"Designed by Apple in California" chronicles 20 years of Apple design - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/11/designed-by-apple-in-california-chronicles-20-years-of-apple-design.html <comment><USER2> I love Apple, but they seem really focused lately on how good they _used_ to be. It's a troubling cultural trend.

<comment><AUTHOR> This sentiment, posted every time Apple does something post-Steve Jobs, is essentially American declinism [1] but for Apple. Substitute Apple for America in this Robert Kagan article [2].

>But how real is it? Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests on rather loose analysis, on impressions that the United States has lost its way, that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past, that it lacks the will to address the problems it faces. Americans look at other nations whose economies are now in better shape than their own, and seem to have the dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas Friedman's latest book, that "that used to be us."

[1] [http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/08/declinism-is-america- and...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/08/declinism-is-america-and-mitt-can- too/)

[2] [https://newrepublic.com/article/99521/america-world-power- de...](https://newrepublic.com/article/99521/america-world-power-declinism)

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's a good idea to compare a country made of 300+million people and many more millions of entities, with a single entity driven by the decisions of 1 person.

While you may be right that people are reacting incorrectly, it's significantly easier for a single corporation headed by 1 person to actually decline than it would be for an entire democratic nation.

<comment><AUTHOR> As the first article noted American declinism has been a popular genre since the 1950s. It comes with the territory with being on top for so long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The price tag feels rather exorbitant.

<comment><USER5> Those books can be expensive but $299? It seems like they're celebrating Apple pricing philosophy on top of their design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strikes me as the sort of thing that Steve Jobs would have said "no" to.

(He famously avoided doing much backward looking. "It distracts from the NOW," as Edna Mode would say.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Yo dawg, we heard you don't like the new MacBook Pro, so we put pictures of old Macs in a book so you can buy a new book of Macs for pros.

</comment><comment><USER8> The time period covered by the book (1998-2015) is significant. This is Ive telegraphing the end of the Jobs roadmap. "from 1998's iMac to 2015's Apple Pencil" which is very much in line with the following Jobs quote of pre-iPhone prototypes. "I had an idea of a multitouch display that you could type on. About six months later they called me in and showed me this prototype display. This was in the early 2000s"

</comment><comment><USER9> Why buy a $300 book full images of products when IKEA gives you a book like that for free?

<comment><USER10> Random aside: the IKEA mail catalogs are actually very well designed and nicely printed. They're one of the few catalogs I actually keep. They don't feel consumeristic and actually have a lot of neat furnishing ideas, even if you don't want to buy anything from them.

I am pleasantly surprised by their non-consumeristic advertising. It's sexy functionalism.

<comment><USER11> Aside trivia: Did you know most of those Ikea pictures are 3D renders?

<comment><USER12> This. I would love someone to do a realistic IKEA furnishing just to see how impossible and unpractical it would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone care to guess the margins on the $199 and $299 books?

<comment><USER14> Yes, Apple is getting rich selling books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would really like a book on NeXT design, UI and hardware.

</comment><comment><USER16> Made in China?

</comment><comment><USER17> A video trailer for the book: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkskY9bL9Bk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkskY9bL9Bk)

</comment><comment><USER18> lol. explifying the apple design itself - a beautiful, but less practical embossed white cover.

<comment><USER19> Well, Steve Jobs was a fan of the Beatles...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Please tell me there's a jony ive video about it!

</comment><comment><USER21> Aren't you suppose to publish a book before you step down from a role? Seems to be the Silicon Valley trend...

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't think the last 20 years were that much interesting. The 15 years before that? Certainly.

<comment><USER23> Why go out of your way to comment to say that you aren't interested in a particular book? If this book doesn't interest you why did you click the link? Such negativity and casual dismissal of things other people may be interested in.

<comment><USER24> I find it interesting to read everyone's reactions here, both positive and negative. As long as it's not trolling, or being rude to others, why shouldn't one feel free to leave their thoughts?

In fact I checked out the comments for this article specifically because the book doesn't appeal to me either, and I was curious if I was the only one who felt that way.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Letter-to-Mark-Zuckerberg-Facebook-News-Feed-12495018.php <comment><USER2> I want to go to Facebook to keep connected with friends and family, not to see cringy memes and clickbait 'news' articles. Zuckerberg made the right decision to focus on users instead of publishers, and I think these changes will change Facebook for the better.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, a lot of the times it's friends and family that post these cringy memes.

<comment><USER4> And each required explicit acceptance of a friend request.

As opposed to a gaggle of news sources that crop up whenever.

<comment><USER3> The gaggle of sources needed you to either like their pages or have friends who like or comment on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow.

News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim's fakenews.

There's no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI.

We need more protocols and less platform.

<comment><USER6> An algorithm is desperately needed though. Sources have varying publishing rates and quality. Aggregating across them and culling is crucial. For the most part I've thrown up my hands and delegated this job to hacker news and Reddit subscriptions, but it's still not well personalized.

<comment><USER7> _An algorithm is desperately needed though_

An algorithm that weaponises jealousy, FOMO and outrage will always out- monetise a benign or no algorithm at all, over any financially viable timescale. The algo doesn't "know" of course. It just knows that showing you X has historically made you spend longer on the site than Y.

The only way to win is not to play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

... or, at least, hurts sfchronicle.com ad revenue.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does Facebook really need to take on this role of news publisher? I get that people are accustomed to it now, but wouldn't it be easier for everyone to undo this, let Facebook be the place where you go for the occasional family photos and local event updates, and let news be somewhere else? We don't need Facebook to be a newspaper at all, people were doing fine before it.

<comment><USER10> > Does Facebook really need to take on this role of news publisher?

Facebook did everything in their power to take online e traffic from news sites. The begged papers to host articles on Facebook, begging publishers to put that stupid like button on every page, or to use Facebook comments. And now that they have captured all the eyeballs, they are going stop showing legitimate news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Of course a news site owned by Hearst would say this. They're probably going to see a pretty big decrease in all their social metrics.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage time series data in your medium-data application? - <AUTHOR>

We're a small team currently using a rolled-our-own MySQL/Rails solution for time series data, for an application that records ~100,000 raw data points per day. Previously, we tried a solution based on HBase (OpenTSDB, to be exact), but a horizontally scalable solution is overkill at the moment and we can't justify the operations overhead of running a service that complex. The API, built-in rollups and caching were nice, however.<p>At the moment, we're in the middle of trying to expand our client-facing features and spruce up the backend (including using some form of caching on our time series queries), and have reached a bit of an impasse on how best to proceed. I'm wondering what kind of solutions HN readers have seen/employed in crossing the bridge between an unoptimized RDBMS-based solution, and the seemingly overkill BigTable-esque options. <comment><USER2> 100,000 points per day? If a point is just a 64bit time stamp, and 64 bit float value. That results in ~122Gb per day of data. (or 44.5Tb per year).

I'd suggest looking into a horizontally scaling solution if that is actually every day, day to day use.

:.:.:

The traditional solution to this problem when your working with raw DAQ communication/values is you store your data logs on a cold storage cluster (lots of slow cheap HDD's).

While you store 'meta-data', when data was collected, by who, what device, what day, a pointer/path to orginal data. In a more active SQL data base.

:.:.:

I'm speaking from live data acquisition experience. May not 100% align with your use case. Feel free to email if you need more info.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually see more on the order of a few 10s of MB per day (the data points are fairly small, and we've done some optimization to de-duplicate timestamps). Our entire database is currently less than 10GB.

<comment><USER2> If you de-duplicate time stamps how can you dynamically re-generate the data?

I.E.: Receive a sine wave, and give back the same sine wave?

<comment><AUTHOR> We collect data from a number of sensors at once, at an interval of 15 seconds (nothing super high speed or precision, here), so a row contains only one timestamp (UNIX epoch), but several sensor readings. It's for an electricity metering application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm using influxdb at the moment, a quick back of beer mat is ~288,000 a day - it works great, and I like the SQL like querying. Not sure on size here, as I'm in the pub.

More a testing thing at the mo, but its been running fine for the last few months.</comment>


Realtime Web Messaging over Animated Gifs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets <comment><USER2> I am convinced HN is the Pinterest of software.

Someone made a coffee table out of old crates? Pin. Someone made a fence out of old wood pallets? Pin.

Someone made a realtime messaging library out of animated gifs? Upvote.

<comment><USER3> Someone made a logic gate out of crabs? Ignore :(

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831987>

<comment><USER4> Someone made a Turing machine out of Magic: The Gathering cards. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4506865> Even more ignored.

<comment><USER5> Both got decent upvote counts

<comment><USER4> They do now :) The MtG post had about half as many upvotes when I posted the link, and I think the crabs one got an even bigger boost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > sadly we are in mid September here in the northern hemisphere.

I am in the south and can confirm we are also in September, will report back with news.

/snark

<comment><USER7> Our Canadian office managed to convince a couple of team members in our American office that we ran on a 20 hour clock, with 72 minutes in an hour. That was fun for a week.

<comment><USER8> As a remarkable coincidence, another hack that Ka-Ping Yee did once was writing a nonstandard clock for his Palm. He spent a summer living 28-hour days: six 28-hour days per normal week, going in and out of phase with the sun once a week. So he needed a way to remember when to go to sleep, when to wake up, when to eat dinner, and so on. When it's 25:00, what do you do? We have a lifetime of intuition built up around clock times on a 24-hour clock.

So he wrote a digital clock that used standard-length seconds, but 70 of them per minute, 60 of those minutes per hour, and 24 of those hours per day. So when it was 10:30:59 by his nonstandard clock, he was at the phase of his nonstandard day that corresponds to 10:30 or so of the standard day --- but the clock would then roll over to 10:30:60, 10:30:61, ... 10:30:69, 10:31:00.

It was very amusing to see people's reactions upon watching the clock for a little while, especially at the time of week that it was more or less in phase with normal time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen this technique once before... Ka-Ping Yee built a demo that did this back in 1999: <http://zesty.ca/chat/>

It's an awesome hack, cool to see it being rediscovered/reinvented after so much time!

<comment><USER10> A friend of mine wrote a Citrix ICA client using this idea and a server-side image map, IIRC. It was actually usable.

<comment><USER4> For a while (they've changed clients a few times but it still might work) the last fallback of LogMeIn remote desktop software was a gif of your desktop in an image map. It was surprisingly usable!

<comment><USER11> I've always thought of that, but never an animated gif. It seems brilliant!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome -- you never know when a solution like this might come in handy.

Wayyyyy back in the day (NS4, IE4 day) I used the width / height of an image the browser polled every few seconds as a transport mechanism... the only other option (refreshing a hidden frame) caused an irritating "page refresh" clicking noise. This was before XMLHttpRequest obviously and was enough bandwidth for our needs. It worked so well that I believe its still being used in production systems.

I haven't looked at the javascript generated in this animated gif solution, but I assume that it does some stuff that wouldn't work in the pre-IE6 browsers. It would be extremely amazing if it did though.

<comment><USER12> Ah, I just realized that this simply prints text out in a gif... it doesn't encode text in the gif and then decode it in the browser into text that javascript could manipulate. Too bad. I wonder if that's possible...

<comment><USER13> It is possible, as you can now get the raw pixel data of an image by copying it to a canvas and using getImageData.

        <img src="test.gif" id="img">

        <script type=text/javascript>
        var img = document.getElementById("img");
        var canvas = document.createElement("canvas");
        canvas.width = img.width;
        canvas.height = img.height;

        var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
        ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);

        var imageData = ctx.getImageData(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
        </script>

Then you can do whatever you want with the pixel data.

<comment><USER12> This would be a great step in some kind of rube goldberg inspired website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First person to turn a 90s animated GIF divider into an actual live progress bar with API wins the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER15> I did something similar for cheap (insecure) desktop streaming a few years ago.

Roughly, use scrot (or similar screen capturing command line tool) to take a screenshot of the desktop and then encode it into a gif frame. Repeat once per second. Boom, your desktop is now a gif.

The main problem with this approach is that transmitting stuff via gif (low- color bitmaps, remember) is painfully slow even with modern internet.

That said, could probably be very useful in some instances!

<comment><USER16> It is possible to do some interframe compression with gifs[1], so one can potentially reduce the data sent significantly, especially if one is typing or not changing the whole screen. (And gifs aren't "just" bitmaps, they have some compression[2].)

[1]: _"Some economy of data is possible where a frame need only rewrite a portion of the pixels of the display, because the Image Descriptor can define a smaller rectangle to be rescanned instead of the whole image."_ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#An...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Animated_GIF)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Wel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> No one has mentioned these specific use cases yet...

1) live charts and graphs of server loads

2) interactive maps (instead of loading new images, just append)

3) I'm also thinking of some kind of captcha, where the user waits for the server to show a certain image and then can submit a comment and the server would know which submits were valid based on timestamp... or something.

4) weather, temperature, stocks

5) collaborative drawing applet? (would still require ajax though)

<comment><USER18> (3) is only secure if no one bothers to write a bot for your site. It would be trivial to do so, however.

<comment><USER17> I admit that I have only thought about this for a minute or two but I am thinking of something a little more complex than a hard coded image.

More like: Hit submit when a picture of a dog is shown in the slideshow, if its a cat, your comment will be denied. And these images of dogs and cats would be picked randomly by the server from a google image search (...or something). The vulnerability so far is that a bot could just keep trying until it got in but I'm sure a crafty programmer could come up with an attempt limiter.

Still a half-baked idea, but the tech does offer some interesting possibilities. I particularly like that this may work when AJAX/JS is disabled or otherwise not an option.

<comment><USER18> I worked on CAPTCHAs at Microsoft Research in a past life, and I can tell you, most original forms won't work. In the case of the one you described, I as an attacker can just put it through Tin Eye to find the original, and then do some semantic analysis on the page containing the image, or event just the URL, to figure it out. I have working code for this as a proof of concept for Microsoft's Kitten Auth.

<comment><USER17> If that is the best attack on my idea, then I'd say that's pretty good! A spammer would have to target the site specifically (for tailor-made script) and parse an animated gif into individual images, then send every image into Tin Eye (which is awesome but the API isn't free right?).

That said, I am a complete amateur at captcha design. Cool research though and I bet a lot of HN'ers would be interested in your PoC if you haven't already submitted it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So when you read about countries like Venezuela installing proxies in front of Twitter before an upcoming election [1], is there a potential to use this technique to tunnel information into areas that normally would suppress it?

[1] [http://orvtech.com/en/general/gobierno-venezolano- elecciones...](http://orvtech.com/en/general/gobierno-venezolano-elecciones- proxy-twitter/)

<comment><USER20> They can always use <http://priv.ly>

<comment><USER21> This is better, partly because it requires no plugin.

<http://fourmilab.ch/javascrypt>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would be much cooler if you were to send the video stream to the gif instead of the booring old messages. Very cool though. Just think if something like this with video was invented back in the days of IE6 , it would have been the skype of its day.

<comment><USER23> HN's jacquesm did just that, and made a lot of money doing so.

<comment><USER24> Could you expand on what jacquesm did ? Interested to hear.

<comment><USER25>
        Founder of camarades.com / ww.com, creator of the first 'streaming webcam software'

see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm>

<comment><USER23> He was bet a candybar that he couldn't make a gif that never ended. He did it, of course, and that became the first streaming webcam software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> That is extremely clever, this just goes to show that if you know how something works inside and out you can come up with clever hacks.

</comment><comment><USER27> If realtime messaging is a new and cool thing, what were chat rooms back in the day? not realtime? Am I missing something? I don't remember needing reloading those pages...

All that aside, this is amazing.

<comment><USER28> Chat rooms 10 years ago weren't using web standards like HTML, GIF and Javascript. They were writing either in Java or in Flash.

However MSIE6 also supports XmlHttpRequest (though an Active-X Control), which you can also use for real-time communication. Just setup a XmlHttpRequest and let the request idle on the server-side until new data become available.

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't that lock up a thread, per request? Things would quickly grind to a halt I'm sure

<comment><USER29> Depends on your web server. AFAIK, nginx uses a combination of events and threads to handle a ginormous number of simultaneous connections.

See:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_I/O

        http://www.slideshare.net/joshzhu/nginx-internals

        http://www.aosabook.org/en/nginx.html

        http://serverfault.com/questions/86674/why-is-nginx-so-fast

Also, Node.js.

Edit: formatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I get the humor of this library, but in reality wouldn't you just use HTTP 1.1 chunked transfer encoding instead? According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol>, that would even work with your IE 2 users.

</comment><comment><USER31> Would it be possible to use <canvas> for extracting pixel information as binary data?

<comment><USER32> > <http://ernestdelgado.com/public-tests/gifoncanvas/>

Kinda:

> if we add an animated GIF as the first source, every time a drawImage call > happens it will render whatever the status of the GIF is at that very second

So if you call drawImage in a (timeout/setinterval) loop, you can get the frame's data, compare to the previous frame's data and if they're different you got a new frame-worth of data.

Considering that requires canvas support (with image-query capabilities) you're probably better off using websockets and the like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "The awesome image that illustrates this page was given by the internet." That excellent gif is from "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" Just thought I'd give proper credit where it's due.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does this work on the iphone? I expect this would be a great alternative to socket.io for mobile that doesn't support websockets or flash.

<comment><USER35> SockJS works basically everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Combine this with a client side JavaScript based OCR implementation, and you could even send TEXT in real-time.

Imagine the possibilities !!11!1

</comment><comment><USER37> That's pretty amazing, and it's really too bad that this technique wasn't actually available years before... (or was it?)

<comment><USER38> I wrote the first (only?) GIF decoder for the Commodore 64 back in the day, including displaying animated frames. There was no 'live' delivery of images back then though; you had to download them in-full over FTP or a proprietary file transfer protocol before you started parsing. I suspect the encoding was too slow on most computers at the time to stream the file as it was encoded anyway. But yeah, the basic capability was present back then.

Once the WWW kicked off and GIFs started being served, and especially once cgi scripts started being written, someone could have had this idea and the software and hardware probably could have handled it. So we could have been doing this in the late 90's. I wish I had thought of it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is pretty cool. I don't know if I would use this in production, as people with epilepsy usually disable GIFs to protect themselves, so this tech would probably fail (usually people use an extension or set the browser to only load frame 1 of the GIF and stop).

<comment><USER40> Also, I can't imagine it would play well with screen readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Couldn't this be used to add another layer of security to a conversation? If there is a way to generate gifs on the fly that contained what you wished to say, it could be used to mask your message from basic text screening and copy/paste.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER42> It wouldn't provide any meaningful security; think of how difficult it is to make a CAPTCHA that is both readable for humans and hard to beat for computers. Adding security to a conversation is a solved problem in the technical sense (use encryption such as GPG), the only reason that it's not in widespread use is that people can't be bothered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How exactly is this a better approach than multipart/x-mixed-replace, which is designed to push new messages from the server to the client in a stream until the server decides to stop?

</comment><comment><USER44> does it work in email clients?

</comment><comment><USER45> Question: Could this be used for screen sharing?

</comment><comment><USER46> You can also use image streams: <http://minipenguin.com/?p=647>

</comment><comment><USER8> The original chat system from 1999 from which he took inspiration was written by Ka-Ping Yee, not an anonymous hacker.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it was anonymous for me when I published this post today. Then some guy here on HN pointed me to the original link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> there is no client side code or am I missing something?

how do I decode my data from animated gif in javascript?

<comment><USER48> You don't, it just displays the image.

<comment><USER47> title is very misleading, on purpose I guess

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> if flash wasn't dying already I would have asked if this could have been useful to enable flash games or videos on the ipad... but the answer would have probably been "no" anyway

</comment><comment><USER50> Very clever hack.

</comment><comment><USER51> hacking at its finest. while real life use cases are debatable the implementation is very, very cool.

</comment><comment><USER52> make a QR code stream, and decode it in browser.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm crying. I always wanted one of these. I'm so happy.

</comment><comment><USER36> GIF... that's soooo geocities...

Very clever

</comment><comment><USER54> This is just wrong and needs to die and go away. It's probably fun to read for the 1st minute.

</comment><comment><USER55> From the example, ;; go and open <http://localhost:8081/> in Safari or IE6

IE6, are you serious?</comment>


Show HN: TVQue.com -a mailbox for TV. Send photos/videos to friend's TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.tvque.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Send photos/videos to any SmartTV or Roku using TVQue or create new channels using RSS playlist or by search and share with your friends. Feedback welcome.</comment>


Longaccess Wants To Cold-Store Your Digital Life For 30 Years - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/longaccess-wants-to-cold-store-your-digital-life-for-30-years/

<comment><USER2> 100GB for 30 years? Well, I'm not sure about average cases, but personally I have collected a stack of about a dozen of hard drives (volume ranging from 60GB to 2TB) over last 15 years. All fully loaded with the digital junk - because why delete things when you can just leave them?

Most of the data in that digital fossils is movies from that bay with pirates, but I guess there's still much more than 100GB of self-produced information - message (email, IM, phone) archives, digitized drawings, RAW photos, source code, savegames and so on.

Obviously, one could sort out the trash and compact the rest (like extracting a 10KB patch from several-gigabyte OpenWRT source tree, or radically compacting photo collection by deleting bad shots) and fit into 3GB/yr quota, but that's a hard and - unless one really wishes to fit some storage quota instead of just buying another hard drive - mostly pointless work.

<comment><USER3> This service isn't really meant for storing things like your music and video collection, or even your day-to-day chats. I think the analogy of a safe- deposit box at the bank really describes it well. You wouldn't keep your DVD or CD collection at the bank, because storing it would be expensive and your collections are most likely easily replaced. But you might want to keep your wedding pictures, the video of your kid's first step, birth and death certificates, love letters, and important legal documents in a safe deposit box at the bank. You might even store something like your great-grandmother's wedding ring and other historic documents. Essentially all the stuff that would be difficult to replace, and would be worth keeping for the sake of posterity.

Given this, I think 100 GB is probably an acceptable amount of storage for this day and age. That may change in 5 or 10 years time as technologies change and the size of images and videos expand. But in 5 to 10 years time, services like this will probably have changed to keep up with the times.

<comment><USER4> I couldn't have put it better, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The main concern I have with services like these is: will they, their hosting, and thus my data, still be available in 30 years? I can just imagine that within 5 years, the service will go "Okay we're bankrupt, sorry, you've got one week to get your data before we pull the plug".

I'd rather see a service where you can upload your data, and it'll send you back a physical data container where your data is written on a medium that is guaranteed to last the ages - i.e. no magnetic or optical (think dvd / blu- ray) storage, but more of a stable solid-state or holographic storage. In a box that can be put in a safe for posterity to discover after 30 years.

<comment><USER6> Archival Blu-Ray storage can last a great deal longer than 30 years - [http://www.mdisc.com/](http://www.mdisc.com/) \- and it's (relatively) cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it's great to have online long term storage, but, I'm a strong believer in also having an _offline_ storage, particularly one that you physically control.

You can get a 3 Pack of 25 GB archival Blue-Ray discs for $15. So, for $30 you have 150 GB of truly "cold/offline" data that should last significantly longer than 30 years. Toss that in a box somewhere to go hand-in-hand with the LongAccess/AmazonGlacier storage...

<comment><USER2> Would they really last for 30 years? My experience with CD-Rs wasn't that good - after 15 years about 1/3 of the discs is partially unreadable.

Guess, my experience would be better if I had bought pricier better-quality discs and stored them in climate-controlled environment instead of just stuffing a bundle on a shelf.

In my experience, cold storage is best with hard drives. Preferably, in RAID-1 setup, so if one in a pair accidentally dies, the other's likely to remain intact.

<comment><USER6> I'm not talking about your average CD-Rs, but ECMA-379 [1] certified media. Something like the M-Disc [2]

The US Department of Defense put a lot of effort testing their DVD Media [3], and it stood up well. We'll see if their Blu-Rays likewise get the same kind of certification/accelerated life-time testing, but, at the very least, I'm guessing they will last 30 years. Just don't leave them out in the Sun.

[1] [http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...](http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-379.htm)

[2] [http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/](http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/)

[3] [http://www.mdisc.com/docs/chinalakemillenniatatestreport_mod...](http://www.mdisc.com/docs/chinalakemillenniatatestreport_mod_04feb2010_a.pdf)

<comment><USER4> We believe that the average consumer needs more than a technical solution.

My latest laptop has no DVD drive, and I would bet that a DVD would not be more useful than a cassette tape to my daughter in 20 years, even if the data on it is in good shape. We may not even have the WWW by then, much like we don't have Gopher any more. What we offer is a service: we will do what it takes to keep the data in good shape and make them accessible to anyone holding an Archive Certificate.

The DoD, or large companies don't need this kind of service: they have the resources to manage, migrate, validate, replicate, etc, their data for as long as they are valuable to them. If DVDs start to fail, I'm sure they'll notice it, and they'll spend a gazillion dollars to move data to a new medium.

I don't think any consumer has a special week of the year when they take out all their DVDs and HDDs and verify them, make new copies, and replace the bad ones.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Longaccess.

<comment><USER6> So - first, I made it very clear that an online solution such as yours is definitely part of an archival solution, for all of the benefits that you have listed, and I'm excited that longaccess exists, and looking forward to seeing you do great things in this space.

But, people should not rely _solely_ on a third party solution for their archival needs. They should _always_ have a copy of their data that is offline, and physically in their possession, in a ECMA-379/ISO-10995 certified format that will last a long time. Certified Archival Media, is precisely that - it's designed to last on the order of a 100 years or more with zero requirements to validate. If you are super paranoid then you could make two copies. Then, you have both of your bases covered; You have something you can touch, and is 100% under your control, and, simultaneously, Longaccess will take care of all of the hard work of checking integrity, reproducing data, transferring it from data system to data system (in whatever form that takes over the next 30 years), and otherwise ensuring that there is continuity of data which can be accessed by the user (or their descendants) from something as simple as a certificate.

And yes, I do agree that the achilles heal of DVD Archival Media is the very real possibility of there being no DVD players in 20-30 years from now. Here's hoping eBay is still around. :-)

<comment><USER7> There are almost 500 different cassette players on Amazon, a device and media that is completely irrelevant.

If there is any demand for something someone will produce it, whether or not it's the latest and greatest technology.

There will also be a great deal of notice before a device as important as DVD / Blu-Ray stops being produced. I'd say it's a non-issue, especially since a great deal of data is being backed up on these disks.

Of course, multiple backup types and locations is always safer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 100GB for 30 years - €399 (~$550) on Longaccess vs $360 (plus retrieval cost) on Glacier.

Who would you trust?

<comment><USER4> Longaccess uses AWS Glacier too (a combination of S3 and Glacier, actually). The added value comes from a couple of features, like:

\- making the use of Glacier friendlier to the average user

\- providing a well defined way of accessing the data (retrieval, decryption, etc.). This is very useful if, for example, you want the files to be retrieved by your children in a couple of decades

\- making a commitment to take care of the data for decades: if Amazon decides in 10 years that they are no longer interested in being in this business, we will move the data to an alternative provider, but nothing will change for our users.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Longaccess.

<comment><USER9> So you pass your liabilities onto Amazon? Utterly ridiculous that I should have to have faith in Glacier when your storage is your main product.

<comment><USER4> Our main product is not storage, in the same way that a bank's main product is neither steel nor vaults.

We just use a reliable technology. AFAIK Amazon is not in the business of preserving data for decades, but they are great at storing data. On the other hand, Longaccess' business is to preserve private data for decades, and using the best underlying technologies and services at each given point in time to do so.

<comment><USER9> Forgive me. Techcrunch wrongly refers to your product as cold storage and sensationalized falsities. Your website has no such claims and seems like a worthwhile product. I wish you luck and success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This would be more comforting if the data bailment were accompanies by some kind of insurament policy. Then, the stored data would be a valuable asset that could be sold to a new caretaker when Longaccess goes belly up.

<comment><USER4> We are working on something that's somehow close to your suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great idea.</comment>


The data center inside an Airbus A350 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxS2RR-Vx_s <comment><USER2> Great video! But I'd suspect that it's more than just a data center. Some of those racks probably contain things like the radio and radar equipment.

<comment><USER3> That's not data to an airplane?</comment></comment>


Tesla's solar panels are now more efficient and affordable - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/tesla-solar-panel-efficiency-update-144914935.html <comment><USER2> Anyone knows how much production of these solar panels pollutes environment and how many years they need to work to compensate for the pollution resulted in their production?

<comment><USER3> The term you are looking for is "embodied energy" or "embodied carbon".

[https://heetma.org/2015/04/09/embodied-energy-in- photovoltai...](https://heetma.org/2015/04/09/embodied-energy-in-photovoltaic- panels/)

<comment><USER4> A few points of nuance:

\- pollution comes in many forms, not just carbon

\- only looking at the replacement product is insufficient; you need to look at the net difference in all inputs and byproducts, as well as the expected lifetimes of the two comparable prodcuts.</comment></comment></comment>


Marissa Mayer had nursery built near office before work-from-home ban - <AUTHOR> http://business.financialpost.com/2013/02/27/yahoo-marissa-mayer/ <comment><USER2> Is it a foregone conclusion that others can't bring a baby to work?

My biz partner brought his newborn in for about 10 months - it was awesome. Given, we are a tiny company and they are Yahoo, but its not obvious to me that its impossible to work it out.

So I'm glad M. Meyer is doing so, I think that's kind of awesome. The kid will probably have a great time. Maybe there's a way to let others do it too.

<comment><USER3> Where I work, it's perfectly acceptable for people to bring their children in. But it would be impossible for me to get anything done if I brought my two kids in, other than taking care of my kids while they're here. It's also disruptive to the other people here, so out of deference and sheer common sense I don't bring them in.

Other companies provide a day care service, which I hope becomes a bigger trend. Goldman Sachs has one that employees have a certain number of days that they're entitled to.

I too am glad that Marissa is doing this. She, like every parent I know, is trying to find a work-life balance, and she is in the privileged position of being able to do it her own way.

<comment><USER4> > ... But it would be impossible for me to get anything done if I brought my > two kids in

The University of Houston has a day care that is operated by the Psychology Dept. It is very well regarded, and quite a nice perk for employees (except for its limited capacity). The center is housed in a separate building, so there are no uninvited disruptions, except the ones that are universal to every day care (injury / accident, etc.). It wouldn't be the sort of thing that a small shop could do, but a company the size of Yahoo! could put such a day care in (maybe they already have?), and potentially save the company and employees considerable time and money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this article trying to make Mayer look like a hypocrite? She had a nursery built near her office because she planned to work _at_ the office, not from home.

<comment><USER6> Unlike Ms. Mayer, the average Yahoo! line employee cannot afford to have a nursery built near the office so they can come into the office while still having their baby right at hand. So the "everyone comes into the office" edict falls on them a little harder than it does on her.

It doesn't make her look like a hypocrite, in other words, as much as it makes her look like an out-of-touch, clueless plutocrat.

<comment><USER3> The "everyone comes into the office" edict probably doesn't affect child care. If you have kids, you probably have already arranged for other types of care for them.

If you choose to work from home and think you can take care of your kids at the same time, then bully for you.

But if you think that changing diapers, changing clothes, breast feeding, and cleaning up vomit for your kid and giving them activities to keep them from climbing the walls is easy, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

Ms. Mayer is at least trying to do this and run a company. She may be out of touch, but she's trying.

<comment><USER4> >But if you think that changing diapers, changing clothes, breast feeding, and cleaning up vomit for your kid and giving them activities to keep them from climbing the walls is easy, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

Maybe nurse-maids are about to make a comeback.

You can hire someone to do all of those other things, except breast-feeding; where your options are to feed or to pump. Employees who choose to breastfeed still receive the periodic disruptions in absence of the baby's immediate proximity.

<comment><USER3> > Maybe nurse-maids are about to make a comeback.

#shithnsays

Sure you can hire someone to delegate parenthood to. But that just underscores my point that working at home is nearly impossible if you need to care for your children by yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do these angered employees think it's reasonable to compare themselves to the CEO of the company, who is trying to pull said company from a deep shit that it is in.

<comment><USER8> You make that sound remarkably selfless of her, as she heroically arrives and tries to save the day, the ungrateful slobs unwilling to see what is good for them.

<comment><USER9> I looked at his comment multiple times and it looks like you're trying your very hardest to put words in his mouth.

All he said was that it's odd that rank and file employees expect the same perks as the CEO. I think that's a very reasonable statement.

if the CEO get's a personal assistant would every other employee expect one?

<comment><USER10> Considering that she just took away a big perk from everyone (and one that is very common in the industry), it's not crazy to wonder whether she'll try to make it up in some other way.

<comment><USER4> Especially given the difficulty of arranging good quality child care on short notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maternity leave is not remote working. Women should have the right to take lengthy maternity leaves without the fear of corporate ostracizing.

<comment><USER12> > Women should have the right to take lengthy maternity leaves

And the cost should be borne by single men.

<comment><USER13> Screw you, seriously. You want to remove childbearers from the workforce? You want to reduce everyone's employment experiences by diminishing the market of employees and ideas? You want your ten bucks a year so that you can say you don't support single mothers (note -- extensive public health research demonstrates that productivity and well-being of women of child-bearing age is the best indicator of the overall health of a society)?

Why should society give you anything at all? Why should my tax dollars go towards protecting you from crime, or paying your emergency room bills? And I mean you, specifically, not people in general -- if you don't want to contibute to make everyone's lot better, why should anyone give a crap about you, or for that matter your opinions?

<comment><USER12> I see I hit a sore spot. I don't really want to remove childbearers from the workforce, but I do want a frank discussion about who bears the costs. Actually, just an admission of the inherent injustice of the system would be nice. Ten bucks a year? Screw _you_. I pay roughly 70% of my income in taxes every year.

And holy thoughtcrime Batman! Despite paying tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, all government services should be denied to me just because of my opinions?

<http://mises.org/daily/2485>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've read a lot of outrage about this, particularly around the hypocrisy of having a nursery while forcing others to come into the office with no comparable perk.

Problem for me is, I actually don't think there's any moral imperative for Yahoo to make life easier for working parents or people who have some need to telecommute. It may make good business sense - Richard Branson certainly seems to think it does, but that's not a moral issue, it's a strategic one. If good employees who have options no longer wish to work for yahoo, they will leave.

I do think Yahoo managed this poorly from a PR perspective. I think it would have been wiser to announce Yahoo's plans to make the campus a perfect place to be, with everything a working parent could want. Play up the daycare, gym, dry cleaning. If they're not doing this, start a plan or two and make a big deal about it. I'm speaking cynically here, this is about managing the press. I'd rather it were sincere, of course, but this is PR we're talking about.

<comment><USER15> > Problem for me is, I actually don't think there's any moral imperative for > Yahoo to make life easier for working parents or people who have some need > to telecommute.

It's not any more or less of a moral imperative than having bathrooms. It's a concession to the structure of human society, and is arguably moral in that sense.

<comment><USER14> I'd like to start by saying that I do agree with you that some basic rules about the relationship between employer and employee reach the level of "moral imperative" and should be codified in law. "At will" employment is a big part of this (if you don't like it, you leave), but I certainly do agree that there should be some legally enforced rules around this.

So the only real disagreement we have is where to draw the line. Do you really put the right to telecommute on the same moral level as having a place to pee or time off to go to the bathroom?

<comment><USER15> I don't disagree with anything you've said, just pointing out that it's an arguable point.

I think child care is more important than corporate America perceives it to be. It is _the_ thing perpetuating the pay disparity between men and women in white collar jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish people would give this a rest already. This is getting old fast.

</comment><comment><USER17> To her credit, she probably has the toughest and most scrutinized job in the technology industry right now. Every action she takes will have hoards of supporters and nay-sayers. Kudos to her for actually being bold and ignoring the noise.

<comment><USER18> The big stacks of money she's being paid, and the enormous golden handshake she'll receive even if she runs Yahoo! into the ground, probably help with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am not unconvinced the turning off the WFH was not a stealth layoff.

<comment><USER20> Nice triple negative. I think there's an element of layoff about it, but comments from ex-Yahoos about lax work culture in remote employees might well mean it's the best thing to do. Especially when your management clearly can't work well with remoters and no longer has a clear direction.

Remote work is _great_ if there's good communication both ways. If not, it's throwing money into a bottomless pit.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like they should have laid off management then. :)

<comment><USER19> If they just need to decrease headcount, they can completely move the conversation to WFH vs NOWFH instead of "why are they laying off people" by canceling it.

I'm going to bet MM doesn't necessarily think WFH is bad at all, it was just an easy layoff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why is the disgusting media leaking into HackerNews?

<comment><USER23> The same reason we have comments like this : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5299756>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the one hand, what Mayer does with her money is her business. It is actually kind of nice that she built a nursery for her kid - it shows that she is taking her parental duties seriously (unlike most CEOs who get tunnel- visioned into their work and ignore their families).

On the other hand, it would have been nice if she petitioned the Yahoo! board to spend company resources to build a larger nursery, one that can be used by regular employees. That way, it would have come across as, "we are eliminating the work-from-home perk for everyone, but we understand that this is tough for employees with young children, so we built this nursery they can use free of charge." That would paint her as a no-bullshit CEO who is also attuned to the family-related needs of her employees.

</comment><comment><USER25> Well where are the details about the nursery? Is it just for her? If it's available for all employees you could rewrite the headline:

 _Mayer builds Nursery for employees' children to compensate (in advance!) for loss of remote working._

<comment><USER6> Since the nursery is literally "next to her office" (see [http://allthingsd.com/20130225/survey-says-despite-yahoo- ban...](http://allthingsd.com/20130225/survey-says-despite-yahoo-ban-most- tech-companies-support-work-from-home-for-employees/)), and she paid for it out of her own pocket, it seems highly unlikely that it's intended for community use.

<comment><USER25> Oh. That does seem likely to cause resentment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It might look like a stupid decision, but I think the true reason isn't as obvious as "people working at home don't work".

</comment><comment><USER27> fact is people have kids & that's just life. If M wants to make Yahoo a more attractive place to work & get the most from her employees then build a dam child-care facility on site / at the office so that every employee can use it - take care of your employees common life requirements so that they are free to focus on building the best products & not about what time they need to leave to beat the traffic & pick up the kids.

</comment><comment><USER15> My wife's reaction: "it's great, but [she] should have built on-site daycare for everyone to use." (Profanity edited).

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a horrible criticism: Marissa Mayer is the CEO of Yahoo. She can do whatever the hell she wants.

<comment><USER4> What is your argument? That those who are adversely affected should go and get CEO jobs themselves? Yeah! Let's all be CEO. In this country we have a long established right established in the principle that everyone can speak their mind. If Marissa Mayer's feelings are hurt, she can wipe away her tears with freshly printed one-hundred Dollar bills. But, one thing she absolutely does not have is the right to live a life free of criticism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I look at this latest story and think about it in context when Yahoo switched their employees to iPhones and Androids, which was well received as I understand it. Other perks put in place also helped boost the morale of the rank-and-file a little bit. But it appears she thinks about morale and vibe as quantifiable, something that can be managed relative to the available morale quotient that she can tap.

If this is part of an overall strategy, Mayer looks like someone who only knows how to manage things on paper using spreadsheets. I'm sure she's trying to replicate many of the successful approaches she took at Google, but Google and Yahoo are not the same.

This nursery story just adds to my impression of her that she's tone-deaf to how her actions affect the organization.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's excellent, so Yahoo! employees have access to a nursery at the work- site? That sounds like a reasonable thing to do after revoking the work-from- home policy on short notice.

</comment><comment><USER30> Mayer is not there to clock hours or save Yahoo with her brilliant ideas. You don't hire a pregnant CEO to get things done. Yahoo has to take a number of unpopular actions in order to get back into the game. Remote workers tend to be mediocre workers and they need to go. So do others.

Mayer is there to absorb and deflect criticism during Yahoo's readjustment period. For various reasons, people don't like to criticize her, and when they do, they aren't criticizing Yahoo. She'll continue to slash and burn for a couple of years, and then she'll be gone, leaving Yahoo with a sort-of-clean reputation.

<comment><USER31> This is some extraordinary claim. Do you have any extraordinary evidence besides her pregnancy?

<comment><USER30> She was sidelined at Google for years and basically forced out. Despite that, and despite her pregnancy, Yahoo still hired her. Every indication is that she is at Yahoo as an Image CEO.

Further, the only thing that makes my claim "extraordinary" is that Mayer is someone who garnered elect status on HN shortly after her tenure at Yahoo began. A similar (though opposite) phenomena was the story yesterday about Mark Pincus, which generated a lot of heat for saying something positive about one of HN's "damned" personalities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why do I feel like I've never read about Yahoo's CEO before it was Marissa Mayer? Is it because she's a woman?

<comment><USER33> Way to jump to conclusions of sexism against all evidence... Carol Bartz (former CEO of Yahoo) was also a woman. The reason you hear about Marissa Mayer a lot is because she had a sudden, high-profile transfer from Google to Yahoo, and had high expectations by some of making big changes at Yahoo in an attempt to turn them around (as well as expressing the intent to do so).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm CEO bitch.</comment>


Ask PG/HN: Questions about applying to YC - <AUTHOR> I have an idea I developed recently that I believe is fairly complicated. I would be able to implement only a prototype in the next few days before the deadline. I am in two minds - either I can apply to YC in this round with a prototype only and perhaps hurt my chances or I can apply in the next round with a reasonable "alpha" version of my idea and perhaps increase my chances.
What do you suggest?
Also, do you get people who "reapply" after getting rejected and if so, how many of them make it the second time? <comment><USER2> A prototype is enough for us.

We often accept people who reapply. The best known is probably Drew Houston of Dropbox. There were at least two in the most recent batch: FanVibe and PagerDuty. For the PagerDuty guys it was the fourth time they'd applied.

<comment><USER3> If YC selects based on people and not ideas, what changes between applications? Does the submitter grow in some meaningful way, and that sticks out?

<comment><USER2> There are multiple explanations. We care more about people than ideas, but we don't care zero about ideas. Especially if a startup is passionately committed to what seems a bad idea; we'll usually reject them no matter how good the people are.

When people reapply it's often with different teams. I think all 3 cases I mentioned did.

People do change somewhat between applications. Someone who's only 25 gets 4% more experience each year.

And also, as we say in the email when we turn people down, we're often simply wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is good to know, just like startups it's better to iterate early and often</comment>


Preserving Outputs Precisely while Adaptively Rescaling Targets - <AUTHOR> https://deepmind.com/blog/preserving-outputs-precisely-while-adaptively-rescaling-targets/ <comment><USER2> Slightly off-topic, but David Silver did work on this project and discusses it briefly in his really great reinforcement learning course [0]. It's worth checking out if anyone is looking for a well-paced, well-explained introduction to some of the basic reinforcement learning algorithms and theory.

[0] [http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.silver/web/Teaching.html](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.silver/web/Teaching.html)

Edit: The slides are fine but the gem is the YouTube lectures playlist!

</comment><comment><USER3> Since the Atari era, video games changed significantly in as much as they no longer tend to be built around trying to "kill" the human player and end their game. This structure made sense in a video game arcade (you die, you put in another quarter, the more often this happens without you losing interest the more money the game makes) and it got inherited into most early video games _because_ of the arcades, but it's not actually fun.

In most modern games the human will invariably "win" eventually, so the "try to get most points before dying" approach makes less sense in general. But, _Speed running_ has become a very popular activity even in games you may not think of as being about "speed". I will be interested to see multi-purpose AIs take on speed running for two reasons:

1\. The evaluation function is easier for the machine AND the human assessing it to understand, especially for "Any%" runs in most games, where the rule is basically you don't care how the game is supposed to be played, you just want to go from the start to the end in the least time using the controls (e.g. Mario Kart speed runs are often mostly about convincing the game that your shorter route counts as a "lap" of the track).

2\. TAS (Tool Assisted Speed-running) is already a thing, TAS players don't compete with live human players, they choose and play back a precise sequence of inputs to cause the game to play out in a particular way, so they can do hundreds of frame-precise movements, or even influence hidden internal variables (with the effect that seemingly "random" behaviour from a game often proves to be deterministic). An AI can do everything the TAS player can, moment by moment, but it reacts to changes, which a TAS run cannot, on the other hand the TAS players often have deep insight into the implementation details of the game which would not be available to a general purpose AI player.

<comment><USER4> That's actually an interesting point - TAS tools should make it possible to make _any_ game into an AI training environment.

The one thing I would say about that is that speedrunning is a really, really difficult thing to do with a gradient descent approach; you can get really optimized with a particular strat, but getting substantially faster often requires _drastically_ different strategies - which can only be discovered with a very broad knowledge of the game's systems, in areas which you will likely never see if your only experience with the game is speedrunning one particular strat exclusively. And exploration of the game's space _during_ a speedrun would kill your time.

<comment><USER5> > speedrunning is a really, really difficult thing to do with a gradient > descent approach

That's kind of what makes it interesting, no? You could argue that speedrunning requires not just observing a change in score from a change in inputs, but understanding, symbolically manipulating, and exploiting game mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me wonder if games that "require" the player to read the manual first can be played by a similar agent with/without reading the manual.

Or perhaps even more difficult are the games that even humans struggle to play through to the end due to "cryptic gameplay elements" (of which there are a lot of examples in Atari games).

<comment><USER7> I seriously doubt this AI can play games like Adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark or the Swordquest series, where there is no score tally and a complex sequence of actions is needed to win the game.

<comment><USER3> Like a human player the AI needs to have some idea whether it's succeeding. Actually, an AI needs this slightly less than humans because it's so purposeful anyway - it's not as though it can get bored and go watch TV. But it needn't be displayed as a "score" number, there's no score in Chess for example, and that didn't stop Deep Mind's chess engine.

In Advent for example there are clear sub-goals and an AI can be programmed to try to achieve these, you actually get points in Advent (all versions I think?) for partial completion, so it's just a matter of exposing that to the evaluation function, but other evaluation functions might work as well, or even better.

<comment><USER7> Isn't this the general AI that plays Atari games by watching? It would have to guess the rules of Adventure.

If it doesn't evolve into a corner, it probably could master those games given enough time, but how much is enough time?

<comment><USER4> The standard "hard game" of that category is Montezuma's Revenge - which has no score, is easy to die right on the first screen, and requires a fairly complex series of actions to make any clearly visible progress (moving to the second screen) at all.

Deep Q Networks (the Atari AI you're thinking of) and really all reinforcement learning systems generally fail to make it past even the first screen.

<comment><USER3> The POPART paper actually shows that Montezuma's Revenge is one of the games in the standard set of Atari games they tested, and yup, their AI was no good at it.

<comment> dane-pgp That game (and others like it) would probably be much easier if instead of optimising for score they optimised for "game states (pixel arrangements) that the AI hasn't seen before". This metric should correlate well with moving the player character around each screen, and getting to new screens, as well as picking up objects.

I believe some researchers have tried this approach and had some success, but I'd like to see how far DeepMind (for example) could take it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Teetering Towers of Abstraction - <AUTHOR> http://bit-player.org/2020/the-teetering-towers-of-abstraction <comment><USER2> Modern mathematics is based on formal systems, not an "abstraction" of counting jelly beans. That's like saying that chess is an abstraction of war. It seems like a reasonable analogy but they're actually entirely different things.

A formal system of category theory is no more abstract than a formal system of natural numbers. The apparent difference in abstraction is relative to the subjective (and irrelevant) choice of application. Category theory seems abstract for counting jelly beans, but for other applications it might be less of an abstraction than arithmetic.

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/298912/real- world-a...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/298912/real-world- applications-of-category-theory)

Similar to how computer programs can be broken down into physical laws about the movement of electrons, mathematical proofs can be broken down into deductive statements about ZFC set theory, etc. In both cases this is ideally about concretely building upon previous work, not creating abstractions.

The problem of incomprehensible proofs isn't about a "tower of abstraction". There's no abstraction within formal systems. The system is described and the implications are deduced. The problem is expanding complexity with a lack of detail and exposition that allows for misunderstandings and perhaps even errors.

<comment><USER3> >The problem is expanding complexity with a lack of detail and exposition that allows for misunderstandings and perhaps even errors.

I think this is also a problem in modern software development. Everyone writes a new API; uses obscure library A,B, and C; throws things together and claims it's their new pattern X.

Then you're left with all this new complexity introduced by custom abstractions that often aren't transferable from one development case to the next and require learning entirely new sets of concepts that are poorly explained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think mathematicians favour abstractions more then programmers, opposite as to what the OP suggests

Its like when you're coding this solution in haskell and start to wonder if the GHC is going to optimize all the intermediary data structures with it's di-forestation algorithms as apposed to doing it in a imperative language and including an assembly file with the floating point routines implemented using SSE instruction.

<comment><USER5> Whoa.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review our new startup - <AUTHOR>

clickable i hope http://failreminder.com
In first place, please excuse us for the double posting, we won't be posting again if this does not gather attention.
Our concept is different from awesomenessreminders.com, even if it might look and sound similar, our service addresses the biggest flaw of the aforementioned site. The fact that their message is going to become boring after a while. We do tailor your teaching/message to your story if you wish so, you can even email us and tell your story in detail if the text area is not enough. If you do not wish so we still provide a teaching/message that will never be the same. Just our thoughts. We'd love to hear what the HN community thinks. <comment><USER2> You have some line breaks on the frontpage in this section you need to cleanup: \--- We will deliver you a teaching tailored to your case, if you specified that on the additional instructions or by email. Otherwise we will deliver you a random teaching, related to how your daily life could be affected by past mistakes, in short, we will try our best to make you more aware of these subtle mechanisms to increase your life`s quality. And don`t panic, we won`t keep you on the phone for hours, it will be short, very short. Think it as your little personal oracle. If you`re not around, we will leave you a voicemail. \---

Personally I would branch out if I were you and call about more than just reminding you not to focus on failures.

For example, how about calling someone in an Austin Powers voice and telling them they've got Mojo, baby, Mojo!

Buddhist quotes would eventually get on my nerves I think.

Also, people like texts better than calls. I would switch to texting- I bet it'd be more popular.

And make your front page shorter and get rid of those images that might be copyrighted.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the great suggestions. I have already changed the site according to your advice. Regarding the other suggested models, yes, i have considered SMS and i will probably include it. The other sites part of the network will be less serious than this one. Maybe you are right, most people does not like buddhist quotes, but we are not limited to that. What exactely does make you think that we are limited do that ? i am asking that so i can fix it. Thanks in advance and Kudos

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The guy getting hit in the face with the soccer ball sure looks painful, but if it's in the context of a wall then that's actually success as far as the team is concerned.

<comment><USER3> Of images hosted on wikimedia or freely usable obviously. There are a couple but we are not sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> clickable <http://failreminder.com></comment>


TikTok uses Facial Beauty as Recommendation Model Input - <AUTHOR> https://www.tiktokbeautiful.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Context: The claim is that Tik Tok uses an ML model to rate the attractiveness of subjects in videos and uses that as input into a second model to predict a video's potential virality.

[https://www.tiktok.com/@benthamite/video/6838386972445248773](https://www.tiktok.com/@benthamite/video/6838386972445248773)</comment>


What's stored in a school Google Drive account? - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20180919124648/https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats-stored-in-your-school-google-drive-account-you-might-be-surprised/ <comment><USER2> > "My voice to text was being stored as well as any search my kids did, and I > could say 'sure my daughter was searching on Google,' but my phone uses > Safari. When I used my texting app on my iPhone, it recorded my voice, as > well as typing out the words and saving it on my Google Drive," said Brette > Hay, the Ely's daughter and a teacher at Pershing Middle School.

If it's possible to get voice recordings out of the iMessage app from a separate app (shouldn't be possible from an iMessage app either) this would be a major security hole and Apple would be _pissed_ at google for doing it.

This is almost certainly a misunderstanding of what's actually going on.

<comment><USER3> The texting app might not be iMessage

<comment><USER4> It was most likely WhatsApp, which as far as I know allows backing up to Google Drive.

<comment><USER5> iOS WhatsApp backs up to iCloud. Don't see any Google Drive option.

<comment><USER6> Correct, it's an Android-only option: [https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/28000019/?category=52452...](https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/28000019/?category=5245251)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like someone who doesn't have an understanding of how the services they're using are designed to interact with each other. This is a problem, but it's not specific to Google: it's difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that your average user actually understands how these services are meant to work. As the user starts to realize how integrated these services really are, it causes a level of confusion and paranoia; humans fear what they don't understand. This, in turn, causes them to misunderstand how the services truly integrate; they feel helpless and don't understand just how much control they have over their own data.

Many of these claims are outright false because they're technologically infeasible and would require the exploitation of security vulnerabilities. Companies like Google are constantly having their apps inspected by hobbyists and professionals alike; there's no way that'd go unnoticed for any length of time, plus it's nearly impossible to begin with.

In short: a parent has just discovered the internet. They're scared, paranoid, and confused. This is, unfortunately, quite normal.

There are legitimate privacy concerns regarding Google's collection of data, but none of them are raised in this article. It's a misunderstanding at best and outright propaganda at worst.

<comment><USER8> Parents complain about auto-sync of passwords, and browser history, past searches and things like that. They would like more control of what's stored/synced by default. It's not as benign as you describe it, especially when it comes to children.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't auto-sync without your permission; you have to request that the browser save your password. If you want to save passwords locally without syncing, it's trivial to disable. You can additionally encrypt the passwords with a master password so that Google doesn't have access to them.

Auto-syncing of passwords is a core feature of every modern browser. Safari does it, Firefox does it, Vivaldi does it, Edge does it, Opera does it, and, of course, Chrome does it.

Want control over your child's account? Google has something for that: [https://families.google.com/familylink/](https://families.google.com/familylink/)

Want the school to manage it for you? That's exactly what G Suite is.

Edit: The problem here is ignorance. It's easy to demonstrate that it's possible to control all the data about which this parent is concerned. Sure, there's data they can't easily control, but they make no mention of that. Your interests, demographics, everything else Google infers about you... you can't fully control that, and that's what parents should be worried about--not password syncing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This suggests their main complaint is about logging into Chrome Sync with the EDU account, where expected behavior _would_ be to store and sync history and passwords. (And if you don't keep separate Chrome profiles, obviously that would include everyone using the computer.)

And then they talk about saving voice recordings and transcriptions from their phone messages... I can only guess they did something like configured WhatsApp to store backups on Drive and forgot they had?

EDU accounts should be treated like work accounts: use them only for EDU- or work-related things. Don't visit your bank's website and save the password to Chrome when logged into syncing to your daughter's school account.

On the other hand, asking students, parents, and faculty to fully understand the Chrome login-and-sync model, and how it differs from website logins, may be asking too much. And it can be hard to tell the difference between Chrome sign-in and Apps sign-in, or to realize that signing out of one won't necessarily sign you out of the other.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand. What they are describing sounds like Chrome syncing. But you can certainly install Google Drive's sync client without using Chrome/Chrome syncing. Is this a new thing?

<comment><USER11> They must have signed into Chrome, but Chrome will explicitly tell the user if their data will be accessible to the GSuite administrator[0] so this is likely on them for not fully reading this popup or forgetting about it.

0: [https://judge.sh/YILh0ozLX5.png](https://judge.sh/YILh0ozLX5.png)

<comment><USER12> Being accessible to the G Suite administrator is understandable, but this is saying that anyone with an account on the school's G Suite plan could see the passwords for any other user.

This has to be something where the admins changed some default setting to change the default security on everything in G Suite, so that all other school accounts could have access to it.

Maybe someone intended to set it up so that all google sheets and docs were shared among everyone on the plan, but didn't realize the change they made applied to other things that got synced to G Suite, like Chrome sync passwords?

<comment><USER13> From my reading of it, they are saying that all passwords saved in the browser (potentially all users of the home PC or mobile phone) get associated with the google account but _not_ that all users of the school system can see each others passwords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if some of this is cause by not logging out from everything? You can probably log out of gmail, but not the chrome browser and not realize it. And the browser will still record everything. Or the opposite.

I am a bit curious about some of the claims about sync on iPhone. I don't have one, but is it even possible for another app to reach the internals of Safari? I would think that is locked down. Or are they logged into their google account in the browser? As for google getting the voice and text from a messaging app, how would that be possible unless its an actual google app?

</comment><comment><USER15> More context for this story here: [https://www.pogowasright.org/back-to- school-revolt-in-spring...](https://www.pogowasright.org/back-to-school- revolt-in-springfield-employees-balk-over-using-google-drive-as-evidence-of- massive-privacy-breach-mounts/)

</comment><comment><USER16> The academic Google Drive does some weird stuff. I let my daughter access her school's G-Suite on my work laptop once last year. For weeks afterwards whenever I tried to surf to certain websites I would automatically get redirected to the school's web logon page. Which tells me that at the very least some Google software was tracking my web usage.

I basically had to do a full reinstall of the browser to stop it. It wasn't a case where she didn't log out.

<comment><USER17> So it set a cookie that indicated that on Google properties it should redirect you to the right place to log in, not take you to the main Google login?

I mean maybe it's not as clear as it should be, and maybe it should remove that cookie if you log out (ehhh...), and it should probably be easier to get rid of all of that... but we're hardly talking the conspiracy of the decade here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Weird since my child is in this school district. They also don't mention much about the fact that every child (as far as I know) has a Chromebook provided, so I doubt this would be a common thing where kids are logging into Google Drive on another PC at home.

<comment><USER19> A lot of school districts allow the chromebooks to go home with the kids and there are ways to manage DNS filtering and chrome app management for those chromebooks. It is very attractive for cash strapped school districts or for eRate projects (every 5 years). G Suite is used by a lot of schools and a lot of teachers do the G Suite educational certifications as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> that was not even google drive, but her myactivity page.. she logged into google when using the app. the stuff is in her account, and she looked at it. and then it was a local fox story.

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://web.archive.org/web/20180919124648/https://missourie...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180919124648/https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats- stored-in-your-school-google-drive-account-you-might-be-surprised/)

(Not sure if there is a legitimate reason this has been taken out)

<comment><USER22> The original page ([https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats-stored-in- your-s...](https://missourieducationwatchdog.com/whats-stored-in-your-school- google-drive-account-you-might-be-surprised/)) works for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm just seeing a 500 error.

</comment><comment><USER24> Antivirus blocked page...</comment>


A scalable pipeline for designing xenobots (reconfigurable organisms) - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/01/07/1910837117 <comment><USER2> This is really cool.

At first I thought they were simulating entire living genomes in software, but then realized no, they're just simulating cellular shapes and manually performing surgery on living stem cells when they transfer the software representation to the living representation.</comment>


Aaron Swartz: How to Get a Job Like Mine (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget <comment><USER2> The blog is dead. Archive link

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180616204226/https://aaronsw.j...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180616204226/https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget)

<comment><USER3> This link shows blocked due to content filtering.</comment></comment>


Rate my weekend project, Thursday Flowers: a thoughtfulness service - <AUTHOR> http://www.thursdayflowers.com

<comment><USER2> It's probably too early but, when you have the users, you should put up a dashboard with how many people are using the service. You could have something like "2436 People Are More Romantic," that would 'prove' legitimacy and verify the your premise of the site.

"Sign up and we'll send you ideas every few weeks at random intervals," sounds like "when we come up with an idea we'll send it out," it doesn't make me believe that you're committing to the site which makes me skeptical of entering my email.

Just my .02. Otherwise, I'm a fan of the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> The counter is in the plan but is currently an embarrassingly low number (79 and counting!).

Re: random intervals, we'll try to find a better way to express what happens, and as someone else suggested will show an example of what the email will look like.

I think we'll also add a random suggestion to the front page.

<comment><USER3> Instead of:

 _Sign up and we'll send you ideas every few weeks at random intervals._

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

How about:

Sign up and we'll keep your romance spontaneous by randomly sending you ideas every few weeks.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is just an opinion, but if you need reminding to be thoughtful, you've already lost a lot of the essence of what thoughtfulness is all about.

Being given suggestions about how to be thoughtful further removes the 'thought' from the so called 'thoughtful' act. Though I haven't signed up, in technical terms I'm sure its a fair achievement for a weekend project, however I really think it misses the mark in an area where there could be much larger scale opportunity.

For example: you're limiting this service to romantic thoughtfulness, completely ignoring being thoughtful to people with whom your intended users might have a non-romantic relationship.

There are quite a few reminder / notification type projects popping up lately and I have to wonder how long-lived they will be even for avid users. I can't help but think its eventually going to feel like spam (even if your email content is fantastically insightful and useful).

With that said kudos for an interesting idea that you've made a reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't it a thoughtful act to sign up for this service? :)

We're not ignoring non-romantic thoughtfulness in the sense that we don't know about them and the potential in those users, but rather ignore them in order to get something out the door and gauge interest.

We too worry about showing up like spam. Our current algorithm is to send a mail no sooner than 7 days but no later than 21 days after the last notification, which hopefully isn't too often. We're looking at adding user accounts to let people customize this timeframe and the suggestions.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you really making enough from the ads on the bottom of the page to let it clutter up your design?

If you continued to develop this so your special offers would allow me to do whatever it is (send flowers, etc.) with one click or one reply e-mail, that'd be great.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm so on the fence with the ads. I agree they clutter up the design. We've made the big $0.04 on the ads so far... I'd much rather send well formed and target recommendations with the suggestions.

tl;dr - we'll probably kill them, but thought it would be cool to buy a beer with the proceeds.

<comment><USER6> I'd have thought you could make more from affiliate links on your recommendations.

<comment><USER7> <http://affiliateprogram.1800flowers.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> DanI-S You should add a random, monthly-ish gift autodelivery service and call it 'Flowers and Forget'.

</comment><comment><USER8> A bit of a blackbox from a user's perspective about what it will be they would be receiving beyond "it will be an email" and "it will have an idea".

From the stance of someone who may have just entered their email, before doing so it would be helpful to see an example of what it is we're getting ourselves into.

The pitch is too easily misconstrued to "every few weeks we'll ask you to buy something from one of our advertisers, so please sign up".

Perhaps a friendly use case/sample would be helpful here.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea, and easy to show on an example page. Added it to the TODO - thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please, by god, kill the ads at the bottom of your sign up page. It makes me highly skeptical of your service, since you seem to be interested in making a quick buck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, killed the ads. I hated them as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems like a decent idea if that's what you really intend to do with it.

I'd get rid of the ads at the bottom though, kind of cheapen the look of the site.

<comment><USER8> Fwiw, I didn't even know there were ads on the site with adblock on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Actually had a similar idea a few years back and did a bunch of research. Two big things came up: 1) The tension is making guys look good without "taking the thought out of thoughtfulness." 2) How many new and unique suggestions are you really going to be able to give? After ten or so, they start to get stale or obvious.

Btw, re the counter you can fake the number just to see if it works/test something.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure of the implentation details, but hopefully you're sending out different ideas to some degree per week/user. Depending on the ultimate success of the site, some might notice the use of some external force in 'suddenly thoughtful significant other'

"Bob gave you flowers last wednesday? and a card on Monday? Frank did the EXACT same thing!" (etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Every user gets a random idea from a a database of ideas; there's maybe 40 ideas in the DB for each combination of genders. We have some logic that prevents you from getting the same suggestion twice in a row, and in a branch we've yet to merge we've added a link to the emails that lets the user get a new suggestion.

We've got Big Plans(tm) to add user accounts that will let users than customize their own suggestion list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You're missing an option:

I'm a [person] who wants to create thoughtful moments for my [Significant Other].

Not hard to add, and there are lots of good reasons to include non-gendered options.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if I'd get in trouble if my girlfriend caught me using this...

</comment><comment><USER14> It passes the jwz test...

<comment><USER15> What is the JWZ test?

<comment><USER16> <http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html>

_"How will this software get my users laid"_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wonderful idea. I signed up.

Nth-ing the suggestion on tweaking the ads. They're definitely jarring. Perhaps try to pick up some sponsorships? 1800Flowers, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ads are dead. We'll probably look for sponsorship if running the sites ends up costing anything. It is on google app engine, so everything is free right now.</comment></comment>