Ask HN: Can I recruit for your startup for a flat $2k fee? - <AUTHOR> I.e. not contingent upon hiring, but just a flat fee for the time I invest into the search. As the title suggests, I'm a self-employed recruiter, mostly focusing on tech/IT/product but have knowledge of other domains. I'm not particularly wedded to the current recruiting model of high fee if I place someone, $0 if I don't. I primarily just work with startups & cool small companies.
I'd be most interested in seeing if I could apply this flat fee model to seed/angel-stage startups, that probably can't afford a traditional recruiter. Seems like classic disruption theory to me- a smaller, more agile new entrant offers cheaper services to a market segment previously underserved by high-profit incumbents. I read the big discussion yesterday about breaking up the real estate agent cartel with great interest- lots of great ideas for alternate business models in there, perhaps I can help contribute on the recruiting front. Yes we could probably work out a bulk deal for multiple jobs.
I was unsure if commercial content/advertising like this was prohibited by HN rules (I Googled around, and did read the Guidelines twice to be sure). If so, please feel free to delete/nuke from orbit, I won't be offended.
If you're interested, please let me know a good way to reach you (I was slightly concerned about putting my info out there in case the response was negative). Thanks, <comment><USER2> That approach requires companies to trust you to actually do any work in exchange for the fee. How do you propose to gain that trust? If you manage to do that, will you still manage after a few less scrupulous parties have entered this market?

Also, if, after a week/month/quarter, you haven't found a candidate that gets hired, would you continue working indefinitely as eager as you initially did on the recruiting?

IMO, no sane employer would expect you to, and many would think anybody who promises that is a fraud. So, why not simply make it $x per day/week, and effectively become a hired hand?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't take a week/month/quarter to find a software engineer for one job. I could do most of the reachout in 2-4 days. There's only a finite amount of stuff one can do in a search.

I suppose I could invoice after the fact. I can easily provide glowing references from other startups, that's not an issue.

There are already plenty of hourly contract recruiters (I have a low opinion of their quality, sorry). My personal experience with hiring hourly workers (on Upwork) is that that's where the real scams are- incentives are not aligned. I only hire others on on a project basis now- seems like it makes the most sense for everyone involved

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm in your target audience - ping me for a chat (see profile for the email).

<comment><AUTHOR> It bounced back, sorry- 'because the domain tznvy.pbz couldn't be found'

<comment><USER3> The email address is encoded (see the opening comment).

<comment><USER4> That's an interesting challenge that could be used test "AI"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amateur radio digital communications 126.96.36.199/8 partial sell-off - <AUTHOR> https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102103.html <comment><USER3> > _These days, less than one third of the address space is assigned and in > use. Large chunks of it have almost never been used_

This part probably angers me the most as I (and I'm sure many others) have asked for an allocation in this address space and after waiting months without reply was eventually denied the request.

<comment><USER4> I'm not usually a "let the market decide" person, but ARIN has only made this problem worse with their idealism over reality policies. Their response has continued to be "time to switch to ipv6" which grossly oversimplifies the reality of the issue.

Oddly enough, the Europeans, through RIPE are doing it right by allowing a market system so that unused but assigned net blocks can be sold to people that actually have a need for them.

I've also faced denials from ARIN for tiny allocations, with a clearly justified use case. They are a miserable bureaucracy to deal with. But as others have indicated, there is still a lot of IPv4 that is allocated to organizations but completely unused.

<comment><USER5> I believe the op is not talking about a denial by ARIN. The 44 space is administered by a series of volunteers that I believe is distributed worldwide. Some people in the amateur radio community like to create little fiefdoms and the distribution of subnets in 44 is not immune to this type of gate keeping.

<comment><USER3> Correct. ARDC (managing entity of AMPRNet) then used the lack of use of the 44 address space as an excuse to sell it off to the highest bidder. Those addresses were indeed unused, but not for lack of want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The money involved in IPv4 allocations - and name allocations too - <USER2> sickens me. It's a blemish on humanity and a testament to the limitless nature of human greed. IANA (and ICANN as a whole) is a corrupt, captured organization that I think represents the worst of the internet when it should have been the best of it. Removing price caps on .org, gold rushing outrageously priced gTLDs to anyone with the money (private corps), and the ridiculous marketplace of IPv4 subnets - I'm ashamed to have anything to do with this community. I'm loathe to extend my contempt to capitalism as a whole but it's crap like this which makes me wonder if the humanity of future centuries will look back at our greed-powered society with disdain.

<comment><USER7> I'm confused. You're blaming humanity because a marketplace developed following the scarcity of a commodity? Why was any of this bad behavior? I'm genuinely confused.

<comment><USER8> He's blaming humanity for maintaining a commodity as scarce, rather than working to alleviate the scarcity.

<comment><USER9> We did alleviate the scarcity. It is called IPv6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this sounds crazy to an outsider. I highly recommend reading deep into the mailing list conversation from the link. It really does sound like a private organization "squatted" on a public resource, went under the radar for a long time, and then cashed out on their adverse possession.

My outsider perspective on this is ARIN needs to provide a transparency report on the number of complaints it received from legitimate ham operators who attempted to register addresses in this block but were denied by ARDC, and a general oversight review of the characteristics of ARDC as a community steward of this space.

<comment><USER11> ARDC had administrative control of 184.108.40.206/8 for decades. It's not squatting... It's their space. There aren't enough active Hams in the world to use all of it, so nothing is lost. We'll all benefit more from Amazon and their customers making use of some of it.

<comment><USER12> I don't like mega-corporations stealing away the "public land" of the RF spectrum.

This is like having a nice public park in your neighborhood get replaced with a Goldman Sachs corporate building.

<comment><USER11> The difference is those public parks get used. 126.96.36.199/8 is mostly empty.

<comment><USER12> Even so, we're left with less space than we had before. To my knowledge the FCC is pretty liberal with dishing out public RF spectrum ranges to private entities, but they're much more conservative with turning over private RF ranges to the public.

Every part of the RF spectrum that the public loses is unlikely to be reclaimed. We have less airspace, permanently.

<comment><USER13> The FCC is shortsighted for not making all spectrum be leased.

It should all be on 25 year leases, auctioned a few years in advance of expiry.

<comment><USER14> Congress could reclaim spectrum anytime they want, in theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't really have a problem with selling off parts of 44/8 that are unlikely to ever be used.

I do have a big problem with the ARDC unilaterally doing this without any public discussion or real accountability.

They should have created a new foundation with board members from various amateur radio organizations (ARRL, AMSAT, IARU, TAPR, etc) in order to manage the (rumored $50 million) funds.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hate to be a downer, but nobody even knew about this space until it was mentioned here. I've been a ham for almost 10 years and this is the first I've heard of it.

The Internet and ham radio don't mix. The rules of the modern Internet are "encrypt everything and trust nothing." The _laws_ of ham radio are literally "you must not encrypt anything". It wasn't meant to be, unless you want to change the laws in every ITU member state. By the time that's done, we will all be accessing the Hypernet with IPv20 from our personal space stations.

Selling off this IP space to Amazon so that some people can get grants is going to make way better use of this resource than than the ham community ever did.

(I like all the people on the nanog list trying to derail it. "Some of the board members don't have ham licenses!" Not actually a requirement to manage a ham radio organization. Only a requirement to transmit a signal. "There is an antique router configuration out there that creates a peering arrangement between the University of California and Amazon that's not authorized!" Guess what guys, they'll probably shut down the arrangement. They're not going to say "welp, there is no way to fix this, here's your money back Amazon!" The thought that that's a possible outcome is making me laugh. I am sure Amazon can find a transit provider if they need one.)

<comment><USER17> > The laws of ham radio are literally "you must not encrypt anything"

Wait, really? Why is this the case?

<comment><USER18> To enable enforcement of amateurism.

<comment><USER19> Similarly why gopher is not encrypted:

[https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?gopher://tilde.te...](https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?gopher://tilde.team:70/0/~rain1/phlog/20190608-encrypting- gopher.txt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wrote about this block earlier last year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912496)

Note that this is also the block used for the UCSD CAIDA "Internet Telescope": [https://www.caida.org/projects/network_telescope/](https://www.caida.org/projects/network_telescope/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Would be interesting to know the salary of the board will be in the future. It looks and smells like a cash grab to benefit those at the top with cushy jobs to be a pseudo VC under the guide of giving "grants".

If they were being honest with themselves, they would donate the entirety to the EFF instead of this bullshit maneuver.

Just to add, even if they dont get a salary at all (I would be shocked), the responsible thing for them to do would be to give the money away to the EFF or another org who knows how to best put the money to use.

The idea we are entrusting a group thats financial statement going back the past few years show just 5k-10k in assets with a 100 million dollar windfall is insane. If they dont fuck it all up within the first 6 months I will be shocked. More likely though will be some lawsuits which delays any use of the funds.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would have more faith that the ARDC will use the proceeds from the sale for the benefit of the ham community at large if they engaged the community beforehand.

It seems to me that they saw the opportunity to make a lot of money, and figured having a lot of money is a good problem to have and they could figure out what to do with it later.

The fact that they have no specific public plans for the money is telling. They mention vague plans for grants, scholarships and a perpetual endowment, but how do we know they won't keep most of it in the endowment and use most of the interest to pay board member salaries? If the board decided to do that, who could stop them? Who elects the board?

I particularly don't like this response:

> This makes me one of a VERY small group of people with any arguable personal > property interest in network 44. And yes, 25% of this space, which is VERY > unlikely to ever be used by hams, has been sold to Amazon.

> Rather than try to personally profit from this, we all readily agreed to > place the _entire_ proceeds of this sale into a 501(c)(3) charity chartered > to support amateur digital radio and related developments. No one is buying > a yacht or a mansion.

[https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.h...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.html)

I'm not saying I expect the board will use the money to buy a yacht or a mansion, but the whole tone of that email makes it sound like they feel entitled to do so, and it was only their own magnanimity that caused them to give the proceeds to a 501(c)(3).

I'd much rather the board of the organization see themselves as stewards who are not personally entitled to the money. Otherwise you end up with "charities" like the Trump Foundation.

</comment><comment><USER23> Informative thread, with some details on the 501(c)(3) being funded with the profits:

[https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.h...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-July/102138.html)

<comment><USER24> [https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/rp1995-48.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- tege/rp1995-48.pdf)

I'll bet you it still just vanishes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know somebody who basically stole a class A IP network many years ago. (He wouldn't tell me which one. ;)

The company that owned it went out of business, so he registered their domain name, and sent in an email to authorize the transfer.

Once you've got a hot class A network on your hands, but don't have 16,777,216 computers to use it, what can you possibly with it?

It's not as if you can hide it in your garage, file the serial number off, repaint it, and put it up for sale on the black market!

He ended up trading it under the table to a company that could use it, in exchange for the promise of free service for life.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks)

<comment><USER11> I can believe this about a class B or C. Class A is too large to go unnoticed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting to look at the usage of the block in the context of the entire IPv4 space (2018): [https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png](https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png)

<comment><USER27> What are Ford and Prudential doing with their allocation? It seems unnecessary for them to have so much space.

<comment><USER26> I guess that at some point Ford though they could have an IP for each car? Out of curiosity I looked at the headers of an email I got from them and sure enough it came from an IP in their allocation! However, the same was not true for emails from Daimler...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A small earlier thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855).

</comment><comment><USER29> We were supposed to run out of space in the 90s, but NAT was a temporary bandaid that turned into the status quo. Not the original intent, and it's used as a de facto firewall with really mixed results.

I say, exhaust it and force people into IPv6 like we should all be on.

<comment><USER30> There's no incentive for migrating to ipv6 for corporations. I have said this previously NAT breaks the Internet [0]. Without setting an expiration date for ipv4 NAT is going to get dragged to 2050.

[0]:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253427)

<comment><USER31> Maybe NAT breaks the Internet of twenty years ago. But we've already worked around it. I'm using a computer which is behind a NAT which is behind a CG-NAT and everything works fine. Sure, people can't connect to me directly, but why would I want that to happen? If anything, that makes my computer more secure.

I know this sounds like trolling, but let's be pragmatic.

<comment><USER32> Some users _do_ want people to be able to connect to them directly though, hence Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), which can open ports on your router. You may disagree with the wisdom of automating the port forwarding process for people who don't understand networking concepts but there are people that do want other people to be able to connect to them directly, even if you don't.

Generalizing that one use case will suits everybody, fits about as well as one-size-fits-all clothing. Which never fits right.

<comment><USER33> Those that want or need a public IP can pay for it. I do. As you say, there is no one-size-fits-all.

<comment><USER30> This is why we are stuck with huge corporations to provide services to connect to each other. We are sacrificing privacy because we don't want direct connections. We could have hosted an Instagram clone at home as well if NAT wasn't there.

Ability to connect directly does not necessarily mean that you are somehow more vulnerable to attack. There are measures that you can take to prevent attacks from happening. It's trivial to configure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am not familiar with this domain, anyone mind answering: What does this mean for amateur radio practitioners, and what does this mean for the greater internet/communications industry?

<comment><USER35> They had a /8, out of that they sold a /10 to probably one of the big 5.

They never got close to using the whole /8 and currently allocated about a third of it.

They are using the money for grants and scholarships and perhaps an endowment to fund them perpetually (and just being cynical, probably paying the board who made this decision some of that money as well)

IPs and blocks have been allocated for decades to people for amateur radio related things and will continue to do so without any changes.

<comment><USER36> What sort of money are we talking about here?

<comment><USER37> 220.127.116.11/10 was sold which equals 4,194,304 IP addresses. At $20.00/address that comes out to a cool $83,886,040.

Using this to base the IP address cost: [https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior- sales](https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales)

<comment><USER38> None of the big guys are paying this much, especially for blocks this size. $5-10/IP.

<comment><USER39> Nice to see they get backroom deals for about 0.15% of the ip addresses on the internet, AND massive discounts.

<comment><USER40> A volume discount isn't a backroom deal. Unless you think for some reason the group that controls 184.108.40.206/8 is beholden to Amazon or big tech for some reason.

<comment><USER39> No, but the deal itself is certainly extremely suspect and with a total lack of transparency for a supposedly public resource.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deep Learning Enables You to Hide Screen When Your Boss Is Approaching - <AUTHOR> http://ahogrammer.com/2016/11/15/deep-learning-enables-you-to-hide-screen-when-your-boss-is-approaching/ <comment><USER2> As a linguist, I really appreciate reading/hearing people write/speak in a non-Native language, as the constructions are really interesting, and while I don't intend to laugh at anyone, sometimes amusing:

> Perhaps I am the one who possesses the face image of the most boss in the > world. I must have it more than his parents.

:)

<comment><USER3> This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely. Besides the small note with two Japanese characters (ヽ(' ∇' )ノ ワーイ"), you can see some strings it in the screenshot.

I've been learning Japanese and studied in Japan for a while and it _is_ fascinating to see this:

> When you are working, you have browsed information that is not relevant to > your work, haven't you?

I don't know enough Japanese to translate half of it, but that kind of negative question termination is really characteristic from the language: "masenka?" (ませんか?) or even "sou desuka?" (そうですか?) as a reply.

The interesting thing is that you can see the progress depending on the English level of the person, as Japanese people who are more fluent in English will first translate it into "right?". Even more fluent people will leave the sentence open-ended like it's missing something as they realize it's not so natural in English but still haven't totally switched over.

Note: I'm Spanish and it's also funny to catch myself saying some of these different things as well.

<comment><USER4> > This is from a Japanese-speaking person most likely.

More things pointing to this being a Japanese blog:

"aho" in "Ahogrammar", the name of the blog, is Japanese for stupid/silly.

The wordpress theme is setup to write dates in Japanese.

The default "Hello World" post from the wordpress installation has been left intact and is in Japanese.

He links to his Github, where he registered himself under a Japanese name and as living in Tokyo, as well as published code for a Japanese chatbot that can search for restaurants [1].

[1] [https://github.com/Hironsan/HotPepperGourmetDialogue](https://github.com/Hironsan/HotPepperGourmetDialogue)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question: will this post help or hurt them when they're trying to get another job in the deep learning field?

<comment><USER6> It will hurt them because now there are more people who have knowledge of DL.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure that's how it works? If you only had one programmer capable of creating websites, would we have internet the way it is today?

<comment><USER6> Building websites was more profitable 15 years ago than it is now. In fact, being a webmaster often was a full-time job in those days.

<comment><USER7> It still is, it just depends on scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> (1) This is a clever implementation. Maybe with a mobile camera it can be even more convenient to use? (2) True knowledge work requires breaks, and can not be measured with simple metrics like "boss watch what on screen" or "lines of code" (3) Even true knowledge workers can get into a non productive youtube loop, and sometimes external influence helps to prevent procrastination (4) If your relationship with the boss is based on these types of system, you better look for another place where you are respected 360 for your contribution (5) We should respect people that can not easily find interesting work or bosses that respect you (6) Communication, context and respect are always better than authority, hierarchy, and politics. Alas, humans can be very good at both

<comment><USER9> (6) Not always

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Couldn't you use face recognition and skip the deep learning part. I was playing with the Sonos Python API and I found one where if the camera spotted an office worker it played their theme music. It used some face recognition API. But good work nonetheless

<comment><USER11> Exactly my point. I don't think DL really gives any significant advantage in this case.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that was the point of the article .. more to give him some way of learning DL on the job ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i remember many old-school DOS games featured a "boss key". with a single key- press, the screen would instantly hide the game and show some innocuous "business app" instead.

this is taking it to a whole new level. i love it

<comment><USER14> Heh, one time the boss walked back into the lab, looked at one of my workmates computers and said "Ah, I see you're running lookbusy" (for the younger amongst us, lookbusy was a program that would intercept a hot key and display a fake Lotus 123 spreadsheet on your screen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Changing what's on your screen won't help much when your boss has access to your internet logs, and potentially remote access to your computer... (Yes, these are both still things in startups today)

<comment><USER16> I always have an ssh tunnel toward squid running on my scaleway server (3.6€ per month). The portable version of firefox allows me to avoid the enterprise policy that prohibit customizing proxy in chrome.

<comment><USER17> Depending on how serious your company is about network security, it's entirely possible they MITM all secure connections. Especially something really suspicious like a persistent SSH tunnel to a scaleway server.

I don't even understand why you'd go through all the effort. It's a silly position to put yourself in. If the IT policy bothers you that much, talk to somebody about changing it or find another job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of:

[http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/](http://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/)

[http://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/](http://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/)

[http://codereddit.com](http://codereddit.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> I hate the idea of my boss looking at my screen. I'll browse reddit or watch YouTube videos or check on my sports team whenever I want. If you have a problem with my productivity, let's talk about it. Otherwise, respect my fucking privacy. I'm an adult and a professional.

<comment><USER20> To be fair, and I'm speaking as an outsider here since I'm relatively young and haven't had any experience in your industry, employees are paid per hour, which means that your firm has bought your time for that hour. You can't really use that time to do your own stuff.

That's just the way I see it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong and this sort of thing is normal.

<comment><USER21> Your employer wants to get best value for their money.

Some bad employers think this means arse-on-chair for that hour. They may go as far to time loo breaks.

Some better employers recognise that employees, and thus the work they produce benefit from some flexibility.

But, I think obviously, employers can't allow completely free use of their computer network. They need to defend against malware and they need to protect their data. They also need to stop people watching porn in open plan offices.

<comment><USER22> If you are employing someone who is watching porn in an open plan office the problem isn't with your internet filtering system. It is with your employee so just fire them! If someone is dumb enough to think watching porn in the office is a "good idea" then they are too dumb to be working for you. Just my 2c.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wouldn't the workplace have a problem if an employee has a camera up which records 24x7 or atleast till he is at work.

Sidenote : don't desk Webcams have a recording red light?

<comment><USER24> When I worked at a thankless "startup", I set up a Pi Camera pointed out of the window from my desk that was next to the window. It was setup to take a picture every five minutes of the trees whilst the office was closed.

One of my colleagues took exception to this when he came in about ten minutes earlier than I (not that he could tell it was using the camera, or even what it was doing) that he thought it a great idea to rip the camera out of the pi by the ribbon and pull the SD card out when it was on.

When I discovered the smashed up pi in the morning, I asked who broke my pi and explained that I was capturing a time lapse of the window. He told me I should have asked permission before recording people in the office.

My initial reaction was to have a go at him, tell him he was responsible for any costs, tell him that he was overreacting and that he is in a room with literally 45 laptop cameras pointing at him daily, but he remained resolute that he was in the right and I was some kind of perv.

The only image my pi camera captured that wasn't the window was a single frame of his angry face as he ripped apart the delicate ribbons and wires plugged into the pi.

That job was pretty bad in most respects, and I finally got out of it to go contract professionally, but there are a few bad memories that linger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This reminds me of a 'boss proximity meter' that we made while in college. Now; this was the early days of when Bluetooth started to appear on mobile phones. What we did as interns was to have a SW on desktop that alerted you when bosses Bluetooth enabled phone started to approach your cubicle. That was a lot of fun! And mostly of novelty value of course! And I did learn a thing or too about BT in the process... :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Next step: make it open [http://www.hackertyper.com/](http://www.hackertyper.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> While this is a fun project, the ultimate conclusion here should be: if you feel uncomfortable in you job or browsing the internet near your boss, it's time to move to a different job. I understand this is not a privilege possible by everyone, those that can should exercise it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ok people need to start writing articles on what deep learning rather cannot do ;)

<comment><USER29> People do write those, and even propose viable alternatives, but those articles don't get upvoted as much ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> your boss may notice that the cursor isn't blinking since you are using an image!

</comment><comment><USER31> Which "The Office" episode did you inspire from:

Episode with "the password"? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GxqvnQyaxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GxqvnQyaxs) Or episode with"the spy " ? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INbuofE_hms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INbuofE_hms)

</comment><comment><USER32> Can also be used for wives when they walk in on you doing something like ah.. reading "Dear Abby"

<comment><USER33> Nothing to see here. Just jerking off to some lines of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Instead of full face recognition can't you just recognize pointy hair?

</comment><comment><USER35> Any decent face recognition library would have done the job. But i guess the intention was to learn DL, and use it also as a marketing tool. Well done and really good presentation.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm looking for an implementation which warns me whenever I'm slouching. Could I use the same code for that purpose?

<comment><USER36> There are some devices for that. Eg: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gobackbone/backbone- the...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gobackbone/backbone-the-smart- easy-way-to-a-healthy-back)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Seems like this could get pretty annoying with false positives... but awesome idea nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER38> Applied Deep Learning in the Wild.

</comment><comment><USER39> Favorited just for the effort :)

</comment><comment><USER40> Sorry, as someone who worked with faces, I can't believe this has no false negatives

</comment><comment><USER41> I wish they would just pass a law banning office spaces without doors.

<comment><USER42> A door isn't that helpful when everyone can just ping you on Slack anyway. And it's not like you can close the app for a while, because then people think you're unresponsive and unhelpful. Especially when 1/3 of your team is remote.

<comment><USER43> But I can mentally snooze a Slack notification for three minutes or so, enough to neatly tuck away everything in my head and reach a state where I can more easily resume what I was doing. That doesn't work as well when I have someone breathing down my neck who "just wants a really quick word".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Isn't this situation the reason handheld devices were invented?

</comment><comment><USER45> Funny now you could watch porn at work!

</comment><comment><USER46> Am I the only one who thinks, gee, can't we just do actual work at the place we are being paid to "work" and not goof off needing something like this?

I get it, people need downtime every now and then. How about doing something that's different, but still benefits the company?

Maybe I'm just getting old, but it really bothers me how much I see coworkers on Facebook, or worse, especially as most of them are the ones who barely put in an 8hr day.

<comment><USER47> If this bothers you _and_ your bosses, a much more effective approach than trying to physically catch them would be to simply either block Facebook or write something that logs the amount of time people are spending on the corporate network browsing those types of sites. Tell everyone that these wasted time stats will be baked into their performance reviews.

Voila - you now have a fun-free workplace.

<comment><USER48> Or people just use their phones instead but the atmosphere is somewhat poisoned. :)

<comment><USER46> It's more often in meetings that I see it, people on their phone randomly flicking through their Facebook feed rather than participating. My personal thought is, if you're that bored, then excuse yourself from the meeting and do something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> In a real world, you actually want to do this when __anyone__ is passing by. You don't want to be seen as a slacker by your boss, but you also don't want to be seen as a slacker by your colleagues.

In which case, this is actually a much easier problem to solve since all you need to do is detect any motion (instead of all this convoluted--although hilarious--deep learning task).

This is like the story where some government tried to come up with a super high-tech pen that works in the space (because regular pens don't work in zero gravity environment) when the final answer was just a pencil.

So the lesson here is: there are many ways to solve a problem, and if you don't know what problem you're trying to solve and you don't know your customer well enough, you will end up wasting a lot of resource doing something totally unnecessary. (But it was a fun blog post! Kudos for that)

<comment><USER30> didn't you watch the movie "3 idiots" ? pencils didn't work well in outer space too!

from:[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or- fiction-n...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa- spen/)

"Originally, NASA astronauts, like the Soviet cosmonauts, used pencils, according to NASA historians. In fact, NASA ordered 34 mechanical pencils from Houston's Tycam Engineering Manufacturing, Inc., in 1965. They paid $4,382.50 or $128.89 per pencil. When these prices became public, there was an outcry and NASA scrambled to find something cheaper for the astronauts to use. Pencils may not have been the best choice anyway. The tips flaked and broke off, drifting in microgravity where they could potentially harm an astronaut or equipment. And pencils are flammable--a quality NASA wanted to avoid in onboard objects after the Apollo 1 fire."

<comment><USER50> And thus the invention of the Fisher Space Pen.

[http://www.spacepen.com/](http://www.spacepen.com/)

Rubber that, under the pressure inside of the ink cart, is liquid, but when finally written onto paper, becomes solid instantly and cannot be smeared.

I've had one for years, and it is the smoothest and best pen I've ever owned.

<comment><USER30> I didn't know that these pens are available to the public! They have some great looking pens though. I may try one in the future</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The sad state of voice support in cellular modems - <AUTHOR> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20170902-cellular_modems-voice/ <comment><USER2> I have recently bought Huawei USB modem and discovered that these things run Linux with Android. This is pretty off-putting. With such a modem it is no longer enough to keep your system & drivers up to date, because the device has it's own full-blown operating system. An attacker no longer needs to hack your machine to capture your traffic or make you a part of a botnet, it can hack your modem. And the modem, like Android phones, is probably not going to receive software updates for long.

<comment><USER3> how is that a different threat profile than your router or any other IoT you may own?

<comment><USER2> There is a large selection of routers or general purpose devices that can be used as routers (for example Rasberry Pi) on which you can easily run standard Linux distributions. You can configure such distribution to install software updates automatically and have a quite secure setup for years.

With these USB modems, although they run Linux & Android, the images are of course proprietary and you fully rely on Huawei for security patches. The patches also don't install automatically, you need to check for them, download and install by yourself.

Most IoT devices have the same problem, so I personally avoid buying them, although they can work behind your home firewall, which can protect against many remote attacks. GSM modem is your gateway to the internet, so you can't put a firewall at front of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do cellular modems really "need" to do audio any more? I don't mean because everyone could just be using data-only SIMs with OTT SIP software. I mean, instead: sure, audio is part of the cellular _standards_ —but why is it part of the cellular _baseband hardware_? Phones aren't made in a way where the baseband chip "is" the phone any more. The modem is now a tiny part of the processing power of even the dumbest of dumbphones.

So, given this, why can't the standards require that the modem expect there to be some _other_ chip (e.g. the SoC in a smartphone; a specialized DSP on a dumbphone; a ground resistor on a mobile data stick) to feed the modem audio packets which have been pre-encoded and serialized to the format it would have done itself, so it can just take them, wrap them in baseband frames, and directly put them on the wire?

In other words, why is the (DAC + GSM/G.722/etc. DSP + ser/des) logic a feature of _cellular modems_ , rather than a feature of _phones_?

Think about it by analogy: you wouldn't expect a PSTN modem to come with a feature where a computer can make analogue telephone calls using it by hooking it up directly to your microphone and speakers. You'd expect that, if it did any such thing, it'd be by DMAing pre-encoded-for-the-wire packets out of a realtime ring buffer, the same way any network card consumes any other packet. Maybe your sound-card would provide hardware support for some codecs (by consuming one DMA ring and producing another. Or maybe you'd do the audio encoding on your GPU with a GPGPU shader, allowing your phone to speak new voice codecs with just a firmware update.

<comment><USER5> Captain Crunch called. He wants his whistle back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I suspect that the reason for this is the behaviour of most OS's around USB audio devices: switch over the default inputs and outputs to the new device -- which would mean that when you plug in your modem, suddenly your Skype would configure itself to "use" that device for it's audio IO.

Also, I'm not sure how easy it would be to even configure the OS to route modem output to default sound card input (your headphones), and the same soundcard's output (your microphone) to the modem input. The assumption of most OS's seems to be that you have one active input and one active output at any given time. It's certainly not something I'd immediately know how to wire up using the default mixer in Windows.

<comment><USER7> You wouldn't have to wire it up using the default mixer yourself. Whatever program you were using to make calls could do that for you.

The only vaguely valid technical reason I can think to do it how they have is to reduce latency. Of course the real reason is laziness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The 'reason' for this distinction between breaking out the audio of the modem to a standard interface, versus not breaking it out - but rather requiring a secondary processor to submit proprietary packets - is simply this: cell equipment manufacturers have to comply with the requirement that it be relatively difficult _to record calls made with their equipment_.

Putting the DAC elsewhere absolves them of this requirement and drastically simplifies their time-to-market statistics. If you make the OS and other layers of the stack responsible for the ADAC, then you don't need to worry about it - as long as there is a usable interface.

Around the world, different markets have regulations governing the recording of calls. Its never supposed to be easy to do this, at a hardware level, because its supposed to be very hard even for the players in various markets to do this - without a third party (i.e. government) involved.

tl;dr the reason this is so, is because hardware vendors have to comply with legislation, and doing squirrely ADAC instead of out of the box Audio routing absolves them of the responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER8> One correction: Modems in phones are not normally LGA modules, but rather components soldered directly to the main board. Sometimes the baseband processor and protocol stack are even integrated in the main processor SoC.

Systems that use the LGA or m.2 modules often don't use the audio at all, so nobody has cared to make a nice interface.

<comment><USER9> I stumbled over that as well at first when reading the article, but then realized that it was likely talking about modem modules for computers, not phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How annoying. Especially as several of the Huawei USB dongles support voice over USB.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8367864/how-make-use- of-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8367864/how-make-use-of-the-voice- api-to-make-calls-using-huawei-3g-modems)

<comment><USER6> That answer seems to be exactly what the article is describing:

> Instead, what some modem vendors have implemented as an ugly hack is the > transport of 8kHz 16bit PCM samples over one of the UARTs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would VoLTE make the situation better, since voice is sent as data?

<comment><USER12> From my experience with cellular chipsets, no. The voice channel is exposed the same way on the chip, it's just sent differently over the network. The "bad thing" about VoLTE additionally for ultra small embedded applications is that it requires two antennas.

<comment><USER13> The diversity antenna requirement is a carrier one, not a technical one. You can get waivers if it makes sense for your application.

<comment><USER12> Do you have a source for that info? Every chip manufacturer (3 of top 4) and carrier (every US carrier) I've talked to said different.

<comment><USER13> You'd be looking at Category 1 LTE, which is LTE without the MIMO. Some Category 1 modules are starting to support VoLTE. This stuff is relatively new, which might explain the answers you've got if it has been awhile since you've asked. It's still strongly recommended that Category 1 devices use a receive diversity antenna, but they work without it. Less robust, obviously.

<comment><USER12> Ah! Cat1 modules aren't actually shipping yet with VoLTE in volume. Manufacturers are sampling them, but as of June weren't shipping yet. Expected by year end last I heard. Maybe you have better sourcing, but that info makes more sense now. I'd love to pick your brain more, if you're up for it, my contact info is in my profile.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/08/an-isolated-tribe-emerges-from-the-rain-forest?intcid=mod-most-popular <comment><USER2> An elusive (but not totally isolated) tribe in Peru killed an outsider who was known to provide them help (bananas, pots and pans), and it's not clear why (probably he stopped providing help), this and a series of other violent episodes prompted a government team to set up nearby in hopes of interacting with them to try to prevent future violence. T here already exist laws preventing others from contacting them out of a fear of communicable disease.

Christian evangelists still interact with them, hoping to convert them, and it's pretty difficult to stop.

In the end, despite mutual communication, they couldn't find out why they were killing people, because once they start asking questions, the tribe packs up and leaves.

Their interactions outside of the jungle seem to be primarily for resources and when they are not provided with those, they get upset and leave, and/or take the resources forcibly.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Saved me more than half an hour, I guess.

<comment><USER2> I was pretty annoyed this started off with a mystery, and ended up with no resolution. Kind of a cruel way to structure a story, but oh well.

<comment><USER4> You've just described life.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, I'm pretty sure yours will end in collapse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing that wasn't clear to me from the article:

Do the Mashco (the isolated tribe) speak the same language as the Yine (the more assimilated tribal people)? And if so, do the people on the contact team (at least some of them) speak the Yine language and can consequently speak directly to the Mashco using essentially the same language?

This kind of contact situation can't help but be difficult and dangerous, but if the contact team and the contactee tribe have a mutually intelligible language that they can use, it seems like it would make things a lot easier, relatively speaking.

<comment><USER2> In the article, one of the Yine people who the team works with had a father who was half Mascho, but was abducted as a child and used as a translator, she learned the language from him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome idea for a browser plugin: find the <article>, delete all other elements.

<comment><USER8> The (mobile) New Yorker didn't appear cluttered to me, but I use Evernotes web clipper for this purpose.

<comment><USER9> The Internet in 2016: so many ads and so much junk that you need to use additional tools to extract the part which contains content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _they believed I was a pishtaco, an evil person who had come to steal the > oil from their bodies._

> _in the sixteenth century, [...] some of the Spaniards, frustrated that > their muskets and cannons rusted so quickly in the jungle humidity, were > said to have killed Indians and boiled their bodies in iron pots, then used > their fat to grease the metal._

Really, Spaniards? Really??

</comment><comment><USER11> ... in search of better 4G signal strength.</comment>


Predicting Kickstarter campaigns success within 4 hours of launch [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://vincent.etter.io/publications/etter2013cosn.pdf

<comment><USER2> I'm the main author of the paper, and creator of [http://sidekick.epfl.ch/](http://sidekick.epfl.ch/). If you have any question, please ask, I'll be happy to answer!

<comment><USER3> I didn't see any classification measures besides accuracy... Could You provide the confusion matrix? It's easy to derive all the important values (FPR, TPR, precision so on) and get a lot better idea of quality.

Since the outcome is either success or not, the coin flip classifier yields an accuracy of 50%. It would be worth noting that in the paper.

<comment><USER2> It's true that that should have mentionned it in the paper. The basline here is always telling it fails, which gives you about 52% accuracy. I should definitely provide the confusion matrix, it's on my TODO list. I will add a performance section to the website where I show this kind of information.

<comment><USER3> Yes, thank you.

I didn't mean to put down the article. Quite the opposite. It's truly an amazing application and a well thought through execution of the machine learning methods.

I have been wondering for some time, what the supervised learning could be useful for, which could benefit the broader audience (beyond computer vision, gaming, medicine and all the much popular and repeated applications). That You nailed perfectly.

<comment><USER2> No problem, I'm glad to get feedback, I didn't take it negatively ;).

Thanks a lot for your kind comments!

<comment><USER4> Vincetn, What's the best way to contact you about the paper. I sent you an email today to your EPFL email. Thanks, Robson.

<comment><USER2> Robson, I got your email, thanks. I just answered. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One possible explanation: the initial boost is largely a reflection of the pre-launch marketing efforts, which are in turn a measure of the effectiveness of the marketing effort generally. So, you could read this as saying more that marketing is important, than that there's something that's special in particular about the large "pop".

<comment><USER2> Sure, many factors can explain the initial "surge" in pledges: pre-launch marketing, featuring on recently launched, novelty, first spread on social medias, etc. I did not really try to explain the causes of the different phases, but merely to use the raw data to predict the state at the end (successful or failed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> From your findings, is it possible to create a sentence formulated like this? "If, after X hours, your KS has $X and X links, your chance of success is X in X." If not, can you create a comparable "headline fact"?

<comment><USER2> I haven't done it yet, but I could. This also depends on what your goal is, and how long the campaign last, but it is quite easy to extract such probabilities of success. For instance, this plot shows the estimated probability of success as a function of time and the proportion of the goal that was pledged: [http://imgur.com/hoTzBEW](http://imgur.com/hoTzBEW). From it, you can see that you need to be at about 25% or more of your goal in the middle for your campaign if you want to have more chances of success than failure. Similar plots could be done by including more factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I found curious was the difference in goals for successful and non- successful projects. It seemed that lower goals had a higher chance of succeeding (all things considered). Would that be a right conclusion to jump to?

<comment><USER2> It is correct: on average, failed projects ask for more money than successful ones, _except_ for projects in the Video Games category. There, it is the opposite. I'll add a "Stats" page to the website as soon as possible to show these results.</comment></comment>


AI Project Needs a Front Door - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/sky-ledge/ai-needs-a-front-door-93db73b89781 <comment><USER2> Great post @nraf, really practical set of ideas.

</comment><comment> andrew-evans Just read it, that comic does sum it up.</comment>


Ask HN: Search results are now filled with SEO traps, how can we fixed that? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Make it a habit to look at both the title and the full URL before clicking on any search result.

I believe that anyone can learn to recognize SEO traps by their URL pattern.

If, let's say, I'm looking for a new pair of headphones, I'd probably follow a link that says _Review: the best headphones in 2020_ with an URL of `reviewhub[.]com/best-2020-headphones`.

But I'm not going to follow a link that says _Best headphones xanax_ with an URL of `arizonabakery[.]com/_php/xyzs13mvfpw`.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that there's a high probabability that reviewhub is just full of ghost-written SEO-bait with affiliate links that ranks high but doesn't actually show you the best headphones but rather the headphones that pay most affiliate kickback.

<comment><USER2> 100% agree. That only weeds out the malware/PUP/_You won a free iPhone 11_ gunk.</comment></comment></comment>


Build a Lazy-Load Router with Vue.js and the Lastest Browser Features - <AUTHOR> https://vuejsdevelopers.com/2017/10/30/vue-js-dynamic-imports-lazy-load/?jsdojo_id=hn_llc <comment><USER2> Since the author appears to be OP here: I think you meant "latest" browser features?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh god how did I manage that...thanks, I've updated the original post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know how to do this with react?

<comment><USER4> Yup, I use React-Router with React-Loadable: [https://github.com/thejameskyle/react- loadable](https://github.com/thejameskyle/react-loadable)</comment></comment>


Newspaper.com - <AUTHOR> http://newspaper.com <comment><AUTHOR> It is a redirect - I don't want to spoil the surprise by posting the destination URL. Safe for work.</comment>


Critical Code in Millions of Macs Isn't Getting Apple's Updates - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/critical-efi-code-in-millions-of-macs-is-not-getting-apple-updates/ <comment><USER2> The same Twitter-posting Apple employee noted in a thread last week that they had intended EFI checks to ship in Sierra. This indicates that Apple has been considering EFI as an attack vector for at least a couple years, and may perhaps (!) be aware of the risk category.</comment>


Ask HN: Should i publish my fork? - <AUTHOR> I first forked language-java (https://github.com/vincenthz/language-java) without the intention of publishing it, i just wanted to add a few features and if it's useful create t pull request to the original project. Here is my fork: https://github.com/exemplator/java-parser<p>But then things got out of hand, i discovered significant bugs and realised that the features require a complete rework of fundamental parts of the library. I have since touched nearly every line of the project and completely broke backwards-compatibility.  Since i think the bug-fixes and features introduced would benefit a wider audience, should i publish my project? This might be a personal thing, but i have to confess that i don't like trying to merge huge amounts of work upstream into private repositories. I like programming and a lot of thought went into my changes, so i want at least some recognition for it (even if nobody ever notices it). Also, the original project is pretty much unmaintained and the work feels wasted if it just disappears into an unmaintained project. So, what should i do? <comment><USER2> It doesn't hurt to publish, and others will benefit. Make the fork public (and be sure to document the breaking changes), then reach out to the upstream owner that you'd be happy to advise on your changes if they want to consume the effort to merge back and maintain their current compatibility.

But as you said, the project is unmaintained and you likely won't get a response. If you don't get a response, then the world can benefit from your fixes.</comment>


Insider Threat Training: Building the Employee Defenses - <AUTHOR> https://news.clearancejobs.com/2017/02/06/insider-threat-training-for-employees/ <comment><USER2> Does this site know that clicking their "hamburger" menu icon does nothing from within an article? (Tried on Chrome and Opera Beta)</comment>


Mecanum wheel - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecanum_wheel <comment><USER2> Intralox belts are sold under all sorts of names...mecnasort and tabletronix were a few older ones I recall when I first started as an industrial machinist 15 years ago. The problem with intralox is theyre relatively sensative to weight and if one row or cluster of links goes down, it can very quickly take the entire table down.

Mecanums on the other hand are incredible. If you need to service a four thousand pound part, you can drag it around on a table of mecanums like its a childs toy. Mecanums pods are even individually addressable, so you can get an email or alert to exactly which one is under too much load, or failing.

<comment><USER3> You referring to intralox's ARBs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These are so damn cool. My old FIRST team wanted to use these but the lack of traction was a real problem. Great for moving heavy & slow, not so great for fast turns (even with relatively low center of gravity).

<comment><USER5> My FIRST team did use them and loved using them. For our use case it was great

<comment><USER4> That's awesome! I think the year we considered it was "Aim High" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim_High](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim_High)) or one of the adjacent years. We used our previous year's robot as a test bed and found regular wheels could too easily push our Mecanum wheel robot out of the way / knock it off balance. Do you remember which competition you used the wheels? What did you end up using for a driver control layout?

<comment><USER5> We used it for Steamworks ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Steamworks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRST_Steamworks)), where speed was a priority for our light robot. Unfortunately, defense was utilized to our detriment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yup, like the article notes, we use these on ships where there are often times when you need to transport large pallets of material through a maze of passages and you often don't have enough reserved deck space to accommodate the turning radius of a normal pallet jack or 'walkie'. Material Handling Equipment with Mecanum wheels are omnidirectional (no turning radius), so you can transit heavy/bulky cargo through very tight passageways that would otherwise be virtually inaccessible.

<comment><USER7> Here's a forklift with mecanum wheels (1 min)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW3OBb_b89k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW3OBb_b89k)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat! I built a little mobile robot that uses omni-wheels[1], a related style wheel. Build report here[2] (forgive the lousy website, I'm a mech guy just starting to learn software)

The wheels allowed some neat driving tricks, but it also made it really difficult to drive in a straight line. You don't get the normal tracking behaviour that wheels give you, and differences in traction from wheel to wheel also tend to distort your course. Adding a gyro for use in a closed-loop angular control system really helped this a lot.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_wheel) [2] [http://willbeattie.ca/Projects/Twitch/Twitch.html](http://willbeattie.ca/Projects/Twitch/Twitch.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of Intralox belts[0], which are used extensively in manufacturing and warehousing. Intralox belts are conveyor belts made of tiny wheels pointed 90 degrees (usually) off of the direction the belt is traveling.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqLYhhV7u7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqLYhhV7u7Y)

</comment><comment><USER10> Demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne09Y72zW_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne09Y72zW_Y)

</comment><comment><USER11> When reading the wikipedia page I was surprised to learn that: "In 1997, Airtrax Incorporated and several other companies each paid the US Navy $2,500 for rights to the technology, including old drawings of how the motors and controllers worked, to build an omnidirectional forklift truck"

This was more than 20 years ago, but $2,500 seems on the low end for a usage- license. This patent is pretty interesting after all. Does anyone have any knowledge in this area? Is that average for these types of patents, or is the Navy giving it away for cheap to incentivize new innovation?

<comment><USER12> '97 was 25 years after the original patent was filed, so the original patent was well expired.

I would guess that what they were buying from the Navy were literally just the implementation notes, because even if the patent covers all of the original, key, patent-able ideas, it can still be a bitch to go from that to an actual working implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This video explains it well:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7FbDy- gE70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7FbDy-gE70)

<comment><USER14> It's a pity that they got the orientation of the rollers wrong.

The wheels should have been oriented either like this:

          ___
      [\]|   |[/]
         |   |
      [/]|___|[\]

or like this:

          ___
      [/]|   |[\]
         |   |
      [\]|___|[/]

instead, they managed to mount them like this:

          ___
      [/]|   |[/]
         |   |
      [\]|___|[\]

<comment><USER15> The only correct configuration is the middle one. If you have the rollers making an X then the vehicle is unconstrained about Z.

<comment><USER16> Could you explain that deeper?

<comment><USER17> I see where they're going now that it's pointed out.

The X pattern defines a single point of control where the lines cross, while the 'diamond' pattern creates (roughly) four outer lines of contact and thus for a complex terrain beneath allows for better control in the location on top of that uneven field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Theyve been made for lego robots as well: [http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/lego-mindstorm- mecanum-w...](http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/lego-mindstorm-mecanum- wheel-vehicles-by-yoshihito-isogawa)

</comment><comment><USER19> If the original patent was November 1972, then surely it had long-since expired by 1997, which then begs the question of why it was necessary that: "In 1997, Airtrax Incorporated and several other companies each paid the US Navy $2,500 for rights to the technology"

Is there something about US patents not mentioned in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent_in_the_United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent_in_the_United_States) ?

<comment><USER20> It seems there is some complexity and other patents involved.

From their SB2 form:

A form of our Omni-Directional technology was originally patented in 1973 and was sold to the US Navy. We secured a transfer of this technology from the Navy in 1996 under the terms of a CRADA agreement (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement) and we have worked since that time to commercialize Omni-Directional products. We received 3 patents regarding the "redesign" of the wheel. In addition, we have a license agreements for the algorithms used to control vehicular movement, and a patent for this technology has been applied for. (...) The patent for the Omni-Directional wheel expired in 1990.

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1081372/000101376207...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1081372/000101376207000731/formsb2.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Plenty of options here if you're interested: [https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=mecanum&sa=&dwh=585aec7...](https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=mecanum&sa=&dwh=585aec74c689e1f)

<comment><USER22> Shows no results found.

<comment><USER21> go to [https://thingiverse.com](https://thingiverse.com), search for mecanum. Done!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Airbus uses them to move A380 parts around their factory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_8xhCi72w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_8xhCi72w)

</comment><comment><USER24> The alternative is using Omni Wheels mounted at 45 degrees, which lets you do translations without rotations.

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

</comment><comment><USER25> Liddiard wheels are a bit of an iteration on this concept: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jas_y1cUndI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jas_y1cUndI)

<comment><USER26> Is it just me, or do the physics of the tire not make sense here? I'm clearly missing something, given that they have a working demo.

But it seems to me that the surface area of the tire is getting stretched and squashed as it spins horizontally.

<comment><USER27> Yep you are correct. It seems like the tires would have to consist entirely of a fairly elastic material, preventing the use of banded or radial designs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> the mythbusters had a forklift or something with these wheels I believe

<comment><USER29> Yeah, they had an ATX-3000 Sidewinder.

[http://www.vetexinc.com/vehicles/sidewinder.html](http://www.vetexinc.com/vehicles/sidewinder.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Has anyone looked into these for an Omni directional treadmill?

<comment><USER31> Smarter every day had video recently about it used in VR company

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> how well do they roll on tarmac?

Imagine an electric car that can park and drive in tight spaces.

<comment><USER33> Neither surface nor weight seem to be issues: they're used for multisurface forklifts, they do fine on grass or dirt or sand, they're used for heavy lifters. They're expensive and heavy though.

But I'd be more worried about operating speed, mecanums have maybe 60~70% of the traction of a regular threaded wheel, and probably behave much more poorly at high speed.

On a regular car, you're probably better off with auto-parking (the tech is getting pretty damn reliable, it's just a question of having it trickle down from the luxury segments) or even just parking assist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think my nephew's toy robot puppy moves around on these.

</comment><comment><USER35> That's one the few cases where it made sense to _[puts sunglasses on]_ reinvent the wheel.</comment>


Show HN: Virtual "stress-o-meter" to stay calm and carry on - <AUTHOR> http://soundtocalm.com/ease.html <comment><AUTHOR> A "luminotherapy" app</comment>


Show HN: A Map of Refugees Seeking Asylum in Europe (made Using R) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zubairs/a-map-of-refugees-4e737d2aeb0c <comment><USER2> Show HN is explicitly for stuff people can use:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> damn I should learn to read slowly.. thanks for the info</comment></comment>


Steve Blank is My Hero - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twosix.es/2010/05/13/steve-blank-is-my-hero/

<comment><USER2> It's a little late in my life for Steve Blank to be my hero, but I must say he's provided the last set of organizing principles necessary for me to just about completely understand and organize the failures of the startups I worked for or that were otherwise important to me.</comment>


Visually emulating the 6502 with HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/

<comment><AUTHOR> For anyone having trouble viewing it here's the guidance from the site:

"Our chip simulator makes heavy use of the latest version of HTML5 drawing technology.

It will only run on recent browsers and on a computer with sufficient memory (we recommend at least 2Gbytes.)

We've tested it on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Unfortunately Internet Explorer isn't yet capable of running the graphics.

If you're using one of the above browsers and having trouble, please restart the browser."</comment>


Inequality driving 'deaths of despair' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/education-48229037 <comment><USER2> I urge anyone who is using dark patterns in their software or business models to take a step back and think about this: some of the people your projects engage are fighting to keep their head above water. Your decisions, however abstracted they may be from these people, could make or break somebody's will to live.

Concretely, I was so disheartened to hear of Facebook/Cornell's studies a few years back around effecting users moods by controlling the negativity of content. In the communities I come from mental health is not simple and people are dying. Relationships are being stretched. People are out on thin ice just to survive. Those researchers were clearly completely out of touch with the gravity of their decision to experiment on people like that. We need to do better.

<comment><USER3> But how many people on HN have this level of authority... it's akin to asking the person who flips the burgers to think about American health. People who set research agenda at Facebook likely have PhD's and are involved primarily in research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The summary line of the article:

> Widening inequalities in pay, health and opportunities in the UK are > undermining trust in democracy, says an Institute for Fiscal Studies report.

It's addressed again, later in the article:

> Sir Angus said "people getting rich is a good thing" but not if it meant > "enriching the few at the expense of the many".

In the U.S., we talk of the American Dream, but the more modest versions of it weren't really a dream, but more of a promise, or an agreement: You could get by, and even modestly prosper, by being a person of good will with a dose of diligence and hard work; life could be fair. I think that got lost in the inevitable exaggeration of that dream for dramatic effect, things along the lines of forming the next Google in your garage or of winning the lottery or getting promoted into the C-Suite for your ingenuity or "moxie" or whatever. Granted, this hasn't been a credible belief for all sectors of society (It helped to have had white skin.), but it enjoyed some prevalence. To the extent that it was believed, it animated people's actions. They could bear up under a dreary job to send their kids to college, or to save up for retirement, or both. Devastations like cancer or some other personal disaster could be regarded as exceptions, enough so to hold the Dream together.

It just isn't like that anymore. Predatory insurance companies seem bolder in their greed. Hospitals seem complicit. The easy money available from being the only manufacturer of (honestly pretty shitty) cars went away, and labor prices deflated out from under the working classes. Houses, formerly built to last a lifetime, are built to sell, and then fall apart. The whole thing has turned to ashes.

Honestly, the honest, modest version of the American Dream is gone. Hard work is rewarded with insecurity and layoffs. The ACA even seems tenuous under Republican rule, and that only for the slight majority that think the ACA to be progress over private victimization. All that seems left is the prospect of walking over one's peers to a better life. We may malign CEOs as having said, "Fuck you, I've got mine," but we feel left with, "I'm sorry, I have to get mine."

The point of this ramble is not to diminish the contribution of naked inequality of the scale we're seeing. (I think, practically speaking, that's the cause.) Rather, the point of this ramble is that it's something like the modest American Dream that has to be tenable in order for a stable working class, and therefore democracy, to limp along much longer. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

<comment><USER5> > Houses, formerly built to last a lifetime, are built to sell, and then fall > apart

I suspect people think that older homes are better built because the only older homes around today are the best built ones. The rest fell down and were replaced. I.e. survivorship bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been reading the works of the great social reformer Henry George. A socialist literate in political economy, he advocated a land value tax, which does not distort economic incentives as land cannot be produced.

I see many angry youths, even very intelligent angry youths entranced by neo- Marxism, which seems to consider any concrete policy proposal as "logocentric".

I stumbled across a Marxist YouTube channel, PhilosophyTube, whose solution to the housing crisis was to outlaw the housing market and distribute the houses to democratic committees. Things like incentives for production, supply and demand, the many pathologies of democracy, the sense people have that they ought to be able to express their choice as individuals, public choice theory, and the fact that no given unit of housing is fungible were presumably too logocentric to address.

I have seen the Marxist movie before and where it leads is not pretty.

I would urge people who think egalitarianism is important to read George. The space of political economy is much larger than either left or right would have you believe.

There are forms of wealth distribution that do not decrease economic efficiency, such as said land value tax. Harberger taxes are another such policy.

<comment><USER7> I must second George. His whole idea of taxing things humans do not produce instead of labor, etc. is remarkably rational.

Both Marxism and fascism have made a comeback in a big way. Neither offer any solutions that will lead anywhere other than dystopia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The UK is a very odd place. There is an entrepreneurial spirit but that is held almost entirely by people who will never become entrepreneurs.

The reason there is stagnation isn't "the rich". It is the vast swathes of middle-class people who are determined to get something for nothing. An investment without risk. A job without effort. Respect from others without ability. The list continues forever.

What is bizarre, but totally typical of the British media, is to blame "other people" for something that is obviously systemic (the BBC is, ironically, a great example of British feebleness).</comment>


StubHub backtracks on offering refunds for events affected by coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/sports/stubhub-refunds-coronavirus <comment><USER2> StubHub has also been withholding payments from sellers for a month now.

They would be making millions on interest alone if interest rates weren't so low.</comment>


Have We Out-Grown jQuery? - <AUTHOR> http://tech.pro/tutorial/1385/out-growing-jquery

<comment><USER2> Things like "if(selector === undefined){", "typeof HTMLElement === "object"", "__dolla_handler_guid" are the typical bits as I go through Javascript code that remind me why I'm not a Javascript programmer (or at least not a enthusiastic one).

Almost 20 years in and with a de facto monopoly on the most ubiquitous medium of the 21st century, it's awful to think that it's still so coarse (the word is carefully chosen here to avoid being too inflammatory). Or maybe it's actually because it's so widespread (and getting even more so every day) that it can't be made into a cleaner and more elegant language across the board.

That being said, kudos to the author for a well-crafted article. Very interesting to follow and perfectly illustrated.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe we'd better learn what tools we're using, what for and what their use entails.

We don't ougrow our tools, we outgrow the use we have for them. But today, with all the jQuery plugins landscape, it's pretty hard to outgrow it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Who is "we?"

</comment><comment><USER5> Catchy title... ;)</comment>


Moving from PHP to Go and Microservices - <AUTHOR> http://blog.arduino.cc/2015/04/16/arduino-web-architecture-back-to-the-future/?utm_content=buffere40c1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER3> "[Go] is impressively fast and soon we figured out that our bottleneck was not the language/framework neither the application, but our database"

You re-wrote your entire REST API in a new language without first understanding where your performance issues were?

<comment><USER4> They also talk about switching DBs. In my experience it is rarely the database choice but bad schema and/or poor SQL queries.

<comment><USER5> Yes these were my biggest problem with this post; they don't spend the time to try and find out bottlenecks and when they finally do instead of investigating the WHY they're thinking about simply switching to yet another which is going to have the same issues if they're not using an optimal data model, etc.

<comment><USER6> This is unfortunately a very common problem-solving approach. I've seen devs upgrade jQuery because they're getting a 500 error from a PHP app. No relation to the problem - it's just flailing around in hopes something random works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being 100% honest, the first thing it came to my mind after reading the title was "Why?".

And now I still don't know why.

Maybe I'm dead wrong but for me this is yet another case of pure tech fashionismo.

<comment><USER8> My personal motivation for rewriting some of my old PHP projects (albeit hobby projects at best) to Go is A) willingness to maintain PHP (which is almost nil) and B) rewriting programs can help discover bugs and re-understanding your programs.

But that's for small hobby projects, where the developer team is usually just me. For a large project, there should be some serious advantages to Go over PHP in their use cases. Don't get me wrong, I think Go is a better language to write websites in than PHP, but I am also a pragmatist.

<comment><USER9> There is a lot of reasons to choose Go over PHP for new project (static typing, better scaling because of smaller memory footprint of each request and so on). But for existing project all is not so simple. But after reading their post I understand it as they just got tired because of code mess, so rewrite was only way to clean things up. Only thing I don't understand is why they didn't remove PHP at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love coding in Go, it's much more fun for me than PHP or node.js.

According to half the comments here and on every other Go-related HN post that makes me a hipster, fashionista, hype-driven sheepdev.

If this had been a post about Arduino.cc being unhappy about performance and refactoring their code in an attempt to improve that, nobody would be batting an eye. But since they decided to refactor with Go, suddenly everyone is asking "why?"

<comment><USER11> Asking "why" is a sign of curiosity, a desire to gain insight from the experience of those who are, apparently, willing to share it with us.

Using fashionable tech X is not bad on its own. But without the "why" we have no clue what the author's reasons for the given choices are, and how the end results align with the initial reasons.

Lots of small businesses have driven themselves off a cliff basing their tech choices on what their employees would "enjoy" most. It's a good reason to code Go in your free time, but not to migrate a company's infrastructure to it.

It's very strange to see that you wouldn't want to know "why". Maybe you're smarter than all of us.

<comment><USER10> The "why" I'm seeing here is not the curious type, it's demanding justification. It's telling people they must explain themselves thoroughly, to defend their decision every single time they choose to use it.

Go is sufficiently mature enough that those questions need not be asked any longer. Docker is built on it, Google's Vitess database sharding system (which powers _YouTube_ , of all things) is built on it. Nobody is at risk of "driving themselves off a cliff" for choosing Go, provided they are proficient enough with it.

I haven't seen any other language get as much hate as Go does on this site.

<comment><USER12> > Go is sufficiently mature enough that those questions need not be asked any > longer. Docker is built on it

So... just so I can get the chain of thought, here:

       * the language has growing for a while

       * people have used it to ship something

Therefore, no more need to ask questions -- just switch to it!

> I haven't seen any other language get as much hate as Go does on this site.

Given the amount of criticism PHP and JavaScript get on this site, this statement is simply indefensible.

And a lot of the criticism Go gets is concrete and a direct result of choices the language designers consciously made.

<comment><USER10> > Therefore, no more need to ask questions -- just switch to it!

Well, sure, if you want to twist my words then go ahead.

What I said rather clearly, but seems to have been lost on you, is that questions not asked in earnest but in flippant disregard for the developer's choices are not welcome.

And my statement on the hate Go gets is certainly defensible. I never questioned the criticisms, I'm not here to say Go is perfect, only to rail against the senseless vitriol that is guaranteed to fill the comments on every Go-related link posted to Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to hear how folks are actually deploying Golang for web apis - <USER2> Gorilla, net/http, etc?

<comment><USER14> Like the others, net/http with gorilla packages pulled in as needed. Nginx for static files and a reverse proxy for go. Upstart, and that's about it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a developer, I appreciate having an interest in and using different technical combinations, but as a site maintainer I've been wrestling with how to accommodate different tech stacks with limited time and developer resources. It's lead me to start questioning the developers choice of tech vs. what the right tech choice for the organization. There's an assumption the developer will choose the right tech, but frequently the client has no idea how to access tech decisions and developers are left to pursue whatever they choose. There are use cases where a custom stack is appropriate and other cases where a an off-the-shelf solution (like WordPress, Django, Drupal, etc) has better options for long term support. I'm not saying this is the case at arduino.cc, but the blog post did trigger that reaction.

</comment><comment><USER16> Which IDEs have good Go support (code complete + debugging)?

</comment><comment><USER17> Go was interesting me to up to the point that I found out there is no real debugger, and little interest in making one. I find it hard to get excited about being unable to properly debug my code.

<comment><USER18> Now there's a good interview question to determine if you're the type of person who gets things done. Plenty of code has been written without "real debuggers".

A debugger can make things easier, but can you effectively work without one if needed?

<comment><USER19> Sometimes stepping through is faster than adding in trace temporarily. I say that as someone who almost always uses trace. This is a terrible interview question if "yes I use a debugger" is the wrong answer. What matters is if the person can get the job done, not if they'd do it the same way as you.

<comment><USER20> I'm fairly certain I would have zero desire to work someplace that considers 'Yes, i use a debugger' the wrong answer.

<comment><USER18> That wasn't the question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not sure if going forward with Angular.js was the right choice, given Angular 2.0 had been announced, and will be different from Angular 1.0 (no backwards compatibility)

<comment><USER22> FUD.

There will be a clear migration path, including, it seems, the ability to run both 1.x and 2.x modules side by side using the new router from 1.4. This means you won't have to rewrite your 1.x modules immediately. 1.x also has a commitment from the Angular team to remain maintained for the foreseeable future.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Grpcc – a gRPC cli for easy testing/scripting against gRPC services - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/njpatel/grpcc <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all - grpcc is a simple cli tool for running interactive or non-interactive rpc calls against gRPC services.

I posted a big update today with some nifty features and thought it could be useful for others too.

In interactive mode, I mostly use it for debugging & exploring services. It has a full nodejs repl so you can get as complex as you like.

In non-interactive mode, it's useful to run scripts against gRPC services and have the output printed to stdout - great for scripting/testing.

Cheers!</comment>


A Trillion Edge Graph on a Single Commodity Node - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/27/trillion-edge-graph-single-commodity-node/ <comment><USER2> Isn't computing on a single machine generally always faster? Clustering is for handling more data than a single machine can hold, which requires paying network costs. There are parallelization benefits, but CPUs have so many cores now.

<comment><USER3> This. It can be faster per-node because of removed IO and abstraction overheads, but perhaps not overall (and they allude to that fact). There are other side effects too though - you're limited by how large hardware on a single node can go, and what the cost/performance ratio is with _highly_ specialized hardware like the above or commodity machines.

People also might want distributed systems for other reasons - fault tolerance is one. So as your SLA requirements go higher, you sometimes end up with little choice but to pay that cost. Other times you don't.

They do cite challenges with scaling this up, but I think quite a bit of their innovation is around just leveraging hardware better, which is a big enough deal on its own.

<comment><USER4> But can we have a cluster of computers that look like a single computer sharing the underlying hardware, because that's just basically linking a remote device. I supposed special kernel has to be written to overlay.

EDIT: Looks like this is already a thing [1]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image)

<comment><USER3> That's not quite the issue - SSI (which I didn't know about!) sounds cool, but it's a programming model that solves similar issues at a different abstraction layer. The question that remains unsolved is, regardless of what abstraction you use, whether the overhead of communication (latency, throughput) between nodes is large enough to make things annoying, and whether it's possible to work around this effectively or not. Stuff like InfiniBand along with tech like RDMA is helping a lot with this, and hardcore database installations do use this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting paper, but the experimental section confuses me. They compare their system which preprocesses the graph into the tile-structure (a compressed representation), but none of the in-memory systems they compare against use a compressed representation. Is this comparison really apples-to- apples? If you can reduce the size in-memory of the graph by 60%, then I would expect an algorithm running on the compressed version to be faster than the same algorithm running on the uncompressed version (assuming that decoding the compressed adjacency-list is significantly cheaper than the cost of a cache- miss).

</comment><comment><USER6> Wasn't expecting to see the reference to the 9p file system!

</comment><comment><USER7> The paper doesn't mention "commodity", and I'm not sure that one to four Xeon Phi can be described as commodity.

Can the title be edited?

<comment><USER8> I live the Xeon Phi---I worked on the original Larrabee project---but this article reads like an ad fir Phis.

<comment><USER7> The Larrabee project, and all the things it spawned [1], is fascinating.

[1] [http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...](http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20didn%27t%20Larrabee%20fail%3F%5D%5D)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> so, any repo code available yet?</comment>


Show HN: Research project "Working in times of crisis" - ude-aopsy https://www.uni-due.de/biwi/aopsy/en/forschung_corona <comment> ude-aopsy The current corona crisis fundamentally affects the working life of many workers.

Our research group at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany has therfor started a research project that intends to investigate the working conditions and psychological well-being of workers during this situation of crisis.

Since I always lurkingly enjoyed the exchange on HN about WFH and similar, I want to invite you to comment, share your ideas - and hopefully participate in our research.</comment>


Philosophy of Computer Science [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/phics.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> William Rapaport has just won the 2015 Barwise Prize for significant work on philosophy and computing -- [http://www.apaonline.org/news/254862/William- Rapaport-is-the...](http://www.apaonline.org/news/254862/William-Rapaport-is- the-2015-Barwise-Prize-winner.htm)

</comment><comment><USER2> Rapaport is also the man behind the rather exhaustive Buffalo Restuarant guide:

[http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/restaurant.guide/](http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/restaurant.guide/)

And he was a central figure in the construction of the Buffalo sentence:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks awesome. It's a huge book though; this draft is 824 pages! Still, definitely looking forward to reading this... eventually.

<comment><USER4> Honest curiosity: What do you think you'll get out of it? A big chunk of it seems to be about definition. A lot of it hinges on knowing more about consciousness (and state-of-the-art seems to be essentially nil on that topic - the position that consciousness is magic is still taken seriously). There's discussions about the "duality" between hardware and software: while certainly a rich area to make arguments, I'm not sure it's really impactful or interesting.

There seems to be little to no practical concerns addressed. Which is fine - chasing things just because they're intriguing shouldn't be looked down on. I'm just wondering if there's more to it, something that'd impact people writing software (even for fun) or designing computers.

<comment><USER5> Sure. For example, what it means for a program to be correct. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" is a joke, but also a playful illustration of a complicated topic. It's worth thinking critically and clearly about these things, and will only become more relevant as formal verification & specification enters our field. It's especially useful when defining undefined behavior, or just implementing an imprecise spec. Analytic philosophy in general is summed up thus:

"When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy—for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas." \- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy ([https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm))</comment></comment></comment>