Apple Introduces Core ML - <AUTHOR> http://deepdojo.com/apple-introduces-core-ml <comment><USER2> Main discussion from this week: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494337)

</comment><comment><USER3> May just be me, but article does seem a little sensationalist (as the website is geared toward machine learning on a Mac).

Can someone with more knowledge on the field elaborate on if this really is a breakthrough/a 'stunning' technological achievement?

<comment><USER4> I haven't much time to look at CoreML, but I do know a little bit how it's done before this new framework. For instance, Inception v3 model was 'rewritten' to use in MetalPerformanceShaders(part of Metal framework on iOS). Since model provides parameters, you do know what 'layers' need to be used to implement inference network based on Inceptionv3. And this is quite difficult to do, looking at the code. But here, bam - drag and drop, auto-generated classes and code, and you're ready to go, I guess. If it's working like this, I'm quite impressed.

<comment><USER5> Is this basically a path from model code that runs on an nvidia GPU like most people currently do, to a model that runs on iOS taking advantage of Metal?</comment></comment></comment>


Dollar Bus Club: We Built a Tool to Find $1 Bus Tickets - <AUTHOR> https://www.busbud.com/blog/busbud-launches-the-dollar-bus-club/ <comment><USER2> Fun fact according to the research: top 5 countries for $1 tickets are the US, the UK, Italy, Canada & Germany, and your chances of finding a $1 fare are best 30-100 days in advance, peaking at 90 days.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The probability of finding a $1 bus ticket increases when you search a month in advance, hovering near the 4% mark at that point. It reaches its peak with around the 90 day mark.</comment>


Google Is Exploring an Alternative to Cookies for Ad Tracking - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/google-is-exploring-an-alternative-to-cookies-for-ad-tracking/

<comment><USER2> "Google could create an anonymous identifier, tied to users of its Chrome browser on a specific device, that advertisers would use to target ads."

Wait what? Thats even worse for privacy. So incognito mode is a bust I guess? I thought with all the NSA revelations, we should be working against such tracking methods not towards it!

<comment><USER3> _> >Wait what? Thats even worse for privacy. So incognito mode is a bust I guess? I thought with all the NSA revelations, we should be working against such tracking methods not towards it!_

Duh! Google has their agenda and that's collecting as much info as possible to better monetize you and your grandma. I know you don't believe their crap about empowering you or your privacy. They are essentially a for-profit NSA.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe claims like this, but on this matter, this needs to be traced:

[http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44076497](http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44076497)

An important information from the "confidential" studies here for example would be what kind of monitors were tested

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An "identifier, tied to users of its Chrome browser on a specific device, that advertisers would use to target ads"

Isn't that the most common definition of a cookie now? What's the difference between this and a cookie?

<comment><USER6> _What 's the difference between this and a cookie?_

This not-quite-a-cookie wouldn't be suppressed by the technical mechanisms springing up to suppress cookies.</comment></comment>


China's Electric Cars Hit Some Potholes - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-20/quality-issues-plague-china-s-electric-car-industry <comment><USER2> > _For example, the most common Chinese complaint about NEVs is that battery > performance on the road doesn't meet what's advertised._

This was actually something I was rather shocked with on the Tesla Model 3. I never, ever get anywhere near the EPA range on ICE vehicles I've driven, but in the TM3 I can regularly beat the rated Wh/mile efficiency.

With two caveats. One, if outside temperature is below 50F and I'm running the heater the efficiency drops a bit at higher speeds and significantly in heavy traffic (because heating is per minute not per mile). And two, even though the electrical efficiency is better than advertised, the MPGe conversion is not accurate because electricity costs are artificially high in MA.

<comment><USER3> Think the issue with cold weather heating will be fixed by the introduction of better heat pumps.

<comment><USER4> And actually insulating the car. Cars today are almost entirely thermally uninsulated, which was fine back when gasoline engines pumped out kilowatts of heat for free.

Having an insulating layer between the inner and outer steel panels and maybe making all glass out of a laminate with the inner plastic layer something thermally insulating would help a lot.

<comment><USER3> That's a good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > More than 40 NEVs spontaneously combusted in China in 2018.

I will be the first one to complain about shoddy quality control and questionable practices but... this doesn't seem like a high number at all.

I mean, ICE cars will catch fire pretty often, but this is not news.

"In 2003-2007, U.S. fire departments responded to an average of 287,000 vehicle fires per year. "

The ICE fleet is pretty big, but this also goes to show how absolute numbers are worthless.

<comment><USER6> Are the ICE numbers due to collisions? I think there is a significant difference between a car catching fire as a result of a collision and during normal operation as `spontaneously` suggests.

<comment><USER7> I have seen at least a dozen car fires and had the car I was driving catch fire twice (same car, different causes), and none of these fires involved a collision. Anecdotal, I know but that's what I have.

<comment><USER8> I've seen at least two car fires where the person was able to pull over to the side of the road, get out of the vehicle... and then watch it burn while they waited for the fire department.

I also one time had a minor fire in Jeep of mine due to a mouse nest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I was Panasonic or Samsung I would be very nervous about losing trade secrets. China would give anything for their IP. With the same quality of materials Panasonic and Samsung have 30-40% higher energy capacity than Chinese BD.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chinese manufacturers make it sooo attractive to send it all over there. Low to zero up front costs including development amortized across so many units as to be lost in the parts cost. It's only when you ask for the molds and IP that you find out your product is not your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not quite the same, but related: China's BYD buses are also similarly poorly built, and every non-Chinese transit agency that has purchased BYD's electric buses has either cancelled or downsized their order.

LA's Metro purchased a few of them, and despite being brand new, they have worse reliability than 30-year old ICE buses.

<comment><USER11> {{citation-needed}}

<comment><USER10> (literally the first search result in Google and Bing)

[https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-electric- buses-201...](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-electric- buses-20180520-story.html)

<comment><USER11> Describes arguments around range in one deployment. A long way from _every non-Chinese transit agency that has purchased BYD 's electric buses has either cancelled or downsized their order_.

<comment><USER10> Even though its a very long article, it helps to read the entire thing. The article references the Phoenix, Albuquerque and Long Beach transit agencies, all of which cancelled their BYD orders as a result of LA Metro's issues with BYD's buses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> China's electric cars look like golf carts with a plastic skin wrapped around it. The don't look like they have much more safety features than a road legal golf cart in my state.

<comment><USER13> Only Americans need a tank on the road. Weight is a big problem when you want to travel far. In a perfect world, the electric car is not the solution, we should aim for electric scooter, moped, bicycle, ... for our daily travels.

<comment><USER14> Weather is a bit problematic with those. When you regularly get rain, sleet, snow and freezing temperatures, you want a cabin and heating.

<comment><USER15> I've lived in the US and understand the long driving distances makes it hard. That being said weather is a non issue, I bicycle everywhere all year around no matter the weather (live in Denmark). As long as the trips are below 10 km at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's hoverboards all over again.

<comment><USER17> More wheels though. They'll make them work eventually, just like everything else before that.

<comment><USER18> Start with the shape and spec, then iterate the features and quality over a few frantic generations.

Classic catch-up engineering.

<comment><USER16> Not catching on fire? Leave that for the 2nd iteration!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > By one estimate, there are "as many as 500" NEV startups in China

I would have thought that the US was the home of startups and Capitalism. Can someone explain this phenomenon? How are they funded, etc?

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems a market that is ripe for Tesla's entry into it with the Model 3. That might be why they're getting so much Chinese government sponsorship.

<comment><USER21> No. Teslas, all of them, are exponentially more expensive than the average EV in china. These aren't what we would even call cars. The average Chinese electric car is more akin to a really fast three-wheeled golf cart. I'm talking about the sub-$5000 market, price points that wouldn't cover the doors on a tesla.

<comment><USER22> > exponentially more expensive

Just a pet peeve, but is it a trend that people like to use "exponentially" to just mean "way more"? Exponentially doesn't mean what you just wrote here.. Exponential implies a rate of growth, the cost of tesla's isn't doubling every N years compared to other EVs..

<comment><USER23> It's a rhetorical device like using "literal" even when something is meant in figurative terms. Specifically, it's hyperbole or exaggeration.

It's one of the strengths of human language that we can infer meaning from context -- from connotation -- rather than purely relying on denotative meaning. By exaggerating factual reality of our statements, we imply the strength of our belief or emphasize the degree of the description we're making.

Further, it's important to recognize that jargon does not _supercede_ the vernacular meaning of a word. Just because you know what "exponential" is and how it differs from, say, "geometric" when referring to mathematics, this doesn't mean that the vernacular meanings of these words don't apply any longer. No, it doesn't matter that mathematics is the origin of the terms. There are still valid, accepted, vernacular meanings. Understanding jargon means you need to understand the context that the speaker is using to determine what meaning they're using. Here, since "exponential" in the mathematic sense is clearly nonsense, you should conclude that that meaning is not the intended literal meaning.

Human communication is about conveying the overall meaning _in spite of_ the meaning of individual words. Language is imprecise because thoughts, opinions, and arguments are more complex and nuanced than the individual words we're forced to express them in can ever be. After all, think of diversity of the range of devices that can accurately be described as a "computer". Or how many different types of objects you could describe as a "cup" or a "table". These are common nouns for real, physical objects, and their meaning is fuzzy enough to cover dissimilar objects made of dissimilar materials that serve dissimilar purposes. And yet if I say to you "I put the cup on the table" you have sufficient information to know what has happened even though you and I have never met in person, we've never shared a conversation, and you've never seen my cup or my table (and, indeed, the cup and table you're imagining in your head almost certainly look nothing like my actual cup and table).

So, yeah, that isn't what "exponential" means, but that sentence is not meaningless because of it.

<comment><USER24> >Human communication is about conveying the overall meaning in spite of the meaning of individual words.

That _really_ ought not be your goal.

<comment><USER25> All the poets, songwriters and comedians would have a collective heart attack if they were told they needed to use language like that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is 10 in base pi? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-is-10-in-base-pi?share=1 <comment><AUTHOR> (I'm actually trying to submit the answer by Dave Williamson, but I'm not sure how to link directly to it. It's ridiculously comprehensive. He shows how to calculate it using pure math, using a calculator, by writing a program, and demonstrates a partial proof on some of the properties.)</comment>


1000Memories: A Loved One Has Passed Away. What's Your Digital Strategy? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/09/a-loved-one-has-passed-away-whats-your-digital-strategy/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how this might change the way we remember those long departed.

We are a relational by nature as human beings and this means that connections fade with time. Young people by nature tend not to care about the life challenges faced by grandpa and grandma all those many years ago. We make idols of celebrities in our generation but what of the past generation or two. Maybe those of us who are older will well remember a film star out of the 1940s such as Loretta Young but young people don't (and for those who are older, who remembers or cares about Gloria Swanson as a sex goddess of the 1920s, for example). The same can be said of any other type of famous person. Today, some of us remember a few notable things that Ike did, for instance, but as we go back further, say, to William Howard Taft, we remember or care little or nothing about his life and the issues faced by that generation (even more so as we recede further - Franklin Pierce anyone?). Indeed, this is one of the problems of getting older. As our prime fades, and as things move on, fewer and fewer people care about what we did with our life's struggles and we can feel progressively marginalized and isolated as we enter into our 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. Only those who are our contemporaries can reflect upon and appreciate our life's accomplishments as they come to know us and as they share the common experiences with us. In time, of course, people die off and then those who relate to the remaining older people become fewer and fewer until the isolation is nearly complete for someone who lives a really long life. For the most part, immediate family might care but no one else does. For the person who is 100 today, no one cares what it was like to live through Prohibition or to have experienced talkies for the first time, or to wonder at the marvel of air travel that no one had ever seen before or to grow up and raise a family in the rural midwest of long ago. That time has come and gone and we, as a relational people, just can't relate any more.

Today, I can look at old photos of my parents (both deceased) and my heart is moved. I can do the same with photos of grandparents whom I actually knew and can relate but with nowhere near the same intensity. But, then, I look at old photos of my great grandparents in the old country from which my parents ultimately emigrated and I feel nothing - it is just some bearded guy posing for a picture in some little hut from a distant land and a distant time.

I love the study of history precisely because it helps bring to life how people lived and dealt with the challenges of their generation, no matter how distant from ours. But most of the events of humanity are forever buried in history in a way that they can never be known. Think of all the millions of people from the 1830s, for example, who lived and died while facing many of the same issues we do today - how am I going to make something of myself? how do I find my life's mate? where do I want to live? do I want to go to school and what should I study? how do I try to change my world for the better? For all those lives, the events and the subsequent memories were as vivid as could be as the lives were lived out and as a generation or two that knew those people remembered or were told stories about what they had done. But, given the passage of enough time, none of this matters one whit to those who live today. Now, nearly two centuries later, only a few high points of that era are remembered and often only from a sterile textbook type of memory (important historical "facts" in a book) about which few people care.

Will a perpetual digital presence on the web change any of this over time? Of course, it can help make vivid the lives of those we knew or directly remember from our lives and those of our contemporaries. It can lessen the "out of sight, out of mind" mode of forgetfulness and make us more easily appreciate those whom we knew and loved or respected while they lived. In this sense, the impact can be profound and particularly so concerning those closest to us in life - it is like my being moved by looking at the old photos of my parents, potentially magnified many times over in having been enriched by stories, anecdotes, written memorabilia, etc. not only from immediate family members but also from friends, acquaintances, and others. What a rich treasure trove this might be to help us remember and honor the memory of those to whom we related and all the more so the closer they were to us in life.

But what will thousands or millions of such narratives mean to those who live two centuries from today looking back on it all. Yes, it might be a rich vein for historians trying to identify broader trends and issues of our era but does it matter beyond that? In other words, would we even care to remember the stories of millions of persons with whom we are unconnected in every way, even if they were ancestors in our direct family line? I don't know but I would suspect that this would be much like looking at that old photo of my great grandparents in the old country. It might be interesting for a passing glance but nothing more. As relational people, it is hard to relate to those with whom we have no connection (or at least very little connection), and the memories of those lives in this sense would be relevant only for a time, i.e., as long as those who could relate still lived.

All this is another way of saying that, in time, the mark we make in this world will inevitably fade. And, for this reason, I doubt that it can be captured by online digital preservation in any way that will prove meaningful beyond the lives of our contemporaries.

All that said, this is a beautiful idea and this piece is a thoughtful evocation of its possibilities. It just can't be overstretched to achieve a goal that is, in my view, beyond the limits of human capacity. We can all be memorialized to a point but the limit is bound by those who remember being able to relate to who we were and what we did. At some point, that connection breaks and the memories fade, no matter how well those lives may be documented online.

<comment><USER3> " We make idols of celebrities in our generation but what of the past generation or two." Consider the insane amount of people who are considered extremely influential in their respective fields/disciplines/arts only AFTER they pass away. I don't know if that is a trend that will continue into the future, but I certainly hope so.

<comment><USER4> There will be people who are obscure to history, for all the right reasons, and for all the wrong reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't see why my loved ones need to be on the internet.

If they have to be, the main value is long-term-ness. Whatever info/pictures I put out there, I'd likely want that to still be there in 10, 20, 50 years. Nobody has done that type of long-termness well, so far, that I know off.

What I might want to put online is their digital archive: the stuff they chose to share online while alive, archived for a long time.

<comment><USER6> No in the internet domain or electronic, but Wilhelm Research have epic amounts of data on film longevity, and you can download freely their 800page illustrated history / report book which is awesome. You find out things like Kodak knowingly sold crappy film stock that would fade to uselessness within a few years, which explains why there's so many 70's and 80's vintage movies no- onecan get on DVD, because the originals are spoiled short of painstaking and hugely expensive restoration. Can't remember if this applied to consumer film, but Kodak sure lost their reputation bad, letting Fujifilm grab the market.

Side note: the true losses i've experienced of family records were precipitated by ignorant relatives disposing of things they had no right to. My only ever data loss was also caused by carelesness or malice by a third party.

As a direct result of this i realy got into learning about everything from backup tape wear to filw system formats, data integrity. I suppose that might be a silver lining, certainly i am able to use what i learned most weeks for work.

But my real concern is how little people understand bit-rot and data integrity in general for storage. My view is nothing is yet truly archival quality. One of the things i learned was the way careful movie studios (used to?) separate their color originals into monochrome R,G,B reels, because the mono stock lasts so much longer, doesn't fade. Also i learned about Technicolor, which uses organic dyes which don't fade or hardly fade. But the original technicolor process is no longer used, apparently the last few lab setups were sold to China. I think China maybe got a good deal, and i wonder if we won't see it making a revival? That thought came courtesy of Andy Grove's recent interview where he observes that if we throw the "low tech" jobs away to other ambitious countries, eventually they innovate with it, like RCA / Westinghouse televisions and then Sony who then outsoruced to Korea who are the present hib of plasmas / lcds and so on.

What i mean is, don't outsource your family records and memories. Write stuff on paper.Print digital picstures on the best current Epson or Canon ink and put them in a dry dark place. Put a lock on it or put it under a attorney managed storage contract so your kids can get access but not throw it away in a fit of upset or stupidity.

As for this service, i admit i've not read much on their site, but where is the front and center discussion of how they've addressed the myriad ways data gets lost / corrupted?

I looked hard at trying to start a service similar to this, but not with the same angle. No way could i make the numbers work on a "freemium" model. Some website outfits do diligent archive style backup for pro photogs, and they charge very serious amounts of money, and i couldn't get any of those on record as to storage policies. It's not just having ZFS, but every app which touches your data better be doing checksums and more, and when i modelled my own idea, i had a 4 - tier multi redundant system that extensively used WORM tape for anything flagged "archive". The numbers got hard at the point the equipment his EOL or cumulative MTBF required preventative reinvestment. I was looking hard at trying to find insurance cover so that, should three data centers all fail, i could at least give some financial condolence to customers / cover lawsuits, but never got right at the kind of person who could quote me. I suppose that would be "cat risk" and i'd need a big "RE" not a front line insurer, but that was only part of my problem. If data is truly private - it might be of a marriage which went wrong and you only want those records to be available after a decent amount of time has passed - you need to build a fairly sensible, but necessarily complex, security model. Then there's the simpler fun of where to store keys, and how do you make any of this easy to use . .

I fear that projects like this risk more tears than they solve problems. The obituary thing is just a gimmick. What print paper runs an obit (for real,not as a paid insertion) without someoe caring to contact them and explain why this person was significant. Not only that but the few obits of friends of mine had to be written on a volunteer basis, even for pretty well known people, because the paper (a major national) allocated no budget for that beyond very high profile people.

I don't want to simply knock this project, because it's an interesting idea, but i think it's flawed and fragile. I don't want to place trust with a faddish organisation when, heck, i've been burned by trusted family and weak courts and straight up accidents and worst of all, couldn't care less attitudes. Only you care enough to do this. If we all did, maybe family life would get a lot nicer for some of us?

Just a thought. Best to all.

<comment><USER7> "Organic dyes" have nothing to do with Technicolor print stability. All films and most colorants (in ink jet, dye transfer, etc.) use organic dyes or organic pigments. What made old Technicolor so stable was that it could produce silver separations of the three primary color records, and it was the silver negatives, which are extremely stable, that can be used to strike new color prints (with their organic dyes). Trouble is, this is a very expensive process. Disney used it for its animated features which it intended to release again and again over many decades. Most studios went for the much less expensive dye originals which are less stable, especially if poorly processed or stored. (New viewing prints can be struck from properly stored master prints.) Modern color movie films are quite stable (science marches on), which is largely why the costly Technicolor separation process gradually disappeared.

Digital systems pose their own problems, of course. There's media obsolescene (8-inch floppies, anyone?), digital integrity (bit drift, etc.), and media integrity (oops, that tape broke again). Much of what keeps archivists busy is deciding protocols for the continuous migration of images from one generation of media to another.

For really good up to date information on image permanence, I recommend the independent, non-profit (unlike Wilhelm) Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They've got some excellent, free downloads on both the basics and the advanced stuff. Wilhelm's book may be free, but it's very old and out of date. <http://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like Gary Vaderchuck's take on this: everything we do today will be recorded for the benefits of our grandkids. Soon enough, this will be essentially non- optional. Act accordingly.

This is a sea change in just the last few years, too -- I lost everything I wrote in college with the exception of one paper, but now with Dropbox I'm likely to never lose anything I create ever again.

In a few decades I'll probably need a personal archivist to sift through for the good bits and give my grandkids something with a narrative to it.

<comment><USER9> Your last sentence. There's a million dollars there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like this idea and execution. Really nice work!

I think a good feature to add would be some sort of kiosk mode that could be used during a wake or reception by just putting a web browser on one of your pages and it would rotate through photos, guestbook entries, etc. like a slide show but would drop in to the guestbook with a mouse click and go back to the slideshow after the page went idle for a while.

Another good feature would be a way for people to buy coffee-table books of a site to save as a personal memory. I'm certain with some effort and partnerships with a publisher, you could create a well designed book automatically from the data you have. I put together a video montage of my father after he passed away and having something tangible that you can have of a loved one is always comforting.

Finally as a way to generate traffic, I'd consider building some killer example sites of celebrities as soon as the news breaks of some celebrity's passing.

<comment><USER11> I agree with all of these suggestions. The Kiosk mode strikes me as particularly creative and insightful. There's a startup that let's people create a wedding guestbook with video snips people record on a laptop, that'd be an awesome thing, people teliing stories about the deceased into a camera and aggregating them into a video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hi all, We'd love to have your feedback or comments. If you'd like our help in setting up a profile, please get in touch at email@example.com Thanks, Brett, Rudy and Jonathan

<comment><USER11> It looks really nice. Small comment: On the main page for a memorial, when the box pops up asking if I know the person, it says "show your support". I found that phrasing a little odd, less heartfelt than I'd expect. I'd change it to 'show your love'.

<comment><USER13> "Love" might be a little too strong for people who were only marginally connected to the deceased.

<comment><USER14> Show your caring?

<comment><USER13> I don't like "caring" as a noun much. I think "support" is good -- it means "emotional support for the family", not "I support this dead dude, he was cool".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My digital strategy? Dry my eyes with two pieces of cloth?

On the serious side of things, I guess this would be useful for some people but when I read the article, I assumed it was about how you would notify friends and family online - I doubt that many young people read the arbituary in the local newspaper often enough for you to find them there.

</comment><comment><USER16> "They'll develop their business model over time".

That would be a little scary to me as an investor.

<comment><USER13> So would the fact that they have (sensible) ethical issues about extracting money from grieving relatives.

<comment><USER17> As an investor, I like that. I think this is a business where it's a real competitive advantage not to be jerks.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but i'd rather know how that's codified into business rules and policies. I try to do that for my own company. People change, staff moves, even if infrequently, you get a new CEO . . . qualifying this as a personal trait isn't much substance in my book. It's not concrete, even if it's an honorable intention. Sorry, but i don't see how you hinge a business plan on merely an intention to play nice. Google codified their original intent roughly as not doing crappy flashy adverts, so that's a tangible. But some processes are never immediately visible to customers, and how you you apply attitude as a criteria to that? If you run a shop which prides itself on exceptional behaviour (distinct from a market around you where you see values are a real reason hindering growth) is it not reassuring to try at leat to find some measurables? One might manage a lot of this in interview for new hires, or you might insist on a certain policy regards customer support, such as never giving a stonewall answer per a policy but giving your reps the power to look into a problem. What i'm suggestig is you can do wonders with company culture if you nurture it like a first born, but are there not times when this can be checked against behaviour more thoroughly? I'm thinking about the number of times my cellular reps promise me, voice and in writing, they'll fix a billing glitch, and not once have they come through. That's possibly measurable, as an example. As in "why does customer x contact us so much?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The sample site, a memorial to a relative of one of the founders, is fantastic. Great execution. I don't like the lack of a business model, though. I think it would be better if they charged a reasonable amount up-front, that included the ability to export all of the content in a nice format.

I don't like where TechCrunch went with it. They called Legacy's "cash extraction procedures" _cheesy_. I don't think that's the right word for it. I think, as described by the article, _unethical_ would be the right word.

I looked at Respectance's pricing. It seems they make it so the person who create the site and who sponsor it can be different people.

I don't see great memorials starting like this: A) someone decides to create a site, but doesn't want to put too much into it B) the community rallies around it C) a generous member of the community forks over the cash. I think more often, great things are created by people who care about it. Like the sample site. The founder put a lot of effort into making his loved one's site great. I'm sure in the face of that, $59 or so wouldn't have stopped him.

As for free trials, I don't really think they're appropriate. I think it's what makes it feel like "cash extraction" rather than paying for a valuable service. I think that the only free trial that's needed is the ability to create a site, and pay a one-time fee to get it published, and to keep it online, accepting contributed content, and with an export tool.

</comment><comment><USER19> Small bug:

On this page, there's an "unrendered" —

<http://1000memories.com/a/saldebruno/stories>

<comment><USER12> Good spot. We've fixed it. Thanks, George.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Could they not have gotten a better domain? Also, the Bad Religion song lyrics are beating them in search results.

Great concept, good execution.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the compliments, Teye. We're working on SEO -- doing a lot better after yesterday's traffic. If there's something obvious we're not doing to improve our results, please let us know! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Would love to see a partnership with Legacy Locker here: <http://legacylocker.com/>

</comment><comment><USER22> How do I change the main image for the page after I've uploaded other photos?

<comment><USER12> You can click the "Edit" button at the bottom of any memorial page. Please email me directly if you have any questions or suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it ok to have a personal homepage there ?

I've been looking for a online community where the other users don't annoy me for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looking forward to some good competition! We just launched as well (but before you guys) - we're also free - wwww.people2remember.com Amazing similarities between your product and ours - though I must admit your UI is very clean and concise. Nicely done!

</comment><comment><USER25> nice. solid execution on a great concept.

</comment><comment><USER26> Can you really say "forever" on $20,000 of YC funding? Is there a foundation set up to host the site in the likely event that investors balk? Are you spending your YC funds on offsite backups and some sort of forever RAID?

I'd much rather trust the long term hosting of my memories to a company that is around for the long haul like Wordpress or Google, or one of many other companies with products that aren't marketed for this purpose, but provide similar (actually a lot more) functionality.

<comment><USER27> I'm creating RestBackup.com right now and my next project will probably be RestArchive.com. I'm interested in the problem of data archival for regular people. I've been thinking about the problem of business continuity. One possible solution to the problem is to endow a trust to maintain the archive in the event that the business fails. I'd love to hear what the HN community thinks about this.</comment></comment>


How Plans Kill Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://assistwindow.com/bwm/posts/how-plans-kill-productivity/ <comment><USER2> > I came across several such incidents when I saw employees gossiping about > the changes or tweaks that could have dramatically improved productivity but > they never conveyed them to their seniors

If I don't have "You are to save your employer and your management from consequences of their stupidity." written in job description then I don't see why should I provide them with my insight unasked. Especially since no good deed goes unpunished.

For example while working at corporation I may have an idea of how to do some things simpler but I can't take for granted that making things simpler is beneficial to my supervisor or the team he supervises. Voicing my idea could put my supervisor in awkward situation.

I suppose start-ups are more straightforward.

<comment><USER3> That's a very sad view on the employer-employee relationship. I assume that's why inteligent people are hired in general - pretty much the opposite of what you wrote. Unless you're an assembly line worker and your position is just not important enough to be replaced by a machine (yet), I would hope that any improvements you can come up with are going to be respected. Not necessarily accepted and implemented but at least considered.

I'd really hate to ever be in a position where an overall improvement is treated as a bad thing because of politics.

<comment><USER4> Have you not worked in an office environment at a medium to large sized company yet? As cynical as the original comment comes across it neatly encapsulates the realities of working in that kind of environment.

<comment><USER3> I do work in a (very) large company. I also managed to be fairly successful in ignoring the politics and just doing the job, raising issues with processes and problems in my and other teams when I saw them. If I'm ever punished for doing that, I'll start sending out my resume to other companies most likely.

<comment><USER2> That's perfectly possible if you have strong enough position and you are ok with some people hating you silently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Plans that people rigidly adher to even though the information they were based on is completely outdated are pretty bad.

But know what's even worse? Having no plan at all, or just a vague mission statement. Because then you have no way to answer the question "what do I do next and how do I know it's finished?", and you end up yak shaving, turd polishing, working at cross purposes and just plain killing time, often way past the point where the project cannot achieve its goals any more and just lacks someone with the courage to kill it.

To be useful, a plan has to be updated regularly.

</comment><comment><USER6> It feels easy to blame planning. If I take your interpretation, plans are checklist tasks or milestones for management to measure developer progress. At worst a plan can be something you create for someone else to flog you with it. These sort of plans are also by their nature almost always inaccurate to some degree.

To my mind a good plan is one where it can provide context for an entire team about where and what (to some level of accuracy) needs to be done. Part of planning is to reduce the principle-agent type problems that come with software. Individual developers are responsible for their own plan and it isn't too constrained so at their own liberty people can swap or modify what they need to do without centralized agreement.

Planning isn't easy, and I agree that sometimes the best plan for some types of work is to be very short term and iterative.

</comment><comment><USER7> Straw man argument.

A more accurate title would be "How Bad Project Management Kills Productivity". It's like the author has never heard of Rolling Wave planning [1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_Wave_planning>

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, Your title suggestion inspires me to write another article around management and productivity but I need some more research for it :)

<comment><USER7> :-)

It grinds my gears how we get articles along the lines of "I worked somewhere with pathological project management. Therefore all project management is stupid. YAY DEVELOPERS!!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great article. Funny thing that I was planning with my colleagues a project right before I read it and we realised that planning is not going to help a lot.

I mean it's cool to have some rough estimate but you can never be accurate, especially when a project involves doing things for the first time (ie. innovating)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Nikolas! Glad you liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a developer recently turned project manager I've come to learn a lot about planning and documentation. I understand the reluctance to plan, and to create project documents at the beginning of a project.. but there are good reasons.

One of the key was to create an environment where developers are free from distraction and able to efficiently develop is to have someone plan, and to communicate.

Here's my (somewhat brutal) response to your article: [http://beardedinventor.com/blog/2013/01/23/plans-dont- kill-p...](http://beardedinventor.com/blog/2013/01/23/plans-dont-kill- productivity/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I am having a serious deja vu reading this. I am pretty sure I have read a post exactly like this one here on HN that suggested plans destroy developer interest/creativity and they end up just following the plan instead of suggesting something that they think would be better. It was long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER11> I ended up blogging in response - <http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/01/23/short- term-planning/>

TL;DR - I agree, and highlight how the short-term planning process baked into most agile approaches addresses this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://assistwindow.com/bwm/posts/how- plans-kill-productivity/)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is talking about "plans" in the sense of a grand plan not like, "I plan to get x done today" which I find quite helpful in being productive.

<comment><USER14> Indeed, even team planning, goal settings, ... are useful to avoid wasting time on low value stuff, or getting stuck when others can help.

Problem of project plan generally is the divide and conquer approach. Work is divided in various independent streams, but plan very often fail to consider that the final product need to be whole and underestimate the merging side of stuff.

Getting the balance right is always the problem. Applies not only to planning, but to testing, designing, documenting, certifying, optimizing, supporting, ...</comment></comment>


Facebook Acquires Drop.io - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/facebook-acquires-drop-io-nabs-sam-lessin/

<comment><USER2> "As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops"

Fuck. I loved this service because it was so easy to send people large files. Anyone know of a replacement? Yes, I have a Dropbox account.

<comment><USER3> These talent acquisitions always make me think:

The market's already proven by the company that was just bought. The company that was just bought is being shut down meaning 1) no market leader, 2) less competition in the market, 3) a bunch of paying users are going to be looking for the same exact same product to pay for.

Seems like the perfect opportunity for someone to create a startup to replace the one that was just bought.

<comment><USER4> You also have to think though, if it was going so well they wouldn't have sold in a talent acquisition but continued for a far better payoff later on.

This service looks like a great deal of time and polish has gone into it, replicating it would not be easy. It's also a very competitive space, sure this service takes a slightly different take on it but the file uploads area is pretty saturated.

<comment><USER5> > You also have to think though, if it was going so well they wouldn't have > sold in a talent acquisition but continued for a far better payoff later on.

Not necessarily. In an environment like Facebook it may be possible to leverage their talents to achieve results that would have taken far longer if they were independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Primary source thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1849274></comment>


Closest Temperate World Orbiting Quiet Star Discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1736/ <comment><USER3> I always dislike it when I click on an article like that and there is a giant artists conception that, for a split second I mistake for an actual photograph. It doesn't seem proper to have an artists conception of something on a scientific article.

<comment><USER4> I mostly agree... but then there is the aspect of this that can be quiet inspiring to help us imagine what it might be like... a perhaps inspire us to get the real picture.

<comment><USER5> I like the abstract pictures on quanta magazine, e.g.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision- shakes...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutron-star-collision-shakes-space- time-and-lights-up-the-sky-20171016/)

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron- st...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/squishy-or-solid-a-neutron-stars- insides-open-to-debate-20171030/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> According to the Wikipedia page Red Dwarf stars sound like they'll be around longer than our sun:

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

"Red dwarfs therefore develop very slowly, maintaining a constant luminosity and spectral type for trillions of years, until their fuel is depleted. Because of the comparatively short age of the universe, no red dwarfs exist at advanced stages of evolution."

And here I thought because of their small size they'd be LESS suitable for life.

<comment><USER7> Why do we say the universe has a "comparatively short age" when we have no other universes to compare it to?

<comment><USER8> There is no reason to believe that the universe has a meaningful end, but it appears to have had some kind of origin less than 15 blya. Even if you posit proton decay and use heat death as and endpoint, you're still talking about many more orders of magnitude of "future" than "past" and... well... what else do we mean when we say _young_?

<comment><USER9> If you use the Stelliferous Era [From 10^6 (1 million) years to 10^14 (100 trillion) years after the Big Bang. --wikipedia] as a meaningful period we are still at the very beginning, less than 0.0138% through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought when I got older I would be able to look up at the moon and see expanses of colonies. I don't want to die not knowing whether life exists outside of our tiny little sphere.

The future was supposed to have surface lighting.

<comment><USER11> Just assume there is life elsewhere.

Even if the odds of life are astronomically low (one in a billion), there are billions of galaxies, with billions of stars.

The odds are good, but the results are irrelevant. Only 5% of the stars that we see can emit light presently that will ever reach us - they will all recede beyond our cosmological horizon.

There is very likely life elsewhere, and it makes no difference.

<comment><USER12> Considering the extreme difficulty in getting organic chemistry processes to work in the laboratory, having random chance work to get any pre-biotic sequences is of such low probability that all the hand waving and blackboard erasures of the current biology experts, etc., means nothing.

We do not know and cannot show any viable means of creating the full sequence of pre-biotic chemicals needed for the first organism to exist. When one of the top organic chemists in the world puts out that challenge and nobody responds, one can then say that all of these experts know full well that they do not have a clue and are just deluding everyone else as to how life even came to be.

Just using probability to say that life came about without at least a semblance of an idea of possible sequences that could work is useless. You need at least some possible viable sequence for the full biotic complement of chemicals to be available. Since the sequence requires processes and solvents that are inimical to previous and follow-on chemicals, this sequence development is a major, major problem that is regularly ignored by those who use probability to say life can arise.

When these things are taken into account, the simple fact that there is life here on this planet can be seen as a unique event throughout all of the universe.

On some estimates of random action giving rise to life anywhere in the universe, the probabilities are so low that the universe would need to exist for many magnitudes of time longer than its apparent age at this time. Your "one in a billion" is oh so many magnitudes of order higher than the probabilities estimated.

Of course, your view can be very different and if you can come up with a viable sequence then simply accept the challenge that has been put out. There will be an awful lot of relief if this could be done.

<comment><USER13> The simple truth is, we have no idea. Of course we don't. Data points so far: One. Statistics on that kind of basis tend to be rather meaningless.

One thing we _do_ know to be extremely unlikely: That we - exactly we, us, here at this specific point in time - should somehow have arrived at a point where we can confidently secondguess the universe in all its glorious details. We can't, and we don't really even have the foggiest idea what kind of life is possible, or how it comes about in the first place.

All the Drake equations in the world can't hide the fact that we know nothing. Every single galaxy may be bursting with life, or we may the only specimens anywhere in the dark, cold void.

My personal guess - which is no better or no worse than anyone else's - <USER2> that life or its functional equivalents is more or less everywhere, but that _intelligent_ critters like ourselves are exceedingly rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is anyone aware of a reasoning of why a usable planet would be a requirement for space exploration?

Sure, if a "clone" of Earth is found, it would make things created here more reusable on the new planet, but seems like a pretty limited way of viewing the potential for ventures in space.

More to the point, is anyone aware of the requirements of non-planet staged space operations would look like and how viable such plans would be compared to planet dependent operations.

<comment><USER15> I reckon we'll master terraforming worlds here in our solar system by the time practical (or impractical) interstellar travel becomes a thing. We can get to Mars, Venus, Titan, etc. Will it ever be possible to get to another star system in a useful amount of time? Terraforming Venus would be sweet; as soon as you do it, I'll come visit!

<comment><USER16> Venus is pretty sweet as it is. Go high enough in the atmosphere, and you have about Earth atmospheric pressure and room temperatures. That altitude in the Venus atmosphere is effectively an Earth biosphere sized almost-Earthlike living space.

One convenient circumstance: A breathable Earthlike atmosphere will float at that altitude, so it would be easy to live in floating balloon habitats.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI- old7YI4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I)

<comment><USER17> If you go to all the trouble to get out of one gravity well, what's the point of anchoring yourself?

<comment><USER16> Escaping radiation? Scenery? Proximity to lots of other people? There's a good chance that the barrier of a gravity well is going to go the way of the barrier of mountainous terrain.

Also, exchanging the fixed geography of land for the fluid geography of fluid might result in changes to the underlying nature of society. In hunter gatherer days, dissenters could simply walk to a different part of the environment. Farmer's fields and defensive walls anchored people to particular pieces of land. If everyone lived in mobile floating habitats, everyone would be free to move. This is quite likely to change the nature of government.

You also get this in a Dyson Swarm, but there's a matter of scale. A minimum viable space colony is likely to be larger and more expensive than a minimum viable floating Venusian compound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do we have the technology yet that could even discover a planet the same size and distance as earth from a star similar to the sun?

From these discoveries, it seems that truly earth-like planets around sun-like stars are rare, but i think it might be more of a drunk under a lamp-post looking for his keys because that's where the light is.

<comment><USER19> > it might be more of a drunk under a lamp-post looking for his keys because > that's where the light is.

Maybe, but we haven't looked everywhere the light is yet, so why struggle to look in the dark?

<comment><USER20> Because we're in the dark and that's where we're most likely to find other keys?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article said that they aren't actually sure that it _is_ temperate. It _might be_ \- or it might be as cold as -60 C.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've always wondered if someone on such a planet is looking at us and wondering if there is intelligent life here.

<comment><USER23> Not sure if we'd be sun-transiting to them, but perhaps they can get a highly sensitive atmospheric spectral line chart.

Then they can start debating whether the CO2 level going from 0.03% to 0.04% indicates we're entering another extinction period. If they're within a few light-decades then the next century will be a very exciting time for their astro-xeno-biologists. Lucky them!

<comment><USER24> We would not be sun-transiting to them, at least at the moment: the current declination of Ross 128 happens to be less than 1 degree [1], meaning it's near the celestial equator rather than near the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic plane is at 23.5 degrees to the equator, they would see the Sol-Earth system tilted at that angle: much too large to be sun-transiting.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_128](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_128)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Speaking of space and planetary systems too far away to get to:

What's the current status of the EMDrive? Has it stalled? Is there a space- faring test due soon to see if it actually works in space?

It's seemed to have dropped off the news completely. (Reddit emdrive shows nothing of note.)

<comment><USER26> > It's seemed to have dropped off the news completely

Gonna go way out on a limb here and guess "because it's totally fake" is the most likely reason.

<comment><USER27> You'd think with as many people calling if fake as there are, we'd at least get some of them rubbing it in. Eh, it's probably just the media realizing that those stories aren't very engaging (the title gives you all you need to know), so they only get traction on really slow news days. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So how long would it take to get there with current technology?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have no operational space ships, so with _current_ technology we will never get there.

The fastest feasible technology for human-carrying ships is the fission fragment rocket, with a burnout velocity of about 0.1c. That's 40 years to Proxima b. An 11 ly trip to this world would not be feasible, because a multi- generational ship with the payload fraction needed to hit 0.1c is not feasible.

Probes can be much lighter, enabling higher payload fractions and faster trips.

<comment><USER29> What happens if you hit dust going that fast?

<comment><USER30> Plasma.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Serious question. If we are going to discover or invent a "warp drive" or similar, what are we doing currently that will lead us to that knowledge? CERN?

<comment><USER32> Currently, a warp drive is forbidden by relativity. So I would say, all research trying to find where relativity breaks. So I reckon the gravity wave detectors like LIGO and LISA are more relavant than CERN.

<comment><USER33> Actually, a warp drive is permitted by general relativity assuming it's possible to create 'negative mass': [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)

Of course, that's not a small assumption...

<comment><USER34> Apparently the designers of Mass Effect did their Sci Fi homework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I expect we would find life on another planet within 50 years. But, it would take a lot longer to find or be found by an intelligent life.

</comment><comment><USER36> So is Ross 128b tidally locked or not?

</comment><comment><USER37> let's go!

</comment><comment><USER38> Ross 128? So when will we start shipping our prisoners there?

<comment><USER38> Not many played Frontier Elite 2?

[https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm](https://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/permits.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I need sophisticated optical equipment to read that font. Presumably the target audience has such things in abundance.

<comment><USER40> Firefox has a read mode for this. It displays only the relevant content, in a very eye-friendly font. It does not look very pretty in that mode, but it very easy to read. I love this feature.</comment></comment>


Optimize React Performance - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@treyhuffine/optimize-react-performance-c1a491ed9c36 <comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Use key correctly

2\. Manage shouldComponentUpdate

3\. Extend PureComponent instead of Component

4\. Build for production</comment>


Monero Gold integer undeflow scam - <AUTHOR> https://66shitcoins.com/blog/2018/2/4/monero-gold-the-story-and-tech-specs-of-a-4-million-usd-shitcoin-scam-brilliantly-executed <comment><USER2> Yep, and $coin is right now a big steeming pile of..

Pretty much no matter how you shake it, there's scammers everywhere, fakecoins abounds, and liquidity transfer from $coin to paper fiat currency is fraught with dangers.

Look at the coinbase horror stories - it's now well established if your money is stuck there, you __must __get the help from having a high post here on HN if you want a reasonable response.

Long story short: some people will make a mint. A lot of people will lose their shirts. It's a repeat of the stock market of the 10's and 20's, right before the foundation of the SEC and the controls we now criticise.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Edit: aaand here comes the -1's. I hit a nerve here from the looks of it.

1\. Coinbase: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261136)

2\. Almost 1400 altcoins in existence. [https://www.justcryptonews.com/120/how-many-altcoins-are- the...](https://www.justcryptonews.com/120/how-many-altcoins-are-there)

3\. "Investors" mortgaging their house to buy bitcoin. [http://fortune.com/2017/12/12/bitcoin-investors- mortgages/](http://fortune.com/2017/12/12/bitcoin-investors-mortgages/)

4\. History of the SEC: [https://www.sec.gov/Article/whatwedo.html](https://www.sec.gov/Article/whatwedo.html) \----

Companies publicly offering securities for investment dollars must tell the public the truth about their businesses, the securities they are selling, and the risks involved in investing. --- WHICH ISNT BEING DONE

People who sell and trade securities – brokers, dealers, and exchanges – must treat investors fairly and honestly, putting investors' interests first. --- WHICH ISNT BEING DONE

<comment><USER3> > Long story short: some people will make a mint. A lot of people will lose > their shirts.

Zero. Sum. Game.

<comment><USER4> Is it?

That doesn't sound correct. Bitcoin didn't exist a decade ago. The amount of wealth it added can be measured directly.

But perhaps I'm not thinking of it in the right way.

<comment><USER5> Assuming Bitcoin is totally worthless in the long run (which I strongly believe it is), the right way to think of it is that people who own it have lost however much they paid for it. When you think of it that way, all the sums add up to zero.

<comment><USER4> Suppose Bitcoin ends up worth a dollar. Since there will be 22 million BTC, it seems true to say that it added at least as much wealth to the world as a failed (acqui-hired) startup. Therefore it wasn't zero sum, correct?

It's not like we're doing anything else with our time, so we may as well have a thought experiment.

<comment><USER6> the fiat currency required to fullfill the 22 million coins being cashed out would be removed from other areas of society

<comment><USER4> Why is that different from a startup being acquired for $22M? In both cases, people now have $22M to spend that they otherwise wouldn't have had.

<comment><USER7> Startups are bought because the buying company plans to use them in a profitable enterprise. What would you do with post-crash Bitcoins that you paid a dollar for?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a pretty profitable scam that will remain viable for a while. Creating a token is basically free and with some slick advertising and community shilling you can create a social phenomenon that will make the scammer rich with very little risk (until the inevitable crackdown).

<comment><USER9> any idae if there is any legality issues to something like this?

<comment><USER8> I'm not a lawyer, but I think this kind of stuff pretty clearly counts as fraud under existing law and that these ICO scammers in general would definitely be vulnerable to lawsuits, however:

A. The coin operators can remain anonymous. B. The coin operators could live in any jurisdiction. C. It's nearly impossible to prove that the operators are the ones who stole the token (which makes the scam particularly ideal).

<comment><USER10> Surely in the case of (C), at least in the contract described in the article, there would be a visible transaction showing that the contract owner caused the underflow, because only the contract owner can sign a transaction burning more tokens than there are in existence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Monero, the most prominent fork of Bytecoin, the result of years of work of > a very dedicated community, probably the most anonymous currency in > circulation today - in the form of an ERC20-Token?

What about Zcash? I'm pretty sure that's a serious contender for the title of "most anonymous".

<comment><USER12> Zcash had a big bug that caused 400k tokens to be printed by an attacker due to a typo of = instead of ==; so I'm not sure how serious it is if a contender.

<comment><USER13> This was Zcoin, not Zcash.

Multiple critical bugs have been found in Monero, eg. [https://getmonero.org/2017/05/17/disclosure-of-a-major- bug-i...](https://getmonero.org/2017/05/17/disclosure-of-a-major-bug-in- cryptonote-based-currencies.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, let me get this straight this is a scam because there was $214k in volume at the price of $0.17 and developer created tons of coins for himself? Couple of things which comes to mind:

First, how do we know it wasn't simply rounds of wash trading which led to this? Dev(s) selling coins to himself or friends and family to bump up the price and volume? Because it seems people get stuck up on data like market cap, volume etc in crypto which can be faked easily.

Second, the only exchange it is trading on is CoinExchange. What role, if any, do exchanges play in running these scams? Because it is harder to pull of volume and price markup without having a reference price feed.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Monero GOLD" was a scam fork of the legitimate cryptocurrency "Monero" \- just to avoid any confusion.</comment>


Samsung's security reminder makes the case for not owning a Samsung smart TV - valiant-comma https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681683/samsung-smart-tv-virus-scan-malware-attack-tweet <comment><AUTHOR> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205131). Both submissions made the front page but that article seems a little more substantive.</comment>


U.S. drone strikes wedding convoy in Yemen, killing 14 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/12/world/meast/yemen-u-s-drone-wedding/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not good; are we creating more revenge terrorists that we are killing with these drone strikes?

<comment><USER2> And that more or less encapsulates the blindness our government has when it comes to combatting this so called war: blowback.</comment></comment>


Angel Etiquette - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2014/02/how-to-be-good-angel-angel-etiquette.html

<comment><USER2> Acquihires are typically _four year_ commitments? That's crazy.

<comment><USER3> two to three years, typically.

<comment><USER4> I think it really depends on the company and context. E.g. if it is truly an "acqua-hire" for team members only, it is 4 years. If there is some IP, asset, or expertise thrown in the timeframes can be shorter. It also depends on the company doing the acquiring....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you an Angel VC or is this a wishlist?</comment>


Scoop – A command-line installer for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://scoop.sh/ <comment><USER2> >iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('[https://get.scoop.sh'](https://get.scoop.sh'))

>Note: if you get an error you might need to change the execution policy (i.e. enable Powershell) with set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s cu

The Windows equivalent of curl | sudo bash...

Please don't do this. Sign your Powershell scripts.

<comment><USER3> Powershell really is crippled by default, unlike bash. Your equivalent is only equivalent (the sudo part) if you start powershell with 'run as administrator', which you probably shouldn't, but it's quite common practise because Windows doesn't have a good, convenient equivalent to sudo. Luckily you can install one with 'scoop install sudo'.

Note you don't need to run as admin to install scoop--it's all about installing stuff for your user account without requiring elevation.

You are right though that you probably shouldn't just run scripts like this if you don't trust them. I do it all the time because it's convenient and I'm not running elevated. You can always check the source if you're not sure.

<comment><USER2> In many organisations, the security advice is to force AllSigned via group policy - this script will never run.

<comment><USER3> My condolences to anyone reading HN who works for one of these organisations.

The iex [remote-script] probably will run in that case actually, just not the 'scoop' command. Which shows what a farce the PS execution policy is.

<comment><USER2> If I think about it tonight I'll build you a version that checks its own hash, then signs itself if possible. That way your script will have even more reach. No need to be dismissive

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. I've only every tried Cygwin a long time ago, and I remember it being a pain to use and setup, but it was the only thing available at the time. Is this an alternative to Cygwin? Why should I pick this over Cygwin? (might be a good FAQ entry?)

<comment><USER3> Good question.

I think you'd want to pick Cygwin when you want to be able to compile and run POSIX apps on Windows without having to modify them too much.

However, if you just want a better command-line experience on Windows and want to easily install cross-platform open-source programs, I think Scoop is a better alternative to Cygwin.

If that is what you want, then not being a pain to use and setup is one good reason to pick Scoop :)

Also, Cygwin programs can only run under the Cygwin environment, whereas the programs Scoop installs are usually native programs that can be called from any other Windows program, or executed from a normal console. I assume there's a way to call Cygwin programs from a normal win program too--it's just more round-about.

<comment><USER5> Cygwin programs don't all depend on a Cygwin environment, most of the work occurs at the C library level. Some stuff might want a shell with more or different features than you get with the windows cmd shell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. I used to download and unpack zip files manually from the gnuwin32 SF project until I found mingw-get[1] which downloads and installs packages from the MinGW32 and MSYS projects. Problem with that was it lacked packages like curl which I still had to get from elsewhere.

It seems that quite a number of apps in Scoop pulls from these projects.

[1] [http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started](http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started)

</comment><comment><USER7> For anyone behind a proxy try:

$s=new-object net.webclient;$s.proxy.credentials=[system.net.credentialcache]::defaultnetworkcredentials;$s.downloadstring('[https://get.scoop.sh')|iex](https://get.scoop.sh'\)|iex)

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is just as awesome as brew on OSX. I had no idea that there was an alternative to the hideous command prompt. I installed Windows 8.1 on a desktop last week, and this has finally convinced me that it is feasible to use as dev machine.

</comment><comment><USER9> what are some differences between this and chocolatey?

<comment><USER10> From a cursory glance, I can see that scoop is installed in your $env:LOCALAPPDATA path. While Chocolatey is, by suggested default, installed in C:\chocolatey\\. This is a plus for scoop since installing in your root is usually bad practice and can make managing your machine more difficult for systems administrators. This also allows a standard user to install applications without administrator approval. (so long as they can execute unsigned PowerShell scripts)

<comment><USER11> Exactly something that could have been pushed into Chocolatey. The biggest thing about these kind of tools is to add and maintain the packages. Chocolatey has been gaining momentum and has a lot of packages. Now, there comes a new kid in the block.

<comment><USER3> Fortunately, it's much easier to write packages for Scoop (aka "app manifests"). You only really need to know JSON, whereas with Chocolatey you need some Powershell and Nuget chops.

There's a simple example app manifest here: [https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/App- Manifests](https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/App-Manifests)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems nice. In fact, this almost does what I've been doing for years through a script. The major functional difference between my script and your otherwise excellent idea is that I try to avoid installing anything. And that is possible for pretty much everything in your list.So please favour portable versions instead of installers. And if possible and only an installer is supplied, please check if you can't get the app anyway by simply unpacking the msi and getting the files out of it.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree. Self-contained installs without side-effects are the goal for Scoop, and it's almost there. Scoop extracts NSIS/NullSoft and InnoSetup installers already, and if all goes well it'll extract MSI installers soon too (using lessmsi).

If you're building your own package for Scoop and you just want to run the installer, there's good support for that too.

<comment><USER13> Note you can extract an MSI using:

        msiexec /a foo.msi /qb TARGETDIR="c:\temp\bar"

<comment><USER3> Thank you so much! I've seen that before but assumed the /a 'administrative install' meant UAC popups. Just tried it now (with /qn though) and it's UI- free. Very cool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice project, I think this was very much needed for windows. Having a proper shell is pretty much mandatory for web development these days and I think this will help great deal for developers who would prefer windows.

Completely unrelated but you might want to silence the parts where you type your passwords in the video, some one can easily predict your password by keyboard's click sounds. For example your github password is 7 characters long and contains `w` or `n` in first 3 letters.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Out of curiosity, is there anyone here who uses the virtual machine approach to get unix tools onto Windows? Wouldn't that work much better?

I'm currently using OSX as my development os and I would like to switch to Windows because I do a lot of hardware hacking and often drivers are Windows only. The only things that holds me back are battery life (about half compared to OSX) and command line tools.

<comment><USER16> Sure, VMWare Player with a shared folder pretty much lets you act with a shell onto a (Windows) directory. I don't know how much this helps you with hardware evelopment though.

<comment><USER17> Also, at least with Virtualbox, file change detection doesn't work. So if you depend of that to recompile your SASS or something, bad luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you have git on the command line in Windows a lot of the most common programs are already there (see [https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/tree/master/bin](https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/tree/master/bin)).

<comment><USER3> Yes that's true for common programs like less, tail, grep, awk, and sed. I do think Scoop can give you better support for ln and sudo though. Then on top of that, Scoop lets you install Ruby, Postgres, Figlet, Go, Vim etc.

For a lot of GNU core utilities, Scoop uses the same MSYS programs that come with MSYS Git, it's just installing them separately so you can choose only the ones you need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, this is incredible. Exactly what I needed to start developing on Windows.

<comment><USER20> Why? I've been doing it since 1992 without the aid of this!

<comment><USER21> It's incredible and useful because there are some others like me, who would rather reboot to Ubuntu/Fedora/etc just to avoid the hostile developer environment of windows, even for small tasks.

There is a severe lack of good commandline utilities. The ones that exist, require so much effort to set up. Just because it is possible to develop on Windows since 1992 doesn't mean it is a pleasant experience to do so.

<comment><USER20> That's fine but you can still install stuff and leave it. It's not hard.

For ref, I'm currently fixing something on a Windows NT4 VM in Visual C++ 6 for a client (they are tied to this configuration before you ask). I've had this VM for 11 years. Haven't set anything up since then apart from apply a couple of hotfixes.

I'm also, whilst the above is compiling which takes a while because it's huge, editing our python VCS hook scripts on a Ubuntu machine in vim.

They're both shit and wonderful at the same time (in similar ways).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks a little easier to use the chocolatey.

Bookmarking this for sure!

</comment><comment><USER23> > what dev tools are in the buckets ? ~ set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s cu > ??...

<comment><USER3> You're going to have to set-execution policy yourself—I highly recommend it though for a useable shell ;)

So far there are 59 apps in the main bucket: [https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/tree/master/bucket](https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/tree/master/bucket)

There are 17 more apps in the 'extras' bucket: [https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop- extras/tree/master](https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop-extras/tree/master)

To use the extras bucket, you just need to run 'scoop bucket add extras'.

Any requests for more dev tools? Feel free to add an issue or pull request on GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, something like this has been sorely lacking. Thanks!

<comment><USER11> Why, there has been Chocolatey - [http://chocolatey.org/](http://chocolatey.org/)

<comment><USER3> Author here. I use Chocolatey too, although not so often recently.

Scoop is more focused on open-source command-line developer tools. I expect Scoop will appeal more to cross-platform developers, those who appreciate a bit of Unix philosophy in their spare time, and those who feel 'stuck' on Windows.

Chocolatey does a lot of things that Scoop will never do, like install Web Platform Installer apps, and built-in Windows features.

<comment><USER11> So I need to write chocolatey packages for non open source stuff? For example, I was about to add a package for Teamcity. So scoop doesn't encourage that kind of tools / software? Btw, I am not being critical of the tool. It is great that Windows is getting some much needed tools like this.

<comment><USER3> The 'extras' bucket for Scoop is a good fit things that aren't open source command-line tools, but are still useful dev tools. Teamcity should fit well there:

[https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop- extras](https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop-extras)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wonderful - thank you!</comment>


Having fun with Go's nil, interfaces and errors - <AUTHOR> https://katcipis.github.io/2016/09/17/fun-with-nil-interfaces.html <comment><USER2> Is this confusion just so that we can ask the type of a nil interface value at runtime?

A man orders coffee in a restaurant.

"Would you like it with or without cream?"

"Without"

A few minutes later the waiter returns.

"I'm sorry sir, we've run out of cream. Would you like it without milk instead?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Nil interface/nil pointer in the interface errors also explained in this 'Go landmines' post [https://gist.github.com/lavalamp/4bd23295a9f32706a48f](https://gist.github.com/lavalamp/4bd23295a9f32706a48f)

<comment><AUTHOR> I already had a few surprises with the for loops + closures too :-). Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > This is a very interesting situation (and not a very common one for me) > because it is where Go's simple errors as values decisions shines. Doing > this kind of thing with exceptions would be pretty clumsy, [...]

Just because a language supports exceptions does not mean you always have to use them. You can always use a helper function to catch any error and return it as a value.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't that basically be replicating a return value-error approach, in a more cumbersome way though?

You could argue that Go can use Exceptions in the same manner as X lang too, by using panic and recover... but most people seem to not like that.

With Go and Rust, return value error handling is just simply nice. There's no question about if a function might error out, just look at the signature.

<comment><USER4> > Wouldn't that basically be replicating a return value-error approach, in a > more cumbersome way though?

This would not be "replicating" anything, exceptions already are values in most languages. The only thing to do is wrap your call with a function, like "err = catch-all(expr)".

> ou could argue that Go can use Exceptions in the same manner as X lang too, > by using panic and recover...

Except that it would be cumbersome ;-) because panic/recover works only in combination with defer[0].

> With Go and Rust, return value error handling is just simply nice.

Using non-exceptional control flow for errors can be useful depending on the circumstances. Using exceptions is simply nice in many other cases.

> There's no question about if a function might error out, just look at the > signature.

Just look at the documentation. Code defensively.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/q/3413389/124319](http://stackoverflow.com/q/3413389/124319)

<comment><USER4> Just to clarify:

        err = catch-all(expr)

If your language does not provide a similar tool, you can't just use a function because "expr" is evaluated before the function is called. I had Lisp macros in mind when writing this. A poor man's approach that is still generic is to wrap the expression in a closure:

        err = catch-all(() -> expr)

Not too cumbersome, but YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got bit by this the other day when returning a nil pointer to a struct as an error. It was incredibly frustrating when I finally figured out what was going on, and I'm curious if there's a good reason to distinguish between these 2 types of nil or if it was just an oversight/mistake during the language design process.

<comment><USER7> Most likely the reason is keeping the language implementation simple. Java- style `null` is actually quite subtle: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/2707333/46571](http://stackoverflow.com/a/2707333/46571)

<comment><USER8> Go has the same complexity. From the Go spec: "For an expression x of interface type and a type T, the primary expression x.(T) asserts that x is not nil and that the value stored in x is of type T.'"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had run into the same situation of handling multiple errors. Assuming I wasn't the first to need such a thing I found multierror[1]. Searching now returns more choices some of which use a nil []error and some with structs.

[1] github.com/joeshaw/multierror

</comment><comment><USER10> Francesc Campoy covers nil across all language types in Go [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynoY2xz-F8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynoY2xz-F8s)

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned this presentation on the beginning of the post, it is a great source of information on nil behaviour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even Google's App Engine SDK has its own variant of the "multi-error" ... like an array of errors in one.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love the idea of a "read only" map (or any other type), but it seems it is just a side-effect landmine in this case. Yuck...almost strikes me as a bug as described in the article

<comment><USER13> A map is a pointer to the actual map implementation. When declared via

        var m map[T]T

you're basically writing

        var m *runtime.hmap

which is a nil pointer. Go has sane zero values, so it makes sense that reading from a nil map returns the zero value for whatever type its values are.

However, there's a trade-off: either Go's maps allow nil assignment (in a similar fashion to slice's `append') _or_ it retains its "reference" (forgive me for using that term) semantics.

Go's designers decided that maps should differ from slices in that regard, and I tend to agree. I think it'd be a mistake to have to always return a map _just_ in it's newly allocated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Why ? It seems to me that it happens because how interfaces are implemented

Why on Earth should a user of a _high-level_ language have to care about language implementation details?

> What the actual fuck ???

Exactly.

<comment><USER14> Except it's not a language implementation detail, it's part of what the language _is_. You might as well ask why a user of another language needs to know what a class is, or how inheritance works. Too many people seem to be assuming "Oh, it's like void*, so it must act like that always!", but it's not.

<comment><USER7> > Except it's not a language implementation detail, it's part of what the > language is.

Okay, but what was the rationale for designing the language like that?

<comment><USER15> The last bit of information you need to understand that is that unlike some other languages you may be used to, "nil" is a perfectly valid value for a pointer to have. You can write methods like this:

        func (o *Object) ReturnSomething() int {
            if o == nil {
                return 0
            }
            return o.SomeOtherValue
        }

It is also therefore legal to return in an interface value a nil pointer to a struct of a particular kind, and therefore "an interface containing a nil pointer of a particular type" and "an interface containing nothing at all" are fundamentally different things that can not be collapsed together.

So as Vendan says, it is just part of the language. All languages have this sort of wart in them, where two or more perfectly sensible decisions interact to create something that isn't sensible at first glance.

(I'm still in favor of going back in time and changing Go to have non-nillable values, but that ship has certainly sailed.)

<comment><USER7> > unlike some other languages you may be used to,

The languages I'm used to don't even have `nil`.

> "nil" is a perfectly valid value for a pointer to have.

So, just like C and Java. I don't see the difference.

> You can write methods like this: (snippet)

Oh, now I get it: `nil` itself isn't a value. `nil` is syntactic sugar that expands into a nil value. (In other words, confusingly enough, `nil` and "nil value" are different things!) This is unlike Java, where `null` itself is a value.

It would be very helpful if people described things precisely.

> All languages have this sort of wart in them, where two or more perfectly > sensible decisions interact to create something that isn't sensible at first > glance.

This means that at least one of the two (or more) decisions was less sensible than it originally seemed. Good design decisions don't introduce warts into a system.

<comment><USER14> nil doesn't "expand", it's just what it is. You have to bear in mind that methods are roughly syntactic sugar from

      func (o *Object) ReturnSomething() int

to

      func  ReturnSomething(o *Object) int

In the first case, it may "seem" that a nil Object would be invalid, but in the second case it's obviously valid, and makes complete sense. It may be described as a "wart", but it makes complete sense to me. The issue is, in my opinion, that people drag their own expectations into programming languages as they learn them.

<comment><USER8> In this case, Java and C# have the same feature and don't have this behavior around null. I think it's reasonable for people who have seen identical features in other languages to expect similar behavior when learning new ones.

<comment><USER14> They don't have the same feature of "I can call a method on a null value", at least, not that I've seen... You are calling them identical features when the fact is that they aren't. C# and Java both have generics, do they perform identical? Haskell has generics too, but I bet they'd throw a shit-fit if you tried to say "Oh, C# has generics too, so why would I bother with Haskell?"

<comment><USER8> The ability to call a method on a nil receiver doesn't have anything to do with what comparisons should do. Semantically, the question is whether == should compare the values or the vtables. In no other language I know of does it compare vtables.

<comment><USER16> Interface comparisons check both, the value and the dynamic type. Describing that as "comparing vtables" is misleading.

It the types don't match, the operands are not considered equal. Type _and_ value have to match for two interface values to be equal. How does that not make sense?

For mismatched dynamic types you can't meaningfully compare the values in the general case, so of course you need to consider types.

<comment><USER8> > Type and value have to match for two interface values to be equal. How does > that not make sense?

Because people expect == to compare values, not types. Nobody has ever questioned this behavior in Java and C#.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would it take to build my own laptop from scratch? - <AUTHOR>

Note up front: this is much more of a curiosity thing, unless it turns out to be surprisingly realistic to put together my own.
I'm curious what it would take to put together a laptop from scratch, from start to finish, and an estimate of the cost to build a one-off custom laptop. I realize that this is incredibly broad (perhaps too much so?). The conventional wisdom is that building your own desktop is cheaper than buying a pre-built workstation, and more practical because you can spec it to exactly your needs and not pay for what you don't want. The conventional wisdom with laptops is that it is impractical to put one together on your own, so you're stuck paying for whatever comes included with what you need.
One thought that occurs to me (but I don't want to limit the conversation to just this) would be to hack together a frame around a Raspberry Pi-esque SoC with a screen. What would peripherals cost around one of these? <comment><USER2> I assume you are talking about buying parts and putting them together in one laptop case to have a custom laptop built to your spec. It can be done, and is actually not as hard as you would think. You can easily buy laptop motherboards, memory, hard drives, on sites like Newegg. Your hard part is going to be finding the case. Due to space constraints you really need a case that is designed to fit the type of motherboard, memory, and drive configuration. I think you would have two options here. The easiest would be to simply buy a case online. The other way would be to find a laptop that you could rip the inside out of and use that casing. I've never used this site, but a quick search turned this site up which could be helpful: [http://www.laptopking.com/](http://www.laptopking.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not an impossible task as long as you're not talking about making the highly engineered parts from scratch. Or to put it this way as long as you don't go too far down the technology stack.

You can for instance take a Beagle Bone Black, add an LCD 'cape' and a gob standard USB keyboard and have a functional Linux computer. Laying out a custom ARM mother board using a reference platform is doable, since I've done it for work. You are talking about probably $10-20k and two months of work though.

You could also have an SLA case made. If you did the 3D design yourself, the cost would be about $1000.</comment>


Instagram now asks bullies: 'Are you sure? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48916828 <comment><USER2> > Once a user has been restricted, their comments will appear only to > themselves. Crucially, a restricted person will not know they have been > restricted.

So if I have a friend look at the comments and they don't see mine, I know I'm restricted.

> "You can choose to make a restricted person's comments visible to others by > approving their comments," Mr Mosseri explained.

So you're still reading the bullying comments?

> "Restricted people won't be able to see when you're active on Instagram or > when you've read their direct messages."

Maybe it would be a privacy move to just make that the default with everybody. Nobody needs to know when you're active on some website, or whether you've received or read the message they sent you.

I like the direction, but I doubt that they will have huge success. Yes, asking people to reconsider is good, but it only works for those that are not determined to bully. It's for the casual comment that wasn't meant to sound that aggressive, not for the stalking bully that wants to hurt their victim.</comment>


Welcome to Liberland, the world's newest country - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/serbia/11574521/Welcome-to-Liberland-the-tiny-patch-of-woodland-claiming-to-be-the-worlds-newest-country.html

<comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400443)

Other submissions of the story from various sources:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=liberland&sort=byDate&prefix&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=liberland&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


The best computer interface? Maybe ... your hands - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/james_patten_the_best_computer_interface_maybe_your_hands The computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression," says designer and TED Fellow James Patten. But right now, we interact with computers, mainly, by typing and tapping. In this nifty talk and demo, Patten imagines a more visceral, physical way to bring your thoughts and ideas to life in the digital world, taking the computer interface off the screen and putting it into your hands <comment><AUTHOR> interestingly, we have seen such demo's before. The fear is these things will fade away like many interesting computer interfaces in the past due to no industrial application. I personally think it will be a great help in logistics. But when you put that in numbers, it would cost much more and will be ignored.</comment>


Federal patent appeal paralegals had no work, so they surfed the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/07/31/federal-paralegals-had-no-work-so-they-surfed-the-internet/?hpid=z5 <comment><USER2> tl;dr: There were too many paralegals relative to the number of judges in the department. The paralegals had no authority to work on cases that hadn't been viewed by a judge.

There was in fact a vast backlog of work, but the bottleneck was insufficient judges, not support staff.

<comment><USER3> Shhhhh on the facts and logic, WaPo is getting its "gubmint waste" Two Minutes Hate on. ;)

<comment><USER4> There is obviously a huge amount of waste going on, whether it's because of the judges or the paralegals. This report just got the source wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > But the inspector general found that for paralegals in the appeals office, > working from home was a green light to abuse the privilege by doing laundry, > washing dishes, reading books and a host of other personal activities.

Am I the only one that thinks this is not "abusing the privilege" of working from home? If you don't have any work to do _who cares_ WTF you're doing with all that free time?

If the paralegals were so efficient at getting their work done that they had about 8 hours a day to fool around then clearly we have some _awesome_ paralegals! Bonuses all around!

I work from home and when I need to do laundry I do it. If I need to wash dishes I wash them. My wireless headset is apparently a superpower.

I'll even admit that I've read books while on the clock! They were technical (digital) books related to my work, of course, but if I'm expected to know something how else am I going to learn it if the company isn't providing training?

I've even been known to watch Youtube videos on my personal laptop while on the clock! Just the other day I watched a video about some of the new features in RHEL 7. Oh the abuse, it never ends!

</comment><comment><USER6> _Soon after the appeals board brought on additional legal support staff to address a deluge of challenges to decisions by patent examiners, the Patent and Trademark Office imposed a hiring freeze that halted hires of judges needed to handle the appeals._

Not only are there fees paid to process those appeals, but the USPTO will have made extra revenue by being able to charge fees to patent holders, some of whom would otherwise not have patents for fees to be charged on, should these appeals have been heard.

All in all, they seem to have done rather well out of this hiring freeze, though I am sure they have done so with the utmost propriety and scuppering the appeals process has been nothing more than a simple oversight, of course.

<comment><USER7> This reminds me of Frank Herbert's "Bureau of Sabotage" [1] -- which seems a little like the idea of applying a chaos monkey to the workings of government

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

<comment><USER6> I love their reason for not imposing term limits on their leaders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the paralegals had nothing to do, but still had to put in the hours? I need this job. I am a professional web surfer with 8 years of experience. I think I could really contribute to the effort.

<comment><USER9> I've had this job. I was working for a team based in another country, communications were poor (on both sides I'll admit) and it turned out later the company was in the process of going down the pan anyway.

After a while you stop asking if there's anything you need to be doing. After a while longer you start to feel paranoid that surely someone, somewhere is going to figure out they're paying you to sit at home, sleep late and scratch your butt...

<comment><USER10> I have also had this job, the contract that comprised 90% of my work was lost, and the company didn't want me to leave.

Surfing the internet at work gets boring very fast though when it is all you have to do. I made it through 8 months before leaving for somewhere else.</comment></comment></comment>


IPhone App Developer Was Losing Out On $2000 A Month Because Of Sloppy Coding  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/17/top-iphone-app-developer-was-losing-out-on-2000-a-day-because-of-sloppy-coding/ <comment><USER2> Title should be changed to "...$2000 a day..."

</comment><comment><USER3> My theory: They rushed development of it because they were afraid someone else would beat them to the punch (very simple app). So they didn't test the ad- portion adequately enough.</comment>