What If Everything You Know About Poverty Is Wrong? - <AUTHOR> http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/kathryn-edin-poverty-research-fatherhood

<comment><USER2> This article really stretches the idea that myths are "busted".

 _1\. Absent dads are the problem. Sixty percent of low-income dads see at least one of their children daily._

Seeing one of your children at least once a day doesn't prove you aren't an absent father.

 _2\. Single moms are the problem. Only 9 percent of low-income, urban moms have been single throughout their child 's first five years._

Just because you weren't single during some small part of your child's first 5 years doesn't mean you're not a "single mom".

 _3\. Handouts are bankrupting us. In 2012, total welfare funding was 0.47 percent of the federal budget._

Welfare is paid for at the state-level generally. Of course it doesn't make up much of the federal budget.

Yikes!

<comment><USER3> Regarding #3, do you have a source for that? I believe the programs are administrated by the states, but I think the funds are from the national government.

Not sure if this link is accurate or inaccurate: [http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/federalbenefitprograms/a/Feder...](http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/federalbenefitprograms/a/Federal- Funding-For-Child-Welfare.htm)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pitching an iOS/iPhone App Idea - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for an app that is solid. I have no doubt it will be viral, it's not be done now.
I have no experience with making an app but I do have a decent business background.
1) Investors keep telling me that angel investors & VCs don't mess with NDA regularly, they just want me to spit out my idea. How true is this?
2) Does anyone have an example of a business plan or investor presentation for an app?
3) What is a fair stake? No doubt this thing will sell 1mm+ units in 90 days or less @1.99... If someone buys in at 50k, what is a % that is fair? 100k?
Thanks guys, I'm sure I sound like a noob but I am. <comment><USER2> Investors will generally be more willing to invest in a team of good people creating the application than one person with an idea. You say you have some background in business, that's a start. Look for a good developer to start on the core functionality your app requires.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, how much information about the app should I include when I do the investor presentation. This idea is so awesome in the purest form, I am scared someone will take any opportunity to take it.

</comment><comment><USER3> You and everyone else, start developing the software or at least design in and document what you plan on building IN DETAIL.. and try to find someone to work with for a equity state and some cash.

Ideas are a dime a dozen

on a side note as a developer the word viral give me a visceral reaction and is a instant turn off</comment>


A Case for Open-Source GPU Drivers - <AUTHOR> http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2011/11/30/a-case-for-open-source-gpu-drivers/

<comment><USER2> The reasons for not open-sourcing the drivers don't make sense to me. Sure, the community might not have the knowledge necessary to improve your drivers, but then no harm done. Drivers might be taken in directions you don't want them to go? These companies release new chips multiple times per year. With them come new drivers. Who cares what directions the old drivers take?

And furthermore, chip companies might just get free driver debugging. That makes their chips look better. It makes them look better. More sales.

Is there any possibility that the real reason for the lack of open-source drivers, is that in many cases "different" graphics chips are essentially the same, and what you're really paying for with the more expensive ones, is a driver that enables high-end functionality? Open-sourcing would wreck that.

<comment><USER3> "The reasons for not open-sourcing the drivers don't make sense to me. "

It makes total sense to me:

1-Every couple of years they can sell you a new card as the one that you have does not work with the new OS.

2-Competitors can not look at the code, understand and copy it, so technology leaders like NVIDIA are not reached by followers without significant investment.

3-Software Patents holders(patent trolls) can not look at the code and demand them exorbitant fees because using a buffer to paint on a computer screen is patented by them. This is very common in the USA and the main reason companies asked me for an NDA if I saw their drivers code.

4-People can not unblock features of cheap cards to make the same things expensive cards does(it is very common to make only one chip to get mass production cost and then to use some cheap hardware or software switch to deactivate features on cheap cards).

5- Video decoding and other stuff could be out sourced to specialist companies that demand their code to be secret by contract.

<comment><USER4> >> 4-People can not unblock features of cheap cards to make the same things expensive cards does(it is very common to make only one chip to get mass production cost and then to use some cheap hardware or software switch to deactivate features on cheap cards).

This is also sometimes done with slightly defective chips. E.g. AMD has sold some quad-cores as three-core cpu's when one of the cores has failed some quality control check. Sometimes they can be enabled and they work fine but there may be a risk involved.

I know this is sometimes also done because of marketing reasons. Some years ago, IBM was selling additional Java or DB "accelerator" chips to high-end servers. They were in fact the same kind of processor that the server shipped with but they were crippled with microcode so they could only run the JVM or a DB2 server or something. I very much dislike this practice, talk about wasted engineering effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An example problem of proprietary drivers: Nvidia doesn't support the latest KMS/GEM APIs which are needed for smooth-looking boot and (I guess) for future stuff like Wayland. If the driver was open, the community would have ported it.

<comment><USER6> I disagree with "needed". It's entirely possible to have a modern, "smooth- looking boot" now even with the nVidia drivers as they are.

Wayland support is a valid point though.

Regardless, nVidia remains at the top of the pile in terms of performance and support on Linux. Especially for high-end 3D applications like Maya, CUDA, etc.

nVidia also has fundamental disagreements about the right graphics architecture for the system with many of the Linux folk. I personally think nVidia's concerns about that are valid.

It's unclear whether GEM, etc. are the right long-term approach.

<comment><USER7> Saying that the nVidia drivers are "at the top of the pile" doesn't say much for the competition.

Just a few of the problems that I have had:

1) In a 2 Monitor setup there is no way to rotate one of the monitors into portrait mode without the other unless you create them as 2 seperate X sessions.

2) Fullscreen almost any OpenGL app/game and it will span across both monitors, which just looks weird.

3) A very odd issue where on my second monitor the fonts will randomly screw up or parts of a window randomly become transparent and I can see the window behind (seems to happen mostly with flash) through it. Only way to fix it is to disable and then re-enable monitor.

Yes, I used to have an ATI card and I can confirm that it had just as many if not more issues.

<comment><USER4> >> 2) Fullscreen almost any OpenGL app/game and it will span across both monitors, which just looks weird.

This is because the games often use a library like SDL to do the windowing. Their idea of opening a window is called "SetVideoMode", so no wonder it goes wrong.

If a software uses X11 windowing in a way that most apps these days do, using extended window manager hints for fullscreen, etc, this problem would not exist. Btw. I use my window manager's full screen feature to do this. It works a whole lot better for games which allow resizing windows (this often excludes SDL-based games because you explicitly have to tell SDL you want a resizable window) than letting the game set full screen mode (usually via some horrible deprecated X11 legacy api).

The nVidia display driver is not perfect either, it doesn't support Xrandr yet, so expect problems with multiple displays (and rotation) until the situation is corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe a lot of the problem is that the major vendors believe they'll expose themselves to patent lawsuits by making it easier for aggressors to make a case.

<comment><USER9> Besides any patents there are issues were Nvidia/AMD do not write every piece of their drivers. They can't unilaterally open source pieces of code that they don't even own the copyright on.

<comment><USER10> That's always an issue with open-sourcing any large code base.

It's always been worked around before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMO all drivers need to be Free Software. The problem is that as soon as you introduce loadable modules into a kernel, there's really no way to prevent them because of the precedent set by Linux. One of the reasons the LGPL was developed was the linking issue, but Linux developers seem to be ok with letting binary blob modules as a "gray area": <http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735>

If Linux developers had from the start demanded Free Software drivers, they'd have had them (please spare me the arguments about "Linux wouldn't have grown if they didn't allow binary drivers"). Letting that precedent pass means that hardware developers don't have many incentives to provide sources for their drivers. This affects not just Linux, but all Free Software operating systems.

<comment><USER12> What incentive would hardware venders have to provide open source drivers for a tiny enthusiast operating system? No other OSs have had that requirement. It's hard enough to get working binary drivers.

I don't think that all the Linux driver issues would be solved with the release of source code. Driver code already makes up a large majority of the kernel. The sheer amount of code contained in binary drivers would dilute the already relatively small number of volunteers available. The best way to increase the quality of Linux drivers is to get venders to invest more in Linux driver development. The only way to do that is to vote with your wallets by supporting Linux friendly hardware, and increasing the size of the Linux market.

<comment><USER11> OpenBSD has always had a policy against binary drivers.

The reason it's "hard to get binary drivers" is because hardware manufacturers have no incentive to release documentation for their hardware, because they know they can get away with a binary driver for Linux. Then they call themselves "Linux friendly" and people like you get the wool pulled over your eyes (until you encounter a bug, or work on the kernel, or want to use FreeBSD, or suddenly find that your hardware isn't supported on Linux 2.6.xyz, etc, etc)

Even if they were to write Free Software drivers themselves, it's likely they wouldn't make it into Linux anyway because of quality issues (most driver code is shit). Community-developed drivers are frequently better quality.

Arguing that Free Software drivers would be "too much code" in Linux is just idiotic. Let's just stop writing Free Software altogether because it's "too much code."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A missed bullet point: Ability for FOSS developers to port drivers to obscure platforms. Right now the Haiku OS folks are having a heck of a time trying to get hardware acceleration to work with nVidia hardware.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe it should start with open hardware. The Open Graphics Project seems dead, but maybe there are other alternatives.

There are a lot of open hardware projects lately. Synthesizers, computers, 3D printers. All great examples. But video cards might be too complex to be open.

</comment><comment><USER15> First we need an open-documentation GPU.

<comment><USER5> AMD/ATI Radeon. [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA4O...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTA4OA)

Even with documentation, the open source driver is not very fast because there just aren't enough volunteers.

<comment><USER16> _"...the open source driver is not very fast because there just aren't enough volunteers."_

I'm sure that is part of it, but also writing a high performance/low latency GPU driver is really hard. So when you find someone who can write such drivers, they have no time to 'volunteer' because of all the money people are throwing at them.

It would be fabulous also if AMD would dedicate a resource to walking through their specs and then writing a paragraph about each register and how it was used. The original Voodoo library for the 3Dfx cards was done that way and it really helped. We need GPU documentation for someone who hasn't designed a GPU before.

<comment><USER17> Ah, yes, the moving goalposts. I remember those.

"If only they would release documentation!"

"If only they would release really good documentation!"

"If only they would release some code examples!"

... And so it would go, with neither party ever happy.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but to be fair, it is more the hedonic treadmill than when goalposts get hiked around in a debate as a bad-faith debating tactic. I'm using the ATI drivers right now and I'd have loved to have had this quality of driver ten years ago at the height of the "if only they'd release documentation" phase.

<comment><USER16> I really resonate with this comment. The drivers that exist today are so much better than the ones we had before. They aren't as good as the ones on Windows or MacOS but they actually do 3D acceleration and handing multiple monitors, which they did poorly or not at all before.

So in that regard things are much better. But the grass is not only greener on the Windows side of the fence they have better shader support to make it wave :-) One of the things I had hoped various FOSS organizations might create would be the equivalent to a University 'chair', a position paid for by an endowment to the organization, to encourage some expert in the chair's area of interest in working full time on that.

NetApp supported a group at UMich for a long time who were making the NFS drivers in Linux better and Trond Myklebust who was the kernel gatekeeper. Sort of a public/private partnership. That effort was working because everything needed to succeed was pretty much available (docs, sources, examples, etc).

I had a marketing VP at S3 (back when they were making graphics chips and not an IP holding company) tell me that they didn't release documentation because they didn't know if they were violating someones patent and this way even if they were the patent holder didn't know either, it was better for everyone.

Now later events have born out the notion that patents are the center of the dispute here, between the SGI patents, the Microsoft patents, the 3dfx and nVidia patents, and various other players, clearly that has had a tremendous chilling effect on open communication.

Of course Voodoo graphics were introduced in 1996, so in 2016 3D video card patents start expiring and by 2020 most of the DirectX 9 pipeline's concepts will be public domain. Sadly we have to wait until 2025 for shader technology to unlock sufficiently.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Web 2.0: Unsafe At Any Speed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3726496 <comment><USER2> What an _awful_ article. It sounds like it was written by a 12 year old: "It's even hard to trust trusted sites is not safe any more." Huh?

</comment><comment><USER3> FUD.</comment>


A data analysis reveals the 50 best free online university courses (MOOCs) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/the-data-dont-lie-here-are-the-50-best-free-online-university-courses-of-all-time-b2d9a64edfac#.hvt9i2z2c <comment><AUTHOR> This list was determined by a Bayesian average of ratings from class- central.com for more than 6,000 MOOCs.</comment>


Two bills target video games following Sandy Hook tragedy - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/184997/Two_bills_target_video_games_following_Sandy_Hook_tragedy.php

<comment><USER2> I don't personally care for the existence of video games and movies that are super violent just for the sake of being violent.

But here's the thing - plenty of other countries have full access to all these video games, movies and even their fair share of mentally ill.

What they do not have is constant mass slaughters like this, and that's because they don't have the guns-are-toys mentality we do and open access to as many guns as you want, as powerful as you want, without tracking, liability or lack of social pressure to stop.

Sadly nothing will be done and in a decade we'll have a mass-killing anniversary for every day of the year and everyone will just be desensitized. Instead we'll have armed guards at every place where more than 10 people gather and like the TSA everyone will say "oh well, what can you do".

<comment><USER3> Or, you know, we could just stop spazzing out in reaction to vanishingly-rare events. You can't shrink-wrap the world.

<comment><USER2> Uh, over 1000 people have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook a month ago [1]

That's not a rare event - it's just distributed far apart enough in the news and localized to the point where you purposely do not notice.

I think it would be a great service if every national news program would open with a list of the names of everyone killed by guns and drunk drivers, every day. It would only take a minute but if you did it every day, people would start to get a hint.

PBS News closes with all the people (mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings) killed in the military every night, it could be like that.

1\. [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/1...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html)

<comment><USER4> How many were obtained illegally? How many were suicides?

How many more people died from more preventable causes?

Sound bites are sound bites are sound bites.

<comment><USER2> Isn't the proper question "how many deaths happened in other countries of the same population density" ?

Because I assure you, it's lower in the UK, Japan, etc.

You cannot just say "oh well what can you do, it's the price we pay to have our toys".

<comment><USER5> You're right. Let's ban cars. Though that's a bit too extreme, let's only ban assault vehicles. You know, those black SUV's that look a little too much like military vehicles. That is a good solution to the number of people killed by drunk drivers.

<comment><USER2> Nah let's remove speed limits and drink all you want when you drive. Because people should have all the freedom they want and people are rational and intelligent. Screw the rights of other people to be able to drive safely.

Heck, why restrict fully automatic M16s and bazookas - why dare impose limits at all. People are rational and intelligent their freedom should not stop where others begin. In fact you should be able to drunk drive and carry around your loaded M16 out the window down the highway.

We should be like the middle east with people firing fully automatics in the air anytime they want and gangs roaming around in pickups fully armed.

The gun bans they are trying now are the only place they can start. Because anything more sane would insanely be ignored. At least they are trying and it's a start.

Guns are not toys and that's the whole problem, people want to play with them because they think it's a game.

<comment><USER6> >The gun bans they are trying now are the only place they can start. Because anything more sane would insanely be ignored. At least they are trying and it's a start.

The thing about legislative efforts, is that on an issue where there are parties who want to take certain laws to one extreme or the other (Ex: Banning all guns.) and the sliding scale is freedom vs regulation, there will inevitably always be push from both of the extreme sides. So even if you enact "reasonable" gun laws, there will always be parties trying to push them forwards or backwards. This means that the sensible thing for guns rights organizations to do is turn even a minor gun regulation into a shitstorm so that the opposing forces on the other side have to spend all their energy maintaining reasonable gun laws.

Internet activists may want to take notes.

<comment><USER2> As long as people enjoy killing animals, guns will never be illegal in this country. There are plenty of lefties in the senate who really enjoy killing animals so guns are always going to be legal.

What they are trying to restrict is the use of guns as toys and I have zero problem with that. I think hunting is ridiculous and horrible in this day and age but I guess that's part of the compromise I have to do. I am not accepting anything further than that though, guns are not toys.

<comment><USER7> There are environmentally sound reasons to control the population of wild animals. A population boom/bust cycle wreaks havoc on the environment. We've already interfered with nature on this continent to such a degree it cannot self-regulate. I don't enjoy killing animals, but those that I know who hunt are in fact doing us all a public service we would otherwise have to pay the government to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As somebody who played _tons_ of these newfangled murder simulators for years, I can say with 100% confidence that the worst ideas I ever had as a kid came from cartoons, not video games. [0]

Games don't mess around with casuality very often. Usually when you do lethal things, they kill stuff. In cartoons, very dangerous things are portrayed as being something you can walk away from with only soot on your face or a lump on your head. To give you an idea of how bad we're talking here, there was a time very early on in my life when I didn't know that strangulation could kill people.

I'm not even joking. [1]

[0]: Keep in mind of course that one person is a single data point, not a set. (And not even a rigorous data point at that.)

[1]: Thankfully nobody died.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is no one targeting music that advocates gun violence? Video games and movies are pretty obviously works of fiction. Some rap music, for example, advocates murdering real people in real situations

<comment><USER9> Throwing another art from another medium under the bus isn't going to help things. If anything, doing so just legitimizes these ridiculous laws. We should be against these shenanigans regardless of the medium in question.

<comment><USER10> It _might_ help things. If we threw in books for example suddenly the 1st Amendment implications would become very clear to everyone. Right now pretty much only video games are involved, and a very large portion of the population considers these to be alien, "not art" and frankly just a second class "speech medium".

Music (well, rap music) probably sits somewhere between the two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading the bill, I'm not opposed to it on practical grounds. For a $60 game, it's $0.60. Who cares. Furthermore, the revenue would go exclusively towards the treatment of mental health conditions, which is just fine with me, as I believe the real cause of these violent outbursts is a lack of support system for those who need it most.

What I disagree with in this bill is the use of the privately run, industry controlled ESRB as the measuring stick for what is and isn't violent. Not only are they terrible at accurately rating games (in my opinion), they're not even being given the chance to distinguish between violent video games and other kinds of mature video games (complex plot, general adult themes, etc.) ALL T rated games or higher would be taxed, _regardless_ of the level of violence in the game itself. That's simply inaccurate, and displays a very fundamental lack of knowledge on the topic. Don't try to regulate what you don't understand, please.

Not to mention the fact that, if this wins, it's further legitimizing the absolutely absurd notion that video games are the cause of these exceptionally rare and exceptionally violent outbursts. I can't agree with that.

<comment><USER10> Media should not be taxed based on it's content. Permitting that puts the government one step away from being able to create de facto bans based on content by merely cranking the tax rate.

<comment><USER11> Why shouldn't media be taxed based on its content?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What research has been done on this?

When I played FPS games, I would have visualizations of walking around with a gun (in a game world). These continued for a few years after I stopped.

Now I don't have them.

I was never violent, nor had any urge to violence. But I had tons of violent images. That's an interesting effect. Did anyone else have anything similar, and is there any research on this?

<comment><USER13> Reminds me of the well known "Tetris effect" where you see falling blocks long after you stop playing the game. I have experienced both sensations, but have neither shot nor dropped bricks on anyone.

<comment><USER14> Same thing happens with falling arrows and DDR

<comment><USER15> True story: I got DDR not long before the second time I took the SAT. The night before the test, I played until around 4 AM. On test day, this is what I saw every time I blinked: <http://i.imgur.com/hTk7Q.png>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it hard to believe that video games (or movies, songs, novels, etc,) even extremely violent ones, could compel someone to murder unless they were already seriously mentally ill. Such an ill person, deprived of violent media, would not miraculously be cured nor would they pose any less a risk to those around them.

</comment><comment><USER17> What about violent books, conversations, thoughts, and lectures at school? (Have you ever read a history book? They're twice as violent as Grand Theft Auto.)

<comment><USER18> Violence in books is textual, so it's going to be far less vivid for the reader than a video game where you actually cause the violence. Additionally, violent books/conversations/thoughts/lectures often focus on the _negative_ aspects of violence rather than glorifying it the way movies and video games do.

<comment><USER19> Some would disagree: <http://www.merrycoz.org/yc/BADLIT.HTM>

It's a familiar horse to beat, this NEW media is special, and different and scary.

It happened with jazz, rock&roll, comic books, movies, novels, heavy metal, many scapegoat has met the whip of the righteously ignorant. It's always been a meaningless argument, totally void of scientific fact.

Were there wars before fiction? Was there crime before video games?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Games, cartoons, books reflect the society we live in, hence they would portray violence.

<comment><USER5> I would argue the opposite. Violence is very dramatic and exciting, it's always going to appear in fiction more often than in real life for that very reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sigh. Let's blame video games and mental illness instead of tackling the real problem. This is going to work out great.</comment>


Is Complexity Theory On The Brink?  - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/is-complexity-theory-on-the-brink/ <comment><USER2> Do you think complexity theory gets more attention than it deserves given its impact on practical computing?

<comment><USER3> Though I'm no complexity theorist, I can assure you than complexity theory is one of the biggest math/CS fields that has everyday, practical impact on "practical computing."

If you use any sort of non-trivial algorithms handling a non-trivial amount of data, you damn well better be interested in the relationship between the runtime of the algorithm and the number of things you're asking it to handle (Big O).

If you're designing a novel algorithm (or at least, novel to you) you should at least have a passing familiarity with complexity classes. It's funny how often I hear about (or see first-hand) someone trying to figure out why their code won't always work only to have pointed out to them that their problem is NP-C.

Not only all of that, but complexity theory supplies all sorts of better algorithms—or, rather, methods to improve a general class of algorithms, I suppose—which can immediately or eventually be applied to your everyday problems.

Perhaps you don't need to deal with a lot of these problems on a daily basis, but chances are that some of the tools you use were built by people who worried about them.

It's a neat field, and I'm excited to see these advances.

<comment><USER2> Complexity theory seems only interested in algorithms that shed light on complexity classes.

What has complexity theory done recently that is of practical importance?

<comment><USER3> A simple Google search brings up a multitude of papers and book on the subject of the practical applications of complexity theory, so I'll spare you a list. Wikipedia also has some nice example. RTFM, but I mean it in the nicest way.

But, for instance, I recently ran into some complexity theory when exploring some of these topics, which are _quite_ practical:

        • implementing a parser-generator
        • lambda calculus reductions (for a lisp-y interpreter)
        • encryption/security (you don't want there to be a
          simple function to crack your crypto, right?)

It's totally useful, and totally relevant. And it's a lot of fun if you can get past the initial 90º learning curve.

<comment><USER4> That's not what complexity theorists work on. You could put any algorithm under the label complexity theory, but that's not what complexity theorists do.

<comment><USER5> So what do they work on?

<comment><USER4> Proving lower bounds on complexity and inventing algorithms that have theoretically better complexity but are most times useless in practice (for example the O(n^2.376) algorithm for matrix multiplication).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Create Your Own Webpage Under Ten Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.code-love.com/2014/02/10/a-guide-to-creating-a-good-webpage-under-ten-minutes/

<comment><USER2> Great article!</comment>


Microsoft Releases Roslyn Project, Open Compiler API - <AUTHOR> http://robkennedy.com/2011/10/22/microsoft-releases-roslyn-project-open-compiler-api/

<comment><USER2> The post should link to <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/roslyn> .

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously discussed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132761>

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice. They're learning from clang.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could MS be trying to compete with JVM in letting people to create new languages targeting the .Net CLR?

<comment><USER6> That's already possible.

<comment><USER7> Also, these compiler APIs are language specific, so they don't actually help with that. (it's sort of interesting to think about what a more generic take on this, or a subset of it, would look like, other than the CLR itself, though).

edit: I think my grandparent poster was being ironical, since if you know what the CLR is you probably know what it stands for ... right?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pixelfed.club – Aggregator for Pixelfed Posts - <AUTHOR> https://pixelfed.club <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I built pixelfed.club to reduce friction between people finding out about pixelfed (and other fediverses) and being able to see whats happening on those Fediverses.

Any feedback is welcome.

I've also built a similar aggregator for Mastodon, you can check it out here:

[https://mastodonia.club](https://mastodonia.club)

(Warning: Some NSFW posts might show up, I do my best to filter them out)

<comment><USER3> Looks pretty good! The Pixelfed aggregator seems more useful than the Mastodon aggregator to me, because most of the Mastodon posts are in languages I can't read, but I can look at all of the pretty Pixelfed pictures no matter the language ;-)

Are you going to release the source code?

<comment><AUTHOR> > The Pixelfed aggregator seems more useful than the Mastodon aggregator to > me, because most of the Mastodon posts are in languages I can't read,

Yep, that's a good point. The next feature I am planning for mastodonia is to filter by language

> Are you going to release the source code?

Good question. Not sure yet. I am trying to figure out if commercialization is a good path for fediverse related projects. I think fediverse community is pretty anti VC and profit. On the one hand I kind of agree with them - <USER2> money eventually ruins all community/social related startups (ex: digg, reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram etc). It's a cycle that's been repeating for about 20 years (maybe the market is about to realize it and change direction, hence the fediverse). On the other hand you can't maintain fediverse instances on charity alone. I think a good trade-off are non-profit corp structure.

I think we can learn a lot from high quality communities that have survived and remained high signal in the past 20 years.

Some examples:

Hackernews: Subsidized by YCombinator, to maintain an funnel of companies for their seed fund.

[https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs) \- Hosting seems to be based on benevolent charity from prgmr.com

somethingawful.com - a forum thats been around for a while and charges $10 to join.

My long term thoughts on aggregators for fediverses:

I think aggregation/curation sites (like pixelfed.club) can be a decentralized complement to the fediverse. The fediverse generates the content. Aggregators, can curate the content for specific topics and help new users discover content. Anyone can start a fediverse instance, and anyone can start a aggregation/curation instance.

<comment><USER4> > I think a good trade-off are non-profit corp structure.

Really believe in this model, and hope it is followed more often. And it could also be a coop, which aligns quite well with community-building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A decentralized content ecosystem develops, content tracking and discoverability become a problem, a bunch of aggregators emerge, eventually one or few dominate and become the default destination for a critical mass of the users, decide they might as well become a platform, the ecosystem is no longer decentralized. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree this scenario could happen. That's certainly been the cycle.

But if we go back to thinking about this problem from first principles [1], I think certain things have changed.

1\. Hosting a complex app in the "cloud" has become significantly cheaper, and easier

2\. Centralized services have network effects because you can't find your "connections" on other services. That's not true with federation. Even though gmail is the most popular provider of email, there are still other providers that are alive and well today. In fact there has been some cultural movement of moving from gmail to paid & private email providers, because they are so cheap nowadays.

3\. In federated systems, its relatively "easy" to move to another provider. Although much more work needs to be done to improve migration in fediverse.

4\. De-centralization doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. What is the minimal "centralized", and cheap bootstrapping service for a federated system ? Answer: A domain name + static site with some links to "trusted" providers. Cost: $10 a year for domain + static hosting (pretty much zero dollars) ~ approximately $1 dollar per month

5\. There has been some egregious censorship happening by centralized social providers (a total 180 to how early internet culture was). It's their right to do it as private companies, but that's also what motivated some people to move to the fediverse.

[1] [https://fs.blog/2018/04/first-principles/](https://fs.blog/2018/04/first- principles/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice to see this aggregator! PixelFed [0] is a great webapp and development of the project is progressing at a fine pace (thanks @dansup). New great features continuously announced on their Mastodon account: [https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed](https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed)

[0] [https://pixelfed.org](https://pixelfed.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great idea. My one criticism is that there seems to be some resizing of images taking place which significantly reduces the quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> So there are 2 things that are happening. The image I ingest for the aggregator is the preview image (slightly lower quality than the original image). I also resize the image (using CSS) on the site to have higher content density.

You can see the original quality image by clicking on the post. It will take you to the actual post on the actual pixelfed instance.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Crowdsourcing nice places to live, down to the street level - <AUTHOR> http://www.ratehereratenow.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> OP / developer here~ This is mostly an experiment from a weekend project that happened a while ago. I've since got a stable job and won't be moving any time soon, but enough friends and family have said "that's cool, but needs more people to use it" that I thought I'd finally make it public :-)</comment>


Why You Should Not Run Your Own Mail Server - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-should-not-run-your-own-mail-server

<comment><USER2> You should run your own mail server, both personally and professionally.

The whole internet thing gave us all a post office, gave us all a printing press and a newspaper. If we let corporations make running a web server or mail server or whatever too hard for a garage tinkerer, we as a species have lost a lot of freedom. Keep the Internet free: run your own damn servers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well that seems like it would be counter to what Digital Ocean should really be telling people not to do things themselves.

<comment><USER4> The article headline is more of a play on the number of times a sysadmin has _cursed_ because of the mail server that she/he was administering. It's kind of been a right of passage, though becoming much less frequent these days with the use of gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, troubleshooting why the heck Google's or FastMail's message didn't reached the recipient or why customer's e-mail hasn't arrived is much more difficult than looking at your own logs.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://mailinabox.email](https://mailinabox.email)</comment>


How to structure incentives for salespeople in an early stage startup - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I've been working on a startup for about the two years and after multiple pivots and changes in strategies we think we've come up with a viable product in the education space. We've had a pilot already in a few classrooms and teachers (as well as students) loved the idea, and the principal was eager to purchase the product for her school. Now we're looking to expand as quickly as possible and trying to determine the best incentive structure for the salespeople. (They'll be working part-time on their own and receiving no base salary.) I believe it should be solely based on commission (e.g. they get 20% of the revenue they bring in), whereas my partner believes we should be giving out equity as well (10% - 20%) to make sure they're motivated, since the first few sales are so crucial to the company. We have no external funding, so without revenue coming in we can't really keep going. Does anyone have any suggestions, or links to relevant resources, on how we should structure this? I don't mind playing around with the percent commission since we can adjust later, but my concern is that once equity is given out there's no way to undo that. Thanks in advance for any help. <comment><USER2> Make more sales before you hire a salesperson otherwise you are just dumping the whole responsibility of making the business successful on someone else which regardless of how they are compensated is likely a very bad idea.

<comment><USER3> +1 this ^^ comment. If the founding members don't know how to sell their own product, I think you have bigger problems to solve before you worry about how to compensate your salespeople. (If you do know how, then sell it yourself until you reach the threshold where you can just hire sales people on base salary+commission).

If you absolutely must, bring in a partner (and equity) who will close your first N (for whatever "N" is that makes sense in your situation) sales, that you must close in order to "keep going."

You can tier the equity stake the partner earns (and cap it): e.g., first X sales gets $Y cash commission, next X' sales earns $Z cash + 0.N% equity per deal, up to M% total equity cap.

Edited to add:

The notion that you need to give out equity to keep sales people motivated is a HUGE mistake, IMHO. Unlike most employees, who are income-bound by salary plus bonus (e.g., their salaries don't scale directly based on their performance), equity can be a nice incentive. But, for commission-based sales where income scales directly with performance, a good sales person (who knows they're a good salesperson) knows they can make a killing _right now_ (and thus, don't need the delayed gratification of an equity liquidity event) by just doing what they do REALLY well.

As long as you track sales properly and pay out commissions correctly and on time, making tons of money is usually incentive enough for good sales people.

And, bad sales people ... well, you're gonna want to throw them off the bus ASAP, and giving them equity makes that REAL hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.

The issue isn't that we can't sell the product it's that we don't have the free time available to scale out to the extent we'd like. We're already stretched quite thin, so having a separate sales force allows us to reach far more customers than we could ever reach on our own. Also, given that we're selling to schools, our salespeople have a lot more contacts, and can thus reach the relevant buyers more effectively.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fantasymath.com – math based, matchup specific fantasy football advice - <AUTHOR> Been working on this all offseason and wanted to post here with the kickoff of the NFL season.
www.fantasymath.com
In FF, the goal is to pick a lineup of players that outscore your opponent's lineup. In real life, these players are often the same team/playing each other, and so their performance is correlated (e.g. a QB throwing to a WR). The fantasymath.com model takes these correlations into account in order to give you a slight edge when setting your lineup (apart from that, the rankings are basically the "fantasy consensus" or wisdom of crowds, set to distributions).
Do everything on this myself. I'm a modeling guy by trade, and had to learn all the back and frontend stuff myself. The frontend is React + Redux.  Used the React framework Grommet, which I really like.
The backend is in Flask and Google App engine. Other really helpful things were Auth0 and Stripe.
Audience is hardcore Fantasy Footballer's who are mostly interested in whatever edge they can get, so charge $40. Have a decent amount of subscribers, but definitely not enough to cover time spent (which is OK! have learned a ton). <comment><USER2> Very cool! You should add some sort of 'loading...' message when you submit the demo - I initially thought I was back on the home page.

Also - it's probably a bit more work and/or more processing intensive, but it would be very helpful to see the probability outcome in real time (as I move players in/out).</comment>


Ask HN: Where should I go on my Hacker Tourism Vacation? - <AUTHOR>

I am setting out on a cross country trip from Washington DC to San Francisco. Like many here, I love the article Mother Earth Mother Board ( http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html )and I have always wanted to have my own Hacker Tourist adventure.I would love to get recommendations from a community that has taught me so much about so many things.
So far, I have visited the production facility of an antenna tower fabricator. On my way to Chattanooga I will be stopping at a few of the towers they have built. After that I am heading to Kansas City MO.
I want to hit as many places as possible, and I'd like to go from the basic construction of infrastructure to the 'last mile' of service delivery. <comment><AUTHOR> ...really? thanks guys gg</comment>


New Github error pages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/404.html

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2056629> for relevant discussions and such (longer thread.)

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry for the duplicate. please Y-god add a search link in the top left corner of any hacker news page... it's not so hard: 1\. buy them <http://searchyc.com/> 2\. <a href="<http://searchyc.com/> title="search">Search

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fun, but this is likely to be very confusing to anyone not technically- inclined.

<comment><USER4> I agree, but I guess you have to wonder how many of those people will be on github to begin with, or what they hope to gain from being there.

There's plenty more to confuse them as well. tar? zip? clone? git? What is all this stuff?</comment></comment>


What are the best books you read in 2017? - <AUTHOR> Bill Gates recommends books every year.  Which book would you recommend? <comment><USER2> I recently read The Three Body Problem and it surely is one of the most interesting and accessible hard science fiction books that I have read in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> \- A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

\- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

\- Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

\- Tools of Titans (was positively surprised by this one)

For developers I can highly recommend the Domain Driven Design books by Vaughn Vernon.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" was a standout read this year [https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success- Distracted-...](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted- ebook/dp/B00X47ZVXM)

</comment><comment><USER5> The best book published in 2017 for me is this one:

"A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market" by Edward O. Thorp

[http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all- markets/](http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all-markets/)

</comment><comment><USER6> For any current or perspective developer; Clean Code. I cannot recommend this and the rest of Uncle Bob's books.

</comment><comment><USER7> In no particular order:

* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday

* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday

* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau

* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman

* Certain to Win, Chet Richards

* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley

* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos

EDIT: list formatting

<comment><USER8> I like the book 'Man Searching for Meaning'. I read it multiple times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> \-- all fiction except Tense Bees --

Born - jeff vandermeer

Dichronauts — Greg Egan

That's Why I'm a Journalist - Mark Bulgutch interviews

Mooncop - Tom Gauld

Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs - Michael Tye

Alif the Unseen - G. Willow Wilson

Junction True - Ray Fawkes, Vince Locke

</comment><comment><USER10>
      -When Breath Becomes Air
      -The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return

</comment><comment><USER11> Agree with tools of Titans, disappreance of childhood (older book), on tyranny, and trust me I'm lying

</comment><comment><USER8> \- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

\- Euler letter to German Princess - Part 1

\- Tipping Point

</comment><comment><USER12> consider the lobster

The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks

cryptonomicon

The hunt for Vulcan: and how Albert Einstein destroyed a planet</comment>


Sony Mobile: Build AOSP Nougat 7.0 - <AUTHOR> http://developer.sonymobile.com/build-aosp-nougat-7-0/ <comment><USER2> For clarification Google took out support for the popular 800/801 chip from AOSP which meant vendors wouldn't pass CTS if they update to Nougat anyway. Seems that the requirement for N is having a Vulcan/OpenGL ES 3.1 capable device[1]. Which is a bit bullshit from the side that in regular usage this isn't warranted and that even target apps for that (entertainment) don't have those kind of support.

So, since Sony Z3 series running this SOC was very popular (and completely capable of running Android 7, Z3 even had a N preview), seems Sony will try to hint the community into building a custom ROM.

But probably it will have incomplete/unstable camera binaries, because they aren't open source.

Android is a mess.

[1] [http://www.androidcentral.com/Android-7-snapdragon-800](http://www.androidcentral.com/Android-7-snapdragon-800)

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the answer will turn to be encryption support. Snapdragon 800/801 doesn't have instructions for AES operations acceleration (the equivalent of AES-NI on Intel processors) and Google seems to want to make encryption a standard feature of Android.

<comment><USER3> From the 6.0 CTS:

> For device implementations supporting full-disk encryption and with Advanced > Encryption Standard (AES) crypto performance above 50MiB/sec, the full-disk > encryption MUST be enabled by default at the time the user has completed the > out-of-box setup experience. If a device implementation is already launched > on an earlier Android version with full-disk encryption disabled by default, > such a device cannot meet the requirement through a system software update > and thus MAY be exempted.

This doesn't refute your point, just illustrating the previous requirement for FDE. Curious to see the 7.0 CTS standards when they're published.

<comment><USER4> Fwiw my z3+ runs fine with fde enabled (android 6.0.1 stock Sony rom).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> AOSP directly from the manufacturer... Almost too good to be true. _rubbing my eyes_

<comment><USER6> Sony has been doing it for a while for the Z-range. In fact, they even provided N Preview images for the Z3, as the first and only non-Nexus.

The Xperia Z has a fully functional (all hardware, no major issues) Android 4.4 build a week after the 4.4 sources were released. It was the first non- Nexus with a working KitKat. Sony provided the right stuff on GitHub and their devices are very easy to develop for.

<comment><USER7> The only caveat, of course, is that if you unlock the bootloader on at least the Z3 and up, you lose a bunch of "protected" functionality, including what makes the camera on these devices great. It's for this reason that my Z5c is, and will likely remain, forever locked.

I used a root exploit to obtain permanent root on my old Z3c, but it felt kinda pointless since I couldn't install CM without unlocking the bootloader. (Yes, locked root made it possible to back up the DRM partition, but running CM without the DRM partition intact and the bootloader unlocked meant living with sub-optimal camera performance, so that was a non-starter for me too.)

So yes, Sony's devices are "easy to develop for", if you don't mind living with crippled hardware features (permanently, in the case of the Z5) once you unlock the device.

<comment><USER2> It's also hilarious that they're protecting their knowhow like this, where Sony imaging postprocessing of taken pictures is really bad.

They ship capable camera sensors on their devices and are outperformed by other vendors who use their same sensors, but don't suck at image processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just curious, have they sorted out the updating problem already?</comment>


Ask HN: Releasing code as open source - <AUTHOR>

I wrote an iPad app that was rejected by Apple with no hope of being accepted anytime in the foreseeable future.  I've decided to move on and use the concepts for another project but in the event that others might find it useful I'd like to release the code as open source.
Having never done this before I'm not sure the "best" way to go about it; simply open up a public repository on github and post the code, or do I need to select a specific license, update the source to reflect this choice, provide documentation, etc.?
I'm sure there are no hard-and-fast rules but I'd like to do this in a way that is most beneficial to other developers out there. <comment><USER2> Let's be clear. "Open source" actually means distributed with a license compatible with the open source movement. Unlicensed is not technically open source. (Semantics, I know, but it can make a difference - not knowing exactly what your application does it is hard to tell whether it is relevant).

If you care at all what happens to it, slapping the GPL on it and putting it on github are easy choices. Here are the instructions on how to GPL your code:

<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html>

If you really don't care what happens to it (i.e. don't care if it is forked a zillion times) just slap it on your website somewhere - but personally I would still GPL it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's the sort of info I'm looking for. I don't want to make the use restrictive but I'd like to prevent someone else from claiming it and then preventing others from using it in the future.

<comment><USER3> Which kind of license you should pick depends on what exactly you mean by "claiming it and then preventing others from using it in the future".

The two main styles of licensing are:

* Permissive (BSD-style, MIT-style): Anyone can use your code for any purpose, including in proprietary products, but they must retain the copyright notice.

* Copyleft (GPL): Anyone can use your code, on the condition that any software they use it in gives the same freedom to reusers.

Which you should choose depends on what you'd consider fair/unfair reuse of your code. For example, if Microsoft used an adapted version of your code in the next version of Excel, would you consider that a great thing, and be happy to see your code out there, or would you consider it a betrayal of your intent for someone to adapt a version of your code and then keep the adaptation closed-source?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm OK with the code being used in a commercial product so long as that doesn't prohibit others from using it as well (in other words, I wouldn't want Microsoft to somehow copyright a function my code provides that would get anyone else who uses that function sued).

Don't get me wrong, I don't see this as a possibility but I'd like to save others the trouble.

<comment><USER3> That shouldn't be a problem with pretty much any option. At worse, Microsoft (or whoever) can make an improved version of your code that they copyright, but they couldn't copyright the original version that you released in a way that would prevent others from using it. The biggest difference between licenses is whether you care about those derived works: if someone improved your code, should that improved code also have to stay open source, or is it okay if someone takes the improved version closed-source? If you want to ensure that any improved versions stay open too, then copyleft licenses (the GPL is the main one) are the way to go. If you don't care about that, and only care that the original stays open, then any permissive open-source license is fine ("BSD-style" licensing).

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent, then it looks like I guessed right :)

Thank-you for taking the time to lay out the differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would highly recommend using an MIT license - I think everyone working at GitHub uses it for all of our OS work.

<http://github.com/schacon/showoff/blob/master/LICENSE>

It is very open and people that are interested in learning from or using your code don't have to worry about licensing issues. If you are a hard-core copyleft advocate, then great, use the GPL - if you don't care, please use MIT. It makes people looking at your code not have to worry about exactly how they're using it and it makes sure they don't have to beg you to ask permission in case they want to use snippets in a non-GPL program.

</comment><comment><USER5> It depends on what you want. Do you want people to just do whatever they want, then go with MIT or a BSD license. If you want people to contribute back (and 'keep on giving') use one of the GPL licences. Personally I always use MIT.

It's no harm to go over your code again and clean it here and there (not having seen the code, just in general ;)

Regarding documentation: If you want people to do stuff with your code, providing documentation is very helpful. Writing documentation is a boring task, so most open-source projects conveniently forget to do so. If you have a well documented source even, it's much, much more useful to others.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good to hear, I'd like to "have good manners" as a way of putting it, but it's good to know that I can release the code and wait to see how much interest there is before I invest additional time pruning and creating documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One quibble with using the GPL: it is the position of the FSF that it and the Apple App store licensing terms are incompatible: [http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app- store-...](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl- enforcement)

However, if you're holding the license, it's up to you if you take action against anyone using your code in an iOS app. (And perhaps you _don't_ want people going down that dark path anyway...).

The more you care about other people using your code, the less you'll want to use a restrictive license. The vast majority of open source Lisp implementations are _not_ GPLed, I assume at least in part for that reason (CLisp was coerced into the GPL by its use of readline). For Clojure Rich Hickey uses the Eclipse Public License -v 1.0 for reasons that I forget but that made complete sense to me when I reviewed them (<http://opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php>). Do pick one of the most common, license proliferation is a bane of FOSS.

On the other hand, software like language implementations that don't require including so much of themselves in a released version are very natural fits for the GPL, e.g. GCC. The more community involvement you get, the better.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would give it a GPL/LGPL/Mozilla/etc license (your choice, GPL is popular) and put it on a public GitHub repository, and then post it here on Hacker News so we can see it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well hopefully I didn't do anything wrong that's too embarassing: <http://github.com/jjg/DashApp></comment></comment>


Super – We're on the hook for your home - <AUTHOR> https://www.hellosuper.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I came across this on producthunt. It looks really interesting, although im struggling to see their business model, is this more like home insurance?</comment>


How Much Do Software Engineers Really Make in Each City? - <AUTHOR> https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer-earnings-271vpf599k#.WYgE--uTDu8.twitter <comment><USER2> The analysis seems dubious regarding international cities.

"Oslo tops the list in terms of earning power, but we did not mention it earlier because the job market is the smallest among the 43 cities we analyzed in this report. Compare its 106 job offerings to 22,554 in New York City."

Sure the numerb is lower for Oslo, but it should be also ponderated by the number of persons living in both cities.

Taxes and social security are a cost, but also benefit depending on how the money is spent. I'm not sure this has been taken in account.</comment>


Google still hiring, despite recession - <AUTHOR> http://news.techworld.com/networking/3203613/google-still-hiring-despite-recession/ <comment><USER2> Well, of course, all companies do. Regardless of prevailing economic conditions there will still be staff turnover, it might slow in a recession, but people aren't going to stop living their lives.

<comment><USER3> I think the point is that they're still expanding (and hence hiring). See this paragraph:

"Though Google is expanding into multiple areas such as operating systems, applications, online books and display advertising, more than 90 percent of company revenue comes from keyword-related search advertising, acknowledged Schmidt, who is also the chairman of the company."

To me this seems smart. If you still have the money to expand and you realize the recession will eventually end it's smart to continue expanding. That way not only will you not lose 2 years but you'll essentially gain 2 years that were lost by all the other companies that slammed on the brakes because of recession fears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A bit offtopic, but does anyone know how long Google usually needs to get back to you when you apply for a position? Also, do they notify you if you've been rejected, or does your resume simply disappear into a black hole?

<comment> brown9-2 Someone inside Google might be able to correct me, but I believe that both 1) you won't be notified if you aren't a current fit (they'll put you into a resume database) and 2) if you are a fit, you'll hear back relatively soon - I've received replies from Google recruiters about a week or two after the online submission in the past.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reply. I wanted to get an idea how long I should wait before signing a contract with another company.

I applied with several companies about a week ago an it's really interesting to see the differences between small and large ones. The smallest company is really quick and I'm meeting their engineers tomorrow. In the case of the somewhat larger one (50+ employees) it took several email exchanges with two separate people to set up a phone interview with their recruiter. And I haven't heard back anything yet from any of the large companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> if i had the money, i will increase my hiring spend as you can get much better people because number of new startups reduce and also less competition in hiring</comment>


UK grocery giant Tesco to trial virtual shopping at Gatwick - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19148154

<comment><USER2> Tesco tried this in South Korea with Home plus.

Video here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJVoYsBym88>

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting, thanks! I knew something like this had been trialled in South Korea, but wasn't aware of the Tesco connection - the video clears it up though Tesco is brands itself under Home Plus in South Korea.</comment></comment>


The Cloud's Hidden Lock-in: Latency - <AUTHOR> http://blog.archivd.com/1/post/2009/04/the-clouds-hidden-lock-in-latency.html

<comment><USER2> I would call this locality rather than latency, and it's hardly hidden. In the pre-cloud world you probably wouldn't build an app that straddles two random data centers, so don't try to do the same thing in the cloud. There is an opportunity to make cloud migration easier and faster, though. For example, incremental migration (rather than bulk copying) would be a great feature.

As for "Amazon charging less to put data in than to take it out", that's a legitimate consequence of symmetric pipes with asymmetric demand.

I think the first instance of cloud peering was the link between Joyent and Facebook; hopefully we'll see more of this in the future (especially between specialized clouds).

<comment><AUTHOR> Good example of peering! I'd missed that.

There's a difference with the pre-cloud world. When you ran your own datacenter and some new tech came along, you could buy it from many vendors and make it work (compatibility issues aside).

If all of your operations are in cloud A but only cloud B has some new thing, you cannot use it until your vendor decides to build their own. The time and cost to send data around is too high.

Amazon's pricing is justifiable but they are very aware of the implications.

<comment><USER2> _When you ran your own datacenter and some new tech came along, you could buy it from many vendors and make it work. If all of your operations are in cloud A but only cloud B has some new thing, you cannot use it_

Ah yes, this bundling is a big pain and will probably get bigger as different cloud platforms diverge. That's why I prefer as-low-level-as-possible IaaS where most of the interesting functionality is in software; this will probably never be as granular and easy to use as PaaS though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd consider the issue of latency to be a switching cost vs. lock-in. You could move all your stuff over to the new, shiny cloud. Of course, if Cloud A is good for some stuff and Cloud B is good for other stuff, then you're stuck in the middle (without low-latency peering as some commenters have mentioned).

In general, I don't see why people are scared of Amazon EC2 lock-in. You're still writing a regular 'ol app that runs on RedHat (or whatever). How does switching over to your own datacenter require any re-writes (other than config changes, etc.)?

I understand the S3 issue, but you ought to be abstracting away the S3 details anyway with a code layer. So, you could implement some sort of hybrid scheme (S3 + new way abstracted away) easily enough if you must avoid downtime Or, if you don't have that much data, just write a script to move it all over.

Queuing: If you're relying on some specific feature of SQS, you're doing it wrong.

Payments: Ok, this gets interesting. But, it's low volume compared to most computing activity, so you can afford the latency. It's not like your DB is at Amazon and your app servers are somewhere else.

I'm more sympathetic to Google AppEngine lock-in. However, I don't think it's too hard for someone to implement the limited set of interfaces provided by the cloud (at least in the Java case -- I haven't examined the Python one), so it's easily broken.

As Clouds become more abstracted away from hardware and the current ways of doing things, I think lock-in will become a real concern. But, it doesn't matter right now.

</comment><comment><USER4> I suspect a number of the Cloud providers already peer with each other. Amazon, Google and Facebook are already peering with some providers, and possibly each other. Of those, I believe Google has way more peering partners than anyone.

Mosso's tough because Rackspace does everything over purchased transit, they don't really peer with anyone.

Simple peering isn't going to fix the latency problems, though. The solution is latency tolerant applications. There are numerous ways to help apps be resilient to latency. Things like datacenter local write through caches, the multi-master replication that's easier with newer datastores (CouchDB for instance) than traditional databases, etc.

The real latency problems happen between your assembled bits and your users. Creative CDN use can help with this, and I expect that we'll see much smarter CDNs in the future that offer some of what Akamai does without requiring payments in live kidneys.

</comment><comment><USER5> Solution: Locally-hosted clouds.

Few of the advantages of clouds are actually bound to them being over there, instead of over here. If you want to outsource management, go ahead; the cloud management company can reach in orders of magnitude more easily than you can move your data around out of the cloud. Remote backups to another cloud, yours or somebody elses, aren't that hard either. (The remote cloud would still be, well, remote, but it would be better than nothing while you're waiting for your local replacement servers to arrive.)

The only reasons that clouds currently must be hosted remotely is that A: it's slightly easier and B: the cloud owners _want_ you to be locked in. A would be easy to overcome with some software if people wanted it. Everything else about the entire cloud idea works just as well if the cloud lives in your own server room or your choice of colo; easy server replacement, task migration, easy upgrades, whatever, it's all just software, not magic.

But the cloud owners don't want you to realize that.

(Once again, I think RMS is way ahead of the curve, and I think the next five to ten years will prove he was right.)

<comment><USER3> I worked for a large web company where the busiest traffic day of the year was 20x a normal day. And, the busiest hour of that busy day was 100x normal. So, they had a whole bunch of excess data center capacity hanging around to handle just a handful of days a year. For them, the value of not owning the cloud (along with on-demand provisioning) is that they can significantly reduce hardware usage.

<comment><USER5> Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out to somebody else who doesn't care about these issues as easily as they can migrate services and push data around (again, all depending on software not written and with a lot of people who don't want to see it written). Definitely another advantage to outsourcing your cloud operations.

If you're getting a gut reaction against the idea of people running around on your hardware, that exact same gut reaction should be applied to your stuff running around in somebody else's cloud.

<comment><USER3> We outsourced the physical data center but owned and operated the servers. There would have been no issue with other people's stuff running, and the company had even considered it (for simulations, etc.). Our costs were much higher than Amazon's, I suspect. While we might have bought a couple hundred servers at a time, Amazon probably buys thousands. They can buy bandwidth cheaply and probably even power.

Open standards are nice and all, but worrying about running a datacenter stinks. It's a huge management overhead among the zillions of other problems. Even signing the contracts to have it managed is a pain.

"Locally-run clouds can rent their capacity back out"

I'll buy capacity from Amazon, but probably not from Joe Blow. More management overhead to sell capacity back. There would have to be an intermediary, but even then it would be a pain.

Amazon's lock-in/switching costs are mild problems compared to the issues of dealing with one's own datacenter. Everybody I worked with would have much rather spent their time making the apps better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's always fun to find ways that you can make things cheaper, more efficient, more automated. That includes reducing latency and bandwidth costs.

Look at javascript minimizers. Y-Slow...

<comment><USER3> A cloud user can't reduce latency. He can reduce the number of round trips, but the network latency is basically out of his control.

<comment><USER6> Content Delivery Networks reduce latency.

<comment><USER3> They do, but they basically cache (although I'm told Akamai is allowing servlet-ish stuff to run at the edges now). If you want to make back-end RPC calls between data centers, you're eating at least one round trip.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Driving dataset for car autopilot AI training - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/commaai/research <comment><USER2> Cool, but this really confirms what I suspected about Hotz's car all along. He's just done the 'easy' bit - output steering angle on easy highways. That was done in the 80s (slower admittedly, but still).

Wake me up when it can drive here (to pick a random example):

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,0.143...](https://email@example.com,0.1433238,3a,75y,19.57h,82.48t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1saA9p1edgcTokW-f7AhejPg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DaA9p1edgcTokW-f7AhejPg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D80.355255%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x47d8a00baf21de75:0x52963a5addd52a99!8m2!3d51.5073509!4d-0.1277583!6m1!1e1?hl=en)

<comment><USER3> That's not a hard case. It's just a narrow, straight road lined with obstacles. If you have sensors that can get a height field, that's no problem. Our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle could have done that in 2005, using a LIDAR. Google wouldn't have any problem with that. Tesla would have a problem; they're dependent on lane lines.

<comment><USER4> The main difficulty with a side street like that is there isn't actually enough room for 4 vehicles across--2 parked and 2 going in opposite directions. Humans can deal with this pretty easily because it's usually fairly obvious who can most easily yield or even back up a little bit. It's not an especially hard problem and 2 vehicles that could formally communicate would make it easier yet. However, if the behavior depends on essentially social signals, that's somewhat harder but far from impossible to model. (You probably program the computer to politely yield if at all possible.)

However, as you say, this is yet another case where vehicles aren't expected to unthinkingly follow lane lines--if they even exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very cool. I believe scientific papers, especially in the AI space, should habitually share all data that was used so others can repeat and build on the results.

That said, a few hours of highway driving is of course woefully inadequate for learning anything but steering in normal conditions on that particular highway, if even that. So this is not the "build your Tesla Autopilot" kit, even though the OP decided to use the word "autopilot" in the title.

<comment><USER6> The big question for me is... does comma.ai intend to continue to build a public dataset? Because for companies like Google, their primary "value" is their data, that's what they won't share with everyone else, it's what gives them their edge.

If a company was truly willing to share their large datasets down the road, that'd be a Big Deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> When you think about it, at least in Russia many people have video cameras in their cars, and you probably can buy their data for relatively small money, acquiring many hours of driving video. I'm surprised no company have done it yet.

<comment><USER7> probably you just wouldn't want to train your AI on Russian driving. I mean it is like R rated movies - you don't want to expose unprepared mind to it until it reaches stage of maturity that would allow to handle it :)

<comment><USER3> Using videos from vehicles in accidents could be useful. Take the last seconds before the accident, extract a top-view model, and try to train for ways to detect imminent trouble and avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Author George Hotz, also known as geohot, is the author of first working iOS jailbrake. He decided to enter self driving car area[1]. Apparently he founded a new company called comma.ai [2]

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self- driv...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/)

[2] [http://comma.ai/](http://comma.ai/)

<comment><USER9> Once I read George Hotz.. I knew i recognized the name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This creates a model for driving that totally ignores things that can go wrong. It will work great in the normal case, and totally screw up if anything unusual happens. There's no model of "obstacle" or "oncoming vehicle". That's unsafe.

This is a field where bug reports are written in blood.</comment>


Yahoo and AP Caught Manipulating User Comments - <AUTHOR> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/06/yahoo-and-ap-caught-manipulating-user-comments/ <comment><USER2> Paranoia will destroy yah.

Yahoo/AP also did this for weeks with whatever was the lead Gulf oil spill article.

And accusing AP staff of complicity in Yahoo site weirdness is beyond the pale.</comment>


Show HN: How we static site - <AUTHOR> https://makers.airware.com/open-source/this-blog/ <comment><USER2> ive always wondered how these static generators handle ajax or dynamic content?</comment>


Facebook gives UK man $20k for discovering security flaw - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23097404

<comment><USER2> Unbelievable how easy that was. If I were him, I would have been so tempted to take over celebrity accounts.</comment>


Smb Tech - <AUTHOR> https://memos.substack.com/p/ahead-of-the-great-re-opening <comment><AUTHOR> These past few months have been incredibly challenging for SMBs. Informed by many conversations, I've tried to outline ways that SMBs can become more resilient going forward and how technology can play a part. Would love to hear any feedback or about any projects people are working on! -Damir from Index Ventures</comment>


Many Facial-Recognition Systems Are Biased, Says U.S. Study - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/technology/facial-recognition-bias.html <comment><USER2> Great to see a federal study of this. I'm prone to be pessimist and to think that some level of face-recognition will be used in government services — I mean, technically it already is, since photo ID is all but mandated for air travel.

But a disparity of 10 to 100x for different racial groups would seem to make face-recognition a non-starter in the U.S., for everyday use by police for something like stop and frisk. But the pessimist in me thinks that the racial gap in algorithmic performance currently exist only because there hasn't been enough profit motive to fix it, and if there's the potential for a massive federal contract, there will be firms enthusiastic and capable of improving state of the art.</comment>


How I accidentally got access to the secret keys to NBC's websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.bookingbug.com/blog/2014/05/accidentally-access-secret-keys-nbcs-web-sites/

<comment><USER2> Recently my organization locked down GitHub admin access and moved all access requests to a custom in-house app that uses the GitHub API. I found it mildly annoying at the time. Suddenly I am not the least bit annoyed.</comment>


The REX Neo Architecture: An energy efficient new processor architecture - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki6jVXZM2XU <comment><USER2> For those who prefer reading: [http://www.rexcomputing.com](http://www.rexcomputing.com) (I haven't watched the whole video, but it looks to have more or less the same content)

The mentioned paper ([http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2818966](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2818966)) unfortunately is paywalled.

<comment><AUTHOR> The website has not been updated in over a year, while this talk was from this past Wednesday. The video shows our hardware in a temporarily broken state, and goes over what has happened over the last year of development leading to our first test silicon.

We will be relaunching the site early next month with developer documentation, demos of our test chip, and a look at the future 256 core production chip.</comment></comment>


OpenHAK: Open-Source Health Activity Kit - <AUTHOR> https://www.openhak.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I got this from the website linked at [1], but I figured this warrants its own discussion.

Are there more open source Fitbit type of hardware?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20604566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20604566)</comment>


Louisiana upholds black man's life sentence for trying to steal hedge clippers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/07/lousiana-court-denies-life-sentence-appeal-fair-wayne-bryant-black-man-hedge-clippers <comment><AUTHOR> PDF of lone dissenting opinion.

[https://www.lasc.org/Opinions/2020/20-0077.KO.bjj.dis.pdf](https://www.lasc.org/Opinions/2020/20-0077.KO.bjj.dis.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> tl;dr he was in prison several times before for other crimes

> Bryant, 62, received the life sentence under Louisiana's habitual offender > law, which allows a person's sentence to increase based on their criminal > history.</comment>


Show HN: Fake Google Oauth2 for Spear Phishin' - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JWally/xGoogleSpearPhish <comment><AUTHOR> This is kind of a show-and-ask, but I always wondered why a fake authorization site (google, fb, twitter, etc) isn't a security risk (ask); so I built one (show).

This project comes with the following handy features to make your phishing expeditions more productive:

-credential verification (through imap)

-redirects (send your victim to any web-site you choose after they log in)

-stay logged in (if the victim clicks the link after validation, they go straight to their target site)

-easy, remote data dump downloads what you've collected ([http://evil.com/dump?prison=time](http://evil.com/dump?prison=time))

I set up a dummy server @ 184.108.40.206.

If you want to play with it

-A. Be Careful. It requires GMail credentials which are not being transferred over ssl. I do (try to) sterilize your data by using public key encryption (kbpgp.js) and running imap over port 993

-B. I only store the first 5 chrs of your e-mail address, and do not store your password (I don't think). This project is running nginx, node.js, and express so I don't think anything is being logged

-C. Point your browser at 18.104.22.168?goto=[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)

</comment><comment><USER2> IMAP might be a poor choice to validate the credentials as I believe gmail has it disabled by default.</comment>