Employee #1: Coinbase - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-coinbase/ <comment><USER2> I cannot recommend Coinbase at all. I operate an adult comic book publisher and they shutdown our account without notice and blamed the bank they work with (despite the fact that we were not converting our BTC to USD). All support tickets took 3 - 5 days to get a reply and it was always unhelpful.

For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers.

Do not use Coinbase.

<comment><USER3> Coinbase CEO here. I think this boils down to a misunderstanding about what our product is.

There are some companies which operate purely in the digital currency world, and never store people's money. They are not regulated businesses. I'm glad these exist (and it sounds like this is what you are looking for) but this is not Coinbase.

Coinbase is an exchange that integrates with the traditional financial system to help people convert their local currency into and out of digital currency. I wrote a post about this here which may help: [https://medium.com/the- coinbase-blog/coinbase-is-not-a-walle...](https://medium.com/the-coinbase- blog/coinbase-is-not-a-wallet-b5b9293ca0e7#.obvdyhi2b)

When you say Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for, I have to disagree. We are enabling millions of people to get access to digital currency so that it can succeed. We do this successfully by playing by the rules in the existing ecosystem. You may not like these rules, but if you want millions of people to have easy access to digital currency (so that a new economy can develop etc) we are the greatest ally you have on that mission.

One company can't play both roles, of integrating with the existing financial ecosystem, and creating the brave new world that you want to see. That role probably needs to be filled by separate companies.

We are much closer to Stripe and other businesses which don't allow adult businesses either. [https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent- allowed](https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed)

Further reading: [https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/building-the-bridge- why...](https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/building-the-bridge-why- compliance-is-key-to-digital-currencys-success-7bfdd88a084c#.la2sbe32x)

<comment><USER2> >playing by the rules in the existing ecosystem

Are you implying that by supporting my business you would not be playing by the rules? If that's what you're saying, you don't seem to be fully aware of the rules. That, or you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the financial ecosystem or somehow believe that a company selling mature content is not "playing by the rules".

My business has a physical store, existing relationships with banks, existing relationships with credit card companies, approval to sell adult comics on Amazon, and even approval to sell with PayPal (yes, they know we sell adult comics). When our customers requested we accept Bitcoin we turned to Coinbase, and you banned our account without providing a reason.

It's ironic, given their history, that PayPal is more accepting of merchants like myself than your company.

This is why I chose to speak up.

You may be an ally to the big banks, but you are not an ally to small businesses or consumers.

<comment><USER3> There are many banks with many rules out there. Paypal may be in a different negotiating position than we are. Believe me, I'd love to support all legal businesses (including yours). Sorry we couldn't get there yet - we may be able to eventually.

<comment><USER2> That was a good response! I hope you get there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was one of the remote hires brought on through the first Bitcoin SAT on Reddit. I recall completing the test and thinking "well, that was fun, but there's no way I aced it," particularly because one of the questions, I was pretty sure, was a trick meant to see how you'd handle _not_ coming up with an answer.

To my surprise, a few days later Olaf emailed me and asked whether I could meet him on Skype. The interview lasted for around an hour and we found a lot in common (Olaf studied sociology and I studied anthropology, we're both rock climbers, and, of course, massive crypto nerds), and toward the end he asked whether I was okay with working support. The quote's not mine, but I answered "when you're asked to join a rocket ship, you don't ask where you sit."

A few days passed and Barry Kwok contacted me to make it official. I joined the team on November 1st, 2013. Those early days were wild, even from North Carolina where I lived. Bitcoin's price was soaring and the users (and tickets) were pouring in.

The rate at which Olaf's team became acclimated, with so few existing resources, is a testament to his leadership and their outstanding caliber, and something I'll never forget. You really had the feeling that you were "a part of something big," surrounded by talented and inspiring minds.

It was a wonderful experience in my life, but one that I don't talk about very often and haven't posted about until now. All the best to Olaf in his continued adventures: no matter the route, I'm sure he'll send it.

<comment><USER5> I'd love to hear something about your thoughts on anthropology and computers (and work).

My girlfriend is finishing her master's in anthropology. I'm going to the Anthro/IT conference in Tartu (Estonia) in November. I'm curious about the intersection.

<comment><USER4> Sure, though I have to confess to trending more toward IT than anth, and being limited in exposure to my sub-discipline (cultural anthropology).

Immediately after my time with Coinbase, I started working at Duke University. My team provided web application development and protected data management to social science researchers, and worked with the Department of Public Instruction on certain projects.

Without question, data management is _the_ thing. Field data is almost entirely electronic (collected through the web, SMS, or downloaded off of tablets (mobile engagement is also big)), or will eventually be made electronic. This benefits later analysis in something like R, Stata or Julia, but introduces a host of concerns relating to secure storage, access, egress and ingress. Large data sets are also sometimes shared between institutions and typically come with stringent use requirements (up to and including air gapping).

It's very new territory for many in the social sciences, and they rely on IT to provide them with solutions and answer their questions. Interestingly, the medical field have already covered a great deal of this ground, so their work can often be used as a template for - or at least a vision of - the future of best practice in the social sciences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought we were over the "torture the interviewee" interview stuff, this blows my mind

\</comment><comment>-

Olaf : This is just to Fred. Fred and I probably talked for 45 minutes–a long time. Then Fred gave me a really brutal mathematics problem ...

Okay. So there are 100 lockers in a row. They're all closed, okay? A kid goes by. He opens every single locker. A second kid goes by. Now he closes every other locker, every second locker. Third kid comes by, every third locker. If it's open, he closes it. If it closed, he opens it. Then the fourth kid goes by. Every fourth locker, he changes the state. And now 100 kids go by. What is the state of the lockers after 100 kids go by?

...

Craig : What was the actual job?

Olaf : Customer support

<comment><USER7> I interviewed with Coinbase a couple years ago and had a horrible experience from start to finish. The whole team was super disorganized throughout and the people I talked to weren't inspiring in the least. The CEO was super rude at the end of the process too.

I aced the stupid online test they wanted, then aced the phone interview with Brian (the CEO), and then on top of that they wanted me to come in and contract with them for a week as a "trial" which I did do partially (didn't do the full week because I was busy that time of year). Their expectations of the trial were entirely unrealistic, misguided, and in some cases nonexistent (which is worse than misguided imo). It was doomed to fail from the beginning.

Anyway, jokes on them because they lost out on a great engineer. I wonder how many more they lost out on due to misguided and _mismanaged_ hiring practices. Now I'm shipping software to more users than Coinbase can ever dream of, having more impact on those users than Bitcoin ever will, and making far more money to boot while working with a higher caliber Eng team. So I'm incredibly thankful for having dodged that bullet.

<comment><USER8> Was the trial week paid? If so, that's becoming a more common practice. Unpaid trial week? Pfft no way.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if they expect this "trial week" out of all candidates. A trial week of work, paid or not, pretty much eliminates from the hiring pool anyone who currently has a job (i.e. people who were already qualified by some other company at least once).

<comment><USER8> Most people just take a week of vacation. Especially if it's in another city. Take your SO and get a paid vacation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am not a math genius, but I spent a few minutes thinking about the locker problem.

It seems to me that:

1) Every locker essentially is open (let's say "1"), and it will switch to the other binary state ("0" from 1, or 1 from 0) a number of times.

2) The number of switches is based on number of factors that comprise that number, minus one. E.g. position 1 = zero switches. Position 2 = one switch. Position 3 = one switch. Position 4 = two switches. Position 5 = one switch. Position 6 = three switches. And so on.

Am I correct?

In case, the final result is something like: 100100001000000... Which is essentially 1 + a number of zeros equal to two, then four, then six, then eight, etc.

Edit: I've now continued reading the article and, well, the solution is down there. In a way, it seems I was correct.

<comment><USER11> He said the perfect squares are the only ones with an odd number of factors, which doesn't make sense to me. 16 for example has 4, 25 has 5, 36 has 4 again, so I'm not sure what he was getting at.

<comment><USER12> The first door will only be flipped once, by the first person. The fourth door will be flipped by the first, second, and fourth people (three times). The ninth door will be flipped by the first, third, and ninth people (three times). The sixteenth door will be flipped by the first, second, fourth, eighth, and sixteenth people (five times). The twenty-fifth door will be flipped by the first, fifth, and twenty-fifth people (three times). The thirty-sixth door will be flipped by the first, second, third, fourth, sixth, ninth, twelfth, eighteenth, and thirty-sixth people (nine times).

It should be clear here that the number of times the nth door is flipped is the number of unique divisors that n has.

For any non-perfect square n, for any divisor p, n/p = q is another divisor not equal to p. So non-perfect square numbers have an even number of divisors.

Perfect square numbers are the only numbers that have an odd number of divisors, which in this game corresponds to being flipped an odd number of times.

<comment><USER13> You could take this a step further. For any number of lockers/kids, if you start at 1 and square each number until you get a number that exceeds the number of lockers/kids, you've found all of your perfect squares in that range. Which, of course, is the square root of your original number, rounded down to the nearest whole number.

So, for any number of lockers/kids, n, the number of open doors is simply floor(sqrt(n)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Coinbase told me I need to verify my residence information. I cannot start that process with funds in my account (0.01e), I cannot move a sum that small away from Coinbase, or buy BTC for just 0.01e.

I complained about this to customer service, and got a canned reply saying I need to empty my wallet to proceed.

A lot of companies are guilty of the same sins, having weird catch-22 glitches on the platform and customer service that wants to close tickets, not help customers, but if Coinbase seriously wants to handle my money, they need to start doing better.

</comment><comment><USER15> Had the pleasure to work with Olaf during an internship at Coinbase. Great guy, super fun – if you're reading this, good luck with your new startup!

</comment><comment><USER16> > Okay. So the first one was on the pharmacological induction of lucid dreams. > It is complicated, but it's a mechanism to induce lucidity in your dreams. > You can control your dream by waking up in the middle of the night and > taking an over-the-counter supplement called galantamine, which increases > levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the synapse. Fun fact is > that I've been writing down my dreams for 11 years.

Uh, what? Has anyone heard of this kind of procedure? I'm aware of other methods to induce lucid dreams but never ones that involve OTC medicine.

<comment><USER17> Not sure there's anything to explain. Waking up and then going back to sleep is going to help with inducing lucid dreams, supplement-assisted or not, that's the point of WILD.

<comment><USER18> I've actually always been able to wake up in the middle of the night, then go back to bed and continue dreams where I left off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >I'm actually buying units of the protocol. I'm buying scarce blockchain tokens and creating a portfolio of those tokens. I'm basically buying ownership in all of these new 2.0 peer-to-peer protocols.

Is this any different from buying actual bitcoins, ether, litecoins etc?

<comment><USER20> No, but the VC world has been ill equipped to attempt to profit in this sure to profit way in the blockchain space.

A lot of capital backed projects in the blockchain space were attempting to "responsibly not buy the speculative asset because we don't want to lose money irresponsibly", and they all lost money irresponsibly because they couldn't find a way to make any money

There are ways to improve the blockchain space, with capital, and it so far requires getting capital into the tokens itself.

<comment><USER21> > Now, instead of just normal network effects, there's also monetary incentive > network effects built into this protocol.

That kind of sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme. Is that a more responsible way to make money?

<comment><USER20> It is direct investment into a new asset class

There really is no rebuttal to the clever savant that makes this observation whether you are at a VC fundraising event, an Amway meeting, or talking to Charles Ponzi himself

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Another gem

> My belief is that the inexperienced, interested person will outperform the > experienced, uninterested person over time.

</comment><comment><USER22> > I did customer support by myself until we had 250,000 users

It's good to know what the limit to customer support can be. Don't say customer support doesn't scale.

</comment><comment><USER23> Minor nitpick and I enjoy reading these, but they could be edited a little tighter. Does every single one need to include: [Laughter] at some point?

<comment><USER24> I think the [Laughter] part is important to get a sense of how the conversation was going, and whether that particular comment was said jovially. A lot is lost otherwise on plain text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know where can I find this thesis?

</comment><comment><USER26> $5 Million is hardly a hedge fund.

<comment><USER20> We are all here because we dare to dream

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is now a thread about lucid dreams and the galantamine/choline stack.

Galantamine is marketed as an Alzheimer treatment, and although me and others are weary of pharmaceuticals (side effects? cancer? higher-morality rates in clinical trials?) drug induced lucid dreams sound very interesting to me. Has anyone on HN experimented with this?

<comment><USER28> Lucid dreaming is fun. You can use apps like Android sleep coupled with Android wear and hue smart lighting to help learn how to do it. No drugs necessary.

It does take a bit of practice/getting used to. The apps monitor you heart rate and movement patterns to try and detect REM sleep and send a signal to you. At first these signals will wake you up but with practice you will recognize them in your dreams without waking up.

<comment><USER29> Can you provide a link to any resources describing the technique and how to practice it?

<comment><USER28> [http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended- features/...](http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended- features/lucid-dreaming/)

[http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream](http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream)

Keeping a dream journal is probably one of the best techniques.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Our Worst Nightmares About the Government Tracking Us Just Came True - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5622800/our-worst-nightmares-about-the-government-tracking-us-just-came-true Creepy. <comment><USER2> This was inevitable. The Supreme Court held a long time ago that the government can surreptitiously put a transmitter on a car and track it. (Think 1970s cop movie.) GPS is a clear extension of that rule. The 9th Circuit was just following the precedent it is bound to.

I kinda think the Supreme Court got it wrong years ago and the 9th got it wrong today. But in the long run that won't matter. The erosion of privacy is inevitable. Technology is advancing too fast. The solution is not to put the government in the akward position of self-imposing constraints that regular people do not observe. (E.g. the government can't track you on Foursquare but your friends can.)

No, the solution isn't in access, it's in use. The Supreme Court needs to use the Fourth Amendment to limit the actual, in-court use of "private" information. It needs to ensure that that use is open to the press and the public. And most importantly, Congress needs to relax those laws that until now we have only accepted because they were difficult to track and so difficult to enforce broadly. (Read: traffic and drug laws.)

<comment><USER3> >The solution is not to put the government in the akward position of self- imposing constraints that regular people do not observe.

You have the right to peaceably assemble, but if you're on my yard, I can ask you to leave or have you arrested for trespassing; the government can't keep you off public property altogether.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: best programming language for a programming book? - <AUTHOR>

I wonder which programming language to use for a book about (web) programming. The book is not supposed to be about a specific framework, but about ways to solve common problems. So the programming language should not get in the way of the concepts.
Example: "Programming Collective Intelligence" uses examples in Python to explain the data mining algorithm it presents.
I am almost tempted to pick JavaScript, as this is the common language every web developer should know anyway.
I would like to use Ruby+Rails, but I fear it might be too complicated to explain. I want to spend as little time as possible on framework specifics.
I was really impressed by the brevity of the Python examples in the Collective Intelligence book. Unfortunately I don't know Python yet.
The publisher who might be interested in publishing the book pointed to PHP as still being among the most popular languages for such tasks (along with Java), but I would like to avoid that. <comment><USER2> >> I am almost tempted to pick JavaScript

I can't phrase that any better - I have this feeling that using JavaScript for such a project would be evil, but when I stop and think about it - I think JavaScript might have become the "duct tape" of the internet (yes - I know perl already claims to be soo).

I integrate JavaScript with my Flex applications all the time. It gives you a good understanding of HTML, basic programming, and as AJAX becomes more popular, JavaScript becomes more important.

PHP is another good option. It does have some problems, yes, but it's common, free, and easy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you wanted the largest target audience?

Pick a 'scripting language'? Then eliminate based on issues...

I would come down to python or ruby being the easiest for most people to look at and quickly gronk. python being the easiest i would suspect. and i say this as someone who does 0 programming in python these days.

You don't know python however, so ruby would be fine. If you start doing stuff with blocks etc, you might want to explain that as some people would find.

File.open( "a_file", "r" ) { | line | puts "this is a line #{line}" }

a little confusing.

of course all this assumes you target audience is imperative, algol steeped programmers.

<comment><USER4> You can "learn" Python in a day or two. Of course, becoming proficient takes longer, but it has the shallowest learning curve of any language that I have used. A big plus, it like JavaScript/JSON has literals for arrays and hash table, allowing easy configuration and data transmission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since you know Ruby, you might consider writing examples in Sinatra. Compared to e.g. Rails or Merb, it's less of a framework and more of a simple DSL for building web sites/services. It really gets out of the way and keeps the focus on the content and logic. But the newbie web developer who learns Sinatra will have a lot that's still useful if they move on to a full-stack framework like Rails or Django (for example, templating and database models are basically the same).

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, I had totally forgotten about Sinatra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> JavaScript, for several reasons:

1) Dynamic typing. The user doesn't have to worry about data types and memory usage and what-not.

2) Common syntax. It uses somewhat of a C-style syntax (with its conditionals, curly braces, and so forth) and therefore shares characteristics with many, many other languages (PHP, Java, Perl, etc.) and will help the reader translate your teachings to other languages.

3) Ubiquity. As you mention, most of us have or will encounter JavaScript.

4) Ease of use. Everyone has a JavaScript interpreter (via their browsers). To test code no software installation is necessary.

Many coding-enthusiasts will say Python. While it's a very, very well-designed language, I recommend avoiding it because it's syntax is so different than other languages.

</comment><comment><USER7> Javascript might be a little bit confusing for the casual book-picker-upper: "wait, is this bit on the server or in the client?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, but if that is the only issue, it might be easy to resolve.

I am more worried about talking to a database or generating server side HTML. Javascript web frameworks exist, but I don't really know them yet (ie Helma). In theory I would like to be able to do everything in Javascript - why learn two languages if one could suffice? But I might be too ahead of the time for a book targeted at the average web developer.

<comment><USER7> Maybe this sort of approach would be better:

Show people a wire dump of what's actually going over the socket, and how different languages/frameworks create abstractions to handle things like "CGI variables", "sessions", cookies, and so on and so forth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if I could make that work. I envision to make the book as hands on/getting things done as possible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Losing an hour of sleep impacts my work significantly." - John Carmack - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/932592469971296256 <comment><USER2> "Just sleep a little faster." \- Arnold Schwarzenegger

[https://youtu.be/1g2ntIN7JuY](https://youtu.be/1g2ntIN7JuY)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's true. We should all avoid alarms and sleep until we feel rested. Why don't we do that?

<comment><USER4> \- cooperation (working at the same time helps)

\- out of tune bodies because of artificial light (I tend to days longer than 24h. When left alone I will at some point stay awake til sunrise, than maybe try to skip the nights sleep and end up falling asleep at 3pm anyways)

\- stupid bureaucracy

In any way, even with a job keeping my clock straight, I'd very much welcome the option to sleep until 11am or something. I'm still not a morning person after all...

<comment><USER3> Same for me... I sometimes sleep 12 hours a night, sometimes 0. Having worked remotely with flex time for the last 5 years, I have to say, it isn't that hard to communicate with colleagues even without a set schedule. People are almost always awake at noon.</comment></comment></comment>


Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris - <AUTHOR> http://curiouseggs.com/extremely-rare-color-photography-of-early-1900s-paris/ <comment><USER2> These pictures are part of a huge collection assembled by the banker Albert Kahn: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kahn_(banker)>

Other pictures (about 1200) from the Albert Kahn collection, from other parts of the world: [http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.net/archives-de-la- planete...](http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.net/archives-de-la- planete/mappemonde/)

There are some wonderful pictures in that collection. My preferred are the ones with people living in a way that doesn't exist anymore like the ones from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), Ireland, Benin and South East Asia.

<comment><USER3> There's also a BBC series titled The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn that includes a selection of images and film with a little commentary thrown in for context. I really enjoyed it.

[http://www.bbcshop.com/history/the-wonderful-world-of- albert...](http://www.bbcshop.com/history/the-wonderful-world-of-albert-kahn- dvd/invt/bbcdvd2855/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Russian version: [http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_c...](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html)

The photographs were taken on three black and white plates with RGB filters in front of them, and could only be seen projected on a screen.

This is an article describing how the original images were composed to create the color version <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html> this is about the russian guy, Prokudin-Gorskii, but the process he used to take the pictures was the same.

On the LOC website you can see the originals and composite <http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/prk2000000200/>

<comment><USER5> One interesting detail is that each colour exposure was temporally separated by a small amount, which caused vibrantly colourful artefacts on the images where the subjects moved - as can be seen on picture 27 in your first link, and more subtly in picture 15.

Some of the ones at the LOC, even more so. Moving water has a particularly curious, shimmering quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm amazed at how the color changes the emotional response I have for these kinds of pictures. My mental image of 100 years ago seems very abstract, as if events and people from that time have the same reality of Sherlock Holmes. Somehow the color drives home the reality of where and who these people were. It makes me wonder what effect color pictures, or even better - color movies, from hundreds or thousands of years would have.

<comment><USER7> This had a bizarre reaction on me also, feels very disconcerting/jarring seeing things like this in color and I can't quite understand why!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Other than the number of cars (more), balloons (fewer) and soldiers (fewer), Paris looks pretty similar today.

<comment><USER9> Could be interesting to juxtapose old/actual photos I immediately recognized this perspective, in the (nowadays) turkish district : <http://i.imgur.com/Lj5guCF.jpg> vs <http://goo.gl/maps/d7rDc>

<comment><USER10> There's a picture art book called _Revisiting Eugene Atget's Paris_ which compares a famous photographers' early 20th century photographs of Paris and similarly-exposed black and white shots from the same position almost 100 years later

<comment><USER11> You're right, Atget's work is also particularly interesting! Here's a link to some of his pictures: <http://openpn.tumblr.com/tagged/Atget>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool photos. Thanks for the comments pointing to the set of photos of Russia in the Library of Congress collection posted a while ago here on Hacker News.

For this set of photos of Paris, especially cool is to post a link to

<http://www.paris1914.com/>

(a multilingual website) on the basis of the Hacker News guideline

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER13> While I generally agree with that sentiment, I'm actually very grateful for the "blogspam" version that was linked to.

The <http://www.paris1914.com/> site has the worst user experience I've seen in quite a while. Somebody went to a lot of work to make the site have all those bells and whistles, and they totally blew it. It's just ridiculous! I move the mouse over a picture and the picture flips around to show me some info about it. OK, but what happened to the picture? I wanted to see the picture. So I try to click, and that only works half the time. You have to catch it quick before it flips around to display the title card. Good luck with that. Then if the click registers, it does this weird two-way-but-not- both-at-once animation and finally shows me the picture. Then I can close that, lose my place, and pick some other picture to look at more or less randomly.

This is NOT the way to make a photo gallery.

By contrast, the "blogspam" page has all the pictures in a simple page that I can scroll up and down. Nothing fancy, nothing I can't figure out, and no way to lose my place.

I was showing these pictures to a friend and it would have taken a good half hour to poke our way through the paris1914 site. But thanks to the blogspam page, we were able to enjoy all the photos in the time we had, without having to fumble through some kind of misguided navigation.

Again, I don't disagree with your point about posting original sources, but in this specific case, the blogspam was _very_ beneficial to me at least.

Edit: So I thought to myself, maybe I should give this thing another chance. Once you get one of the photos open, maybe you can just skip from photo to photo right there? Indeed you can, and it even has a keyboard interface: the left and right arrows work just as expected.

But what's all this scrolling? It doesn't just change photos like a slide show, it does an enormous sideways scroll of the whole thing. It's very disorienting visually and not at all fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Beautiful. Similarly, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled Tsarist Russia in the decade before the revolution, taking fantastic color photographs with three plates and color filters: <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Everytime I look at historical photography my first thought is "All of those people are dead." And yet, here we are with as many humans as ever and the world is still alive and ticking.

Startup/business takeaway: don't underestimate humankind's ability to transition into and out of roles while keeping the machinery moving.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fabulous.

Original source: <http://www.paris1914.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow. Paris hasn't changed that much other than the cars.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wonderful. But the site's zoom setting don't allow for expanding the post/photos to the width of an iPad. Very frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER19> The comment "It is extremely astonishing to look at the world now long gone, the world which you are used to see in black & white images and often with poor quality." is a bit off the mark. Black and white pictures, by and large, were excellent quality. eg look at Atget's pictures of Paris from the same date (although done on much older equipment) [http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/artist/eug%C3%A8ne- atg...](http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/artist/eug%C3%A8ne- atget/4132599/) or [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_by_E...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_by_Eug%C3%A8ne_Atget)

</comment><comment><USER20> This was right on the Eve of World War I. Sad to think that many of the young men in uniform probably died in the trenches at Marne or Verdun over the next several years.

<comment><USER2> These pictures are part of an huge collection made by the banker Albert Kahn (I posted 2 links in another comment).

There are hundreds of them taken in the trenches of WWI in Central Europe, Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. It is quite shocking to see how the poor and simple people where impacted by the war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone else collect early European postcards? I have a good few hundred of them and am interested in collaborating to start an online museum.

</comment><comment><USER22> My favorite : The one with the Michelin balloon which I think was taken at Le Palais de la Decouverte (not 100% sure)

<comment><USER23> I'm almost sure it was taken at the Grand Palais.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Palais>

<comment><USER22> right, same building.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This one [1] is hard to believe as it's a low-exposure night shot. I was under the impression they lacked the technology to do that even in B/W back then, no?

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/IHt7ypS.jpg>

<comment><USER25> Iùl not deep enough in photographer jargon to be sure I interpreted your mention of "low exposure" correctly, but as I'd see it, that photo is of low average exposure, and "normal" exposure on the light sources. And the fireworks do look superposed: that hints at long exposure, which "cameras" have been able to do before we even had camera lens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> TIL that neon lights were invented in the early 1900's.

Also: that first picture is a subway station.

</comment><comment><USER27> Black and white photos make the past seem so much further away. The colors truly make them feel real. Its hard to believe it was so long ago with such vividness.

<comment><USER28> Indeed. Here is a picture (<http://i4.minus.com/ibokGCW1TVxmUA.jpg>) which has been colorized.

(It is Ulysses Grant btw.)

His clothing looks out of date, but it just seems so real.

(Photo shamelessly stolen from www.reddit.com/r/colorizedhistory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Mieux Que Nue [better than nude] at the Moulin Rouge.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow. Paris doesn't look like its changed much.

</comment><comment><USER30> Where are all the people? Paris today has the same buildings, but is overrun by people and cars!

</comment><comment><USER31> Beautiful, but it's too bad that the digital reproductions are so noisy.

<comment><USER32> If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, it's not digital noise. It's an artifact of the Autochrome process. The images are made with colored grains of potato starch. It's a fascinating process that (to my knowledge) has never been successfully reproduced in modern times.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome>

<comment><USER31> That's really interesting---I assumed it was just really bad JPEG compression!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wow - those are great.

</comment><comment><USER34> Paris (France). If I could snap my fingers and change one thing about how Americans communicate, it would surely be to stop them saying Paris, France. Or London, England. Or Moscow, Russia. Or ... many similar examples. Please abandon this whole meme. Normal people know where the great cities of the world are.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, if there's any such thing as a "Normal" person.

When discussing the salience of possible referents context is the major determinant, especially with things like geographical proximity to one of a possible set of similarly named cities.

If someone in Columbus, Ohio (as opposed to Georgia) is discussing travelling to London, there's a non-trivial possibility that they were talking about London, Ohio, rather than London, England.

Traveling Southwestern Ontario provides similar circumstance, given that the British decided to name the entire province after England. London (Ontario) sits at the fork of the Thames River, an hours drive from Stratford, which likewise rests on the Avon.

So sure, maybe if you live in Europe, "normal" people always use "London" to refer to the UK, but "normal" people in Toronto, probably mean the city in Ontario when they use the name.

tl;dr: you're being a cultural imperialist.

<comment><USER34> I regret using the word "normal". However I am not being a cultural imperialist. Sure, disambiguate where it makes sense. It would make sense for people in Ontario to disambiguate London often. Paris, not so much. There is absolutely no need for disambiguation in an article meant for a wide audience and featuring iconic cityscapes complete with the Eiffel tower etc! The "Paris, France" meme is endemic in North American media but completely absent in the rest of the English speaking world.</comment></comment></comment>


According to Google: Gmail is not the top option for mail. No more - <AUTHOR>

Until last week, typing mail and then I am Feeling Lucky brought you straight to GMail.<p>For over than a week, it redirect to Yahoo! mail.<p>(I found out this by using goosh.org "l mail" command) <comment><USER2> I don't think it has anything to do with Google saying that Gmail isn't the best/top option. It depends on their ranking system. The "I am feeling lucky" button takes you to the first result in the search. So maybe Yahoo Mail has beaten Gmail in the Google ranking.

Besides, it's only in Gnoosh, the same takes place when I type "mail" and then do "I am feeling lucky" search. It still takes me to Yahoo Mail

<comment><AUTHOR> you missed my point - the best answer should be at the top - that's their aim. so either the best answer is at the top or the algorithm is not accurate.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559 <comment><USER2> This article correctly shows that virtually none of the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are new. They can all be traced to the academic literature going back decades.

Cryptographic signatures and public-key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, cryptographic proof-of-work, time-stamping, Merkle trees, chains of transactions blocks, Byzantine fault tolerance, smart contracts -- all of these ideas were old when Bitcoin was invented.

Satoshi Nakamoto's achievement lays in the complex, ingenious way in which he (or she, or they) combined these ideas into a new distributed algorithm.[1]

\--

[1] For those who don't know, Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to- Peer Electronic Cash System" proposed the first known solution to the double- spending problem in a peer-to-peer network (i.e., without centralized control), with Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., in a manner resistant to fraudulent nodes attempting to game the rules), via a clever application of cryptographic proof-of-work. The paper is available at [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I've spent a lot of time reviewing the original Bitcoin codebase.

It's brilliant code. It's production-grade C++. There's nothing in it that hints at academic origins. Most people are either academics or professional coders -- to be both is a rare exception.

The codebase seemed to materialize out of nowhere. One of the earliest commits in the SVN repo contains 36 thousand lines of code. "Satoshi" (or this group of people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on source control.

The code also uses irc to find seed nodes, which is amusing. It just connects to #bitcoin and assumes that some of the people in the channel are running bitcoin nodes. That's a cool way around the "What if all the hardcoded seed nodes fail?" problem. I know it's probably a standard tactic, but bitcoin integrates _so many_ standard tactics so well in addition to its academic work.

Here it is as one gigantic file: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b4d5d1ab333c5d6e238fdc2242...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b4d5d1ab333c5d6e238fdc2242a428b5)

<comment><USER2> Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if "Satoshi Nakamoto" turns out to be, not an individual, but a _tightly-knit team of people_ , including BOTH professional coders who write software for a living AND computer scientists with strong academic backgrounds. Bitcoin is in my view too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in isolation.

<comment><USER4> > too impressive an achievement to be the work of a single person working in > isolation.

It's been done before... for example, djb

<comment><USER5> Could you explain what his accomplishment was in terms a non-cryptographer could understand?

<comment><USER6> First of all djb is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein) and the accomplishment was releasing a secure email server (qmail), a secure webserver (publicfile), and a secure BIND server (djbdns). Both qmail and djbdns became widely used, and the main alternatives were projects supported by large teams.

It took 8 years before the first bug was found in these projects.

I highly recommend reading through the guidelines in [https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html](https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html) for how to write secure software. In particular point 5, Don't Parse, is broadly applicable and under appreciated. A well-known class of bugs arising from this error are SQL injection attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coauthor here. Here's some context for how this essay came about.

When we released a draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook [1], one piece of feedback was that we focused on cryptocurrency technology as it is today, and ignored the juicy and tumultuous history of how the ideas developed over the last few decades. So I invited Jeremy Clark, who's connected to some of this history, to write a preface to the book. If you're interested in the history, you might enjoy that chapter. [2]

Jeremy and I then got together to develop the ideas further, resulting in the present article, where we also provide some commentary on the current blockchain hype and draw lessons for practitioners and academics.

[1] [http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/](http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/)

[2] [https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/p...](https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf)

<comment><USER8> When you were researching the ledger part, I'm curious whether you've come across a DAG-based ledger. I've been reading the byteball [1] paper and still can't tell whether it's baloney or really the DAG is a consensus that does not require PoW... I suspect it's neither, there are trade offs, but I could not find much anything good on the subject to read.

[1] [https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf](https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf)

<comment><USER9> A great DAGchain paper is "SPECTRE - Serialization of Proof-of-work Events: Confirming Transactions via Recursive Elections". Its peer reviewed and contains rigorous security proofs.

[https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Interesting read, quite a unique perspective.

One thing found interesting about the conclusion of OP's article is the role of academia vs practical implementation.

> Many academic communities informally argued that Bitcoin couldn't work, > based on theoretical models or experiences with past systems, despite the > fact that it was working in practice.

It will be interesting to see the Academically based SPECTRE competing with another DAG based coin such as Byteball. Well measured research and a peer- reviewed foundation against practical implementation, first to market and continuous improvement.

<comment><USER9> Academia and industry both have filtering problems, how to tell good ideas from bad ideas.

The industry solution tends to be to try things and see what works in practice. This is extremely expensive in time and only a small number of ideas can be tried. Furthermore the success or failure depends on the execution and marketing. If Bitcoin had not had the developer commitment in the early stage it would be dead and forgotten despite the great ideas.

The academic solution is that ideas should come with detailed arguments about why the solution works, what its flaws are and how it compares to other work. This allows ideas to be compared and judged more quickly at a lower expense. However constructing these arguments is hard, requires rare knowledge and is not always possible.

Academics dismissed Bitcoin because it did not have these arguments. They had no way to know if it would work when it was running with real money on the line. Distributed systems ideas are very hard to get right and Bitcoin had all sorts quirks that Satoshi didn't foresee, however PoW turns out to be a very robust mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After 12 years as an academic computer scientist, Bitcoin was the most impressive computer science research I saw.

And it came from outside the academy.

<comment><USER12> It's more than just science. I believe it changes the world more than anything in the last 30 years. I have been thinking of what the world would be without internet / computers / mobile phones, but having a great liquid store of value. If I had to choose only 1 of these technologies for my life, I would pick Bitcoin.

<comment><USER13> You do realize you need internet / computers for Bitcoin to exist, right?

<comment><USER14> The p2p network could be implemented over radio and without computers we'd just have a far lower hashrate and probably a different PoW algorithm. I don't see any reasonable way we would have discovered cryptocurrencies before the internet and computers though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its amazing to me it took 15 years to go from hashcash to Bitcoin. I think it speaks to the strangeness of Bitcoin, and its niche idealogical underpinnings. Bitcoin solved a problem that most of the people never thought about. Yet if you're looking to solve Bitcoin's problem set, calibrated hashcash to secure a ledger seems completely obvious.

I also thought that Bitcoin's asic-vulnerability (and thus mining centralization) would be fatal. It turned out to be not fatal (yet), but thats not something which could be determined on paper. It needed real-world use before people knew if it could work or not.

<comment><USER16> One of the points of the article is that the field wasn't idle during those 15 years; bit gold, b-money, and Finney's RPOW made incremental improvements on hashcash that led to Bitcoin.

Also, Bitcoin is kind of a "dirty" solution to the consensus problem; if all the academics were looking for an elegant solution it's not surprising that they didn't discover it.

<comment><USER17> The repeated claim that Bitcoin came up with a totally new and unknown way of solving the problem always irks me.

Everyone keeping a complete history of all actions is, like, consensus 101.

Research is based around not having to do that.

<comment><USER18> That wasn't the key insight -- it was the idea that you could get a working solution under the assumption that 50%+1 of the hashing power is from honest nodes as long as those nodes agreed to coordinate on the ledger with the most proven work invested in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I loved reading this.

Bitcoin is truly something worth more than the sum of its parts. I don't feel that the creative combination and implementation of existing ideas diminishes the achievement one bit. (Not that the article made it out this way, just my 2 satoshis)

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone serious about crypotcurrencies will know at least know two ideas not being Satoshi originals - 1. Ecash, Digicash - author's refer to it in paragraph one as something people are aware of. 2. PoW/Hashcash - Sure people might not be aware of the anti-spam but they are aware of Hashcash and Adam Back.

That being the case, I think author's assumption that everyone in the bitcoin space thinks Satoshi as the one inventing everything and hence the article needs to prove otherwise is..well false at best.

<comment><USER21> i completely agree. there is nothing new to somebody a bit involved into bitcoin. there is even a website which is old and widely known ([http://nakamotoinstitute.org](http://nakamotoinstitute.org)) where all the referenced literature is listed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> /me waits for the citation for the prior fault tolerant 'consensus' with O(N) scaling; or for the consensus process that doesn't have approved membership but still achieves some useful security properties

</comment><comment><USER23> This was a great read. I've been in a pretty heated debate with one of my friends (As BTC seems to do) about the origins of the technical under pinnings of Bitcoin. I'm relatively new to the cryptocurrency space, but it seems like there is huge political push (Cypherpunk ideology) promoted by a vocal slice of the BTC community. Every time I ask for the history and origins, my friend credits everything to the Cypherpunk community.

</comment><comment><USER24> Gwern Branwen noted all this ages ago, and should have been cited in this paper.

[https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better](https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better)

<comment><USER25> Gwern actually replied elsewhere in this thread mentioning that paper. It's a great read.</comment></comment>


Why not to use infinite scroll on your website - <AUTHOR> http://geeks.bizzabo.com/10-reasons-not-to-use-infinite-scroll-on-your-website <comment><USER2> I personally despise infinite scroll, at least on mobile sites, as it limits:

1\. My ability to orient myself in the content. 2\. My ability to control my consumption of the content (e.g., jump back to top, jump to end, jump to rough internal location).

Some sites have added navigation buttons or tool bars, but, to be useful, they must always be visible, so they take up valuable space that should be used for content. Depending upon implementation, they can also be distracting.

There are certainly ways that navigation options could be restored while still not significantly interfering with content, of course. If decent feedback of current location were also provided, then infinite scroll could be OK.

Most content breaks down pretty naturally into some smaller increments, though (pages, chapters, sections, topics, days -- whatever), so I think it typically makes more sense to present it in that way.

Just because we _can_ do infinite scroll, doesn't mean we should.

</comment><comment><USER3> All these problems are solvable. I co-founded Discourse ([http://discourse.org](http://discourse.org)) which uses infinite scrolling heavily. Discourse is also 100% open source so you can see how we did it.

My responses below:

> Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become > useless.

We have a fixed "x/y" posts widget at the bottom with a progress bar.

> There's no ability to jump to the end of the list.

The aforementioned widget has an up arrow and down arrow to jump to the top/bottom.

> Your users will not be able to get back to the same in-page position in 1 > click.

We use replaceState to update the URL as they scroll. The back button works fine, and you can link to any position in the topic.

> There's no visible footer until your users come to the end of the > list/content.

Isn't this true of all sites where the user scrolls anything? I guess the difference is you see it more often with pagination. We instead have a fixed header with navigation options and extra details.

> Slow Experience - You are using a lot of browser memory as the page scrolls > down.

We unload posts that have scrolled off the screen. We released a library for it too - [http://eviltrout.com/2014/01/04/hiding-offscreen- ember.html](http://eviltrout.com/2014/01/04/hiding-offscreen-ember.html)

> If you switch away from the page by following a link there's no way of > getting back to where you left off.

The back button works fine thanks to replaceState!

> Lack of sense of completion- no closure for users.

The progress bar and constantly increasing numbers in the widget help a lot.

> There's no SEO opportunities for content located below the first scroll.

We serve up google indexable content just fine. See: [http://eviltrout.com/2013/06/19/adding-support-for-search- en...](http://eviltrout.com/2013/06/19/adding-support-for-search-engines-to- your-javascript-applications.html)

> You lose the ability to bookmark a dedicated point of interest.

With replaceState and updating the URL, you can bookmark at any point and return right back to where you left off.

> Distraction - The fear of missing out on data or other options will deter > your users from completing an action.

I'm pretty sure this isn't relevant since we support all the above.

<comment><USER4> Excellent response.

Yet I feel compelled to ask: how much effort was invested in reaching such degree of finesse?

Pagination is (usually) very easy to implement and can be done completely on the server side. Your (very magnificent) solution sounds like it would require days, if not weeks, to be implemented, and adds plenty of javascript to the server-side part.

Do you think there's a "economy class" infinite scroll, or is it only viable for sites with a big budget (in effort at least)?

<comment><USER5> Good question, but you have to such fanboy when you ask?

<comment><USER4> Don't get jealous. You are gorgeous too <3

<comment><USER5> Jelous for...? more like a cringe when i see to much azz-kissing ;|.

<comment><USER4> It's not ass kissing when it's true.

I'm not going to apologize for complimenting someone's work. If that makes you cringe, then you will have to live with that. I think you will be happier if you try to choose other things to get upset about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't hear P-interest users complaining. With some content you might want to use a 'Masonry'/'Isotope' layout as P-interest does. That comes with a ragged footer and doesn't really work unless you have infinite scroll.

As for the nonsense about 'never getting to the footer', the footer can be stuck to the window or dispensed with entirely, again a-la P-interest.

It is very easy to put together a '10 reasons why I hate this' blog article, it is much harder to put something together that works to the delight of millions.

</comment><comment><USER7> Infinite scroll can be implemented well, but more often than not it's implementation is just terrible. Take Soundcloud for example. I love their service, their UI is generally pretty good, their site is usually fast, and in most cases, their product is a pleasure to use. But their implementation of infinite scroll is terrible. I'm not sure what it is, I haven't troubleshooted it too much but when you scroll a playlist with a lot of songs, every so often, the pages repeat themselves. And sometimes when you scroll down below a certain point it will just restart at page one.

So if I open a playlist with ~400 songs and I want to reach the bottom, there is no way for me to do it but to just scroll really fast and wait for each page to load. Okay, fine. But when I do this, usually about ~30% of the time it will start repeating pages or it will just start feeding the playlist from the first song again. In this case, I think infinite scroll does ruins the experience. If anyone out there from Soundcloud is listening, please consider implementing pagination.

</comment><comment><USER8> Without going point by points to counter every reason I would like to say I absolutely love continuous scrolling when I am shopping or looking at items on a retailers website.

>Users will lose the page length orientation - the browser scrollbar become useless.

This is entirely untrue I can still use my scrollbar to get back to the top of the page again, it can also be used to easily skim the results that were displayed.

For most retail shopping I actually would rather have this than pagination especially if I am lazily browsing on my ipad, no reason to change hand positions.

<comment><USER9> I really don't like continuous scrolling for retail shopping. its easier to remember what page something was on than a relative position. I don't mind it for pointless content consumption like Reddit and Facebook, because I rarely ever want to go back to something on those platforms.

<comment><USER8> I can see your point.

The best use I have seen is a hybrid approach. Load 10 or so out of 100 items, use continuos scroll to show the remanding 90 and then use pagination to access the other results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But please don't paginate a 500 word text into 10 pages either...

</comment><comment><USER11> If you do use page numbering and next-links, please make the link to the next page amply big. Really big please, you don't have much to lose.

<comment><USER12> All the time I see people complaining about usage of HTML tables vs. pure CSS, and yet the one thing that drives me absolutely insane is a 4 point smaller than the rest "prev 1..3,4,5..10 next" navigation control at the bottom of a page. Always a treat to use on mobile too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like just implementing pushState would be enough to solve almost all of these issues. Some simple design decisions could help with a few more of them.

I think saying flatly to not use infinite scroll lets me know that the writer doesn't have much technical skill. Rather, stating the current issues with infinite scroll and how to fix them is a million times more useful.

<comment><USER14> What problem does infinite scroll solve? Why add the complexity of more code which needs fix upon fix to get back functionality we already had? Getting infinite scroll "right" takes a _lot_ of work (and nobody's done so yet, to my knowledge). Knowing how to fix the issues might be useful, but being able to spot that you don't need to incur the cost at all is so much more so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sure there're 10 reasons to use too. infinite scroll as opposed to infinite pagination? I like infinite scroll, it's just fun. It's a lot about the goal. If it's facebook or instagram, users won't go too far, they don't have time and they check feed regularly, however for search infinite scroll might be not the best fit

</comment><comment><USER16> As an alternative, I'm going to start using something like [http://emberjs.com/list-view/](http://emberjs.com/list-view/)

(warning: not mobile optimized)

It solves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10, and could reasonably be implemented with bookmarking to fix 6 and 9.

SEO is still an issue, but really, when is it not?

<comment><USER17> For SEO use the next link relation[0] e.g. <a rel="next" href="/resource?page={next_page_in_sequence}" />.

I am assuming more results are loaded based on scroll-depth < 100% + an overlay to stop the user clicking.

Google/bots will be able to activate the link and request the next set.

 _Uesful resource_ [http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link- relation...](http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link- relations.xhtml)

[0] [http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#link-type- next](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#link-type-next)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I drag the scrollbar and use pageup/down keys as much as I use the mousewheel.

I don't enjoy getting near the bottom of the page and suddenly being warped several screens ahead, then having to go back and figure out where I was. Find a way to prevent this if you're just loading comments to an article.

I find the scrollbar less disorienting because it has a high resolution than most mousewheels, its feedback loop is tighter, and I can jump both short and long distances; that is, there's no tradeoff between speed and continuousness.

I switch to pageup/pagedown/home/end on pages with infinite scroll because I can be guaranteed I won't miss any content and it's just less tiresome that using a mousewheel IMO.

A really stellar example of these sorts of bad user interaction is the Google Art Project if anyone cares.

</comment><comment><USER19> What a pointless article. Every single one of these can be mitigated if not completely re-mediated. It should be titled, "10 reasons why infinite scroll takes more effort than you think."

</comment><comment><USER20> What if browsers had dedicated support for infinite scrolling? Just like you trust regular scrolling to the browser or even operating system rather than implementing it yourself in javascript.

You could solve some of these problems, like the browser being able to bookmark or get the url of a specific section, and standardizing the way it's done.

</comment><comment><USER21> #6 is the one I hate the most. Twitter does an alright job of taking you back to where you were but most sites don't.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> True the some of the issues can be solved, the problem is that most of the sites are not solving it. Probably I could name it "Point to take into account when implementing.. " I'm sure hope to see better implementations to infinity scrolls on the web.

</comment><comment><USER22> 8) isn't absolutely true: [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.it/2014/02/infinite-s...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.it/2014/02/infinite- scroll-search-friendly.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> Ideally I'd prefer (rather than infinite scroll) progressive gzip and just flush/chunk out more data all at once. Technically not infinite but fast, simple and overall a better experience, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER24> Number 7 is exacty what you want: [http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/08/the-webs- slot-machine.html](http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/08/the-webs-slot- machine.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> Here's how linkedin does pagination

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkKYEmkCAAA3x8u.png:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkKYEmkCAAA3x8u.png:large)

I think an infinite scroll would be better...

<comment><USER9> I think infinite scrolling would be much worse in that case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> These are for sure good reasons to not use infinite scroll. But I think this is more like an implementation problem than a problem with infinite scroll itself.

</comment><comment><USER27> The scroll bar things is such a serious issue i would never consider using infinite scroll until that is dealt with on a browser level.

</comment><comment><USER28> infinite scrolling works for things like Facebook, Twitter or any other case when you probably don't want the user to be alarmed by the amount of time they've spent on a site..

If i saw 'page 11' on Facebook, i'd instantly think about all the time i just wasted and try and be sure i didn't so that again.

</comment><comment><USER29> I totaly agree. It is really great, when you need to click on link in the footer of the page, that keep running out.

</comment><comment><USER30> As always it's never that simple.

Infinite scroll is great for browsing images. That's whats it's always been good for.

<comment><USER31> Except it's not. Those image loads start to bring a heavy memory hit. It especially stinks on mobile browsers.

<comment><USER32> That's something that's fixable. It's just people who use infinite scroll don't do a good job of fixing some of the problems of causes. But that doesn't mean infinite scrolling is bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The use of infinite scrolling does have certain obstacles that have to be taken into consideration. However- when done correctly it can be utilized correctly. Making a simple system that loads content at the end of the page is not enough- if you want to include infinite scrolling on your website you also have to take in mind the memory issue (as pointed out by EvilTrout), as well as other ways to dynamically update the url for book marking.

I am personally not a huge advocate of infinite scrolling (in most cases)but if are you are a seasoned programmer, that's not to say there are practical (and safe ways) to implement it.

If you want to launch a new site, and you have limited time (or are the only programmer) it's not cost effective to spend hours and hours working out all the kinks and make sure it's cross browser reliable etc... the novelty of infinite scrolling is something you should avoid. But if you have a good need, a good team (or yourself can spend time on thinking of all the various issues with it)- there is no reason why you could not implement it successfully.

I will not be using infinite scrolling on the comment system I'm writing for my start-up, pagination is good enough. But I will probably use it for the scroll back on a chat window (no one generally bookmarks chat...)

I agree with rch- people are always resistant to change... when you have something that removes a level of control- people freak out... new challenges introduced does not mean that it's bad, it just means it's a whole new set of things to think about. Humans are pretty resourceful. I liked the full physical keyboard on an old Nokia I had- but I got used to the touch keyboard- sure the touch keyboard is different, but there are many ways to make it better, and a physical keyboard adds a lot of much bulk to the phone.

I agree with the title of the post-- there are many reasons NOT to use infinite scrolling-- especially if it's just more of a novelty. But if done correctly (for for the right kind of content) it can provide an enhanced user experience.

My advice would to be: If you want to implement infinite scrolling-- make sure A) if you want to use infinite scrolling think about the aspects you have to deal with B) know general user's computer systems-- and how much memory you want to capture, C) decide if it's worth all the time to make it work right.

"New technology and trends always have good applications- it is up to you to decide if you are implementing it simply because it's trendy, because you want to learn, or because you want to enrich the community- if it's the latter- the best way to do is by sharing what you have learned, and learn from past failures" \- Gus Anderson

</comment><comment><USER34> And GOD HELP YOU if you have a page with a footer and infinite scroll.

</comment><comment><USER35> This would have been better if it infinitely scrolled.

<comment><USER36> They did finish with "Scroll down for 10 more." ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This really should be, 10 reasons illustrating the need for a more robust infinite scroll. Most of these issues seem to be solvable. Except maybe the footer thing, that's just dumb.

</comment><comment><USER38> Most of those issues can be fixed.

</comment><comment><USER39> Infinite scrolling also consumes a lot of memory since resources like images pile-up endlessly.

Compare that to a page-number navigation scheme where only the displayed resources on a given page are loaded.

Not everyone has a fast computer (or tablet).

<comment><USER40> There are ways around that, too. I'm sure there are better descriptions but just for example: [http://engineering.linkedin.com/linkedin- ipad-5-techniques-s...](http://engineering.linkedin.com/linkedin- ipad-5-techniques-smooth-infinite-scrolling-html5)</comment></comment>


Fred Wilson: The Coming Downturn - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/09/fred-wilson-the.html

<comment><USER2> It may not be glamorous but if you develop things people need and are willing to pay for you should be able to stay in business downturn or not. Your product would need to help there business do something they couldn't otherwise do easily.

Downturns hit highly leveraged companies and companies developing ideas on the 'fringe' that have not yet been accepted widely enough yet to charge anything (or enough) for.</comment>


So Much for the Decentralized Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/twitter-hack-decentralized-internet/614593/ <comment><USER2> I love the outsized importance applied to Twitter by journalists and news junkies who lazily rely on it.

The vast, overwhelming, majority of human beings would not notice if Twitter had disappeared last night if it weren't for lazy journalists and news junkies reporting on its disappearance.

Journalists writing about twitter remind me of novels about quirky authors, songs about musicians on the road, and movies about Hollywood: self-important inside baseball.

<comment><USER3> So true. Whats funny, is a perfectly good decentralized option exists and works great but they wont use it because usability and security are not things they care about. They want to write short stories based on tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not advocating for or against blockchain / DLT here, but I find it kind of weird that this article explicitly talks about not just the lack of decentralization in the modern internet, but about cryptocurrency... and doesn't mention the claims from DLT companies that they're fixing that.

Ethereum is almost a household name as much as Bitcoin. IPFS is obviously more niche but if you were to spend an afternoon reading about blockchain you'd surely stumble upon it.

I just find it odd that this article presents a very clear problem, but doesn't present the thousands of people working on hundreds of projects who passionately feel that they have a solution.

<comment><USER5> Your tech bubble mentality is leaking.

Passionate feelings aren't solutions.

To date, Ethereum and IPFS have yet to provide value to regular people. The blockchain/DLT space is focused on financial infrastructure, and until scaling is solved ("6 months away") it just isn't relevant to a general audience.

Ethereum is nowhere near the brand that Bitcoin is. Bitcoin at least enables people to commit crimes.

<comment><USER4> Refer back to my comment where I explicitly said that I'm not advocating for blockchain / DLT, nor did I say that Ethereum / IPFS provide any value.

But, there are millions of dollars in investment and research being poured into these pieces of technology that attempt to address the problem stated in the article. I'm not saying they do or do not solve anything - my point was that it just struck me as odd that an article explicitly talking about crypto and the problems of centralization, didn't so much as mention that there are folks out there trying to fix it.

It would be like saying "fracking is a problem" without mentioning any group that's trying to address that problem. It's pointing out a problem without a call to action. Whether or not that call will actually fix that problem is a different story.

<comment><USER5> The Atlantic is an institution with a storied history and strong reputation. The blockchain is a wild west known for (at best) overpromising and underdelivering and (at worst) pump-and-dumps, fraud, and black-hat hacking.

If they mention a blockchain project, it's basically like sending some of their audience straight to Binance to get rekt.

Do you see why it's not a slam dunk for them to shoutout some project that's passionately trying (and unlikely) to solve these hard problems?

<comment><USER4> What...? I'm well aware of what The Atlantic is. People aren't (or shouldn't be) using it to guide how they spend their money.

<comment><USER5> The missing concept is trust. Blockchains are ideally trustless. Media brands are trustful.

In a high-trust environment, a mention is an implied endorsement.

If the Atlantic wanted to mention a blockchain project without encouraging their readers to invest, it would need to explicitly criticize it in the same piece.

This may seem weird but it's how it is.

<comment><USER4> Interesting - I hadn't thought about it that way. I'm no journalist, so it just struck as a surprising omission. But, that being said, I have to imagine this would strike many other people (certainly not most, but a large amount) as a noticeable omission as well.

You're saying it's more just in their best interest, as a large and reputable source, to risk potentially bothering that small group in order to keep their hands clean from inadvertently endorsing anything?

<comment><USER5> Ya there is an asymmetry for sure.

If you already know about projects deep down the rabbit hole, you can go to their website/github/chain explorer/chat and do your own research.

But if you don't know anything except that bitcoin is darknet money, the first mention of e.g. "smart contracts" may lead you down the rabbit hole...

I think that everyone who gets into distributed systems by reading news stories about blockchain goes through a "holy s __* this is revolutionary!" phase, and for too many people that means buying tokens without performing due diligence.

<comment><USER4> Lol - I remember that phase well. Luckily I was still in college at the time so I had no money to sink on it.

I'm a believer in the tech, and have a little money in it now, but in terms of expected earnings... well, I treat it just as I would treat having money on Rushie winning Blue Grass Stakes. Just like I wouldn't bet anything I'm not comfortable losing on a horse, I treat any crypto "investments" the same way. I try to separate the money from the tech as much as I can.

All that aside, that's an interesting insight that really hadn't occurred to me before so I'm glad you pointed it out!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Climpare – Compare the climate between 2000 cities around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.climpare.com <comment><USER2> What is the source of weather report?

Rest looks good (Y)

Tried few indian cities. I couldnt find them. Then tried US cities it worked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man. The source is National Climatic Data Center ([http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov)) and the GHCN-Daily dataset.

The dataset probably contains data from weather stations from the cities your searched, however, the relationship between cities and weather stations is sometimes lacking. So, the case with the indian cities, I bet they are defined as weather stations, but has not been mapped to a city.

Cheers!</comment></comment>


The Supreme Court's technical cluelessness makes them better justices - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/4/23/5644154/the-supreme-courts-technical-cluelessness-makes-them-better-justices

<comment><USER2> While there are definitely certain points in the article the I find myself agreeing with, the overall piece is remarkably bad. The ideas of a generalist perspective and enforcing of "common sense" are most definitely good things, but pointing to their lack of knowledge on a subject as the reason behind their utilization of common sense seems silly.

>The justices' lack of technology savvy ___may_ __have been an asset in resolving the Grokster case...

That single "may" is a fairly huge assumption to be making for this article, and one which is just kinda carried along.

>The court refused to set a numerical threshold for liability, perhaps recognizing that a line that makes sense for file-sharing networks might not work for the next technology that comes along.

See, this seems (to me at least) like that decision is coming from their expertise with regards to the Law rather than any real or perceived ignorance of technology.

>So maybe we should be happy that Justice Sotomayor has no clue how a Roku box works. It probably makes her a better justice.

I'm sorry, but anyone touting the idea that ignorance somehow leads to better decision making is delusional.</comment>


Managing Nested Libraries Using the GIT Subtree Merge Workflow - <AUTHOR> http://typecastexception.com/post/2013/03/16/Managing-Nested-Libraries-Using-the-GIT-Subtree-Merge-Workflow.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> I won't say any of this is hot, new information. This is my attempt to document the use of the subtree merge strategy/workflow in a way that would have helped me in figuring it out. While most of the information was out there, my best understanding came from working through multiple sources. If anyone sees where I have something wrong, I would love to know so I can correct it. I do NOT want to be propagating bad information. There is a real basic walk through for folks who are not deeply experienced with Git, and also a link to more of a reference for those who are more fluent and need less of the narrative/screenshots. As always, feedback is appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER2> Really useful info, I know of at least one open source and one proprietary software project both of which could put this to great use. It it certainly less documented than the submodule workflow. And I find 50% of the joy of git come from switching to it, the rest from learning to use it to do cool stuff. The first time I used git bisect it made my day, no my week!

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree about 50% of the joy coming from learning to use git. Frustrating at times, but in the end, that's the kind of thing that keeps me learning to code!

If I understand correctly, the subtree workflow is a (relatively) newer thing, and there is an actual subtree command either newly added or soon-to-be added which simplifies things a little further.

I decided to learn the old, hard way before I started exploring the subtree command itself (prior to the addition of the command, my understanding is that "subtree" represented a merge strategy, from which evolved the subtree "workflow" and out of which a git contributor evolved a "command," which appears to have been added to git 1.7.11:

[http://log.pardus.de/2012/08/modular-git-with-git- subtree.ht...](http://log.pardus.de/2012/08/modular-git-with-git-subtree.html)

I will likely follow up at some point with a post on using the actual subtree command as well.</comment></comment>


Generating natural-sounding synthetic speech using brain activity - <AUTHOR> https://humanbioscience.org/2019/04/new-brain-machine-interface-can-generate-natural-sounding-synthetic-speech-using-brain-activity.html <comment><USER3> Amazing. One thing I'm not clear on is this: did they have to re-establish the brain activity -> muscle movements model for each patient? Because presumably that wouldn't have worked for a paralysed patient. In that case, the question is how hard is it to generalise a brain activity model so that it can be trained on one population and then used to get data from a paralysed person's brain?

<comment><USER4> Yes, typically in brain computer interface tasks there is a need for retraining models given different individuals or even the same individual on different days/weeks/months. In another summary page there is the statement:

> The researchers also found that the neural code for vocal movements > partially overlapped across participants, and that one research subject's > vocal tract simulation could be adapted to respond to the neural > instructions recorded from another participant's brain. Together, these > findings suggest that individuals with speech loss due to neurological > impairment may be able to learn to control a speech prosthesis modeled on > the voice of someone with intact speech.

As per paralyzed individuals that is a primary target of this area of research. Things get considerably more complex in those cases however as they would need to start out with a pre-trained model which couldn't be naturally adapted by listening to their own speech. Additionally any brain damage which many have contributed to their condition can impair some of the signals in question. Overall the particular problem seems to be advancing from when I worked with a lock-in patient last, but there's still a good ways to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this tech could one day be useful for general users without disabilities.

> _Even when the researchers provided the algorithm with brain activity data > recorded while one participant merely mouthed sentences without sound, the > system was still able to produce intelligible synthetic versions of the > mimed sentences in the speaker's voice._

That already seems borderline usable for people with speech. I wonder if it could be made to work when you're merely thinking about the mouth movements without actually making them. That would be ideal.

<comment><USER6> It'd be great if this technology matures to the point where we can perform telepathic communication, à la Ghost in the Shell.

<comment><USER5> Beyond radio comms, I think a telepathic _" Hey [Siri/Alexa/etc]..."_ could have some startling social implications.

It might even be the killer app to make elective brain implants mainstream. (Of course if this could be done without hazardous and expensive implants, all the better.)

<comment><USER7> When you just have to think about buying something, and Alexa orders it for you :O

<comment><USER5> That's something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Not so much accidental orders, but rather who these software assistants will be owned and controlled by in in a foreseeable future where this sort of tech creates tighter couplings between software assistants and our own minds.

If the software assistants are sufficiently useful and tightly coupled with the human mind, I think it quite likely that the line between self and software might get blurry for some users. The ability to think a question and hear a _correct_ answer as a voice in your head is the sort of profoundly powerful user experience that I think might plausibly alter the assumptions people make about what it means to be themselves.

If these software assistants become apart of the users' own mind in their own perception of themselves, what responsibilities do the owners/operators of those systems have to their users?

I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get their, but the relative immaturity of FOSS software assistants is starting to unnerve me. In 2040 when Amazon starts selling "god in a box" to the general public, a two-way telepathic connection to a state of the art quasi-AGI living in the cloud, will there be a viable FOSS alternative?

<comment><USER6> In a way, we're already there, no? We listen to what Yelp reviewers tell us. We stop trying as hard to memorize facts as we offload our cognitive functions to Google search.

I guess the tighter coupling than what it is now is what makes the idea repulsive.

Also, as far as FOSS alternative goes, I wouldn't count on it. It's not so much the code - in time it'd be the huge data-crunching that counts, something only big corporations are able to do.

<comment><USER5> Even if we just had _reliable_ FOSS voice recognition without the rest, I think hackers could create powerful user experiences. But alas, even that seems to be asking too much. There are some FOSS efforts to implement state of the art solutions with lots of training data, Mozilla has been working on this from what I understand, but last I checked nothing was really ready yet and the stuff Mozilla is working on needs really beefy server hardware to run, which I think unfortunately disqualifies it as a viable competitor to the commercial offerings (which also use expensive hardware, but don't require end users to know anything about it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Video (buried in the article): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pv0vT82Cys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pv0vT82Cys)

<comment><USER9> at 2 minutes:

they can produce words from brains even when the subject does not speak them. interrogation tool?

<comment><USER4> No, this approach is not reading thoughts. The video states that they still mouth the sentences which will trigger similar muscle movements which appears to be the target of this method. Without the signals to move the muscles, no intelligible speech should be detectable using this approach.

<comment><USER9> I mean, we can already read subvocalizations.

What I mean is, when we think about moving our arms the same parts of our brains activate as if we are moving our arms. Maybe, when we think about talking a similar thing happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is the google Cached version. Seems the site is offline

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://humanbioscience.org/2019/04/new- brain-machine-interface-can-generate-natural-sounding-synthetic-speech-using- brain-activity.html)

Copy the link above to view the research

</comment><comment><USER11> Why aren't they replacing the mumbling with closest match words in the synthesizer?

Anyway, putting electrodes inside the brain is not for common public, is this at all possible without those intrusions?

<comment><USER4> Approaches like this are not possible without invasive methods. Placing electrodes in the brain or on the brain provides considerably higher signal fidelity.

<comment><USER12> That's unfortunate. I have RSI in both my hands and throat and something like this would really be a life changer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slap on a style transfer layer and it's a wrap.

Disclaimer: I know very little about how to actually do ML stuff, it just seemed like something that'd be possible in the near future.

<comment><USER14> I work in this space, so I'd love to give a bit of detail on the ML if you're interested:

Style transfer is trickier to do with speech than images! One significant issue is the lack of a good "content" versus "style" distinction. In images you can get great results by calling the higher-level features of an object classifier network "content" and holding that constant. Some people have tried this for audio with e.g. a phoneme classifier, but there are additional characteristics (such as inflection) that relate the emotional content of speech which wouldn't be held constant.

Another issue is that much of the speech classification work is done in spectrogram (or with further processing MFCC) space, which lets you treat audio similar to images and leverage a bunch of technology that we have for classifying those. But for synthesizing speech, spectrograms aren't a fantastic representation, because small errors in spectrogram space can translate into large errors in the waveform which are very clearly audible, and humans in general are pretty sensitive to audio errors. There are cool neural spectrogram inversion methods out there which can help, but those should still be trained to be robust to the kinds of errors that a style transfer algorithm would make, so it's still pretty tricky.

My company, Modulate, is building speech style transfer tech; and we've found a lot more success with adversarial methods on raw audio synthesis, where the adversary forces the generator to produce plausible speech from the target speaker!

One of the coolest parts of the kind of BMI research in this article, to me, is the potential to buy back some latency margin for speech conversion! If you're working on already-produced speech, there are super tight latency requirements if you want to hear your own speech in the converted voice - <USER2> 20-30ms for the entire audio loop, and you start to get echo-like feedback that makes speaking difficult. Even without looping back, you don't want more than 100-200ms of latency in a conversation before it starts impeding the flow of dialogue. This means your style transfer algorithm gets almost no future context, and limits the kinds of manipulations that you can do (not to mention the size of the network that you can do them with, depending on available compute power!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is super cool! Does anyone have any insight into whether this sort of muscle-movement based vocalization has been done in the past?

<comment><USER16> The cognitive systems lab at the university in bremen[1] ,germany does a lot of research in that field and I had the pleasure to visit them a few months ago. If you are interested you should find a lot of research on their homepage, ranging from regular speech to text, over silent speech (aka muscle movement to text) up to brain to text.

[1] [https://www.uni-bremen.de/en/csl/](https://www.uni-bremen.de/en/csl/)

edit: small correction of my bad english :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The proofs of concept accumulating in this space are so exciting. It's hard not to jump straight into runaway speculation.

</comment><comment> a-dub i'm curious, what's the effective bit rate? speech and language have excellent priors and fancy speech synthesis has been a thing for a while.

either way cheers for getting something to work well!

</comment><comment><USER18> so they use the brain to bypass the brain that isn't working properly. that makes sense.</comment>


Scientists Unsure Where Chinese Space Station Will Crash to Earth - <AUTHOR> https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/03/09/2325242/scientists-unsure-where-chinese-space-station-will-crash-to-earth <comment><USER2> This is just a wrapper for the _Guardian_ article already submitted.</comment>


Show HN: Serverless Handbook – modern back end skills for front end developers - <AUTHOR> https://serverlesshandbook.dev/ <comment><USER2> I can't access the material after selecting the "opt-in" button. I am instead routed to a blank white screen.</comment>


Mountain Lion: How to get the most out of iMessage - <AUTHOR> http://blog.joelesler.net/2012/07/mountain-lion-how-to-get-most-out-of.html

<comment><USER2> The article is wrong, there's still a _huge_ part missing from the so-called "unified" messaging and Apple needs to step up their game ASAP.

No matter how you configure the "caller ID" option, if a friend iMessages you (i.e. they initiate the convo) to your cell phone number and not email (most common, as if they were texting but it silently switched to iMessage), the message will only be received on your phone.

Apple _needs_ to add an option to allow you to authenticate/verify your phone number as a valid _receive_ address for the desktop ASAP.

<comment><USER3> Coming with iOS 6.

<comment><USER2> No. That's coming for the iPad, not for the desktop. There is no iOS6 for the desktop (and it's not in Mountain Lion :)

<comment><USER3> Here's what Scott Forstall said:

"We're unifying your phone number and your Apple ID," said iOS guru Scott Forstall at WWDC today. "So if someone calls you on your phone number with a FaceTime call, you can answer the call on your iPad or even your Mac. And we're doing the exact same thing with iMessage."

I think you need iOS 6 to set it up, but clearly it will work on OS X afterwards.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for that. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is surprisingly difficult to set up on both the iPhone and on OSX.

Apple seriously needs to put some UX talent working on this.

<comment><USER5> IIRC the initial setup process of an iOS device walks you through this step by step. I don't remember doing any of these steps when I signed into Messages on OSX. This article seems to be more for the people who skipped associating an e-mail address with their iMessages settings the first time around?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand the use case for a platform-specific messenger. When your whole company uses Blackberries, BBM makes sense. Otherwise, why not use something that everyone you know can use? Behind text messaging, Facebook Chat has the largest user base in my social circles.

I've assumed that most iMessage use thus far has been as a transparent transport for SMS over a data connection. Is this correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple is positioning it (IMO) as a replacement for text messaging on iOS. The fact that it works across devices is the killer feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks a lot for this tutorial. I am really amazed that Apple has not thought this through properly. Really disappointing. Creating a vibrant set of iOS messaging and sharing channels would really increase their barrier-to-entry.</comment>