$22M federal program for outsourcers in South Asia to learn Enterprise Java - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500202

<comment><USER2> About 8 years ago, the state I live in put a project out for bid. It was a web application to help the unemployed find jobs. They gave the contract to a company in India. Talk about irony.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get why they don't build private schools, with accommodation, like a student halls and then allow people to go there and learn the skills the government needs. It would create jobs and would allow the government to keep a much closer overview of how the money is spent. It would also allow you to fast track their learning as they would be surrounded by it 24/7.

Or make it so you can pay a fee to go there for a year or so if you want, without prior qualifications.</comment>


Secrets to smart decisions when you graduate from college - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/05/21/secrets-to-smart-decisions-when-you-graduate-from-college/ <comment><USER2> Secrets for making your advice sound more interesting:

1\. Put it in the form of bullet points

2\. Call it "secret"

</comment><comment><USER3> I think she is right about graduate school, though. Going off to grad school because you have nothing better to do isn't really a good use of time. Most post-grads would be better off by working in their field for a number of years, as that way, they get some pretty valuable experience in dealing with the 'real world', and they have a chance to try a life outside of academia.

If a recent grad can't figure out what kind of job they want, there are a lot of other opportunities -- the Peace Corps, for one, or moving to another country to teach English for a few years. Anything is good, as long as it requires that our hypothetical graduate stand on his own two feet.

Honestly, I'm finding myself facing the 'what do I do now?' conundrum. I left a rather nice job as a sysadmin and went back to school about four years ago, and in about an hour will finally be done with my second BA[1]. I've been programming since I was a kid, so it seems like a natural career path, but I'm not sure that I want to just go back to the corporate grind. There are so many problems out there that need to be solved, or at the very least stuff that could be improved, and while I'm far from being the smartest guy on the face of the Earth, I'd like to have a go at doing something more useful than pumping out Java classes.

So, rather than 'soul-searching' and doing nothing, I'm using up what remains of my savings to have a go at starting a company, and spending a lot of time doing things that I've always wanted to do, but shoved off -- like traveling in Europe, getting back into martial arts, and so on.

I know more than a couple of other people who are in my position, and many of them have opted for the 'do nothing' route -- they spend their entire day playing video games. So, her 'secret', of making sure that you do _something_ , is good advice, I think.

[1] My first degree is in Mathematics; I'm rather proud of that one. The second is in Japanese, and I've asked if they could print the diploma on toilet paper, so that it might be useful for something...

</comment><comment><USER4> Seriously. I find it difficult to take advice from her after some of the stuff she writes on her blog.

<comment><USER2> For example?</comment></comment>


The Internet Connectome project: Attempting to predict latency between IPs - <AUTHOR> http://iconnect.iro.umontreal.ca/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm one of the researchers involved in that project, I'll do my best to answer your questions. A few preliminary points:

\- Using the Java technology, with its inconveniences, was necessary to have access to ICMP ping from the browser.

\- The applet is digitally signed by the University of Montreal, and its source is available at [https://github.com/lisa- lab/pings/](https://github.com/lisa-lab/pings/).

\- The data collected from the applet will be made publicly and freely available to all.

\- This research project is part of the Ubisoft / NSERC industrial chair on Artificial Intelligence at the DIRO, Université de Montréal.</comment>


Schneier on Security: Fun with Secret Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/fun_with_secret.html

<comment><USER2> Entertaining (though I've already read this one...).

I have a more interesting game I play with bank security questions that's more useful, though -- and applies to the most common usage (where the bank provides the question to you).

Simply this -- for each question, imagine how easily you could guess the answer even knowing _nothing_ about the account owner. I'm not talking about real analysis here, just roughly mapping out the answer space.

For example, "In what city/town did ___?" is a common question. Well, if it's a US bank, probably you're dealing with US cities, and there are fewer than 20K. (Already, whoa: a _three character_ alphanumeric password has 10 times the possibilities). Then of course cities should be weighted by population, so since NYC is biggest... well, New York has 8.3 million of the USA's 311.6 million population, the answer to this question will be New York City about 2.6% of the time.

"What's the first name of your [specified grandparent]?" is another good one. How diverse are first names, generally, particularly a few generations back? Of course there's a long tail, but otherwise... not that diverse, and it's trivial to find stats on most common names in the early 1900s. I've never chosen this question even before I started thinking hard about security, because it was blazingly obviously a bad question -- the banks would ask for my maternal grandfather's name, and _I was named after him_.

Fun, no?

<comment><USER3> Here is a worse one:

> What is the make of your first car?

The number of relatively common car makers is really low, and when you factor in the fact that most people don't get a really high-end car as their first car, 5 or 6 makers are going to cover a really high percentage (Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota, and Honda would cover most, I'd guess). If you factor in make AND model, we're still talking in the low hundreds of possibilities.

Good security questions are really, really hard to come up with and should, IMHO, really only be used as an addition to a password - not as a way around one.

<comment><USER4> > What is the make of your first car?

Winston Churchill.

<comment><USER2> If you're clued in on security, you can certainly use the fields to enter unrelated answers. A random 20 characters would be better than Winston Churchill.

But it probably goes without saying that if following the instructions (and putting in an actual answer...) makes you insecure, the model is broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I almost always pick something like "What's your favorite color?" and answer with random noise (say "a3tcuh487wchaowiudh23doch3298ahraui"). The rationale is that if I forget my password, I'll likely forget the secret question as well. I only want the secret question to be as hard, or harder, to guess than my password.

I wonder though, if the human at the other end will accept "just a bunch of letters and numbers" as a correct answer.

</comment><comment><USER6> Original date of this article: April 30, 2010. Too bad it wasn't April 1st.

Q: What is your mother's maiden name?

A: I never use my mother's REAL maiden name in a security question; that is much too easy to look up with Google.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I'm allowed to pick the question, I invariably pick "Which is it?", and the answer is a series of random words.

Now you know, identity thieves.

<comment> mike-cardwell Call centre: Can you please provide the answer to the secret question.

Social engineer: _sigh_ , I know this is going to sound really strange, but I just pick random words when I set up secret questions, and I'm not sure what I used with you. If it helps, it will just be a set of random words that make no sense...

Call centre: Ok, I've spoken to my supervisor and he said that, seeing as you kind of know what it's like, and seeing as you have the name and address, I can reset your password. What number would you like me to SMS it to?

</comment></comment><comment> T-hawk My bank has a particularly horrible one:

"What sports team do you most like to see lose?"

Especially considering it's a regional bank in the northeast US, you can probably hit well over 90% of accounts using less than a dozen answers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why the hell is anyone answering "What was your mother's grandfather's maiden/first name" or "What city were you born in" with real answers, or even real names/cities??

</comment><comment><USER9> While entertaining, choosing the question "What is the air speed velocity of a laden swallow?" is not particularly good security.

<comment><USER10> That applies to many of them. It's clearly just for fun. Quotes are no good. If it's a quote from media like music, movies, book, or TV, the response can usually be googled, if it's not known already. If it's a personal quote, someone who knows you might know it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I have a hard time imagining Bruce just lifted someone else's blog post without crediting (more likely it was passed on to him in conversation?), this post predates Schneier's by over a year: [http://tcoverride.blogspot.com/2011/05/security- questions.ht...](http://tcoverride.blogspot.com/2011/05/security- questions.html).

<comment><USER12> Check the Schneier date again.

<comment><USER11> lol, repost. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thats brilliant. A big opportunity to introduce call centre agents to Monty Python quotes!

</comment><comment><USER14> Q: Ennyn Durin aran Moria. Pedo mellon a minno.

A: Mellon!</comment>


Our Use of Haskell and Elm - <AUTHOR> https://www.sanityinc.com/articles/why-we-use-haskell-and-elm/ <comment><USER2> What I liked about this article is that rather than being a complete sales pitch it mentions the cons about adopting a language that is not used at mass scale. The biggest one being the ability to find and hire talent. They get around this challenge by being willing to train, which is reasonable. And refreshing to not see that real challenge swept under the carpet.

<comment><USER3> I've always thought that hiring i.e. haskell developers would be easier than for more widely used languages like java and python as I've assumed that the talent-to-jobs ratio would be a lot higher. I actually have no idea though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Learning ELM really helped me learn Haskell which is something I'm continuing to do, but Elm helped a lot. So I can see why a Haskell shop would want to use Elm for their frontend work. This makes total sense.

That said, my initial enthusiasm for using Elm, aside from a gateway-drug to Haskell, has waned. I just do not have enough confidence in adopting Elm for our internal project nor to recommend it to other companies.

The last release of Elm was 1 year and 8 months ago. The new release is purported to break many things. However, this new release is unknown, it's really unknown when it's going to be released and aside from a few insiders and contributors no one else seem to know what to expect.

Elm applies some interesting principles (type safety, purity, etc.) that helps to reason about your code. But, it's direction is driven by one person. That in itself is not bad, however, there is very little communication coming out of him (the last blog update by him was 1.5 years ago). Because of that, I started looking at Reason and what FB and others are doing.

I think it makes no sense to invest months or years into something like Elm at this point and any advantages Elm might have had initially, is coming to parity with other solutions.

I still think if you want to get your hands dirty with functional programming, play around with Elm. The Pragmatic Studio Elm lesson is great starting point. But look elsewhere for any serious projects.

<comment><USER5> Why does it matter when the next release is coming, as long as the project is actively maintained?

<comment><USER4> That's a valid point. In this case, two reasons:

1 - active development is relevant. Is it being updated once a year, once a month. Is it going to take 1 year, 2 or 3 years.

2 - Above is not a deal breaker along. But, the new release is going to break stuff. you need to have ability to plan around things, especially as the new release will have paradigm shift (from what I'm gathering). You don't want to write lines and lines of code, then needing to rewrite it all.

I think what makes it even more unreliable, is lack of any communications. I think part of the problem is, Evan (the creator) probably is still not sure what this future looks like. He is very articulate, but not seeing any blog post update makes a reasonable person assume that this new release has not been fully conceived. So, everyone knows there will be a break change. But who knows what will break, when it will be released, etc.

On top of that, this new update has become a gatekeeper for bunch of pull requests and bugs on the existing system that is not being touched.

The people who sit next to Evan the author of Elm in Action and the biggest users of Elm (Richard Feldman) has pushed back the release of his book by one year. Basically the remaining part of his book, is all the SPA stuff that the version of Elm is supposed deal with. From what I've seen, it seems like even he doesn't know what to expect [0]

Put everything I mentioned together, it makes it hard to recommend Elm for anything your company will be depending on, especially when there are other solutions out there. Why take the risk.

[0] [https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in- action](https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in-action)

<comment><USER6> I bought that book 2 years ago, I've since stopped using Elm. It's pretty bad that it still hasn't been released yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm confused by the discussion of bringing new programmers on a team up to speed with these lesser-used languages; this blog is quite explicitly from a one-man dev shop.

<comment><USER8> We do the same in several teams of 5+ people, in a company having 3k employees.

I don't understand what lets you come to your conclusion.

<comment><USER9> On the "About this site", on the right, it says:

> Hi, I'm Steve Purcell - Sanity, Inc. is my one-man consultancy and software > house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Check out Miso [1] a frontend framework built in Haskell.

[1] - [https://haskell-miso.org/](https://haskell-miso.org/)

<comment><USER11> I look at the opening stanza of the first example:

[https://github.com/dmjio/miso/blob/master/examples/todo- mvc/...](https://github.com/dmjio/miso/blob/master/examples/todo-mvc/Main.hs)

"We're not in Kansas anymore"

<comment><USER12> RecordWildCards and DeriveGeneric are clearly used but fairly basic. OverloadedStrings seems to be used for MisoString.

The other extensions don't seem to be used so it probably isn't as bad as it looks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, what does HN think of PureScript these days?

<comment><USER14> Can't speak for HN, but I really liked tinkering with it. If I remember correctly, its data structures were just basic JS data structures under the hood (e.g. JS arrays, objects, etc), which meant it didn't show the same perf benefits of a language that uses persistent data structures under the hood (e.g. Clojure, OCaml/Reason). I wonder if that has changed since I took a look.

<comment><USER13> Cool you liked it - I recently had a similar experience replacing from JQuery froms with it.

It does by default it provide access to native JS data structures, but you don't have to use them e.g. there are persistent structures as well. [https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript- ordered-c...](https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript-ordered- collections/1.0.0) though I don't quite understand the comment that persistent data structures are "slower" than native structures; I thought usually, it's the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They mention plentiful motivated job applications, how is the market from the perspective of a developer looking to focus on Haskell?

<comment><USER16> > They mention plentiful motivated job applications

I'd take anything from an advocacy article with a grain of salt.

> how is the market from the perspective of a developer looking to focus on > Haskell?

Considering the only response you got points you to a subreddit, I'm guessing it isn't so great. At best, it is a niche market ( though that could be lucrative ).

I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket. I'd make sure you have some expertise in Java, C#, C++, Python, etc ( don't forget SQL ) where there is a large established market that isn't going anywhere soon. But even more important, get experience in specific technologies ( databases , web servers, IDEs, version control, etc ).

<comment><USER17> > Considering the only response you got points you to a subreddit

Funnily enough, a job posting was made on r/haskell since that comment was posted. It's not a bad space to watch for jobs.

<comment><USER18> And another one ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why are they not using ghcjs? Wouldn't that work nicely with their existing infrastucture and codebase?

<comment><USER20> GHCJS is a beast to bring in, and brings lots of complications with it. The build tools and environment around it is also not great, and most development tools that work for GHC break down for GHCJS.

That's not to say it can't be used, in fact a lot do quite successfully, but it is a BIG increase in complexity.

I'm more hopeful for approaches such as WebGHC[0] or perhaps more promising, Tweags Asterius[1] :)

[0] [https://webghc.github.io/roadmap](https://webghc.github.io/roadmap)

[1] [https://github.com/tweag/asterius](https://github.com/tweag/asterius)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > "Haskell has excellent libraries for integrating with databases and web > services, and for building API services."

I tried using Haskell for my side project(group chat type). Its libraries are nowhere near matured ones like Phoenix.

<comment><USER8> What libraries did you use, and which problems did you encounter ?</comment></comment>


Force-Directed Edge Bundling for Graph Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=679

<comment><USER3> It's really easy to hack together a simple force-directed layout engine on top of Processing.

All you need to do is write a simple physics particle library w/ forces/springs. I wrote one similar to Traer Physics (<http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~traer/physics/>) over a weekend (Traer does the math well, but the API is terrible and very incomplete).

For the longest time I was intimidated by force-directed layouts, and would just rely on static graphviz generated images even though I really wanted dynamic/interactive ones.

But once I sat down and actually started writing, it wasn't so bad at all.

<comment><USER4> How many nodes can you handle with processing? I recently tried to write such a thing using Javascript canvas, but it was too slow for my use case. I haven't tried it with Web Workers yet, though.

<comment><USER3> Up to around 500 or so while maintaining a decent framerate (say, better than 30FPS in steady state).

I was using Java's Processing though - which I would expect to be considerably faster than Processing.js. I didn't try decoupling the UI from the computation/model (since the performance was already more than sufficient for my needs), but my gut tells me that my physics code was the bottleneck - <USER2> Processing itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We need a Graphviz for the new millenium. Dot(ty) has helped me produce so many wonderful images, but this just goes to show that there is a lot more innovation to happen in this space.

</comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't seem to do node placement.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice paper and the graphs on page 6 really illustrate the power of their method. But Borland Delphi? Ouch.</comment>


Developers can now code and run eXo add-ons online thxs to Codenvy and Docker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.exoplatform.com/en/2014/12/03/the-new-codenvy-is-a-game-changer-and-everybody-benefits

<comment><USER2> The new Codenvy is a game changer and everybody benefits.

Codenvy allows any developer to code, build, debug, run, and share any application on top of any software stack that runs in Docker, all from the browser without downloading anything on the desktop.

You can try it yourself, using this Codenvy Factory link: [https://codenvy.com/f?id=bhkm1qblbzicha1x](https://codenvy.com/f?id=bhkm1qblbzicha1x)

This is a total game changer, and will have a deep impact in the software industry:

\- It will change the way developers discover and learn new technologies. \- It will change the way software vendors promote APIs and SDKs. \- It will change the way cloud development environments are managed by DevOps. \- It will change the way developers collaborate while building apps. \- It will change the way developers exchange with QA teams. \- It will change the way support teams interact with their customers. \- It will change the way Open Source projects manage their communities.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and if you're curious how Codenvy and Docker are used to put it together: [http://blog.codenvy.com/creating-codenvy-factory-exo- extensi...](http://blog.codenvy.com/creating-codenvy-factory-exo-extensions- development/)</comment>


MWC 2020 canceled over coronavirus health concerns - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21127754/mwc-2020-canceled-coronavirus-trade-show-phone-mobile-world-congress-gsma-statement <comment><USER2> While I feel sorry for the people that put the energy to make this happen and also for the people that may lose their jobs this month over this, as a native inhabitant of Barcelona, I can only celebrate the news, even if it is for this terrible reason.

When MWC is ocurring in Barcelona, public transport (subway) goes on strike (because of the maximum impact). But usually this only fucks over non MWC attending people, because tickets are so expensive that only people which can use a taxi anyway will go, greatly diminishing the impact of the strike for attendants while making inhabitants lives miserable for that time period.

Also, Barcelona already has a very severe problem of houses being rented out to tourists with very high markups, producing a gentrification of the city (along with other factors, not only the tourism is responsible for this). Events like MWC do not help this situation.

BCN is already overloaded with tourism, events like MWC only make it worse for those of us that live there.

I'm completely aware that this is not the responsibility of MWC organization or tourists, this is a regulation problem. But since regulation is stacked against us, I can only get happier that this year we won't have to suffer all the inconvenience of the event while reaping almost none of the benefit.

<comment><USER3> You never really know what you've got till it's gone. A hundred thousand visitors eating, drinking, commuting, sightseeing, dwelling, and flying about in your city in a short period of time.....for many cities that would be a welcome occurrence (apart from the traffic woes).

It's about $500m Euros of revenue, and I saw an estimate of something like 15k part-time jobs due to MWC. No small thing.

<comment><USER4> I'm also in BCN and everyone always says that but I'm not sure I buy it.

I mean, yeah, some guys benefit from having the MWC for sure but I'm not sure most residents do - I'm not letting out flats or running venues etc. I'm trying to get to work on time and pay my rent.

It reminds me of the similar arguments people make about the big cruise ships that come here - I mean sure, it massively benefits tourist attractions and restaurants etc. but most citizens don't see any of that money, they just get lungfuls of air pollution.

<comment><USER5> Do you understand how economics works? When money from outside your city is spent in your city, that is a huge net benefit to everyone.

<comment><USER4> > that is a huge net benefit to everyone.

This isn't necessarily true though.

Honestly, the MWC doesn't bother me that much - yeah the metro always goes on strike but that's a problem with the metro unions and the Ayuntamiento not the MWC in my opinion.

But take the case of the cruise ships which do irritate me - every citizen gets to suffer worse air quality so a few can enrich themselves on the tourist money.

I understand that in theory that money might 'trickle down' to the citizenry at large, but it is far from obvious that this actually occurs sufficiently to compensate the downsides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just can't understand why the stock market keeps going up.

<comment><USER7> No clue about the stock market.

But here is some interesting real-time traffic congestion data plotted with 2019 averages for cities. Gives a sense of how many people are going back to work.

Scroll down and click "Last 7 days"

Notice SF & London are trending with 2019 averages:

SF: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/san-francisco- tra...](https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/san-francisco-traffic)

London: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/london- traffic](https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/london-traffic)

Then compare:

Wuhan: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan- traffic](https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic)

Shanghai: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/shanghai- traffic](https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/shanghai-traffic)

Beijing: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/beijing- traffic](https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/beijing-traffic)

Shenzen: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/shenzhen- traffic](https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/shenzhen-traffic)

Hong Kong: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/hong-kong- traffic](https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/hong-kong-traffic)

<comment><USER6> This is a great resource. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I heard, insurance coverage played the big role. Seems like, in US, insurance companies are able to find exclusions for this scenario on foreign land. This is the text shared by one: "..Your travel & health insurance could contain exclusions to pandemics since the regional insurance industries can't measure the amount of risk. The insurer might defer to apply broader exclusions...."

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a very sad news for the city of Barcelona and for everyone involved in organizing or exhibiting. But that was the right choice.

I'm wondering what's next to be cancelled.

<comment><USER10> Olympics are this summer, could be at risk if it hasn't been contained by then, especially given the proximity of Japan to China/mainland asia.

<comment><USER11> Summer is not a good time for a virus since the don't survive Heath and the sun so well.

<comment><USER12> Given the number of cases in Singapore, this may not be the case for _this_ virus.

<comment><USER13> Plenty of Singapore buildings have A/C. Some of the clusters so far include two churches, one Chinese medical store, and Grand Hyatt Singapore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't make sense from a medical point of view.

China, and specifically Hubei Province and its capital Wuhan, suffer an epidemic that they are trying to control with titanic efforts. 99% of cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) infection, today more than 40,000 with a thousand deaths, have been registered in China. Of them, almost 70% in Hubei. Only 1% of cases have been registered outside China, in 24 countries (including Spain), with transmission chains (secondary cases from a first imported case) very short so far.

To put things in perspective, although perhaps inaccurate, the number of cases of COVID-19 infection in China is less than 3 cases / 100,000 inhabitants.

The flu, in Catalonia, this week has reached figures of 360 cases / 100,000 inhabitants: more than 120 times higher than the incidence of COVID-19 infection in China.[1]

Our Health Alerts and Emergencies system works, works as a team and the protocols established in the EU apply: detect the case, isolate it, treat it and follow all possible contacts. In this way, the transmission chain can likely be properly controlled.

There are many things we do not know for sure about this disease, but most cases (80%) are mild. Serious cases and mortality (2%) will be adjusted downwards safely in the coming weeks, as the detection of mild cases increases. There is WHO data that indicate that control measures are slowing the epidemic in Hubei and better controlling the situation in the rest of China.

[1]: [http://canalsalut.gencat.cat/web/.content/_Professionals/Vig...](http://canalsalut.gencat.cat/web/.content/_Professionals/Vigilancia_epidemiologica/documents/arxius/spfi.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Was waiting for this. The flu kills 10000 people a year in the US and pneumonia kills 45000.

Suicide kills 47000 a year which makes you wonder why we aren't spending more effort on mental health given it's a bigger cause of death.

CDC ref: [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm)

<comment><USER16> Suicide is a big problem, buy it's scary in a different way. I'm not personally worried about a suicide epidemic, or catching suicide from someone.

<comment><USER17> And yet there are actually suicide clusters, with people essentially "catching it" from their friends or loved ones who've committed suicide.

<comment><USER18> This seems like equivocation on the meaning of "catching it." Isolating yourself so that you either have no close relationships or somehow never hear about any suicides among your close relationships is a fairly nonsensical proposal, and probably wouldn't in fact decrease your chances of committing suicide.

<comment><USER19> The realization that suicide has contagious properties does have practical ethical ramifications for journalism. It's not some impractical theoretical matter that can't be acted on.

<comment><USER3> I went to a talk on this very matter. Kurt Cobain's suicide is an interesting case study on how journalism affects the development (or attenuation) of suicide clusters.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8897665](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8897665)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> IMHO the coronavirus was used as an excuse to kill a fair that was already producing negative ROI.

Due to the size and fame of the fair, most big companies were forced to participate to "look better" than their competitors, even if they didn't have any great novelty to show there: it was a marketing arms race where each company had to invest more than the previous year.

On the other hand, the relevance of the fair has dropped, correlated to the smaller incremental improvements that get into mobile phones year after year: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=world%20mobile%20congress)

So, the Coronavirus gave an awesome opportunity to exit the race: a big company can skip the congress this year without appearing defeated.

Let's see if the fair will have an edition next year.

(of course that's only MHO)

</comment><comment> corona-chan The official infection and death numbers in China appear to be completely fabricated as they followed an almost perfect quadratic progression: [https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_quadratic_coronavirus_epidemic_growth_model/)

None of the various measures taken to contain the outbreak have affected those numbers.

This apparently has happened before with organ donation data: [https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...](https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12910-019-0406-6#citeas)

</comment><comment><USER21> As a citizen of Barcelona, I welcome this unspected event. A quiet end of winter wihtout thousands of crazy tourists collapsing all the services. I hope MWC celebrates in another city.

<comment><USER22> but what do you do for living?

<comment><USER21> I work for tech company

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's the over/under on SXSW doing the same?

</comment><comment><USER22> Huawei is the reason why this was cancelled. Huawei has MWC as the big show up/party/global event of the year. Any excuse is good. Huawei spend Millions in this event, more than anybody else

Recap of screwing Huawei history: Daughter of President jailed for business with Iran, baning their products ( network infrastructure, google apps in devices...), MWC cancelation....

🧐</comment>


Jack Dorsey Joins Disney's Board Of Directors - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/23/jack-dorsey-joins-disney/ <comment><USER2> It's worth checking out the NYT piece on the rise of Twitter and the role Dorsey played. His rise to fame was a tumultuous one and while he is no doubt a talented individual he is credited with more than he actually created. It will be interesting to see how his influence develops and shapes Disney's future.

 _" Ideas rarely, if ever, come from the mind of a single person, but those who go down in lore as visionaries take credit for them as if they do. Dorsey seemed to understand this intrinsically, too."_

 _" By this point, many Twitter investors believed what Dorsey had been telling the media for the past two years. More important, they knew the public did. He could be an effective public face of Twitter as Costolo managed the operations. The board was grateful for the $25 million that Costolo arranged in deals with Microsoft and Google, and he had a good rapport with Twitter employees. A pact between all of the investors was formed. By late September, Costolo was told that he had been picked to be interim C.E.O. Williams was out. Dorsey was back in."_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in- lo...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in-love-and- twitter.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER3> Noah Glass deserves all the credit, IMO.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-cofounder-noah- glass-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-cofounder-noah-glass-2011-4)

"Originally, (Twitter) was all running on my laptop on my desk. An IBM Thinkpad. Using a Verizon wireless card. It was right there on my desk. I could just pick it up and take it anywhere in the world. That was a really fun time."

<comment><USER4> Calling him a founder seems to be a stretch based on Twitter's official comments on the matter. He wrote the code. He was an engineer employed by Odeo. That doesn't mean he's a "founder." I don't know which side is true, but my sense is that calling him a "founder" is tech linkbait.

<comment><USER5> He didn't call Glass a founder. He implied Glass wrote all the early code and essentially built Twitter, and said he deserves all the credit for that early building out. I really don't have a problem with putting it that way. That's true based on everything I understand about the Twitter backstory (and confirmed by Noah, Ev, Biz, Jason, and Jack himself).

<comment><USER3> I think he's referring to the article's headline. But that quote resonates with me. I would never serve files from a laptop--who does that?! But it does have battery backup in the event of power failure, LOL! I can see the appeal for getting something working quickly. And you don't have to worry as much about random web host stealing the source. At least in my imagination, Noah's coding style was perfect for getting a prototype working, but had to pass it on to "do it by the book" engineers who no doubt cursed "this spaghetti is all wrong, there's globals everywhere!"

<comment><USER6> "random web host stealing the source" really shouldn't be a concern at MVP stage.

<comment><USER3> In the old shared hosting days, they knew exactly which scripts were suddenly eating up resources. You might get an email like, "Hey we disabled xyz.php because it was hogging the server." So it's not like they couldn't see who was about to make boatloads of money and then jump on the bandwagon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kudos to him.

I'm not bitter or upset but I'm thinking: Why can't _I_ think of stuff people want? Maybe I don't know how to listen? He's a human, just like me, but I can't do anything. Maybe asking this question is a first signal of failure, or at least that I'm of a wrong mindset, that separates a good entrepreneur, whom wouldn't ask that question and just go do it, from people like me.

If his WP page is accurate, it's not like he didn't have startups that didn't work out but he still made it.

<comment><USER8> Well if you think back to the release of twitter the overwhelming response on most tech sites was that it was stupid/useless/waste of time, etc...

("Why would I want SMS restrictions on the web?!")

Maybe you need to get out of the tech-site bubble :)

<comment><USER9> Count me amongst those who shared that impression...my impression hasn't changed much! It obviously isn't completely stupid or completely useless but its utility is still shockingly low especially when you consider its stock market success.

I am on twitter mainly as a way to promote my company and connect with prospective people, but otherwise the utility of twitter still strikes me as rather low.

It is a good medium for one-to-many (aka broadcast) communication but there aren't enough interesting people in the world to make that a viable option. Not to mention once you start to follow more than 20 people your stream becomes a fire-hose that is not really consumable.

I guess now that it is a public company we'll have to wait and see if it can turn the amount of profit that matches its valuation.

Also stupid/useless and success are not necessarily mutually exclusive, we are talking about humans after all :)

<comment><USER10> > once you start to follow more than 20 people your stream becomes a fire-hose > that is not really consumable.

I only feel like people discover the "true" nature of Twitter after they go above 200 follows - it is intended to be saturated consumption like TV, something that can be consumed habitually at any idle moment. There is a Matrix-like quandary in this, in that users who want to filter stop themselves from reaching the point where they see a net-positive outcome. IRC is very similar in that getting the full effect out of it means keeping dozens of channels open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And the mimicry of Steve Jobs continues.

<comment><USER12> I feel like people who say this do it to downplay his accomplishments. It's a very negative tone.

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's a negative tone. My feeling is that he unjustifiably self-identifies with Jobs. As mentioned, I've recently read 'Hatching Twitter' and it paints him in an unseemly light.

I don't see how the comment is downplaying his accomplishments though.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. I haven't really read that book but it seems that most really successful people have had to behave in very cutthroat ways no? Of course I may be saying this with subject to some selection bias. We have our standard set of Bill Gates, Zuck, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, etc to provide some weight to the statement but I'm sure there are many many noble leaders that I haven't heard of that weren't as ruthless but maybe that's why they haven't achieved the same level of success? I'm not sure.

I'd love to read the book but I'd love it even more if you could give an overview of the sentiments echoed in "Hatching Twitter".

In any case, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you that Jack is an unlikable person, but was simply pointing out that almost every time someone has said "Oh he thinks he's Steve Jobs", it's often to downplay the story at hand. It's cool that Jack is on the board of Disney, that a significant accomplishment.

<comment><USER11> > I'd love to read the book but I'd love it even more if you could give an > overview of the sentiments echoed in "Hatching Twitter".

The book credits him with seeding the concept for Twitter, but certainly not for fleshing it out. At a very early stage, Jack was ousted as CEO and left with no role at Twitter other than a board seat with no actual voting rights. While the rest of the team made the product what it is today, and scaled the business to .5bn users, Jack was on the outside doing nothing. Despite this he pandered extensively to the media lying about his non-existent role at the company and daubing himself the 'inventor' of Twitter.

All that said, I've enjoyed watching some of Jack's talks, and I think Square is incredible (more so than Twitter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's a pretty cushy salary - isn't? Anyone know how much a new Disney board member gets paid?

<comment><USER14> Is there a cushier job than being a board member?

<comment><USER15> Being on the board of a publicly-traded company also opens yourself up to a lot of personal liability, as you're legally bound to act in the best interest of shareholders. I personally would not want the job; if I were wealthy & accomplished enough to be offered a board membership, I'd much rather have a quiet life out of the public eye than wrestle with concerns of a multi- billion-dollar enterprise that needs to satisfy many different constituencies. Being on the board of a non-profit, however, can be pretty cool. You usually don't get a salary for that though.

<comment><USER16> They have insurance for this tho, I thought. Its paid for by the company. That being said, once upon a time this was a much better job than it is today, but for other reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I personally find a lot of inspiration visiting the Disney Family Museum here in SF ([http://www.waltdisney.org/](http://www.waltdisney.org/)). Whenever I feel like I need a bit of a kick to see how a man can go against all odds to realize his dreams, I visit the museum. It may be dull to some, but the quotes alone make it worthwhile.

I find I might owe to Disney and his product some of the push I have. It may pay off for some of you to take a visit.

</comment><comment><USER18> Please insist on a better script for the next Tron movie.</comment>


On "Quantum Supremacy" - <AUTHOR> https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-supremacy/ <comment><USER2> Here's a Seeker video regarding Google's leaked paper, that makes it easier to understand IBM's blog post: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyuf1zt- TpU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyuf1zt-TpU)</comment>


Voxel Rain (seeing randomness) - <AUTHOR> http://voxelrain.appspot.com/ A random experiment about seeing randomness in some of its forms. <comment><USER2> I'm seeing similar patterns everytime I reload the page. Is this normal?</comment>


Introducing Spoken.co - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cameronmoll/introducing-spoken-co-f0cc2c3095e <comment><USER2> I signed up regardless, but am really untrusting of terms like this.

>We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to modify or replace these Terms at any time. If a revision is material we will provide at least 30 days notice prior to any new terms taking effect. What constitutes a material change will be determined at our sole discretion.

So Spoken determines that no change is material and therefore never needs to provide a 30 days notice and can update their Terms of Service at any time without your knowledge. This is of course, assuming bad faith and bad conduct. This would be harmful to them if any users discovered the material change that wasn't given notice. But it's still a possibility, and that makes me uncomfortable.

>INDEMNIFICATION

This entire section. It's becoming increasingly popular in ToS of web-based services and I dislike that. Also, and correct me if I'm mistaken, but with how it is phrased they do not need to follow their ToS because you agree to defend them if they breach the Terms. This should specify the user breaching the Terms as it reads, currently, it seems to include if Spoken breaches their own Terms.

>b) a breach of these Terms

>If you wish to terminate your account, you may simply discontinue using the Service.

This should be removed or reworded because that does not constitute terminating the account - as the account still exists. This implies the account is deleted if one stops using the service. I find that very misleading.

>However, by posting Content using the Service you grant us the right to publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through the Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of the Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms.

Doesn't this allow other users to "reproduce" through the Service, your content? As you are waiving your rights on the content so long as it is shared on or through the Service for public display, reproduction, and distribution.

eg. I submit a spoken word piece. User Thief steals my work for their profile. Since I waived my rights for distribution through the Service, they are not breaching ToS and I cannot file copyright claims as I've waived my rights. So long as they are sharing on the Service and not a 3rd-party site of course.

Final note: IANAL</comment>


2600hz launches Kazoo, an Open-Source, distributed API based telephony platform. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.2600hz.com/post/26139448549/introducing-kazoo-beta-a-free-visual-cloud

<comment><USER2> As one of the lead developers for the platform, I'll be around to answer questions. We're really proud of what we've accomplished in the last two years.

For those that like X is like Y but for Z, I would liken us to a Heroku for telephony applications.

You can use our high level REST APIs to build high level things like a PBX (configure a device, provision it, configure a callflow, voicemail box, etc); our low-level AMQP APIs which provide lower level telephony actions (answer the call, play this file, etc); and coming soon are more real-time interactions to make it easier for third parties to integrate telephony into their existing work.

And for startups just getting going, we're offering the first five seats free (plus a phone number)! Sign up at kazoo.io and message me to get bumped up in the invite list.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

I'm Josh, I run Biz Dev for 2600hz. We've built a carrier application switch in Erlang, and we have two sets of APIs (REST and direct AMQP) to allow you to do big things.

This isn't Twilio because it's open-source, massively scalable and does handset registration via API.

This isn't just another boring PBX.

This is a set of powerful APIs backed up by lots of built-in software redundancy.

If you'd like to deploy this to your servers, it's really as simple as creating an account, clicking on the cluster manager and pointing the cluster manager to your servers. Our platform handles all the setup for you.

In short, if you want to build big things in Telecom, we can help, or you can use our tools to deliver this service.

Do what makes you happy :).</comment>


Dyson confirms working on an electric car to launch in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/09/26/vacuum-maker-dyson-electric-car-launch-2020/ <comment><USER2> I hope they will be better built than their vacuum cleaners.

Onve they were well built but if you ever have to repair one you will see how cheaply and shodily they are made.</comment>


Full Commodore 64 Emulator Rejected from App Store - <AUTHOR> http://toucharcade.com/2009/06/20/full-commodore-64-emulator-rejected-from-app-store/

<comment><USER2> This is a non-story. How could this developer have not known that Apple's app store agreement forbids emulators, interpreters, and so forth?

I mean, not only is it there in plain letters, but that particular clause was all over the interwebz! The fault here lies solely on the developer for spending all that time and money on development without reading the contract.

Or maybe I should say "praise". This is most likely a PR stunt to increase awareness of his product so he can then go sell it to jailbreakers (who are probably more likely to use, enjoy, and be able to understand it anyway).

<comment><USER3> The comments below the article seem to explain why he thought it would be possible to submit the emulator and have it approved. The SEGA games in the app store contain emulators, and it looks as though there are more apps that do the same.

Inconsistency on Apple's part (haven't seen that before).

<comment><USER4> Maybe there is a difference between containing an emulator and emulating stuff you download from the internet. I don't know the SEGA stuff, but I suppose they just use an emulator internally.

Perhaps with some repackaging that C64 emulator could have made it into the App store, too: just claim it is an app that can run a lot of C64 games (that would have to be bundled with the app). Remove the part where it can run games downloaded from the internet.

<comment><USER5> Yes. In fact, there's a whole section in the developer agreement (section 3.3.2) that explicitly forbids using (non-built-in) interpreters on downloaded files. This might be a nice app, and maybe the guy thought he could roll the dice and sneak it past, but this is the rare open and closed case of Apple doing exactly what they said they were going to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After a few months of in the App store, I am finally realizing the realities.

A month ago they told me I had information that would be confusing across regions. I changed it immediately but they have not reviewed the app again.

I have send at least a dozen emails asking them for a review to no avail.

And this is a business app. So if anyone thought getting in was the biggest thing, think again.

This review was probably fair but then again, I have personally found dealing with the review team to be highly frustrating.

<comment><USER7> Good luck. I kid you not, I just got a response for a question I asked in _November_. Yes, 7 months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think some people (including the app reviewer possibly) are not understanding the SDK terms correctly.

"3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch _other executable code_ by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

The key phrase here is "other executable code"- i.e., code that isn't already in the application bundle. There's nothing wrong with running an emulator or interpreter. You just can't have it dynamically download new games or apps that weren't already bundled. It's understandable why Apple would have this restriction, or else there would be a lot of people trying to build their own app store within an app.

If the C64 app didn't allow new games to be d/l'ed then there's no reason for the rejection. Perhaps it wasn't clear to the reviewer (it certainly isn't to me, after reading that article) whether it allowed new games to be loaded or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no way that it could have been unclear to the reviewer - if the app includes download functionality, then it would be in the build that the reviewer saw and rejected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually, there is a bit of a story here around how to get emulator/software packages bundled and placed on the Apple store. The interesting paragraph for me was:

"Lyscarz pointed out to us that there are a number of apps in the App Store that do exactly the same thing from CHIP-8 emulators, programmable calculators and, of course, Frotz, a Z-machine interpreter. In fact, Sega's Golden Axe and Sonic iPhone games are nothing more than emulators packaged with the original game ROMs."

With a bit of work, I suspect that the C64 Games can be repackaged in such a way that they are no longer considered "emulators."

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Apple doesn't allow anything _called_ an emulator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do people keep developing for the iPhone? What's the point in wasting a year of hard work on an application that will just get rejected out of hand?

This is stupid. This is beyond stupid. Apple is going out of their way to alienate developers and they keep going right back to the platform like the stupid sheep they are.

This is disgusting on every level.

<comment><USER12> I think source of this problem (Apple abusing developers) lies in Steve Jobs's personality. Many a time, the company develops a culture based on its leader (or founder, etc.) In this Steve Jobs's personality seems to have a influenced the Apple culture heavily. If any of you remember, Jobs is not one of the nicest guys is the world. He is well-known for his arrogance, anger, and lack of respect for his coworkers and fellow human beings. We're talkign about a guy who even refused to pay the child support fees for his own child and a father of a bastard. Jobs also has an intolerance for anything non-american (or non-western) which is probably why he charges upto 6 times the price for the iPhone in India (a good thing; loosers in India who buy it deserve to get their money stolen by sucha crppy product). In any case, Steve Jobs is famous for his incredible anger, he has been known to hit people, throw them on the wall and other stuff (before he deservedly got fired in 1984 for his incredibly unethical behabior.) He is in essence a control freak. This control freak in him, is why the App Store also acts like sucha control freak, destroying months of effort develpoers put in with a simple rejection letter. Hopefully once the nutcase Steve Jobs dies from whatever disease that has been holding him from work, some sense might get into Apple. As personal advice, I suggest every abstain from touching, thinking or using any Apple product until Apple steps ups its ethical standards, removes all these DRM-like/based restrictions from their products and ofcourse, start showing some repsect for developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks to Google's market policy we Android users have a wide variety of emulators to chose from including NES, SNES, Genesis, Scumm, C64, and more...

<comment><USER14> And windows mobile has had these for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Manomio then contacted Apple Europe in the UK and detailed what they were planning to accomplish and according to Manomio's CEO Brian Lyscarz, "Apple seemed really excited" and so he felt safe that they would sanction the final app. With that assurance in hand, Manomio proceeded to secure the necessary licensing from individual publishers and finalize work on this major project._

This was an incredibly stupid move on the developer's part. They "contacted Apple Europe" who "seemed excited" and they considered that an assurance worth spending money on developing the software and purchasing licenses? It almost sounds like they emailed someone they know at Apple about what they were planning on doing, who responded "Nice...sounds cool." It sure doesn't sound like due diligence or the kind of thing you'd do before spending tons of time and money on an app you may not be able to sell. An expensive mistake, but I don't feel bad for them.

<comment><USER16> Is it even possible to get such an assurance from Apple? If they do approve apps which violate your plain reading of the ToS, and reject apps which don't even seem to, what can you do besides roll the dice or stay out of the market entirely?

<comment><USER15> Seems like you have four options:

1\. Build apps that adhere to the TOS (they didn't) 2\. Break the standard TOS, but get written assurances from Apple in advance (they didn't) 3\. Avoid the market (they didn't) 4\. Take the big risk and hope things work out OK. (they did)

Obviously, #4 is a valid option...I just think it's a stupid one for a small company that can't afford to blow a year on something like this, but maybe they can. Regardless, how can you feel sorry for them?

Also, it may seem that Apple approved apps which violate the TOS, but does this developer _know_ that those other app developers didn't arrange this in advance with Apple? I have a hard time believing that a company like Sega would risk so much time and money developing apps without first talking to Apple and getting some clear assurance that they'd be allowed to sell it when they were done. Why couldn't this company have done the same?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Apple is being quite consistent in rejecting this - that isn't a story.

The only story here is yet another reason to dislike this policy of Apple's. Because of this policy, something exciting is not available for the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER18> I see two issues here:

* the policy of the appstore obviously sucks for both developers and end-users

* developers miscalculate the risk that their application will be rejected and therefore engage mindlessly into the implementation phase

There is not much to do about the first (except of course give Apple the bad PR it deserves by e.g. posting this stuff to HN). But developers can/should calculate their profit expectations more thoroughly.</comment>


Ecuador becomes the first country to roll out its own digital durrency - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/102397137 <comment><USER2> Ecuador seems to be progressive in a lot of ways. Given a relatively weak economy, and a desire to stand on their own, it seems reasonable to have a state bank provide easy to use digital currency. Central and South America are looking more interesting as alternative places to live (a friend of a friend is permanently moving to Ecuador with his family in two weeks from the USA). My wife and I were considering buying a home in Belize or Costa Rica last year, but the US government, with FICA laws, etc., is making it more difficult for Americans to live abroad. I totally understand why the American empire does not want its citizens spending their retirement dollars abroad, but the effect seems to take away a lot of freedom of choice.

I have visited Columbia, Belize, Guatemala, and Costa Rica multiple times and I find a freshness to their society that I like. Sure these areas have their problems but people seem to have good life values there.

+1 Ecuador

</comment><comment><USER3> So basically a state run bank? Disturbing politically, and with respect to the privacy implications to Ecuadorians, but otherwise technically boring.

There we greater and more interesting strides in to real digital currency in the early 90s. See, for instance, eCash[0]. The problem is, aside for some potential wrt saving the cost of counterfeiting, minting and replenishing grubby notes, there's no tangible incentive for a State to get behind a respectable replacement for cash. It's much easier just to pass the buck to the card industry.

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

<comment><USER4> And there is all the reason why a state would _not_ want to adopt a currency they don't control. The ability to print money is one of the greatest powers any group can have.

<comment><USER5> It's possible that state A might want to adopt a currency that it doesn't control in order to gain increased independence from state B whose economic influence is too powerful to evade but which makes poor long-term decisions about its own state-controlled or state-influenced currency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems to be a stretch to call this a "digital currency", since it is "directly tied" to the local currency. Besides, digital currencies are not really interesting, as one can make digital transactions of traditional, "non- digital" currencies.

<comment><USER7> I would be very interested in a crypocurrency run by the Federal Reserve ( _bitcoiner brains pop_ ). The fed would be able to peg the bitBuck at 1:1 exchange rate with the USD$ but also have many of the benefits of cryptoprotocols.

<comment><USER8> Isn't USD already a mostly digital currency? Only around 10% of all dollars exist as bank notes or coins.

What would a centralised cryptocurrency contribute? If you're centralised, you don't need the crypto part of all, which handles distributed trust. "Crypto" here doesn't refer to all applications of cryptography, but to the blockchain. So what do you have in mind? Perhaps a blockchain where every block has to be signed with a unique private key? This seems even more horribly inefficient than the current digital USD.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I have difficulty understanding this too. In what sense is USD not a digital currency? The vast majority of USD exists only in digital form, albeit it is exchangable for physical currency. The vast majority of USD transactions take place purely digitally. To be sure, the _implementation_ is not as nice as some people would expect, as not every bank has a convenient/free/cheap way to send currency to other individuals (though plenty do).

Is "digital currency" just a buzzword? A misnomer referring to cryptocurrencies?

<comment><USER8> I think people just fundamentally misunderstand money. USD is "real" money and Bitcoins are "fake" money. They use other words instead of "fake", such as "virtual" or "digital", but the intent is the same: it's not as valid as USD. The actual details of how the money works across the internet are not under scrutiny. What people seem to convey with words like "virtual" and "digital" is distrust: this is not as real as USD.

This sort of distrust with new methods of currency is not new. Bank notes were viewed with suspicion and not as real as coins when they were first introduced into Europe from China.

<comment><USER10> It's 'fake' in the same sense that 'investing' in say, trading cards or some other good mostly backed by the interest of the public to buy it is. In fact, it's very much like stock for quantities of stock too small to have a meaningful impact on corporate operations.

<comment><USER8> What is backing USD or any currency other than the interest of the public? It's not like any country gets to dictate to other countries how much their money is worth.

<comment><USER11> Taxes back fiat money.

More generally, currencies are backed by demand for that currency. A lot of that demand is ouroboros-style circular demand of two kinds: (a) shops demand the currency for their goods because their suppliers and employees demand it, who in turn demand it because shops demand it; and (b) people have loans because somebody else demanded currency, and now they will be subjected to demand for a longer time period.

Taxes are special in that they create an _outside_ demand for the currency, so they act as the bootstrap and anchor of this whole demand cycle.

Also note that the sibling comment by jzwinck is confused: the Swiss central bank decided for some time to put an _upper bound_ on the value of the Swiss franc. This is easy because they can always create more Swiss francs, and is irrelevant to your question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Quite frankly, this type of system is the future. Moreover, this type of system already almost exists in many places (consider, for example, how regular people can easily transmit money within SEPA, the Single European Payments Area).

Bitcoin, by contrast, is interesting technology but with weaknesses that make it unsuitable as something that regular people interface with every day (security implications, mostly). It is also economically problematic (widespread use of Bitcoins would mean regressing back to gold-standard times).

Ideally, though, Bitcoin can play a useful role by putting enough pressure on other payment systems to remove any remaining suckiness (mostly the fact that existing payment systems are very bad at international and cross-currency payments).

<comment><USER4> > security implications

Like what? I have a wallet with around $3000 in it and I feel my money is a lot safer there than in some bank, because I control the security, and it is all mathematically provable. You have to _trust_ your bank, and at that _trust_ your state to insure your deposits. I don't have to trust anyone with my wallet.

> widespread use of Bitcoins would mean regressing back to gold-standard times

The problem under the gold standard was that dollars were valued at fractions of gold and the US could not control the monetary base at all. With bitcoin they could hold a reserve to inject in or out of the economy to maintain consistent growth, and the rate of coin generation is incredibly predictable.

I don't think that btc is the right currency to use in daily transactions. Something like doge makes a lot more sense, because doge is perpetually inflating with constant volume increase, which keeps monetary velocity high. BTC is naturally regressive, so it is a fantastic gold replacement, but disincentivizes spending as the rate of generation slows and coins are lost over time since the monetary base is shrinking.

I would like to see someone try to implement a cryptocurrency where the generation algorithm is not as simple, that could take into account velocity in the economy to increase or decrease coin generation to attempt to maintain a healthy velocity (ie, not too much hoarding but not over-capacity spending like most fiat currencies are in right now, which I believe is one of the reasons 2008 happened, and why it will likely happen again soon).

<comment><USER12> I don't have to trust the bank very much to use an insured account.

I'm trusting the state whether or not I use bitcoin, so I might as well take advantage of its insurance.

I'm not cocky enough to assume I won't get hacked.

>I control the security, and it is all mathematically provable

The parts that are provable won't keep you safe. And control is a feel-good measure, not a safety measure. Consider the people scared of air travel despite how safe it is compared to automobile.

<comment><USER4> > I'm not cocky enough to assume I won't get hacked.

And I'm not going to my faith in the state to guarantee my assets because between my bank and bitcoin, I can (and have) read the source, the implementation, and the algorithms behind the security, whereas with my bank, I have no access to the software they use, to the procedures they use to secure my funds, or have any reason to trust the people in positions of power in the bank regarding my money. I'd much rather put faith in the mathematics I can observe and reason about than the behavior of an entity who wont' tell me squat about how they operate.

That, and the fact they are using terribly implemented mass produced web sites and apps to access critical bank details do not give me any faith in their actions. Individual bank entities are mingling in software intimately on the consumer facing front in ways they have been for decades on the backend but never have they been software companies and from my engagements with banks (I've talked to several local credit unions and regional banks about security and potentially working on contract to fix their broken web portals when I find loopholes) the decision makers are not computer literate or competent in the slightest. They deal in effectively informational data without any desire to invest or put effort into actually knowing what they are doing, and it is incredibly dangerous.

<comment><USER12> Banks have terrible security, it's true.

But you don't lose your dollars when they get hacked.

You do lose bitcoins in a hack.

>faith in the mathematics

All the mathematics do is keep your money from disappearing in the situation where there are no security breaches. I'm confident enough in the bank+FDIC to do _that_.

<comment><USER4> So how exactly do you steal bitcoin out of a password protected wallet, when I have never written the password anywhere, it is "reasonably secure" (no dictionary, mixed notation, 16+ characters) and it is encrypted AES-256, which has not been cracked yet? I'm not talking about online wallets which are just as untrustworthy as banks unless they FOSS their implementation, and even then you are trusting their system administration, especially if they keep backups of your password and thus have access to the contents on their end.

<comment><USER12> Virus on your computer as you type in that password.

<comment><USER4> I'm wondering how I'm going to get a virus on a curated Arch installation without usb autoexecute, also considering its on my office and usually locked, behind two firewalls without any inbound ports default open. They would need to get an executable on my system - shell or not - somehow give it executable permissions (which reminds me, there really should be some mechanism in almost any file transfer protocol to deny-execute on downloaded files so users need to manually allow it), run it somehow, and have it running when I'm accessing my wallet, via somehow injecting itself into an autorun mechanism. And I have PAX disabled access to xinitrc, bashrc, bash_profile, ~/.config/systemd, ~/.pam_environment, and ~/.config/autostart.

I'll take my chances. If I heard of wallets getting keylogged, I'd just access my wallet via a TTY without my desktop running without any user autostart configuration. It is also a partial advantage that X is horribly implemented and since the window manager grabs the keyboard, you need to exploit the window manager to listen to keystrokes like that, if you deny /dev access to keystroke polling. I think it gets even better in Wayland where the system compositor controls keyboard access, so you can stay diligent in only passing keystrokes to the actually selected application, and take steps to avoid situations like false frames over the GUI login prompt that passthrough keystrokes from an invisible keylogger (I'm not aware of if thats even possible on X or Wayland, though, should look into that).

<comment><USER12> What program are you using to make the actual transaction? It needs knowledge of the blockchain, is that coming from another computer or is it connecting to the network? A firewall isn't going to protect you in the latter case.

I would want a nearly completely airgapped machine before I would be comfortable using it to self-manage significant quantities of bitcoin. Maybe feed blockchain info over a one-way serial cable. Definitely no disk sharing.

With a bank I know that a hack might happen but nothing is irrevocable. If they want to use bad security it only hurts their insurance premiums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Epic typo in the submission ("durrency"), that is not on the original page. Somebody please fix.

<comment><USER14> It is the title tag of the original document.

<comment><USER15> it's a mistake, though. the word durrency appears no where in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The consensus amongst the middle-class and affluent Ecuadorians I have met was that tying their currency to the US dollar was an important first step to regaining stability, and they weren't sure the government had yet changed its corrupt ways enough to make a new Ecuadorian currency a good idea. Now, Ecuador has a very large poor population as well, who need a lot of help (I mean so poor they can't afford a door on their shacks), and the competing ideology is that a new currency that is locally controlled is necessary for new growth to bring those people out of poverty. Though there also send to be an unspoken understanding and willful ignorance of the fact that the government is too corrupt still to make that a good idea.

I don't know, that's just the impression I got from talking to people in one city, and a particularly affluent one at that (Quito).

</comment><comment><USER17> Key question #1 : how is payment settlement going to take place? In the US and the vast majority of floating fx currency regimes(fiat money regimes), payment settlement occurs via credit/debits to/from reserve accounts at banks. Banks have accounts at the Federal Reserve which are used to settle payment amongst each other. By settling in reserves and allowing bank deposits to be merely denominated in reserves -US case- money supply is much more flexible.

Key Question #2: How will loans be made ? Will banks be able to make loans out of thin air as in the US and most of world or will loan creation be tied to reserves?

As it stands today, Ecuador's monetary regime looks like a gold standard fixed currency regime. This digitization change appears to be an attempt to eliminate cash transactions but maintain the dependency on dollar reserves which the Ecuadorian government cannot print and must be obtained via exports, which is hard. Golds standards died because of this inflexibility. My guess is this is a first step in returning to a sovereign currency but without saying so explicitly. If loans and settlement are based 100% on dollar reserves today maybe tomorrow they can remove the US Dollar reserve usage.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is closer to M-PESA, I think: operating on mobile phones, a financial service for the unbanked. Because Ecuador is dollarised but can't print their own $, physical wear on notes is a significant cost. A digital service allows for an expansion of the money supply (M1? not M0), cost savings in money transfer, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Countries that don't have a currency of their own

[http://qz.com/260980/meet-the-countries-that-dont-use- their-...](http://qz.com/260980/meet-the-countries-that-dont-use-their-own- currency/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is 'durrency' a new made-up word that's a play on 'digital currency' or a typo?

</comment><comment><USER21> Iceland already did something similar: [http://www.auroracoin.org/](http://www.auroracoin.org/)

<comment><USER22> Why is this getting downvoted? Iceland did roll out a crypto-currency, the article did claim this other to be the first. Seems logicalman is being just that ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "The project initially created buzz in in the bitcoin blogosphere, but that > interest faltered once it was clear that Ecuador's project would not present > a competing alternative."

and

> "In fact, Ecuador's project is more similar to M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based > money transfer service"

Headline is deceiving.

Nothing to see here. Move along.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you seen any open source HN clones? - <AUTHOR>

I found this Indian one:
http://www.garamkabar.com/
But it doesn't have threaded comments like HN. That seems to miss the whole point.
Has anyone seen an authentic open source clone with the two key features: voting and threaded comments? <comment><USER2> HN is open source itself. Are you looking for a clone specifically?

<comment><USER3> Where is the code available from?

<comment><USER2> arclanguage.org

It's part of the arc distribution

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I had no idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reddit is open source.

<http://code.reddit.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, thanks, I should have mentioned I thought about that - but the unruliness of the community turned me off. I assumed this is the case because anyone can downvote. Likewise I assume HN is more polite because only more established members can downvote. That said, I suppose I could use the reddit code and tweak the downvoting feature to only provide it to users who have established some credibility in the community :)

<comment><USER5> _"Likewise I assume HN is more polite because only more established members can downvote."_

I think HN is more polite because:

1) when people flag a submission as off-topic, it gets killed

2) people here often care about their reputations, because they may work professionally with other people here, now or in the future

3) when name calling starts, Paul Graham often steps in, and people care about what he thinks (see item 2 above)

None of these attributes can be found in the HN source code.</comment></comment></comment>


The First 3-D Printer in Space Makes Its First Object: A Spare Part - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/first-3-d-printer-space-makes-its-first-object-spare-n255516 <comment><USER2> The utility of this can't be understated. In space, no one can hear your call to AAA. Like everything else with 3D printing, the first things will be small and I doubt NASA will forego incorporating redundancy in favor of sending more printers.

But I imagine the space (and cost) saving potential is huge here. I'm guessing the space station requires a number of redundant and common parts. That has a cost, a common part is more easily replaced, but has to be made to the lowest common denominator. Niche parts have to be carried in duplicate or triplicate, I'm sure. If someone could chime in, I'd like to know how much that's the case.

If my supposition is true, then this means fewer parts need share common components, and this means less weight and more room for everything else. Now if only they could 3D print better meals and more dignified sanitation for the brave members of the ISS, I'm sure they would appreciate that.

<comment><USER3> > If someone could chime in, I'd like to know how much that's the case.

I'd be interested to know this too. I'm guessing there aren't that many vital parts made from plastic though, unless they've secretly built the ISS out of Lego :D

<comment><USER4> Next step would be a laser sintering device (additive metal manufacturing). Floating powder might be a problem, but could be solved with rotating the device to use centripetal force to hold the powder against a surface during the process.

<comment><USER5> I doubt bringing fine metal powder to the ISS is a good idea. Any powder that escapes (and escape it will) will end up everywhere, and can short out electronics. Breathing it in also isn't that healthy.

<comment><USER6> Possible stupid question: couldn't it be done outside? The machine is autonomous anyway...

<comment><USER7> (Disclaimer: I enjoy playing KSP.)

Then any escaped "fine metal powder" could turn into a 10,000 km/h sandblast for the next satellite over.

It'd probably be fine for the ISS, since it's in a low enough orbit that dust should deorbit quickly, but you'd still have the basic issue of logistics. I can't comment on how convenient it'd be to build and operate a 3D printer in hard vacuum, beyond "not very".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if they can print without using support structures? I would have expected layer bonding to be an issue due to no gravity, but if it's really not a problem (as indicated in the article), I think that 3D printing should work _better_ in space.

<comment><USER9> I suspect you'd still need 'supports' added when slicing - as often it's not so much gravity, but movement from the print head that causes things to go awry.

As for layer/bed adhesion. Even here on Earth, the RepRap MendelMax/Lulzbot [1] can print upside down. I imagine that's true for most of the units made from aluminum extrusions. And there have already been prints done in parabolic 'zero-g' flights using a Makerbot looking printer [2].

[1] [http://download.lulzbot.com/TAZ/photos/upside_down/Lulzbot_p...](http://download.lulzbot.com/TAZ/photos/upside_down/Lulzbot_product_4-8-131323.jpg)

[2] [https://flightopportunities.nasa.gov/technologies/4/](https://flightopportunities.nasa.gov/technologies/4/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We can't say, "Tea, earl grey, hot" yet, but we can make the cup. It's a start.

Small steps Sparks, small steps.

<comment><USER11> You can even make a cup with your voice [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TKjj5eakao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TKjj5eakao)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not only a spare part, but a spare part _of itself._ How nicely meta. :)

<comment><USER13> Thinking about it, it's probably the first thing you should _have_ spare parts for, given that if something breaks you cannot make more ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a little piece on my thoughts on 3d printing in space last year: [http://jimkeener.com/posts/fpga-spaceflight](http://jimkeener.com/posts/fpga- spaceflight)

I really do believe that 3d printing and malleable computing will enable long- term space exploration.

It's extremely exciting to see the start of this!

</comment><comment><USER15> I know theres some really tantalizing ideas about using metal 3d printers which melt powdered metal with a laser in space. By varying the composition of the powders, it's possible to make pieces which are _gradient alloys_ \- Imagine a pipe thats copper at one end, silver in the middle and gold on the other. Opens up a lot of possibilities for mining asteroids.

</comment><comment><USER16> A few years ago I met some folks at the Huntsville, AL Hackerspace who were working on turning the consumables into 3D printer feedstock. All of the food containers, etc would be turned into valuable materials. Right now they have to ship all of that waste back down to Earth. The potential for this kind of reuse is huge.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very handy to have spare parts to be 3D printed. Reminds me of the Bob Shaw's short story "Put part A into part B", where the crew have to assemble a robot capable of assembling anything, but it comes disassembled to the space station.

<comment><USER18> I'm not finding anything by that title written by Bob Shaw: [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Bob_Shaw](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi- bin/ea.cgi?Bob_Shaw)

<comment><USER19> Googled "short story Put part A into part B", second result is an Asimov short story:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insert_Knob_A_in_Hole_B](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insert_Knob_A_in_Hole_B)

<comment><USER17> That's the one, thanks. Human memory is weak, apologies. But the story plot is quite relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Even while they can 3D print, they still can't live without Duct tape up there!

</comment><comment><USER21> _spare, adj._

> A spare part ... is an interchangeable part that is kept in an inventory and > used for the repair or replacement of failed units.

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

> kept in reserve, as for possible use

> being in excess of present need; free for other use

[1] [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/spare?s=t](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/spare?s=t)

A replacement part made on demand is by definition not "spare". Let's not have this word go the way of "drone", please?

<comment><USER13> It wasn't made on demand, it was made as a demonstration and to have a spare.</comment></comment>


Remdesivir: Drug has 'clear-cut' power to fight coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52478783 <comment><USER2> "remdesivir's polymerase inhibitor mechanism can reduce viral load, experts said. However, all available data is still empirical in nature, and load reduction may not translate into clinically relevant outcomes like reducing hospital stay or decreasing mortality ([https://www.pharmaceutical- technology.com/comment/gilead-rem...](https://www.pharmaceutical- technology.com/comment/gilead-rem...))

Remdesivir is an element similar to one the cells use to create protein chains. When used instead of the real element it stops the chain. This limits the ability of the virus to create new copies.

Remdesivir is difficult to make. About 8 liters of starting material is used to create a milli-liter of product which is about 1 injections. It appears that each patient may require multiple injections.

Remdesivir is not a vaccine.

Remdesivir might reduce viral load (number of virus particles). The relationship between viral load, which is high in the beginning but less later, does not necessarily translate to sickness or death.</comment>