Ask HN: Email Service Provider For Web Apps - <AUTHOR>

I know all about companies such as Mail Chimp and aweber but they seem more for email campaigns to a group of people. Yet with each public app I create I need to add email capabilities for password resets, confirmations or notifications. Is there a company that I can integrate with that would do this for me.<p>So I would just call an API method saying, send an email to this email, with this template (that I preloaded in their system) and this data. Then I could use the companies email tracking capabilities, unsubscribe and other list management functionality without having to do it all on my site. <comment><USER2> <http://sendgrid.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, looks great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amazon: <http://aws.amazon.com/ses/>

Rackspace: <http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/>

<comment><USER4> I use SES (from C#) and it integrated very painlessly and seems to work flawlessly.

Between EC2/S3/Cloudfront/SES Amazon offers a very compelling suite of products that no-one else has replicated. Sure they may not be absolutely the best and certainly not the cheapest, but the single vendor benefit is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://postmarkapp.com> \- we love it.

</comment><comment><USER6> postmarkapp.com is amazing. They have API's and also standard SMTP provider.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, certainly looks promising. I have a few to checkout now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://mailgun.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> very close, but Mailgun are programmable mail boxes, I can easily do the coding for sending emails etc, I already have that, I was more after the list management and list statistics/tracking when sending emails.</comment></comment>


IPv6 Statistics from Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html <comment><AUTHOR> Notice how the IPv6 traffic spikes on weekends and falls off on weekdays. Also Switzerland is leading the charge with over 9% of the traffic coming to Google over IPv6.</comment>


excellent rant on the dumbing down of data access and UIs - <AUTHOR> http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/63867353935/data-rant

<comment><USER2> The author seems to be forgetting two related things. The first one is that the number of users of computers has increased by orders of magnitude in the past couple of decades. He looks back longingly at people doing complex stuff on Access back in the day, yet I would not be surprised if there were as many of those cases today, probably even more. Simply, their number now seems relatively much smaller. Computing is now a tool for everybody, not just for Western office men.

Which brings us to the second issue: for most people, computing is just a tool to solve problems that they encounter in real life. These problems have nothing to do with computing in the first place so, understandably, people tend to prefer solutions that allow them to focus on their actual problem rather than on the developer's own problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know, if you're opposed to the ideas presented here, play dwarf fortress.</comment>


Tricks to Play with your Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashinglists.com/10-amazing-tricks-to-play-with-your-brain/#

<comment><USER2> _Lift your right foot a few inches from the floor and then begin to move it in a clockwise direction. While you're doing this, use a finger your right index finger to draw a number 6 in the air. Your foot will turn in an anticlockwise direction and there's nothing you can do about it!_

Hmm... this might be overstated. I could do it with a little bit of concentration.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's overstated.

To play the piano, for instance, you have to do harder things than that, like playing a 3 against 4 rhythm (left hand plays 3 notes while the right hand plays 4).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am 30 and was able to hear the 18000Hz tone without a problem (and it's _extremely_ annoying). It's very similar to the sound produced by a CRT that's turned on without video input.

Has the "under-20" presumption been empirically tested?

<comment><USER5> Same here. I'm 31 and can hear that sound as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it just me, or are the pictures for #7 and (maybe) #1 a bit NSFW?

<comment><USER7> Depends on your W, but I'd rather be worried about being caught in front of my desk with ping-pong eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe, maybe not. With respect to the first one... I sleep with earplugs and a sleep mask. I don't hallucinate with these on -- I just don't get woken up by sound or light.

<comment><USER9> I can see shapes, particularly faces, just by closing my eyes for short periods. I assumed this was normal, e.g. seeing things in clouds, inkblot tests etc. so I think they're just overstating things slightly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is #2 an illusory rickroll?</comment>


Every Internet-connected computer, ... is assigned a four-digit IP address - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/26/internet-run-ip-addresses-happens-anyones-guess/

<comment><USER2> yup, base 255.

<comment><USER3> 256, actually. :)

<comment><USER4> Don't panic, base 256 is just like base 10 really, if you have 256 fingers.</comment></comment></comment>


New forms of 'racism' arise in science research - <AUTHOR> http://m.timesofindia.com/home/science/New-forms-of-racism-rise-in-science-research/articleshow/30439080.cms <comment><USER2> If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different through evolution. There's a lot to learn from genetic diversity rather than applying the racism badge to it every fucking time and ignoring it to pacify some over-sensitive idiots. This attitude is no better than witch hunts and mandatory religious laws.

The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes.

<comment><USER3> >If it's a fact, it's not racism.

So many apologists here seem to think that you can just list facts, context- free, in some sort of objective manner. The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement.

For example, if you were to do a study on prison population in the US, you could end up presenting two facts :

> blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population

> poor people are dis-proportionally present in the prison population

These are both facts, but the one you choose to present gives a soundbite to somebody. Just because you are so magnificent as to not fall into the correlation=causality trap doesn't mean that you're not enabling racism.

By even presenting the first fact, you are implying that it is a fact worth mentioning to begin with. If you also found out that people who wear hats on Sunday are disproportionately present, would you mention it? presenting the fact shows that you believe the link between the two needs to be investigated in the first place.

We could also go into the whole "black/white is not a race" debate too, but the notion of race (as it is defined in common culture) has no place in many studies. Shared ancestry can be relevant in other studies too, but one of the defining characteristics of racist attitudes is how genetics/ancestry define you so much that it is OK to discriminate based on those factors alone. Enabling that sort of thinking (for very little scientific gain) is rarely worth it.

<comment><USER4> > The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of > value judgement.

Yes, but then the problem is not with the facts themselves, but the way they have been used, and I took the grandparent statement to be talking about the facts themselves.

<comment><USER3> you can't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will show what you tested against), so there is always at least some form of choosing mechanism.

<comment><USER4> > _you can 't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will > show what you tested against)_

A 'fact' is something that is fairly well established. Of course we can never know anything with absolute certainty. Given that notion of 'fact', are you saying there are no facts in, say, physics, or chemistry, or biology? And on top of that, are you saying they can't simply be presented?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that humans are extremely homogenous

[http://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf](http://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf)

That is to say that the differences between me and the most different human (with not chromosomal disaster like Downs) are so small as to make arranging humans into groups according to their genetics meaningless.

<comment><USER6> One issue (this also applies to some discussion of gender differences) is that people often organize discussion of group differences around comparing population means on some trait, and trying to come up with studies that have large enough statistical power to show a difference in means. What often gives a clearer picture, though, is to estimate the full distribution of some trait in different groups, not only a point estimate of the mean. In that case, the result often ends up much less impressive: you end up with two bell curves that almost exactly coincide. If they don't _exactly_ coincide, a study with large enough statistical power can show a difference in means. But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X than women, with p < 0.05", the result is two disjoint bell curves, rather than two nearly-coincident bell curves.

<comment><USER7> > But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X > than women, with p < 0.05", the result is two disjoint bell curves, rather > than two nearly-coincident bell curves.

Which just means people are bad at understanding statistics. They have a folk understanding of "mean" that doesn't allow for differences in distribution.

Which is an endless source of unjustified outrage whenever you try to make demonstrably true statements about population means.

The whole educational fad to teach everyone to code is fine and all, but I want to see a fad for statistics...

<comment><USER6> I think the people attempting to make technically true but scientifically uninteresting statements about population means often have ulterior political motives (which is why they don't do analyses that are actually scientifically interesting), so I don't think the outrage is always unjustified. This can be seen in their paper titles and abstracts, and particularly their press releases, which make typically claims about differences between groups unsupported by the data. There's a whole cottage industry of "men are like X, women are like Y" folks who are rather tendentiously misrepresenting data to sell their books.

In particular, that two populations have differing means is trivially true for nearly any two population groups and choice of traits, even randomly split ones, so simply demonstrating a population mean difference is nearly never interesting. If you choose _any_ trait that can vary between people, and you manage to find every person in two finite population groups and compute a mean (so at this point you have zero sampling error, since you have a complete population count), the two means will very rarely be literally identical. There is some exact rational number that is "the average height of HN posters who registered on a January 2" and a rational number that is "the average height of HN posters who registered on a January 3", and these numbers are almost certainly different. Therefore demonstrating a difference in means is simply an exercise in getting a large enough sample size to prove something that is nearly always true. But going through the effort to collect the sample to "prove" that Jan-2nders are taller than Jan-3rders or vice-versa is not scientifically interesting, even though one of the two is almost certainly true. And it would certainly not be justified to hang much interpretation off my result, in which I speculated wildly about how evolutionary differences resulted in the Jan-3rders having (slightly) shorter height.

Now if you could show unexpectedly large differences, like many Jan-2nders are > 6ft while very few Jan-3rders are < 6ft, such that the population curves differ by more than a trivial amount, that could be an interesting result that merits further study. But then you need to be talking about distribution estimates and comparing curves and error bands, not talking about population means and quoting p-values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _But she warned that science could be "misused" to propagate the belief that people inherently have different abilities

...

based on skin colour or ethnic background_

Is the issue the variability or the link to causality? Because surely there is variability. The other issues get into statistical considerations relating to interpreting the genome itself. The argument that there is no genetic basis of {race} seems highly flawed at face value. So the question still remains about the co-variance matrices between the two sets of variations. This is where there seems to be a fine line with respect to identifying the data; understandin the data; and drawing conclusions (right or wrong) from the data. But without doing any of that work, it seems highly presumptive to argue there is no information {in that data} per-se, and/or to completely disregard it (out of hand). None of this has anything to do as of yet with granting political or social priveledge to certain people or others.

</comment><comment><USER9> "...spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture,..."

Wait, is this not generally accepted? (As in, not generally accepted that they are different).

<comment><USER10> "There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined."[1]

From a genetic perspective there is basically no basis for the traditional categorization of race. Two people of the same skin color, from the same country, who would be considered by traditional definitions to be the same race, can have completely different genetic lineages. There is a National Geographic documentary that discusses this called "The Human Family Tree" that is available on Netflix.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29#Complications_and_various_definitions_of_the_concept)

<comment><USER9> > basically no basis

what's "basically no basis"?

> can have completely different genetic lineages

yeah so what? that does not really prove that the concept of race does not exist.

<comment><USER11> Is it really important to you that race be traced back to genetics?

I mean, is it really important we have this concept?

You realize that your brain is not your skin right? The whole concept of race not existing is that if you look at genetic diversity for markers we can correlate to function, there is no difference between the "races" greater then the difference we find within each population - i.e. the population does not exist, beyond visual cues.

But you know, it's probably really important we be utterly pedantic on this point. Because heaven help us if we don't acknowledge people's skin color can be different in a consistent way. That seems really important and we must mention it a lot. For some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This stuff really makes my head spin. I consider myself a rationalist, a Bayesian even. If something is true, I'd like to believe it; if something is false, I'd like to believe it is false.

Whatever is true of race, I would like to believe. Even if it's politically incorrect, or even if it's not, I would like to believe whatever is true.

But I don't know what to believe. There doesn't even seem to be a noticeable leaning in the evidence for one side or the other. Experts in the appropriate fields say 'There is no scientific basis for the concept of race.' Experts in the appropriate fields also say 'Clearly there are racial differences.'

Is it a semantic issue mostly? Are some people just afraid of the inconvenient truth? Or is the other side peddling an 'inconvenient truth' for racists- motivated reasons? I am not coming close to having a grasp on this issue.

I only want to believe that which is true.

<comment><USER13> Racism is not about having a belief about a property. That "Bayesianism".

Racism is defined as making a judgement of value across ethnical boundaries.

"Blacks in the US get sick more often" is not racism, it's a scientific belief with evidence. "Africans are genetically more prone to have bad health" is a belief without enough evidence, which might be fueled by a subconscious judgement.

"We don't need to put an effort into improving African-American Health, because they are disease-riddled anyway" clearly is a value judgement and devoiding a part of the human species of rights the other part enjoys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It was never said that all humans where alike and to be handled the same way. You won't give the same birth control methods to male and female individual for instance. When speaking of equality, I think it is implied equality before society: equal rights, same laws, no irrelevant discrimination (I don't know how it works but I guess sellers are partially chosen depending on how they look and how attractive they are). It would not mean that you mean to be blind to factual and neutral evidence which leads to technical efficiency. From the original article:

> Published research has shown that blacks are more likely than whites to have > a blood type that causes sickle cell disease and can protect against > malaria, and are more likely to have a certain gene called APOL1, which > protects against a parasite that causes sleeping sickness.

It is quite a good example of information that could help put a diagnosis on a person taking into account racial aspects. And I doubt it would count as racist in any way. Because not everything is black or white, they is a grey area:

> She cited new research urging that children be identified based on their > genetically predetermined educational abilities and then put in separate > schools that could be used to foster different kinds of learning.

This is a border line case: technically, it might mean more proficient teaching using adapted methods for both groups. However, this is also segregation. A way to draw some line would be to avoid discriminating social interactions: in this case, X kids are only interacting with X kids, which make a bias on the population distribution.

tl;dr: calling "racism" on non-biased factual evidence is quite harsh, but we need to be cautious when using such facts

Note: "non-biased" because Nazis did pretend to have factual evidence against Jews, but it was only pseudo-science propaganda (and, well, they only used it to justify arbitrary discrimination)

<comment><USER15> The problem with

> She cited new research urging that children be identified based on their > genetically predetermined educational abilities and then put in separate > schools that could be used to foster different kinds of learning.

is, we already know that constructing social categories based on biological traits is bullshit, simply because the relevant criteria are not given by science. Science can only give a classification of some measure, but it can not reasonably define if the measure is relevant. For an extreme example, even if you get a "obviously relevant" distribution, you have to choose at which values you draw the line.

But lets assume for the sake of the argument, that there is initially no difference in the outcome of the education ( defining this is left as an exercise to the reader), one of the school types will be perceived as better. So it will get more applications, can afford harsher selection criteria and actually become better. At which point the better school will probably get more resources, and the cycle continues.

So calling "racism" on non-biased factual evidence is harsh. Assuming that non-biased factual evidence includes citations to the roughly 100 years of research how oppressive structures develop. (These 100 years of research are usually called feminism.) But we know that precisely these footnotes are the first to be dropped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think ignoring the differences between races (e.g. hypertension medicine targeted at african americans) is as wrong as ignoring the fact, that genetic differences between 2 people, which might be considered as being from the same "race", might be much greater.

Furthermore "white knighting" for races (i.e. probably non-caucasian ones) is very likely not much better than racism itself (same as the people fighting "for" women and against the jerks at conferences etc.).

</comment><comment><USER17> "the belief that people inherently have different abilities based on skin colour or ethnic background.". It certainly appears at present that this is largely true.

It's odd that on the one hand some people proclaim they are from a certain 'race'. On the other hand they don't want any characteristics of this 'race' to be drawn to anyone's attention because that's 'racism'. Meanwhile we get on with our lives and treat folk as we find them.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating- map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/)

</comment><comment><USER19> That entire article is nothing but moral supremacy dribble that's attacking science by using the R word to immediately claim victory and stop all discussion.

The people that used to wear white sheets on their heads, are now the same group of people that the author belongs to... They've just found a new way to make themselves feel superior.

They are the people that claim they are open minded, stand for diversity of ideas, and open discussions.

Yet the moment you present a counter-view to what they believe, you're a racist, a Nazi, your work should be shunned, and you should lose all chances of gainful employment.

</comment><comment><USER20> And then there is _speciesism_ : [http://i.word.com/idictionary/speciesism](http://i.word.com/idictionary/speciesism)

</comment><comment><USER21> I see after I awaken in my time zone that there have been quite a few thoughtful comments on the interesting article kindly submitted here, many of them replies to top-level comments. For participants on Hacker News who like to read whole books or scientific articles on facts about the world they live in, I recommend a specialized bibliography on race

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations)

kept in Wikipedia user space and updated from time to time. The actual articles on Wikipedia about the topic of "race" are mostly very low in quality and frequently edit-warred, with one of those articles being one of the ten most edit-warred articles on all of English Wikipedia.

The basic fact we can all rely on as we think about these issues is that we are all very closely related to one another, throughout humankind. Every human being is more closely related to and more similar to every other human being than most people imagine. That's a consistent finding of molecular genetics research.

The United States Census Bureau says

"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

[http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm)

In other words, "race" categories used by the United States government are arbitrary and are not based on science. A confirmation of this fact is the disagreement between any two countries' categories for "race"\--the same individual can change categories as the individual crosses national borders.

Feldman, Marcus W.; Lewontin, Richard C. (2008). "Chapter 5: Race, Ancestry, and Medicine". In Koenig, Barbara A.; Lee, Sandra Soo-jin; Richardson, Sarah S. _Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age._ New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-4324-6. is a good current book chapter on medical implications of race research informed by genetics. The article notes on page 93 "Finally, it must be borne in mind that the taxonomic problem cannot be inverted. That is, while clustering methods are capable of assigning an individual to a geographic population with a high degree of certainty, given that individual's genotype, it is not possible to predict accurately the genotype of an individual given his or her geographical origin. Thus, knowing an individual's ancestry only slightly improves the ability to predict his or her genotype. The more polymorphic the markers, the more difficult this is." Another book chapter, Harpending, Henry (2007). "Chapter 16: Anthropological Genetics: Present and Future". In Crawford, Michael. _Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications._ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 457. ISBN 978-0-521-54697-3, points out that "On the other hand, information about the race of patients will be useless as soon as we discover and can type cheaply the underlying genes that are responsible for the associations. Can races be enumerated in any unambiguous way? Of course not, and this is well known not only to scientists but also to anyone on the street." A specific example of "race" failing to explain a medical observation is hypertension (high blood pressure), already mentioned in this thread before I posted. The book chapter by a specialist on the development of blood pressure medicines, Kahn, Jonathan (13 August 2013). "Chapter 7: Bidil and Racialized Medicine". In Krimsky, Sheldon; Sloan, Kathleen. _Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture._ Columbia University Press. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-231-52769-9. points out that "In medical practice what matters is our shifting understanding of the correlations between such evolving social identities and the evolving economic, political, and environmental conditions to which they may be related. For example, what are we to make of the fact that African Americans suffer from disproportionately high rates of hypertension, but Africans in Nigeria have among the world's lowest rates of hypertension, far lower than the overwhelmingly white population of Germany? Genetics certainly plays a role in hypertension. But any role it plays in explaining such differences must surely be vanishingly small."

I have been to different parts of the world, and have met people from all over the world. Sometimes I have met persons of one "race" who look just about exactly like people I know from another "race," and I have found kindred people (as to any personal characteristic you care to name) among people from all over the world of all different "races." The race categories are not informative, or at least not informative about individual genomes. In some societies, "race" is a salient enough category that an individual's personal experience can be profoundly influenced by race categorization. If you haven't read the book before, you could read the book _Black Like Me_ by John Howard Griffin to learn more about that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Some people have massive, powerful shoulders. And they need them. To carry that chip on their shoulder for so long.

Whether their personal chip is racism, sexism, or any other -ism, their chip is the real problem. So, how do we stop them foisting their chips onto the rest of civilised society?

<comment><USER23> Focus on how they got the chip on their shoulder and then make sure it doesn't happen to anyone without one.

<comment><USER22> Sounds far too simplistic. Some people are born arseholes, some blame the world for their bad lot in life, others still take pleasure in causing problems and generally trolling. Finally a small honest few may derive their chip from personal experience, the most honest experience. I agree we should review what happened in their respective situations, and work to avoid that in the future. But the rest? Not worth the attention they so desperately seek.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture" \- D'oh!

<comment><USER24> Different but none better the others.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_classification)#Mod...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_\(human_classification\)#Modern_debate)</comment></comment>


JPMorgan Files Patent for P2P Distributed Ledger Settlement System - <AUTHOR> http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20180121911.PGNR.&OS=dn/20180121911&RS=DN/20180121911 <comment><USER2> Is this for Quorum, their _fork of Ethereum_?

Did they just fork ethereum, add untraceable private data privacy on a private chain, and try to patent it?

Hasn't ripple been doing basically exactly this -- what the patent application describes -- for more than 5 years?

Note: I read the quoted claims from what is probably this patent application on CoinDesk a day or two ago. I thought "isn't that basically what ripple does, except on a 'private chain' and therefore both prior art and obvious?"

AFAIU, the USPTO only searches their own database; other people have to explain that prior published art exists and that 'but on a private chain' and 'but on a blockchain' are very similar to 'but on a PC'.

Without reading the patent application, I'll have to rely on someone else to compare this patent application with, say, a dated copy of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_(payment_protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_\(payment_protocol\))

\-- [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bitcoinpriorart](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bitcoinpriorart)</comment>


Is It Ethically Okay to Get Food Delivered? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/grocery-delivery-takeout-eating-ethically-pandemic/610111/ <comment><USER2> The author wrote an article with a click bait title to conclude that they are not sure of the answer?

No one should be governing their moral principles based on a magazine or blog post. Evaluate the potential consequences of your actions and make the right decision for you. While I don't get food delivered as there are no options for that where I live, I personally see this as no different from any other delivery. Is it unethical to get mail?

My personal compass says this is perfectly ethical and presumably the alternative for the delivery person is unemployment. One could easily ask if it is unethical to NOT have deliveries given the plight of restaurants and their staff.

In the end, I see the whole conversation as a gross tone deaf exercise in privilege.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, why not</comment>


MacRuby soon on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://iflipbits.com/post/1101983568/macruby-soon-on-ios

<comment><AUTHOR> The debate over whether or not Ruby could play a major role in Apple's future may soon have a definitive answer.</comment>


Effective .emacs - <AUTHOR> http://a-nickels-worth.blogspot.com/2007/11/effective-emacs.html <comment><USER2> My .emacs has been more or less the same for the past 10 years. The 4 most critical lines are these:

     (global-set-key "\C-h"     'delete-backward-char)
     (global-set-key "\M-^"     'query-replace-regexp)
     (global-set-key "\C-x:"    'goto-line)
     (global-set-key "\C-x\C-e" 'compile)</comment>


Show HN: Komiser – Detect Potential AWS and GCP Cost Savings - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/komiser/komiser-optimize-cost-and-security-on-aws-183174ba58c5 <comment><AUTHOR> any feedback is welcome</comment>


W3schools: Chrome Has Surpassed Ten Percent Share - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/w3schools-chrome-has-surpassed-ten-percent-share/

<comment><USER2> Wikipedia has an aggregate table of several market share companies estimates: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table)

Currently, most put Chrome at between 5% - 6%.

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia also publishes its own stats, though they take some time to update them: [http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClien...](http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm)

</comment></comment><comment> jim-greer It's up to 9.8% of visits to Kongregate. Here's our browser share vs a year ago. IE lost a lot, Firefox a little, Chrome and Safari both made big gains.

Internet Explorer

Jan-10 41.8%

Jan-09 50.1%

Firefox

Jan-10 38.2%

Jan-09 40.2%

Chrome

Jan-10 9.8%

Jan-09 3.0%

Safari

Jan-10 7.5%

Jan-09 3.9%

Opera

Jan-10 2.4%

Jan-09 2.4%

<comment><USER4> What's interesting for HTML5 web developers is the rendering engines, which combines Chrome and Safari: IE(6/7/8 mélange): 41% Gecko: 38% Webkit: 17%.

So standards compliance is becoming more and more popular.

<comment><USER5> IE should be Trident.

 _Trident_ : 41%

 _Gecko_ : 38%

 _Webkit_ : 17%

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's take in mind that the first sentence acts as a disclaimer

"The web developer-focused w3schools releases browser statistics every month."

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the last year on Mibbit (main client). <http://mibbit.com/browserShare.png>

What was surprising to me is that chrome is stealing share from IE. Which is fantastic news! Course the other theory would be that firefox is stealing share from IE, but Chrome is stealing share from firefox at about the same rate.

But in any event, less IE is good for the web.

<comment><USER8> > But in any event, less IE is good for the web.

My hatred for IE 6 notwithstanding, I'd phrase it: browser diversity is good for the web. I see nothing wrong about using IE 8 (although it's not my personal choice), because thanks to competition it's actually a decent browser.

<comment><USER9> There's nothing decent about IE8 -- and competition doesn't really apply to it since it's installed (and upgraded) by default on the majority of PC's. Since nobody chooses IE, there is no real incentive to make it competitive.

<comment><USER10> Have you actually used IE8 as your main browser for any length of time? It's actually quite good. Certainly better than FireFox+Firebug for development, with its proper javascript debugger.

If it weren't for Chrome, I'd be using it today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love Chrome. I installed it as the default browser on my company's Terminal Server/Citrix for our 50 users. It is a bit difficult to set it up in TS environment for all users but once setup, it works great. When 15-20 people had IE open with our intranet site, the server spiked to 60-70% usage. With Chrome, it's barely 20%.

<comment><USER12> Could you please explain why the choice of browser affect the server load?

<comment><USER13> Because for whatever reason he has people accessing the intranet via a browser running in terminal services/citrix -- meaning all of those browsers sessions are running on the server and the clients are simply presented with a view of what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know all of you hackers love your Chrome, but when I tried to switch, it was a total bust for me on a Macbook Pro.

Chrome is indeed much faster than Firefox, but it is embarrassingly bad at running Google applications... GMail and Docs are both heavily bugged in Chrome, and I depend on those daily. The exact moment I switched was when Chrome wouldn't let me send an email in GMail because it would always want to scroll up to the top of any GMail page... a really bizarre bug.

Other annoyances that switched me back to FireFox:

* Chrome crashed on me several times

* I had to put up with annoying ads

* The JS debugging tools are alien to me

And also, quite honestly, it was frickin' annoying to re-login to a billion websites. If they are importing my settings and such from FF, would it be insecure or some such to import my passwords?

</comment><comment><USER15> The site I write for isn't particularly addressed to geeks. It got about 14 million pageviews in January, and Chrome represents about 5.8% of visitors.

</comment><comment><USER16> Conclusion: The next wave of web developers pick Chrome.

<comment><USER7> You can't just dismiss it like that. Techies are early adopters. Chrome is smashing through and stealing market share from every other browser. Check your own stats. Check others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does Chroem work well on the Mac yet? The two times I tried it was terribly slow, especially in scrolling.

<comment><USER18> It works just fine. I've been using Chrome on Mac since they began releasing stable ones a few months back. Haven't looked back (I also use it on every other OS, so I may be bias.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I figure Google has released a browser simply (as with their Google toolbar) so they can spider all the 'dark web' pages everyone visits. Evidence? Look at all those eBay search results when eBay prevents spidering.

<comment><USER20> Where is eBay preventing spidering? Their robots.txt doesn't block off anything significant, and while it says that robots should ask permission Google would certainly have that. I also don't remember any issues crawling it with the startup I work at except that the site is _massive_ and extremely time-sensitive.

<comment><USER19> I remember a few years ago, an auction aggregator tried to spider eBay (just incrementing the auction ID) and eBay basically sued them, or blocked it off - either way, the aggregator went out of business.

But that was 2001. So I guess things have changed (and thanks for informing me).</comment></comment></comment>


Presenting Doesn't Have to Be as Scary as Halloween - <AUTHOR> http://mindfulpresenter.com/mindful-blog/presenting-doesn-t-have-to-be-as-scary-as-halloween <comment><USER2> Very Nice.</comment>


Ask HN: Any software projects considered Done? - <AUTHOR> Assuming the semantics of programming languages are well-defined, I'm wondering if there's any software projects that we can confidently say are entirely bug-free and not requiring any new feature additions to be considered complete.
If not, how about only considering the projects' core source code, not counting compiler/build-chain bugs and dependency bugs?
If not, what would be the closest? <comment><USER2> Daniel Bernstein's qmail has a standing offer from 1997 to find a bug [https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html](https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html) and the last version released was in 1998, I guess it's done. He wrote a paper about why it succeeded [https://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf](https://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> TeX (not LaTex) is quite close [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#TeX82](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#TeX82)

</comment><comment><USER4> The Hewlett Packard calculators had their binary code inserted into the ROMs as part of the fabrication of the chip. The code was written in assembly language, then heavily tested on hardware simulators. The original HP-35 had a bug in the logarithm code. The bug had to be found and fixed, retested, new ROM chips fabricated and packages. Then owners that wanted it fixed had to mail their calculator back to HP. The unit was opened up, a ROM chip removed, the new ROM soldered in, unit closed up, tested, mailed back. All for free. There was a very strong demand that this never happen again. I am unaware of any other HP calculator recalls. Each calculator code was considered complete.

The early video games, both console and arcade, were delivered in ROM chips. Also early embedded systems like DVD/CD disk players, televisions, modules in cars, routers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I consider the static site generator [0] I wrote done. I don't plan to add new features (can't think of any). I have no idea if there are bugs left in it; I have been using it for 476 days to generate a tumblelog [1].

[0] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john- bokma/tumblelog)

[1] [https://plurrrr.com/](https://plurrrr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I doubt they'd claim to be perfectly "bug free" but this came to mind reading your post: [https://github.com/boltdb/bolt](https://github.com/boltdb/bolt)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the GNU coreutils are mostly done.</comment>


Juul employees get a special $2B bonus from tobacco giant Altria - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/20/juul-to-pay-2-billion-dividend-to-its-employees-after-altria-deal.html <comment><USER2> It's $150 per share so most of that is going to investors and a small number of large share holders.

Link: [https://www.recode.net/2018/12/20/18150929/juul-altria- billi...](https://www.recode.net/2018/12/20/18150929/juul-altria-billions- dollars-dividend-shareholders-employees)</comment>


Entrepreneurs, you only have to be right once! - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-you-only-have-to-be-right-once/

<comment><AUTHOR> It may be a bit old, but I just read it, and thought I should share it with all HNers.</comment>


CSS Playing Cards - <AUTHOR> http://selfthinker.github.io/CSS-Playing-Cards

<comment><USER2> Check also: [https://github.com/Youpinadi/cards](https://github.com/Youpinadi/cards)

</comment><comment><USER3> These are great. I was looking for such a set to illustrate sorting algorithms for a pet project of mine.</comment>


Dashboard Metrics that Actually Work - <AUTHOR> https://segment.io/academy/dashboard-metrics-that-actually-work/

<comment><USER2> In my experience, dashboard metrics shown on TV screens for everyone to see are as useful as wall painted murals -- cool to look at but not much help driving the business forward. Everyone wants to look at different things. Marketing might want to look at ROI and LTV, PM's want to see retention rates, and execs want to see top line goals as a percentage of monthly targets. Its better to have a tool that can be customized for each owner / stakeholder.</comment>


Elon Musk: Watch this documentary for free until Sunday night - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/982119546420002817 <comment><AUTHOR> I highly recommend everyone to watch this great documentary. We all know AI (and robotics) will be revolutionary, as we see it daily in the news and in our social feeds, or we are (enthousiastically) working on AI projects ourselves. This 1,5hr well-made movie brings it all together, and offers a disturbing glimpse into our near future. The revolution is well underway, and it is mostly unregulated.

Watch and share!

You can watch for free until Sunday night, April 8, according to Elon Musk

If you are (rightfully) worried about where this all leads, come join the non- profit humanetech.com community and provide your insights and solutions for the development of more Humane Technology. We are still small with 1300+ members and need all the help we can get :)

</comment><comment><USER2> It's here:

[http://doyoutrustthiscomputer.org/watch](http://doyoutrustthiscomputer.org/watch)</comment>


Confession: I Don't Think Uber Is Actually a Great Business (Yet) - <AUTHOR> https://finnscave.com/2016/04/11/dont-think-uber-actually-great-business/ <comment><USER2> Uber's value is this:

1\. Same interface in any city. I don't need to figure out what the taxi phone number is (or what they are in case of multiple companies).

2\. I can get a car somewhere other than downtown.

3\. I can pay with credit, without fear that a driver will (best case) lie that the credit card machine is not working, until I say I don't have cash, or (worst case) kidnap me and take me to an ATM.

4\. No silly medallion limits, so I never need to wait for long, even at closing time.

They really don't need to do the Ponzi scheme thing, hemorrhaging money and leaving the VC with the bill. Plenty of people will gladly pay more than a cab for the above benefits. In that sense, taxis are not really a competitor.

<comment><USER3> These are consumer benefits, what does this have to do with Uber being a great business?

<comment><USER2> Right now, Uber's business model is throw so much VC money at everything that everybody else goes out of business, and hope the taxis die before you run out of VC money.

<comment><USER4> So Uber's short/mid term plan is to put all taxis out of business by lowering prices using VC money and their long term plan is to use autopilot cars to leave all drivers jobless.

And the other day there was an engineer from Uber commenting how ethical the company was.

I'm sure their engineering team is very ethical and responsible. But their business model and plan is actually very questionable. It's like they are hiding the highly questionable business ethics behind the good engineering ethics.

Or is there a point I'm missing?

<comment><USER5> Don't forget the whole dodging regulations thing. This aspect of the "sharing" economy I find the most disgusting.

Ethics goes out of the window in the pursuit of profit.

<comment><USER6> BS. The "ethics" went out the window when the taxi cartels captured the regulators in the first place.

Don't want people to play a crooked game? Don't set one up.

<comment><USER5> That's a shortsighted view. Similar to saying that the Airplane cartel captured the regulators and are preventing indie airlines from starting up...

Regulations exist for many reasons, not all are designed to act as a barrier for new entrants. Consumer safety springs to mind...

<comment><USER6> Have to agree to disagree on this one. Comparing taxi medallions to the FAR is enough of a stretch that I don't see a further basis for discussion.

<comment><USER5> Yes the comparison is ridiculous, but so is your complete dismissal of taxi regulations. If you can't see that, then I agree that there is no further basis for discussion.

Plus acknowledging that regulations do provide some benefit is reasonable. Regulations ensure that: * Taxis are regularly maintained * Pricing is standardized, transparent, with rules to prevent gouging during "surge" periods * Background checks for drivers * Drivers are qualified (have to pass various tests to get licensed)

On a more philosophical level, I think taxis serve a public utility function, similar to busses and subways. In this sense, some government oversight makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uber definitely has some advantages vis-a-vis competitors, because there is a brand and networking effect at play.

Everyone knows about Uber, nobody knows anything about that 'local startup'.

The real competitor is obviously regular cabs. There is always a cab when I need one in Montreal, I don't care about Uber really.

The bit about 'regional profitiability' is valid. I'm suspicious that Uber is running profitably in the US. That said, I'll bet the absolutely could if they wanted to ... but they spend a lot on aggressive tactics/marketing.

If they had to 'stop growth' and 'just be a US' company right now - they'd have to lay off, downround etc.. Sure - they'd have screwed over later investors, but that's the point no?

The loser in all of this is the later stage dumb money. Mostly everyone else wins.

</comment><comment><USER8> The real question is whether Uber can ever make money without subsidizing rides with investor capital. At some point, they have to raise prices. This make them vulnerable to competition.

The good news is that if Uber goes under, it's easy to replace them. Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin TX last May over required fingerprinting of drivers. Ten competitors sprang up to replace Uber and Lyft. They're doing fine.[1]

[1] [http://www.curbed.com/2016/12/7/13828514/uber-lyft-ride- aust...](http://www.curbed.com/2016/12/7/13828514/uber-lyft-ride-austin- rideshare-get-me)

<comment><USER9> Curbed is ... not the best experience I've had in ride-hailing. To be honest, it's easier and more convenient for me to have the office call a cab for those relatively few times when I'm in Austin. They may have ironed out some of the quirks of their platform since then (scheduled cabs being called out immediately, an attempt to get a ride to the airport being denied because the app decided I was trying to be dropped off on the tarmac itself), but there's no killer reason yet for me to try it out again.

Having said that, it's definitely true that there are basically no meaningful barriers to entry beyond mindshare (after all, every Uber driver is also running Lyft, and likewise for the drivers -- and Lyft's better driver rates are also why I have to use Lyft when I leave for the airport at 3 AM).

Things like UberEATS may provide some stickiness, but I'm far from sold that their basic economics are going to work in the long run, let alone keep them in the market pole position.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure UberEATS must be a horrible customer experience based on the random shit I see happening at registers in places that I get food from. Stuff like the driver having no idea what the customer has ordered and just taking any old order the people behind the cash register are willing to give them. Since both ends of this transaction don't qualify as the sharpest tools in the shed, it's basically the blind leading the blind.

I get that it makes sense from Uber's point of view -- increasing driver utilization and smoothing out the supply side of the relationship is probably great for their unit economics. But they actually have to execute it well if they expect people like me to use it.

<comment><USER11> I use UberEATS multiple times a week and every time experience is very good. They deliver fast, no tipping and so far all orders were correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Facebook six years back: "There's no way they're worth $33B" [1]. Now they're worth 10X, publicly traded, and printing money. Respectfully, even professional prognosticators (ie. VCs) get this shit wrong 9 times out of 10... so lamenting all the ways it could "fail to be a great business" isn't really that insightful (in the probabilistic priors sense).

TL;DR: You could be right (and frequently will be), and you could be spectacularly wrong. But we're just Monday-quarterbacking while they're trying to make the future bad-ass with magical "autonomous" cars (whether human drivers or computerized). That's cool in my book; I wish them the best of luck!

[1] [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not- worth-33...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not- worth-33000000000)

<comment><USER13> How long is it going to last though? I expect FB to face some very hard questions about it's ad business (click farming, bots, etc) in the next 12-24 months.

<comment><USER3> Really? I don't.

Companies aren't blindly paying FB billions of dollars for ads without verifying they actually deliver a return... Clearly it's working, that's the reason so many companies pay for them.

Sure, they could probably get better at managing "click farming, bots, etc", but despite these things, advertising on FB has proven incredibly valuable and there's no clear indicator that'll change soon. If anything it'll just grow more valuable across a larger user base, hence their lofty P/E ratio (implying growth).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Uber is overvalued.

It's not rocket science, easily copied, little customer loyalty and consumers will switch quickly to whoever offers the better and cheaper service.

The end game here is autonomous vehicles and I'm not sure they are even in the game.

<comment><USER15> Uber is already running autonomous car tests with customers[1]. They have an entire division devoted to self driving technology[2].

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/1386711/](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/1386711/) [2] [https://www.uber.com/info/atc/](https://www.uber.com/info/atc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The BBC ran an interesting article the other day asking if Uber were getting too big to fail, pointing to the way state-subsidised Uber is replacing public transport in some areas and worrying about what their lack of profitability means for this: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38252405](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38252405)

</comment><comment><USER17> How could Uber have negative gross margin? I have a hard time believing that.

I guess it depends on what they include in COGS.

<comment><USER18> They pay drivers more than they charge users. It's pretty simple.

Over 75% of my Uber rides are heavily subsidized in some way:

\- pools where no one else is picked up.

\- 25% off coupon for 10 rides (I almost always have one of these)

\- 50% off coupon for 5 rides (I get like once a month, and have one currently)</comment></comment>


To Build a Better Teapot, Researchers Create Liquid Helix - <AUTHOR> http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2019/05/to-build-better-teapot-researchers.html <comment><USER2> Url changed from [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/dribble-no-more- phys...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/dribble-no-more-physics-can- help-combat-that-pesky-teapot-effect/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER3> My Hario teapot never does that. Their spout is really great, I hope they have patented the hell out of it.</comment>


Lawn chairs and kitchen tables: Ergonomics in the involuntary work-from-home era - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/08/work-from-home-01-ergo/ <comment><USER2> Amazing to see how few people actually think about this. I badgered my sister in law to not work from a laptop on a folding table months ago. She's still at it but finally let me order her a full ergonomic setup within her budget (chair/regular desk/monitor/keyboard/mouse/webcam/light)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the top of my monitor should be at eye level or slightly higher. Any lower and I start slouching down to read. Looking up helps my posture.</comment>


(Video) New York City in 1993 in HD – DTheater DVHS Demo Tape - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT4lDU-QLUY <comment><AUTHOR> Uploaded by one of my favourite YouTube channels, Techmoan.

There are a few clues to the era in this video - older vehicles and suchlike - but the most striking difference between now and then to me is the absence of smartphones.

Crowds of people going about their business and not staring at their phones is such a bizarre sight nowadays.</comment>


Tech care of elders - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/digital-puppy-seniors-nursing-homes/ <comment><AUTHOR> I really liked the CareCoach approach for solving, probably, one of the most profound problem of care taking. Good way of giving the human touch to AI. Also intelligently lowering the bar of AI expectations thru an Pet avatar...

I've never used or know someone who has any experience using it but reading the article makes me think they must be doing a decent job...</comment>


Ask HN: Does it make sense to use GitHub for private projects? - <AUTHOR> Most private companies are using Bitbucket and JIRA with bitbucket pipeline for CI.<p>Is there any leaner setup for small tech startups? <comment><USER2> > Most private companies are using Bitbucket and JIRA with bitbucket pipeline > for CI.

No, they don't. Feel free to provide data to the contrary but anecdotally every startup I've ever worked at used GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think, if you are using Atlassian stack (Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, etc.) it makes more sense to use BitBucket or Stash because they are all working together very well.</comment>


KnightOS, a third party OS for TI z80 calculators - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KnightOS/KnightOS KnightOS is a third-party Operating System for Texas Instruments z80 calculators. It offers many features over the stock OS, including multitasking and a tree-based filesystem, delivered in a Unix-like environment. KnightOS is written entirely in z80 assembly, with a purpose-built toolchain. Additionally, the KnightOS kernel is standalone, and you can use it as the basis for your own powerful operating systems.<p>You can download the latest (experimental) version here: http://www.knightos.org/download/ <comment><USER2> I'm the author of this software, with the help of some open-source contributors. Feel free to send questions my way.

Even people who don't know assembly can help, if you're interested. We need assembly, C, Python, and web programmers. Let me know if you're interested in helping out.

<comment><USER3> This is very well done! Almost makes me want dig up my 83 Silver Edition, try it out, port Antrun and fix that one bug that made it impossible to play after a while[0]... except I have given it to my sister who actually has a proper use for it during her biology master.

Does this OS come at the cost of not having any of the standard calculator functions, or are all of those still supported? Or maybe a better catch-all question that covers that: what do I have to give up if I switch to KnightOS from the stock OS?

Does it support any forms of on-calc programming?

[0] [http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/328/32817.html](http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/328/32817.html)

<comment><USER2> You give up math support, as well as on-calc file editing. However, efforts are underway to support both of these things.

You could probably port that game fairly easily. Many Ion functions are included in the kernel.

<comment><USER3> Does it work on emulators? If so, any suggestions? (I haven't kept up with development of the TI calc scene at all, I assume there's new kids on the block by now)

<comment><USER4> Runs best on wabbitemu, but you'll need wine to use it on Linux. We're working on a new emulator, maybe you'd like to help? [https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e](https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another project worth mentioning is [GlassOS]([http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5686&highlight...](http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5686&highlight=glassos)) which is an operating system for the TI-8x series calculators written in C and compiled with sdcc. It doesn't offer multitasking (or at least not background tasks, suspending and resuming might be planned, I don't know). It also supports some fairly gimmicky things like system-wide grayscale settings. It also hasn't seen any development for several months, which makes me sad.

KnightOS seems to be more focused on just providing a sane environment for user programs instead of TI's stock OS which is calculator-first and user programs are second class citizens.

I'm not sure how practical preemptive scheduling with background tasks is for these devices, they really are resource constrained. I'm sure it works fine with one background process, especially if it clocks up the cpu for that, but I don't see it scaling much beyond that. I'll have to try it out some time.

I'd be interested to see if a compatibility layer for programs written in C could be set up. SDCC's binaries tend to be reasonably performant, but significantly larger than their assembly equivalent. With 31k available to programs however, C could work for a lot of applications. I might hack on that sometime.

<comment><USER2> I hope to eventually implement C support in some form. You're right about SDCC making huge binaries, though - GlassOS is enormous, there's very little space left on the device and it supports fewer calculator models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to see a never ending well of software for TI calculators check out [http://www.ticalc.org/](http://www.ticalc.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Needs the most important feature that prints out the "Memory cleared..." text as the original TI-OS would to fool the teachers and still have your crib notes!

<comment><USER8> If these kinds of hacks become popular, I wouldn't be surprised if some school districts and standardized test makers decided to ban all non-stock-OS calculators in the near future.

They might even partner with TI to add some sort of DRM and force students to buy these new, even more overpriced, "ETS-approved" calculators...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, this brings me back to the early 2000s and MirageOS, which wasn't actually an OS but a glorified shell: [http://www.detachedsolutions.com/mirageos/](http://www.detachedsolutions.com/mirageos/)

This is a complete replacement though, right? IIRC, the firmware updates had to be signed, how did you get around that?

<comment><USER2> > This is a complete replacement though, right?

Yep.

> IIRC, the firmware updates had to be signed, how did you get around that?

Here are Texas Instrument's private keys: [https://github.com/KnightOS/kernel/tree/master/keys](https://github.com/KnightOS/kernel/tree/master/keys)

<comment><USER10> How'd you get them?

<comment><USER11> They were successfully brute forced in 2009: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_signing_key...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_signing_key_controversy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thought I'd share this as it's really neat

<comment><USER12> The text you posted doesn't make it in with the submission when there's a url. (It's on our list to modify the software to make that clear.) The way to do it is to submit the link and then post the text as a comment to the thread—which you'd be welcome to do here. The project looks cool!

<comment><USER13> @dang As far as I can tell, the text _does_ make it in with the submission (i.e. it is stored) but it is not _displayed_.

I'm reading HN on hn.premii.com (which uses the Algolia API) and I see both the submission URL and the submission text.

BTW thanks for the awesome work you're doing on HN!

<comment><USER12> Thanks! You're right: the text is stored (that's how I knew it existed) but doesn't show up when there's a URL. Unless, it seems, you're using a clever client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Other than tinkering, what's the point of that project?

AFAIK you buy those things because you want TI's math software, not because you need some hardware to run your software on it. After all, these are _a bit_ pricey if just look at the hardware, right?

<comment><USER15> A TI-73 or TI-83 is $20 or less on eBay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. Good job! Unfortunately I lost my TI-84, I'm tempted to try KnightOS on an emulator on an android tablet, running in an emulator on my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does it do math?

<comment><USER2> No, but it's being worked on. It wasn't being worked on until recently.

<comment><USER18> Nice. The main reason I own a Casio (9750g) is because I can't stand the TI8x OS. The hardware is better than the Casio but the software isnt. This could be the sweet spot :)

I understand some people might call me crazy but I couldn't use a calculator that forces you to shift to enter EE.</comment></comment></comment>


JB-9 jetpack makes debut flying around Statue of Liberty - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/jetpack-aviation-new-york-flight/40286/ <comment><USER2> I used to work for this guy, for a company called Yodel (owned by Fulfilnet). I know it's not Hacker News worthy, but he's a really awful human being and I remember him coming into the building and firing people blindly just so he could make enough money to keep his jetpack hobby alive. He's British, so he started businesses in Australia and left them running remotely so he couldn't be brought down by them.

Sorry for talking about the person and not the technology, I just can't stand by when I watched this guy really screw people over for his own personal gain.

Sources: [http://www.ecommercereport.com.au/failed-businesses-yodel- bl...](http://www.ecommercereport.com.au/failed-businesses-yodel-blink- digital-fulfilnet-etc-re-surface-as-australian-internet-advertising-pty- limited/) <\-- This is the interesting one. After crashing his previous businesses he started up another and bought the assets and customers under a new name, then started fresh. New company is [https://www.aiad.com.au/](https://www.aiad.com.au/)

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

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-16/customers-left-in- the-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-16/customers-left-in-the-lurch-as- internet-ad-agencies-go-bust/5159762)

<comment><USER3> What is wrong with firing people to cut the costs?

<comment><USER4> Sounds like two things: 1) Firing people blindly and 2) Doing #1 to fund an expensive hobby. Neither one really demonstrates responsibility that you'd want in a good leader, to say the least.

So to your question: Nothing. But embracing parent's experiential data: Everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In USA future, backpack carries _you_!

I was a skeptic, but this looks unbelievably cool (even though they could have done a lot more cinematically).

However, jetpacks seem fundamentally limited to me because of the energy required. Perhaps a nuclear powered one would solve this? Or, the mythical massively higher density battery.

An alternative for personal flight is the powered parasail (aka parapont). There's a local guy who cruises around the bay shoreline at about 20-30feet, for a couple of hours. It's not capable of jetpack acrobatics, but more like seagulls soaring along a ridge.

<comment><USER6> Nuclear would definitely solve the endurance problem. Since there's no weight margin for shielding, a few minutes of fuel would suffice for a lifetime supply.

<comment><USER7> Ha. I suppose a lifetime warranty is not out of the question as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The competition referenced may be the Martin Jetpack. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Jetpack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Jetpack)

It is listed on the ASX stock exchange, although hasn't released a product to market yet. However, I think they may be further down the line towards commercialisation.

The JB-9 looks more lightweight and fun, but the Martin has a parachute...

<comment><USER9> A parachute doesn't really make it safe. There is still a large "dead zone" where it would be too high for the pilot to survive a crash but too low for the parachute to work. Unlike a helicopter, the propulsion system doesn't have enough inertia to perform a power-off autorotation.

Some designs for larger powered lift vehicles have somewhat solved that problem by using multiple engines with cross-linked drive shafts. But that increases size, weight, and cost.

These jet pack devices may find a very limited niche market. But they don't have much of a real use case beyond looking cool on video. Most potential buyers will still prefer small helicopters, or drones.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if they could put in an electric hybrid system that could give a few seconds of propulsion to slow decent in the case of losing gas power. I have no idea though if that would even make sense because it seems like it would just increase the weight with no benefit.

<comment><USER9> Sure but it would require a complex, heavy, and expensive set of electric motors, transmissions, clutches, batteries, etc. At that point you might as well just use a helicopter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I actually submitted this yesterday but it got resubmitted automatically? Is this a new HN feature?

<comment><USER11> An experiment they're doing to give "the best stories" a good chance [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537417)

<comment><USER12> This is great

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This one is cool too: [http://mashable.com/2015/11/05/jetman- airbus-a380/#R7nf8vKsQ...](http://mashable.com/2015/11/05/jetman- airbus-a380/#R7nf8vKsQ8q3)

<comment><USER14> The JetMan device is not a jetpack in the proper sense of the word. It's actually a full-fledged airplane (just mini size) with turboprops. It requires forward velocity to generate lift. Also, it can fly quite a bit longer than a jetpack.

A true jetpack generates lift reactively, and can hover at zero forward velocity.

<comment><USER15> It looks a lot cooler though, in motion. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Serious question, anyone know the ballpark figures of thrust-to-weight based on 1000 ft/min ascent rate for fully loaded and ground level?

I'm trying to calculate maximum theoretical fuel capacity, essentially 1:1 thrust-to-weight, given it burns kerosene - 6.82 lbs/gallon at STP.

10 gallons of kerosene = 68.2 lbs is much less than the weight variation of a standard adult human, which falls roughly in the range 100 lbs - 200 lbs, so doubling the fuel capacity should be easy.

I suppose engine upgrades would also be easy. They did mention the JB-10 was in the works...

[Edit: thanks Retric, 68.2 lbs not 16 lbs]

<comment><USER17> Yea, 10 minutes of flight time seem incredibly high to me. That means you could significantly increase it with external fuel tanks (say, for a total of 20 gallons). 15 minutes would be a darn long jet pack ride. Limiting factor is actually just how much weight you could plausibly carry on your back.

(Edited numbers.)

<comment><USER18> it seems they are using pure jets and in this case high-by-pass would be a way to immediately improve the thrust and thus to decrease the fuel consumption.

<comment><USER19> It crossed my mind that all you really need is the right engines and some means of control ...

[http://jetbeetle.com/JB_body_products.htm](http://jetbeetle.com/JB_body_products.htm)

Cost for 150lbf thrust about $15k [http://crxturbines.com/jetbeetle.htm](http://crxturbines.com/jetbeetle.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> obligatory [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJARrc40imk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJARrc40imk) \- used turbojet as the one on Tomahawk cruise missile.

</comment><comment><USER20> Big city firefighters need these. They could fly up skyscrapers and rescue people or bring hoses way up there.

Mountain rescue teams could use them to extract people or get first aid to the sides of cliffs.

I remember watching Navy Seals jumping out of helicopters in San Diego harbor and then presumably swimming down to meet submarines. They could do this in reverse - climb out of a submarine and then flying up to the helicopter.

Cool stuff.

<comment><USER21> Except that you can't really carry additional weight (certainly not another person). Even a lightweight hose or line would mess up your flight if it was tethered. As for fires: burning buildings are masses of hot, moving air which wouldn't be navigable (the best you could do would be to land on an unaffected side of the building).

Even the Martin Jetpack (the only other nearly-commercial product in this market at the moment):

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

is only likely to be useful in a small number of "first responder" situations despite being dramatically more powerful.

<comment><USER22> Party-pooper, you're holding the future back! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shouldn't we look to genetics and try to grow wings instead?

I often wonder how different the world would look if "humans" had evolved from birds instead of from primates...

<comment><USER24> Thank you,but i am happy a primate.but you have to consider faster heart beats ,very short life span etc

<comment><USER25> Not all birds are short lived... Over 60 and still producing offspring:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_%28albatross%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_%28albatross%29)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [√] jetpack

[ ] flying car

[ ] Pan-Am space shuttle

[ ] Space station with artificial gravity

</comment><comment><USER27> Why does it use 1 gallon per minute?

<comment><USER28> To counteract 9.8m/s^2 of downwards acceleration?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> About damn time...I want 4 of them now!

</comment><comment><USER30> I wish I could have someone with a remote control fly me to work every day with one of these.

<comment><USER31> or software which could automate the flight path similar to a drone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Meet George Jetson...

</comment><comment><USER33> Uh oh -- this might be a game changer for well-funded suicide bombers.

<comment><USER34> Private planes have existed for a long, long time and can carry a lot more explosives than this can.

Also, where are these "well-funded suicide bombers" I keep hearing about? The ones in the news all seem to be running on household chemicals, jacked-up cookware, and chutzpah.

<comment><USER35> Provided by the Feds in numerous cases too!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: how to build large scale infrastructure with less spending? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am working on a Facebook application. Never developed application for large scale. I am not clear about monetization model for project yet.
How can i build cost effective infrastructure to handle large scale ? <comment><USER2> I'd say get started with one instance and go from there. You will be able to first increase the instance, second separate the database out onto a 2nd instance and third, add instances.

Two things you might want to consider or DotCloud which takes some of the pain out of scaling and Joyent which has a free year of hosting for preferenced treatment for Facebook apps: [http://www.joyentcloud.com/developers/free- facebook-develope...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/developers/free-facebook- developer-program/)

<comment><AUTHOR> definitely helpful any thoughts on databases?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you considered using one of the PHP PaaS solutions like dotcloud, phpfog, pagodabox or cloudControl?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am using php + mysql so thinking to get 2 small EC2 instances from Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER4> Caching! Check out Varnish, and memcached for various caching schemes.</comment>


Introducing Sign in with Slack - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/introducing-sign-in-with-slack-290949e1c3f5#.dtcij5s54 <comment><USER2> Can anybody speak to the strategic business advantage of rolling this out? Is it simply branding? A data play? Building a moat? It seems everyone wants their own Sign In button. FB getting a Like button everywhere had a clear data advantage to them as it let them get analytics on where everyone went. Does this do something similar for Slack?</comment>


CMU Binary Bomb meets Symbolic Execution and Radare - <AUTHOR> http://ctfhacker.com/ctf/python/symbolic/execution/reverse/radare/2015/11/28/cmu-binary-bomb-flag2.html <comment><USER2> I did this lab as part of CMU's excellent intro to systems class (15-213, which also happens to be the zip code of CMU). Its one of the best courses offered in the CS department. As far as bomb lamb itself, I had a lot of fun doing this lab and getting to use gdb.

For anyone interested, here is the class and labs - [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/).

<comment><USER3> My first instinctive response to seeing this post's title was "Oh no, someone has published the solution for binary bomb, that's unnecessarily damaging to the 213 pedagogy."

Upon not-much-more reflection though: all pedagogy has to adapt to available tools and techniques. Even classic college-level puzzles like the binary bomb aren't excepted if decompilation and analysis tools have advanced far enough to make "Hit it with gdb until your head aches" no longer the best solution approach.

(Besides, gdb is the tool for the job, not necessarily the best tool for the job. That program really shows its age these days).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like Radare is not far from being a full decompiler. I remember when it was still a rough prototype.</comment>


Cloud Haskell on Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://alenribic.com/writings/post/raspberry-pi-in-a-haskell-cloud

<comment><AUTHOR> Another idea: port HaLVM and get a Haskell baremetal OS - with native threads, GC, type safety, instant boot - <https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM>

<comment><USER2> halvm.org seems to be down (<http://isitup.org/halvm.org>). However, there is a summary here[1] and the source is on GitHub[2].

[1]: <http://corp.galois.com/halvm/> [2]: <https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, it has moved to github now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's an interesting use case for Raspberry Pi. My team loves to play around with them. In fact we are about to launch an Open Source OS for it (the current Raspbian OS is weak at best). We're also testing various serially chained variations as well.

Bottom-line. It's really cool to see what this little thing is doing as far as innovation in the market.

<comment><USER4> I'm interested in hearing more about this RPi OS. Would you mind sharing? So as not to take the thread too far off course: my email is in my profile.</comment></comment>


The Linux Documentation Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.tldp.org/ <comment><USER2> Cutting edge CSS3 / HTML5 !

How did they pull this off???</comment>


Random good Pens from Codepen.io on each refresh - <AUTHOR> http://upwith.it/

<comment><AUTHOR> just whipped this up last night for fun. expect more from this domain.</comment>


Basic Income: Bots are going to force the issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.danballard.com/?p=249

<comment><USER2> We need a robot tax to pay for minimum income.</comment>


The First BBS (1978) - <AUTHOR> http://www.portcommodore.com/cbbs.php <comment><USER2> That's insane. I used to run an 8 line renegade BBS in Minneapolis in the early 90's. The scale of then versus now is straight up crazy.

<comment><USER3> I ran a 3 line renegade bbs system, the WWW is still catching up to how strong the bbs community was or maybe I am just nostalgic.</comment></comment>


EMC co-founder kills himself - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/30/richard_egan_obituary/ <comment><USER2> >Egan had an amazing life, encompassing involvement in the Apollo space programme, the US Marines, starting and building the most successful storage company on the planet, and becoming the US ambassador to Ireland. Finally, aged 73 and facing a lingering death, he ended the battle decisively and on his terms. He was never a shrinking violet.

Would you do the same? I would!

</comment><comment><USER3> "Maybe I don't have any compassion. Maybe these things I am doing are not altruistic. If you do it for altruistic reasons, it will collapse. To do good just to feel good is no good."

I especially like this quote, and I think this idea had a lot to do with his success.

I wish the title somehow explained the fact that he was about to die from lung cancer. While factual, "EMC co-founder kills himself" is a vast oversimplification that probably leaves many readers with the wrong idea.</comment>


How I bootstrapped a 59x ROAS e-commerce cold audience in 8 weeks on Instagram - <AUTHOR> https://blog.phantombuster.com/how-i-bootstrapped-a-59x-roas-e-commerce-cold-audience-in-8-weeks-on-instagram-9e63dce66fdd <comment><USER2> You're in France, scraping instagram for likes and saving people's names and usernames for retargeting. This is a violation of the GDPR for good measure, as these people don't have any relationship with you or your company, it's just straight up spam.

Also a breach of Facebook custom audiences T&Cs, since you don't have permission to target those user ids.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any open-source project similar to Yo app? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> A pager. Its not open source necessarily, but its the exact same functionality (except not on your smart phone).</comment>


Selling cookies online? Next-day shipping offer may increase sales by 41% - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ecommerce-increase-sales-2/

<comment><USER2> "You get gratification faster than you think!" works in many, many contexts. It is one of the first things I try with clients, e.g., mentioning that you can sign up for a free trial in $NOT_MUCH_TIME or that upgrades are $SYNONYM_OF_IMMEDIATE.

Obviously, test.

Edited to add: Aaron Wall made a one line copy tweak to my BCC purchasing page which went on to make me thousands over the last three years.

Before: "Purchase a single copy for only $24.95"

After: "Get it through instant download for only $24.95"

It changed a wee bit after a price increase and me largely focusing on the online version:

These days: "Use online instantly for only $29.95."

<comment><AUTHOR> By the way, bit off topic but when and how did you decide to increase price? Did you just wanted to see how price sensitive your customers are or some costs increased for you?

<comment><USER2> I raised prices way back in 2009. My rationale was "I think they will pay more money." They did.

My prices are utterly unrelated to my costs. For example, the yen/dollar exchange rate is putting a serious crimp on my style right now, but that's irrelevant to my customers. If I thought they'd pay me $50 for BCC instead of $30, I'd raise prices to $50 immediately. (I suppose I could test e.g. $35 or $40 as interim moves, but honestly, BCC is not the future source of growth for my business at this point.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article but I want to know what their sample sizes are for the test groups. 9% conversion rate means I wouldn't put much weight on the numbers unless the group sizes were >5000 visits (~450 sales).

I think any lower and you start running the risk of drawing conclusions from natural statistical variance.</comment>


Using secure chat is a moral imperative, and iMessage is my best option - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/13/18677644/imessage-iphone-apple-secure-encrypted-chat-moral-imperative-signal-rcs-hangouts <comment><USER2> > My preferred texting app is Signal, but the barrier to get iPhone users in > the US to switch is still too high.

One nice feature of Signal on Android is the ability to let it become the SMS/MMS default application. This lets normal texts go through and automatically switches to Signal E2E encryption when your counterparty is also on Signal.

Is this feature possible on iOS? As in, could Signal become the default SMS/MMS app on an iPhone, leaving only iMessage to the system app?

<comment><USER3> No, iOS has no such capability. Ironically, it's always been considered the more secure approach - Android Facebook users were able to set FB Messenger as their SMS app, and FB vacuumed up the data of anyone naive enough to do so.</comment></comment>


Sexual harassment in videogame culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/08/03/sexual-harassment-in-videogame-culture/

<comment><USER2> I'm a guy. Years ago, in what feels like another life, I played World of Warcraft. My first character was a night-elf healer. I don't know what was going through my head at the time I created my character, but I named it a girl's name and, through my actions and the things I said, gave everyone the impression that I was actually female in real life. The results were:

\- When I visited cities, random people would open trade windows with me and offer to give me gold, anywhere from a few gold to a few hundred. One guy gave me a thousand and I accepted. He then asked me if I would be his girlfriend. I said no. He told me to keep the money, so I did.

\- People would offer me help, especially when I did quests. Even those from the opposite faction would do it (I was on a PvP server) by helping me kill mobs.

\- I would get a lot of what in real life would be considered "cat calls". People would use emotes such as /whistle, /lick, /dance, etc. on my character. I guess you could consider this sexual harassment, although I didn't feel threatened (I might have, if I were actually female).

\- When I played with groups, for example in dungeons, if the group leader was male, he would give me first dibs on loot. This often times made the other players angry. At other times, they agreed I should get the best loot, because I was a girl.

\- People, especially those in my guild, would send me private messages of various natures. Some would make stupid jokes, some would share details about their private lives (without me asking), some would just say sexist stuff, etc.

At the time I quit the game, I was very rich, very popular on the server I played on, and had several people who thought I was their e-girlfriend (even though I had told them no). I was also the second highest-ranking leader of a serious raiding guild - promoted because the guild master had a crush on me. It helped that I was also good at the game, but I was undoubtedly given preferential treatment because there were people who were more dedicated and more skilled.

The whole experience, which lasted about a year, was very interesting for me, because I gained a first-hand understanding of how women feel when they get a ton of attention and receive special treatment, both positive and negative. I interacted with normal dudes, lonely dudes, creepy dudes, stalkery dudes, and girls who would complain about those dudes. And once I had this experience, my real life behavior changed: I stopped treating women as special objects on pedestals and started treating them like normal people.

P.S. I'm sure I will get some negative comments about how what I did was unethical, and I tend to agree. Although I don't really regret it. The way I looked at it at the time is that it was just a game and I was just having fun. I never went out of my way to hurt other people, although those who I declined advances from probably felt bummed for a while.</comment>


Never Mind the NSA, What About Google and Facebook? - <AUTHOR> http://editeddaily.com/nsa-google-facebook

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is the is a particularly strong argument, but an incredibly important point none the less.

There are different mechanisms and motivations by which corporations gain, express and are removed from power. But I remain thoroughly unconvinced that those make the power wielded somehow benign.

There are differences, sure, but to quote my favorite blogger: Wired are more horrified about NSA spying, despite there being an explicit terms of service agreement with them that what it finds without a warrant is inadmissible, but Google monitoring my sexts for their commercial benefit is SAGE approved behavioral economics. Google buying Boston Dynamics is better than DARPA having it, is that the game we're playing now? If I had to put my chips and my children against an 8 year rotation of civil service nincompoops vs. some nerd with an open marriage who spent $15M on a "bachelor pad" so he could score chicks of questionable emotional stability, I'm going with the group my private sector lawyers have an outside chance of pwoning.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hysterics choose sides, realists distrust government and commercial interests equally. But the key to evaluating the threat can be summed up in the Senator's own words: "private sector entities gathering personal data for marketing and commercial purposes". That's it. I don't want to buy the crap Google and Facebook want to sell me, but I do want to use their services to make my own life easier. I'll keep on benefitting from this unequal relationship until I feel uncomfortable.

Government agencies, on the other hand, are not as forthcoming about their motives. "We spy on you to keep you safe?" No you don't. You spy on other people to keep me safe. You spy on me to keep other people safe. Who are these people? Why do they feel threatened by me? Are these people who have a reason to fear me? Should I rather fear them?

So no, not never mind the NSA. Or any other three letter agency. There's a world of difference between the transparent and often sleazy motives of commercial entities, and the secretive and often sinister motives of governments, government agencies, and the "patriots" who blindly support them.

</comment><comment><USER5> >So I ask you this: Why is it that a popularly elected and democratically accountable government—the democracy in which Americans take such pride—is more suspect than immensely large and wealthy private corporations?

To offer my perspective on this, and feel free to disagree.

Corporations could (and do) use the data to increase profits - mostly through marketing and selling the data to marketers. While invasive of peoples' privacy - their freedoms remain intact.

Government could use the data for control, to maintain power over the people and could use it maliciously through imprisonment and maltreatment of people based entirely on the collected data. While also invasive of privacy - it has a risk of limiting freedoms or worse. People fear the possibility of this.

It's not that people necessarily trust corporations with their data (most users are simply unaware) - but rather that they have _less to fear_ from companies than the government.

The government might revoke my drivers license because I show signs of road rage. The license being revoked could lose my transportation to work, losing my job. In the current economy and lack of job availability in my area - I'd lose my house. All over a little blob of data the government decided to use against me. Meanwhile, Google having that same information might show me ads for an anger management class.

I'd rather Google have it than the government in my contrived and made up example. I imagine that's why fewer people care if Google/Facebook know everything but want to keep that information from the government.

Privacy-concerned people use alternative-to-Google services like Duckduckgo and don't even have a Facebook. So they don't trust corporations either (although ironically turn to smaller corporations as alternatives?)

<comment><USER6> Did you miss the whole PRISM thing? If you give data to Google, you are _also_ giving it to the government.

<comment><USER5> I used Google as an example but it could very well be any corporation - <USER2> or international - and unless you believe every company in the world is a part of PRISM or is handing data to the government, my example holds but without the specifics.

Thank you for bringing up this point though, I was hoping someone would (and you can choose to not believe me if you like). Making the connection of major companies to government surveillance outside of the security-minded (ie. people who keep up or are educated on the Snowden leaks) wouldn't make this connection. Which I treat as supporting evidence for my speculation on why the "common layman" doesn't care.

<comment><USER7> I think your overall point is accurate and would go further to add that there is an ironic safety in storing my data with "hostile" nations (or corporations associated with them) over nations that are "friendly" and readily exchanging data with my own.

The US is in fact far more likely to imprison/traumatize one of its citizens over one of its many obscure technicalities (whether actually violated or not) than say NK is to attempt to use data to somehow pressure that US citizen.

Trying to decipher the underlying perspective of the article, I also find mirth in the apparent angst of all the secret agents and their sponsors; they have no idea what corporation will screw up their cover. Joseph Conrad would be proud of our progress even if it is marginal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Never Mind the NSA, Google and Facebook. What about your own employer or recruitment firms? [http://www.benhowell.net/future/2015/05/03/people- analytics-...](http://www.benhowell.net/future/2015/05/03/people-analytics- and-the-big-data-dystopia/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Google and Facebook keeps most loud noise on internet happy by giving them free stuff. Actual quote from a comment here: "Google gives their software for free, I don't see any reason to oppose them". So don't be disappointed if people don't hear you out. Nice article, thank you and good luck

</comment><comment><USER10> I think this is hinting towards a future where end-users will expect end-to- end encryption for everything by default. As a consumer I never want to think about who's watching me, I just want it to be impossible.

<comment><USER3> What are you talking about? Encryption doesn't protect you if the other party in the communication wants to sell you out.

See also: any https website that uses google analytics or social media embeds.

<comment><USER11> End-to-end encryption isn't perfect, but it's still an improvement that reduces attack surface. Prevents man-in-the-middle attacks.

I think this is hinting towards a future where tech-savvy privacy-aware end users will continue to trailblaze- utilizing and evolving technology that minimizes the need to trust government _and_ corporations.

That technology includes self-hosted services, decentralized/distributed (p2p-esque) protocols and platforms, open-source encryption ciphers that feature perfect forward secrecy, and open-source hardware.

>See also: any https website that uses google analytics or social media embeds.

There are browser plugins for opting out of google analytics tracking. Also plugins for blocking social media and commercial/advertiser tracking. A bandaid- but better than nothing.</comment></comment></comment>


Inside the connected future of architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-the-edge-the-worlds-greenest-building/ <comment><USER2> "The super-efficient LED panels, made by Philips specifically for the Edge, require such a trickle of electricity they can be powered using the same cables that carry data for the Internet."

Power-over-ethernet, for anyone trying to figure out what kind of cables they were talking about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Panopticon again? No matter how many features this building has it's still a panopticon

</comment><comment><USER4> Everything is wonderful, right up to the moment the "system" determines you have no value. You can run, but you cannot hide. In a perfect world, I love the idea.

<comment><USER5> Right. This thing is a control freak's dream. Notice that "about 2,500 Deloitte workers share 1,000 desks." Are there disfavored employees wandering around in a futile search for a free desk? If you leave your desk, is that sensed and it immediately becomes available for someone else?

Coming soon, the Smart Sweatshop™.

(That's been done. It's called "Hyperactive Bob", and it's an automated boss for fast food restaurants.[1])

[1] [http://triblive.com/news/adminpage/991215-74/company- hyperac...](http://triblive.com/news/adminpage/991215-74/company-hyperactive- porfeli-percent)

<comment><USER6> Deloitte is a consulting/accounting firm. On any particular day a large number (probably 60%: 1500/2500) of those 2500 workers are probably at a client location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main thing I noticed was that it was impossible to scroll through the page due to the fancy images or whatever else was going on in JS.

</comment><comment><USER8> The thing I don't understand is this: What is the added value these workers create? They have no daily routines, they have no strong attachment to their team nor do they have a say in the furbishments of their work area. In my role as a highly trained knowledge worker in a system that is rather more organically grown than planned, I need intuition on the status of a large number of different parties in the ecosystem where I work in, and every fixed constant and known know and unknown is a valuable fulcrum I can use as a leverage to do my work as well as I can.

What human constants do the people have that work there? Are they treated as pure drones? Or is there a some sort of 'digital nomad' vibe going on there?

<comment><USER9> I have worked hot desk environment before. You basically act like a remote worker 2/3 the time, but it's easy to show up for meetings. If you note the 2,500 workers to 1,000 desks that tends to work in large part because you only show up if you have a meeting and only needed a desk between meetings. After that you can just go home and avoid the traffic.

It's arguably just an extension of liberal telecommuting policies if your only there 1-2 days a week your not going to leave important stuff at your desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We think we can be the Uber of buildings".

Righttttt ... makes total sense.

<comment><USER2> "The Uber of desks in an office building" might be a more apt description, but it doesn't have quite the already-very-cliché ring to it.</comment></comment>


Android iBeacon Library - <AUTHOR> http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/ibeacon/android/

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel like a lot of folks think iBeacon is some kind of iOS-exclusive technology to promote Apple ecosystem lock-in. But it's totally open to other platforms. It's just a broadcast signal to provide accurate near-proximity geolocation. Anyone can listen to them.

<comment><USER2> so is the wikipedia entry about iBeacon wrong and needs to be updated?

"Android operating system devices can receive iBeacon advertisements but cannot emit iBeacon advertisements"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon)</comment></comment>