684)

<comment> lil-scamp Wonder what the pricing in on that location data is for financial sector customers, and if it's cheaper than a regular purchase of satellite data. It'd be interesting to compare the mobile location data to the satellite data and find the deltas— that would make it a lot easier to build efficient models w/ existing satellite if it's cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I was listening to a podcast on trading where there was a quant trader as a guest. He mentioned that quant firms have been doing this for years. The guest mentioned that this is no longer an advantage in quant trading as it is common knowledge and can be done by other firms.

</comment><comment><USER64> Some of the comments conflate retail traders with regular Joes and Janes. A lot of hedge fund investor money comes from pension funds who are placing retirees' money either directly or indirectly into hedge funds.

HF compensation is different can of worms.

</comment><comment><USER65> Theoretically you could fake a bunch of cars moving around in the parking lots of a failing store. Wait for the hedge funds to bite and move the stock price up... then boom, dump your shares.

</comment><comment><USER66> I think this was a storyline in the TV show Billions.

<comment><USER67> It was, something to do with chip fabrication iirc.

This is definitely a case of art imitating life though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Um... hedge funds are part of "wall street". Silly clickbait headline... sigh

</comment><comment><USER69> Retailers should try painting images of cars in their parking lots.

<comment><USER70> They could splurge for some covered multi-level parking. That would be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> How is it that Berkeley can't run https on their webservers?!

<comment><USER72> That site is hosted off-campus, coordinating obtaining the cert from the campus CA and then getting it into their off-campus host is probably just a low-priority. They should still do it, though, being off HTTPS is going to hurt their SEO soon enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> A soooooo good idea, I wouldn't have thought about it ...

</comment><comment><USER74> i was pitched a dataset of this almost 20 years ago. not new.

</comment><comment><USER75> what surprises me is how sat images are more cost effective than digital dragnets.

</comment><comment><USER76> Honestly, I'm not particularly impressed. There are a lot of other trading edges that could be found for a lot less hassle and money, but I guess that's also the beautiful thing about the market - more ways to skin a cat than anyone can imagine, and it's also not a zero sum game.

<comment><USER77> > There are a lot of other trading edges that could be found for a lot less > hassle

What are you thinking about?

<comment><USER78> :^)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: My house was robbed. - <AUTHOR>

Nothing of consequence was taken. A couple iPads. MacBook Pro but all my client files are in Dropbox. We may have lost a few family pictures. My MacBook called home but myself and five officers couldn't narrow down the apartment that it was in(or they didn't think we could get a search warrant for all 10 possible units).
The most valuable thing that was taken was my wife's feeling of security.(and mine too if I'm trying not to be too macho)
So here's my question: what do you all use for home security? I've been screwed by ADT's long term contracts before and while I have att uverse as my ISP, I don't have a landline and that used to complicate monitoring. I'm hoping the world has progressed.
Ideally it would be something with cameras that upload to the cloud so that if a burgled takes the hosting unit it will be to late and I'll have them on tape. If I could get alerts of movement on my mobile when I'm not home, that would be awesome too.  Monitoring is not a must because I think it is pretty much worthless but LOUD NOISES would be nice. <comment><USER2> First, I'm so sorry. We were broken into in October 2012. The big fear as we waited outside for the police to say we could enter (they dusted for prints) was that we'd lose photos of our kids. They took laptops, but not the backups. I now have offsite backups.

Security is an antiquated industry. I went with Simplisafe.com. It's a self- installed system, it uses wireless over t-mobile to call home. It has a 24/7 call center monitoring the alarm and they do call 911 quickly. I know this bc we had a few false alarms after installing.

Simplisafe has great service and there is no contract, but as a practical reality you don't have many choices in the space anyway. So yeah, you can cancel, but there's not too many places to go. You can also buy a brinks/ADT yard sign on eBay, since to my mind that's scarier than a startup most thieves haven't heard of.

The only part of home security Simplisafe reinvents is the installation. I thought they were coming out with a networked fire alarm, but they're not moving to be a total home automation or internet of things play. You can't add third party hardware, like the Foscam or GE home automation stuff I have. I see why Simplisafe doesn't want to just support any HW, since the result of a false positive is their call center calling the police .

I am not a fan of their motion sensors. That was the cause of both false alarms. It wasn't the cat, they later told us that the air mass coming out of forced air heating looks like a person. This is a big deal and I screamed at them for not disclosing this. The police where I live are very helpful, and we cried wolf twice. The first time, the neighbor unlocked the door and an officer entered our home gun drawn. That must've been incredibly tramautic for that officer. And of course we were fined twice.

Hang in there. That first night, my family slept w/ the neighbors. I was at Home Depot and a man starting his late night shift cut a perfect piece of plywood for me. I used it to board up our broken door like you might before a hurricane. I was so grateful to have that help, to have the help of police, and neighbors. It was a temporary euphoria because, as you mention, you're going to be on guard for quit a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are security companies (like Smith Thompson in Dallas) that uses cell phone towers. You don't need landline for them.

I also have Foscam that emails me whenever movement is detected.

Also you can install monitor/security systems that are not monitored. You can still setup codes and arm system when away. It is just that if no one is monitoring the alarms, then no one will call police. But it should still scare away intruders.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been waiting for Canary to launch for forever. [1]

[1] [http://canary.is/](http://canary.is/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Dang. Narrowed it down to 10 possible suspects. It seems like there should be some way to nail which one it is.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been broken into before too, it sucks. What was the method of entry? Can you prevent the same thing from happening again by improving something? That's better than the alarm IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> They came in my daughters window. It may have been unlocked or they popped off the latch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> GHS Interactive Security (California) is a fan of hacker news. I don't want to post my contact info directly out of respect but I've saved lives so it's important to people. If you call us and ask for the SBC Manager Cory you can get a fairly decent guy to answer some fairly tough questions you may have.

Edit to add info requested in op. Alarm.com cloud services No upfront option Vpn tunneled cameras Cellular and IP routing Rapid Responce monitoring center monitors gov. clients.

Disclosure, I work there and can provide some promo price cloud stuff on a friend type deal.

</comment><comment><USER8> On a sidenote: don't forget to write the stolen stuff of on next years' taxes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Linux box + motion + IP cameras.

</comment><comment><USER10> dropcams.</comment>


8 (new) steps for fixing other people's code - <AUTHOR> http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/31584205500/8-new-steps-for-fixing-other-peoples-code

<comment><USER2> I feel like a really important step is missing between steps 2 and 3: open an issue about the changes you'd like to make, and get feedback from the project maintainers. Unless you are just fixing an extremely obvious and simple bug, it is a really bad idea to just write up a pull request without getting an "I'd consider merging that" from a maintainer.

There are plenty of reasons that a pull request might get rejected. Perhaps a maintainer has already written some similar code and just hasn't merged it into a public branch. Maybe the approach you took isn't in line with the maintainer's vision. Maybe they just simply don't want to add the feature you want.

Randomly sending pull requests out of the blue is a good way to waste time and become frustrated. It's not very fun to write a bunch of code and have the maintainer just drop it on the floor.</comment>


Filepicker.io now supports Instagram, Flickr and Video Recording - <AUTHOR> http://www.filepicker.io/products/services/

<comment><USER2> The twitter bootstrap default styles need to go or at least be tweaked into something more personalized.

As it stands it makes the site look very backwater, regardless of features.

<comment><USER3> I don't think normal people would even notice this. Doesn't mean personalization isn't something that should be done, just thinking you might be overblowing the problem.

<comment><USER4> I disagree - their target audience is developers, not "normal people". Because bootstrap's default styles have been beaten to death by startup-in-a-weekend type apps, I subconsciously don't trust their service because it seems like it might not be here in a month or two.

<comment><USER5> What makes you say that?

<comment><USER4> Say what? That they won't be here in a month or two? I think they definitely will be around, they seem to be ripping up HN lately. All I'm saying is that using bootstrap's default styles tarnishes the brand they are trying to build (which is especially important because their target audience, developers, are very familiar with default bootstrap).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So exciting! We were able to remove about 400 lines of shit S3 code and an ugly flash widget when moving to filepicker.io. Great to see them adding so many services.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's awesome. Especially the video recording is perfect for what I'm doing.

As soon as you guys make it so that I can get the video URL as soon as the upload starts I can integrate you in.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really wish you guys would support a bookmarklet to let you pick pictures on a web page the same way say Pinterest does it.

<comment><USER9> Interesting suggestion. Could you give me an example use case?

<comment><USER8> Well if you have an app or website that enables photosharing, you'd want to capture content from offsite and deliver it into your gallery.

Importing stuff from the big sites--Flickr, et al is great, but say someone has everything sitting on their personal webpage or scattered on site around the internet?

Instead of making them save, then re-upload a bookmarklet is great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great job, guys! I've been waiting for the flickr integration!

</comment><comment><USER11> first of all, awesome.

question: is video recording supported when using the iOS SDK? if yes, great. if no, any timeframe for supporting?

thanks, scott

<comment><USER12> Hi Scott,

iOS video recording is ready and soon to be shipped. Send me an email for early access: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice addition. Question for the community, what are the thoughts on this approach of iframing the full content (ie filepicker.io's complete app) inside a lightbox vs fully built in JS?

I have a project that I'm about to venture in which will need a similar setup and curious on thoughts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're cranking out even more, let us know what you want to see next

<comment><USER9> I'm really digging the Gmail feature. What about allowing me to pull from my own ftp server?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i don't get it at all.

what's the value here?

</comment><comment><USER15> Sweet! I can't wait for more video and general file source options. Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER16> Are you working on Skydrive support?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a hiring season for tech companies? - <AUTHOR>

The US academic job market follows the academic calendar, with openings posted in the fall, interviews in late winter and early spring, hiring decisions in the spring, and start dates at the beginning of the fall semester.<p>Are there seasonal trends in hiring for tech companies? <comment><USER2> Large companies like Microsoft, Google and apple at least are probably always hiring sufficiently skilled people.</comment>


Send Bitcoin Via Facebook, Email & SMS. - <AUTHOR> https://blockchain.info/wallet/send-via

<comment><USER2> The forum thread where this is discussed:

\- [http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40264.msg1000405#msg1...](http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40264.msg1000405#msg1000405)

The URL that is sent is a bearer code (spendable by anyone with access to the data). I question whether this approach, and consider another problem due to SMS being a channel controlled by the government here:

\- <http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90901.0>

</comment><comment><USER3> This appears to not be on AWS (some UK colo company I think?) Is there a reason?</comment>


Google's Chrome Remote Desktop Screen Sharing Service Comes Out Of Beta - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/10/controlling-your-computer-from-afar.html

<comment><USER2> Is next step virtualization baked in right inside the browser?</comment>


Spacewar Video Games Blast Off: Exhibition at Museum of the Moving Image in NY - <AUTHOR> http://www.movingimage.us/exhibitions/2012/12/15/detail/spacewar-video-games-blast-off/ Some pictures taken by The Verge: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/20/3788608/spacewar-history-of-science-fiction-video-games <comment><AUTHOR> Some pictures taken by The Verge: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/20/3788608/spacewar- history-...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/20/3788608/spacewar-history-of- science-fiction-video-games)</comment>


China Launches Heavy-Lift Long March 5 Rocket for First Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/34601-china-launches-long-march-5-heavy-lift-rocket.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, I did not know that China wants its own space station into orbit.</comment>


Show HN: UI Automation – How to Test Less - <AUTHOR> https://anwendo.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN Community!

I'm the author, was technical lead at Oracle and spent lots of time and energy writing and maintaining end-to-end and integration tests. It was tedious and draining job and finally I decided to build a tool that can click through the UI instead of my teammates, do that continuously, and require less care than Selenium.

I will be very glad about any feedback.</comment>