Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://math.andrej.com/2013/06/20/the-hott-book/ <comment><USER2> The most interesting suggestion, to me:

"However, there is something else we can do. It is more radical, but also more useful. Rather than letting people only evaluate papers, why not give them a chance to participate and improve them as well? Put all your papers on github and let others discuss them, open issues, fork them, improve them, and send you corrections. Does it sound crazy? Of course it does, open source also sounded crazy when Richard Stallman announced his manifesto.

Let us be honest, who is going to steal your LaTeX source code? There are much more valuable things to be stolen. If you are tenured professor you can afford to lead the way. Have your grad student teach you git and put your stuff somewhere publicly. Do not be afraid, they tenured you to do such things."

This is a fascinating idea. I'm curious. If we did this (say, with an upcoming technology paper), would anyone want to contribute?

<comment><USER3> _open source also sounded crazy when Richard Stallman announced his manifesto._

rms: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

(Background: [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point.h...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html))

<comment><USER4> Richard Stallman still sounds crazy. But open source software has gotten credibility because it's very good. Linus Torvalds had more to do with the acceptance of open source than Richard Stallman.

PS: I hate the stupid fights over words: "Gnu/Linux", "Free software"... It's called "Linux" and it's called "open source software". Now get off my lawn.

<comment><USER5> > Richard Stallman still sounds crazy.

He doesn't sound crazy he is just very eccentric as a individual. And he has an "extremist" position, some would say. IMHO we need someone like that to keep us honest. Remember all the years people like Microsoft put actually money into discrediting FOSS? Would a wishy washy attitude have done much good then? Diplomacy doesn't work worth a damn when your enemy wants to destroy you by any means possible, be it by embracing you or extinguishing you

<comment><USER6> His extreme positions sure sounded crazy to me. Like "I refuse to have a cell phone because they are tracking and surveillance devices... many can be remotely converted into listening devices."

After this NSA scandal broke, I feel I was a little quick to judge him. I'm not going to give up my cellphone, but I've already quit using FB and have started using more digital privacy tools like OTR in pidgin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another post that actually loaded for me: [http://homotopytypetheory.org/2013/06/20/the-hott- book/](http://homotopytypetheory.org/2013/06/20/the-hott-book/)

[incidentally, it's the _official_ post announcing the book]

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this blog post better. It goes more into the radical innovation (for academia) of the authors' process:

"But more importantly, the spirit of collaboration that pervaded our group at the Institute for Advanced Study was truly amazing. We did not fragment. We talked, shared ideas, explained things to each other, and completely forgot who did what (so much in fact that we had to put some effort into reconstruction of history lest it be forgotten forever). The result was a substantial increase in productivity. There is a lesson to be learned here (...), namely that mathematicians benefit from being a little less possessive about their ideas and results. I know, I know, academic careers depend on proper credit being given and so on, but really those are just the idiosyncrasies of our time. If we can get mathematicians to share half-baked ideas, not to worry who contributed what to a paper, or even who the authors are, then we will reach a new and unimagined level of productivity. Progress is not made by those who break rules."

"Truly open research habitats cannot be obstructed by copyright, profit- grabbing publishers, patents, commercial secrets, and funding schemes that are based on faulty achievement metrics. Unfortunately we are all caught up in a system which suffers from all of these evils. But we made a small step in the right direction by making the book source code freely available under a permissive Creative Commons license. Anyone can take the book and modify it, send us improvements and corrections, translate it, or even sell it without giving us any money. (If you twitched a little bit when you read that sentence then the system has gotten to you.)"

(borrowing the google cache link from below: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cach...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fmath.andrej.com%2F2013%2F06%2F20%2Fthe- hott-book%2F))

<comment><USER7> That seems like quite a contrast from Mochizuki.

<comment><USER8> Yeah... Bummer....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some direct links:

[https://github.com/HoTT/book](https://github.com/HoTT/book)

[http://hottheory.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/hott- online.pdf](http://hottheory.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/hott-online.pdf)

[http://hottheory.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/hott- ebook.pdf](http://hottheory.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/hott-ebook.pdf)

First commit in Nov '12\. Most work seems to be have been done since Jan/Feb '13:

[https://github.com/HoTT/book/graphs/commit- activity](https://github.com/HoTT/book/graphs/commit-activity)

</comment><comment><USER10> Quibble: I downloaded the pdf, which defaults to a file called 'hott- online.pdf'. Why not Homotopy Type Theory - 1st Edition.pdf'? I download a _lot_ of pdfs (mainly because of being a law nerd), and I am sick to the back teeth of having to rename virtually everything that I download so that I'll be able to find the filename again later. I do use Mendeley to keep my documents more-or-less organized, but what have people got against human-readable filenames? Really I ought to be able to get semantic metadata for everything I download.

As for the work itself, great stuff, I look forward to reading it, or at least dipping into it (not a mathematician).

<comment><USER11> Zotero has a feature which will attempt to read metadata from a PDF and create a bibliographic reference for the PDF.

It also has a feature which allows you to rename the PDF based on the bibliographic reference it creates.

Using those two together has been a really easy way to earn brownie points with my professor boss.

<comment><USER12> A similar application exists for Gnome, called Referencer ([https://launchpad.net/referencer](https://launchpad.net/referencer)). It keeps a library of PDF files and can extract metadata such as title and DOI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Someone should make an effort to market Git to mathematicians (and academics and scientists in fields where Git exists).

This article is a start, but it would probably be stronger if the author had a nuts-and-bolts tutorial about how to use Git from the point of view of someone whose use case involves LaTeX markup rather than source code.

<comment><USER14> Honest question: what is the advantage of Git over something like Dropbox or remote centralized storage accessed via ssh? The only possible answer I can think of is you get a revision history, but this doesn't seem terribly useful.

If you could provide a use case to demonstrate how Git+latex is a winner, I'd genuinely appreciate it!

Edit: As soon as I submitted this it occurred to me that for collaborative editing Git is the obvious choice.

<comment><USER15> I think the most important difference is conflict resolution. If you modify a file on DropBox and save it while someone else still has it opened, you're going to end up with two files, one named youFileName (conflicted copy of someone 06/20/13).tex and the original. Not only does Git allow you to see and fix the conflicts when you merge, it does it automatically most of the time, which is a huge advantage.

<comment><USER16> I haven't found git to work much differently in practice, at least with papers (I haven't written a book in it). You will end up with way too many conflicts unless you basically "lock" sections through either a software mechanism or agreement, because edits often touch or reorder many paragraphs. A copyediting/wording pass will typically touch _every_ paragraph, for example, and these are more frequent in writing than refactoring or variable-renaming passes are in coding.

You can _somewhat_ improve the situation if you adopt a somewhat weird source- formatting policy, where you write each sentence on one separate long-ish line, rather than flowing by paragraph. Then you will be able to automatically merge as long as nobody has made an edit or move that touches the same sentence, giving you better merge granularity. But even then conflicts happen pretty often, and few people like this style of formatting (maybe it'd work better with tool support).

For a book this might work better, though, because I assume you'd be making less frequent edits, and people would less often be working at the same time.

<comment><USER17> Note that in principle it's probably better to change your diff software to recognize sentences than to change how you write your latex.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but in practice, starting each sentence on a new line isn't difficult and works great with standard 'diff'. I actually quite like it for proofreading, since fragments and run-on sentences jump out at you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like I'm in the minority for being mostly excited about a solid book on homotopy type theory!

<comment><USER20> To be fair, this is a community of mostly non-mathematicians, most of whom will probably have no use for this work. But yeah, certainly that's the real "big deal" here.

<comment><USER21> Well, homotopy type theory is in the same general area of study as the type theory studied in computer science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So it's basically Bourbaki with modern tools.

<comment><USER23> For those who don't know about Bourbaki, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki):

 _" Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Even better: _One surgeon_ wrote a mathematics book in a decade in Microsoft Word!

It's better than anything I've read from any mathematician. They seem to forget that people don't know what they are talking about to start with.

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/039304002X](http://www.amazon.com/dp/039304002X)

<comment><USER10> I found this new book surprisingly readable, but agree with your general criticism - I hope others will be inspired by this project to do more elementary open-source affordable books aimed at a more general audience. Imagine if kids could afford to buy their own maths books instead of having them dispensed by the school district with all the corruption that entails.

I quite like this book that you linked, BTW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if GitHub are planning to add LaTeX files compilation any time soon. It would be amazing to be able to see diffs on a generated output rather than source code.

<comment><USER25> You can roll your own using latex-diff. It comes eg. with TexLive and has some (limited) built-in support for different versioning systems.

<comment><USER26> We are rolling out support for Latex & Git with our new latex editor in the next two weeks. Sneak peek here: [http://cl.ly/image/3u3Z3f40382K](http://cl.ly/image/3u3Z3f40382K)

Drop me a line firstname.lastname@example.com if you want early access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Shamelessly copied [1] from tactics (go upvote him there) from the Haskell subreddit in case it's of interest to anyone here:

"Homotopy Type Theory is a recent advancement in the area of dependent types. Think Agda, Coq, Idris-style languages if you're familiar with them... otherwise think GADTs on supersteroids gone berserk.

Dependent types allow you to be extremely precise with your data types. You can talk about not just lists or lists of strings.... but also lists of strings of length n (for some natural number n). In the far future, it may be the key to getting fast-as-C performance (think removing bounds checking on arrays completely safely) and software verified correctness of a program simultaneously.

This isn't software, though. This is a math book. There was a realization a few years ago that equality types (the ability to express x = y in the type system) gave rise to a mathematical structure called a weak ω-groupoid which was giving homotopy and category theorists a hard time. Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT) is a typed lambda calculus that makes studying these things easier. In fact, every data type corresponds to (a very boring) weak ω-groupoid.

What this allows mathematicians to do, though, is to create new interesting data types corresponding to more interesting examples of these things. You get a data type for a Circle, or a Sphere, or a Torus. You can define functions between them via recursion the same way you'd define a function on lists or trees. These new fancy data types are called higher inductive types, and while they don't (currently) have any use for programmers, they pay the meager salaries of long beards in the ivory tower.

The other novelty of the theory might be more interesting for programmers some day (at least if you believe dependent types will save the world).

A guy named Voevodsky proposed a new axiom called the Univalence Axiom that makes HoTT a substatial alternative to the former foundations of mathematics. The Univalence Axiom formalizes a practice mathematicans had been using for a long time, (despite its technical incompatibility with ZFC). tl;dr, the Univalence Axiom says that if two data types are isomorphic then they are equal.

Eventually, this axiom may allow a programmer to do some neat things. For instance, a programmer could write two versions of a program -- a naive version and a "fast" version. (Currently, all programmers only write the "fast" version). If you want to formally prove your "fast" program doesn't suck, it's nasty. However, it might even be humanly possible to prove some correctness about the naive version. The Univalence Axiom (once given "computational semantics") may be able to let us prove things about the dumb, slow, reference implementation of a program or library, then transfer that proof of correctness to the fast one.

To give a small example for anyone familiar with a dependently-typed language, you may notice that in Coq and Agda and whatever, the first data type you learn (and one you stick with for a long time) are the unary natural numbers. That is, you have 0, and 0+1, and 0+1+1, and 0+1+1+1, etc.. We use unary numbers because they are reaaaally easy to prove stuff about. But as any programmer might guess, actually doing anything with them is suicide. The Univalence Axiom would allow us to keep on working with unary numbers for all of our proofs, but then swap them out for actual, honest-to-God 2's complement representations when it comes time to run the program.

So there's that.

Not everyone cares about software correctness, though. But if you're sold on category theory, here's a neat trick. You probably know that equality becomes a hairy, nasty thing in category theory. Two objects can be equal or isomorphic. If you move onto 2-categories, two categories can be equal, isomorphic, or equivalent! And for higher category theory, you end up with even more notions of equaltiy, isomorphism, equivalence, etc, etc.

In a univalent foundation of category theory (which appears in the later chapters of this book), we see that all of these notions of equality collapse down into just one. If two things are isomorphic, then they are, by definition, equal to each other. You no longer have to worry about that stupid squiggle over your equals signs, because univalence means that every construction must respect the structure of your data. There are no leaky abstractions in your data types!"

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1gr3uw/the_homotopy...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1gr3uw/the_homotopy_type_theory_book_is_now_available/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I guess no one on here has heard of the stacks project. Its over 3800 pages and I counted 93 contributors on the first page. Also, the LaTeX source is freely available on github. [https://github.com/stacks/stacks- project](https://github.com/stacks/stacks-project)

</comment><comment><USER29> Google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cach...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fmath.andrej.com%2F2013%2F06%2F20%2Fthe- hott-book%2F)

</comment><comment><USER30> So, obviously I don't want to sound ungrateful and I'm impressed that they put this together and made it freely available. I'm not sure that creative commons is the right license though, since it doesn't require the LaTeX source to be redistributed if the pdf is (unlike the GPL or the GNU Free Documentation License). (They're providing the source on GitHub, but if interest in the project trails off and someone else forks it, the person forking is under no obligation to share the modified LaTeX).

I can think of many sets of notes on the MIT OCW site that are CC, which I'd like to be able to modify and share but can't because the source is missing.

Anyone else have thoughts on the right license for this sort of project?

</comment><comment> a-nikolaev Btw, the blog author, Andrej Bauer, is an amazing guy.

I was really fascinated by some of his older blog publications (and I was only scratching the surface):

[http://math.andrej.com/2007/09/28/seemingly-impossible- funct...](http://math.andrej.com/2007/09/28/seemingly-impossible-functional- programs/) (by Martin Escardo, an article about a Haskell program doing exhaustive search over the "Cantor space" of infinite sequences)

[http://math.andrej.com/eff/](http://math.andrej.com/eff/) (Language Eff, a functional programming language based on algebraic effects and their handlers.) My understanding is that in this language all effects and evaluation order are explicit; effects and pure functions are easily and explicitly composable. Something like monads but more advanced. (My interpretation is probably wrong!)

[http://andrej.com/plzoo/](http://andrej.com/plzoo/) (The Programming Language Zoo). A number of mini languages which demonstrate various techniques in design and implementation of programming languages. (calculator, mini-ML, mini-Haskell, mini-Prolog, etc)

</comment><comment><USER31> If I were to go back to college, I'd probably try to get all my engineering friends to use git for projects to the point of getting their annoyance. Even now when I ask them why they don't use github to do something that would make their job easier, I get blank stares… so is life I suppose.

<comment><USER32> I guess it's partly resistance to change. If you tried to follow every recommendation a friend gave you, you'd go mad.

But sometimes it's hard to encourage VC simply because it shifts the balance of power. You can't hold anyone hostage with "your" code. Mistakes are traceable. You can't waste as much time in meetings, discussing things like project status and interfaces. Silos exist for a reason, it's just not a good reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd love a good epub or mobi version of this, if anyone's got one

</comment><comment><USER34> > NOTE: my blog is being slashdotted by Hacker News

:) I think we need a new verb here.

<comment><USER35> ycombinated?

<comment><USER27> pointfixed, recursed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For anyone interested, with a little background in Coq or Agda it feels like (from what I've read so far) this book is pretty approachable by mathematicians and computer scientists alike.

</comment><comment><USER36> One of the authors listed, Thorsten Altenkirch, teaches quite a few second year Computer Science modules at Nottingham. He's absolutely mad. Here is a selection of some of his best moments: [http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~txa/thorsten.html](http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~txa/thorsten.html).

Note that this hasn't been updated in 13 years. The gold that has been lost since then truly saddens me.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is awesome! Great use of git & latex! This is the exact problem we are tackling at my startup, Banyan, with our new latex platform [http://cl.ly/image/3u3Z3f40382K](http://cl.ly/image/3u3Z3f40382K)

</comment><comment><USER37> Bourbaki!

<comment><USER38> A more forthcoming Bourbaki since all the HoTT authors are publicly listed. No conjectures needed.

<comment><USER39> Less opportunity for guessing games and amateur sleuthing though. Seriously Bourbaki was the first thing that came into my head when reading the blog post about the book linked to in these comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am going to refer to the latex code for my future assignments in electronics and mathematics classes.

Really nice to have the source.

</comment><comment><USER35> Off topic -- The title of the hacker news submission made me chuckle. It reminds me the old software principle that "9 women can't have a baby in one month."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> git treats every paragraph as a single line. That seems like an annoying default for english text.

<comment><USER41> The issue is less that git treats every paragraph as a single line, and more that git treats every line as a single line and they've put the paragraphs onto one line. It turns out that LaTeX actually looks for a double line break between paragraphs, and you can insert single line breaks into paragraphs without having them appear in the output.

So what you actually want to do is put a line break after every sentence and possibly after every clause, so that in the LaTeX source diffs work sanely, while the output looks as normal.

<comment><USER42> I'd argue that what you _want_ to do is write English language as you're accustomed. Paragraphs with multiple sentence in a single line.

What you'd like Git (or whatever your diff'ing program) to do is parse the individual sentences as individual lines for version control.

To each his own though. I have trained myself to start putting LaTeX sentences on separate lines to accomodate for this, but don't think that this is the best solution.</comment></comment></comment>


Git GUI or Command Line? - <AUTHOR> I am a junior and I use git via the command line. My boss thinks I am only trying to be fancy and that I'd be more productive using a GUI.<p>Is he right? Pls help. <comment><USER2> I use the command line all day every day. I also use SourceTree, however, maybe 3-4 times a day to see something visually (to commit a hunk, to quickly add individual files to a commit, etc).

I'm intermediate with git at best. I don't do anything fancy. I pull, branch, merge, push, and that's basically it. All day. I've used bisect precisely once about a year ago, I still don't know what rebase does... But I'm rock solid on the stuff I do know.

Given that I do things like:

git co -b feature/new-menu

git pull

git merge staging

git push

git co staging

git pull staging

git merge feature/new-menu

git push staging

Hundreds of times a day, there's simply no way it's faster to do it in a gui. I can type git co staging, git pull, git merge feature/whatever, :wq ( to close vim ), git push in probably 4-5 seconds now. I don't even think about it when I type it I've done it so often.

Get that fast at it and then invite your boss to watch. There's no way anyone could be convinced that a gui would be faster for me if they watched me pushing/pulling/creating/merging branches. They wouldn't be able to keep up.

(not a brag at all btw. These are simple tasks done hundreds of times every single day. You get really, really fast with that!)

good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Both can be productive depending on what what you have practised. Being good at command line will give you one more ability - "compose" various commands together to do complex task in a single command whereas the GUI guy can't do that as you can't compose "pixelated output". Think of this like - to do some task in GUI the guy will do something like - click, wait, click, type, wait... where as the command line guy would just write a single command composed of other commands.

</comment><comment><USER4> The command line is more powerful. You can pipe git's output to any other command line tool (like grep). It's easily scriptable.

Also, almost all documentation/HOWTOs you read will assume you're using the command line.

You're right to be using it. Even if you're not a power-user yet, you'll get there in time and will benefit greatly from it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can your boss use git from the command line? If not, then it's probably his ego taking a hit! But he's the boss ...

</comment><comment><USER6> If you normally work on your project using the command line (vim, emacs, &c) it's probably better to use git from the command line. If not, you should definitely learn to use command line git anyway even if you use the GUI normally because IMO it gives you a deeper understanding of the tool.

</comment><comment><USER7> Use git however you want to. I'd personally say that using it via command line is better because you're not tied to only knowing the GUI, so know how to use it on any machine with git installed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Commandline only. Especially if you define some bash macros.

If you don't know git command, you don't know Git at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find the command line far more helpful.

</comment><comment><USER10> using command line is better idea, if you know the commands well it really easier than using GUI</comment>


Palantir forced out of job fair after outcry over ICE contracts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833792/palantir-lesbians-who-tech-job-fair-ice-contract <comment><USER3> Let's be honest. Palantir's business model is mass surveillance of people (including, especially, US citizens). They allow many government agencies to circumvent the legal procedures required to access government databases by instead using theirs.

If you support that, more power to you. Be honest about what you're supporting though. This is not just about ICE. This is not the same as the advertiser tracking.

<comment><USER4> Palantir is much closer to a consulting agency (think SAP or IBM) than anything like that.

<comment><USER5> Could you explain that? I, and I think a lot of HN readers, are strongly of the impression that Palantir sells a platform and toolkit for mass data analysis specifically meant for human tracking across large government datasets. I understand that as with any large-scale implementation, a good portion of their actual project dollars will come from billable hours to get it running and keep it running, but they're certainly not run like an actual consulting company.

Also, neither SAP nor IBM are consulting companies. SAP is an ERP provider and IBM is a cloud-based solution provider and outsourcing company. Most people would say consulting companies are those like Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, BCG, etc.

<comment><USER4> SAP and IBM are both absolutely consulting firms, with the caveat that tech consulting means you're actually building solutions for your customers and not just telling them what they should build.

I think the biggest confusion is that Palantir is not in the data collection industry. They make tools to analyze data and contract out consultants (Forward Deployed Engineers) to do the analysis -- but the data is not being sourced by them. There's nothing you can do with Palantir that you couldn't do with any consulting firm or an in-house data-science/data-engineering team. Palantir's value proposition is that they have better tools and smarter people, but there's nothing magical or particularly nefarious about it.

<comment><USER5> I'm going to continue to disagree on the definition of consulting companies. Consulting companies have billable hours as their primary revenue stream. SAP in Q2 made over 80% of its revenue on cloud and software licenses. It's an ERP company with some consultants, not the other way around. Accenture, in comparison, makes about 75% of its revenue on billable services. I'll give you _maybe_ IBM since their revenue is close to a 50/50 split between billable hours services and infrastructure/application fees depending on how you define the categories in their 10Q.

If anyone has any breakdown for Palantir's revenue by category, I'd love to see it.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure why that matters. You can knock on IBM's door with a pile of cash and they'll build your software system for you. I don't doubt that it's a smaller part of their business but it's still analogous to what Palantir does. Pick a different software services company if IBM and SAP don't suit you.

<comment><USER5> I could also knock on my neighbor's door with a pile of cash and he'd build a shed for me even though he's never swung a hammer in his life. That doesn't mean he's in the business of building sheds, it just means he likes money. Palantir markets itself as a platform and tools vendor, and everything I've seen so far indicates that their primary revenue stream is there, not in professional services.

The actual consulting equivalent of Palantir would be any of the many data science "guns for hire" consultancies floating around that will sell you a few people for $250 an hour to get a project done, then leave.

<comment><USER4> If he builds you a shed for money he's in the shed-building business. I'm not sure why you're so intent on arguing semantics here.

IBM will build you a system to analyze some data. So will Palantir. Two different firms that offer a similar service. That's the only point I was trying to make.

<comment><USER5> Semantics here are important because calling Palantir just a consultancy and trying to categorize it with other consultancies is disingenuous. It is a company with a platform and toolset specifically built to enable surveillance states. Calling it a consultancy "like IBM" is not a fair characterization of the company.

And no, if you do a thing once for money you are not in that business. That argument is completely ridiculous. You are in the business of whatever you _primarily_ do for money on a regular basis.

<comment><USER4> It only feels disingenuous because you're not familiar with Palantir's business or offerings. You're not alone in this, most people who have strong opinions on Palantir have them based on lazy journalism from publications who's primary goal is to spread FUD (it's funny how we laugh at the average journalist's understanding of technology until the narrative aligns with our personal beliefs). I tried my best to explain but it seems you've already come to your conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nobody likes the idea of arresting undocumented immigrants and kicking them out of the country. It could probably be done in a better way too. And the legal immigration system is crazy (I've dealt with it myself). But it's work that needs to be done to secure the border, even though it's heartbreaking sometimes. Just like security making sure people don't sneak into a concert without a ticket. I probably wouldn't want to work for a company that was involved in supplying info to ICE raids, but there's a lot of jobs I wouldn't be interested in doing. People should be able to decide for themselves.

<comment><USER7> Is there any documented evidence on the efficacy of ICE raids? They seem to function primarily as a destabilizing force in communities. We certainly seemed to be doing fine prior to 2003.

From what I can see, they're a bloated DHS organ that's sucking down massive amounts of tax dollars for what amounts to security theater. You'd think in the $47 billion DHS budget they'd find some money for things like soap and toothbrushes.

<comment><USER8> Yes, there is evidence, right on the ICE website: [https://www.ice.gov/features/ERO-2018](https://www.ice.gov/features/ERO-2018)

<comment><USER7> A sweep targeting thousands of people nation-wide resulted in only 35 arrests: [https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-07-23/ice- ra...](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-07-23/ice-raids- immigration-arrests)

The number on ICE's website are computed based on an Obama-era change where they can count turning away people at the border as a deportation.

<comment><USER8> Did I get it right that you're complaining about ICE not making enough arrests?

<comment><USER7> I'm saying it's a bloated government organ that spends billions of tax-payer dollars to perform what amounts to security theater. You could cut it down to 1/10th the size and pass the savings on to tax payers (or allocate somewhere more effective) and get better outcomes.

Even if you support their mission There's really nothing defensible ICE. They're sucking down billions while being bad at what they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Used some if their product. They do a good job. Perfect example of how good products can be used to cause so much harm.

<comment><USER10> Considering the story of the original Palantir, I couldn't think of a better name.

<comment><USER4> That's actually the intention: [https://www.quora.com/Did-Palantirs-founders- consider-the-et...](https://www.quora.com/Did-Palantirs-founders-consider-the- ethical-implications-of-their-work-Do-they-have-thoughts-about-the- consequences-of-what-they-built/answer/Joe-Lonsdale?ch=1)

<comment><USER11> What a strong read. Thank you fellow hacker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is how the world changes. Just because ICE is enforcing the law does not mean that what they do with Palantir's software is ethical. Once upon a time the military was enforcing the law by outing and dismissing gay people and that changed by private entities taking a stand. Just acting on the default that enforcing the current law is ethical is just lazy, IMHO.

So, you can have any opinion you want about whether or not the job fair should have acted the way it did but I think it's well within their right to do so if they want to make an impact.

</comment><comment><USER4> As Google has recently proven steering clear of the politically woke is probably the right move anyways.

<comment><USER13> Their share price seems to be doing ok.

<comment><USER14> Would you argue that there isn't a gun problem because gun sales went up after a shooting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stupid question: The article never says what ICE is, anyone can give a clue to non-americas readers?

<comment><USER16> Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Comment readers be warned, this is a fairly toxic and divisive thread.

<comment><USER18> You would've thought that the esteemed readers of HN would be able to spot and rise above an article like this, knowing there's no "winning side" and you're not gonna be changing anyone's views today.

Humans of all calibre just love a scrap, it seems.

<comment><USER19> I don't think it would be appropriate to rise above an article like this. It _matters_ if a major tech company gets excluded from things, whether you think that the community is rising up against bad tech or that Palantir is being unfairly demonized. You can't make a rule of never discussing controversial things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't Palantir also contract with Middle-Eastern governments that are not exactly known for their outstanding record on LGBTQ affairs? If so, I'm surprised that that concern wasn't brought up.

<comment><USER21> Yes a gay man like Thiel not looking out for LGBTQ people's rights would be quite shocking. But then money knows no gender orientation.

<comment><USER22> Why would there be any correlation between sexual orientation and morality?

<comment><USER23> That's not what OP was trying to say. The point here is the irony of Peter Thiel, an openly gay man, having cofounded Palantir, which helps foreign governments persecute LGBTQ+ people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No problem with enforcing the law of the land but locking up kids and separating them from their parents , and withholding essentials like basic cleaning and health services makes this a moral issue of those who enable this i.e Amazon, Palantir etc ...

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately the lack of funding is purely political football. Regarding the separation issue, how do feel about prisons which historically involve separation from family members?

<comment><USER26> Illegal immigration is different because often the entire family commits the crime together. Further an irregular border crossing is a misdemeanor not a Felony. We don't take kids away from parents for misdemeanors.

But even if you ignored the cruel and unusual punishment aspects - <USER2> the children separately is unforgivable. In some cases they didn't even bother to record the family connection before separating them.

<comment><USER27> You can absolutely go to jail for misdemeanors.

<comment><USER28> None of these people have been convicted of anything. It's not a judicial punishment. Furthermore, some of them aren't even immigrants. [https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens- ice-20180...](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens- ice-20180427-htmlstory.html)

Fundamentally, America has given the right - no, _demanded_ \- that police do "papers please" stops on people, and given them the right to detain them indefinitely until they produce papers. This is like a mandatory ID card system but without the benefits or coherent organisation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like a PR stunt by this this organization holding the career fair. They knew what they were getting themselves into when they accepted Palantir's money to hold a table their. This ICE reputation by Palantir isn't some new revelation.

if I took money from Trump, am I going pretend to act shocked when he did something controversial? No, I knew the whole time

</comment><comment><USER30> So we have the fake outrage here over working with a government organization to enforce the law (which you may disagree with, but it is still the law).

Meanwhile, Apple, Google, etc all get a free pass for working with China, which is doing far worse things to its citizens, and has made no attempt to conceal that it wants to use those tech companies to do even worse things. The hypocrisy on this board is astounding at times.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure how you could consider Google to have been given a "free pass", given the number of times stories about employees protesting those issues have trended here.

<comment><USER30> When was the last time Google was kicked out of a job fair over their products or abuse of personal data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would have assumed that lesbian ideas about immigration ran the gamut of the political spectrum, just the same as non-lesbians. It's curious that they apparently cluster at one end.

<comment><USER33> If you're a person facing societal oppression you're likely to (1) recognize that societal oppression actually exists and (2) be sympathetic to others who are facing societal oppression.

<comment><USER34> > Facing societal oppression

> Sponsored by some of the country's biggest companies: > [https://lesbianswhotech.org/newyork2019/#Sponsors](https://lesbianswhotech.org/newyork2019/#Sponsors)

<comment><USER35> Are you implying that no one in an LGBTQ group could be facing societal oppression because they have major sponsors? That's absurd

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Soon, activists will start boycotting Microsoft (gov't agencies use Word and Excel), 3M (gov't agencies use Post-it notes), and Charmin (they also buy toilet paper).

<comment><USER36> Big difference between making general purpose software like MS is and making software specifically for a specific purpose...

<comment><USER37> There have already been calls to boycott cloud providers for providing VMs in the cloud so no, it seems there's little difference in the eyes of some people.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Idea Test - Test your startup ideas - <AUTHOR>

I had an idea the other day and I would like your feedback: http://ideatest.pt.to <comment><USER2> Clickable <http://ideatest.pt.to>

<comment><USER3> link doesn't work. You should also make the headline the link, otherwise you're gonna get no upvotes.</comment></comment>


Which startup is most worthy of in-depth study for a budding web 2.0 entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Depend what your goals are.

Are you looking to turn a hobby into a business and grow it with minimal cost? LiveJournal.

Do you want to start small and opportunistically grow the business over a long period of time? Microsoft.

Do you want to change the world and change it now? Google.

Are you looking for examples of what not to do? Value America, or just go work for some startup off the street.

Are you looking to bootstrap a company for very little money and the flip it to an acquirer? Reddit, ViaWeb (Yahoo Store), or Vermeer (Microsoft FrontPage). The latter took VC investment, so I wouldn't really call it "very little money".

Are you looking to succeed in some business, any business, and do it on a dime? Flickr.

</comment><comment><USER3> All of them. No one success story will be an instruction manual for yours.</comment>


Show HN: Bop.fm (YC S13) iOS App – Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud in One Music App - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/bop.fm-music-player/id940691723

<comment><USER2> Enjoy it while you can. I don't see this being up for very long since this type of app is expressly forbidden in Spotify's Developer Terms of Use[1]:

> Integration with Third Party Services. You shall not create any product or > service by integrating the Spotify Platform, Spotify Service, or Spotify > Content with (i) any non-interactive internet webcasting service or (ii) > with streams from another service.

[1]: [https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of- use/](https://developer.spotify.com/developer-terms-of-use/)

<comment><USER3> You can add Beats Music[0] to that list:

> you SHALL NOT [...] locally store, cache, and/or aggregate any data, > including audio content, obtained through the Beats Music APIs.

I was worried about how my new side project[1] might be viewed to breach these terms, but these guys are taking the piss. Is it a case of why ask for permission when you can ask for forgiveness? Is that how it got past the Y Combinator people?

[0]: [https://developer.beatsmusic.com/tos](https://developer.beatsmusic.com/tos) [1]: [https://match.audio](https://match.audio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone comment on how this actually works?

Is it mint.com style where they require your username / password and they store them in the back end to do stuff?

Or do they use everyone's API to get this?

Does the music actually play inside their app or does it generate links that open in the other apps?

<comment><USER5> For the iOS app we do need you to login to your Spotify account for us to stream through it, but it uses Spotify's oAuth flow, so we don't store any of your Spotify credentials on our servers. Also you're free to use the app without connecting your Spotify account, and just listen to the music through Youtube and Soundcloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great because a) I don't have to see youtube comments, b) it just keeps playing and seems to pick the ones I want to listen to, c) is simple

<comment><USER7> I'd second this - really nice idea and execution!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> +1 for Darude's Sandstorm on the last screenshot

<comment><USER9> HA, someone noticed! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> awesome! i've been waiting for something like this for iOS, even though i should've built it myself :)

if you're looking for something similar for Mac, check out my app [http://cloudplay.fm/](http://cloudplay.fm/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Great idea, but doesn't deliver. I use Spotify and sometimes I wish I could add songs into my playlist that are only on Soundcloud. I installed the app, ran several searches for songs and artists that I like, and nothing returned.

<comment><USER5> Stay tuned for an update that fixes a couple of the search bugs/limitations you're seeing on this version. Should be out very soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a similar idea in an open-source application, see [https://www.tomahawk- player.org](https://www.tomahawk-player.org). It works on Windows, OS X, and Linux already and is in beta for Android.

<comment><USER13> Tomahawk didn't work for me and a friend (was very buggy about 5-6 months ago).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do you plan to create an Android app too ?

<comment><USER9> It's on the roadmap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Get some Hypem.com integration next :)</comment>


htmlspecialchars does not throw E_WARNING on multibyte problems - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47494

<comment><USER3> If you find an odd situation in PHP due to backwards compatibility or whatever, I highly recommend you just make a wrapper function to do what you want.

Another example of a common mistake with default functionality:

Did you know

json_decode('null')

and

json_decode('{')

both return the same thing, NULL. One is correct, one isn't. The only way to actually tell the difference? Also call json_last_error() to make sure there wasn't an error parsing the json. Pretty inconvenient to do every time (and most people wont). Solution: Wrap it.

At Thumbtack we have lots of wrapper functions which take care of situations where a built-in function doesn't have an interface we like. Most of them are purely for convenience though, not situations like this where the default output does something potentially misleading.

<comment><USER4> > Solution: Wrap it.

Conversely, cut your losses and use something saner with better internal and API coherence.

<comment><USER5> Please take your hipster elitism somewhere else. Every language has warts and learning how to avoid them is always a good idea.

<comment><USER6> That's not elitism; that's reality. Notice that PHP is pretty much the sole language garnering this reaction? No one actively makes fun of C#, Python, Clojure, Haskell, Perl, Java, etc., even when they dislike them.

For example, I don't care for Java at all, but I admit that it's a really good implementation of a language I just don't happen to like very much. Same for C#. My reasons for not using it have nothing to do with the language itself (which is perfectly decent by all accounts). Programmers joke about Perl looking like line noise, but even that's a criticism of how some people use the language and not anything bad about Perl directly.

But no one other than PHP programmers seems to have anything good to say about PHP. It's nearly universally disrespected as an insecure, inconsistent, buggy mess. That's very unusual - perhaps unique - among major programming languages. Maybe there's a reason that non-Java programmers have a grudging respect for Java, non-Python programmers can find things they like about Python, but non-PHP programmers almost never have anything good to say about PHP.

When a lot of subject matter experts vocally dislike something, maybe that thing is misunderstood. When nearly all of them dislike it, perhaps there's a reason for it.

<comment><USER7> > But no one other than PHP programmers seems to have anything good to say > about PHP.

The people least familiar with the language have the most negative to say about it. Making fun of PHP is pretty much a fad -- this particular topic, about htmlspecialchars(), I heard originally 5 years ago and it just cycles around and around. Even the most famously quoted articles about PHP's shortcomings are typically at least 50% flat-out wrong and 25% opinion.

That being said, PHP has a fair share of warts -- it's a language with a long history and rapid change with little overall direction.

<comment><USER8> _> The people least familiar with the language have the most negative to say about it_

My 12 years of experience with PHP would beg to differ. It is, by ANY standard, a terrible language. In fact, it's primary defense of being "convenient" is not even true. Most developers would probably get a Django site up and running in the same amount of time it would take them to get a Cake or CodeIgniter site up and running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In fairness, display_errors is a terrible idea -- do you actually want errors thrown by your program to be interspersed with the HTML output of your program?

This sort of stuff should be going to the error log. And it is, so "throws error" and "error reporting" in the title are both inaccurate here. It does throw an error; it merely refuses to send that error to the HTML output of the page when display_errors is on. If normal, sane error reporting to the error log is on, the error does show up there.

<comment><USER10> It only really makes sense when PHP is used in a shell. If nothing else, its strange that a lot of PHP implementations have them turned on by default.

<comment><USER11> Not really. People that turn off display_errors and set up proper logging typically know what they're doing; it's a pretty sensible default for "my first website" level of projects. Remember, those folks are just uploading PHP files to their shared host - they don't have a local development environment, let alone a custom-configured production setup.

Is it unfortunate that a lot of production sites run with stupid settings because they aren't run by full-time software engineers or sysadmins? Sure. But the accessibility of making changes is great, and most people would consider it a good thing that people are taking an interest in learning how to do this stuff themselves rather than outsourcing all of their technology problems. After all, isn't that how most of us got started?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This "bug" has been resolved since 01-Mar-2012 when 5.4 was released, and there's a very straight-forward explanation of it if people would just RTFM.

This is the worst part of the PHP community - all the in-fighting when the core developers don't bend over backwards to accommodate short-sighted programmers who _know_ their conflicting demand is the one that should be heard.

</comment><comment><USER13> The problem is that people have conflicting demands. They want all errors - even most unobvious ones in most deep functions, in all outputs - <USER2> immediately shown to them with all details, without having to do even minimal amount of work, and then they want the whole system also be secure. It can not work this way. If you want errors on the output, it can not be secure. If you want secure defaults, you can not have server spewing errors to the output.

So we have a choice here - do we prefer, convenience or security? Given that inconvenience is much less dangerous than insecurity, the choice for PHP developers was security. In ideal world, where nobody runs their production servers with display_errors=on and everybody understand the consequences of their actions, this hack would not be needed. We live however in a real world, where thousands of production sites are run with dislpay_errors, so we need to account for this reality. It means somebody has to check their error log from time to time. If it's too hard to do - install custom error handler and override the default behavior.

</comment><comment><USER14> I start finding those arguments about PHP close to ones Adroid vs iPhone. Yes, PHP is inconsistent and etc. But on the other hand, it just gets the shit done. And for historical reasons, it has a huge community. When you add those two factors together and stop being a hipster... It's not that bad, is it?

<comment><USER15> It's terrible. PHP doesn't "get the shit done", although PHP _programmers_ can. There are far better languages for getting things done. Huge community is not terribly attractive, as plenty of other, better languages have sufficiently large communities.

I'd survive if I had to program in PHP, but it would definitely be a last resort. It could be worse (Malbolge?) but I don't understand why people feel a need to defend it or say it's not bad.</comment></comment>


The impact of GPT-3 on Google Search, a complex-adaptive system - <AUTHOR> https://www.kevin-indig.com/the-impact-of-gpt-3-on-google-search-a-complex-adaptive-system/ <comment><AUTHOR> Everybody's reaction to the many GPT-3 demos on Twitter have been the same: First, it's "oh my god, is this real?" Then, it's "People are gonna lose their jobs." The fear of GPT-3 replacing writers and designers is real. While I think some of the concerns are realistic, many are not.

<comment><USER2> I see GPT-3 as an "advancement" rather than a "breakthrough". There were several differences to the previous model such as the transformer being used and the rest is more like data + compute power. Have a read from this post here about it. [0]

What the hype around this only shows is the market potential around GPT-3's capabilities and glosses over the issues around it because from a VC standpoint: "Who cares, I want that giant 10x exit."

Just like black-box models, GPT-3 is an opaque NLP deep learning model that takes an input to generate an output but doesn't know why and cannot explain itself or its own actions. It may be only text its generating but it is still unsuitable for very sensitive areas like law due to this despite several valid ideas in applying this into legal text. We need proper scrutiny towards GPT-3 from the tech industry and less of the hype manufactured by its merchants.

But that's all boring to everyone, look at what GPT-3 can do right now. Far more important than actual potential breakthroughs like explainability in deep learning, detection mechanisms or AGI these days /s

[0] [https://pagestlabs.substack.com/p/gpt-3-and-a-typology-of- hy...](https://pagestlabs.substack.com/p/gpt-3-and-a-typology-of-hype)</comment></comment>


The Stanford CS Education Library (home to the Binky pointer video) - <AUTHOR> http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/

<comment><USER2> The NLP section too is worth looking into. [ <http://nlp.stanford.edu> ]</comment>


Cross-Chain Deals and Adversarial Commerce - <AUTHOR> http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2019/12/cross-chain-deals-and-adversarial.html <comment><USER2> _Disclaimer:_ I am a researcher in this space and also CTO of a company (Arwen.io) which builds cross-chain atomic swaps.

To me, one of the more powerful properties of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies is that they overcome a long standing impossibility result in cryptography:

fair exchange, i.e. atomic swaps, are impossible without a trusted third party [0].

Cryptocurrency-backed blockchains do this by modifying the underlying assumptions behind that impossibility result in two ways [1]:

1\. it adds the assumption that at least one side of the exchange is trading a blockchain asset,

2\. it the treats the blockchain holding that asset as a trusted party.

To someone outside the world of cryptocurrency this may seem like an odd set of assumptions. However if what you want to exchange is a blockchain asset, assumption 1 and 2 is very reasonable. Valuing a blockchain asset already assumes that the blockchain is trustworthy because the value and ownership of the asset requires a trustworthy blockchain.

A very cool result is that a party can perform a fair-exchange between a cryptocurrency and the solution to a problem in NP. For instance the ZKCP (Zero Knowledge Contingent Payment) protocol has been used to perform a fair- exchange of bitcoins for the solution to a Sudoku puzzle [2]. SIA coin uses a slightly different model to enable users to prove and collect cryptocurrency for storing another users data [3].

Taken to its logical conclusion, this seems like it would allow substituting information or math for currency. Could we build an economic in which hard currency is backed by proof-of-storage or solutions to problems in NP? When I was a teenager I read Richard Brautigan's poem in which a man replaces his plumping with poetry [4]. It was one of reasons I got into cross-chain trading research as it inspired me to think about how to replace cash with computation. Hopefully it works out better than for the protagonist of that poem who ends up living in YMCA. Brautigan, writing 50 years ago, captures both the promise [5] and downsides of information technology ecology projects like cybernetics and cryptocurrency.

[0]: On the impossibility of fair exchange without a trusted third party [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/208b/22c7a094ada20736593afc...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/208b/22c7a094ada20736593afcc8c759c7d1b79c.pdf)

[1]: The Arwen Trading Protocols (Full Version) [https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/024.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/024.pdf)

[2]: The first successful Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payment [https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge- conting...](https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent- payments-announcement/)

[3]: sia - about [https://sia.tech/technology](https://sia.tech/technology)

[4]: Homage to The San Francisco YMCA by Richard Brautigan [http://www.rewindreduceandrecycle.com/richard-brautigans- hom...](http://www.rewindreduceandrecycle.com/richard-brautigans-homage-to- the-san-francisco-ymca/)

[5]: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace) [https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of- Loving...](https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace)</comment>


Facebook now requires your Social Security number to buy political ads - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/technology/facebook-ads-social-security-number/index.html <comment><USER2> > In addition to a Social Security number, users wishing to buy ads will need > to provide a picture of a government-issued ID and a US mailing address. > Once Facebook verifies the information submitted, the company will mail a > code to the provided address to authorize the user's Facebook account to buy > ads.

State actors more than likely...

1\. have access to giant databases of Americans' personal info (including SSNs),

2\. the ability to forge a genuine-looking fake ID (or photoshop a photo of one), and

3\. the ability to conduct a well-timed mail-theft (American mailboxes are notoriously insecure, and they could use USPS Informed Delivery to know exactly when to do it).

I don't think these procedures will be effective against any of the entities that matter.

<comment><USER3> >the ability to conduct a well-timed mail-theft (American mailboxes are notoriously insecure, and they could use USPS Informed Delivery to know exactly when to do it).

Not even that. The same credentials needed to buy an ad could also buy a PO box for a trivial fee

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> reminder: this information was provided to the open market by the credit reporting agency hax, dont blame me if you see my social in there

<comment><USER5> That's why they are doing a positive challenge as well.</comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi launches camera with interchangeable lens system for $50 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/raspberry-pi-launches-camera-with-interchangeable-lens-system-for-50/ <comment><AUTHOR> Another post here in hacker news or you can go to the source

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/an-open-source-camera- stack...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/an-open-source-camera-stack-for- raspberry-pi-using-libcamera/)

Plus this

[https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/camera- guide](https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/books/camera-guide)</comment>


Capital Float Tech Blog - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/capital-float <comment><AUTHOR> Capital Float is a digital finance company serving businesses in India.

We provide fast, flexible and transparent working capital finance to businesses looking to grow their customer base, purchase inventory, or manage cash flows.

We are constantly trying to build most effective and simple finance products possible to disrupt Indian market using latest technologies.

We would be publishing our views/stories on our blog, please share your reviews.

Thank you!</comment>


Show HN: Python ChatBot Tutorial - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/daviducolo/python-chatbot-with-chatterbot-3dbc <comment><USER2> Show HN is for things you made that people can try, not tutorials or blogposts you wrote. (If I'm mistaken and you wrote Chatterbox, the chatterbox project page would be better to submit as a Show HN)</comment>


Class Action Lawsuit Filed for Data Breach Victims of First American Corp - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-class-action-lawsuit-filed-110000081.html <comment><AUTHOR> That didn't take long.</comment>


Almost four environmental defenders a week killed in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-four-environmental-defenders-a-week-killed-in-2017 <comment><USER2> Don't forget the suicide epidemic among indigenous tribes, especially the Brazillian _Guaraní_. [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/suicides-s...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/suicides- spread-through-a-brazilian-tribe.html) Filmmaker Jon Alpert and his crew are further investigating the issue. They found out that the _Guaranì_ natives are being murdered (disguised as suicide) by the local farmers for land grabbing. He mentions it in this podcast [https://jamesaltucher.com/2017/12/jon- alpert/](https://jamesaltucher.com/2017/12/jon-alpert/) at 00:21 min. The documentary is still a work in progress.

> _Mining conflicts accounted for 36 killings, several of them linked to > booming global demand for construction materials._

If you want to grasp the real human cost of mining, I highly recommend the essay _The Missing Ethics of Mining_. [https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2013/the- missi...](https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2013/the-missing- ethics-of-mining-full-text/)</comment>


Improving advertising on the web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.chromium.org/2017/06/improving-advertising-on-web.html <comment><USER2> It's a last measure for Google since otherwise the percent of people using ad blockers (that block all ads) will become so large that Google will crippled beyond recovery.

There hope is that if a blocker is built in natively, new users won't install a third party blocker. And there blocker will allow most all their ads, but block all competitor ad's that are especially annoying. And people will presumably hate ads less.

This will most likely backfire since everyone who never considered installing an ad blocker will now have it by default.

Then eventually, Google will without question eventually block third party blockers. They will say they unsafe, negatively affect performance, or insert any excuse. Then everyone will be stuck viewing all their google ads.

If Google were to block blockers now, they would be destroyed by the public, but assume that if they offer a blocker that there maybe less backlash and hoping people won't leave for Safari or Firefox.

<comment><USER3> Google's stock is up from 735 this time last year to 988 today. They're not fighting with their backs against the wall. They're in the middle of the ring, taking all comers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ugh, I don't like this. Why is one of the worlds largest advertiser deciding what ads will be displayed, and which ads wont. Seems kind of like leaving the fox guarding the hen house.

<comment><USER3> They're making a decision based on pretty measurable psychometric variables (flashing, size), not content. They included in their position a commitment that they will not serve their own ads on such sites, so they stand to lose if the publisher commits to losing. It's the publisher's choice if they want to degrade the quality of the open web by overselling psychological manipulation techniques that advertisers obviously want to employ. But Google is exercising its right to exit that market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is precisely the problem with Google operating the dominant browser on the planet. They are always going to be accused of having a conflict of interest; the conversation itself is the problem.

IMO, if Google's goal is to really improve the web experience, it would be much better if Chrome was spun off into a non-profit of its own, and not controlled directly by Google.

That won't happen because Google needs Chrome to control the platform where most ads are delivered and that helps keep Google dominate.

<comment><USER6> Yeah... the reason why it smells like a conflict of interest is because it is a conflict of interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not entirely clear to me how even Chrome can enforce this, though any reduction in crappy behavior is probably a net win.

Frankly I want a cap on downloads of random junk for _any_ reason, ads or otherwise. Chrome should set strict limits on sizes of scripts, number of domains, amount of data, etc. and require user opt-in only where it makes sense (e.g. "I need to watch a video").

</comment><comment><USER8> Google execs sounded the brown note :D

I installed ad-blockers on all relatives computers after those "you have a virus" full-page ads that talked my mom into calling someone, handing over her credit card, _and_ giving them remote control over her computer.

I see no reason to remove them now; what's the consensus on when chrome starts blocking competing ad-blockers?

<comment><USER9> If this ad-blocking is baked into Chrome on Android and Chrome on Android doesn't get extensions, then Chrome on Android essentially has a built in ad- blocker and blocks all competing ad-blockers. Chrome on Android currently has no extensions.

If you want to block ads within the browser on Android, Firefox + uBlock is your best bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Far too little, many years too late.

At this point, I can't imagine any development that would make me substantially revise my approach to online advertising and tracking, which is - block everything, preferably at the router level. I don't know many tech literate users who think differently.

And for any relatives and friends who ask me to install their computers, I set up adblockers by default. Those who notice (most people, actually) are usually between happy and ecstatic.

</comment><comment><USER11> Main discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463732).

</comment><comment><USER12> > Due to these poor ad experiences, _the usage of extensions that block ads > across the web continues to rise, up about 30% from just last year._ This > reduces the ability for publishers to continue creating free content and > threatens the sustainability of the web ecosystem.

Is this the first step to remove ad blockers from Chrome? I guess that 30% also affects Google.

<comment><USER13> I don't think so. To me, that simply reads as Google providing support for their claim that users are increasingly frustrated by "poor ad experiences".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Advertising is a critical component of the web, keeping content open and > free for everyone.

This is repeated often. I'm sure it is true to a degree, but to what degree?

Many of the pages that I read have:

\- no advertising at all (HN for instance, MDN, etc.),

\- advertising that is very easy to ignore (e.g. BoingBoing), or

\- content that I can live without

</comment><comment><USER15> I imagine that this will make some new WTF moments in web development, when my code will be considered as "bad ad" and removed from DOM.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone here know a good alternative of chrome based on V8? I personally still can't bring myself back to FF due to V8.

</comment><comment><USER17> Are we giving censorship a new name now?

First the search results, now the ads. When the users?

</comment><comment><USER18> Google is reacting very slowly to their declining ad revenue model in the face of social media and influencers, they are stuck with a degraded experience/platform.

It will be interesting to watch how they are going to salvage their ad network with a much more ad-aware and a younger demographic with purchasing power.

Time to pivot, but I doubt this will work or the recent chrome ad free beta.</comment>


Scientists Achieve Optical Invisibility - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110518085200.htm

<comment><USER2> Here's the paper:

<http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ol/upcoming_pdf.cfm?id=143769>

</comment><comment><USER3> What is exactly new about this compared to (scientific paper link at bottom): [http://www.st- andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2010/Title,59358,en...](http://www.st- andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2010/Title,59358,en.html)

I'm not a physicist but if someone knows enough that would be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was hoping for some pictures but....

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like a fun project!

Does anyone know what the practical use of something like this would be?

<comment><USER6> The practical use of an invisibility cloak?

<comment><USER5> Besides military and women's lockerrooms.

<comment><USER7> Paint wind turbines with the material and you remove the only obstacle to placing them near population centres.

<comment><USER8> ...or airports...?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is getting a job before doing a startup worth it? - <AUTHOR> Hey folks!
I've been trying to start-up for the past 5 years or so (officially launched something at 20, currently 25). I've been coding since my teenage years, and have produced a few companies with revenue or promising contracts, but for one reason or another things didn't stack the way I'd hope.
As far as I go: I started off as a UI designer, moved into HTML/CSS for a number of years, and then jumped on the JavaScript bandwagon to cover the full stack. I'm currently operating a "lifestyle" business and took a venture into the social space while living abroad to avoid the insane New York costs.
One thing I'm hearing everywhere is the benefit of joining a company and putting in a few years of work before doing a start-up. I'm hearing founders say they wish they had done it, but we've all also seen successes who skipped that.
It sounds like there could be nice things about it (work with smart colleagues, get a steady paycheck, etc) but at the same time, it could carry a big opportunity cost and mold you in a way you mat not not want to be molded.
What I'm trying to decipher is, what is this benefit of learning at a company? Could you share your experience of doing or not doing that? <comment><USER2> Successful startups solve real problems. If you never have a job you won't see any problems apart from the ones that affect you directly as a consumer, or later as a business owner. For example, there are a handful of startups in the container shipping industry at the moment that are _really_ disrupting that space. Could anyone who hadn't worked in that industry first have identified the problems and seen the potential to solve them? No. You need experience of the industry to see what's wrong with it.

Having a job before doing a startup isn't about learning some skills that apply universally. It's more specific than that. To that end, if you have ideas for more consumer oriented businesses that you can build without industry knowledge, there's no need to get a job first.

One small caveat: having a job and being an employee means you'll understand what your own employees feel if your business grows to the point of having any. That would be useful.

<comment><USER3> These are all very good points.

 _" having a job and being an employee means you'll understand what your own employees feel if your business grows to the point of having any"_

It's more than just knowing how employees feel, it's knowing what employees do (e.g., what's the role of a CTO, a product manager, a marketing person, etc.?) and how to manage them. If you've never been an employee or a manager, how likely is it that you'll be a competent CEO who can hire effective employees and managers? If a company ever becomes successful, it won't be just a couple of programmers in a room anymore.

I'd also add that the more experience you've had in the business world before starting a business (and the more you've seen of life in general), the more likely it is that you'll be able to recognize bullshit - it will be harder for potential co-founders or investors to take advantage of you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If it's a really complex industry (especially ones that have a lot of regulation, such as energy or healthcare) I think it's a good idea to work in the industry for a little while - just enough to understand what the different areas are you need to know about. It'll probably be a faster learning curve to spend 1-3 years as an insider than wandering in the wilderness there.

If it's more consumer, or you have a clear way to build revenue early, just go for it.

Either way, I think being in a big company (or more established startup) to learn culture, work with smart colleagues, etc. is definitely a nice-to-have, but not a must. You can pick that up on your own as you build your own startup. Good luck!</comment>


Show HN: Mjolnir, an automation/productivity app for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://mjolnir.io/ <comment><USER3> Congratulations on releasing Mjolnir!

Here is some feedback: I have never heard of Mjolnir, or Hydra, before. I visited the page you linked and skimmed through. Here is what I learnt:

\- That it's a "Lightweight automation and productivity power-tool for OS X"

\- How to try it out

\- How to uninstall it, or install it to $HOME

\- How to install it's doc sets

\- How to work with modules

\- FAQ on some very technical questions

\- Some high-level phylosophical comparison with other apps ("Mjolnir is more modularized, Slate is more all-in-one")

\- Thanks, technical changes, license etc.

I still have no idea _what is it_ , what _problems_ could it solve and what are some _typical_ examples of automation, apart from a single paragraph"start writing some fun staff" in "Try it out" section.

I'm certainly interested in automating tasks on my Mac, but after reading the landing page I have no idea what kinds of tasks it could be. Is it better that Automator? How does it compare? Is it better then writing shell scripts? etc.

If I were you, I would spend 70% of the page to explain what someone can accomplish with Mjolnir and why they should care, and 30% (or less) on the technical stuff. May be I'm not an intended audience.

<comment><USER4> Can't emphasize this stuff enough. What problems does it solve for the user? It's described in very general terms, which I'm going to assume is because it's a general-purpose tool that can solve many problems. Show some of them! Are they problems people already solve in a different way? Show why yours is better.

<comment><USER5> Thanks to both of you. I've updated the website now to include some things that help clarify some example use-cases. I hope it helps?

<comment><USER3> Thanks - it does help. So now I have a better understanding what it does - <USER2> I were to express my understanding in a single sentence, it would be something like "Mjolnir allows you to script Apple mouse events or system dialogs in Lua and assign them to a hotkey - no need to use Apple C API".

Again, if you target Mac power users (which is the right market you should probably target - much bigger than just developers), I would emphasize _higher-level_ stuff you can do with Mjolnir and ease of use comparing to AppleScript.

For some inspiration, go to App Store and search for "Automator" \- you'll see several bundles that help people automate programs like Adobe Illustrator, etc.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Here is another idea/fun experiment: try to express your idea in:

\- 5 words

\- 1 sentence

\- 1 paragraph

\- 3 paragraphs

Adding constraints like that really help you focus on what's important. For example, does "Lightweight" section belong to the introduction, or is it an implementation detail? Should you move screenshots up on the page above the "fold line"? etc. etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Author here.

I'm very glad (and relieved!) to finally release this after several months of hard work and a ton of help from many very supportive and smart contributors. Mjolnir wouldn't be nearly as useful without their help!

I'd be happy to answer questions here.

<comment><USER6> Congrats on the release!

I've enjoyed a few of your other projects, and am currently happily using Phoenix. I look forward to trying Mjolnir in the near future.

I hope Mjolnir will be around for a while. I like your work, but redoing my setup each time is getting annoying. :)

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

Mjolnir is not quite the same as Hydra/Phoenix/Zephyros. Those were "window managers" and that's really all they do. Mjolnir is for general automation, although window managing can be part of that.

So if Phoenix is working for you, stick with it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't read that page at all (I'm rendering it in XFCE in debian, because I am broke and between Macs.)

to clarify, I can see that there is text, but it's so thin and faint on my crappy LCD that I'm getting a headache trying to read it. No, this doesn't happen on most sites.

<comment><USER5> Hmm that's weird. I'm using a canned Github-Pages theme on that site. You can read the exact same text on the official readme:

[https://github.com/mjolnir-io/mjolnir](https://github.com/mjolnir-io/mjolnir)

<comment><USER8> The colour (#777) makes it hard to read (at least for me). Having it in black (and font-size bumped to 16px) makes it way more readable

<comment><USER9> I'd bump the font size up a few notches and maybe go with #333 or #444 if you're just itching for gray text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was going to ask -- isn't this exactly like Hydra? But some Googling indicates it's the same project and was renamed. Explanation of the name change here:

[http://sdegutis.github.io/2014/08/11/the-history-and- current...](http://sdegutis.github.io/2014/08/11/the-history-and-current- state-of-appgrid-zephyros-phoenix-hydra-penknife-and-mjolnir/)

<comment><USER5> It does similar things, and started off from Hydra's code-base. But it's design and architecture is so different that it's now a completely different app. Many Hydra modules can be ported, but they're not completely 1:1 compatible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does it compare to Amethyst [[http://ianyh.com/amethyst/](http://ianyh.com/amethyst/)] ?

<comment><USER12> Amethyst is a tiling window manager, mjolnir is an automation tool, which can be configured to be a window manager. Not sure if it can be configured to be a tiling one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It'd be awesome if there were a brew cask formula for install/setup.

<comment><USER5> We experimented with that early on, but at the time `cask` didn't have any way to remove old versions when upgrading. This caused problems with the start-at- launch feature, which then launched several instances of the app. This may be fixed in newer versions of cask, though. If anyone gets around to it, send a PR :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> meow-meow?

<comment><USER5> According to #mjolnir it's actually pronounced "myur-myur"</comment></comment>


F1 Query: Declarative Querying at Google Scale [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p1835-samwel.pdf <comment><USER2> I read this as we have so many query / data platforms so we're going to build another query standard to standardize all the query languages. Just another flavor of the standards problem.

<comment><USER3> I see F1 as: ``what is the largest SQL subset we can support without compromising scalability.''

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related Reading (FB Equivalent): [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/presto-i...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/presto-interacting-with-petabytes-of-data-at- facebook/10151786197628920/)

<comment><USER5> 30000 queries per day, and 550000 queries per second seem like two radically different things.

<comment><USER4> That number was from 2013. Don't underestimate exponential growth :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's relation with BigQuery?

<comment><USER7> Bq is based on Dremel, which is for data warehouse, not facing user traffic. You can find the original paper for Dremel easily.</comment></comment>


Amazon and Walmart's rivalry is reshaping how we'll buy everything in the future - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/3/17630604/amazon-walmart-competition-tech-partnerships-grocery-delivery <comment><AUTHOR> The article was interesting to me because of its focus on how the two companies were using their respective advantages: Amazon and their cloud computing platform + Whole Foods, Walmart and their large number of stores.

</comment><comment><USER2> Perhaps the most interesting part is all the things Walmart is doing to play catch-up. They should honestly work really closely with Google to upend Amazon.</comment>


YC Stats Winter 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats-winter-2015 <comment><USER2> Interesting to note that the average founder age is 30.27 (median is 29). Not that that's old, of course - just that I imagined it'd be younger.

<comment><USER3> Why would you not assume the opposite? I would assume the most experienced people with the most knowledge, contacts, and money to be in their 40s and 50s.

<comment><USER4> Warning, I'm about to make a couple of massive generalisations...

I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need it.

I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have solved.

Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not be as attractive to them.

As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some conclusions.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention the fact that it's probably quite a bit harder to convince a group of 40-50 year olds to move to SV for 3 months for $18k than it is a group a 21 year olds.

<comment><USER3> It's $120k now but yes, one 40 year old engineer working full time makes that in 9 months. Why doesn't YC offer more attractive investment, say $500k, and allow non-SV offices? Is it just the presumption that this won't lead to large returns? Is there any data to support that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      Companies with a female founder: 25 (21.93%)

      Companies with a Black founder: 9 (7.89%)

      Companies with a Hispanic founder: 6 (5.26%)

They should release the stats of the number of people overall, not the number of companies with at least one member who fits into one of those groups.

For example, say X% of the people are female, etc.

<comment><USER7> We've historically reported companies versus individuals, so we wanted to stay consistent. But that's fair -- we'll put it in those terms next time we release stats.

<comment><USER8> Sam Altman wrote 8 months ago:

> _As a side note, even though it will break backwards compatibility, we are > considering changing how we look at this to the percentage of all founders > that are women instead of the percentage of companies with a female > founder._

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and- startups](http://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups)

After being told by dozens of people how obviously misleading this statistic is. It was beneath YC to ever release such a phony stat, but it's downright unethical to continue propagating it.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure you didn't mean it but your post comes across as entitled.

YC has no obligation to share stats and just because you disagree with the methodology doesn't make them unethical.

<comment><USER10> Likewise, just because you disagree with the parent poster's interpretation doesn't make them "entitled". Just as YC has no obligation to share stats, the parent has no obligation to not have an ethical opinion about that, or to share it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the rising age of founder trend is a good one. Probably means the snapchat/whatsapp/instagram gold mine is nearly dry and some actually difficult-to-implement and domain-knowledge requiring ideas are starting to come into focus again.

<comment><USER12> It could also be a sign of many different things. My "gut guess" is that founders with some startup experience that now are heading out on their own are being selected for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> No stats for Asian founders? It would be interesting to see a complete breakdown of WC W15 entrepreneurs by ethnicity.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is "Countries represented" only from W15 or overall? If it's only from W15, could it be possible to know the list of all countries represented since the beginning of YC?

<comment><USER7> This is only representative of W15 companies. We don't have a list of countries overall, since it's not something we've always tracked. But that would certainly be interesting to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be great to have stats on the applicants as well. It would be good to know whether to bother applying given various info (single founder, no customers yet, sector, etc).

</comment><comment><USER16> What are the four $1B+ companies?

I can think of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, ...

<comment><USER17> Twitch.

<comment><USER18> Technically Twitch sold for $970m... Maybe he's referring to Quora (they joined YC late-stage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's the difference between B2B vs. Enterprise?

<comment><USER20> B2B would solve issue's for businesses of any size while enterprise is creating products for the fortune 500.

<comment><USER21> Enterprise has nothing to do with only 500 companies in the US.

There is no real difference.

Though some might say if you charge thousands and have dedicated salespeople, you're enterprise, even if you sell to a 25 person architect firm. Sales force is definitely though of as enterprise. While basecamp or twilio is more B2B. It's fuzzy, if there even is a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone else surprised at the number of startups in this class? (114) How much individual attention can each startup get?

<comment><USER23> YC has a sharded structure now. Arguably startups now get more attention than in some of the earlier batches.

<comment><USER24> Can you explain this a little more? Are there different groups where each group has a mentor or shared resources?

<comment><USER23> Prior to sharding all partners were responsible for keeping up with everyone in a batch.

Now there are multiple groupings of partners which oversee a smaller subset.

I'm not certain, but I'm sure partners are assigned based on their domain expertise. Though, I'm sure all partners are open to helping anyone in the batch if needed.

Can anyone comment on this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be interesting to see a breakdown by founder team size.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why are the YC total stats for all YC companies on the W2015 infographic? That seems out of scope.

The percentages of companies with a female/black/Hispanic are slightly off. As worded, it should be calculated by

       (# W2015 companies with atleast 1 female/black/Hispanic founder) / (# W2015 companies).

For companies w/ female founders, 25 / 114 = 21.93%, not 23%.

Black: 9 / 114 = 7.89%, not 8.03%

Hispanic: 6 / 114 = 5.26%, not 5.35%

<comment><USER7> Thanks for catching. Making a few updates to clarify.

<comment><USER27> Your Hispanic founder graphic seems to be missing the flagpole!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone happen to know the other two nonprofits besides [http://democracyos.org/](http://democracyos.org/) ?

<comment><USER29> Watsi is one, presumably.

<comment><USER30> These stats are just for this batch, watsi was a previous batch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm interested to hear more about the one aerospace startup that they funded in this class.

<comment><USER7> They haven't launched publicly yet. You'll hear about them soon.

<comment><USER31> Excellent. If we're talking civil aviation and space, it may be one of the hardest industries to disrupt thanks to regulatory capture (and a million other things), but from a technical standpoint there is a tremendous amount of room for improving the current state-of-the-art.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I applied with an entertainment (film) industry related startup, but looking at the company categories, it looks like that wasn't on the menu this time around.

Always next time, though!

</comment><comment><USER33> Id like to know more info about that aerospace startup.

</comment><comment><USER34> would be interesting to see similar stats for the groups that applied. Both along the company categories and the gender/race breakdown.

<comment><USER35> Also how many total applications did they receive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The SketchDeck link redirects to the page itself. I'm sure they would appreciate some YC traffic.

<comment><USER7> Roger - updated!

<comment><USER37> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Which company is from Turkey?

<comment><USER39> [http://www.ebrandvalue.com/](http://www.ebrandvalue.com/)

<comment><USER38> Oh. I did not know. my friends are working there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Which was the aerospace co?

</comment><comment><USER41> No Australians huh? We'll have to do something about that!

</comment><comment><USER42> so, invested a total of 101 million and current value of investments = 0.06 * 30 bln * dilution factor. So roughly speaking, current value = 300-400 mln ?

<comment><USER43> Where do you get the 101 million from?

<comment><USER42> 120K * 842 companies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Would you be able to provide a breakdown on the industry of the companies beyond B2B, B2C, etc? I'm curious how many are in developer tooling, oil & gas and so on and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER45> Which one is the Chilean company?

</comment><comment><USER46> Age of the eldest entrepreneur @YCcombinator = 66?

I sure want to know more about this person, and their start_up!

I'm a relatively older entrepreneur too, fall right on the right side of the median. Recently I had been been thinking of applying to YC. But couldn't convince myself for it, and my age was one of the reasons.

<comment><USER47> please go and apply. if you need inspiration check [http://fundersandfounders.com/too-late-to-start-life- crisis/](http://fundersandfounders.com/too-late-to-start-life-crisis/)

<comment><USER46> This is great, thanks for the encouraging note!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: First Weekend Project: CougarReport.com - <AUTHOR> http://cougarreport.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN...There have been a ton of cougar sightings around where I live. I thought why not aggregate them all onto one easy to view map. Let me know your thoughts!</comment>


From a CEO: 10 Reasons This is the Best Time to Build a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.newscred.com/?p=162#comment-4011

<comment><USER2> I have to echo these comments, given that my current company was founded in late 2001. The horrific job market for engineers in the valley over the next couple of years meant that we could assemble a first-rate team much more easily than we could have in, say, 2005, and it forced us to focus on controlling costs and building revenue sustainably rather than just trying to get huge and grab market share.

Another upside the article doesn't mention is that companies in a downturn tend to face less pressure from VCs to get big fast with no regard for long- term viability, allowing you to build your business for the long haul and focus on quality products and real revenue. At least that's been my experience, and I chalk it up to there being less of an arms race/land grab mentality, along with more of a realization that succeeding in this climate requires a solid business, not just a bunch of non-paying users or meteoric- yet-unmonetized growth.

The primary downside is that companies funded during a downturn tend to get far lower valuations for the same level of funding, giving up a lot more equity than they would in more exuberant times.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please change the link to <http://blog.newscred.com/?p=162>. Currently it points to one of the comments (<http://blog.newscred.com/?p=162#comment-4011>).

</comment><comment><USER4> This was encouraging!! We are on it Mr CEO, Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I got fed up of listening to all the reasons why we shouldn't be working on startups. This is our time to shine!</comment></comment>


From Side Project to Profitable Start Up – Part 3 – Shit Shit Shit Shit Shit - <AUTHOR> https://www.bugmuncher.com/2015/11/03/from-side-project-to-profitable-start-up-part-3.html <comment><USER2> Oh Shit!</comment>


Ask HN: Graphics/Game programmers, How do you port 3d games across platforms? - <AUTHOR>

I was discussing the topic recently, with regard to some of the Metal Gear Solid titles being ported to Xbox 360, and the Playstation Metal Gear Solid being ported to Gamecube, etc.<p>What does it take to port the game? Do new meshes have to be re-done? Does all the code have to be re-done? Or is it a 'simple' matter of changing a few files, tweaking Makefiles and building the codebase using the platform specific toolset? <comment><USER2> Its no simple matter; its a full time job for at least 6-15 months, with a team of between 2-80.

For example, when I worked at SCEE we ported Little big planet to PSP from PS3, and that was 14 months with 40 odd people full time.

It can be much quicker than that, but in general you have to worry about getting the engine working on the new platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> does alot/all of the in-game models have to be redone?

<comment><USER3> Depending on the underlying tool chain, it can be as easy as just re-exporting the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It depends. A/V assets are usually portable. Coding issues may range from having to transcode the whole mess to having to set a few flags ... but in either case, you then have to do testing & debug to make sure it works as expected (hah!).

A tool like Unity3D helps if it will actually do what you need, but it's not going to keep you from many months of testing and debug to make sure the "painless cross-platform support" is actually working and to fix the case when it fails.

Oh, and then you have to patch both / all versions when you make changes...fun!

Some are easier than others though, e.g. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into ensuring that Windows <\--> Xbox 360 is reasonably painless compared to * <\--> PS3 (where "reasonably painless" == "months of tedious work").</comment>