Kaboom: an unusual Minesweeper - <AUTHOR> https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/ <comment><USER2> In a similar vein: Cheating Hangman, once described as "an app that perfectly recreates the infuriating feeling of playing hangman with your older sibling who was _definitely_ cheating and also knew way more words than you". [https://cheatman.danq.me/](https://cheatman.danq.me/)

Implementation details: [https://danq.me/2019/09/26/cheatman/](https://danq.me/2019/09/26/cheatman/)

<comment><USER3> Hatetris (or whichever implementation of that idea came first) appears on this trail:

[https://github.com/qntm/hatetris](https://github.com/qntm/hatetris)

On the topic of hang man, we played some on breaks at work. Eventually I figured that I could use some tool assistance that scored dictionary words according to their length, the overall frequency of the letters that appear in them, the number of times letters are repeated within the words etc. and from the top of those I manually picked the most obscure ones.

<comment><USER4> As far as I can tell bastet[1] goes back to 2004.

[1] [http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html](http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a MUCH easier version of Minesweeper, purely due to the fact that when you're down to guessing it's guaranteed to be safe.

That is an excellent idea, I'm going to have to try this and see if I'm really as good at Minesweeper as I think or if I just get lucky sometimes on unproven squares.

Also somewhat relevant, there's a recent Minesweeper roguelike that recently came out on Steam: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141220/DemonCrawl/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141220/DemonCrawl/)

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say it's "easier", since random chance of failure isn't a difficulty level, it's a lack of difficulty: Your gameplay has no effect on the outcome.

If anything, this is Minesweeper as it should have been: A game of perception and deduction with no chance of random failure.

As a huge minesweeper fan, I think this is fantastic.

<comment><USER7> I'm not entirely sure the software's working correctly. I lost my first game, and I'm fairly certain that there was a different possible orientation of mines: [https://imgur.com/gallery/hg1Mcwq](https://imgur.com/gallery/hg1Mcwq)

<comment><USER8> There were other possibilities, but you were punished for taking a guess when there were guaranteed-safe squares. Guessing is only supposed to be safe when you _have_ to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's amazing how good this is for training!

Apparently I am not that great at minesweeper and guess way too often when it's not necessary. This variation kills those bad habits pretty quickly by punishing you 100% of the time for guessing. Along with undo and double checking with the debugger, I've picked up way more patterns/heuristics than in my years of playing.

Coolest thing is that if you're a perfect logician you can always win!

Link to actual game since it's not prominent in article: [https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/](https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Great read!

It's in a similar vein as the variant I developed, which makes you declare that you are in a situation that requires a guess. I don't use an SAT solver, and I prepopulate the board.

[https://magnushoff.com/articles/minesweeper/](https://magnushoff.com/articles/minesweeper/)

In comparison to the Simon Tatham version mentioned at the end of the article, my game allows all game configurations while Tatham's version guarantees solvability by restricting the possible configurations.

<comment><USER11> I'm currently writing a minesweeper solver in my spare time and have a question about one section of your article.

Under the "Complete solution: Global reasoning" section, you say that the situation requires accounting for the entire game state - but I think my solver can do it without resorting to that?

Given

        .          a
        .2         bX
        .22   as   cYZ
        ....       defg

Then we have the constraints:

(X:) `abc` contains 2 mines.

(Y:) `bcdef` contains 2 mines.

(Z:) `def` contains 2 mines.

Which can be combined:

(X-a:) `abc` contains 2 mines so `bc` contains between 1 and 2.

(Y-(X-a):) `bcdef` contains 2 and `bc` contains between 1 and 2 so `def` contains between 0 and 1.

(Z-d:) `def` contains 2 so `ef` contains 1-2.

((Y-(X-a))-(Z-d):) `def` contains 0-1 and `ef` contains 1-2 so d contains 0 mines and can be cleared.

Have I missed something? Let me know if I haven't explained it properly.

<comment><USER10> It's been some years, but I think it boils down to the definition of when you are _considering_ some part of the game state.

Right off the bat, I cannot agree that abc must contain exactly 2 mines. From what we can see, abc contains _at most_ 2 mines. There may or may not be mines in what you have left out, and we cannot know without considering what's there.

I haven't written a formal proof for that statement, but I have been unable to solve it to my own satisfaction by reasoning about a reduced view of the board.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I left out some bits of the game state for conciseness - perhaps this is a better way of displaying it

        .---       a---
        .2--       bX--
        .22-  as   cYZ-
        ....       defg

Where:

. means unknown

\- means clear (and in a real game would reveal a number and therefore a constraint, but we don't need to consider those numbers for this solution)

a number means clear and producing a constraint that we want to use

This mirrors the game state in the article, and would allow us to assert that abc contains exactly 2 mines, while still only having to consider a 4x4 section of the board.

Thanks for helping me with this btw, it's much appreciated :)

<comment><USER10> Right, so, in my book, reasoning based on facts such as "these squares are clear" are _considering_ those squares.

This is in contrast to the local rules I first describe that consider only a very limited part of the board, and there is a pre-determined hard limit for how much would ever need to be considered for these rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > One of the bottom squares contain a mine, but it's impossible to say which > one. You have to select one of them. But according to what I just said, that > would mean certain death! I wanted the game to be cruel, but now it's > unwinnable.

If it's not stalemate, haven't you won at that point? The tiles are practically in a state of quantum superposition where they are both safe and unsafe at the same time. You can't know without observing.

Except... the game rules say they're both mines if they're uncertain (in that version of the game), so the player has won because the game has been backed into a corner.

If there's a way to make that situation truly unpredictable, I'd be amazed. For example, if it was networked and another player worked a similar board, but they clicked one of the same tiles. So your clicking of a tile is the observation of what happened in someone else's game as opposed to a random calculation or game logic.

<comment><USER13> Read further down.

> So I'll modify the idea a bit and say you are allowed to guess, but only if > there are no safe squares left. This way, the game will be cruel, but fair.

<comment><USER12> That's not quite the same though. The computer's rolling a dice on that one. My thinking was that the final state comes from a random player at the other side of the world.

<comment><USER14> The computer doesn't roll a dice, it makes whichever option you select the safe one - taking all the chance out of the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quote: "Recently, I had an idea: what if you had to play Minesweeper against the computer?"

For me that statement means player 2 played by computer. What he actually implemented is not that. Which gave me the idea to actually do that. Same rules as classic one, you click, another human click (or computer player) - loser is the one who reveals a bomb. In case nobody blows up winner is the one who is last to flag correctly a bomb on a guessing situation.

Ideas, constructive criticism is welcome. What you guys say?

<comment><USER16> There was a game a long time ago called "Minesweeper Flags" that was a 2-person minesweeper, except it worked in reverse.

When it was your turn, you'd reveal a tile. If it's a mine, you get a point and your turn continues. If it isn't, your turn is over and now your opponent has more information because of the square you revealed.

A great game that rewards following all the logic you have on the currently revealed board without the benefit of gaining more information as you go, as well as playing the odds when guessing. However, it had a tendancy to give a player an easy win if the other player happens to reveal a large blank area all at once.

<comment><USER17> I definitely played this variant on MSN messenger. IIRC that service only ever managed to get 4 different games.

Such a shame, it was a good "hey someone's online, let's play a game" paradigm, words(etc) with friends have a problem of waiting around for a long time and things fizzle out.

I guess we'll never really get back a "hey I'm online atm" immediacy situation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As far as I understand this has been done more than 15 years ago by the "Mines Perfect" game [0], which is open source IIRC. In this case you'd use the Lucky Mode and the Murphy's Law option (although more modes are available). And no SAT solver was used in that game, I think, which to me is more impressive, although perhaps less elegant.

[0] [http://www.czeppi.de/english/index.html](http://www.czeppi.de/english/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> How can I choose which square has the mine without guessing here?

[https://imgur.com/gallery/GlAgExv](https://imgur.com/gallery/GlAgExv)

<comment><USER5> According to the rules of the game, both positions are safe.

The golden rule of this variant is: If a tile could contain a mine, it does.

Except: If there are no more tiles that can be guaranteed to be safe given the information on the board, you have to guess.

When you're forced into guessing, the rule is inverted: If the tile could be safe, then it will be safe. Again, this only applies if there are NO other guaranteed safe tiles on the board.

So click whichever you prefer.

<comment><USER20> This is a good explanation. It took using the "cheat buttons" for me to fully internalize the logic.

In this configuration, if you click "Hint" it will say there are no safe squares. If you click "Debug" you'll see they are both question marks. Therefore, whichever you click on will be safe (with a count of either 1 or 4) and the other is forced into being a mine.

The interesting question (if this were earlier in the game): when in this situation and you get to impose your will on which one is safe, what's the "best" one to pick?

<comment><USER5> > _The interesting question (if this were earlier in the game): when in this > situation and you get to impose your will on which one is safe, what 's the > "best" one to pick?_

I've been struggling with that question on `Ultra Violence` difficulty, where 4-6 are the norm and 1-3 are a breath of fresh air.

I've been preferring whichever will give me an open route to an unexplored area. I'll pack mines along the edges or against other mines if possible, as long as I have some path to new territory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me a bit of the discussions around designing Quantum Minesweeper. Where you are playing N classical games in superposition. And the player is allowed to make "classical" or "entangled" choices. The ability to probe non- locally opens up interesting possibilities. See Qiskit for demo ;)

If you are craving a quick game, there is a Chrome Labs PWA implementation called Proxx that works on all devices

[https://proxx.app/](https://proxx.app/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Given that guessing is always safe when it's required, it means you have a choice in e.g. the initial play. Is it more efficient to click tiles on a line, or to click them in a cluster?

<comment><USER23> I'd assume that you'd be able to open the most squares by opening those that are completely disconnected from all other squares. That is, make a checkered pattern where there is at least one border of unopened squares around every opened one. (Except for 3's on the corners, 5's on the edges, and 8's anywhere in between, of course.)

Edit: Ah, this doesn't work, because of "You are still expected to select one of the adjacent cells." Clever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why a SAT solver? Constraint propagation with backtracking and arc consistency checks is very fast for minesweeper (source: this was an old Stanford CS homework problem), and it's fairly straightforward to re-solve with added constraints to ask questions like "could there be a mine here".

In general, the Kaboom game logic seems to be nearly identical to writing an optimal minesweeper solver.

<comment><USER25> Why implement backtracking when a SAT solver implements it for you?

<comment><USER24> You can turn this around; why implement complicated cardinality constraints to reduce a problem to SAT when a different solver can handle them directly.

I think it's a shame that there is a general lack of high-quality open source IP/MIP solvers. Formulating Minesweeper as an integer program is trivial. SMT solvers might work well, too.

There's another twist. The right thing to do here is probably to divide the board into connected components (where two squares have an edge if they have a common neighbor), then solve each component with no constraints on the number of mines, and then to match up the solutions. This would improve the game, since the concept of "a guess is needed" could take into account that revealing more numbers might not help solve a given component.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> While playing this, I had an idea. What if marking the mine reduced the number of any number tiles adjacent to the mine? So the number tile would show the number of adjacent mines, minus the number of adjacent flags. Then you could work through the puzzle by bringing all the number tiles to 0, which might make certain situations more readily soluble.

</comment><comment><USER27> > One of the bottom squares contain a mine, but it's impossible to say which > one. You have to select one of them. But according to what I just said, that > would mean certain death! I wanted the game to be cruel, but now it's > unwinnable. So I'll modify the idea a bit and say you are allowed to guess, > but only if there are no safe squares left. This way, the game will be > cruel, but fair.

The situation when your only move possible is a guess is exactly the same we have in the very beginning of the game so I would rather make such fields guaranteed safe the way the first click is.

<comment><USER28> If you read through the rest of the article, that's actually the end result! Ambiguous squares are guaranteed not to be mines iff guessing is the only possible move.

On the flip side, the game punishes you for guessing by guaranteeing ambiguous squares result in a mine iff there there are moves you could make without guessing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Super cool! I was playing with a friend and found the interesting strategy of minimizing the information available to us and trying to force as many guesses as possible. Start from the corners, and whenever you have to guess, guess in a way that limits you (for example, guessing to cover all your edges with known mines). Then, since you don't have any options, you get a "free" space to continue! And with the free space, you pick a different corner...

</comment><comment><USER30> Man, I need to reserve a weekend to play with a SAT solver.

</comment><comment><USER31> Beautiful solution with the binomial encoding. Apparently, "at most k" is a well known problem [http://www.sat4j.org/maven233/apidocs/org/sat4j/tools/encodi...](http://www.sat4j.org/maven233/apidocs/org/sat4j/tools/encoding/Binomial.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> I have been playing this obsessively the last few weeks without knowing about the implementation. I thought it expresses the known facts about the board configuration as a system of linear equations and uses one of the classic algorithms for solving these. Anyone know if that would be infeasible for some reason?

<comment><USER33> I was thinking along the same lines when the systems of linear equations came up. The difficulty is that the variables are 0-1 while the equations are over the integers. So this is not quite as simple as solving a system over F_2, but is instead feasibility testing of an IP with 0-1 variables and a 0-1 matrix.

I wonder if solving the LP-relaxation might lead to a rounding based approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The ability to choose where mines aren't can yield some funny results. My goal is now to force as many mines as possible in the upper left corner. [https://imgur.com/a/X1zxwdO](https://imgur.com/a/X1zxwdO)

</comment><comment><USER35> At first I thought it's a variation of the old Atari game of the same name [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaboom!_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaboom!_\(video_game\))

</comment><comment><USER36> The original minesweeper had a smiley face up the top, which would turn dead if you lost, and would have a :o face while picking a cell.

Having the face change if there are safe cells available would give the face a purpose.

</comment><comment> enahs-sf I love the doom style level names. Great game. Lots of fun! Awesome work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also the author's blog post about how he built it: [https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/](https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/)

<comment><USER37> We've changed to that one from [https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/](https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/) because it's a bit more informative and maybe more interesting to read first. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't Silverlight more popular? - <AUTHOR>

I mean, I work for a Microsoft Gold partner building (mostly) internal business apps, and I spend literally hours trying to get ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript to all play along nicely. I'm exactly the sort of person who should be switching to Silverlight, it seems like it's designed specifically to save people like me a whole load of trouble. But I (and many of my peers) just haven't gone for it and I can't really explain why. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I do all of those as well (ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript) yet mine is that _I have no interest in learning Silverlight_ for the same reason that I have no desire to learn Flash. I think a huge failure of Silverlight is MSFT's thinking that, "Well if we can just get half of all the millions of ASP.NET programmers to start using it, it'll be h-u-g-e!" But as an ASP.NET developer, I don't think of myself as someone who would develop Silverlight. And there's no way I want to learn a new, has- the-potential-to-be-dropped technology right now what with VS 2005, VS2008, VS2010, VS2012 and so forth (i.e. there's too much material too quickly).

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably a perception thing. I haven't looked into Silverlight much, but my gut says it's probably geared toward .NET developers (I could be completely wrong here). It is hard to beat Flash integration with Adobe CS4, especially on Macs (can you develop Silverlight apps on Mac?).

<comment><USER4> You can develop Silverlight apps on a Mac, but only if it has an Intel chip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I spend literally hours trying to get ASP.NET, MS AJAX Toolkit, jQuery, IE6 and HTML/CSS/Javascript to all play along nicely_

If you switch, get ready to spend you hours instead banging your head on Silverlight.

</comment><comment><USER5> one thing is the kinda surreptitious way they try to get you to adopt silverlight: "hey, did you know [insert major sporting/cultural/political event] is available as a streaming download? BUT! You have to install silverlight first"

plus, i think many ppl in the more tech-savvy crowd are left wondering why they have to install a plugin for stuff that's already "solved", namely Flash.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is no official support for Linux, you will need to use moonlight. Until 3.0 font rendering was a major issue, hence NYTimes switched Adobe Air. Creating a stand alone app is harder compared to Air wasn't even possible in Silverlight 2. It still doesn't have printing capabilities even in version 3.

The bright spot of using Silverlight is the programming language, you can code in C# or F#. But considering that you will need to host the solution on a Windows makes it a more expensive to scale. That probably drives away a lot of startups.

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't support Chrome. I was trying to view algorithms here but Chrome was not listed.

[http://algorithmatic.com/algorithm/6/version-10/naive- prime-...](http://algorithmatic.com/algorithm/6/version-10/naive-prime- generator/)</comment>


Ask HN: How to Patent an Algorithm? - <AUTHOR> So assume I created a magic algorithm which is capable of reducing the computing cost (disc IO and CPU) of any given database-query by 50%. Is is possible to get a patent for that algorithm? My research showed that it is generally not possible to do so, but for example I found out that google did this somehow with MapReduce. [1]
The other question is if it even makes sense to get a patent. Are the examples where someone got a patent for an algorithm and got successful out of it? The other option would be to just make it open source (together with the implementation of the algorithm).
PS: I live in europe.
[1]  http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,650,331.PN.&OS=PN/7,650,331&RS=PN/7,650,331 <comment><USER2> Well, we have slaved for years under the oppression of lossless compression algorithm patents. View a few of these for suggestions as to the right law firm to consult.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=patented+image+compression+a...](https://www.google.com/search?q=patented+image+compression+algorithms&oq=patented+image+compression+algorithms&aqs=chrome..69i57.15407j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER3> I would only look into getting a patent if you can easily deduce what the algorithm is by using the product. If not, getting a patent will make the algorithm public and only protect it for a certain amount of time. Keeping it secret, like the recipe for coca-cola, could be the better move.</comment>


Recollect Gives Social Media Ephemera Permanent Placement - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/recollect-gives-social-media-ephemera-a-permanent-home/

<comment><USER2> Cool Idea! I've been working on my own version of this since Nov, 2010. I have my own implementation and right now I'm trying to integrate it with my EEG for even less friction. Mine logs Sms, E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Banking, Computer activity, etc and aggregates them all looking for the moments worth recollecting. I could never see my software running on a non-private infrastructure as it pretty much contains every detail of my life from what I eat to my sleep patterns and where I am at any moment.

<comment><USER3> This is interesting. How do you "look for the moments worth recollecting?"

You might be interested in this (somewhat dated, from May 2012) slide deck of related work I'm doing: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/vitorio/Automated%20Storytelling%20M...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/vitorio/Automated%20Storytelling%20May%202012.pdf)

I'd be interested in hearing more about your software if you'd care to share. My contact information is in my profile here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome people. Good idea.</comment>


Is it okay to post about software releases to HN? - <AUTHOR>

I've been reading HN for a long time, but I'm new to posting.  I read the guidelines a couple of days ago, and am a little curious.  The guidelines say that on topic submissions are "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."  Given that, is it okay to post stories about software releases that most people interested in the software would know about already?
I've seen a few stories about software releases, and I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't have been posted here.  Just asking if it's okay to post the releases for other products as well, and at what point does it stop being intellectual curiosity and turn into advertising?
Anything else you can say that will help me understand what to post will also be appreciated. <comment><USER2> They are all the time anyway so why not?

On the other hand there was a post about the release of freebsd 8. If I cared about Freebsd I would have known about it. If I didn't care then well I don't care. I would say post if it is a\your startup, otherwise people who care about it already know about it and people who don't don't want the channel to be polluted.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it's really noteworthy, I think it's ok.

<comment><AUTHOR> but who decides if it's noteworthy? is it just the fact that the release was made, or that some cool new innovations went into the release?</comment></comment>


The story of N++, a ninja game 10 years in the making - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/17/8434019/n-plus-plus-playstation-4

<comment><USER2> Oh wow, I remember playing n through middle & high school. Definitely a great game.</comment>


Guess What, You Don't Own That Software You Bought - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/first-sale-doctrine/http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/first-sale-doctrine/ Surprise, surprise. The courts are making silly decisions yet again. Expect movies, music, etc, to come with licenses granting you the right to listen, instead of ownership of a copy. Yay? <comment><USER2> Broken URL, and a duplicate anyway:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1679906></comment>


Kevin McCarthy leads charge against Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/homenews/house/404642-mccarthy-leads-gop-charge-against-silicon-valley <comment><USER2> > After sharing a screenshot of a tweet from Fox News host Laura Ingraham that > was covered by language warning of "potentially sensitive content," Twitter > users were quick to point out that Ingraham's tweet was covered up due to > settings in McCarthy's own Twitter account, not because of a company > campaign to silence conservative voices.

It's kind of sad that the people out to regulate technology companies aren't really all that familiar with technology themselves.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but Kevin McCarthy isn't out to actually regulate anyone. He's just paying tribute to His Orangeness, and maybe offering some red meat to republican voters, before he loses his position in a few months. This is a risk free move, given that there won't be any ability to follow through. But it is pretty much garden variety poor leadership / waste of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why don't you try privately funding a platform where you can tolerate all the types of speech that you wish to tolerate?

Innovation is hard innit?

<comment><USER5> It's not even hard. Gab and Voat exist. No innovation is needed to set up a social site. You can run a sizable one for less than a few hundred a month given how cheap cloud hosting has become.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. The main problem being Twitter's entrenched/sticky network effect?

Just a couple hundred donators could support the whole project with a few bucks, a la Dwarf Fortress or many hundreds of Youtubers

<comment><USER6> I don't think there's any real problem here: conservatives in washington wants their base to think there's a conspiracy against them in tech.

The technology industry employs large numbers of people who are college- educated, millennials/yougner Gen-Xers and/or Asian-Americans: people who demographically skew left. This alone makes our industry suspect to the conservatives.

Isn't it odd that Steve Bannon starts publicly ranting about there being too many Asians in Silicon Valley and now all of a sudden we're far too liberal and censoring conservative voices... despite the fact that both Facebook and Twitter have been utilized deftly by conservatives to spread their message and communicate with their voters?

<comment><USER7> It's called "working the refs": [https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22work...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22working+the+refs%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

<comment><USER8> Are you kidding me? I do not know who refs, but if Social Media companies are your refs, god bless your children.. then need lot of luck!

Here is an interesting exercise - name 5 silicon valley conservative stalwarts.

<comment><USER6> > Here is an interesting exercise - name 5 silicon valley conservative > stalwarts.

Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Tom Perkins, David Sacks.... and for extra credit: Jeremy Tunnel, Curtis Yarvin, Brendan Eich, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Ted Dzuiba...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So... this is just the start. You know the next step is the government taking control over what tech companies can do when it comes to dissemination of information.

I'm gonna say it now: In 20 years, large tech companies in the States are going to be controlled by the US government, much like how China controls (or at least has direct oversight) large companies within their borders.</comment>


Ask HN: How Do You Focus? - <AUTHOR> What is your ideal focused work setup? What prerequisites do you have before you can start focused work? <comment><USER2> I personally often use this technique: [https://azeria-labs.com/the- importance-of-deep-work-the-30-h...](https://azeria-labs.com/the-importance- of-deep-work-the-30-hour-method-for-learning-a-new-skill/)</comment>


Show HN: Topsoil, a gardening puzzle game - <AUTHOR> https://topsoilgame.com <comment><USER2> over quota error message appearing for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed! thanks for letting me know.</comment></comment>


McDonnell Douglas DC-X - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X <comment><USER2> This is the tech precursor of the Falcon 9 first stage, and shows that we could have been _way_ ahead if we'd funded such things more way back in the 80s and 90s.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was truly amazing for the mid-nineties, I just thought it would be a huge return on investment.

Wasn't it supposed to be based on the avionics from an F18, what goes into avionics anyway? How could F18 avionics be repurposed?

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing there are common parts like sensors and maybe some common code or electronics for doing things like determining vehicle orientation.</comment></comment></comment>


Raindrop bookmark service adds full text search and permanent page archival - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/raindrop-io/full-text-search-permanent-library-and-more-12738383b445 <comment><USER2> webrecorder.io is a better way to archive pages

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty cool, thanks for sharing.

To be fair, it's not really a fair comparison. Raindrop is first and foremost a bookmark organizing app. The ability to archive pages integrates with the bookmark service in case the page is removed or changed. In other words, to prevent link rot.</comment></comment>


Git and SVN - an open source perspective - <AUTHOR> http://wooga.drbacchus.com/git-and-svn

<comment><USER2> > 1) Cheap branches. Subversion has cheap branches.

I think what people might mean by cheap branches is that git does cheap _local_ branches. You can work in your own private space and only when you are ready commit the whole thing (reworked if necessary) to a central repository or otherwise publish it. The outcome is that commits are seen by the outside world (whether centralised or decentralised) as a set of complete logical steps to get from A to B. The history ends up showing the evolution of a program getting better. If in future a regression is discovered, it is easier to find and fix by using the history to find the logical step with an error and fixing just that.

With svn you have to create a branch on the central repository which will remain in history forever more. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing, the outcome is that fewer people do this way. Of course it happens for major features, and for private branches. However for private branches it happens less. Some try and do everything in one big commit instead of using individual logical steps. More people make mistakes and then have to commit corrections later. The outcome is that commits are seen by the outside world as a bunch of random not-necessary-logical steps and corrections as the programmer worked out how to solve the problem. This puts more errors and inconsistencies into the history, making it less useful.

> 2) Fork and hack without all that overhead of connecting with the community.

This is where git shines. The community often won't accept a patch first time. They'll discuss it and ask for modifications and improvements. git integrates with this really well, since you can rebase in your private branch often and submit new revisions of a particular patch, and this is all integrated into the revision control system. svn simply has nothing that can compare.

> 3) No central repository.

No requirement for a central repository. As you point out, git can be arranged in a way that uses one.

The difference between git and svn is that svn is just a means of maintaining a central repository. git is a tool that can do this _but also helps you work on your own code in an integrated manner before you publish it_.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find my mercurial love comes from two things neither of which have to do with the distributed nature of the project. It is faster than svn even on tasks that require "server" access. The second is the ability to stage checkins. Both apply to git as well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some good points regarding git, open source and hype.</comment>


SafeCurves: Choosing safe curves for elliptic-curve cryptography - <AUTHOR> http://safecurves.cr.yp.to <comment><USER2> Everything djb does is high quality, above anything else available in the field at the time.

In the qmail days, his attitude drove people away (which is stupid, I think: Would you rather have to deal with djb's attitude, or deal with compromise?), but now it seems he goes to greater length to accommodate users.

You don't have to go the whole djb way [http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/](http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/) \- every small thing is useful.

Personally, I preferred qmail+ezmlm to everything else when I ran my own servers (up until 2002), and I still prefer daemontools and redo to everything else.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to try this out yourself, be sure to check out [https://github.com/impl/libcurvecpr](https://github.com/impl/libcurvecpr) for a solid implementation of djb's CurveCP in an easy-to-implement & understand pluggable library.

<comment><USER4> Do you happen to know if anyone has integrated that with libuv? Seems like a match made in heaven...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm no crypto expert, but I would like to learn a little more about ECC. Are there any books or websites in particular that I should look into? I have a copy of Applied Cryptography and plan on eventually reading through more of it.

I only ask because it seems like there have been a lot of advancements in this field recently (from what I've seen on the internet).

<comment><USER6> This one might be a good start. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S9eZRHjP8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S9eZRHjP8g)

EDIT: Added [http://www.cryptotextbook.com/](http://www.cryptotextbook.com/) as well.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for linking these :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh someone needs to get Qualys (ssllabs) to take a look at that.

</comment><comment><USER9> The rigidity page calls schemes "fully rigid" when the scheme used to select their generator point is unspecified.

This is unfortunate.</comment>


Zsh Configuration from the Ground Up - <AUTHOR> https://zanshin.net/2013/02/02/zsh-configuration-from-the-ground-up/ <comment><USER2> I can't encourage people enough to actually set up their zsh manually instead of running a configuration framework.

I spent a few hours on this about a year back and went from over 2s to about 0.15s for a full run of an interactive login shell (`time zsh -l -i -c 'echo "test"'`). No functionality lost, at least none that I actually used and cared about.

Definitely one of the best quality of life improvements I've made to my setup in recent years.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more. I did the same. Big improvement in performance and I have a better idea of how to customize as per my preference.

I was also worried about random code getting downloaded to my machine and getting executed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use powerline-shell in zshell, and was also extremely annoyed by the delay.

So, I decided to rewrite [https://github.com/banga/powerline- shell](https://github.com/banga/powerline-shell) in go, and the performance is amazing.

The latency went down from several seconds to 200µs (except when git is used, then it's ~4ms), and it's fast enough.

The repo is at [https://github.com/justjanne/powerline- go](https://github.com/justjanne/powerline-go). Here's a small video showing just how different the latency is: [https://s3.kuschku.de/public/2017-08-21_16-43-41.mp4](https://s3.kuschku.de/public/2017-08-21_16-43-41.mp4). Disclaimer: Although the original was MIT, I licensed my rewrite under GPLv3.

Improving the latency of software is just such an amazing quality-of-life improvement, it was well worth those 10 hours of work.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pretty sweet collection of zsh shortcuts and tips.

Who cares if it's old, if it's still relevant?

Is there something out there now that is better than zsh?

<comment><USER6> Fish is pretty sweet. The biggest annoyance IMHO is that you have to use env to set environment variables inline to execution.

<comment><USER7> My biggest issue with fish is that it has no way of letting me kludge the last command like bash does. I have muscle memory for bash shorthands like !$ For last word of the last command I executed or !! For the whole line.

It still catches me out with its sub shells too sometimes. ( () is equiv to $() in bash )

Also. No control+R

Otherwise I think it's a beautiful shell and I keep using it.

<comment><USER8> The fish philosophy is that instead of "!!" you can use the up arrow to bring up the last command from history and then edit it directly.

And the up arrow already does something similar to ctrl-R by default. No need to have a separate hotkey for that behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Needs a "(2013)" tag

</comment><comment><USER10> grml's zsh config is so good that I never wanted to change anything in it (it's default in Arch liveusb)

Oh-my-zsh is for aliens

</comment><comment><USER11> oh-my-zsh is really good. The only thing I needed to do was set DISABLE_UNTRACKED_FILES_DIRTY="false" which is a default that really makes no sense

Also find a theme that works for you

</comment><comment><USER12> > alias 'devmount=mount_smbfs //ome:ch1cag0@localhost:10139/ome > /Users/$USERNAME/Projects/devvm/'

Whoooops...

<comment><USER13> Provided access to a VM (@localhost). Not as big a whoops as you would like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please tag old posts as old posts. This was written on February 02, 2013...</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite Online Recommendation Engine? - <AUTHOR>

What recommendation systems stand out as the most effective/relevant to you guys?  These can be largely explicit feedback based systems (ie Netflix), implicit feedback based (ie Amazon), social graph based, etc.<p>Not looking for RMSE metrics or traffic driving numbers as much as subjective personal opinions. <comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I find Netflix does the best job and is easily worth the rating- entry time investment required.

It's not because of the content they show me, but rather because of the accuracy of their "predicted star rating" metric. Netflix showing me a broad spectrum of content I can immediately parse through by looking at predicted ratings combined with all the other standard quality metrics I look for has led me to find an immense wealth of content I never would have guessed I'd like.</comment>


I am a geek and I've made my first video. It's about weight loss - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sqh52moVrs <comment><USER2> I've been doing this for years except having coffee while fasting. I've heard antioxidants can take you of ketosis though. Any thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably referring to the Magic Bullet Coffee. I've heard of it and it makes sense to me. If I've learned anything all this years is that fat is not that bad after all but sugar is though.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, for years, I was putting ghee and coconut oil in my coffee, but in the past 7-8 months I stopped. I think what I did is a good approach to shift your habits. Because the fat coffee was a good transition from breakfast to no breakfast and now I don't need the fat. Most interestingly, my eliminating fat, I reduced my caloric intake by at least 1,000 calories, but didn't lose any weight, i.e. the idea that fat doesn't make you gain fat has been proven right for me at least.</comment></comment></comment>


Web 2.0 is dead in France ... RIP - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecrans.fr/Olivier-Martinez-fait-condamner,3730.html For those who did not take French 101, this article basically says that the actor Olivier Martin sued the local Digg (Fuzz, www.fuzz.fr) which was ultimately condemned by a French court for having hosted a link related to the alleged Martinez-Minogue liaison. His total bill: 2500 euros. The site owner has decided to end his adventure for, as he says, "it has become too risky." His lawyer argued, without success, that it is essentially going after all the magazine and newspaper kiosks. <comment><USER2> Translated and summarized:

French site Fuzz.fr shut down by a judge.

Site editor fined 2500 Euros.

Olivier Martinez sued about 20 web sites for writing about his relationship with Kylie Minogue.

Among them was fuzz.fr. Fuzz.fr is a francophone digg clone, thus, the relevant news story was posted by a user, not by site editors. The judge ruled that the site owners must be considered editors.

The site owner decided to shut down the site rather than try to screen every link posted.

The site owner's legal team generalize this case to imply that all user- generated content in France, thus, Web 2.0 itself, is in danger.</comment>


Haskell at Front Row Education - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/commercialhaskell/commercialhaskell/blob/master/usage/frontrow.md

<comment><USER2> > The testing frameworks out there are still fairly spartan from the developer > experience standpoint.

At IMVU, we built up a bit of scaffolding along these lines: [https://gist.github.com/andyfriesen/43d886ce60927c69b3d1](https://gist.github.com/andyfriesen/43d886ce60927c69b3d1)

The basic premise is that all our business actions can either be run "for real" through Yesod, or within a State-based framework that's part of our standard testing scaffold.

The end result is that it's trivial to write tests that arrange for the database, clock, sockets, and so forth to be in precisely the state we want them to be for the test, and to sense everything afterward.

Running these tests as pure State actions has additional benefits:

Since State operates by making successive state copies for each "mutation", test fixtures are easily effected by performing some actions and saving the produced state. Individual tests can start from this state as many times as desired. The state is immutable, so test interference is impossible.

Additionally, tests run without access to IO. This means that the compiler rejects any test which could forseeably intermittently fail.

<comment><USER3> Great, I'll need to mine that for ideas, thanks for sharing! Are IMVU web- services also Yesod-based?

<comment><USER2> They are for now, but we've been whittling away at it.

We don't actually use any of Yesod's affordances except for its router. We're aiming to eventually split that off and run on bare Warp.

<comment><USER3> Any particular reason why Yesod isn't a good fit there? Is the team large enough where it makes more sense for you to roll your own and not deal with making it super generic?

<comment><USER2> Yesod provides a ton of functionality related to the larger problem of building a website with Haskell, but we're only using Haskell for JSON services.

All those extra bells and whistles are wasted on us. :)

<comment><USER4> Sounds like you need servant, i've found writing pretty minimal web services in it really nice.

<comment><USER5> or Airship [https://blog.helium.com/helium/2015/04/01/helium- webmachine-...](https://blog.helium.com/helium/2015/04/01/helium-webmachine- airship.html) which uses the webmachine model. Very nice for for APIs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A recent HN post was claiming JEE to be a "startup's secret weapon" (SSW), and I commented that the article did not much to actually backup that statement.

This article explains nicely why Haskell _could_ be an SSW, and specifically in what cases it might is more likely to be. It nicely walks through the strengths and the weaknesses, and compares to the previous experiences with clojure/ruby.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Build times, especially once the whole constellation of Yesod and Persistent > packages are brought into the mix, are not insignificant. It still takes a > good 5-10 min to build our larger web application on our beefiest machines. > There are optimizations that can be made in this space which we haven't > adopted yet, such as caching already build object files to avoid having to > re-compile them every time, so I'm confident this will be a non-issue in the > nearby future, but it's still worth being aware of. GHC works hard, you need > to provide it with enough juice or time to let it do its job.

You hint at the solution to this problem when you mention caching, but I would encourage you to look into the Nix package manager. It's platform and language independent, and is excellent at dramatically speeding up builds by only building anything once. It's gaining popularity in the Haskell community.

<comment><USER3> Cool! Do you happen to have links to good "how to get started" guides for nix+haskell? Right now it looks like it's a battle between halcyon, stackage- cli and this. I don't quite know yet what fits our use-cases better.

<comment><USER7> I don't use Nix with Haskell myself yet, because I haven't been doing much Haskelling recently. But I do use it with Python and it's really excellent to use once you start to "get it." Skimming this guide, it seems to do a nice job of explaining Nix as applied to Haskell development[0]. And I'm sure there are many other resources, since it seems to have some traction in that community. I don't know much about the other options you mentioned, but one of the really nice things about Nix is that it's language-independent, which makes it just as easy to express Haskell package dependencies as it is to express any arbitrary dependency (e.g. a foreign library you're linking against).

[0]: [https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-02-04-how-i- develop-...](https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2014-02-04-how-i-develop-with- nixos.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey folks, author here. Happy to answer any questions.

Shameless plug: we're hiring. If writing Haskell to improve education seems like a good idea, check out the role at [http://functionaljobs.com/jobs/8823-haskell-web-engineer- at-...](http://functionaljobs.com/jobs/8823-haskell-web-engineer-at-front-row- education)

<comment><USER8> (EDIT: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521076) answers this, sort of.)

Thanks for writing.

What was the CPU issue, and how did you solve it? I'm referring to the "Strength in numbers" section ([https://github.com/commercialhaskell/commercialhaskell/blob/...](https://github.com/commercialhaskell/commercialhaskell/blob/master/usage/frontrow.md#strength- in-numbers)).

<comment><USER3> Check out this thread where I was investigating the issue, it has a lot more information on it: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yesodweb/LU1r1ygMuOY](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yesodweb/LU1r1ygMuOY)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > ...the time-tested Real World Haskell is now fairly outdated, but the more > recent Beginning Haskell is perfectly relevant.

Wow, I was not aware of this.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Haskell-Project-Based- Approa...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Haskell-Project-Based-Approach- Apress/dp/1430262508)

Generally a good book, with some puzzling typos, IIRC (a year or so since i read it), he refers to Platform when he shd be referring to GHC

______________________________________________________________

there's also recent books by Richard Bird and Simon Thompson, and the Haskell School of Music, which was recently discussed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9487881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9487881)

[http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Functionally-Haskell- Richard-...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Functionally-Haskell-Richard- Bird/dp/1107452643/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice review, but don't leave us hanging, in the Strength In Numbers section what was the root of the CPU utilization problem?

<comment><USER3> Haven't found it yet. Nobody else is hitting this either apparently. Manually limiting the # of cores on GHC pretty much removed the issue for us, although it doesn't give me the sense of closure I was hoping for.

I'm vaguely suspecting some sort of resource contention issue. A good way to figure that out would be to run a profiled build with that many cores, assuming that's at all possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am curious if anybody has experience using Haskell and clojure/core.typed and could comment on the two. In the article the author states "You're writing fewer bugs, you're reusing more code, new developers are causing less damage, and you have more room to deal with technical debt before it bites you.", I wonder if the same could be said of projects with core.typed.

<comment><USER3> Some discussions on the subject:

[http://adambard.com/blog/core-typed-vs- haskell/](http://adambard.com/blog/core-typed-vs-haskell/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/2hql2h/why_is_coret...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/2hql2h/why_is_coretyped_supposedly_inferior_to_static/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is be curious to know how big a problem laziness is in real applications. Is it mostly a non-issue because in a web app things tend to be short requests or do you end up having to use seq and force strictness in many places?

<comment><USER2> I'm sure it depends on your programming style, but my experience is that you can almost always ignore laziness and focus on getting your work done.

<comment><USER3> Haven't run into issues with laziness yet, but, as you guys pointed out, our use-case is very short-lived. We can likely get away with some sloppiness here and there because of it. I'm sure I'll still get burned by this at some point, but at least I'll be expecting it to some extent.</comment></comment></comment>


Two Jokers Social Engineer their way into the Superbowl [video] - <AUTHOR> http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2013/02/two-jokers-social-engineer-their-way-into-the-superbowl/ <comment><USER2> Sporting events are pretty easy to get into, the key is to have a prop and act like you belong.

I once got into a NHL playoff game by picking up a plastic beer cup off the ground in the smoking area outside of the arena and just walking in through the door. They had a security guard standing there with one of those UV stamp checkers. I showed my hand, he scanned, there was nothing there and I just keep walking like nothing and he didn't say anything.

The hard part is getting a seat in a sold out event... If you don't mind standing, there are plenty of places to stand and watch.

<comment><USER3> I do this all the time with my camera stuff.

I'm an amateur photographer (did weddings part-time), but bring my camera bag everywhere. I'll walk up to a security guard and ask him for directions to the press area, making sure that my camera is decked out (DSLR with battery grip, flash, and huge lens).

I haven't had the balls to try at the NFL level, but it works fine at the collegiate / city level depending on the size of the game.

This form of social engineering is acting like you belong and that you know what you're doing.

<comment><USER4> I understand the general principle of how this works, but how are things like press cards dealt with? It seems like that's a major signal that you aren't part of the in-group.

<comment><USER3> This starts going down the rabbit hole, but you can misrepresent yourself as shooting for <small newspaper / blog / group> and say there were communication problems.

Other times there are multiple entrances and if security doesn't communicate with each other you can try again.

It all depends on how willing you are to push the boundaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to practice sneaking into movies.

I am an honest guy, though, so I would buy a ticket, I just made it my goal not to actually show the ticket. It's pretty fun, and you can't really get in trouble this way.

Tricks that work: Just walk fast carrying a drink pretending you are getting back to a movie in progress. Pretend you are catching up to a group that just disappeared around a corner ("guys, waitup!"). If you are with a friend, have a heated discussion as you walk by the ticket-taker. Go to the ticket-taker and ask if they've seen a guy in a "aubergine jacket", when they say no, say "goddamn Jerry, I'm gonna go look for him, ok?"

Pretty much like everyone else says, acting like you belong is key.

</comment><comment><USER6> I once social engineered my way from Nosebleed seats to right in front of the stage at a concert at Cowboys Stadium where tickets were fetching upwards of $500.

Proclaimed to my date that we end up down there before the concert even started.

One of my cooler moments. Another one of my friends social engineered himself into Pit Row at a major NASCAR race. Love stuff like this. Moments to live for.

<comment><USER7> Can you explain how?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That is the Thinking Man's way. This is the Commoner's way: <http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=549_1360247939>

Security theater is all over the place.

<comment><USER9> That's a great video but its not the fault of security theater, it's just a flaw in the gate design. They made an honest effort to secure the wall but theres a bug in that system. If they see this video, they'll likely patch the fence so people can't climb up again.

Security theater would be more like if they made the gate out of rubber. Then, if someone pointed out that its easy to get through a rubber fence, they'd respond by painting the fence a different color, if they even respond at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gold! "You look like Splinter Cell Bro" hah, cool stuff, they did good.

</comment><comment><USER11> there was a video (can't find it) a few years ago when a guy sneaks to every club, restaurant, and even very fancy exclusive parties and some not clubbing related events, by having a pair of headphones on him and saying "I'm the dj". nobody checked on him.

</comment><comment><USER12> I got to sit 3 seats from Marat Safins coach and in the front row once during a professional tennis match that Marat was playing in. He lost the match, so the bitching back and forth was great. But I noticed the free seats in the box and just pointed to the seat when the usher approached me and I pretended I didn't speak english. "There, there, I sit."

Best part was the people in the box realized right away I was out of place. They were really cool though. They gave me their tickets for me and my friends which gave us access to free buffets. It was delightful.

It was also really cool to shout "Zerodina Marat" right in his face. I swear the second time I yelled it he looked at me coldly. Very intimidating Russian.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was recently out travelling, and I couldn't help wonder why I of all people was called to the side by a security officer of some sort at the airport, after we had landed and were heading for a cab.

It only took a few seconds, but I would love to know what made me stand out from the crowd.

<comment><USER14> When people get nervous they sometimes touch there nose. Security officers are trained to notice these things. So maybe you touched your nose or did some other simple thing that got noticed.

But there are also just random checks to make it very difficult to predict when or when not you are checked.

<comment><USER15> > sometimes touch their nose

I genuinely don't understand that. I can't imagine what benefit that behaviour would ever have.

<comment><USER16> It's a way of hiding your face.

<comment><USER17> Sometimes my nose just itches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Site is dead, and the Coral Cache is throwing a 500 error. Anyone got a mirror?

<comment><USER19> Site is just a paragraph, with a link to a Youtube video:([http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=sqodXd- Vtn8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=sqodXd-Vtn8))

"Sneaking in near press/employee access points without going thru them, zigzagging through corridors, and once carrying a box so someone opens a door for them, two jokers from Savannah State University social engineer their way into Super Bowl XLVII for the most part simply by looking like they belong."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> what tool would they use to steady the camera frame like that? having little experience with video editing the only way I know of doing it would be getting opencv to track the horizontal line on the back(of the jumper) of the guy who was leading and rotate the frame accordingly, surely there are video apps that do this simply.

<comment><USER21> Nowadays, even cheap non-linear editors have a built-in motion stabilizer.

Apple iMovie: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7b2SOrwT20>

Adobe Premiere Elements: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqM1mbSsTlQ>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> having the cameras probably helped them

</comment><comment><USER23> I will like it when Google Glasses make this point of view camera stuff more common. I quite like it.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've gotten into clubs and bars before where they stamp your wrist by just flashing my unstamped wrist with an 'alright mate?' and powering through the bouncers.

</comment><comment><USER25> I feel embarrassed for the over 4,000 security in attendance...</comment>


Show HN: Software Engineer search tool based on GitHub public contributions - <AUTHOR> http://findmyninja.io

<comment><USER2> Got an error that my email address is already in use (never signed up). Actually I got an error that i should try to register again but the server responded with "E-Mail address already in use" or something like that. Could not reset my password because it says "Invalid email".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, sorry about that, we'll look into it. We'll grab the logs, but if you could send me your email at anderson <at> findmyninja.io that would be great! Thanks</comment></comment>


Are we Java Programmers done for? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mindbug.org/2009/04/are-we-java-programmers-done-for.html <comment><USER2> I met someone from Sun at a cloud computing meetup on Tuesday, and she had a slide that showed the "old" model, and the companies that participated and thrived in it (including Microsoft, Peoplesoft, Oracle, etc.), and the "new" model (encompassing cloud computing, openness in protocol if not in source, etc.), and Sun was in that group. She then had to concede that the slide was a little bit old, and that now Sun and Oracle were the same company...and we'd all have to see how that played out.

She seemed hopeful, if possibly a bit concerned.

I feel kinda sorry for Sun, as they'd _just_ recently started to get the hang of this new Internet boom and were starting to participate in a meaningful way. Now the hackers that fought back up to the helm at Sun and had started to turn the ship around are now going to have to head right back into battle with an even stodgier pro-business, anti-hacker company. I suspect there will be a large outflow of engineers as the reality of the new company sets in. But, I would like to think Oracle would be smart enough to recognize that they bought themselves one of the best engineering organizations in the world, and that the best thing they can do is stand back and let them invent...and then use that sales juggernaut they wield to sell those inventions.

Tim Bray's "Us and Them" article was the best I've seen from the inside, but it's been taken down due to advisement from Sun's legal staff.

<comment><USER3> I'd hesitate to describe Oracle as "anti-hacker". There's so much duplication and overlap and redundancy in their product range not because they don't know what they're doing but because they'll ship anything anyone comes up with and see what sticks with customers. You can download pretty much everything they do for free from their website and play with it. Sure their core RDBMS engine is closed-source (they've got to make money somehow) but most of the actual functionality is in PL/SQL and you can read it to your heart's content. Same business model is used by Wolfram.

<comment><USER2> I've always felt Wolfram is also kind of anti-hacker (which is why things like SciPy and R have seen such large uptake amongst hackers), so they're not the best example from my perspective.

Oracle has never once struck me as being one of those, "It'd be really cool to work there" kind of places. Sun, on the other hand, frequently has. I'm also a bit more Open Source oriented than most people, and Sun has embraced Open Source in the past two years in ways few companies that weren't spawned of Open Source (like Red Hat) have ever done. Folks think Google is very friendly to Open Source, but they haven't even begun to have the kind of impact that Sun has had over the years. I may have gentler feelings towards Sun than some folks because of the contributions they've made to my own projects over the years (Sun was one of the very earliest contributors to Webmin, and has remained helpful ever since)...but since Sun has consistently been a friend to nearly every project I've ever had interaction with, and not just that one, I think it is built into their genes. Oracle has never done anything nice for any project I've ever been involved in, so it's like 10 projects to zero in favor of Sun. Being helpful (a deeply held hacker tradition) just doesn't seem to be in the character of Oracle, except when it is directly beneficial to them.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Watch Is and Isn't - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/09/14/apple-watch-is-and-isnt/ <comment><USER2> Ok, you're stuck in an airport and bored. You flip out your 4.7" or 5.5" phone. Can you spend an hour or more playing with it, consuming content, even doing work? Yes you can.

Now, you're stuck in an airpot and bored. You keep your phone in your pocket and stare at your watch with a 38mm screen. Can you imagine spending an hour or two interacting with and consuming content on this thing?

These watches deliver the information density of WAP feature phones with interactive models that are not much different (scroll wheel), plus panning and zooming on a tiny screen.

The people projecting the launch of the 2007 era iPhone as an industry defining moment that's going to kick off whole new app business models I think are extrapolating without thinking about it.

These devices are primarily best suited for sensors, and for information radiation tasks: notifying you of information and allowing quick response or dismissal.

But a 300Mah "smart" device with a 38mm screen being something you're going to spend a lot of time downloading apps and using "on the device itself" (and not on the iPhone) I think is too far of an extrapolation.

Maybe I'm wrong and this will be claim chowder thrown in my face in a few years, but to me, the trend towards bigger screens on phones is a perfectly example of why these watches will always be limited.

Humans are visual creatures, and a device that has the screen size and interactivity of a virtual tamagotchi is a fashion accessory toy, not something we will build our whole life around like mobile phones and tablets.

<comment><USER3> The watch isn't meant to compete with your phone for content consumption, it's for subtle notifications and alerts. Who is calling me? What meeting am I going to in 10 minutes? Who just texted me? I see myself getting a completely silent alert and then discretely glancing at my wrist during a meal or some other time it would be inappropriate to be fiddling with my phone. I can politely excuse myself if it's important.

I don't expect to watch a movie on it, I just want it to look stylish and help me stay connected in a less douchey way. The fact that it may replace my Polar heart strap and watch when I'm working out (Hopefully it's more reliable than the Basis watch) is just icing on the cake.

I have a feeling there will be some interesting third party applications, off the top of my head it might be nice to know when my boss is nearby, perhaps based on strength of his phone's bluetooth signal.

<comment><USER4> But I think that's kind of the point isn't it? Out of the box, the watch will more or less do all the thing anybody really wants it to do. It's going to be very hard to build a large viable app ecosystem for these things. At best I think Smartwatch apps will just be secondary notification displays for apps you're already buying and putting on your phone.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that how it is though? Anyone expecting anything more is going to be sorely disappointed.

I don't recall Apple pitching this as something you watch to play around with for a couple of hours at an airport with.

<comment><USER4> > I don't recall Apple pitching this as something you watch to play around > with for a couple of hours at an airport with.

You're right, they didn't. But I'm hard pressed to figure out a great deal of apps for the watch other than what's pretty much going to be shipping with it. reddit mail notification? point to my car?

I dunno. It seems like there's a very limited ecosystem (read:business) to spending lots of effort making Apple Watch apps for exactly the reason you're stating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the problem is that when you talk to "watch guys", they're all after a very specific aesthetic and functional goal. But that market is extremely small and self selecting.

Meanwhile, the mass market watch is something very different (and nearly extinct after the cell phone display accomplished the same goals).

So let's learn from two wildly successful watch brands in the 90s:

\- The information density on the Apple Watch display more comparable to something like the Timex Ironman watches than a mechanical watch. Apple also implies their watch can 'take a lickin' with their sapphire display and completely encased motherboard design.

\- The ability to customize the bands and face designs is in line with Swatch in the 90s. People will likely buy several band accessories the same way Swatch's customers bought multiple Swatches.

The only thing not mass market about the Apple Watch is it's price.

I'm guessing the low end of the product line will fill out the same way the iPhone did. They will keep all the tooling and production the same, but gradually reduce the price to $100 while they work out the software kinks.

But in the end, the product will be amazingly successful because it has the DNA of amazingly successful predecessors.

<comment><USER7> > I'm guessing the low end of the product line will fill out the same way the > iPhone did. They will keep all the tooling and production the same, but > gradually reduce the price to $100 while they work out the software kinks.

The iPhone's price did not drop over the years. The cheapest iPhone 6 you can buy today is $650. The original iPhone launched at $600 back in 2007.

EDIT: I'll eat my hat if Apple ever sells a Watch for $100.

<comment><USER8> The original iPhone was 600 dollars ON contract, which was later dropped to 500.

Yes, some people figured out how to crack the SIM-lock, so they could use a different sim card and not activate the AT&T contract that you were supposed to activate when first connecting it to iTunes, but that's an edge case that doesn't change the fact that it was sold on contract.

The 650 dollar price for iphone 6 is OFF contract. So the iPhone price has significantly dropped over the years.

<comment><USER9> The original iPhone was on contract but unsubsidized. The iPhone 3G was launched at $199 with a 2 year contract and every iPhone since then has stuck exactly at that price point at launch.

<comment><USER10> You guys are only talking about the states right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only thing that is "wrong" so far is the price for the average user, but so was the iPod, the iPhone, and my beloved MacBook Air. Give price a few years and it will be a mass market $99 (nano) $199 (standard) $299 (pro/luxury).

So far there are 2 smart watches that have nailed the design the Moto 360 and the Apple Watch. The rest have a ways to go.

A smart watch has to function pretty well as a nice looking fashion accessory before it ever is going to do anything else useful.

<comment><USER12> Personally, I think the Moto 360 is simply far too large. It looks fairly good on someone with a very wide risk, but a little ridiculous on someone with a small wrist (like me).

This is a problem with circular displays. They naturally have quite a smaller area than the circumscribing square -- they're missing all four corners, every one of which can be used for a UI element. To compensate, the display just needs to be larger -- too large, in the case of the Moto 360, in my humble opinion.

<comment><USER13> You do realize that, inch for inch, a circle has the highest area/perimeter ratio, right?

<comment><USER14> There are at least two constraints on wristwatch size. Let the Z axis be in the direction of the thickness of the watch. Let the X axis be in the direction parallel to your arm. Let the Y axis be perpendicular to the X axis and the Z axis.

1\. You do not want it to extend along X axis too far toward the fingers, or it will interfere with moving your hand at the wrist.

2\. You do not want to extend too far either way along the Y axis, or it will be too easy to accidentally hit things with it.

The point of the post above yours is that if a circle with diameter D is an acceptable size--it doesn't extend too far in the X or Y directions to interfere with your wrist or hit things--then a square of side D will generally also be acceptable. The square will give you more face area than the circle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most of the top shelf watches are going to be fine. It's the Casio, Seiko and Swatches of the world that are going to be in trouble. As is every fitness tracker or health monitor.

But the best quote for me is this one:

"In the future though I see a risk: a generational fracture. The old people, you and me, sticking to the good old mechanical watches and the young people sticking to digital watches - their comfort zone."

<comment><USER16> I'm curious how good the heart rate tracking is. Most current fitness gadgets suck terribly at tracking heart rate while exercising. afaik polar or garmin plus a chest band is the only thing that does a good job, whereas most fitbit type gadgets are only good at calculating resting heart rates. If apple can crack that, they'll find a lot of purchasers. And garmin / polar will be roadkill: their devices are expensive, single use, a big hassle (that damn chest strap is annoying, plus now you have _two_ batteries to worry about), with shitty software.

<comment><USER17> The heart monitor technology used via diodes on these smart watches isn't very accurate. I can't seem to find the article I was reading but I remember a roughly +/\- 10bpm error rate. That's also roughly what I've experienced myself on the LG and Moto watches I've tried.

That said, if you buy a Garmin or similar heart tracker watch, they package it with a Heart Rate monitor transmitter you strap around your chest. Garmin would love to be able to cut costs and keep everything in one piece of hardware, but the prosumer crowd who buy this hardware for Triathlons etc would be furious if the product was inaccurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I see this being moderately successful for apple. This is probably one of the first product launches that I saw where I thought all the work they did was cool, but just can't see myself ever wearing one of these. In fact I stopped wearing watches in general because I had a smartphone pocket watch. The less jewelry I can have, the better...

<comment><USER4> It's one of the few Apple products that really made me sit up and say "wow, they _really_ produced something that's a better, more polished version than the competitors, nicely done!".

And then I realize I got rid of watches when I start carrying a phone around with a clock on it and have no interest in returning to wearing them at all. I got rid of them for a reason, and the burden of pulling my phone out of my pocket every once in a while isn't so bad that I feel the expense plus discomfort of _any_ kind of watch is a good tradeoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find the most interesting thing about this article is the writer - Gassee. I am curious what the opinion on him is from current Apple employees and Apple watchers. Has time improved or hurt his reputation?

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like, if you've got Siri on your wrist, and voice recognition got a little better, the screen would be much less of an issue.</comment>


Any products that came out of nowhere to change the world? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-products-or-services-that-came-out-of-nowhere-were-completely-underestimated-and-went-on-to-change-the-world

<comment><USER2> A few things I initially thought of, that seemingly came out of nowhere and changed the world, were -- the steam engine, lightbulb, automobile, radio, television, zippers/velcro, plastic/steel, various aspects of medicine (antibiotics, x-rays, etc).

<comment><USER3> Did they really come out of nowhere, though? I thought Edison worked for years on the lightbulb.

The automobile evolved slowly from steam-powered vehicles - and trains could be seen as precursors as well.

Television could have been foreseen once radio was invented.

And I think steel has been known in various forms for a long time - but it was kept a state secret for most of its history.

<comment><USER4> I think it depends on your definition of "out nowhere". In most business circles Amazon is seen as a radical strategic innovation that obliterated the traditional book business (almost). But if you lump it in the same category as "selling things on the net", then it is pretty obvious.

No body saw Page rank's impact, but if you think it is obvious that reputation plays a part in relevance, then again page rank is just an obvious thing that built up over time.

The iPhone/Pod/Pad/XXX - if you say "simplicity" is the obvious killer in any product then they well it should have been obvious...

and the list goes on...

I think in hindsight a lot of what made the strategic innovations seem so obvious was well hindsight. It reminds me how MBAs are so great at explaining what has happened but are terrible at providing a plan with 0 uncertainty!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Give a novice dev a dose of reality? - <AUTHOR>

Hey all, posting under an alias since my normal nick is linked to me IRL. I'm a pretty novice developer (1-2 years professionally, 3-4 since I first learned Python), and as my previous questions might demonstrate, I have very concrete career goals.
At my current job, I'm working on things that I believe have little or no impact on where I want to be in a few years. I need quantitative/statistical experience to do what I want to do, and I'm not getting it at work. At the same time they're very accommodating when it comes to my part-time education (walking in late after morning class, taking time to study, helping me with math theory questions), and I'm also building some general dev experience, which is always good.
So HN, I need a dose of reality here. Am I expecting too much for someone with my experience? Should I swallow my pride a bit, take advantage of my job's accommodations and work on this boring, semi-relevant work? Or do I need to leave as of yesterday?
EDIT: In the past I've "aimed high" for gigs, and I'm worried about getting rejected based on my (potentially inflated) view of my skills. Should that complicate this question at all? <comment><USER2> By my estimation, you have two primary options, but I wanted to first ask you to consider:

Is there any possibility that you could (even if slowly, at first) move toward where you want to be in the current job? The reason I ask is, if they are accommodating about your educational goals, then they value that and they value you. So, think about what is available where you are at. I can't tell from your post, but if the work you are doing is semi-relevant, then it could be that you are currently in a "semi-relevant" area because they are grooming your talent for the future; meaning, they want to get you warmed up before they put you in a starting slot as a wide receiver [1] in The Show [2]. Just a thought that maybe you haven't considered.

Otherwise... you could:

 _1\. Start going on interviews._

If you truly feel that things are going nowhere at your current job, and if you feel confident with the target subject matter, then start interviewing. Even though your current experience is semi-relevant, you can still leverage it, coupled with your education, to demonstrate that you can discuss the subject matter and deliver in the target area. Only you will be able to determine if you are ready to take this step. Sure, you may get rejected on some interviews, but, at some point, we all have to "put ourselves out there" and give it a shot.

 _2\. Stay where you are and "work your craft" until you are ready to move._

If you are unsuccessful in landing any solid interviews (or you simply don't feel ready to start interviewing), then stay the course. Appreciate the situation that you are in as being temporary. Stay focused, keep working on your education and, this part is critical: start developing a portfolio. That is, start working on side projects that are related to the area where you want to be. This will increase your skill-set while simultaneously increasing your ability to talk comfortably about the target topic during an interview. This is, of course, important, because you want to be comfortable with the topic so that you can sell yourself during an interview. A portfolio will also show initiative, interest and experience in the target area to a potential employer.

Wishing you the best.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Two things. First, what are your career goals? You say you have them, but not knowing what you are trying to do, it's hard to tell whether you are getting ready for it or now. Do you want to build your own startup? Join a large tech company as a developer? A researcher? Do you want to become employee 1 at a startup? Do you want to go into management?

Second, if you are happy with your employer, stick with them, at least until a good opportunity comes along. It's rare to find _people_ you like working with.

In my personal experience, pet projects and general hacking advanced my career much more than any project an employer threw at me. In fact, most of the projects I worked on for an employer were driven by experience I had acquired on my own time: "hey, I think we should build a highly available MySQL cluster over WAN. I have done this before and it'd be perfect for this application" or "hey, I'd can create a small C program to spoof source IP addresses in UDP packets to simplify transitioning from one server to another" or "hey, let's put our entire server configuration into puppet" or "hey, let's package _everything_ into .deb packages". In other words, I play with tech, then bring it to my employer (now client as I am a contractor) and some of it sticks, not the other way around.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the short term, I want to take on a hybrid quantitative/engineering role. A bit of analysis, a bit of coding. I'd like to do this at a startup to start, so that I'm also involved with product and business decisions (so that they clearly motivate my quant/dev work). I'd like to move into management for this type of work over time, but thats years from now.

While I'm not happy with the work, I'm happy with my coworkers and the environment. This (and the flexibility with my education) complicates the thought of leaving. Maybe its a set of not-so-golden handcuffs...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would suggest to continue working at your current job while still working towards your career goals.

For one you can start researching companies where you see yourself working and that align with your career goals. After you have gathered a decent list of companies you are interested in, check to see if they have entry level jobs you can apply for that fit your skill set. For the jobs requiring more advanced skill sets, find out what those skills are and work at them.

There is a ton of _free_ information available to help you move forward and advance in your career. Take online courses (coursera.org and edx.org are both great resources available for free) and read books at your local library. Continue to build the necessary skills so that when an opportunity in which you are interested in does come up, you are prepared and have the necessary skills and experience.

Hope that helps! Good luck and hope you are able to get where you want to go!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd leave as of tomorrow, once you found the job that is directly on track to where you want to be.

Life is too short to be on some deferred plan.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting. Does it change anything if I say that I might not be qualified for those jobs right now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Grass isn't always greener.

If you're progressing in school and the job is being accommodating I'd stay for a bit and see what happens.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you prefer to use your real name or pseudonym for domains? - <AUTHOR> This came up when I was trying to setup my own domain for receiving email.
Do you prefer <your_full_name>.<tld> or <your_pseudonym>.<tld>?
I feel a bit uncomfortable using my full name to receive email, what do most do? <comment><USER2> > I feel a bit uncomfortable using my full name to receive email, what do most > do?

Well, first, most people don't have either the desire or the power to name a domain after themselves. Don't you mean the "user" part of an e-mail address, like this:

        email@example.com

If I met someone who owned a domain that was named after him, and if he wasn't a famous actor or something, I might suspect narcissism.

To answer your question now rephrased, I think it depends on whether you intend to accept responsibility for what you post. It's my experience that young people prefer anonymous "handles", but as one becomes older, the advantage of posting under your own name becomes more obvious.

> This came up when I was trying to setup my own domain for receiving email.

A domain just to receive e-mail? Okay, now I feel out-of-date. There was a time when a simple e-mail address served that purpose, say from Gmail. A Gmail account is free and it can be set up to forward to a secondary email address, so you don't even have to visit your Gmail account if you don't want.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do business with my domain, so I preferred my "real name". I care very much of what I write and so I have "nothing to hide". I believe, some of my customers read my posts in clear name on mailing lists which they found serious and finally contracted me.

I am an amateur musician by night. I spread my music only with pseudonym and send only e-mail by pseudonym.

Not sure what kind of e-mails you are going to send. But if you want to make business (and this business is not upsetting anybody basically) I would go with real name. If you do want to make art, I would prefer pseudonym. I actually have had problems in my day job in times when i published art with real name.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use a pseudonym as the domain with my name was unavailable. If my real name was indeed available, I would use domain with real name.</comment>


Trump reportedly held call with bank CEOs as the stock market plunged - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/16/trump-reportedly-held-call-with-major-bank-ceos-on-wednesday-as-the-stock-market-plunged.html <comment><USER2> Caption on photo of Trump on the phone: "President Trump talks with on the phone in the Oval Office."

"talks with on the phone"? This is a type of typo we haven't seen much in the past. It's clearly a problem were the spell-checker did not put a wiggly red line under anything, so MSNBC just pasted it in. Semantically, it's an error. "talks with" who? Spellcheck is great, don't get me wrong, but grammar checkers just aren't up to even "lazy human copy editor" standards.

<comment><USER3> I look at this more like an undeclared variable in a bash script. They probably use that photo and caption about 1000 times a year and forgot to set CALLEE="Bank CEOs".

"President Trump talks with ${CALLEE} on the phone in the Oval Office."</comment></comment>


Use Google Docs & Google Checkout to Sell Online - <AUTHOR> http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/07/use-google-docs-google-checkout-to-sell.html

<comment><USER2> Combine this with apps for your domain and a google site (running on that domain), and you've got a drop dead simple e-commerce solution, all for the cost of a domain and the time it takes to execute a good design. Have Amazon do fulfillment, and you've got a nearly autonomous store.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exactly the type of tool I've been hoping someone would make for small businesses like my mother's. Since she already knows how to make a spreadsheet of her inventory, all I need to do is place a snippet of code on her website.

</comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately Google Checkout is still USA & UK only.

Edited: exactly those countries with more offers in this area.

<comment><USER5> Always the same thing, it's like the rest of the world didn't exist. Anyway, when there's a problem, there's an opportunity.

Maybe offer Google Checkout to other countries through your own office and bank account in the US?

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, this seems to be directly prohibited by Google Checkout's Terms of Service:

" _The Service may not be used to process a Payment Transaction, or otherwise transfer money between a Buyer and Seller, that is unrelated to a purchase of a Product._ "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google continues to have its hand of the pulse of the online community. They continue to make technology available to the masses.

I would love to see how Google continues to drive all of this innovation. I think many companies could learn a lot from how Google functions.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious whether this will take off (my prediction is that it will not).

People who are serious setting up an online shop, presumably are also (a) hardworking, and (b) smart. Hence I predict they will be OK with investing the time to learn to use one of the more powerful tools (e.g., something that will automatically print mailing labels and decrement quantity on hand all in one database).

I predict people will (a) want power tools for their trade and (b) spend the time to learn the tools of their trade.

This thing is easy to learn, but it does too little. IMHO and I do not have an online shop.

<comment><USER9> The trouble is, that you're limiting yourself to hardworking & smart people. Opening it up this way gives them a much broader audience.</comment></comment>


There Are Some Super Shady Things in Oculus Rift's Terms of Service - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/there-are-some-super-shady-things-in-oculus-rifts-terms-1768678169 <comment><USER2> Many VR developers were alarmed by the Facebook purchase of Oculus for this very reason. Although, I can see from Facebooks perspective how tempting an always-on desktop service would be. It's just unfortunate that VR is now being tied to the privacy issues of social networking.

I wonder if the "privacy advocate" demographic is large enough to impact VR adoption in a significant way? Does a large amount of software innovation come from this demographic? Will the Facebook angle affect business adoption of VR applications?

As a side note - I'm seeing an increasingly large amount of negative news regarding the Oculus release over the last few days from Google alerts. It seems like the latest round of VR tech has been quite polarising in terms of public opinion.</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone else had perceived legitimacy problems using a .io domain? - <AUTHOR> I purchased an .io domain that I have been migrating to. Works great in all respects, except I deal with some older potential customers, or people on the phone, and they often express skepticism. This is especially true with Paypal transactions, and I occasionally have to give the person sending me money my gmail address because they think the .io thing is a scam.
On the phone with people, when I end my address with '.io', they assume I'm not finished talking, or they do a double-take and question it.
Has anyone else dealt with issues like this? <comment><USER2> Interesting problem.

No experience with it myself, but can totally understand people with less knowledge being cautions and spectic.</comment>


Show HN: Capture customer satisfaction score within FB Messenger - <AUTHOR> I have been building a side project that allows businesses to capture feedback from their customers in-store or online via Facebook Messenger. The idea is simple and I should be launching it publicly in next two weeks. I am looking for people who would like to test it out with me with their businesses. So if you (or someone you know) owns a business and is willing to give this a try please signup on the site.<p>http://www.reactionly.com <comment><USER2> Are there particular businesses you are looking for? Is your target business B2B or B2C?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are targeting existing chat bots. The idea is for these bots to be able to capture feedback from their users without having to build the whole backend to track, analyze and understand the feedback that they are getting.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Alexa is confused about leap years - <AUTHOR> Me: Alexa, what's the last day of February 2020?
Alexa: The 28th of February is the last day of February, and it falls on a Friday in 2020.
Me: Alexa, is 2020 a leap year?
Alexa: Yes, 2020 is a leap year.
Me: Alexa, what is the last day of February in a leap year?
Alexa: The 28th of February is the last day of February, and it falls on a Friday in 2020.
Me: Alexa, what is a leap year?
Alexa: A leap year is a year that contains an extra day, the 29th of February...
Me: Alexa, what day is the 29th of February 2020?
Alexa: I couldn't find any matches. <comment><USER2> It makes me wonder how serious this is as a bug. If part of the programming understands leap years, but other parts don't understand the ramifications, it is entirely possible for things to go wonky when dealing with dates such as "The last Saturday of February 2020," or how it'll handle things either on, or scheduled on that day or some time thereafter.

How many days elapse between Friday and Sunday in that week? Depending on what it uses to count, you could get pretty wild answers.

Lots of ways this could go south.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, all responses are consistent with the idea that the world gets destroyed on 28 February 2020.</comment>


Japanese researchers created holograms you can touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-researchers-create-holograms-you-can-touch-2015-12 <comment><AUTHOR> Original paper "Fairy Lights in Femtoseconds: Aerial and Volumetric Graphics Rendered by Focused Femtosecond Laser Combined with Computational Holographic Fields":

[http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1506/1506.06668.pdf](http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1506/1506.06668.pdf)</comment>