Show HN: Glose, a next-generation social reading platform for ebooks - <AUTHOR> https://glose.com

<comment><USER2> Happy to see a successor for the acquihired/killed Readmill. Readmill offered a ton of free (public domain) books, right after signup, allowing new users to try the app's full reading/highlighting/sharing/commenting experience, before having them purchase books just to get a grasp of, say, the basic typographic look and feel. It drew me in, I bought some titles, and own the epub files still, even after Readmill went to the deadpool. What's Glose's offering as regards long-term preservation of my electronic library investment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and great question. We're in the process of formalizing a statement in our Terms of service that will require us, should we go out of business one day, to let users download their purchased books to read off Glose.

Also, fully agree with your feedback on public domain books! We have a pretty good selection of those and are working to expand it. We loved Readmill as well, and we want to build something even better and sustainable.

Would love to hear more of your thoughts about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's "next-generation" about it, if the present generation Kindle app and e-reader devices have annotation and sharing features, along with things like GoodReads integration?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I'm a cofounder and CTO at Glose. Please let us know if any questions or feedback! We're very excited to be launching and trying to reinvent the way we read books :)

Download link for iOS: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glose/id896681871?ls=1&mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glose/id896681871?ls=1&mt=8)

<comment><USER4> I have been thinking about this space for quite some time now and maybe if I fast forwarded that process and reached a final conclusion, Glose would pretty much be it.

Back when hard copies were pretty much the only copies available for a book, it was pretty easy for me to

      a) read a book
      b) make notes in the side lines
      c) markup text that I liked and
      d) easily skim through the book later thanks to the notes.

I lost b,c & d when I moved to reading on my Nexus only about 2 years ago. I find that I have lower retention rate, find it difficult to find out what all I've read in quick glance and basically try and connect my readings. Previously, I'd just take a look at the stack of books on my table.

I tried finding some reader apps that would allow me to bring back my older pattern of reading. Sadly, no app did it properly. I tried Mantano which allowed me to make notes but it would forget them if I moved the file in storage. Also, the notes were available only inside the Mantano android app.

Right now, an acceptable world for me would be wherein I can take notes (including highlighting quotes) and once I am done with the book I have a page /leostatic/zero-to-one where all of my notes with the associated page number is presented. Allow me to click on a note and jump to the page, put in social features and I'm satisfied. For now at least.

One interesting feature while keeping in mind the above para would be something along the lines of: I visit julien_c/zero-to-one and I get an option to read the book with your notes visible. So now it is almost like reading your hard copy with notes scribbled in.

EDIT: One major issue that I find in glose from my perspective is the overdose of social. Don't get me wrong, I _want_ social but I don't want it _all_ the time. I know I can click on the icon in top right in the web app and select "Only me" but that isn't what I am talking about. Each time I want to highlight something, it throws the annotate field. I don't have data to back this up but intuition tells me number of highlights only will be much greater than highlight + annotate. Let me just highlight and continue reading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping you'll like Glose!

We're definitely intending to have pages where you can filter your highlights and annotations on one specific book.</comment></comment></comment>


The Fastest Growing Open Source Project? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codecombat.com/uid/137237 <comment><USER2> How can they say they're the fastest growing when Popcorn Time nearly doubled the unique contributors (95-ish to 40ish) in nearly the same time? Seems rather disingenuous to include PopcornTime clearly showing it's much younger than CodeCombat, showing at the same age of being open-source it has nearly double the unique contributors, then claiming it's growing slower than CodeCombat. Don't get me wrong, what CodeCombat is doing is great and all the well wishes to them, but I don't think they're interpreting the data very fairly.

<comment><USER3> The Fastest-Growing Open Source Project As Determined By Our Incredibly Specific and Sometimes Downright Strange Metrics

<comment><USER4> Unique contributors since open source launch is strange?

<comment><USER3> "Unique contributors within inital 86-day window of project upload to Github" is not equivalent to "unique contributors since open-source launch."

<comment><USER5> You're right, that's true.

It's not the ideal metric, but it's one that is realistic to compute with limited time and resources. To analyze that statistic using a growth metric like "largest 30 day average contributor gain" across such a gigantic dataset, consisting of hundreds of millions of rows and tens of millions of unique repositories, requires resources and engineer time which few people possess. We certainly don't want to divert too much of either of those things away from development of CodeCombat just for a fun data science experiment!

<comment><USER3> So you narrowed the problem set down to one that was sufficiently effortless, then uploaded a blog post declaring yourself world champions. I'm not sure that makes anything better. "Fastest-growing open-source project, as far as we care" is a perfectly fine headline. What you've got now is disingenuous and baselessly self-congratulatory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Navel gazing is the best way to convince yourself that things are going great and to give you that boost to keep working on the project. At some point you will probably look back at this and think it was nothing to brag about, but it doesn't matter because you're having fun and enjoying the feedback loop between you and your users -- this is a good sign.

</comment><comment><USER7> Also see: [http://xkcd.com/1102/](http://xkcd.com/1102/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I was pretty confident I knew that openstack was the fastest growing open source project. They didn't show up in the answers, so maybe the criteria was such that it was cut out?

<comment><USER5> Looking at OpenStack, it does look like an aggregate of all of the organization's repositories would be definitely the fastest growing. However, we looked at individual repositories, so that's why it's not on the graph. It would be interesting see the growth of the big open source organizations (GNU vs Apache vs OpenStack etc.)

<comment><USER9> OpenStack kinda has a single repo - every commit to the core projects triggers a submodule update in [https://github.com/openstack/openstack](https://github.com/openstack/openstack) \- and there are LOTS of projects which aren't included in this. For example CI and Developer tooling etc.

> openstack$ git count -pm -n3

> 2014-03-01 2608

> 2014-02-01 2545

> 2014-01-01 2173

That looks OpenStack has 7326 commits in the previous 3 months.

> codecombat$ git count -pm -n3

> 2014-03-01 642

> 2014-02-01 426

> 2014-01-01 427

The same tool gives me 1495 commits in the previous 3 months for CodeCombat.

(The tool I used is [https://github.com/moskytw/git- count](https://github.com/moskytw/git-count) )

<comment><USER9> Replying to my own comment feels odd.. whatever ;)

If you're interested in numbers[1] shows the commits currently running through the OpenStack CI system at this very moment in time.. I'm counting 125 when I look at the page.

In the last 24 hours, OpenStack's CI system has peaked at just under 1000 jobs ran in an hour, an eyeballed average looks like to be 450 jobs every hour for the last 24 hours.

For build slaves over the same period, It looks like about 750 Jenkins slaves.

Oh and - OpenStack has a strict 1 change == 1 commit policy. So "Fix typo in previous commit" never happens .. The actually reduces the overall number of commits ;)

[1]: [http://status.openstack.org/zuul/](http://status.openstack.org/zuul/)

<comment><USER5> This is so cool :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> erm, and also the fact that MANY MANY open source projects are not on github? Linux, apache, android, some of the most influential projects are missing. This should be titled, "the fastest growing open source project by people who are not too important to be hosting on Github".

<comment><USER5> Actually, the Linux kernel, Android, and Apache are all on GitHub, and were analyzed (though the latter two are mirrors, so I guess not purely on GitHub.)

For projects like Linux, while it may have 3500+ contributors, it got that way over 23 years.

We also made the assumption that due to the social nature of GitHub, its meteoric growth, and the visibility that it brings open source projects, the fastest growing open source projects are on GitHub. We presume this assumption is correct, but don't have the data (or even know where we could get the data) to verify it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Worth noting: there's a Code Combat challenge on ChallengePost: [http://codecombat.challengepost.com](http://codecombat.challengepost.com)

You have 50 more days to build a working parser and help others learn to code in new languages playing CodeCombat</comment>


Spatial Software - <AUTHOR> https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialsoftware/ <comment><USER2> "Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place". See "memory palace" and "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat". This ground has been covered before.

The basic alternatives are organization by place (the real world), organization by time (Twitter), organization by hierarchy (directories), and organization by search (Google). The recent interest in organization by place may reflect that organization by time has led to endlessly scrolling lists of drivel. Or a hierarchy of same, like Discord.

It's amusing that people are using Animal Crossing - New Horizons as a social system during lockdown. (Classic Animal Crossing models another current problem - when you go into Animal Crossing, you're broke and alone, and then it gets worse because you have to borrow money, then work your way out of debt.)

For social purposes, and for business purposes, you may want some sense of place without a full 3D world. It's possible to hold a business meeting in Second Life. There are conference rooms available. People can leave the meeting, walk around, and meet casually with others. There's directional and position specific audio. Around 2008, this was more of a thing than it is now. It's getting something of a comeback as people are locked down and want a little more in-person contact than you get over Slack.

Second Life's mapping to the real world is a bit too realistic - you can get a slide projector and show your PowerPoint files, with slide changing noises. Someone going between projector and screen will cast a shadow. You can have people in suits. Very good looking photorealistic people in good suits if you pay for a good avatar and outfits. You can have coffee service and a bar if you want. It's the metaverse, like Ready Player One. (Except too sluggish under load, something slowly being fixed.) It looks great, but overkill for most people who aren't regular Second Life users and know how to drive the thing. Here's an actual meeting in Second Life.[1]

Facebook took a crack at this with Facebook Spaces, which was a flop. They shut that down and announced Facebook Horizons in late 2019, which may have been abandoned or postponed.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hdg_miZT9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hdg_miZT9k)

<comment><USER3> I think it's just one of those things where the tech isn't quite there yet. I think a large percentage of people will participate in some kind of MMO virtual world like Second Life, including for serious and business use cases, but it may be some decades away. We need better software/games and better VR/AR technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Misses category of avatar chat apps:

[https://extendedmind.io/blog/2020/3/20/video-conferencing- wo...](https://extendedmind.io/blog/2020/3/20/video-conferencing-wont-cure- loneliness-avatar-chat-apps-can-help)

We have seen massive growth on [https://hubs.mozilla.com](https://hubs.mozilla.com) which can be self hosted [https://hubs.mozilla.com/cloud](https://hubs.mozilla.com/cloud)

</comment><comment><USER5> a code editor using spatial memory it's a paid app

[https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/aerial/id1483897826?l=en&mt=12](https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/aerial/id1483897826?l=en&mt=12)

<comment><USER6> Nice reference, thanks for posting. Added to my collection of references here: [https://www.are.na/john-palmer/spatial-software](https://www.are.na/john- palmer/spatial-software)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: does anyone know a solution how to add the spatial navigation feature from Opera 12 into Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER8> Ha was expecting something about GDAL!</comment>


Add HTTPS to NGINX for free and help make the world more secure - <AUTHOR> http://levels.io/add-https-to-nginx-for-free-and-help-make-the-world-more-secure/

<comment><USER2> Why not sign your own certificate[1]? Is there any reason to trust StartSSL? How do we trust any SSL company? They may well be giving private keys to the NSA, especially if the certificate is free.

[1] To clarify I mean for personal use like securing your own servers for your own use.

<comment><USER3> Because then we start training users to just ignore those warnings about self signed certs and effectively destroy SSL because man in the middle attacks are made easy.

and I just saw your clarification. Who doesn't use self signed for that?

For that matter, you can do that within and organization and just push out your CA cert company wide. Save some money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The free SSL certs are maximum 256bit keys. As pointed out in Cloudflare's blog post yesterday, a 2009-era PC could crack a 512bit SSL cert key in 73 days. Todays machines would make mincemeat of such weak certs.

<comment><USER5> I'm confused. I thought StartSSL only supported 256 bit certs, and their website does mentioned that, but the linked article mentions generating a 2048 bit key which gets signed by StartSSL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did this yesterday for my Raspberry Pi. Sad to say, that Firefox users will get a warning on the StartSSL certificate.

Works fine on IE and Chrome though.

</comment><comment><USER7> great thanks :)</comment>


Drones Are the New Threat to Airline Safety - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-04/drones-are-the-new-threat-to-airline-safety <comment><USER2> Mandatory transponders on drones might not be the worst idea. I'm sure soon enough police will learn to look for the signals.

Many drones are 2.4ghz something something. What if airport police monitored the frequency around the airport? Then use signal finding to capture controllers?</comment>


Ask HN: possible to get paid $300/hour as a programmer? - <AUTHOR>

If so, how do you do it?<p>Is there a particular market you focus on? A particular set of clients? Do any current companies pay this much? Is there a niche skillset that is worth just totally owning? <comment><USER2> I've gotten paid much more than this (though not for sustained periods of time).

I had established clients. I knew their business. I get a call one day asking to fix something trivial. "Ok. But I have to charge you for an hour. I am happy to tell you how to fix it over the phone right now for free. It will just take a few minutes." (I think I was working on something else and didn't want to be bothered).

"No, no. Just fix it. It's fine."

/shrug/

3 minutes later I have a billable hour (which was $150 at the time) ready for invoicing. That comes to an effective rate of $3000/hr.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes a few of the node consultants I know charge around 250-350/hr. Some newly funded startups or even bigger companies who are looking to switch will pay. It's nothing to them.

<comment><USER4> Can you please elaborate "node consultants"? What's their technical skill set?

<comment><USER5> they're "web scale"

<comment><USER6> That's MongoDB. The bear's verdict on node was Bad Ass Rock Star Tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're IBM, that's what you bill your clients (rate card about 1/4 through): [http://www-304.ibm.com/easyaccess3/fileserve?contentid=12765...](http://www-304.ibm.com/easyaccess3/fileserve?contentid=127659)

I recall the SAP guys billing clients from $300-500/hr, and we often subcontracted experts at similarly awesome rates. Just gotta deal with enterprise software and everything that comes with it ...

</comment><comment><USER8> Possible? Yes. Typical? No. You basically have to be a "big name" or otherwise have a lot of high-profile, proven solutions that you can showcase if you're charging that much.

Or, work in finance or provide DR consulting to HFT joints. You might also look into government contracts.

<comment><USER9> > or provide DR consulting to HFT joints

Unfuck this jargon for the rest of us please.

<comment><USER10> "or provide Disaster Recovery consulting to High Frequency Trading joints"

The joke is that often the top executives only think of planning for disaster after it has occurred. Up until that point it is "too expensive" or "not urgent".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Make fixed price bids on stuff you already know how to do or have already done.

</comment><comment><USER12> Oracle's rate card: [http://www.cio.ny.gov/Contracts/ContractDocuments/OracleCons...](http://www.cio.ny.gov/Contracts/ContractDocuments/OracleConsultingRateCardExhib9.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> Once I did it, hoping that the company hiring me thought I was nuts. Against all odds, they say yes. Just 3 hours of work, but they paid me 900 bucks. The advice here is: Be as good as you can in what you do. Work will come along. And charge'em what you please.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sure, get on with the right client on the right niche and you can do it easily. Examples: Enterprise Oracle DBA, SAP, SAS, Peoplesoft (basically stuff that big clients with big pockets need)

* The catch is having the right connections to get you in.

</comment><comment><USER10> Whilst the big consulting firms charge those sort of rates, most freelancers have difficulty getting anywhere near those levels. Really depends on your track record and connections.

</comment><comment><USER15> Finance.

</comment><comment><USER16> We are in the market for an HTML5 game guru for an optimization job and would happily pay $300 per hour to the right person - I've made offers of more and been turned down.

I imagine others in our position would be willing to pay the same - so I can certainly attest to the demand being there and it making sound business sense in certain situations.</comment>


The Incredible Expandable Book - <AUTHOR> http://medievalbooks.nl/2015/10/02/the-incredible-expandable-book/ <comment><USER2> Anybody fascinated by these would probably enjoy reading The Golden Age by Michael Ajvaz. The first half is a (fictional) account of a researcher's stay on an island with a tribe of people who seemingly have no cultural or artistic expression outside of their Book. The entire tribe contributes to the Book, altering storylines, adding footnotes, and even expanding existing stories via small pouches glued to the pages containing additions to the stories.

It's pretty fascinating following the recursion of the stories as the author spends the back half of the story exploring the stories within the Book.</comment>


Bitcoin Is Likely to Split Again in November, Say Major Players - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-20/-bitcoin-jesus-ver-sees-the-digital-currency-splitting-again?utm_campaign=Newsletter%20-%20Mi5M%20-%20Q3%202017&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=56513630&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8-QQ7vx18x76ceiWWntmZ1Vr6OEXtg3X7pyUulL8EvgxPD88hJQq91e6Cg62XmvzOti1r1sMpDbYieDgQxLuFeW7QI6A&_hsmi=56513630 <comment><USER2> It will keep splitting as long as each split magically multiplies the notional value.

<comment><USER3> In layman's terms?

<comment><USER4> In the last split people who held bitcoins got an equal quantity of "Bitcoin cash", so if you had 1 BTC, after the split you had 1 BTC and 1 BCH.

Looking at [https://coinmarketcap.com/](https://coinmarketcap.com/) you can see that each BCH is worth ~$500 (at the time of this comment) and the value of BTC is higher after the split.

so in essence $8,154,513,572 of new value was created from nothing with the split.

If the next split follow the same pattern, more money appears...

<comment><USER5> It's interesting to say that $8B of new value was created, since no one could supply that money if anyone asked for it.

How did the cryptocurrency markets handle that, anyway?

<comment><USER6> >since no one could supply that money if anyone asked for it

What does this mean? BCH can be sold for USD, and there are people willing to buy BCH. Therefore BCH created $8B in new value.

<comment><USER7> That's not exactly right. You have to consider the depth of the market and the size of the demand. However many BCH are in existence, there's no way that the market will support liquidating them all for USD. An order of that size would crash the markets instantly.

The $8B in value created is entirely nominal, because of the size of the pre- existing supply. In reply the real value created could well be negative or at most in the millions and not billions.

<comment><USER6> So what you're saying is that the value of any asset that is not USD (stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate) is completely unknown, and the real "value" would be what that asset would sell for if every portion of it was instantly liquidated tomorrow?

That's not how economics work.

edit: I suppose all these stocks I'm holding are worth $0, since if every person selling them sold tomorrow the value would drop to that price.

<comment><USER7> If you're going to put a specific value on something, it's be much more accurate to calculate it as the sum of the entire demand for that something divided by its quantity.

To take the 100 shares at $500 example from @stanmancan, if one person is willing to pay $500, another 10 is willing to pay $400 for one share each, and one more person is willing to pay $300 for 20 shares, and one large investor is willing to buy up the rest for $100 only, the total demand for the whole company is $14,400 for 100 shares or $144/share. That's the true value.

I can guarantee you that there isn't even an order of magnitude close to $8B of demand for the artificially created and restricted BCH, so that value wasn't really created.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that's accurate either. That just says that the people who want to buy [Share|BTC|BCH|Whatever] value it less than those who currently hold it.

<comment><USER7> It's not perfect either, I agree. It's hard and subjective to define what the real true value of something. But one common way is to define it as "what someone will pay for it" \-- that's the math I did above.

Anyways, I'm not trying to argue that the value of that hypothetical company is $14,400. I'm trying to argue that it's not anywhere near $50k. (Disproving the GP's example that BCH created $8B of value overnight.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know Bitcoin is still in development but if things like this keep happening then it will never make it as a legitimate source of money. It's reputation is already in the dumps and these splits just make it worse and worse.

<comment><USER10> How's that? Bitcoin's hard forks just tend to fizzle out into nothing. Ethereum's chain has been switched out with via hard fork several times already and people still love it.

<comment><USER11> ... with the exception of Bitcoin Cash. It seems to be doing okay.

<comment><USER10> I prefer to measure success in network size rather than price, and Bitcoin ABC (the only available node for BCH) seems to be comparable to Bitcoin Classic, which had 2,000 full nodes running at its height, yet still seems to have fizzled out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> bitcoin probably won't split again. Supporters of the initial proposal that would lead to the split are already withdrawing from this commitment. [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/no2x-breaking- bitcoin-s...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/no2x-breaking-bitcoin- shows-no-love-segwit2x-hard-fork-paris/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The more forks there are, the more laughable the idea that bitcoin is a deflationary currency.

<comment><USER14> But the one and only True Bitcoin is still deflationary.

Your opinion on which is the True Bitcoin might vary. It's one of them though.

<comment><USER10> This. Bitcoin Cash isn't intended as a complement to Bitcoin, but its replacement. Either one of them wins or they all lose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This split is fundamentally different because of the lack of replay protection. On the other hand, it is more consensus-driven. At this point, if the hashing power that is signaling Segwit2x follows the fork, and no replay protection is provided (and no "emergency difficulty adjustment", a la Bitcoin Cash), then we have 93% of the power following the fork, and only 7% staying behind.

That means that block times will decrease 14-fold, and it will be 200 days until the next difficulty adjustment. Since there's no replay protection, there's no effective way to isolate "segwit2x" bitcoins from the non-"segwit2x" bitcoins, so it seems infeasible to trade them separately and let pricing data drive the mining decisions.

This split is much more likely to either go very smoothly -- old chain completely abandoned, segwit2x is now bitcoin, or very disasterously -- becomes impossible to spend either bitcoins of sw2x-bitcoins because of the chain overlap until the coinbase transactions start to mature.

<comment><USER16> […] or very disasterously -- becomes impossible to spend either bitcoins of sw2x-bitcoins because of the chain overlap until the coinbase transactions start to mature.

Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER15> The problem with a lack of replay protection (and this played out for a bit after the ETH/ETC split) is that transactions that are valid on one chain are valid on the other.

For convenience, let's call the chains BTC and SBT (for segwit2 bitcoin). If I hold 10 BTC before the split, then I hold 10 BTC and 10 SBT after the split. If I want to send 5 BTC to an address post-split, but hold on to my 5 SBT, there's no way to do it. The transaction that sends 5 BTC can be "replayed" onto the SBT fork, so the same address on the SBT side also receives my 5 SBT.

In the ETC/ETH split this was resolved by having a contract which split coins into two addresses, depending on what side of the chain the contract was on; so you would make a ETCETH deposit to this address and specify two output addresses; one would receive the ETC and the other the ETH. This is not possible in Bitcoin; the language is not powerful enough.

So to split your coins, you would need to get conflicting transactions accepted by the two chains, and wait for that to settle. Once that's done, you can move the remainder of your addresses by sending from the SBT address along with a BTCSBT address, and sending from the BTC address along with a BTCSBT address. This is pretty hairy for an individual user, and would probably have to be mediated by a service (most likely operated by an exchange).

<comment><USER16> > So to split your coins, you would need to get conflicting transactions > accepted by the two chains, and wait for that to settle.

Good point. I hadn't thought of the possibility of having one part of a double spend be confirmed on the main chain and the other part on the fork.

But I don't see how it relates to the part I quoted.

<comment><USER15> >> […] or very disasterously -- becomes impossible to spend either bitcoins of sw2x-bitcoins because of the chain overlap until the coinbase transactions start to mature.

> But I don't see how it relates to the part I quoted.

My explanation covered the "impossible to spend either bitcoins [or] sw2x-bitcoins" \-- the replay means that attempts to spend one spend the other as well. Forcing a split transaction pair (as I describe above) is really the only way to ensure that your BTC transaction won't spend your SBT as well.

Is it the bit about the coinbase transactions? The coinbase is the most reliable way of getting transactions valid only on one side of the fork; the mining rewards necessarily only apply to the chain on which they were mined. They aren't spendable until 100 blocks after they are rewarded, and only after they mix in sufficiently with other transactions can they be used to differentiate general transactions -- any transaction that descends from a coinbase transaction is also specific to the chain fork. This is more reliable than a timing/sybil attack to try to force the split transaction pair described above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the argument against increasing the block size limit to 2MB, from those who oppose this?

I was under the impression that the original SegWit proposal increased the block size limit anyway — albeit through a change in how it's calculated, but still.

<comment><USER17> I asked this several times on r/bitcoin and just got links to a Core blog post warning, "this isn't something Core supports," and (essentially) "hard forks are confusing for users." So if you blindly follow Core devs, then apparently that's enough "technical" reason for you.

[It seems to me that Core wants to keep small blocks so that fees on the primary chain continue to rise and everyone is forced to use the side chains that they are building and stand to profit handsomely from. They don't want people being able to use the main chain for small purchases because it increases the size of the blockchain, which makes it more expensive to run nodes, but realistically they're simply making Bitcoin too expensive to use at all.]

Anyway, I'm curious if your question can produce some more reasonable answers here.

<comment><USER18> They're right about confusions, bitcoin cash is simple enough to understand if you've been in this for a while but it's very confusing sometimes.

Some people think they're buying one when it's the other. Others have lost money trying to set bitcoin from one branch to another.

These is also an argument that making the blocks bigger wont actually make a difference.

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

Sidechains will happen regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't it obvious that it has to split a few more times? Unless it does it's major investors would not be able to cash out.

The way I see it, Bitcoin works exactly like a classic pyramid schema. Only interesting part of value IMHO is the Blockchain technology itself.

</comment><comment><USER20> So does this mean more 'free money' for Bitcoin holders. yay

</comment><comment><USER21> This is why you don't negotiate with terrorists, Coinbase.

<comment><USER22> Can you explain what you mean?

<comment><USER21> Coinbase initially stated they weren't going to implement support for Bitcoin Cash, then backpedaled when enough people complained.

[https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-bitcoin- cash-8a67a7e8dbd...](https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-bitcoin- cash-8a67a7e8dbdf)

As both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash have done well post-fork, there's a serious incentive for more forks, and forks of other coin types... and Coinbase's compromising makes it much less tenable to say "no" next time.</comment></comment></comment>


New York Times is taking down its paywall for World Press Freedom Day - ajay-d https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/reader-center/world-press-freedom-day.html <comment><USER2> Funny how they are doing this on "World Press Freedom Day" while at the same time covering deplatforming of news outlets.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/technology/facebook- alex-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/technology/facebook-alex-jones- louis-farrakhan-ban.html)

Now I get they are using platforms which can indiscriminately ban whoever they want. Fine lets say infowars makes their own platform.

Doing okay on their own platform when all of a sudden...

Now common payment processors ban them from being able to receive funding through traditional methods.

When all banks ban you where do you go? Crypto currency of course.

When all common outlets ban you at the same time it doesn't seem much like "World Press Freedom Day" it is more like "Globalization Freedom Day" where you talk against the mainstream opinions and will be silenced. No freedom for you!

Just my 2 cents, not that I endorse infowars I just believe in true and honest discourse and to let the idiots keep talking to be able to show how stupid they are. Banning them only reinforces their audience and empowers them to be more fringe.

<comment><USER3> I am finding the same thing in corporate culture. If you identify problems in the corporation, the solution isn't to solve the problems, it's to isolate and vilify the person who identifies the problem.

Fire that person and there's no more problem.

<comment><USER4> In your example the people themselves are not the problem. If you change the example to be a person who is themselves a toxic, disruptive individual, then merely isolating and vilifying isn't enough: You fire them. "Deplatforming" is a close equivalent.

I used to edit a small newspaper. It wasn't uncommon (a few times a year) to receive advertising orders from Holocaust deniers. I did not run those ads. Maybe that was deplatforming, but I don't think it was wrong, or against the interests of free speech to do so.

<comment><USER2> Maybe. We've seen hosting providers banning sites. [https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/14/1344239/godaddy- exp...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/14/1344239/godaddy-expels-neo- nazi-site-over-article-on-charlottesville-victim)

We've also seen registrars canceling domain registrations. [https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/14/1830223/google- canc...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/14/1830223/google-cancels- domain-registration-for-neo-nazi-website-daily-stormer)

Should they have this power? [https://www.newsweek.com/it-legal-hosting- companies-ban-hate...](https://www.newsweek.com/it-legal-hosting-companies- ban-hate-sites-654618)

By analogy, what if the electric utilities started banning people from using electricity based on their speech? Or maybe gas stations refusing to sell you fuel? How far do we let that go? Boycotts are great and all, but the power of the internet is that it gives everyone a voice. So today, are we so dependent on that voice that the 1st amendment needs to apply to it? Or is it okay to limit politically incorrect opinions to meatspace and save the internet for only approved speech?

<comment><USER4> Media platforms are the inherent venue for this content. Utility companies are not. There's a strong difference between a media platform denying him access and a basic utility doing the same. In fact their are laws (in the US at least) governing this sort of thing with respect to Utilities.

If you want to pull in something like the electric utility, you need to change the example from a trollish media figure to someone messing with the power grid via their utility hookup. Doing that might very well get you banned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I subscribed to the NYT and a few other places.

Hell if my subscription made it possible for others to read it for free and that was sustainable, i'd be 100% ok with that.

That's how it works for public radio and public TV, I feel like they're a thing I want to support, but at the same time share as much as support.

<comment><USER6> The thing that makes this a bit weird to me is that the New York Times is a for-profit organization. If you purely want to fund journalism, your dollars may go further with a nonprofit like ProPublica.

I'm absolutely in favor of supporting great papers like the Times as well, so I'm not sure what my point is here. But it seems misguided to compare news corporations to public institutions.

<comment><USER5> I think of it as any other product type situation on the surface. I'm willing to pay for content.

Beyond that there is an element of wanting to support an industry that I think is important to maintaining a healthy democracy, thus I don't care so much how much anyone else is paying.

<comment><USER6> But if the New York Times removed their paywall (and didn't introduce some other subscriber-only benefit), you wouldn't really be paying for their content anymore, right? Because you could get that content anyway.

A payment that doesn't directly benefit you is a donation.

<comment><USER5> I don't mind calling it a donation when it is appropriate, or a subscription when appropriate. I'm willing to do both.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's just that donating to a for-profit corporation is a bit weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't read/watch any news outlet anymore. It's become utter trash (regardless of your political leanings.) Half the time I feel like I'm reading a tabloid publication instead of a news site.

<comment><USER8> Clickbait has changed a lot of the landscape. But this is good news for self- aware people. It encourages to look for alternative and down to earth news sources.

<comment><USER9> Sadly self-aware people seem to be few and far between...

<comment><USER8> True that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing about subscribing the New York Times - is that you still have to deal with a tremendous number of ads, seemingly every other paragraph. The solution is simple, just install an ad-blocker. But then why not use that ad- blocker to just bock cookies and bypass the paywall, since I'm gaming the system anyways? I guess I could consider my subscription a donation because I'm going to use an ad-blocker either way. But why can't I pay to have a great experience? I considered subscribing through the iOS app, but of course there is no way to block ads. So unfortunately, I don't receive any breaking news notifications.

The browser experience is ok with an ad-blocker. But why not reward your subscribers with a great reading experience? Remove the ads, focus on good typography, etc, and I would pay whatever you ask. Preferably through an app.

Edit: I've been a subscriber for years, and I'm willing to pay regardless. I just think they could improve by making the subscription meaningful to a generation that doesn't want to see ads.

<comment><USER11> I can only guess... when you buy the actual paper there's still ads. In the end they are an advertising company. They write things to increase circulation (hits and copies) so they can get more people to see more ads. That's how it's always worked. That "subscribe and you won't see ads" probably makes no sense at all to company that spent decades selling paying subscribers printed ads. People spend money to buy print ads, why wouldn't they mind paying money to see ads on their electronic device as well? They (The Times) and most subscribers probably don't think it's any big deal to pay to see more ads.

<comment><USER12> For most publications, the newsstand sales are a minuscule amount of income - subscriptions are a bit more (and help them plan budgets), but ads is how they keep the lights on. But it's harder and harder to do that bc no one wants to pay for quality reporting and fact checking when they can get rumors and opinions for free on any clickbait website that pays writers pennies and has fired their fact checkers and copy editors. If you truly want quality journalism, pick the publications you don't want to lose and subscribe - <AUTHOR> know that the ads are what keep the cost low enough for the average person to get reliable news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the NY Times, and I'm not saying it should be free, but this seems a self-contradictory stunt. In recognizing the importance of access to a free press, they take down the roadblock to accessing their own content. But only for 3 days.

If this were something like Earth Day, a company vowing to recycle it's waste, but only for a day, would immediately seem just as ridiculous as this does after brief reflection.

<comment><USER13> It's not free press as in zero cost, it's press freedom.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I get that, but by recognizing press freedom (free as in speech) they are providing free press (free as in beer), which rather conflates the two. By implicitly recognizing that the two are intertwined, it's a contradiction of their support of press freedom to charge the rest of the year.

The conflict would be resolved if they kept the paywall and said something like "remaining solvent is a necessary requirement for press freedom. In honer of World Press Freedom Day, we will do X instead." Where X might be something like sponsoring independent journalists in areas of the world where press freedom is much more of an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Update: After a few articles, you need to register to continue reading.

</comment><comment><USER15> Using pictures of starving children as props to collect our personal information is a new low for them. I can't believe this made it through any sort of approval process.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nytimes seems to lean more on the one side since they erected a paywall. It is inherent to subscriptions that they create a selfreinforcing bubble by telling subscribers what they want to hear, but other publications are doing better (ft, wsj)

</comment><comment><USER17> > The Times is taking down its paywall from May 3 to 5 so everyone who > registers can browse as many articles as they like

> everyone who registers

Nice move, to celebrate "freedom" by collecting personal data that will most definitely be used for marketing and upselling subscriptions.

<comment><USER18> A sales pitch accompanied by a tragic photo is in poor taste also.

<comment><USER11> Calling that photo of the starving kid "tragic" is a bit of an understatement. Who the hell that was a good idea?!

<comment><USER19> The Guardian has been using this technique intensively, and is now profitable, so I think we can expect to see a lot more of this.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, but the Guardian is, by my estimation, a truly bad-ass journalistic institution devoted to speaking truth to power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "You're in private mode."

"Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode."

<comment><USER11> I've noticed they can catch Chrome in incognito, but it doesn't catch Firefox in private mode.

<comment><USER22> I believe that's one of those cat-and-mouse games, where ideally they can't tell if you're in incognito.

<comment><USER23> If you try chrome canary, there's a feature you can enable that removes the incognito leak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The NYT employs enough disingenuous obfuscators that I will never pay them a penny, nor will I let them collect my information.

Beyond that, what they don't realize is that other news sites will simply report on what is reported in the NYT, and those sites will forever be free. From time to time I will copypaste a NYT url to a single-use non-private FF instance to read (and then immediately clear history) whereby I invariably find that the article only has a few bits that expanded my knowledge. Most of the articles are those few bits of new info followed by summaries of days or months old information that I am already fully aware of. And the same goes for the WaPo.

I understand that we need to support good journalism and I will when I find some really good journalism, without auto-play vids and ridiculous amounts of ad content and making sure the readership on "both sides" is fairly represented. The WaPo has potential but Bezos' quest for all the dollars is ruining it.

What they don't get is that they can't control the information and that information has no intrinsic price, for our primary advantage as human beings is our ability to spread ideas and information from person to person. Their information is going to get aggregated and there's not a damn thing they can do about it, and I'm willing to wait 12 hours for it to get to me secondhand.

The MBAs are digging their own graves every single day and they don't have anyone to blame but themselves. That they have gone all in on the advertisers is only hastening their demise.

<comment><USER24> > The NYT employs enough disingenuous obfuscators

The opinion writers are purposely selected to oppose and challenge the viewpoint of the editorial board. Assuming that the editorial board is largely truly correct, there is going to be some degree of intellectual dishonesty among the opposing opinion writers.

I do sympathize with you; I do not enjoy many of their opinions.

<comment><USER25> The NYT hired Sarah Jeong to their editorial board so it's safe to say there is toxicity on both the editorial and opinion side of the paper.

Edit, for those of you unfamiliar with this particular editor you can read her own words on Twitter:

[https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1025437806775226368](https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1025437806775226368)</comment></comment></comment>


What MySQL Founder Michael Widenius said about Oracle acquiring Sun - <AUTHOR> http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-to-be-free.html

<comment><USER2> Blogspam: [http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not- to-...](http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-to-be- free.html)

And a repeat at that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Business plan:

1\. Create a good product and a company. 2\. Sell the company for 1 billion. (Profit!) 3\. Whine about how the new owner is bad and leave it. 4\. Start a NewAndBetterMySQL company. 5\. ??? 6\. Profit?

Now seriously. If there will happen a confrontation between "Oracle MySQL" and "OpenSource MySQL", I see two possible outcomes:

1\. Noone will pay 1 billion for NewAndBetterMySQL next time.

2\. The confusion between different versions of the database may mean, that the "OpenSource MySQL" will lose the enterprise market for some time.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps Oracle indeed thinks that some very suitable confusion is worth some serious money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it strange or just me feel that way? How can a commercial entity buy open- source product? The founder can easily start a new free branch of this product because it is GPLed. Then, what is the 1 billion deal of MySQL all about?

<comment><USER6> MySQL was always dual-licensed.

But yeah, Monty has come out of this laughing. Sun effectively gave him a billion dollars for a few months work, during which time all he did was whine about them in his blog. Sun buying MySQL was a strategic blunder on the order of eBay buying Skype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "They will embrace MySQL and Open Source and put their technical expertise on it to ensure that MySQL continues to be the most popular advanced Open Source database."

That distinction rightly belongs to PostgreSQL: <http://www.postgresql.org/about/>

<comment><USER8> Notice that 'most' refers to 'popular' not 'advanced'. So, the point I believe you were making has nothing to stand against. MySQL is very popular and is also advanced.

<comment><USER6> It isn't even the most popular, that honour belongs to SQLite by a considerable margin.</comment></comment></comment>


Ffmpeg.js: FFmpeg Powered by WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ffmpegjs/ffmpeg.js <comment><USER2> Could this be used to detect the supported codecs of the browser and transcode client side? What's the performance and resource usage on chrome and Firefox, compared to native? Would it melt your smartphone?</comment>


'Critical phase' for Iter fusion dream - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23408073

<comment><USER2> I would love to see this happen, but it seems like this project has a kind of 'development by committee' feel to it.

As I understand it though, this plant is designed to be a bigger prototype, extending what was done at Culham, rather than a real commercial reactor.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone has built there own file file-format? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This question is really not specific.

In scientific and high performance computing, people are regularly inventing new file formats. Many of these decisions also follow paradigms such as "We don't like XML nor complexity, so let's do as if it was 1980 and serialise these data as ASCII one datum per line".

Don't forget that your viewpoint comes from your community. If you are a CAD person, you probably never use JSON. If you do data research, you probably never use XML. If you do hardware development, you probably open any file with a hex editor anyway just because data is usually some bitstream for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have designed some file formats for some programs. But your question is not specific enough, I think.

</comment><comment><USER4> I generally use json - inter-operable with almost any language.

Use line-delimited json (jsonl) if you need to store lots of records in a single file -- gzip that file if size is important. foo.json.gz is a common data interchange format supported in data warehousing systems and the like.

</comment><comment><USER5> For scientific data acquisition I extended an extendable standard format and collect data to the files real-time while displaying the signal. It's not as easy as it sounds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. What were the challenges that you faced while doing the same?

<comment><USER5> It was part of a more challenging larger project, where the computer programs that I wrote truly performed better and even more fully featured than designed. But naturally I don't like to toot my own horn very much.

First was understanding the approach others had taken as they adapted the flexible open file structure to their commercial softare, so I could read supposedly "standard" files "exported" from established vendors' proprietary formats into my system as data input for post-processing my way.

Then moving all the way upstream to buffer and parse incoming live data using highest priority without losing ANY.

The parsed data is pre-processed as it is prepared for storage and it is written to an open file in raw form according to the peviously determined structure, and a facsimile sent to an autoscaling scrolling graphing module for real-time (+latency) display on the screen.

The commercial softwares that do this use proprietary raw formats, are expensive and confusingly vendor- and generation- specific (even if still supported by the vendor) and did not start out PC-compatible in early versions, plus I needed to interface to some instruments made before there was software anyway.

That way I could collect analog data from antique reference instruments plus process it without limitation compared to various vendors' exposure of fewer- than-needed options. Then export raw files, or those processed my way, in an early mainframe academic extensible file format still openable by today's proprietary softwares, since it was the only format ever agreed upon for interchange by the competing vendors. Plus the old file format had almost completely standardized extensions for the lab application in the 1990's before one of the vendors achieved domination, at which point development stopped in 1998, but there were only a few vendors and they each went with where they were at the time. The remaining standard document and its initial implemenation turned out to function much better with abandoned development, especially since it's so difficult to comprehand, utilize, and implement, that basically each vendor has always known the standard is dead, and these are the _modules that no one must touch_ so there turns out to be far better consistency over more decades than if revisions would have been made along the way.

This was so the rest of the world could enjoy a few of my analog things digitally after that.

The only reason this works is because of the good fortune resulting from all that early anti-lockin standardization effort before there was one dominant player, and from customers who had been expecting it for so long that they were willing to accept a not-fully-completed standard.

Turns out years of delays toward the end were because support from the strongest vendor who had been one of the staunchest advocates of an open standard as they were arising, became a changing landscape as the dominance was building. Instead of engineers, more MBA-type decision makers, who were considering the competitive implications of a more level playing field for customers, were involved in grinding it to a halt.

But it did put me closer within reach for the first time to the machine learning I was doing back in 1980 when I could put together an adversarial system using high level language on a pair of application-specific operating systems using more than one leading vendor's proprietary application-specific language & data structure in a more favorable way than you could on a PC after that type of office machine first gained popularity. Back then it was good having the first desktop (benchtop) multi-user multi-tasking system as well as the largely-competitive-performing single-threaded offerings from other leading research equipment vendors. Not always literally _micro_ processor either, some were bigger than that.

After all, I thought that was supposed to be the advantage of high-resolution digital data, what you could learn & teach from it through computer processing, because archival storage was not the main objective yet since it was too expensive to store the full raw data.

I already knew what slide rules, vacuum tubes, and chart recorders could do.

Anyway, the live (progress) display was just the icing on the cake but it had initiated the whole project because I was finally running out of the big thermal paper that one of my favorite 1970's-design data systems needed for its live high resolution display which it used in place of an analog chart recorder. I had been gifted a large amount of the surplus high-dollar paper refills from the vendor once this generation of instruments was retired, and fortunately it had lasted until I had some slow time and dedicated equipment to do some experimental computer programming. Now that's good customer service, even though I hadn't purchased a new instrument from them for long enough to be considered unsupportable.

The best antique small data systems had a provision for streaming out more live data than they were capable of storing, for those who had access to more powerful generic outboard storage & computing resources like mainframes or eventually SOC's (Some Other Computer) like the early Apple.

After reviewing the revised, photocopied, re-revised documentation needed to interface to the SOC at the time, which was not focused at all[0] on the Apple the salespeople were helpfully encouraging operators to add to their bench, it was understood how actual support was limited to the binder you were looking at.

[0] this would later turn out to be very fortunate

The customer support was excellent and they would try to help out those few small-timers trying to interface to things like the proven hardware from Apple, but their engineers at the time were still having difficulty making it always work trouble-free for these early adopters, and there was no guarantee.

So it should be understood why I always never wanted to do this, and waited decades into the PC age until I was running out of paper and had no choice.

But it had been on my mind for a bit.

I don't often demo it on the laptop but one day I did go to a 21st century digital petroleum exploration conference where they had vendors represented like Halliburton, Schlumberger, and Paradigm. Microsoft had a vendor booth not offering _off-the-shelf_ exploration ware but more like custom projects for the kind of dollars at stake and you know they had people that can do it.

The only demo I did was where an exploration geek showed particularly good understanding and interest in how lab data related to the field. They were at the booth across from Microsoft who watched too but the only thing obvious from that distance was the detailed animated data-collection graph filling my screen as it progressed during that phase. That type display is really not that much different than commercial spectrometer software already. I don't think they were hearing the discussion I was having with the other vendor (maybe with hindsight now I should rethink that). I did have some actual unexpected VC interest from a major at the conference, but that's a completely different story.

Well when the next Windows was coming out, the preview of version 8 had one of the interestingly useful features not found in Windows 7 where when you click for more detailed info during a file transfer, you get a real-time graph instead of just the old progress bar. They plot ups-and-downs of transfer rate against progress with a rate indicator floating along, where labs plot things like ups-and-downs of analog signal across progress.

The odds against all of this happening were phenomenal.

Made me feel kind of like Forest Gump in a way :-)

The rest of the story may or may not be more interesting someday itself . . .</comment></comment></comment>


If This Then That (Programmable Flight Controller) - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/kmRSIfI_h7M <comment><AUTHOR> This is truly a game changer for flight controllers. You can easily write programs for your FC and only your imagination is the limit.</comment>


We want a sub-YCNews - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> There are only two reasons you'd want to do that: (a) if the volume of submissions became too great for a single thread, or (b) if people wanted to talk about things that would otherwise be offtopic.

(a) is obviously not the case yet. As for (b), this is a site about startups. If it's not at least somewhat related to startups, it shouldn't be here.

If what you're really asking for is a general news site, not about startups, I'm thinking of starting one. But if I do it won't be at this url.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has become apparent that the quality of these social news sites depends on the quality/commitment of the society that is supporting it. It would be very interesting and useful to find out what the start up folks are doing on a daily basis besides thinking about start ups. Like I said, this could be a very good inspiration tool.

Lisp was a landmark in my large scale understanding of computer science. I wonder what are the landmarks in understanding something like physics, or say bio-informatics. What are the problems that these people are facing? Hackers like learning just for the heck of it. In the process we can bring about useful start ups to these domains instead of making another calender application and stacking outside some big huge company in the hopes of being acquired.

I am not asking for a general news site. I am asking for a site where news.yc culture and outlook is preserved, but the domain is slightly relaxed (Note: the relaxing should stop well before we start seeing LOL(pic) in the submissions). If you won't keep the same URL, its ok, as long as you some how figure out how to set up that "outlook".

<comment><USER2> What you're talking about is roughly what I'm thinking of starting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We need a SUB-YCnews where the people of news.yc can post other stuff that they are interested in. That is exactly how startup inspiration will occur. Not by talking about startups all day till you bleed through your nose. We want sub-yc! we want sub-yc! we want sub-yc! [ :o| Consults wikipedia on how to start a lynch mob.]

<comment><USER3> That's how Reddit became crappy. There's plenty of other aggregators that will give you news on anything you might imagine.

PG, please keep YCNews focused and keep it niche. More people and wider subjects will just diffuse the relevancy of content.

<comment><USER4> Constant Bush-Hating "Progressive" links and conspiracy theories are how reddit became crappy.

<comment><USER5> That's the proximate cause (or one of them, in my opinion), but I think what's interesting is how that came to be. I mean, disliking Bush is pretty mainstream around the world, but the sort of frothing at the mouth attitude at reddit isn't. How did the extreme come to dominate?

<comment><USER4> I wonder if it was just the first group to dominate at reddit meant that it they would always downvote submissions that didn't confirm their outlook, attracting more people with a like mind, and repelling people with differing opinions.

If I owned reddit I would have modified it so that you could have blocked submissions from people or sites you didn't like. That would have helped make it bearable for people like me.

<comment><USER5> A "tipping point" in other words. That seems plausible. I think the problem with simply blocking people and sites is that the site still "tips", and you end up ignoring too many people. The happiest people are those who dont' have to ignore anyone.

Which brings up another point - do you really want to foster debate? Maybe it's better to just feed people what they want. If I can't have thoughtful, considerate, and informed debate, I think I'd rather just have the echo chamber than impolite, rude, paranoid extremist rants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This, somehow, seems like it might belong in the Feature Request section. :p

I don't think the site has the user base to sustain subfeeds at the moment. Also it isn't really intended to be a one-stop source for everything, feel free to create a better one and ask us to migrate though. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You seem to have the baggage of reddit, I am not talking about specific subfeeds. Their is no plural. Just a sub-feed which is the complement of what we have here. 1.News.YC. 2.Everything else.

"feel free to create a better one and ask us to migrate though."

I was going to create one and post a message here inviting people. I thought this is a simpler way to solve this problem. So I am trying this discussion first. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can check out <http://www.DailyHub.com.> Not nearly the traffic/submissions as News.YC but is focused on business geeks (and extends beyond just startups).

Not for everyone, but if you're looking for decent content on marketing, strategy and other business topics, you might like it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sub-sites suck. Add tags, problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER9> Help me understand by showing me an example of what other stuff would be posted.

<comment><USER10> stuff like this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29966>

<comment><USER11> again no concrete reply in that thread. only: "I can't remember|I don't know exactly|etc ..." I think at news.yc is slightly everything interesting, the only thing I can't stand is "The True Zuckerberg's Story" 22 times a day.</comment></comment></comment>


Fake Craigslist "everything must go" ad costs man pretty much everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/25/fake-craigslist-ever.html <comment><USER2> And yet I still can't give away that old fridge!</comment>


Examples of Coming Soon Page Designs - Part II - <AUTHOR> http://dzineblog.com/2009/04/25-examples-of-cool-coming-soon-pages-part-ii.html

<comment><USER2> For web apps, reframe the "coming soon" procrastination crap and stick a little text entry where people can leave their email "to be the first to try" or get an invite. Less under-construction orange cone blocking the road, and more like an exclusive concierge to RSVP for a velvet-rope event.

Plus you collect leads :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> cool</comment>


Dan Ariely Talks Creativity And Dishonesty  - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=dan-ariely-talks-creativity-and-dis-12-12-29

<comment><USER2> _What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right?_

Just read any essay by Orwell about writing, and you'll know the answer is "no, I think you meant to say _sloppy_ storytellers". For me creativity requires focus, it requires reflection, it requires constantly evaluating not just what you're doing, but why you're doing it. That is, if you want to be more than just a hack and a poisonous distraction (which, granted, for some actually is the definition of being creative.. but they're wrong IMO). And I say this as someone who is usually a hack, 99% of the time. I wrote and forgot so many crappy lyrics for example, but there's one or two I still feel proud of after nearly 10 years. But those I didn't create by just being easy on myself, but by focusing and working rather hard.

(or am I just rationalizing it? :P)

<comment><USER3> I don't think you're rationalizing. Creativity requires fuller understanding of every little detail and interdependency of the thing you're creating. It might be easier to deceive someone else, but not yourself, you just know too much.

<comment><USER2> _It might be easier to deceive someone else, but not yourself, you just know too much._

Ohh, you're right.. maybe I don't actually disagree with the "article" (it's not really much, and I didn't read or listen to the whole thing yet) then.. because yes, exploring truth certainly makes it easier to lie as well. Being able to be honest to yourself doesn't really translate into being so all the time, and much less into being honest to others necessarily (though I like to think it can help, too ^^).

If you dove around in certain swamp a lot, you can also much more easily walk among some patches of grass on the surface, pretending there is no swamp to an onlooker; precisely _because_ you spent some time in it.

But I still would like to think real mastery of anything worth mastering comes out at a point where you prefer even mediocre truths to grand lies, so I don't want to completely retract my first knee-jerk comment either :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't miss the link to full podcast (30 minutes) vs the short extract directly on article. [http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=cre...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=creativitys- dark-side-dan-ariely-on-12-12-25)

</comment><comment><USER5> Q: How do you know Ariely is talking dishonestly?

A: His lips are moving.

Oh, I must have misread the title ;)</comment>


Show HN: TMinus is where you share what you're counting down to with your friends - <AUTHOR> http://tminusapp.com/ <comment><USER2> I could see this as a useful feature added to an existing platform like Facebook where there are pre-existing network effects, but I wouldn't personally be prompted to download another app for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Thanks for your feedback. Instead of an app would a fully functional website help ?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What are your thoughts on the idea ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Connection timed out for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh . Let me look into the issue .</comment></comment>


Magritte: A Language for Pipe-Based Programming [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://files.jneen.net/academic/thesis.pdf <comment><USER2> I must make a mandatory fanboi shoutout to: [https://luna- lang.org](https://luna-lang.org)

<comment><USER3> Great concept but I found their execution lackluster. The studio (IDE) is an Atom-based editor that is horribly slow and very buggy. I'm still waiting for a cleaner, smoother implementation. Honestly, if they were reinventing the GUI, might as well be an extension for VS Code.

<comment><USER4> VS Code is not universally extensible. Atom is. Extensions in VS Code have a lot more limitations. This is also in part because VS Code was designed to be more performant than Atom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In this linked document for Magritte, it describes its pipeline operator in a section called "Syntax Design - Linear Composition: Why Not Lisp?".

 _..The problem is the prefix-only calling convention that requires a back- and-forth movement of the cursor, and causes the expression to expand leftwards, opposite of the direction of the user's typing._

 _While some languages have some support for linear composition using operators such as Clojure's arrow macros or OCaml's | > operator, the integration of these macros with the underlying subsystem is shallow._

I question this last statement.

Just this weekend I was reading about Hy's (based on Clojure's) threading macros:

"Threading macros, also known as arrow macros, convert nested function calls into a linear flow of function calls"

 _- > (or the threading macro) is used to avoid nesting of expressions. The threading macro inserts each expression into the next expression's first argument place._

 _- >> (or the threading tail macro) is similar to the threading macro, but instead of inserting each expression into the next expression's first argument, it appends it as the last argument._

At least to me this seems far from "shallow" and even more useful/flexible than the pipeline operator.

<comment><USER6> Yeah basically. As a ex Clojure user, I'd agree. It's not shallow and if one finds it shallow then one can write their own macro to be less shallow.

<comment><USER5> As I'm educating myself on Lispy languages, may I ask why the "ex" for Clojure and what (if any) other language you've moved onto?

<comment><USER6> I've always used many languages, but I tried clojure for data processing stuff. I moved away from it because the number of libraries was tiny; I had to write my own libraries for doing basic SQLy things. Some hard things were easy in Clojure, but too many easy things were hard.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! That was interesting to hear about your experience with Clojure. I've heard good things about the language, reading here and there about its features and strengths - so I was curious to know if there were any critiques/cons (pun intended :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks cool! I linked it on my wiki page of alternative shells:

[https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources](https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources)

(which is cited on the first page of the thesis!)

I hope that Oil can a lot of these things in a backward compatible way, but I still have to read it and understand it more.

<comment><USER8> You may consider adding to awk-like group of programs pawk:

[https://github.com/alecthomas/pawk](https://github.com/alecthomas/pawk)

It gives you a more readable and concise way to select a colum, split it and sau snip out few characters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The twist here is that this language doesn't use actual pipes; it just creates representations of pipes that can be used by a different interpreter.

<comment><USER10> So you're saying this is not a pipe?

<comment><USER6> Appreciated :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The implementation is written in Ruby, and the source code is publicly > available at > [https://github.com/prg‑titech/magritte](https://github.com/prg‑titech/magritte).

<comment><USER12> Somehow the link had CGI escaping in it and I ended up on the 404, hopefully this one should work [https://github.com/prg- titech/magritte](https://github.com/prg-titech/magritte)

Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER11> It was copied directly from the PDF and contains a Unicode hyphen U+2011 encoded in UTF-8. I should have checked for such and replaced it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
        1.4 The Desktop-Scripting Problem

        Related to the shell-language design problem is the desktop-scripting problem:
        How should unrelated programs written in different languages be integrated—especially
        in an ad-hoc manner in a desktop environment? Such a task can require a large
        amount of glue code, written by users who are unfamiliar with the inner workings of
        the programs they are using. Notable attempts at solving the desktop-scripting prob-
        lem include the TCL language [Ousterhout, 1989] and Guile Scheme [Blandy, 1998].
        However, while most of these approaches use a large, robust language, it still remains
        difficult to integrate them with external programs—instead putting the burden on
        those programs to integrate with their system. We believe a shell-based approach is
        promising

Hmm, Scheme as a large language? Well, I don't know much about the extensions Guile Scheme has over RxRS, would hope for someone to add info here.

<comment><USER7> This is only a partial answer, but I remember the designers of Julia saying that the Scheme spec spends many dozens of pages on the semantics of integers and floats. That makes the language large.

Remember that Scheme is not the lambda calculus -- you need dynamic types like integers, strings, vectors, hash tables, IO, etc. to get anything done.

In contrast in Julia they said that the semantics of numbers are defined in Julia. Julia has a much richer notion of number than any other language AFAICT, e.g. int8 .. int128, uint8 .. uint128, vectors of those, matrices of those, rationals, etc. They're all on the "same level" \-- there aren't primitives vs. libraries, as far as I know.

[https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/integers-and- floatin...](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/integers-and-floating- point-numbers/)

[https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/complex-and- rational...](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/complex-and-rational- numbers/)

[https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/arrays/](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/arrays/)

[https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/conversion-and- promo...](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/conversion-and-promotion/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is mind boggling that despite the name, they did not (given the (I assume) joke with the name) say, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" anywhere in the paper. Only once does the phrase, "This is not" occur, but completely out of context of Magritte's most famous painting.

I'm serious - this isn't Joke 101, but this is Marketing 101 in some respects.

<comment><USER15> I assume they felt it was a bit too on the nose? Anyone familiar with Magritte will be familiar with the painting; any attempts to shoehorn the quote in there would have felt forced, I think. Maybe if they had a website to go with it... but this is just a paper.

Plus, as jpfed says below: The twist here is that this language doesn't use actual pipes; it just creates representations of pipes that can be used by a different interpreter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wrote clojure for a while. Forward chaining basically facilitates pipe based programming. When it fits it's great, but when it doesn't try code is ugly.

Some computations just want to be imperative. IMO, if you can avoid developing programming fetishes; power to you.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks interesting!

Side note: here's another "Magritte" from 1983: [http://reports- archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-83-13...](http://reports- archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-83-132.pdf). Is there a connection?

<comment><USER17> Yes, both look very interesting!

Here's another one: the Magritte meta-description framework for Squeak Smalltalk, often used with the Seaside continuation-based web framework:

[http://www.hpi.uni- potsdam.de/hirschfeld/seaside/tutorial?ch...](http://www.hpi.uni- potsdam.de/hirschfeld/seaside/tutorial?chapter=10)

<comment><USER18> Here is one for R:

[https://github.com/tidyverse/magrittr](https://github.com/tidyverse/magrittr)

<comment><USER19> Yep, pipes in R are great for interactive use & EDA. (Not necessarily for production code.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of nushell, which pipes around 2D tables (which can instead store hierarchical structured data, for example when reading toml files): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20783006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20783006)

</comment><comment><USER21> Except for the comparisons with Lisp in the third section, I thought the idea of pipes with complex data structures to be a pretty neat idea. Also, this is for a Master'S Thesis from the University of Tokyo? That looks like a lot of work for a MS thesis.

</comment><comment><USER22> Taking "pipe-based programming" to its logical conclusion results in [http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/pipelogic/](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/pipelogic/)

</comment><comment><USER23> The problem as it's defined in this thesis sounds a lot like the problem of microservice architecture. I'm curious how something like protobufs would compare in solving this problem

</comment><comment><USER24> Mario provides an implementation of shell pipes for Python.

[https://github.com/python-mario/mario](https://github.com/python-mario/mario)

<comment><USER25> Please stop spamming that project all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just remember to pipe with the | character. ¦ n'est pas une pipe.

<comment><USER27> But that would ruin the joke - surely in Magritte

"| ceci n'est pas une pipe"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is not a programming language</comment>


HTC vive available now - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/app/358040/ <comment><USER3> This actually links to a HTC video showing off the green-screen room where non-players can actually see what the player is seeing. It's pretty cool - <USER2> think some people would actually consider painting their 'VR Room' at home green just to be able to show this off, or do YouTube videos of VR in action.</comment>


Wealth - <AUTHOR> http://bhargreaves.com/2011/02/wealth/

<comment><USER2> What about a $10,000 or $1,000 category?

</comment><comment><USER3> It needs a column showing how many people reach each level.</comment>


Duolingo launches a craft beer brewery 'based on science' - <AUTHOR> http://brewolingo.duolingo.com/ <comment><USER2> Sucks, the worst day of the year for the web is here, again.

NO, YOU'RE NOT FUNNY!!!

</comment><comment><USER3> April Fools or real? Hard to tell this time of year...</comment>


Kickstumbler: elegantly explore random Kickstarter projects - <AUTHOR> http://kickstumbler.com Hacked this instead of sleeping.
It lets you stumble through cool Kickstarter projects by category (or across the entire site), or watch a continuous video channel of Kickstarter video intros.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Seriously awesome, jump straight into non-stop project vids here: <http://kickstumbler.com/view?vid=1></comment>


Google Could Pay Apple $1B Next Year To Remain Default Search Engine On iOS - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/google-to-pay-apple-1-billion-next-year-to-be-default-search-engine-on-ios/ <comment><USER2> This report is _full_ of hedging. Examples from the opening paragraph:

 _According to a report from Morgan Stanley, Google_ could _pay more than $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default search engine on iOS. In 2009, Google paid only $82 million for the privilege._ Analyst Scott Devitt believes _that it is a per-device deal growing every year._

Is there hard evidence that any of this isn't just speculation?

<comment><USER3> Doesnt seem like it? The miss-use of "To" in the HN title and in the article url is also hugely misleading when the actual title of the article is Google COULD pay Apple etc,etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google should let it lapse, nothing would say that iOS devices are no longer the cool thing to own then having Bing or a lousy Apple brewed search engine be the default.

<comment><USER5> There's not that much of a difference between Google and Bing. Most of us are using Google for historical and cultural reasons - it's what we've used in the past and it's just what people like us do.

<comment> X-Istence There is enough of a difference that when I decided to test with Bing and then Duck Duck Go (Fuck that name is complicated to type) for 2 weeks each I was missing Google's MUCH better results for the same queries. In the Bing it on challenge for example, Google wins 5 out of 5 for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is why analysts get paid the big bucks! To randomly speculate on deals that when confirmed make them look like they know what they are talking about but when nothing ever materializes it doesn't matter because no one is calling them out over it.

</comment><comment><USER7> My parents are not tech savvy. However, they do know to 'Google' it. While they may not know how to change the home page it doesn't matter what device they are on. They go to Google to search. Even if that means finding Google through Bing.

If they are doing this.. I wonder how much value this will actually be.

<comment><USER8> Do your parents know how to change the default search engine on iOS?

The desktop is a different beast than mobile; I think most mobile users just use the "search field" and find what they want.

(Edited for typo)

<comment><USER9> I think his point was that his parents don't just use the search field -- they use google. That is, they'll search for google and then they'll search for what they want. If google ever quits paying apple, this is the bet they'll be making. Who knows if they're right.

<comment><USER7> This. I remember a phone call a while ago. My mother had taken her iPad to a hotel and "the Internet wasn't working."

I spent 5 minutes trying to get her to identify which is the url bar and which is the search bar in Safari. In the end I gave up. My mother is smart.. i swear.. she just somehow doesn't get this.

If she does accidentally use the search box it is to find Google which she almost certainly doesn't realise she is already using.

Really this is my point. Parents are deeply non-tech and it is ingrained in them to use Google whether it is the default search engine or not. I am a bit techy and I always switch the default search engine to Google.

Google paying this money doesn't do anything for my household or my parents. Between our two houses we have 5 iOS devices which are unaffected by this move. It is a tiny number but it makes me wonder how many more people are like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know this article is speculative, but if it's true, this is why Google built Android. I know that tech pundits like to talk about how Apple is making the lion's share of the profits in the smartphone industry (which they are). But despite the fact that it doesn't make them a lot of money directly, Android has prevented Apple from gaining a stranglehold on the smartphone market. If Apple had > 90% of the smartphone market share, they would be eating 75%+ of Google's mobile search revenue for as long as they maintained that position.

<comment><USER11> In my mind, there's never been any question that this was the purpose of Android; aside from the goal of spreading low-cost mobile computing, the business purpose was to avoid a market in which one company (known for their control freak tendencies) had utter control over the mobile OS market, in a much more locked-down manner than was the case with Windows on desktop. This would be a disaster for Google (and arguably, the consumer), as they'd have no market power (and the switching cost for a search engine is much lower than the switching cost for a smartphone). The introduction of Android was simply to ensure more competition in the market (in fact, back when Android phones had a hardware search button, you could find many phones that mapped it to Bing). Android was less about making money off the product directly than about shaping the environment of the mobile industry in a manner that was less unfavorable to Google. As another example of this strategy, see Chrome: Performance of the dominant browsers was hindering what Google could do with their products...until an alternative was launched and both Firefox and IE magically decided that performance gains were possible, and now the state of the browser market is in much better shape than it was.

It's more than a little shocking that so few people seem to understand these concepts. You still see articles (whether from Wall St or the online tech community) about how Android makes X dollars in revenue, as measured in AdMob revenue from Android phones and Google Play revenue. This is then directly compared to the estimated cost Google has put into developing it and judged to be a failure, from a business perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It sounds to me like this is a per device deal. It makes sense that the number would grow annually. From what I saw in the article it doesn't make mention that Apple is extorting this money out of Google either. It seems that people see the 1 Billion dollar figure and assume something sinister is afoot. I would not doubt that this figure was the result of negotiations between the two companies.

</comment><comment><USER13> Apple hasn't learned much from the Maps fiasco, have they? Also, Apple seems to be a lot more keen on _hurting_ Google than on providing the best experience to their users. They did that with Maps, when they decided they'd rather give the users a poorer maps experience, than continue dealing with Google, and if Google refuses to pay this much, then they will do it with search, too.

<comment><USER14> Thats really only half the story. Apple couldn't give their customers the experience they wanted to give them: Turn by Turn, no data mining, etc... while staying with Google. So they made the decision to go their own way.

Hindsight being 20/20 they should've stayed with the "subpar" google maps until their new maps were less "subpar". It's great to point out hindsight but it's hard to fault their logic that they needed to move away from Google Maps. The only thing to really nail them for is doing so before apple Maps were fully baked.

(for different definitions of subpar)

<comment><USER15> > Hindsight being 20/20 they should've stayed with the "subpar" google maps > until their new maps were less "subpar".

I'd imagine widespread usage is necessary for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What if Google refuses to pay? Will Apple remove Google as default search engine on iOS? Recall what happend when they replaced Google maps? Nah, I didn't think so.

Clearly, someone at Morgan Stanley, who came up with this bollocks, must have been wearing their pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses most of the time last year, when the maps fiasko took place.

<comment><USER17> Being the default search option everywhere is worth a lot to Google. A 2011 report says they pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search option in Firefox:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8975584/Google-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8975584/Google- triples-payment-for-Firefox-traffic.html)

So if Google doesn't pay? Bing or Yahoo will happily pay hundreds of millions to take their place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I notice there's quite a large discrepancy between the link title on HN and the _actual_ article title. The "to" makes it sound like the deal is done but the article really just seems like speculation. Is this TC just desperate for more HN clicks?

</comment><comment><USER19> To be honest wouldn't Google search disappearing from iOS devices play in google's advantage looking at their Nexus devices? I mean ... what are the odds Apple comes up with something beter, even third party?

<comment><USER20> I think its about time that we realize that Google is no longer the far and above better search engine _for what most people search for_. News, celebrities, sports, recipes, etc... these are all low hanging fruit when it comes to search. I have no doubt that Bing is on par with Google when it comes to these categories. I'm sure Google still wins massively on the "long tail" search, but these types of searches are only important to a small percentage of users. If Apple suddenly changed their default search to Bing (perhaps also removing branding), I don't think anyone would care besides the techie folks and the bloggers.

<comment><USER21> I personally believe that long tail searches will become even more important in the future with users entering their search queries via tools like Siri and Google Now.

I do not have any hard facts to support that subjective opinion, but to me it feels a lot more natural to speak out a query as a full sentence than to say a few keywords.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a great deal for Google. I mean, depending on how long the $1 Billion gets them the default search spot for, I am certain they will make the money back through ads in the near future.

<comment><USER23> the $1 Billion gets them 1 year

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the $1 billion is in regards to how much advertising money that Apple's cut earns from google's ads on iOS devices. I doubt this is just about default inclusion of the google search engine.</comment>


Online IDE to learn Java in 3 clicks - <AUTHOR> http://www.browxy.com <comment><USER2> Great IDE!</comment>


Twitter Considers Moving Its Headquarters To Brisbane - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/13/twitter-considers-moving-its-headquarters-to-brisbane-ca/ <comment><USER2> I thought Australia first and then thought that's a bit random of a choice. Brisbane, CA makes some more sense.

That said, I don't think they'll move. I think they're bluffing to get San Francisco to throw some of those tax breaks their way. It'd really annoy employees who just bought houses in expensive San Francisco so they wouldn't need to commute, then being told they need to commute (or sell their house in a bit of shaky real estate market and move down to Brisbane).

<comment><USER3> I doubt anyone would have to sell their home for a commute from SF to Brisbane (its one town down and right off 101) at most they'd have to get a car.

That being said, I'd think staff would hate this idea in general.

<comment><USER2> I agree that you wouldn't _need_ to move. It would be tough to walk or bike to work though.

<comment><USER4> Company shuttle?

Several companies in the valley offer this (including mine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would have helped if the title had mentioned "Brisbane, California" rather than just Brisbane. I clicked this thinking they were considering moving to Australia for some random reason.

<comment><USER6> I agree... but for a totally different reason. I thought it was an incredibly bad joke considering that Brisbane, Australia has just been hit by the worst floods since 1974. The CBD and many suburbs are literally awash in water. It's a national disaster: [http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special- reports/gallery-fn7...](http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special- reports/gallery-fn7kabp3-1225983022068?page=1) So... I was relieved to see the piece had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of Brisbane, Australia!</comment></comment>


Apple's Arrogance Stokes Android Gains - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224701492

<comment><USER2> Yes, I'm sure Android's success is a result of consumers' response to all this tech-world inside baseball, and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Verizon's network is so much better than AT&T's.

<comment><USER3> You know what? That's Apple's fault, too. They went with AT&T. AT&T is what Apple wanted, and AT&T is a part of the iPhone experience. Everyone says how Apple works really hard to make sure every aspect of the experience is rock solid, etc. Fine. AT&T is apart of that. Apple said "The AT&T experience is how we want to be represented in the mobile world." If AT&T's service isn't good, this reflect directly on the iPhone, and Apple. The iPhone is Apple's product, not AT&T's.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it was more of a "AT&T accepted Apple's terms when it came to developing a new phone back before anyone had seen the original iPhone." As thanks, they got a 5-year exclusivity agreement with Apple.

<comment><USER3> However you want to swing it, Apple went with AT&T as the provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sad when the "legit tech press" have to resort to linkbait headlines to get eyeballs.

The simplest answer to Android's success has more to do with the number of models and network availability than with some bogus claim about arrogance. A better headline would have been "Is Apple being bitten by Android because of its exclusivity agreement with AT&T?"

<comment><USER6> I have to agree with you there. I'm certain that the iPhone's ties to AT&T only has to be a drag on iPhone sales. Not everyone is willing/able to switch to AT&T.

For myself personally, I love my N1, but I probably never would have got to know that if the iPhone had been available on other carriers. I wanted to by an iPhone since back when they first came out, but AT&T get's completely crappy reception in my neighborhood. :-( If there'd been a TMobile iPhone I would have bought one a loooong time ago.

(I realize you _can_ run a jailbroken iPhone on Tmo, but that just never seemed worth it. You lose 3G, and I'm not excited about ruining the warranty right out of the box on something as expensive as an iPhone.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How come this is the only article claiming that the engineer who lost the phone was fired?

The author also claims that criminal charges were filed against the blogger who found the phone. What blogger would that be? The phone was bought by Gawker who had one of their paid bloggers write about it, but he did not find it. Did the person who found it also have a blog?

Also, he claims Apple files these alleged charges. Really? I must have missed where Apple became the District Attorney. At most Apple reported the phone stolen.

There have been a gazillion articles covering this, and a gazillion minus one were better than this one.

<comment><USER8> I don't mean to be pedantic (and I certainly don't mean to defend this article), but the author doesn't claim that the engineer was fired; they say, "Apple may _yet_ fire the engineer". Which is true, I suppose - Apple may yet fire _any_ of their employees. Nevertheless, it is still a ridiculously speculative thing to write in a "news story".

<comment><USER7> It looks like the article is being updated (without being so marked). Shortly before I posted it said that "Apple summarily fired the engineer who lost the phone".

<comment><USER8> Oh dear, as if this article needs another reason to add to the list of why it is terrible... My apologies for blaming you for the error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It may also be that the new Android phones kick butt. A friend of mine just got the HTC Incredible, which runs on Verizon, and it's smoking fast.

</comment><comment><USER10> "News that Google Android-based devices are outselling the iPhone may be a sign that consumers are fed up with Apple's increasingly restrictive policies and behavior that, in the minds of many, could be characterized as nothing short of bullying."

Or it may not be, as we present no data to back this claim, but that's OK because we put the "may be" qualifier in there, so now we can write the rest of the article assuming that our premise is true.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are almost 50 Android phones, and every major carrier sells at least one Android phone. Apple can't possibly win against that. In fact, they aren't trying to. They want to build the "best" (in Steve's eyes) phone in the world. They aren't trying to build the phone for everyone. These two tasks are mutually exclusive. Android will find its way onto $5 phones in the developing world, for example.

But hey, that sure is a news grabbing headline.

<comment><USER12> It would be nice if the "best phone in the world" reliably made phone calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is complete garbage. It gives absolutely zero facts to back up the author's assertion that Apple's recent behavior has led to Android's gains.

How can a publication publish this? Look at some of the ambiguous language used by the author: "...may be a sign..." "...in the minds of many..." "...bad taste in many consumers' minds..." (The last one is not only ambiguous, it's a cliche, and a mixed one at that.)

Is this supposed to be an opinion piece? It's certainly not labeled as such. IW should be embarrassed to have published this drivel.

</comment><comment><USER14> On iPhone, automatically redirects to a general home page; this story buried among the other headlines. When will companies learn basic mobile web ux?</comment>


The 8% interest banking mobile app - <AUTHOR> Hey, this is Pat from https://outlet.finance and we just made our 100th dollar.
We just launched 3 weeks ago and are getting some great feedback.
We have a little over 100 users at this point and roughly $20,000 in-app under management.
If you have any feedback or want to know how the product works a bit more please ask. Starting a savings app that feels like a bank account is not easy.
The about page explains how the product itself actually works. <comment><USER2> If I'm reading this correctly, your app isn't really mobile banking at all. It's essentially equivalent to a junk bond ETF, except instead of low-grade corporate debt it's consumer crypto debt. This is an interesting vehicle.

Are there any collapse guarantees like a normal savings account (I'm assuming not)?

Do you state the downside risks anywhere (ex. what happens if the stablecoins turn out not to be stable)?

What's the maximum dollar amount people can put in it?

<comment><USER3> Good questions. Waiting for Outlet team to respond.</comment></comment>