Carmakers Are Learning Japan's Tech Talent Doesn't Come Cheap - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-29/japan-s-once-dominant-carmakers-face-big-pay-hikes-to-lure-geeks <comment><USER2> Very funny quote: _"You've got some engineers making 20 million yen ($170,000) a year. Then you try to fit them in the traditional manufacturer-based salary structure where it should be 7 to 9 million yen."_

Clearly they don't understand the market, if the other parts of the market are paying 20Million Yen for this position then that is where it "should be" and you have to figure out how to cover that cost.

I get really tired of companies saying "Talent Shortage" when they really mean "I don't want to pay that much."

<comment><USER3> Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe. Being paid 170k€ in san francisco is maybe the "normal" but few company can afford it in europe or just about anywhere else. And salary is missleading because way of life is way more expensive there.

For me the claim is right, there is not enough engineers and they are all going abroad aka there is a shortage. From my perspective (paris, france) even if you would pay engineers double from now on to match US salary, there will still be a shortage for the next 10years at least.

<comment><USER4> "Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe." I disagree. If the hiring company is looking for the best candidates in the world, then they must be prepared to shell out comparable 'global' salaries.

<comment><USER5> I disagree to your disagreement :p

The talent war is continental rather than global. There are plenty of VISA issues and legal troubles that make it impossible for a lot of people to work in a lot of countries [and for those who do, it's preventing them to get the top end of local salaries].

Thus there is no global salary.

<comment><USER6> there is no global salary. But if a company in say, New York City, needed a special skill, you can bet they would pay NYC prices to get it regardless of location. For the rest of us saps, your comment rings true (this coming from a guy who makes less due to his location)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bloomberg's article title is really confusing here. It should say "Japanese Carmakers are Learning Tech Talent Doesn't Come Cheap".

It's not at all surprising and is part of Japan's overall difficulty in attracting foreign IT talent or cultivating it locally. Professional work culture and benefits packages will have to change if they're going to catch up in the IT sector in the future.

I think the automotive industry is going to develop a lot the way the smartphone industry has in that software is going to become a much bigger component of the value proposition of the product. You can build an excellent car but if you don't have good connectivity, smart features, driver assist technologies, and slick user interfaces you're going to get blown off the road by the companies that get it right.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's not a japanese phenomen. In the german automotive industry it's the same thing - and it's one of the reasons I left one of the big german OEMs.

Salaries are very fixed at those companies. You will start at around 50k€ after university, advance to 70-80€ during the next years and will be basically stuck there. The corporations have defined fixed salary levels together with the unions and these don't contain any "super-complex", "in- demand" or "rockstar" levels. It doesn't even matter whether you are doing mechanical engineering, software, or powerpoint engineering. There exist higher salaries, but only for team leads and above - which mostly don't perform technical work anymore.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like the US defense industry.

<comment><USER5> I thought people were doing defence work as contractors now, which is decently paid, as all contracting work.

Anyway, defence should be reasonable hours without week end works and on call. Not comparable to the average bro-grammer company.

<comment><USER9> > I thought people were doing defence work as contractors now, which is > decently paid, as all contracting work.

"Contractor" does not mean the individuals doing the work are 1099 contractors. It means the work is done through government contracts to private companies. There is serious cost pressure on those contracts and the people actually doing the work are generally making below market compensation.

> Anyway, defence should be reasonable hours without week end works and on > call. Not comparable to the average bro-grammer company.

If only. Sure, you can skate by doing that if you don't mind wallowing in a boring role with 3% (if you are lucky) annual raises. If you want any sort of decent career progression you'll be doing 50+ a week and doing whatever needs to be done to hit the often unrealistic delivery targets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _About half the IT professionals in Japan have never changed jobs, compared with 14 percent in the U.S. and 21 percent in China, according to the METI survey._

 _"We cannot afford to have people that only come here for a year or two," said Redzic_

Translation:

About half the IT professionals in Japan have never learned anything new outside of their office, compared with 14 percent in the U.S. and 21 percent in China, according to the METI survey.

"We cannot afford to have people that have wide ranges of experience," said Redzic

<comment><USER11> No wonder they (allegedly) have difficulties adopting best practices such as version control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >The development cycle for a car usually last years, which can be frustrating for programmers used to building a system in weeks, said Mandali Khalesi, Asia-Pacific chief of Netherlands-based digital map-maker HERE, owned by German automakers Audi AG, BMW AG and Daimler AG. "These people are from complete IT backgrounds and they don't expect these long-time cycles," he said in an interview in Tokyo.

Do these hackers no longer exist in the US? Or is everyone a hipster rubyist today?

<comment><USER13> > Do these hackers no longer exist in the US? Or is everyone a hipster rubyist > today?

Oh, they exist. It's just the proportion of programmers these days skew heavily toward web devs and "hipster rubyists" than it used to. There are still a lot of low-level guys and people with experience with these waterfall models. However, as "self driving cars" become the rage with a lot of the public, more hipster rubyist types will want to jump ship to this rage from their last and will apply expecting the same culture to prevail.

<comment><USER14> I'm afraid the "hipster rubyists" have little to contribute towards the self driving cars field. You need an actual degree, if not a masters or doctorate to play. That's why there's a shortage. I don't think these auto-makers are talking about the type of skills you can pick up in a few weekends of watching Code School videos or trying to teach yourself machine learning without a formal education in mathematics/statistics. This is not easy stuff.

<comment><USER15> Give me a stack of textbooks, a list of open problems to study, and a six month supply of caffeine.

<comment><USER16> Sure. Do you want a divorce with that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Our Tokyo office is really difficult to staff. Remembering the whole job for life culture - you just can't hire experienced people you have to hire graduates and then train them up. So if you want someone with 10 years experience you have to have hired someone 10 years ago. Of course you can't fire them if you decide you didn't need so many.

So we hire many foreigners which aren't easy to come by either, and do most dev work elsewhere.

<comment><USER18> What's the process for hiring foreigners?

I'd love to live and work in Japan but basically every job ad I've seen online wants people who speak Japanese and are already in Japan. Bit of a catch 22...

<comment><USER17> I think its probably the same for any large corporation. I'd check with banks, insurance companies, even Japanese manufacturers where you can start with a job in the US with the view to move.

<comment><USER18> What about people who don't live in the US?

Not aware of many European multinationals with a big footprint in Japan who are keen to ship over staff.

<comment><USER19> Google Japan hires from all over the world and will sponsor visas if you get an offer. Obviously the office is focused on the Japanese market, so roles that don't require fluent Japanese are quite limited, but there's a sizable software engineering team that explicitly does not require it:

[https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software-e...](https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software- engineer-university-graduate-minato-tokyo-japan-1988770623&)

[https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software-e...](https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software- engineer-chrome-os-video-minato-tokyo-japan-1991420014&)

But as in any company, the best way to get posted overseas is to get in locally first and then apply for positions internally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not a very experienced engineer, but I did go to a world class school and have worked for a few years. I have been job hunting in Japan and recently received an offer from a large web company in Japan. They were offering less than 30k usd, and would not negotiate at all. I have no incentive to do a full time job when I can make the same with half the hours.

<comment><USER21> You could make the same in two weeks.

<comment><USER20> I have to say, with the best will in the world, I don't believe you.

I don't believe that someone is paying $15000 a week for some basic software development.

<comment><USER5> Factor in the full week, including week end at extra fees, the perks costs, the insurance, the office, the pension. A 5 figure sum seems perfectly reasonable!

However, it's not take-home pay and it's not for basic development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Where to work is a very multidimensional question, but all of the talk (HR, execs, managers, and even potential employees) proxies it into dollars and cents.

I know people who went to Google and came screaming back feeling that they had Stepford-wifed their youth away. I know other smart people working for libraries and universities for a fraction of what they could make just for the tranquility of it.

If you're young and have no responsibilities, don't get too hung-up on the money. Just go out there and try some shit. You never know what's going to be a good fit, although it's usually pretty easy to spot what's going to be a bad one.

<comment><USER23> > don't get too hung-up on the money

Correct. Not on money, but also not on name ("I _have_ to work for one of the big 4")

<comment><USER22> Great point! I'm tempted to go back and add "not getting too hung-up on the vanity of companies and titles" and giving you credit for it, but that would probably be asking too much. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like the title is wrong or something got lost in translation.

It should, in fact, be "Japan's Carmakers Are Learning Tech Talent Doesn't Come Cheap"

</comment><comment><USER25> This should be filed for safekeeping... you know, for the next time a journalist laments how grossly overpaid programmers are.

</comment><comment><USER26> I do hope some Japanese auto companies get self-driven going. Having been peripherally involved with a couple of Japanese software projects,I would appreciate their rigorous approach as a customer.

Unfortunately I found the same trait stressful and overly nit-picky as a foreign engineer - I'll freely admit it was the best QA I've witnessed in my life by report quality, thoroughness and turnaround times. I got the impression that they do not move fast and break things. I don't know how well SV folk will adapt in such environments.</comment>


A Sculpture Controlled by Live Honeybees - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sculpture-controlled-live-honeybees-180960006/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia?no-ist <comment><USER2> I've seen this, it wasn't super impressive, just a pretty sculpture with classical music playing and no recognisable connection between the music or sculpture and the bees when you're actually there.

Kew Gardens is beautiful though, if expensive to enter (somebody's parent will have a membership card and they aren't draconian about checking names so if you visit Kew or London, worth poking social media to save £40).

</comment><comment><USER3> title should have been "A sculpture playing sound controlled by live honeybees". I spent some time reading before i realized bees dont physically interact with this odd thing

</comment><comment><USER4> OT: What's with sites wanting to show me notifications? Why on earth would I allow this?

<comment><USER5> If you have a website as a desktop daemon (like a calendar app), it's handy. But mainly it's a way to put more ads in your line of sight.

[https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3220216](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/3220216)

chrome://settings/content/notifications?search=notifications</comment></comment>


Show HN: SyncNinja – Mirroring browser execution on the server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/syncninja/syncninja <comment><USER2> Unless I'm missing some of the problems you're trying to solve, this seems like an extremely over engineered solution to the problem of code duplication (like validation) and boiler-plate communication code. For the former, if you're using a node backend, you can pretty trivially reuse the same code between client and server side. The later doesn't really seem like a big enough issue on its own to really warrant an architecture that requires a back-end with per-tab mirroring - you can usually encapsulate the 'cumbersome AJAX calls' with a straight forward API (or GraphQL query if that floats your boat).

This approach also forgoes many of the nice side-effects of having a clear slide-server boundary like avoiding leaking implementation details into your front-end code. Also, a simple REST API can be reused across platforms, so when you want a native experience on Android, iOS, etc you wont have to replicate this architecture or the underlying logic on each of those platforms.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working on a project where we generate and synchronize view models (instead of full views like this proposal) between the server and web/app clients. We maintain (view)state in an Actor based backend, pushing updates to the clients through websockets. The client only needs to databind and render the model. This gives a really nice realtime user experience and is quite efficient.

Like SyncNinja, our architecture moves a layer of clientside code into the server. This enables more code sharing, at the cost of tight coupling between client and server (which does not matter for web but is problematic for our app clients). For use cases that need to work offline it falls apart; for that you need api's that work at the business layer and duplicate the view logic in each client.

I think SyncNinja will share difficulties we found around offline/localStorage, besides high resource usage, support for non-web clients, and all the problems you'd expect from browser differences (i.e. input prefill).

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. Is your project open source by any chance?

<comment><USER3> This is a startup, the application is not open source but everything we use is. We are building on the Microsoft stack, which might make it uninteresting for most of the HN crowd. Our main framework components are Orleans, Nancy, SignalR, Knockout.js and Xamarin. I think one could get the same results using Akka, express, socket.io, flux and React (or Ionic with angular)

<comment><USER4> It'd be interesting to hear about the issues you've found around SignalR and offline mode, as we are building on very similar stack so far and your experience can help others who are using Orleans

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Project looks promising... Do you have source code to a demo app available?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, we're just starting out, pivoting from a previous similar idea. We wanted to include community from day zero, so anyone can contribute to the design as well.

<comment><USER6> The project proposes a model that will have significant (negative) implications on client performance, server performance, developer cognitive overload, and latency (despite transactions).

It'll also introduce a very big attack surface for malicious agents to DDoS your server and possibly exploit the server-side V8 once an appropriate vulnerability shows up.

And it'll also produce application tightly coupled to browser API emulation, which would become an obstacle to the server being able to properly support native mobile and desktop applications.

I can put these issues aside for a moment, and attribute them to me being too cynical to believe in a new way of doing things.

But let's look at the benefits. This is the example being given for the kind of client code that SyncNinja would enable:

        someDatabase.lookup('users', 'john', function (err, userData) {
            console.log("User's real name is " + userData.userName);
        });

This is already possible to do on the client-side, in plain JS, and any kind of server, as a very, very thin wrapper around the available AJAX calls provided by the server web API.

So my point is, I see no convincing examples of SyncNinja making something possible that wasn't already trivial before, and without the big overhead. Maybe you guys should work on what the value of this system is in practice.

Your "before" example doesn't show limitations of the browser, but simply a missing thin client library to abstract the AJAX calls.

Additionally, you have no prototype of this concept at all. Even a toy prototype with just one kind of event, or something. It sends the message that everything written in the paper doesn't come from experience, but it's merely hypothetical. And there's a giant leap from an idea to a working prototype.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the frank comment. Those are fair concerns and there will be a lot to address, for sure. The reason why we posted this so early (without any code) is that we wanted to get some kind of participation from the community from day zero. Your comment is the kind of participation we were looking for.

Now to actually address it, I think it's more than just a thin wrapper. Perhaps the example shows too little, but for many developers, writing server side code and all the necessary communication is a road block. For others it's just extra stuff to maintain. And we generally like less code that does more.

I wouldn't worry about V8 vulnerabilities, there are many node servers running in production today, in general, and they are doing fine. But your DDos point is pretty fair - I can see how that could be a problem. Feel free to submit a pull request to add to caveats if you want to take credit for it.

<comment><USER6> > I wouldn't worry about V8 vulnerabilities, there are many node servers > running in production today, in general, and they are doing fine.

The problem is your concept is more than just another server running V8.

It's a server running V8 with code, which is nearly identical to the code running on my client (it gives me a peak at the server code structure), and which accepts a quite wide range of events allowing me to model an attack that would trigger a V8 vulnerability on the server.

It would be much easier to do compared to a server which exposes a minimal API in a completely opaque way.

> Perhaps the example shows too little, but for many developers, writing > server side code and all the necessary communication is a road block.

I'm not every developer, so I wouldn't know, but I think you overestimate the hurdles of server-client communication that developers encounter.

A server-side API has to be written one way or another, as it's a key asset to a company and it encapsulates its business logic in a platform neutral way. This means I can have web site running off of it, I can have an iOS app running off of it, a desktop app, and also a cron job that runs every night and generates reports, for example.

None of this would be possible if you tightly couple the app business logic with a browser emulator.

Recreating the business logic with every client will be a gigantic waste of time and money and a very rich source of bugs. No one would do it that way. There _has_ to be a central API.

Also there are many libraries that would _generate_ the necessary client code (wrapping AJAX calls) for you from an API definition, here are some random examples I just googled up:

\- [https://github.com/pksunkara/alpaca](https://github.com/pksunkara/alpaca)

\- [https://apimatic.io/](https://apimatic.io/)

\- [https://github.com/ttezel/unio](https://github.com/ttezel/unio)

Given the task is relatively trivial, and tools exist to automate it, I think a "road block" is too strong of a phrase to use here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Security needs to be air-tight for sure, but we think we address it in the doc. Let me know if you have something specific that you think could be leveraged.

We talked with quite a few developers. There are many who want to launch their startup but have waaay less technical skills than you might think.

The way we thought of bridging the gap with mobile is by using Ionic and/or Apache Cordova, which use JavaScript.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


We guard more secrets about salaries than about sex - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-august-23-2020-1.5689297/we-guard-more-secrets-about-salaries-than-about-sex-and-employers-want-to-keep-it-that-way-1.5689307 <comment><USER2> I remember my first full-time job I fought hard for a raise and got it. I worked long hours, putting in extra work in the evenings when everyone else had gone home. Then maybe a month later a new hire came in and casually in a conversation he mentioned how this was just a starter job and he was making peanuts. Those peanuts turned out to be higher than my salary, even after my recent raise.</comment>


Hacking Christmas lights - <AUTHOR> http://www.deepdarc.com/2010/11/27/hacking-christmas-lights/

<comment><USER2> The price surely beats buying/building a bunch of i2c rgb leds ( buy: <https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8579> clone: <http://hackaday.com/2011/06/22/building-diy-blinkm-clones/> )

It also reminds me of the christmas lights webcam, controlled from the web: <http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam>

</comment><comment><USER3> Technically brilliant and completely ridiculous, this really is in the spirit of old-school hacking.

My favourite bit was the author describing how the none of the lights have their brightness value set above 0xCC by the manufacturer, and while the lights accept brightness values up to 0xFF:

"I don't recommend it unless you really know what you are doing. It was probably set to this for a reason" (as if any of this should be attempted unless you really know what you are doing!).

I must confess I had never thought of controlling my christmas lights via webbrowser either. Fun stuff :)

<comment><USER4> The last time this link showed up, some guy had hacked them to show Live Messenger contact status out of Lync. Now _that's_ a good hack:

[http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/15/microsoft- nerd-...](http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/15/microsoft-nerd-reverse- engineers-christmas-lights-uses-them-as-im-indicators/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every now and again you see a post that truly feels like hacker news. This is one of those posts.

<comment><USER6> <http://www.evilmadscientist.com/> has lots more of this stuff if you are interested in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love seeing hacks like this. And one can always pick up something awesome. Also, I never heard of Saleae logic before, but now, I must have it.

<comment><USER8> You will not be disappointed by the Saleae logic. Almost everyday I'm amazed by how beautiful and useful it is. My Logic16's in the mail!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have 98 of these in a box on my wall...

You can "control" it via a web app running node.js. Had a bunch of kids over this weekend who loved playing with it.

<comment><USER10> Post a video of what it can do. I (I'm sure we) would all love to see it!

<comment><USER9> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXahEYJX9-g>

Me drawing some grass, sky, sun then house on the ipad.

The box on the wall is 2' by 4'

<comment><USER4> That's _brilliant_! Nicely done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really wanted to use these exact lights for a giant display in some friends' Burning Man camp this year but the G-35's are pretty much impossible to find at the moment. These lights are on my wish list for Christmas :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I found palettes (plural) of them at Costco this afternoon. $65.

<comment><USER12> Micro-nit: you mean "pallets" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet>, not <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palette>).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, correct. Thank you, Firefox spell-check add-on.

<comment><USER12> From your point of view, I'm actually browser-independent. An amazing value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ybox2 is a collaboration with the ladyada: <http://www.adafruit.com/products/95></comment>


SICP taught in Python 3 - UC Berkeley online - <AUTHOR> http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has been taught at UC Berkeley for 30 years using Scheme.<p>This semester Prof. Hilfinger is teaching it in Python 3.  It isn't a formal online course, but it looks like everything is available including lectures, slides, book & homework. <comment><USER2> I like Python, but how do they plan on teaching recursion with a language that doesn't optimize tail recursion?

Oh, I see, just give them trivially small data sets: [http://www- inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab8/lab8...](http://www- inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab8/lab8.py)

<comment><USER3> I'm currently reading SICP (the original one). Even though it's LISP instead of Python, the syllabus seems to be very implementation-agnostic. Tail recursion optimization is nice and comes in handy, but I don't think it matters much in the choice of a language to teach this course.

Focus is naturally put on how a language looks on paper, more than how it executes on the machine.

My 2c.

<comment><USER4> I remember the text--and the old course--actually spent a good bit of time talking about proper tail calls and "iteration" vs "recursion". We talked about how the code behaves differently--e.g. space usage--and about how to identify the two types.

Also, it's the Structure and _Interpretation_ of Computer Programs; naturally, the first bit talks about how programs look (structure), but the second bit (mainly chapters 4 and 5, if I remember correctly) talks about exactly that: how to execute code on the machine. The last chapter, in fact, introduces a register-based language not unlike assembly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A better alternative (also from Berkeley): <http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61as>.

It's the self-paced, Scheme-based version of the course. The website is currently for last semester; I have some friends working on it and they promise the next iteration (should be up soon) is going to be really awesome. I believe them.

Also, since it's a self-paced course, it's probably a much better option if you want to work along on your own in your free time. I think some other institutions might be using the materials from this class as well, but am not sure about that.

Here are the rather insightful thoughts about using Scheme vs Python for this course from its old professor (who was really awesome): <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html>

<comment><USER5> The site seems to be down for me ...

It sounds really interesting and useful though, thank you (and your friends for working on it)

I'll keep an eye on it and check it out when it's up ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gah, stuff like this just tends to make me upset. SICP is probably still, bar none, the best text I have ever read. In any subject. Now, I'm biased towards computing and I'm sure that there are amazing texts in every field, but I would put this up against any book you can find.

The book touches so many fields in computing and does it in a profound, deep, yet entertaining way. Part of its ability to do so is its use of scheme, a language that doesn't give you a whole lot in conventional terms, but which also puts very few restrictions on your ability to build those things up, so you can get an understanding of them as you create them. Polymorphic method dispatch can seem magical if it has always "just worked" for you in Java, but when the text discusses a system for implementing this (several systems in fact) suddenly it all clicks, and the magic you use every day is a little bit more comprehensible.

And so I feel like attempts to teach SICP but in whatever the more practical language of the day is are misguided, and ultimately a little bit of a cop- out. Before you read the next few sentences let me preface them by saying that I have respect for everyone involved with these decisions even if I don't agree with them, and I don't want to come off as supposing malicious motives on their part.

But the overwhelming feeling I get from reading about these initiatives is that people have looked at SICP and said "Wow that is really a great book, shame about how it uses this fringe language. I know, I'll use language-x which is much more practical, and if there are areas in the text that language-x can't really handle, I'll limit the size of the recursion, or not use higher-order functions as much, etc, etc". And that misses the point. If you want to use language-x then you should probably step back and write a text using language-x that is just as amazing as SICP, and that really utilizes the strength of language-x in the same way SICP utilizes the strengths of scheme. But of course that is really, really hard work and so no one does it. Instead we get initiatives like this that dispense with the magic of using scheme and tail-recursion and lambda, and shoe-horn it into lisp, while also constraining Python to a weird lispy style doing basic things like defining your own functional binary search on a list, which is entirely against the whole reason you use python which is BATTERIES INCLUDED.

And thus you end up with a lazy compromise that doesn't really do justice to either the tremendous original material, or the strengths of a current language. I really think that before you decide to use SICP but with a "modern" language you should ask yourself why you are using SICP and not the amazing course material you have put together yourself to really leverage the strengths of language-x in a way that also teaches computer science. And if your answer is "Because that would be a lot of hard work, and I can just have students do list recursion in python, on small lists, and without doing too much higher-order stuff" then I submit you should abandon your plan and head back to the drawing board, with better goals, and higher standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Scheme wasn't shelved because it was a "fringe" language. In fact, Prof. Hilfinger the one who brought it to Berkeley in 1980, and that class 61A is the first course all CS majors take. Brian Harvey taught the class for ever, and published his own textbook "Simply Scheme."

MIT is doing something similar, with the support of the authors.

The same material is being taught, just in a different language.

<comment><USER7> MIT is not doing something similar; they are teaching different material in Python, following a different book. This is unpopular with the very best students, but even so only the ones who have ever heard of Scheme and SICP. But the introductory computer science course teaches state machines, a bit of recursion, and also a bit of circuits and the like. Nothing nearly as cool as writing your own compiler, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What are the main disadvantages of using python for SICP?

<comment><USER9> When I took CS61A over 8 years ago with Prof. Hilfinger, one of the revelations was how few primitives you need to make a powerful language. Using define, cons, cond, and a couple other functions (but no loops and no assignment), you can write an evaluator for Scheme that can interpret any other Scheme program (excluding I/O, strings). I learned how powerful a first- class function is from that class.

Python has a wealth of syntax and data structures that make it great for real programs but is perhaps not as good at building abstractions from the ground up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how much the TAs had influence on the Labs, or the Instructor is trying really hard to relate with today's students.

From Lab 4 [0]: Exercise 2: Data Herp Derping

The same lab -- possibly others -- has mixed whitespace usage (ex. str_rat method), which may be worrisome for introducing students to languages that hinge upon proper whitespace. The examples will work, as expected, but beginners may be confused by usage of or burdened by not understanding the implications of using 4 spaces here, 6 spaces there, etc.

[0] [http://www- inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab4/lab4...](http://www- inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab4/lab4.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> scheme/lisp was choose by Sussman and Abelson because it does not get in the way to explain SICP.

Python can be a problem and get in the way; scheme was beautiful because it's so simple that all that rest to understand is the really big ideas described in SICP.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are 61A videos on ITunes U but it's hard to tell if they are from the Python version of the course? Anyone know if there are videos of the lectures kicking about from past years of the Python version?

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone give me a hint for Q3 in hw1? <http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/hw/hw1.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not iTunes U?

<comment><USER4> For one, using iTunes U on Linux is difficult, for no good reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally!

</comment><comment><USER3> A little off topic, but reading from week one include a Unix/Emacs tutorial. I wish they would stop defining "cat" as a command to "displays the content of specified files". This trend in the "Unix teaching" community is leading to a lot of terrible practice (Useless use of Cat) in the industry.

I die a little every time I see $ cat file | grep word

<comment><USER16> can you please clarify:

\- correct definition of 'cat'

\- what is wrong with '$ cat file | grep word"

edit: formatting

<comment><USER17> Correct definition of 'cat' -- a tool to concatenate one or more files sequentially into a single output stream. E.g., cat file1 file2 file3 >output- file

what is wrong with... -- "grep word file" takes fewer keys to type and uses fewer resources (important on a heavily loaded server with tons of processes which may well prove compromised and you're trying to peruse the logs for evidence. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and donated it to the local shelter).

<comment><USER18> People nag me about cat'ing stuff to grep, and I explain that it's just easier to edit the pattern when it is the last argument to the command. Also it of course fits better in the toolchain when I need to replace the input or the grep with something else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fears grow over 'food swamps' as drugstores outsell major grocers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/04/food-swamps-cvs-outsells-trader-joes-whole-foods-processed-shopping <comment><USER2> That's a pity, because doing grocery shopping at CVS is like doing grocery shopping at a gas station / convenience mart: there's a $1-3 markup on damn near everything. And I imagine the people that are forced to shop at a drugstore are probably poor to begin with, so, that hits them even worse.

<comment><USER3> > And I imagine the people that are forced to shop at a drugstore are probably > poor to begin with

Why so?

<comment><USER4> If you can't afford transportation you're limited to what you can walk to. In the area I live you cannot bring more than one bag with you on public transportation and it takes almost an hour to get across town on the bus. It would be cheaper to buy marked up food from a gas station or drugstore than pay for a taxi ride or waste half a day riding the bus.

Edit: essentially, a lot of the time it is expensive to be poor.

<comment><USER5> Being poor doesn't mean you can't get a bus ticket. All it means is you are deliberate in your shopping and planning.

You plan your trip to take advantage of transfer tickets and such. Sometimes you walk a mile or two or you bike or you bum a ride from someone.

Being poor doesn't mean you can't plan and are helpless.

Sure it's not ideal and I prefer being able to shop ad hoc at my leisure, no doubt. But when I had to I made do.

<comment><USER4> > Being poor doesn't mean you can't plan and are helpless.

obviously not. But anecdotally what I see where I live is that it is a large enough inconvenience that it makes an impact. If you work 8 hours, then have to spend 2-3 hours getting groceries you already have a 10-11 hour day not counting any other commuting you need to do. What if you have kids you need to get off a bus from school?

trying to blanket say anyone not willing to make that trip just isn't trying isn't fair.

It is well documented that low-income areas have less access to good education, healthcare, and other facilities. blaming the residents doesn't help them improve their quality of life. Not everyone will make it out of that.

<comment><USER5> Unless you don't have a fridge, when you have to make a two hour trip for food, you're gonna make sure you got just about everything for the whole week. There might be some milk or egg runs, but in those cases one might pay a premium once in a while.

We're not making two hour trips every day after work for food. No poor person I knew did that when I was poor. I did it mostly on weekends when there was lots of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a matter of scale. The more interesting metric would be a per-store figure, where TJ and WF outsell CVS by a factor of 5–7x.[1] I'm surprised that it's not higher.

 _> The eyebrow-raising figure probably comes down to an issue of scale – last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe's and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations._

[1] [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CzhWggSef2pbRMJam1m2...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CzhWggSef2pbRMJam1m2hE202Ia --bGjg0TcQ3QnwcE/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure. Each individual TJ's and especially WF store is much larger than the grocery section of an individual CVS. Even the smallest TJ's I've been in (Back Bay) is larger than the largest CVS grocery section I've been in (3 aisles?). I would expect the per-store figure to be _obviously_ in TJ's/WF's favor.

I feel like the most appropriate metric would control for total population served (to discount both the fact that WF and TJ's don't exist everywhere CVS does, and that there are more CVSes per capita than the others where two or more of the three exist).

<comment><USER6> Sorry, to clarify, I'm surprised my per-store calculation isn't _higher_ for WF/TJ. As you point out, the food aisles at CVS are minimal versus an entire store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > With CVS selling more groceries than Whole Foods and Trader Joe's combined

WF and TJ are niche supermarket chains, its just another dumb headline. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/818602/online-and- offlin...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/818602/online-and-offline- grocery-market-share-of-leading-grocery-retailers-us/)

But my fear is growing...

</comment><comment><USER9> CVS is everywhere. Whole Foods and Trader Joes's are only in a few cities and usually there is only one. Guessing about 10 times the number of locations. [https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/list/state](https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/list/state) [https://www.cvs.com/store-locator/cvs-pharmacy- locations](https://www.cvs.com/store-locator/cvs-pharmacy-locations)

<comment><USER10> _Guessing about 10 times the number of locations._

More like 20x.

FTFA: _last year CVS and Walgreens each had close to 10,000 stores in the US, while Trader Joe's and Whole Foods each had fewer than 500 locations._

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure WholeFoods and Trader Joes are good representations of grocery stores nationwide. Both are classified as "Specialty and natural food stores" and have drastically fewer stores than the supermarket chains.

<comment><USER12> This is part of what I was in the middle of commenting. This article seems like it's trying to force together a narrative from unrelated datapoints. TJs is one of the smallest grocery store chains and WF is just a bit bigger, meanwhile CVS is the largest drugstore chain. It is also unclear to me how "retail food marketshare" is measured. Is it just comparing overall revenue among chains that sell groceries? Sales of, specifically, grocery food items? Share of people who have shopped for groceries at these stores?

Just because someone buys a grocery item from CVS does not remotely imply that CVS is their primary grocery store.

The USDA has better numbers representing the market. [https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets- prices/retailin...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets- prices/retailing-wholesaling/retail-trends/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >> A representative of the company, which launched an initiative in 2014 to become the first pharmacy to quit selling cigarettes, indicated via email that they see food as the next frontier.

Wow. What leadership. It only took a couple generations for a place that sells _medicine_ to stop selling _cigarettes_. It should be only a quick thirty or forty years before they stop selling the deep fried salt cakes. Are they still selling homeopathic "remedies"?

There are lots of pharmacies in this world. I seriously doubt CVS was the first to do anything. Somewhere out there, probably in Utah, there had to be a pharmacy that didn't sell cigarettes prior to 2014.

<comment><USER14> San Francisco was the first city in the US to ban tobacco sales in pharmacies back in 2008.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that even if you put fresh produce in a 'food desert' that people don't buy it.

I wonder if a lot of this has to do with how family life is going. It is not the 1960's any more and we don't have the whole family sat around the table at dinner time with mum having been home all day keeping the house in order.

For people who don't have a dining room and people to cook for, why lovingly prepare a meal from fresh produce when junk food can be eaten instead? Price isn't everything. Neither is cooking skills or familiarity with what vegetables look like. Ready meals rule in an atomised society.

<comment><USER16> In the 1960s mom might have started dinner 3 hours before it hit the plate, before anyone else got home. Even recipes listed as 'quick' take at least 20-30 mins to prep, call it another 30 mins to eat, and then 15 mins to clean. In a world where wages are stagnant while housing costs rocket, and both parents need to work, free time is at an all time low.

Not a lot of people have that kind of time to prepare a healthy meal, especially when they get home exhausted from work or have to get ready to work second or third shift, and might be trapped in a car two hours a day. Who has time to shuck corn, mash potatoes, and peel rutabagas? It becomes far more attractive to pop in the take and bake lasagna and throw the tin out afterward and actually have some time to spend with your kids before you put them to bed.

</comment></comment><comment> grayed-down A little "gee-whiz" tidbit along with some new-age virtue shaming; a good start to the day indeed.

Sometimes a drug/convenience store is just a drug/convenience store.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why would we combine Whole Foods and Trader Joe's? Whew, at least it's not bigger than Target and Walgreens combined though! It is however about 40% the size of Kroger... so there is that.

<comment><USER18> Yeah I'm honestly not sure why people would be surprised at this comparison - Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are specialty stores. Nobody goes into them just to buy a head of lettuce.

Trader Joe's has their own in-store brands for tons of products, which has spawned various guides on what should/shouldn't be bough there ([https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/save-money/what-to-buy-at- tr...](https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/save-money/what-to-buy-at-trader-joes/) for example). CVS, on the other hand, is a far more general store. They both sell food, but they're not in the same market segment - so the comparison is strange.

<comment><USER19> I don't live in the US, but I've been to Whole Foods when visiting and certainly felt like a perfectly normal grocery store, not too different from most other grocery stores I've been to. What makes it a specialty store and why wouldn't you go there to buy a head of lettuce?

<comment><USER18> "Whole Foods" has earned its nickname of "Whole Paycheck" ([https://www.fastcompany.com/90305918/whole-foods-is- becoming...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90305918/whole-foods-is-becoming- whole-paycheck-once-again)) although they've tried various ways of combating this, some mentioned in that article

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've noticed a similar thing happening with prepared food. If there are Wawa stores in an area, there usually aren't as many sandwich or salad places nearby as you'd expect. Where I work, your options are basically Wawa or bottom-tier fast-food chains (McDonald's, Taco Bell, etc.). I really wish there were more health-oriented quick-service options (even a Chipotle would be nice), but I don't think they can compete against a place like Wawa since it's good enough for the vast majority of people.

For people scratching their heads wondering what the heck Wawa is, I have no idea what the West Coast equivalent would be. Sheetz is another similar chain on the East Coast, if that rings any bells...

<comment><USER21> I live in New England and have never heard of Wawa or Sheetz.

<comment><USER22> Wawa is a chain of large convenience stores, mostly in the Mid-Atlantic region. They typically have a sandwich counter inside, which I think is most comparable to having an in-store Subway.

Ask someone from Pennsylvania or New Jersey what they think of Wawa. In my experience, their eyes generally light up and they start raving in a way that most people don't talk about a gas station convenience store.

<comment> frosted-flakes It's because they have _real food_ , whereas most gas station convenience stores only sell junk.

24 hours a day, you can get hot soup, quesadillas, sandwiches, salads, burritos, etc. in a matter of minutes for a reasonable price. There's really nothing else like it.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like a 24-hour diner.

<comment> frosted-flakes Except Wawa is explicitly take-away (there are no seats), it's part of a gas station, and they're everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Has anyone attempted a mobile grocery store that drives to food deserts on a fixed schedule? It could say be a container with a single aisle, stocked with the basics and a checkout at one end.

<comment><USER24> I don't think so, because "Food deserts" are what happens when the demand for ideologically congenial explanations for socially inconvenient facts greatly exceeds the supply. There is an assumed causal directionality which turns out to not be supported.

Most places are food deserts not because market forces don't work there, but because they do: People in those areas do not want to buy fresh vegetables and raw ingredients for cooking. They prefer to buy packaged/processed foods, regardless of cost or health comparisons they are making, or not making. This makes traditional grocery stores less worth it, so they leave if they can't make do.

There's a lot of literature on food deserts (as typically stated) being more or less a meme since 2015, here's one example with a couple studies to back it:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/upshot/giving-the-poor- ea...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/upshot/giving-the-poor-easy-access- to-healthy-food-doesnt-mean-theyll-buy-it.html)

> Another study, published this week as a working paper by the National Bureau > of Economic Research, looked across the country and found that no more than > a tenth of the variation in the food people bought could be explained by the > availability of a nearby grocery store. The education level of the shoppers, > for example, was far more predictive.

And so on. So no I don't think your idea would work particularly well past the novelty stage :(

<comment><USER23> This is disheartening. I can see how once people switch to junk food, for lack of availability or other reason, it becomes hard to go back. Junk foods are designed to be addictive (salty, fatty, convenient,...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In one neighborhood I lived in in NYC, the only local supermarket closed down to make way for a Walgreens. They tried to reassure the community that they would stock staples like (terrible) bread and milk, but obviously no fresh food like vegetables.

This neighborhood was not a poor one. Million dollar condos (forget houses), all around.

<comment><USER26> The core problem is zoning. NYC makes it either impossible or prohibitively expensive to find an acceptable site for a large-format grocery store. In Manhattan, all recently built grocery stores have had to be in basements to work around restrictive zoning: [https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/105451854997111193...](https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/1054518549971111936)

However, there are only so many buildings with acceptable basement layouts, and only so many neighborhood that are profitably enough to merit the additional capital and operational cost of a supermarket in a basement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I almost always go to CVS when I need to get a few small items in a hurry (I usually use Amazon Fresh for groceries), so I'm not surprised about this at all. Going to CSV is much easier than fighting the crowd at Walmart since there's only a handful of people there at any given time.

<comment><USER7> Ditto. My wife and I are stereotypically the perfect WF/TJs customers: ecologically-minded hippie-ish DINKs in an upper-middle-class suburb. We live a 3 minute drive from both, and she works a short walk from a Roche Bros (which serves a similar demographic).

Yet, despite the poorer selection and higher prices, the majority of groceries that enter our house come from CVS. Why? My wife visits one regularly to pick up prescriptions, and they have _just enough_ of what we buy, at _sufficiently justifiable_ prices, that she can get enough of what we need without an extra trip to a different store.

The most _convenient store_ is the one you're already at.

<comment><USER28> I didn't even realize I needed to justify periodically buying food there until I read this thread. As if their success somehow means there's something nefarious going on or they're taking advantage of people. There's a CVS _everywhere_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In Massachusetts, convenience stores and gas stations seem to be the only things open at night. I wonder if grocery stores do better in places like upstate NY where the grocery stores are also open 24hr.

</comment><comment><USER30> Have the larger American grocery stores opened small convenience stores?

This has happened in several European countries. For example, in the UK Tesco has opened many "Tesco Express" shops in towns and cities. They are fairly small, but they can take advantage of Tesco's huge distribution system to stock a wide range of products, including fresh food. Prices are the same as the large shops, but the 20% of products they stock are the dearer ones.

<comment><USER31> Tesco Express prices are higher than in the larger stores.

<comment><USER30> So I see, I supect my experience compared a big Tesco in a nice area with an Express in a grotty area.

Apparently the difference is 1-5p on most items, so less of a problem than the American situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Convenience. Grocers should take note.

In Canada the corollary is 'Shoppers Drug Mart' and ever since they merged with the national grocer chain, I can get >50% of my groceries i.e. milk, bread, cheese, meat (I mean none of it is super high quality but often good enough) because it's across the street! And there is no lineup.

<comment><USER33> Always buy my Elsinore there

<comment><USER32> Take off eh. Rosie la Rose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yeah, and at higher prices. CVS is high on the list of Fortune 100 companies for good reason.

<comment><USER35> Government lobbying in the medical field, not food sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does it have to be worse quality? If anything, a more uniform distribution of stores should allow development of pretty tight local supply chains, that could provide fresh(er) food.

</comment><comment><USER37> Weird that metro supermarkets are so rare in the US. All over the EU in major cities people do most of their shopping in small, well-stocked (for their size) supermarkets.</comment>


Who gives a f**k if PHP won anything- go build something useful already - <AUTHOR>

Seriously, languages are just a tool for doing things. Cool things. <comment><USER2> As unhelpful as the threads you're obviously referencing were, it reads like you're dismissing this kind of discussion in general, i.e. what makes a language successful.

In a forum/news/discussion site founded by the man who designs arc, populated by many others who design languages I don't think it's an worthless topic.

So maybe I don't give a fuck _if_ PHP won anything, but I do give a fuck _why_ it did.

ps. sorry about the swears, ironically I couldn't get the eliding asterisks to work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, what a useless post.

AAARGH! I am continuing the cycle of dismissal!</comment>


New BikerCoin cryptocurrency promises greater anonymity - <AUTHOR> http://cryptocentral.info/topic/64/new-coin-bikercoin-bic <comment><USER2> Interesting use of ring signing - does anyone have any further reading on this?</comment>


Skynet, a decentralized CDN and file sharing platform - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sia.tech/skynet-bdf0209d6d34 <comment><USER2> Truly remarkable result from the Sia core team after 5+ years of work!

It will be really interesting to see how the whole JAMStack "static is the new dynamic" movement (NextJS, Gatsby), and the immutable deploy URL pattern can benefit from being built on top of something like this![1]

[1] [https://rauchg.com/2020/2019-in-review](https://rauchg.com/2020/2019-in- review)

</comment><comment><USER3> This could really be game-changing. Even just static java-script apps hosted on Skynet that can then upload data to Skynet is an interesting use. What would really be cool is if a browser implements the Skynet-Portal step so that the `sia://` call could just be baked into HTML pages instead of being proxied.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazing work from the Sia team, this is a serious game changer to the blockchain/crypto space. Once the word spreads this will be huge. Congrats Sia.

</comment><comment><USER5> Skynet is one of the biggest innovations of the last 20 years! Congratulations to the sia hard-working team. Sia blockchain is the future.</comment>


IHMC Teaches Atlas to Walk Like a Human - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/ihmc-teaches-atlas-to-walk-like-a-human <comment><USER2> human-like gaits mainly require the correct structural elements (rather than machine learning), like locking knees (as noted in the article) and slightly elastic legs and joints (for energy storage/release as well shock absorbtion).

most robots are energetically inefficient and require extraneous computational power because they don't take advantage of passive dynamics ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_dynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_dynamics)). it's disappointing to realize that we still haven't caught up to fundamental biological systems yet, even though the research is 2+ decades old.

<comment><USER3> Roboticists have built passive walking robots like the one from Cornell, it walked 5.6 miles without power. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDljbN7eJ5Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDljbN7eJ5Y) Japanese roboticists have built passive walking robot with locking knees: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhu2xNIpgDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhu2xNIpgDE)

<comment><USER4> Exactly. The thing that hasn't been figured out yet is how to combine the energy efficiency and aesthetics of passive walking with the versatility needed to have the robot do useful work, especially in a principled way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I see an Atlas video it surprises me how much I anthropomorphise it. I should be thinking about it like a wheel or jet engine or something, as it's just a means of locomotion, but I can't help by thinking about it like an almost-sentient AI, even though it has nothing like intelligence.

If you showed me a chat bot and a walking robot, I would say that the walking robot is orders of magnitudes closer to being human, even though it's just a glorified Segway.

Very funny how that works.

<comment><USER6> This is similar to what I experienced. There seems to be a heuristic in the brain that sees a human-like object and immediately starts trying to superimpose other human-like qualities on it. It's almost like an optical illusion where the brain totally misinterprets a visual cue, but in this case it's perhaps more like a social/empathetic/mirroring illusion.

<comment><USER7> I'd argue closely related to the Uncanny Valley: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Even Boston Dynamics' own Atlas uses this crouching sort of squat-walk to get around, because those perpetually bent legs are how it keeps from falling over."

If I ever lock my joints I feel like I'm going to fall over too. I wonder if a more human walk might just be less efficient for bipedal movement and balance.

Also, I'm betting that by March we will see Atlas do a Fortnite dance.

<comment><USER9> For walking, I imagine you do lock your knee as you stride off of your toe.

That's a dynamic situation though, locking joints in a static situation pretty much requires thinking about balance, so you'd notice perturbations more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every time the grad student punches the robot with a stick I wonder when it is going to punch back :-) It says something about the improvement in anthropomorphism I think.

Real gaits though really need a foot with four degrees of freedom rather than the more common three. Typically the 'foot' plate has a roll, pitch, and yaw component. If you add an additional bend access where humans and animals have the 'ball' of their foot so that you have a flat surface on the ground while "up on your toes" to can add some additional gait styles.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another reminder of how incredibly powerful our brains are. Walking and motor skills seem like such basic things because we start mastering them as toddlers. Meanwhile, teams of experts across the world are still trying to figure out how to get a robot to do it. For example, they're talking about finding out the location of where to toe-off based on some instantaneous capture point. None of that ever consciously came to my mind, but these crazy calculations are constantly running in the background.

<comment><USER11> This is known as Moravec's Paradox[0]. Fine motor skills and basic visual cognition require far more computational effort than high-level reasoning.

[0][https://medium.com/@froger_mcs/moravecs- paradox-c79bf638103f](https://medium.com/@froger_mcs/moravecs- paradox-c79bf638103f)

<comment><USER12> I think it is a bit generous to call an AI's behavior in those areas "high- level reasoning" :)

It is certainly quite impressive. But it seems to me that the paradox is neatly solved by comparing the how well-constrained the activity is.

Movement and (especially) visual processing are _incredibly_ general problems. Where as board games are very narrow, well-constrained problems.

It always interesting when people expect AI to robustly and effectively process visual content without first actually understanding the world (which obviously no AI is even close to doing).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We're trying now to design approaches that are capable of both precise footstep placement, such as when walking over a rock field with few, sparse footholds, and are robust to when this precision fails, such as really compliant terrain with lots of subtle height variations, using a single algorithm."

Somehow I have the feeling that robots capable of striding confidently over mountains of human skulls could be coming sooner than some think...

<comment><USER9> You don't think they'll have any uses for bone meal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> At least in the future we won't have to suffer the indignity of being gunned down by military robots doing a silly walk.

<comment><USER14> However, if the government would like to ramp up the level of military robot indignity, I guess we'll need some kind of ministry to track and catalog silly walks.</comment></comment>


Pro-'Brexit' City of Sunderland Glad to Poke Establishment in the Eye - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/world/europe/european-union-brexit-sunderland-britain-cameron.html <comment><AUTHOR> The revenge of those left behind by the global economy:

        "I don't have any money in the stock market," Mr.
        Walker, 59, said as he drank a pint of beer in a pub.
        "So what's it to me?"</comment>


What are the prereqs to be able to read martin lof? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for pre books to be able to read martin lof. I'm familiar with denotational/operational semantics, some functional programming, galois theory, algebraic geometry, point set topology, first order logic systems like gentzen, hilbert.<p>thnx in advance. <comment><USER2> I think you may want to take a look at TTFP book by Simon Thompson: [https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/TTFP/](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/TTFP/)</comment>


Ask HK: Is there a good SDK for developer keys? - <AUTHOR>

I want to add a developer API to a project.  You know, where someone provides their userid and/or email address and gets a developer key and a secret.  My choice are to roll my own, steal one from an existing project, or find an add-in/module.  Any of Perl/Python/PHP will do.  Unfortunately, I can't think of any search terms that don't return a crap-load of other people's developer key request pages. <comment><USER2> <http://apigee.com/about/products/enterprise> might be worth a look

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there something wrong with type 4 GUIDs?</comment>


Definitive Guide to Agile Scrum Sprint - <AUTHOR> https://zepel.io/agile/scrum/sprint/ <comment><USER2> > Today, any team that's serious about its business follows scrum and runs > sprints within their team

You can't be serious</comment>


Sharing Is (Still) Hard - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kirigin.com/sharing-is-still-hard <comment><USER2> I understand your specific pain ;) I suppose a quick "hack" would be to allow creating "managed" accounts where you can easily have management access over a sub-section of family/friend accounts without knowing their password, etc. That doesn't solve the underlying problem, though.

Maybe there is room for a single-click-install desktop software app that simply takes the name/email of the destination contact for the arbitrary content and then crawls provider APIs to quickly determine how best to get the content to that person and orchestrates it using the APIs so that the end-user doesn't need to learn configuration screens and confusing (to them) UX.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's wrong with uploading 200 photos to Flickr? Sharing 1.8GB of photos more than once on Dropbox (who deletes things like this?) means you need a paid Dropbox account. So even if this was in the Past when Flickr didn't have an "unlimited" free account, you'd still need to pay for something.

The only way I've found Flickr isn't good at sharing a large number of photos if you want/expect some people to have high res versions of all or a large percentage of those photos on their computer so they could print them offline or something.

Still an unsolved problem there, but if all you were going to do was "host them on a hostname", I'm not how Flickr _doesn 't_ address the need very well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Flickr recently removed limits, making it the best option. I doubt he has the desktop uploader though, so the upload experience is much worse than Dropbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I bet he wouldn't have had any problems emailing that folder to you. I know when I need to send a few documents or photos, I without even thinking try to do it via email, only to be met with messages of exceeding size limits.

Is there a service that ties both the action of emailing with the process of syncing via dropbox? If not, I could see it being incredibly useful for people like your dad, and mine. An app whereby you go through all the same motions of creating a new email, attaching a few documents/folders, and in the background those attachments are being synced to some dropbox folder.

Of course, email services could expand their size limits, but I'm sure there's a reason why they're not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's too big to email.

Dropbox integrates with a few mail clients actually.

<comment><USER5> Email is actually a great and natural way to share things.

It's often easier to mail documents and comments to a content management/ticket system than actually go there, log in, press "create new" etc.

If the email protocols could be extended for efficient file transfer and cloud hosting somehow, a lot of people's lifes would suddenly get a lot easier.

<comment> __--__ What about a desktop app that activated whenever you drag a photo into an email? Instead of attaching itself to the email, it uploads the photo to imgur and externally links to the image in the email instead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree that Dropbox is not very good at sharing photos. The solution really has to start much earlier in the tool chain, ideally with the camera itself, or the tool that downloads them. Smart phones are great with this, since you see share options right after snapping a photo. iPhoto also has fairly decent sharing options (resizes images, creates web albums, etc). But once you're outside of the realm of camera and photo apps and working with general purpose tools like Dropbox, it gets a lot more difficult.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an eye-fi that directly uploads to Flickr with settings set to private. It's right in the SD card! [http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Fi-Class-Wireless- Memory-EYE-FI-8P...](http://www.amazon.com/Eye-Fi-Class-Wireless-Memory-EYE- FI-8PC/dp/B002UT42UI)

This is the equivalent of the mobile app experience with Dropbox. Curating and sending photos around is still hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've worked with users that are anywhere from 15 to 85. You've hit on a lot of key issues. Sometimes they ask questions like "What's a browser?" and then you have to remind yourself that the average middle America user is so far from the demands of a silicon valley user.

Disclaimer: We make a solution in this space. [http://eversnapapp.com](http://eversnapapp.com)

I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. Well written piece.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is wrong with FTP? Or scp if you prefer?

scp -r pictures email@example.com:~/pictures

Oh right: this would go directly from your dad's computer to hour own computer, encrypted, without passing by the NSA case and without your dad's pictures scanned for terrorism.

</comment><comment><USER9> I came to this conclusion as well when my Dad was looking for a way to share travel photos.

Another issue: I imagine it would take a lot of time for the Dropbox client to sync 1.6GB of data, even for people with fast Internet connections.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> true fact: I didn't share the images in this blog post correctly the first time. I used the Dropbox links from the shared folder view, not the shared link view. It's obvious what I put it that way, right?</comment>


Depressed by Politics? Just Let Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/opinion/depressed-by-politics-just-let-go.html <comment><USER2> there's a good quote for that sentiment:

'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'

<comment><AUTHOR> If you read the article, you'll see this is not the point. To quote from it:

"Instead, get involved in a tangible way — volunteering, donating money or even running for office. This transforms you from victim of political circumstance to problem solver."</comment></comment>


Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features - <AUTHOR> http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/05/facebook-requires-social-fixer-browser-extension-to-remove-key-features?r

<comment><USER2> This isn't a Facebook app. This isn't using Facebook API. It's effectively as if he had written a custom browser that displays the Facebook page in a way he likes: a script like that is basically a functional rather than visual stylesheet. Facebook only gets to push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers.

If I understood that correctly then Facebook has _absolutely no say_ about that piece of software. Because if they had, they could also tell us not to distribute a browser that displays Facebook "badly". Or an operating system that does that. Or blueprints for hardware that does that. They could forbid using such a software in the account terms for each individual user but that would be highly unenforceable (as in as soon as the data gets to my computer, I can and will mangle the bits whichever way I happen to like).

What Facebook can do is to terminate the author's Facebook account: I assume he might have broken some legal terms regarding his own account. However, writing and distributing a piece of software is absolutely out of their limits. It's sad and disappointing to see Facebook use the legal card, a multibillion company threatening a one-man party with costly lawsuits.

<comment><USER3> > Facebook only gets to push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers.

This is completely false.

Facebook is a business. That means they have the legal right to do a lot more than transmit data.

This is such a basic, obvious, fact that I find it difficult that so many people seem to not understand it.

Facebook is not a data transmission service. They're a business. They have a product that they offer. If you want to use that product, they ask that you agree to a set of rules. This is very, very, normal. It is the foundation of society: The ability to make agreements.

Whether or not this software violates the agreement Facebook asks of its users is another question.

But, they absolutely DO have the right to do more than "push some HTML, CSS, and JS to its customers."

<comment><USER4> The agreement applies to the users, not to the person coding the browser. The fact that he happens to have a personal page is unrelated, and facebook would probably threaten legal action even if he didn't have one.

On top of that, there is a reason contracts of adhesion are treated specially. An agreement between a billion dollar corporation and someone that wants to post cat photos isn't a true meeting of the minds. It can only make demands that are sufficiently ordinary* Requiring a website to be browsed in a specific way is rather out of the ordinary.

* As defined by libraryfulls of precedent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Watch out, when I ran into a similar situation with my extension, unedditreddit. Reddit, was able to convince google to simply remove the the extension from the webstore.

Chrome makes it really difficult to install a non app store extension, so your normal user will not do it.

On the other hand, google and facebook have a more competitive relationship so maybe there is less to worry about.

<comment><USER6> The admins asked you to remove unedditreddit years ago[1]. And for good reason. It was disrespectful to bring the tool back online after saying you'd disable it, especially when you started charging for it.

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/etd52/lets_have_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/etd52/lets_have_a_discussion_about_deleted_comments/c1as392)

<comment><USER5> 1\. It wasn't disrespectful. The previous version which you refer to directly interacted with reddit servers. I said I would no longer crawl reddit and I do not.

2\. There is nothing wrong with charging for something you have built, but you can check out a free version of similar tool here [http://uneddit.com/faq.php](http://uneddit.com/faq.php) it also does a good job of raising some points from my line of thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _Freedom is more important than control._

... and Facebook is about freedom... how??

I'm not on Facebook, but just this weekend I needed a Facebook account, so I tried to create a (fake) one.

I entered a perfectly real (French) name (not my own but a real one) and was told it was incorrect. I was directed to this "help" page:

[https://www.facebook.com/help/212848065405122](https://www.facebook.com/help/212848065405122)

that dares say "Make sure your name meets our name standards".

"Make sure _your_ name meets _our_ name standards"?? What does that even mean? Is Facebook in charge of naming people? What do they know about names?

(And of course I changed the fake name to another one (more fake by French standards) and they accepted it).

How over 1.2 billion people accept that kind of control/arrogance/stupidity is beyond me; but if you expect Facebook to ever care about "freedom" you're delusional, at best.

</comment><comment><USER8> > What About AdBlock? Why Not Go After Them?

Because it's too popular and too many of their users have it.

> I asked about both of these cases, as examples, and I was told by the person > at Facebook that she was not aware of these apps or Pages, but would check > into them.

Yeah, right. I'm sure they've got top men working on it right now. _Top men_.

</comment><comment><USER9> Social Fixer is great - I've been using it for a while and it makes my infrequent forays onto Facebook less miserable. From what I can tell, Facebook has removed the Social Fixer page on Facebook and are requiring the author to make significant changes in order to return it. The author is going to make those changes.

Why not just lose the page on Facebook and keep developing Social Fixer? If they threaten legal action, throw the code on Github and stop development on it under your own name. Or put it in an LLC or equivalent and just liquidate if they sue. Why does capitulation seem to be the most appealing option?

<comment><USER10> I have a family and limited time. I could lay out an exact plan of how to do a lot of things, including get around all of this. But I just don't have enough time to implement it.

My microwave has been broken for 4 weeks and I haven't had time to even replace it. There are only 24 hours in a day.

<comment><USER11> Would you like me to buy you a new microwave? I will if you promise to keep Social Fixer the way it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the article:

 _every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users_

Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they _have_ to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt.

Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, not users. So benefiting users only helps them if it increases their ad revenue. That might happen indirectly if an improvement to the FB user interface gets them more users or keeps existing users on the site longer so they see more ads. But FB already has a billion users, and many of them already seem to spend most of their available free time on FB, so the relative benefit to FB from improving the UI is going to be pretty small.

Finally, I think it's worth mentioning a historical parallel that seems relevant to me. I believe pg mentioned in one of his essays that many companies who made third-party Windows software ended up basically doing market research for Microsoft: MS just took all the popular features from third-party apps and added them to their own apps. Developers of FB apps like SocialFixer seem to me to be in a similar position. Caveat programmer. :-)

[Edit: I see that the "End of the Power User" article that was linked to hits some of these same points.]

<comment><USER13> > they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders

I wish the meme that this is the only thing a public company can do would die. It's not true in any way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I too wish the meme would die, but not because it's not true, rather because it's overused a lot as a reply.

As I understand it these companies do in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to make every move be one that benefits their shareholders. Can you please voice your thoughts on how that is not true?

<comment><USER14> Matthew Yglesias described Amazon as "a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers." [1]

There are many things Amazon could do to transfer cash from their customers to their shareholders. Bezos justifies not doing these things because he claims there is more value in long term customer loyalty and trust. Because it's a good faith business decision, I don't see Bezos being ousted or sued by shareholders.

Likewise, it would be easy for Facebook to say "we think there's long term value in delivering the best possible experience to users, and if for some users that means using an extension that's fine with us" \- it's a good faith business decision, why would they get ousted or sued where Bezos hasn't?

[1] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_profits_fall_45_percent.html)

<comment><USER12> _it would be easy for Facebook to say "we think there's long term value in delivering the best possible experience to users, and if for some users that means using an extension that's fine with us"_

It would be easy for them to say it, but first they would have to believe it, and second they would have to believe they could convince investors of it.

 _it 's a good faith business decision, why would they get ousted or sued where Bezos hasn't?_

It's not a question of being sued, it's a question of having the stock price go down. Investors don't have to sue to do that; they just have to sell.

<comment><USER15> > _It would be easy for them to say it, but first they would have to believe > it, and second they would have to believe they could convince investors of > it_

You're moving goalposts. That's a completely different statement. Whatever it is they truly believe is totally different than "they _have_ to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt".

> _It 's not a question of being sued, it's a question of having the stock > price go down. Investors don't have to sue to do that; they just have to > sell._

Again, this has nothing to do with fiduciary duty, which was the topic that the original comment was responding to. The fact remains that for-profit companies do not have some kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over them, waiting for them to make a decision that costs stockholders value.

<comment><USER12> _Whatever it is they truly believe is totally different than "they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt"._

How is this relevant to what I said in the particular statement you were responding to here? I wasn't saying anything in that statement about what FB _does_ believe; all I was saying is that, judging by their behavior, they _don 't_ believe that "there's long term value in delivering the best possible experience to users, and if for some users that means using an extension that's fine with us".

As for what I think they do believe, see below.

 _this has nothing to do with fiduciary duty_

Which was exactly my point: saying that FB won't get sued if it lets third- party developers change its UI is not at all the same as saying that FB thinks its stockholders will benefit if it lets third-party developers change its UI.

 _for-profit companies do not have some kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over them, waiting for them to make a decision that costs stockholders value._

I wasn't saying they do; nothing in what I said requires that a single decision is all it takes. I didn't specify any time frame in which FB has to benefit stockholders or go bankrupt. If you read other posts of mine in this sub-thread, you'll see that the strategy I think FB is following is not one aimed at maximizing short-term return on capital, but that doesn't change the fact that they have to benefit stockholders on some time horizon that is relevant for the stockholders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This story should cause outrage among the users and developers (and any _potential_ users and developers) of any software that is like Social Fixer, that is, any software that stores, manipulates, and presents proprietary data in ways that the "owner" (e.g. Facebook) of said data did not intend, for the use of a first party.

The thing that makes the FB legal threats against Social Fixer different, and more troubling than when 3rd party services are shut down, is that Fixer is a "first party" piece of software. It's not helping users syndicate information, or reselling it, or letting anyone else even look at it or use it. I'm just organizing the data that I do have into a format that is more useful to me.

If you accept that there are limits on what we do with our data, where does it stop? Am I allowed to download pictures of my friends and view them in programs that do not display ads? Am I allowed to store and search my own messages, or my friends' messages, in a program that does not notify Facebook or display their ads? If I have an Excel Spreadsheet with friends addresses and phone numbers gleaned from Facebook profiles, have I broken the law?

I can understand Facebook's concern. If it suddenly became common to run programs like this over Facebook's site, then the "user experience" will suddenly get completely out of FB's control. People might not become immune to tracking, but neither would they no longer be manipulated by feed algorithms.

FB has about as much right to control what I do with the messages my friends send to me on Facebook as Google has to control what I do with my email. It doesn't matter if the "messaging protocol" is screen-scraped from the DOM.

The key over-reaching provision is this gem: "You will not do anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of Facebook, such as a denial of service attack or interference with page rendering or other Facebook functionality."[1]

Does changing my browser window size "interfere with page rendering"? What about changing font? Or user styles? Or Ad Blocker? What if I switch browsers? What if that browser renders Facebook poorly or not at all, am I in violation? If I edit the DOM in Firebug or Inspector should I get sued?

Going after people who make tools that help me organize, manage, and control my consumption of the Internet firehose is absolutely wrong. If the Justice system supports Facebook's claim (which very well could happen) then the only alternative is to stop using Facebook, and any other 3rd party that claims not only ownership of the data you disseminate on it, but claims the right to limit your ability to organize and read your own inbox.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms](https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms) Section 3.11

<comment><USER17> Doesn't Facebook have some right to choose what type of content they want to host? The only thing that's happened is Facebook has decided they don't want to host his page.

[Er, oops. Ignore this part. Reading fail] I mean, seriously. FBI? What do they have to do with this?

<comment><USER18> > I mean, seriously. FBI? What do they have to do with this?

I think you might've misread "FB"...

<comment><USER17> Yeah. Enough people start thinking the FBI is out to get them, and then I start thinking everybody thinks the FBI is out to get them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a lawyer, but the ToS says _you_ may not interfere with the rendering of the page, but it doesn't say that you may not provide software that interferes with the rendering of the page. Anyone with a pair of scissors, a microwave oven, or black piece of paper could interfere with the rendering of Facebook for a particular user, but I doubt the ToS applies to them. Not to mention browser bugs, or OS bugs, or video driver bugs.

I think this is too broad to be meaningful. I sort of get what they're getting at ("don't post broken Javascript that fucks up the page for everyone"), but it's not what they wrote. What they wrote is laughable.

All I can say is: I hope you prevail in your battle. Content creators have absolutely no right to tell users how to render the HTML they deliver; the HTML is advisory, not mandatory. If you want to control rendering, buy a billboard.

<comment><USER3> Actually, content creators get to ask you to agree to a "Terms of Service" that gives you access to that content. If you don't like the terms of service, you could say they are "laughable," but that doesn't mean they don't exist, or have a specific meaning.

It seems very clear to me that a page that promotes the removal of Facebook ads, via its software, fits squarely in violation of the agreement.

Facebook seems very reasonable in this -- they're giving him a second chance, after blatantly violating the terms of service. And yes, it is blatant. Anyone who thinks that removing Facebook's ads are compliant with the Terms of Service is living in the world they wish exists, and not the one that actually does.

<comment><USER10> Removal of ads isn't even something I "advertise" as a feature. It's a side- effect of being able to remove anything you want from the UI.

And if they have a problem with that, surely they would have sued AdBlock Plus by now. Right?

<comment><USER11> As far as I can tell, they haven't sued you either. In fact, I don't think you've even received a letter from their lawyers. All that's happened is that someone at FB had _threatened_ you.

Personally, I think they're full of it. I'd at least wait until you get an actual letter from their lawyers before making any decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think it is a bad decision from Facebook to go after Social Fixer. From the Chrome extensions page they have ~200K installs. This is peanuts compared to Facebook's user base(compared to Google where number of Adblock installs are ~40 million combining Firefox and Chrome, it hurts Google more they can't say much about it because of fearing of criticism from their core supporters). But future will be bright for them because people are accessing Facebook more from mobile devices where default mobile browsers are very restrictive and the trend will not change for foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER21> About 6yrs ago my friend made a script, which was essentially a pyramid scheme for adding friends. Basically it helps you find other people who want to add you, to inflate each other's egos. It blew up & I was called in to fix the performance, part of that entailed moving it to my server - about a week later Facebook sent me a cease & desist & demanded the domain name be transferred to them. Pretty lame move on their part, because we were having fun hacking the code to handle the load, etc..

<comment><USER22> You realize any non-law entity can't forcibly compel you to do things, right? They can talk a big game, but it's up to them to file legal proceedings if they really want to shut you down.

<comment><USER23> How is "we can force you into bankruptcy by suing you" all that less forcible than "the government will fine you"?

<comment><USER17> Is Facebook suing him?

<comment><USER23> It sounds like he caved at the C&D stage.

Refusing to do so risks bankruptcy, even if you're in the right, if the deep- pocketed company decides to sue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The real fix is not to use Facebook in the first place.

<comment><USER25> Yup! That is what I finally fell back to. At first I was worrying about all the stuff that I will miss but realized that as long as I was worrying I will never stop using Facebook.

Btw, do you still use Facebook?

<comment><USER24> I haven't had an account in years. I stopped when they started playing games with their privacy settings.

<comment><USER26> Good man. They have a long history of not giving a damn about privacy: [http://pleasedeletefacebook.com](http://pleasedeletefacebook.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Even if they left my personal account alone, they could still mark socialfixer.com as being a risky and/or spammy site, like they have done for [http://FBPurity.com."](http://FBPurity.com.")

That is seriously disappointing to see. I understand that, like Google and others, they have a right to filter on behalf of their users (and in some cases may be legally obliged to do so), but they're clearly in a position of power and trust in doing so. If they want to tell a user they can't post a site, and that site is neither illegal, risky or spammy, but simply something they dislike, they shouldn't suggest it is. Abuse of user's trust sucks, especially when the reason is this pathetic.

<comment><USER28> It'll take time but I think problems like these (unfair flagging a site as spammy/risky) will eventually land a company in hot water with anti-trust issues. Until that happens, this will kind of abide of trust be more widespread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> the solution to this sort of thing is to always wrap yourself in a limited company...

company formation in the UK costs around £20 and then you're personally immune to this sort of legal bullying

<comment><USER30> How so?

<comment><USER29> so say a new shiny product (an extension) is produced by a newly founded company (smallco).

bullyco decides they don't like this and sues smallco.

what's the most the owners (shareholders) of the smallco can lose? their share capital (likely £1).

<comment><USER31> And then they sue the directors. Limited liability is sadly inadequate in today's world. On the other hand it's also good to be able to go after the people behind companies that are truly fraudulent.

<comment><USER29> there's nothing fraudulent or criminal about what this extension is doing, at most it's breach of contract and possibly tortious interference, neither which would allow the 'injured' party to go after the directors

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here is a suggestion - above certain size - lets say 10% on NA adult population classify every social network and such as a common carrier and regulate them.

Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why not make the source available and put it in public domain?</comment>


Self publishing AND traditional publishing? You don't have to choose. - <AUTHOR> http://www.jstorimer.com/blogs/workingwithcode/8031437-self-publishing-and-traditional-publishing

<comment><USER2> lulu.com offers print on demand for ebooks and lists your book in amazon, B&N, etc.

Of course publishers add value with marketing and editing. But a big publisher is not required to sell books in print.</comment>


Cronn.io – Monitor Your Crons and Webservices with Ease - <AUTHOR> We are lunching Cronn.io in private beta. Let us know here if your interested in trying this out. Since this is a beta, not everything will be perfect yet. But with your help, we can make Cronn.io as beautiful and as easy to use as possible.<p>Your feedback and requests are welcomed and encouraged at email@example.com <comment><AUTHOR> Visit [https://www.cronn.io](https://www.cronn.io) for more.</comment>


NASA brings back worm logo - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2020/nasa-goes-back-future-revives-formerly-forbidden-worm-logo/ <comment><USER2> Oh, welcome back to the worm, and f __* off to Dan Goldin who wasted taxpayer money in his obsession to get rid of it, and would get mad at people when he saw it:

[https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/10/magazine/on-sunday- januar...](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/10/magazine/on-sunday- january-10-1999-lost-in-space-meatballs-devour-worms.html)

[http://nasawatch.com/archives/1999/12/](http://nasawatch.com/archives/1999/12/)</comment>


Ask HN: Best sales articles and tips for people w/o sales experience - <AUTHOR>

Please post best sales articles for people w/o experience. Thanks <comment><AUTHOR> For other who might find this: Mark Suster's blog's section on sales is pretty awesome!

<http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/on-selling/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Fog Creek posted a good primer here: [http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-very-most- basic-things-your-com...](http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-very-most-basic-things- your-company-needs-to-know-about-sales-part-1-of-4/)

And one other useful source of advice is the is the blog of Geoffrey James at: <http://www.inc.com/author/geoffrey-james>

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Hello! I´ve had the same problem and I´ve tried to collect some of these tips on how to sell and market on my website: <http://www.ideaoverload.com/Find- ideas/#Selling>

Ive read a lot of books on selling and marketing and Ive tried to summarize these into concrete solutions!

</comment><comment><USER4> Not an article. But a book recommendation.

How I raised myself from failure to success in selling. By Frank Bettger.

[http://www.amazon.com/Raised-Myself-Failure-Success- Selling/...](http://www.amazon.com/Raised-Myself-Failure-Success- Selling/dp/067179437X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1)</comment>


How To Avoid Equidistant HSV Colors - <AUTHOR> http://vis4.net/blog/posts/avoid-equidistant-hsv-colors/

<comment><USER2> There is an alternative color space called YIQ that deals with perceived luminescence. I wrote a small function that can tell you given an arbitrary background color, whether white or black text would be most readable. You can checkt it out here: <http://blog.nitriq.com/BlackVsWhiteText.aspx>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIQ></comment>