Soros to Invest $1 Billion in Clean Energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aMU3BkV3yqPU <comment><USER2> This is a _very_ poor business decision. If Soros goes through with this, he is going to loose a ton of money.

On a cost-per-BTU basis, taking into account upfront CAPEX, cost-of-capital, present-value discounted cash flow analysis (PV10, for example), storage, processing, transport, and end-use thermodynamics, there are no known energy sources in 2009 that are cost-competitive with hydrocarbons.

Which probably explains why such insanely large amounts of cash are flowing to K-Street for Waxman Markey.

The only applications where using something other than hydrocarbons makes business sense, is in applications where the cost of energy is not important.

For instance, telecommunications satellites. Or, closer to home, energizer batteries at the grocery store. A single D-cell lead-acid battery has an energy cost of $500,000 per kilowatt-hour. However, no one thinks of it in those terms -- cost-of-energy is not an important factor for this niche.

Thinking of "renewable energy" sources as a replacement for hydrocarbons is a huge mistake. Hydrocarbons are used in large-scale applications where cost is the only metric that matters. And on that metric, it is impossible to compete with hydrocarbons.

The best bet for "clean tech" is to target niche applications that are underserved by hydrocarbons. Clearly, you're not going to use an internal combusion engine to power your laptop. Rather, you're going to shell out hundreds of dollars for a lithium ion battery -- and then charge that battery from the grid, which is likely to be powered by coal or natural-gas power plants.

To take a page from the enterprise software world, the problem with "clean tech" and "green tech" startups is that they are trying to make a "value" sale in a cost-driven market. That never works.

Unless, of course, you can get the federal government to tax the low-cost producers to death.

<comment><USER3> > cost is the only metric that matters. And on that metric, it is impossible > to compete with hydrocarbons.

Even if considering the cost of the side effects?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speaking of Copenhagen, UNICEF is having a contest for high school students from various countries to go to Copenhagen. It was a written/Youtube video contest.

[http://globalclassroomstudentsdev.innovasium.com/en/involved...](http://globalclassroomstudentsdev.innovasium.com/en/involved/climate_competition/secondary_climate_competition.htm)

Some friends and I made an entry, though we don't expect to win (we didn't have a proper video camera, proper editing, or any experience). Personally, I'm inclined to say that the Youtube video part is a poorly thought out attempt to ``get in touch with the youth of today.''

EDIT: Because it is very difficult to not select for the team with the best video camera, audio, etc. Maybe UNICEF employees can sort through this, somehow...

</comment><comment><USER5> Soros is quoted as stating "The science is beyond dispute" on global warming, and is prepared to invest $1 billion as proof of his conviction.

Do you consider the science beyond dispute? Do you think it is primarily caused by human activities or not? How much do you care, and what have you done about it - if anything?

<comment><USER5> For the record - I consider it way beyond dispute; mostly caused by human activities; I try to limit my carbon footprint (not driving, etc...).

And I'm attempting to develop a "car conversion" kit to convert popular family cars to be plug-in hybrids. Very interesting project involving designing and building new wheel-hub motors + electronics and software.

Having been in software all my professional life, the largest shock when moving into "real" manufacture is how slow it is to get stuff made - considerably longer than a compile.

<comment><USER6> Sounds fascinating - Any chance you can provide some links / Self Post / Reddit IAmA on your progress/challenges?</comment></comment></comment>


EU survey asking citizens if they want to get rid of daylight saving time - <AUTHOR> https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/2018-summertime-arrangements <comment><AUTHOR> This doesn't necessarily mean keeping winter time. From the consultation page[1]:

> _Discontinuing the current bi-annual time changes for all Member States_ and > prohibiting periodic switches; again this would not affect the choice of > time zone, and it would ultimately remain each Member State's decision > whether to go for permanent summer or wintertime (or a different time).

[1]: [https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/2018-summertime- arra...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations/2018-summertime- arrangements_en)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They also provide the survey as a PDF, so in case the website is down (seems to be a bit slow at the moment), here's a mirror: [https://filebin.net/mz8x2ompaqmtwvu4/2018-summertime- arrange...](https://filebin.net/mz8x2ompaqmtwvu4/2018-summertime- arrangements_09_07_2018_EN.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17478108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17478108)</comment>


A/B test results: Mandatory sign up for the free trial ? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alwinhoogerdijk.com/2010/03/31/mandatory-sign-up-for-the-free-trial/ <comment><USER2> The commitment theory would have predicted the outcome.

When you give your email before downloading the software, you commit yourself "more" to the software, increasing the odds of buying it later.

In other words, you will get less downloads but you increase conversion which is what matters.

Read: The Psychology of Commitment by C.A. Kiesler

See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique></comment>


Twitter hack takes over multiple accounts in Bitcoin scam - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/35674/bitcoin-scam-takes-over-crypto-twitter-massive-hack <comment><USER2> Numerous dupes, primary submission is [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851275)</comment>


We Heart Movies - <AUTHOR> http://weheartmovies.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Search. Discover. Share. Find movies that move you. Create collections of your favorite movies and share with friends.</comment>


LaTeX Math in MS Office - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2017/07/30/latex-math-in-office/ <comment><USER3> This is great to see, although it sounds like it's still somewhat in beta. Be interesting to find out if they support packages such as amsmath, either now or in the future.

As a shameless plug, for anyone wanting to use LaTeX without having to install everything locally, the online compilers Overleaf [1] and ShareLaTeX [2] are pretty handy. I'm one of the founders of Overleaf, and we're excited to now be working together with the ShareLaTeX team [3]. Feedback always appreciated :)

[1] [https://www.overleaf.com/](https://www.overleaf.com/)

[2] [https://www.sharelatex.com/](https://www.sharelatex.com/)

[3] [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news- sharelatex-i...](https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex- is-joining-overleaf)

<comment><USER4> Happy sharelatex user here. I'd say one of the essential advantages is rock solid simultaneous editing. I converted a couple of word users and they were instantly hooked. On a tight deadline, no less! Saved our ass in the end - <USER2> slowness of working serially in word would have meant missing the deadline.

<comment><USER5> I highly prefer LaTeX (and Markdown via pandoc) for writing, but Word does not require you to work serially. If you store a document on OneDrive (or SharePoint I guess), you can edit a document with multiple people simultaneously. Both from Word Online and Word on your PC/Mac.

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on- Word...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Word- documents-with-real-time-co-authoring-7dd3040c-3f30-4fdd-bab0-8586492a1f1d)

<comment><USER6> There's a huge difference between "use this specific cloud service" and "use anything that can diff text".

<comment><USER7> "use this specific cloud service" that most large companies and universities are adopting. And with a GUI that's much more familiar to non-programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if Microsoft is going to try to "embrace and extend" LaTeX as they as they have with so many other technologies and standards over the years.

<comment><USER9> They will, intentionally or not. Many think of EEE as of an evil plot, but in reality that's just like all NIH-oriented companies work. Canonical is the same. They take something and after that they make some in-house "improvements" without any care of standards, because they treat every piece of technology as their own, part of _their_ product, and voila, we have a new non-compatible technology. It's cultural, they just can't do it in any other way, even when they make some MIT-licensed OSS.

<comment><USER10> The difference is that Canonical know when their time is up. Microsoft will steam roll everyone with marketing, blogs and noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The example formula in the article looks ugly. It looks like Microsoft Office doesn't support beautiful math formulas using TeX's typesetting engine and TeX's math fonts. [https://www.mathjax.org/](https://www.mathjax.org/) can do it on the web.

<comment><USER12> Huh? The example formula looks great. I really can't fault it. I think maybe you just don't like the font, Cambria Math.

<comment><USER13> I don't particularly like the font, although I only really object to the theta.

There are other nitpicks: The pi looks too italic to me, though I can't really say its wrong (whatever "wrong" means). The spacing between the integral sign and the integrand is too big -- but this is a common problem even in real LaTex.

Overall, it looks decent but just not as nice as the maths that TeX has been pumping out for decades now.

<comment><USER14> As long as we're nitpicking, the d in front of the theta shouldn't really be italicizes, anyway. I'd class that more as an input error than an output error, though.

<comment><USER15> Actually, many mathematics authors use an italic d while the upright d convention is standard in physics and engineering.

<comment><USER13> Is that to disambiguate it from the upright d in exterior calculus?

That would be funny, as that symbol was chosen specifically to overload with the traditional little-d notation from Leibniz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> WSL and now Tex. Some real embracing happening as of late.

<comment><USER17> The MacBook Air being ridiculously noncompetitive and the recent hike in price for the MacBook and the MacBook Pro totally changed the college laptop market.

For the last 10 years+ almost everyone in CS had a Mac from the start or bought one along the way. I'm starting to think this trend will end due to the price hike.

That means that a bunch of new students will use WSL instead of doing their Linux based homework using MacOS *NIX utilities. Adding native LaTeX support in word further makes the platform very attractive for that kind of demographic.

When looking at SV, I see most startups and devs working with Macs. This makes sense as it was probably on Macs that the earliest version of their product was developed. Often the Mac version is the first class version of the app and the windows port often an afterthought. Just look at Node.js that was originally a Mac/Linux exclusive. I think Microsoft want to change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This was added to Pages earlier this year too.[0] I wonder what prompted these features, other than the fact that clicking around to enter equations is a memorable pain.

[0] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207569](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT207569)

<comment><USER19> though not Keynote (yet?)

Mac's in-built but largely unknown Grapher app has the best equation editor I've used. Super easier to use, automatic sub/superscripting, and you can right-click to copy as LaTeX.

Makes me sad that Grapher seems to be abandoned -- Apple invests a lot in pro apps, and consumer apps like Garageband. Where's the love for science/math? Surely the market is as large as the market for, say, musicians? There are a lot of engineers/scientists out there.

<comment><USER20> As a workaround, you _can_ copy and paste equations between Pages and Keynote. It even round trips in the sense that you can edit an equation that was copy- pasted to Keynote by copying it back to Pages.

<comment><USER19> This is really useful, thank you!

As much as I love Keynote it'd be sooo useful to have native equation support, and native code syntax highlighting (can't they port this from XCode?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> LibreOffice has had this for some time:

[http://roland65.free.fr/texmaths/](http://roland65.free.fr/texmaths/)

I do most of my serious typesetting in LyX, so I haven't done much with TeXMaths, but I've used it a little bit. It seems pretty nice: you can have a custom preamble and custom packages (although you'll probably have to link the .sty files you need into the directory where the document lives).

</comment><comment><USER22> I have been waiting so long for this. For PPT it's unfortunately still a bit annoying to enable latex, but I believe MSFT is actively working to fix this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is Microsoft Word able to break the line automatically in a long sum (if entered as a math formula), e.g. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 + 15 + 16 + 17 + 18 + 19 + 20? Is Microsoft Word able to stretch the spaces around the + sign in the math formula to better suit the justified alignment of the paragraph? TeX has been able to do these since the late 1970s.

<comment><USER23> Most importantly, does Microsoft Word support TeX macros? Because I'm not going to type a long sequence of commands every time I want a mathematical symbol in bold face.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is auto-correct as an alternative to parameterless macros, otherwise no, as far as I know, although the last version I've used was 2010.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Microsoft must be on a LaTex kick at the moment. I just noticed there is a Microsoft language plugin for LaTex for VS Code. [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms- vscod...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.latex)

<comment><USER25> "Microsoft" is a collection of 120000 individuals, many of which have used LaTeX for many years themselves (or still are).

<comment><AUTHOR> Heck, one of them is the La of LaTeX ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Math input is the sole reason my school has to keep using Microsoft products. I'm really surprised Google has neglected this so long; while in the meantime MS has caught up in a lot of features (indeed, leapfrogged in some), and we look to shifting back to MS to maintain a unified platform.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this Windows-only? I'm not seeing it on macOS.

<comment><USER28> It says it'll be up next month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Finally! Good job MicroSoft.

</comment><comment><USER30> if one could use LaTex in office it would beg the question why not just use Latex instead..

</comment><comment><USER31> Dear Windows, while you're at it, could you please make home folder encryption available in Windows Home? Because limiting that to Pro is really mean.</comment>


Piper – DIY Computer that plays Minecraft. Great for aspiring hackers - <AUTHOR> http://playpiper.com/products/piper-an-inventor?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=HN <comment><USER2> Looks like a cool project, but this post appears to violate two HN rules: an email signup can't be a Show HN [1], and promotional voting is not allowed [2].

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Whenever people ask me what a good way to teach kids programming is, I always have two suggestions: Arduinos and Minecraft. It's awesome to see someone else was thinking the same way, and put together the perfect kit to combine the two! Kudos.</comment>


IPv6: What Are They Really Thinking? - <AUTHOR> http://www.patexia.com/feed/ipv6-what-are-they-really-thinking-20120608

<comment><USER2> _And it should go without saying that all of that now-unnecessary NAT hardware tends to provide firewalls and other security measures that will no longer be a protective gateway._

It shouldn't go without saying, because it's not true. When using IPv6, you will still have some kind of box that sits between your home network and your ISP, it's just that rather than a Router/Firewall/NAT device, it will just be a Router/Firewall. Users will not notice any difference, and will not face any increased risk.</comment>


It's time software engineers go pro bono - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/its-time-software-engineers-go-pro-bono-steven-alex-littaua/ <comment><USER2> The title makes it sound worse than it actually is because the actual article makes really good points. It's unfortunate the title is the way it is.

Here's an excerpt

> To those in the industry, helping nonprofits does not require you to > sacrifice the food you put on your table. We all need to eat and pay bills. > But during the periods you can volunteer, see if there are solutions you > could provide for nonprofits a few hours at a time. If you are in college, > use pro bono projects as a way to improve your skills and do good at the > same time. It beats putting the same class project on your resume that > everyone else did.

I think a better title would have been "Helping non-profits and volunteering as a software engineer" or something along those lines instead of the more click-baity and imperative phrasing.

Also, a note to the author, consider a more positive phrasing for the tagline

> Technology should benefit us all, not just those who can afford it. We can't > empower change in society without providing the changemakers in nonprofit > the tools to succeed. #nonprofit #npo #hackforgood #probono #software > #softwareengineer #socialgood

E.g.

> Technology [can] benefit us all, not just those who can afford it. We [can] > [enable] change in society [by] [empowering] the people in nonprofit > [organizations] [with the technological tools they need] to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome article. It's very thought provoking.

</comment><comment><USER4> kind of like when they do open source projects?....

<comment><USER5> Can you please read the post before commenting, it literally mentions open source</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good resources(blogs, books) for SQL Query optimization? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> [https://use-the-index-luke.com/](https://use-the-index-luke.com/)

This is the site I was looking for but could not remember. Would recommend 100/100</comment>


Show HN: HyScale – An abstraction framework over Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale <comment> kube-system Wrappers that aim to simplify another technology always make me nervous, especially with a rapidly evolving project.

Yes, this makes it easier to get started -- but when something goes wrong, now you have to hunt down bugs in two layers of software. And, since you've intentionally isolated yourself from the underlying layer, you have less experience with it!

This is why I like Helm. If you write your charts well, you can write your k8s yaml once, and do the things you need to do on a daily basis by adjusting your chart values

<comment><AUTHOR> Your concern is justified. Any abstraction must deal with minimizing leakages. This is why we have started addressing deployment error troubleshooting with some level of diagnosis so that the tool can provide error info in terms of higher-level abstraction.

Helm does require understanding of all the underlying low-level objects defined in Kubernetes. HyScale hopes to provide higher-level entities to deal with, as well as providing ways to do higher-level ops & deployment introspection. We believe it should be possible to satisfy the needs of a reasonably large number (>80%) of apps.

<comment><USER3> > HyScale hopes to provide higher-level entities to deal with, as well as > providing ways to do higher-level ops & deployment introspection.

That's exactly why the operator pattern exists!

Kubernetes stands out from other container orchestration tools for one reason only: it's portable. I can apply my templates to any cluster -empty or not- and my services will be running with the same topology. I can make them work with an existing installation, if I need to. To this end, I need to be able to inspect, modify and understand how everything is fitting together. An abstraction layer will always complicate things.

As said before, Helm is great because it doesn't hide Kubernetes' insides.

<comment><USER4> The first thing that ran through my head when I saw the example of hyscale was: Why isn't this implemented as a CRD? It looks to me like this is a higher level abstraction on top of Deployment resource with more bells and whistles.

<comment><AUTHOR> CRD is a good idea and something to consider for this project. But it does require pre-installing into a cluster before deploying apps. One fundamental difference with HyScale as it currently stands is that it can deploy to any cluster anywhere from any machine and doesn't require to store any state or install anything extra into the cluster. There are pros and cons of both approaches.

HyScale generates standard K8s manifest yamls from hspec as you would write by hand, and in that sense it is portable as well and doesn't hide the underlying yamls if you really wanted to see. Our experience shows that for several apps, one doesn't really need to dig down below. Especially in the case of large teams, you may still want one or two people who understand the underlying mechanism (just as Angular developers may understand underlying JS mechanisms), but everyone else can simply move faster and easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kubernetes complexities are often acknowledged. In our team, we experienced this first-hand while migrating a large PaaS application onto Kubernetes about two years ago. This prompted us to seek out a way to simplify and speed-up app deployments to Kubernetes. This pursuit eventually led us to believe that Kubernetes complexities deserve an abstraction, in quite the same way as JQuery over Javascript, or Spring over Servlets. The HyScale project was born out of this, to create an app-centric abstraction that is closer to the everyday language of developers and devops.

With HyScale, a simple & short service-descriptor allows developers to easily deploy their apps to K8s without having to write or maintain a voluminous amount of K8s manifest YAMLs. This enables self-service deployments as well as development on K8s with minimal IT/DevOps intervention.

We would love to get feedback, ideas and contributions.

<comment><USER5> Congrats on this launch, it's great to see serious efforts at Kubernetes simplification and I hope you succeed! K8s bills itself as a "platform for platforms", and such projects are a real test of that idea.

Questions:

1\. How do you deal with the mutability of K8s resources? Do you assume people won't change the underlying resources that you generate, or do you keep k8s controllers running to ensure there's no deviation?

2\. How understandable is your generated output to humans? Do users have a way to go "backwards" through your abstraction? (Since your tool lives in an ecosystem with many other kubernetes tools, your users will sometimes end up having to deal with the generated output, since other tools operate at the K8s level such as prometheus, log aggregators etc)

3\. Do you interoperate with K8s-level resources well? Do _all_ my services need to be in this abstraction for this to work well? e.g. Can my hyscale yaml reference a non-hyscale service for any reason? Or are they essentially two separate worlds?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your encouraging comments :)

Answers to your Questions:

1\. The expectation is that people deploying through hyscale don't want to go and modify K8s resources directly on the cluster behind the scenes. If they do, then it either deviates from the hspec files in git or they have parallel K8s yamls which won't make much sense either. As of now, hyscale deploys and doesn't keep anything (eg. controller) running, But it's a good suggestion to keep the K8s resources in sync with the desired state (hspec) and we'll certainly put some thought into it.

2\. HyScale outputs standard K8s manifest yamls which are as readable as any well hand-coded. On the other hand, if there was a way to generate back hspec files from existing K8s yamls, would that be interesting/useful?

3\. Suppose you have K8s resources/snippets already written for some of your services, you can refer to them in hspec and add application context to it and make use of profiles for environment variations. If the question is more about off-the-shelf services (eg postgres, redis, etc), we have helm chart support coming up. [https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/Roadmap#2-ots-off- th...](https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/Roadmap#2-ots-off-the-shelf- services-support)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your answers.

> 2

I don't mean literally generating hspec from yaml -- I mean more like operational "source map" support. For example if I look at a pod taking up more CPU than I expect in a dashboard somewhere, I should be able to trace it back to the hspec file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kubernetes was released only 6 years ago so I'd imagine there is still a lot of legitimate evolution left in the ecosystem. I'd have to compliment you for choosing a project like this rather than something that had no chance of working because the ecosystems are completely set, like a new programming language. I believe there will be a distributional challenge for you in getting people to use this software. You can't pay for an advertising campaign. Maybe the most you can do is post on HN, but after that, people will forget about it. The fact that once it's used once in a GitHub project others will be forced to use it provides some hope. You say you want to be like JQuery over javascript. It may be worth it to you to figure out how JQuery solved their distributional challenge. Just as nobody needs to use JQuery, nobody will need to use your software, and there will be a strong temptation for people to bypass it and just use raw Kubernetes.

It is amazing the complexity of modern software projects like Kubernetes and I'd agree they have challenges in creating a simple interface that everyone will like while still getting the software to work consistently. According to the principle of radical skepticism it's amazing that anything so complex works at all.

<comment><USER7> OP - it can be done.

Reach out to the CTOs and VPs of Engineering that list Kubernetes as one of their core technologies. They're most apt to choose K8s for their own team.

Ask them if they've had any issues with Kubernetes, specifically mis- configuration or slow turn around times for configuration changes.

Explain your framework in one or two lines. Pick out one or two _specific_, common problems with K8s and ask them "Are you experiencing X? How about Y?" Talk to them like you already know and feel their pain. Because you do (you wouldn't have created this framework otherwise).

You'll learn a lot. And maybe get adoption and mayb a consulting gig out of it. :)

Use the advanced search on Linkedin to find these people. Make sure your Linkedin title has something to do with being a Kubernetes expert.

If you're in a big city, find those clients that are local first, as you can visit them in person (that goes a long way).

e.g. Senior DevOps Consultant, Specializing in Kubernetes/HyScale.

Here's the people search you need. Use Hunter.io to find their emails.

[https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetGeoUrn=...](https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetGeoUrn=%5B%22103644278%22%5D&facetNetwork=%5B%22F%22%2C%22S%22%5D&keywords=kubernetes&origin=FACETED_SEARCH&title=CTO)

Client outreach can be successful if it's specific and serving a genuine need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat with OpenShift_

This is something I think OpenShift really adds value over "raw Kubernetes." With OpenShift you can treat it a bit like a flexible Heroku with `oc new-app` which can use s2i or your provided Dockerfile and will generate the foundation of what you need. You can then iterate on it if you need something beyond the standard setup.

By the way OKD 4 (the freely available upstream version of OpenShift) is now generally available: [https://www.openshift.com/blog/okd4-is-now-generally- availab...](https://www.openshift.com/blog/okd4-is-now-generally-available)

<comment><USER9> okd4 came ~1yr after ocp4 was there. Can it be trusted it won't have such delays in the future ? What about security fixes, features, will they always lag behind as an incentive to get the paid version? In k8s, even if you maintain iy yourself, there is a huge community and you can always get your fixes. How does okd community compare? okd was on k8s 1.11 till few weeks back, 8 releases behind! Imagine the security issues okd had for such a long period... (ps: even centos seems to be lagging behing badly, centos 7.7 took many months after rhel 7.7).

as for ocp/okd tools like s2i, ansible for replacing helm, routes, deployment configs, etc -> they never took off, community did not agree. Those that did not take care to stay away from stuff that is not pure k8s suffer from beying disconnected from the rest of industry and have to invest to redo everything... not to mention their impossibility to switch to cloud providers solutions like eka,aks,pks,etc...

<comment><USER8> Thanks for your comment. I'll take a bit at a time:

> _okd4 came ~1yr after ocp4 was there. Can it be trusted it won 't have such > delays in the future ?_

This is a fair criticism and great question. I was also really frustrated at this delay, although there was a pretty good technical reason for it. OpenShift was based on Red Hat Core OS, which until recently didn't have an upstream (Fedora CoreOS now fills this void). With the acquisition of Core OS, RH engineers saw an opportunity to totally rethink the Node portion of OpenShift. CoreOS allows you to treat the whole OS as immutable like containers, which makes for some fascinating possibilities. This became a hard requirement for master nodes for a few reasons, one of which is the Node itself is totally managed by an operator[1]. With RHEL being a subscription product, this was a problem for OKD users (no host OS!). I do think RH deserves criticism for not prioritizing the community high enough, but I can assure you it wasn't malice. Also because of this I don't worry about releases falling behind in the future since Fedora CoreOS is generally available now.

[1]: [https://github.com/openshift/machine-config- operator](https://github.com/openshift/machine-config-operator)

> _as for ocp /okd tools like s2i, ansible for replacing helm, routes, > deployment configs, etc -> they never took off, community did not agree. _

This is untrue. DeploymentConfigs _did_ take off. In fact, modern Deployments in K8s are the result of the community agreeing and integrating them into upstream K8s. There are minor differences that were made to balance priorities (primarily CAP theorem considerations, Consistency v Availability[2]), but the two are remarkably similar. The child resources of each (ReplicaSet and ReplicaController) are also super similar.

Regarding Ansible, that works just fine on K8s, and likewise Helm works fine on OCP. OpenShift is not a custom mangled version of K8s - it is K8s, with some custom resources slapped on top. It's true that OCP Routes don't work on plain K8s, but to say that it never took off because the community did not agree is not fair. The modern Ingress of K8s took a lot of inspiration from Routes. Red Hat is the number 2 contributor to K8s (behind Google) and constantly pushes code upstream whenever possible.

[2]: _" DeploymentConfigs prefer consistency, whereas Deployments take availability over consistency. For DeploymentConfigs, if a node running a deployer Pod goes down, it will not get replaced. The process waits until the node comes back online or is manually deleted."_ See: [https://docs.openshift.com/container- platform/4.1/applicatio...](https://docs.openshift.com/container- platform/4.1/applications/deployments/what-deployments- are.html#:~:text=DeploymentConfigs%20prefer%20consistency%2C%20whereas%20Deployments,online%20or%20is%20manually%20deleted).

> _Those that did not take care to stay away from stuff that is not pure k8s > suffer from beying disconnected from the rest of industry and have to invest > to redo everything... not to mention their impossibility to switch to cloud > providers solutions like eka,aks,pks,etc_

I think "redo everything" is pretty unfair and borders on FUD. I've only known one person that moved from OCP to EKS, and the only thing they had to do was change their Route to an AWS Ingress (which is similarly non-portable I might add. It only works on AWS). If you use ImageStreams and such then yeah, you'll have to move those, but it's not very hard. Migrating from OpenShift to "other K8s distro" is really not that bad.

I would also point out that OpenShift/OKD can run nearly anywhere as well, so if you move from AWS to Azure, or bare metal or anything else, you don't necessarily have to abandon OpenShift. There's really no such thing as "just k8s" anyway. If you use any of the custom cloud provider stuff (like the AWS Ingress) then you're not portable without modifications either (and in some cases significant modifications if you have a highly customized ALB for example). If you care about portability, I think OpenShift/OKD is still a decent solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMHO if you need a tool like this, you are normally better off building it yourself in-house. You will inevitably end up fighting all of the leaky abstractions something like this does not support for your use cases.

<comment><USER11> This a hundred times. Do yourself a favour and use Dhall/Cue/Jsonnet to develop some abstractions that fit your workload and environment. There is not much value proposition in a tool like this if you can use a slightly lower- level, more generic tool (like a configuration-centric programming language, which is an actually full-fledged programming language) to accomplish the same goal in a more flexible and more powerful fashion, that leaves you space for evolution and unforeseen structure changes.

The idea of tools mandating what 'environments' are is absurd, as it's pretty much always different for everyone (and that's good!).

<comment><USER12> I've been enjoying using Tanka [1], which is a command-line tool from the Grafana team to manage k8s configurations, which you define using jsonnet. Complete flexibility, with minimal boilerplate possible by using the older (unmaintained unfortunately) ksonnet library [2] or the upcoming jsonnet- libs/k8s(-alpha) (which we're using in production) [3], or roll your own, abstracting to whatever level you find best.

[1] [https://tanka.dev/](https://tanka.dev/)

[2] [https://github.com/ksonnet/ksonnet- lib](https://github.com/ksonnet/ksonnet-lib)

[3] [https://jsonnet-libs.github.io/k8s-alpha/](https://jsonnet- libs.github.io/k8s-alpha/)

<comment><USER11> I've been using kubecfg [1] with kube.libsonnet [2]. I don't like Tanka as it imposes a given directory structure on me via scaffolding - which is a big no- no for the way I organize projects (I value very unopinionated tools in this regard). I also couldn't get into the ksonnet style of mixins/arguments, as it takes away the ease of overriding underlying Kubernetes structures.

[1] - [https://github.com/bitnami/kubecfg](https://github.com/bitnami/kubecfg)

[2] - [https://github.com/bitnami-labs/kube- libsonnet](https://github.com/bitnami-labs/kube-libsonnet)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are the you using the Docker Compose standard ? Your specification looks very familiar.

It would be a killer app if you are.

[https://www.compose-spec.io/](https://www.compose-spec.io/)

<comment><USER14> The examples look like they are not. Yet another Yaml based spec

<comment><USER15> YAY BS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cloud Foundry is doing the same thing and is even longer on the market than Kubernetes. They started with their own container orchestration layer and switch over to Kubernetes. see: \- [https://specify.io/systems/cloudfoundry/features-and- usecase...](https://specify.io/systems/cloudfoundry/features-and-usecases) \- [https://www.cloudfoundry.org/](https://www.cloudfoundry.org/)

Its also backed by some serious enterprises: \- [https://www.cloudfoundry.org/memberprofiles/](https://www.cloudfoundry.org/memberprofiles/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can the author talk about how this compares to other similar-sounding projects like Rancher's Rio[0] or Cloud Foundry[1]?

[0] [https://rancher.com/blog/2019/introducing- rio](https://rancher.com/blog/2019/introducing-rio)

[1] [https://www.cloudfoundry.org/kubecf/](https://www.cloudfoundry.org/kubecf/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Just what people running kubernetes needs, more yaml!

<comment><AUTHOR> :-) Actually less yaml. Typically without an abstraction like Hyscale, for a micro-service you might end up having to write / maintain a couple of hundred lines of K8s yaml including things like sidecars, ingress, PVCs, config-maps, etc. whereas the same service can be described in hyscale spec using barely 20-30 lines of yaml consisting of higher-level entities/language that is intuitive to most developers. You also get simpler troubleshooting of deployment errors and worry less about having to deal with backward compatibility with each new K8s version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a good idea but with simplicity being the value proposition it looks like you have spec files that are roughly the same length as a yaml file I could deploy with k8s. I think it would need to be much much simpler to be more valuable, just my take.

<comment><AUTHOR> Typically without an abstraction like HyScale, for a micro-service you might end up having to write / maintain a couple of hundred lines of K8s yaml including things like sidecars, ingress, PVCs, config-maps, etc. and linking up these yamls with the right selector-labels, etc.

Whereas the same service can be described in hyscale spec using a few dozen lines. But it's not just about the number of lines, the HyScale hspec is defined in terms of higher-level app-centric entities that are intuitive to most developers.

You also get simpler troubleshooting of deployment errors and worry less about having to maintain compatibility of your K8s manifest yamls with each new K8s version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really like git push workflows (Heroku / Dokku). I would use [https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler- kubernetes](https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes) , but it doesn't support Dockerfiles, and I need Dockerfiles for a few of the applications that I want to run.

It would be great if there were some docs on how to integrate Hyscale with, for example, a Github action to enable enable deployment on a push to master. It wouldn't be too difficult for me to set up, but having a "right way" to do it written by the maintainers would give me much more confidence.

<comment><USER17> Does Cloud Foundry/Cloud Native Buildpacks enable the Heroku workflow on k8s?

[https://devstack.in/2020/01/03/introduction-to-cloud- native-...](https://devstack.in/2020/01/03/introduction-to-cloud-native- buildpacks-with-kubernetes/)

[https://www.cloudfoundry.org/kubecf/](https://www.cloudfoundry.org/kubecf/)

<comment><USER21> Yes.

Disclosure: I work for VMware.

<comment><USER20> How so? Do you have some examples?

<comment><USER21> Broadly, once you've installed CF on Kubernetes, the process is:

        cf push

The code gets uploaded, buildpacks chew on it thoughtfully, out pops a running process with route, log capture and service binding.

I've worked on and around Cloud Foundry for about 5 years now. It's still a much easier and more complete developer experience than anything I've so far touched in Kubernetes land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe just me, but I've never thought of kubernetes as being complex for users. To me the complex bit of K8s isn't deploying to it, but administration of it. Figuring out the architecture, debugging some silly thing not working etc.

<comment><USER23> Absolutely agree. There's a ton of literature on how to get started etc but not a lot on "day 2", the "now what" experience in production. (Friend working on it: [https://day2kube.com/](https://day2kube.com/) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A lot of attempts at "simplifying k8s" seem to be writing some type of "coffee-script" that generate the underlying yaml. What I (think I) want is just some good UI built for essential workflows.

<comment><USER25> There are a lot of advantages to defining these things in some form of text- based configuration files. You get to track everything in source control, you don't need to worry about upgrades somehow breaking the UI or database, you can quickly and easily check any deployment config anywhere if needed, you can diff changes in a sensible way.

Adding a web UI option in addition isn't a bad idea at all, but I like the canonical form being config files, be it YAML or HCL or some CoffeeScript-type thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> _Spring over servlets_

This is not actually true. Servlets were never complicated. Documentation, specially the Javadoc, is terrific. I/Os and API are pretty simple. Problem is that there's a lot of boilerplate, and you ended up with a lot of copy-paste. But repetitive doesn't mean complicated. Spring solved may of these issues by providing the boilerplate.

k8s is actually complicated. Both conceptually, and in implementation.

I don't think it's an apt comparison.

</comment><comment><USER27> Awesome!

I did a deep dive into K8s in the last two weeks (usually doing serverless) and I think it really needs projects like HyScale to step up its game.

Even with EKS+Fargate, which remove master and worker provisioning/maintenence, K8s is still orders of magnitude behind serverless solutions in terms of dev experience.

</comment><comment><USER28> So this is two components:

\- 1. Compiles high level config into lower level Kubernetes config.

\- 2. Sends/runs that config on a Kubernetes cluster.

<comment><USER29> If it were just that, then overall the project would be dangerous trap, as there is a big cost of added complexity from the new high level configuration language with its limitations and own terminology (volumes, etc).

Adding a wrapper, and then eventually forcing you to learn all the abstractions that leak through, creates an attractive nuisance. The Hyscale project is at least trying to overcome this problem. Not sure how well they succeed.

Along with the high level config it attempts to help untangle common K8s debugging steps, which normally require using multiple tools to determine what caused an error condition like CrashLoopBackoff - <USER2> [https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/App-centric- Troubles...](https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/App-centric- Troubleshooting)

Looking at the code they painfully enumerate different Docker and K8s options in Java, so it will be expensive to maintain and keep up to date - the host company Primati may have the resources to do this and that's exciting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How (and how well) does the docker file generation work? What languages/framework do you support?

<comment><AUTHOR> You simply specify the stack image that your service needs along with the service source/binaries. See here for more: [https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/Tutorial#using- hysca...](https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/Tutorial#using-hyscale-to- build-your-image-optional)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks super interesting. I'm curious how this can handle conditional logic like Helm supports?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonder what kind of conditional logic you would want to apply. If its more for managing differences between different environments (say staging vs prod), you could just use the profiles option in HyScale: [https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/Tutorial#specifying-...](https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/Tutorial#specifying- over-rides-for-different-environments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can't wait for the abstraction over HyScale. It's abstractions all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER33> What about mesh setups does this Hyscale support meshing.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can deploy sidecar agents using HyScale for your mesh. We're looking at further abstracting out things like VirtualService and we're also watching SMI related developments. If there's any specific mesh use-cases that you'd like to see abstracted out from a service deployment perspective, do let us know on our github page.

<comment><USER33> Yes so the idea would be to use something like "Kong" or "weave net" whatever as the "orchestrator" and then bundle ir up in an easy fashion. I'm always more inclined into lower performance requirements scenarios so for example not always we need a Kubernetes.. I have setup for PM2 on redundancy in which I can run on low-end VPS for example. The "Overload" of Kubernetes is just too much and the costs are way up in the roof it's becoming to bloated so focusing on minimalist with K3S is a must and people looking for mesh are certainly the ones not wanting to rely on any cloud provider's orchestrator, they want to have their machines spinned up anywhere by themselves. That's the beauty of the Mesh. I was able to setup weave net on low-end machines but it takes up a lot of resources so it's not trivial, K3S also is possible within low-end but lacks a lot of stuff so for now I'm just sticking with PM2 only on low-end and K3S on bigger machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not an expert. Comparison to terraform?

<comment><AUTHOR> Terraform takes a more infrastructure-centric approach and its strength is typically for provisioning infrastructure such as putting up a K8s cluster, etc. than for deploying apps (although you can). Whereas HyScale is aimed at defining higher-level entities in a language that developers understand intuitively without any extra learning curve.

HyScale also aims to reduce the amount of abstraction leakage by dealing with aspects of troubleshooting and runtime operations as well. So this application-centric abstraction enables self-service deployments as well as development on K8s with minimal IT/DevOps intervention.

For more, see: [https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/App-centric- Abstract...](https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale/wiki/App-centric-Abstraction)

<comment><USER14> Terraform is moving into the k8s space FYI. So you can use HCL instead of Yaml.

[https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/deploy-any-resource-with- the-...](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/deploy-any-resource-with-the-new- kubernetes-provider-for-hashicorp-terraform/)

<comment><USER35> From what I understand, Terraform's k8s provider doesn't abstract k8s details. You still have to deal with the same complexity.

(Disclosure: I work for Pramati - the parent company behind Hyscale)

<comment><USER14> You can abstract using TF capabilities, they just aren't hidden like HyScale. HCL is widely used, people already use the TF tool, so you end up not having to add more deps and yet another DSL to learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Url changed from [https://hyscale.github.io](https://hyscale.github.io), which redirects to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can access the project here [https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale#readme](https://github.com/hyscale/hyscale#readme) or at [https://hyscale.github.io](https://hyscale.github.io)</comment></comment>


Another Group Photo Sharing Service? Yeah But ZangZing Actually Works - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/13/another-group-photo-sharing-service-yeah-but-zangzing-actually-works/ <comment><USER2> Are there a lot that _don't_ work or something?

<comment><USER3> I think the headline is directed at Color.</comment></comment>


Google's Doubleclick ad servers exposed millions of computers to malware - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/19/6537511/google-ad-network-exposed-millions-of-computers-to-malware

<comment><USER2> Use ad blockers. Tell your friends to use ad blockers. Install ad blockers on your families computers.

<comment><USER3> Would you have been protected by Adblock Plus since it allows Google ads (default config)?</comment></comment>


EU commission recommendation on usage of mobile technology to combat Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32020H0518&from=EN <comment><USER2> They seem to be at least trying:

      (10) Paramount throughout the process should be respect for all fundamental rights, notably privacy as well as data
           protection, the prevention of surveillance and stigmatization.

        On these specific issues, the Toolbox should therefore:

        (1) strictly limit the processing of personal data for the purposes of combating the COVID-19 crisis and ensure that
            the personal data are not used for any other purposes such as law enforcement or commercial purposes;

        (2) ensure regular review of the continued need for the processing of personal data for the purposes of combating
            the COVID-19 crisis and set appropriate sunset clauses, so as to ensure that the processing does not extend beyond
            what is strictly necessary for those purposes;

        (3) take measures to ensure that, once the processing is no longer strictly necessary, the processing is effectively
            terminated and the personal data concerned are irreversibly destroyed, unless, on the advice of ethics boards
            and data protection authorities, their scientific value in serving the public interest outweighs the impact on
            the rights concerned, subject to appropriate safeguards.</comment>


Little Man Computer - <AUTHOR> http://peterhigginson.co.uk/LMC/

<comment><USER2> This is a nice implementation.

I made something similar [1], based on the Post Room Computer [2].

Basically it is a two address (operand) modification of the LMC. It was used to as a teaching tool for undergrad students at my local university.

It's a bit more fully featured - It supports absolute and register based address modes, macros, programs spanning multiple files. The computer is accessible via command line or using the in-built Java Swing UI.

If anyone is bored and wanted to run it, heres a sample program:

      ;; A simple multiplication program

      INP :x:		; Input value and store at location :x:
      INP :y:		; Input value and store at location :y:
      MOV :result: :x:	; Copy the value at :x: into :result:

      ; Multiplication loop
      :loop:
    	  SUB :y: :one:	; Substract 1 from the the value at :y:
    	  JMP EQZ :end:	; If result of subtraction was 0, stop looping
    	  ADD :result: :x:	; Add the value at :x: to the result

      ; If the program reaches this stage multiplication is not complete
      ; So jump back to start of loop
      JMP LWY :loop:

      :end:		; Label to exit the loop
      OUT :result:	; Output the result
      HLT		; Stop execution

      ; Data Stores
      :x: (0)
      :y: (0)
      :result: (0)
      :one: (1)

[1] [https://github.com/Richard-Walton/The-Post-Room- Computer](https://github.com/Richard-Walton/The-Post-Room-Computer)

[2] [http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/2518/](http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/2518/)

<comment><USER3> > Post Room Computer

Given that your link spells this "Postroom Computer" and is British, I'm guessing it has to do with mail (as in, the post; as in, what there is none of on Sundays) as opposed to any of the work of Emil Post, who formalized computation similarly to, independently of, but less famously than, Turing.

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

<comment><USER2> Yes, correct :).

In the "Post Room Computer" analogy, the little man works in a post (mail) room.

The mailboxes are memory, in/out trays are IO, etc etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great simulation.

I've used it with 12 and 13 year olds to help explain how a computer works - [https://www.bournetocode.com/projects/8-CS- Computers/pages/6...](https://www.bournetocode.com/projects/8-CS- Computers/pages/6_Lesson.html)

Peter is a very helpful guy as well. He sent me his files so I could host the simulation and avoid problems with cross-site scripting. He even made alterations to make it easier to control the LMC using opcodes rather than Assembly.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting working with this kind of limited instruction set.

I made a thing that fills the memory with the sequence of numbers from LEN to 1 and outputs it.

              BRA START
      DEST    DAT 60 // Where to start writing
      LEN     DAT 40 // Size of the sequence
      UNIT    DAT 1
      START   LDA DEST
              ADD STOREI
              STA STOREI
      LOOP    LDA LEN
      STOREI  STA 0 // Self modifying code be here
              OUT
              SUB UNIT
              BRZ END // Halt after writing last number
              STA LEN
              LDA STOREI
              ADD UNIT
              STA STOREI
              BRA LOOP
      END     HLT

This is surprisingly fun!

</comment><comment><USER6> great simulator

</comment><comment><USER7> Could anyone ELI5?

<comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_man_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_man_computer)</comment></comment>


Flickr now offers Public Domain and CC0 designations - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/03/30/flickr-now-offers-public-domain-and-cc0-designations/

<comment><USER2> Props to Flickr for the change, and a shout out to the woman who brought the issue to their attention, librarian Jessamyn West: [https://medium.com/message/why-spacex-s-photos-are-now- publi...](https://medium.com/message/why-spacex-s-photos-are-now-public- domain-178f50a62218)

Jessamyn _also_ invented the warrant canary. She is rad.

<comment><USER3> Just publicized, did not invent! But thank you very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like there've been a crop of small sites trying to build in a "public domain stock photography" niche ([http://www.pexels.com/](http://www.pexels.com/), [https://stocksnap.io/](https://stocksnap.io/), and [https://unsplash.com/](https://unsplash.com/) to name a few). I wonder if this will kill them off. :-/

Right now [http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons](http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons) (where I usually head to look for creative commons photos) lists zero public domain images.

<comment><USER5> Marc from StockSnap.io here! We honestly couldn't be happier that Flickr is doing this and we'll be sure to add their CC0 photos to our repository.

<comment><USER4> I have no idea why it didn't even occur to me that the sharing went both ways - totally makes sense now. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe some day, Flickr will actually start to care about CC a bit and log licence changes from CC licences to other licence. Current workflow allows photographers to revoke these CC licences after a while and this effectively prevents many people from using CC pictures because nobody wants to be sent to trial because he's used CC pictures with correct attributions that have mutated to All Rights Reserved suddenly.

This sucks. (ramblings of an old fotopedian)

<comment><USER7> Hit the Flickr URL with Archive.org, which should capture both the image, date+time, and the CC license present at time of archive. The Wayback Machhine has been used in court before, so precedent does exist.

javascript:void(open('//web.archive.org/save/'+encodeURI(document.location)))

<comment><USER8> When building www.everydaydreamholiday.com we cached and screenshot all the external images used (never build a scale solution because we never, um, scaled).

Interestingly, we let the photographers know as well, for a variety of reasons including the possibility they had set CC unintentionally. Most were grateful - we woke up one morning to an irate barrage from one photographer who had uploaded his image to Wikipedia without appreciating what that meant. We just changed the photo we used, and sent him a link to the Public Domain Photo on Wikipedia and a dozen other sites he might want to contact who were also using it. He apologised immediately, which was neat.

Given the amazing images available under CC (even for commercial use), it frustrates me when websites try to steal protected images and get away with it. If I can find a CC Commercial Use image of marshmallows toasting over lava in Guatemala [1], you can find a fully legal image of a sunset.

[1] [http://everydaydreamholiday.com/2013/01/24/pacaya-volcano- an...](http://everydaydreamholiday.com/2013/01/24/pacaya-volcano-antigua- guatemala-toasting-chocolate-marshmallows-over-lava/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been wondering how Aviate identify and curate their lovely background images.

They all come from Flickr... but not sure what groups they'd be following, or search parameters they'd be using to narrow it down.

Prior to this change... I presume they would be restricted to CC-attribution?

</comment><comment><USER10> Only about 10 years too late?

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it because Elon Musk made all SpaceX media Public Domain?

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150322/07190730399/elon-...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150322/07190730399/elon- musk-says-spacex-photos-are-now-fully-public-domain.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't like it. There might be appropriate circumstances for public domain designations, but I think it seems much more attractive to laypeople than it should. Most people should probably stick to licensing their artistic work with something resembling one of the creative commons licenses.

It's always been possible to designate an image to the public domain on flickr, by pasting a designation into the description, but this gave it a level of overhead that I think discouraged people who hadn't thought about it much to avoid it.

Edit: This is getting downvotes, which I'm not sure I understand, but I'll assume it's because I didn't explain the problems with public domain designations. If there are other reasons, I'd appreciate a comment explaining them.

IANAL, but as I understand, there's some debate over whether works _can_ be committed to the public domain at all. This makes some individuals, and a lot of big companies, hesitant to make use of anything with a public domain designation. Most people who try to commit something to the public domain rather than picking a popular non-restrictive license do so in effort to remove all obstacles to people using it, without realizing that there might be more obstacles with a public domain designation than a CC-BY license.

<comment><USER13> If I am uploading historical photographs that are in the public domain, I should absolutely have an easy way to mark them as such. Not everyone uses Flickr like Instagram to share the last neat thing they saw on the street.

<comment><USER12> OK, I overlooked this use-case.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I think you may be focusing on the "creative art" aspect of this and less on other use cases. My mom is a retired photographer and she loves seeing other people use or repurpose (and yes even sell) some of the pictures she takes. In public libraries we want a way to share images the widest way possible and don't always have our own space to do that.

I get that you're concerned that people don't understand the public domain, but I think the response to that is more (and better) explanations about what it is and why it's important, not disallowing people access to tools that they want on a platform they use.

<comment><USER14> Which is a case where she should use CC0 and not the public domain marking.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPhone Upgrade Cycle Slows as Customers Perceive Lack of Innovation - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/22/iphone-upgrade-rates-prices/ <comment><USER2> For me, it's a combination of insufficiently advanced new features, combined with a loss of fingerprint ID and forced switching to Face ID.

I absolutely do not want the latter under any circumstances whatsoever, while I do find the former to be useful and desirable in some cases — just not for unlocking the phone.

I don't mind if the device is capable of Face ID — I can always just completely ignore that.

But if it doesn't have fingerprint ID, then I'm not interested. In that case, should I be in a situation where I am forced to buy a new device, then I will buy a refurb older device that can do fingerprint ID instead of a new one that can't.

And so, I wait.</comment>


I Built Myself a Workshop in My Very Small San Francisco Studio Apartment - <AUTHOR> http://dammitcoetzee.com/2019/01/a-workshop-in-an-sf-studio/ <comment><USER2> Someday........

I thought about using the "easy fit" floors that fitness centers use for a floor, and then adding a layer of ply on top of it to create flooring that can be taken away if needed without damaging the original floor.

Thanks for more inspiration to move my lazy butt and do something.

<comment><AUTHOR> no problem! glad you enjoyed:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why does the final picture not include the Herman Miller chair? I bet it's because the arms extend too far. I bet that idiot bought the chair because it's beautiful and deceptively comfortable, only to realize that it's impossible to pull up to a desk for working. I bet the only purpose the chair serves is to have guests sit in it and demand that they feign interest in it. At least they didn't spring the extra for the upholstered finish. [puts head down, sobs quietly.]</comment>


Tell HN: Paul Graham will be live on Mixergy w/ Andrew Warner, 2/9 @11AM PST - <AUTHOR>

Tuesday 2/9 Andrew will be interviewing Paul Graham live on Mixergy.com at 11:00AM PST.  Please post any questions you have for PG here in the comments.  Hopefully Andrew can work in a few of the questions that receive the most upvotes.<p>Upcoming Mixergy guests along with handy calendar subscription links can be found here: http://mixergy.com/coming-soon/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://mixergy.com/coming-soon/></comment>


Build your own Google Glass - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-your-own-google-glass <comment><USER2> When you can remember everything with 100% perfection there is no distinction anymore between the food you're eating and the food you ate 20 years ago. Between the people you're with and the people you knew long ago. And so on.

In one of Aldous Huxley's books (island) there is the Minah bird, whose main role in life is to remind people to live 'here and now'. This is the opposite of that. Either you'll end up re-living the past all the time or you will end up not using it.

Either way I don't see the benefit. I'd rather live here and now and eventually forget than to be addicted to my own past, my memory is more than good enough as it is.

The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area.

<comment><USER3> _The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area._

Yes, some research shows that reviewing the things an Alzheimer's patient did that day, along with other pertinent facts, slows the degeneration. I've long wondered if memory loss behaves similar to traditional forgetting of facts, if you could do training similar to spaced repetition to combat it long-term, or if it only works in early stages.

For the last several years, I've been considering the greatest beneficiaries of a perfect digital memory may not be ourselves at all, but our descendants: _I am also aware that I will not care about every minute of footage in 20 years. The problem is, I don't have the foggiest idea which minutes I'll care about, and I am not ready to let go of any of it yet._ [http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomar...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/08/backup#comment-6385)

You have no idea what your children will find interesting or important, and to presume to edit your life down or to not record it at all, while entirely within your right, might perhaps be considered negligent in the future. We all have crazy uncles and adventuring grandfathers whose stories we have only heard fragments of, which we'd love to know more about. Wearable computing and lifelogging may be an answer to that, a way to enable that sort of generational storytelling.

<comment><USER2> This is my life and I get to do with it what I want. If my descendants want to have interesting lives they'll have to go and make their own, not piggy-back on mine.

And if they truly believe I've been negligent they're welcome to pass their inheritance to their siblings.

<comment><USER3> In the PDF deck I linked to about my work, I describe storytelling like this:

 _Storytelling is sensemaking and placemaking of the: past (genealogy), present (diaries and journals) and future (personal [digital] archives)._

At PDA2012, there had to have been half a dozen personal storytelling startups, most with a genealogy hook.

You have all the time in the world to scan photos, to write in your diary, but you're running out of time to ask your grandmother how she got that scar, or your grandfather why his hair turned white in the war.

Perhaps you've never been curious about your forebears, but to discount the possibility entirely out of fear that your children's children will enjoy pop- pop's stories so much they'll forget to live their own lives seems churlish to me.

<comment><USER2> I've read my grandmothers diary. It was extremely interesting, especially because I got a first persons account of world war II, and the way it affected her and the rest of the family.

But I don't feel like I have some kind of right to know anything beyond what she chose to tell and I hope my kids will have the good grace to look at me in a similar way. By the looks of it that won't be a problem.

It's one thing to be interested about ones forebears, another to be obsessed by it. When my mom went all out on some genealogy site and put all of my details in there as well as those of my spouse, kids and so on we asked her to please stop doing that.

Besides the obvious privacy angles I don't think kids that can't stand up for their rights should be included in the documentation that others place online, by the same token my kids and their descendants don't have an automatic right to any level of detail about me.

I remember that one of the dictators (Kim Yong-Il iirc) of NK had a film crew following him making a documentary about his life. The guy was batshit insane, and I feel that anybody that wants to document their live to that extent has an overgrown feeling of self importance.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the detailed response!

I think this is a great illustration of the privacy (and thus related legal) issues that simply aren't being addressed in the research and commercialization efforts thus far. We saw a little of this with Instagram's photomap, that people's locations were being "outed" because they were tagged in someone else's photo and that person chose to make their locations public, but it's going to get more complicated before it makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i'm actually interested in the "augmented reality" aspect of this (as opposed to seeing new e-mail notifications, video calls, location info and whatever).

Imagine being able to create content only visible either through an app's camera or these kind of glasses. Like "Second Life"but on the real world.

"Placing" notes, pictures, videos for your friends or public at certain places; 2/3D objects like arrows pointing at that awesome coffee shop.

Actually thought hard at implementing a prototype (for Android) but my current skills are under par.

<comment><USER5> I've been re-reading William Gibson novels in order, currently on All Tomorrow's Parties.

Anyway, when I re-read Idoru, I wondered why we don't really have anything like its proto-cyberspace. With its Walled City, a distributed common virtual world. I can see why the matrix of Neuromancer doesn't really make sense, but having played enough mmos in the intervening years, I'm a little surprised Walled City or something like Snowcrash's Metaverse isn't a thing.

It seems like if the infrastructure for it existed, the Reddit crowd et al would build it out in no time.

We've got half-assed things like Second Life, and I think a lot of Minecraft's appeal is from that same strain. But nothing that really works properly.

It just seems like something that would actually happen eventually, it seems like the demand is there.

<comment><USER4> I see. In theory, like any idea, sounds cool. I've actually taken real world pictures around my building to mockup a possible UI sometime.

The issue is that, as far as i know, geo-location (GPS at least) has a +-10 meter precision, so placing content at a specific spot is, fuzzy.

ps.: by placing content at a specific spot, i mean grabbing the latitude/longitude/height and possibly direction from the device and allowing anyone around it to see it by pointing a device (smartphone/tablet/glasses) there.

edit: of course, the precision is really an issue depending on what your'e "tagging". If you're adding stuff to a town square, +- 10 meters don't make any difference :-)

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, there are many, many smartphone apps that enable this, both using augmented reality and not, and many other research-level prototypes in the literature.

If you've never heard of any of them, perhaps that's because in practice it's not as great an idea as it sounds.

<comment><USER4> Good to know, thanks! (one less vaporware i have to worry about)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Instead, the greatest value will be in second-generation applications that provide total recall and augmented cognition. Imagine being able to call up (and share) everything you have ever seen, or read the transcripts for every conversation you ever had, alongside the names and faces of everyone you ever met. Imagine having supplemental contextual information relayed to you automatically so you could win any argument or impress your date._

This is the common wearable computing utility argument, but in practice, it doesn't seem to pan out.

Gordon Bell digitized much of his life, and everything for the past ten or twenty years. Phone calls, emails, a photo every sixty seconds, more when his heart rate increased. He hardly ever went back to it. Revisiting it was so rare as to be a notable event in and of itself. Rather, he found people with whom he had conversations would go to him and use him as a reference library.

Bradley Rhodes' Remembrance Agent was an Emacs thing which actively indexed and cross-referenced anything you were typing with things you had written before. He's working on Glass now, afaik: <http://www.remem.org/> It isn't a generally useful solution because it requires that you live inside of Emacs. Today you'd need something that could index across multiple devices, multiple independent cloud storage systems, multiple independent accounts, etc.; or something that was locked into a single ecosystem and you lived entirely there, but then you'd develop "blind spots" for things that occurred elsewhere, like how you stop hanging out with certain friends because the only way they communicate with you is via Facebook but you turned off all of Facebook's notifications.

There was an essay a long time ago, a writer had been filing every link and every note into a pre-Evernote piece of notetaking/hyperlinking/PIM software, something with an X or a Z in the name, but I can't recall it or the piece. The essay was about an article he was writing during which the software brought up a saved article and a note he had written, and forgotten about, in a creepily timely and seemingly prescient moment. He wondered at what point the software needs to get credit for providing the research and the associations.

"Forgetting" is a key part of human existence that most wearable applications tend to ignore. "You were last here with [your ex]" says Foursquare. "You haven't talked with [your ex] in a while, make her day by leaving a message on her wall" says Facebook. Using someone's precise words against them can be emotionally cruel. Legally, you're expected to forget all of the specific details of things like trade secrets and company processes when you leave a job; how is that to be reconciled with your perfect, digital memory? None of these things are being actively explored.

We already hit the "second generation" of applications as described by the author; it's the third generation that interests me.

<comment><USER6> Excellent comment! But I take issue with a few points.

I think that recording everything is _almost_ useless, without a good filter (approaching AI levels). The real power, I think, comes in recall and referencing. Just as an example, I've been reading "The Stars my Destination" and two words came up that I didn't recognize (epileptoid and asthenic - funny, FF doesn't recognize them either!), and it would have been handy to just look them up quickly.

As to "forgetting", people already abuse current mnemonic devices (such as photos) to "hold on" too long, and using people's words against them is a problem with or without perfect recall.

For trade secrets, etc, you do what any high security facility does: recording/transmitting devices left at the door, outside, and simply accept the crippling that comes from lack of instant access to information.

Also, what's wrong with living inside Emacs? ;P

Edit to followup: Works of fiction I've found interesting in this vein include "The Final Cut" (even with the poor execution) and "Strange Days"; anyone have any recommendations along these lines?

<comment><USER3> > _using people's words against them is a problem with or without perfect > recall_

Yes, it is! But one thing I've learned in managing online communities is that you don't give people the ability to do something you don't want them to do. I don't feel having perfect electronic recall should be a feature without more context sensitivity.

> _For trade secrets, etc, you do what any high security facility does_

Except for the Steve Mann argument: it's a prosthesis. When you take the hardware away from him, you're disabling him. He becomes disoriented and cannot function as well. It's like taking away a wheelchair, or crutches, or a hearing aid. And when more and more of your potential employees rely on these devices 18 hours a day, more and more will be negatively impacted. No, I think it's something that has to be fixed in the legal system or fixed in the entire design of a wearable system.

> _Works of fiction I've found interesting in this vein_

The novel "Snow Crash" has wearable computing used only by a subset of wired individuals derisively called "gargoyles." Everyone else still uses workstations.

The "Old Man's War" series of books has soldiers with embedded computers, including a subset of soldiers who have them embedded since birth.

The novel "Permanence" also has them, but used for pervasive IP rights enforcement.

The novel "Signal to Noise" has an elite intellectual class with implants that work with pervasive wireless sensors and fully immersive workstations.

The film "Stranger Than Fiction" has AR-style overlays at least during the opening sequences.

The short film "Sight" touches on AR and behavorial control a bit: <http://vimeo.com/46304267>

This kottke.org piece covers a few other shorts: <http://kottke.org/12/04/the- real-google-glasses>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mapping has traditionally focused not on the past, but on the future. Specifically, in considering courses of action. The Olympian perspective maps provide allow people to account for far more information than they can derive from their immediate surroundings in that particular moment. Having visualized a potential course of action, maps then lead back to the here and now, and indicate where the first step should fall. In other words, they're about identifying the optimal path from this moment into a future moment that is preferable to others.

In carrying out this process, there have always been four limiting factors. The first results from the precision and accuracy of the map itself. The second results from how well people can locate themselves in the map, and accordingly, how much confidence they can place in the plans they derive from it. The third, has to do with how swiftly people can toggle back and forth between the cartographic view (outside the bubble looking in) and the ground view (inside the bubble looking out). For example, 18th Century mariners using the lunar distance method for determining longitude at sea may need hours to gather raw information from the relative positions of the horizon, stars and moon then run the calculations to correctly position themselves on a map in order to determine the precise compass bearing they should follow, which is something we can no derive in realtime. The final limit has to do with the kinds of information that can be mapped, and how swiftly it can be refreshed. Once, we could only map coastlines. Now we can map the clouds above them. At the extent of the mappable expands, so does the range of factors that can guide our plans for the future.

As far as humans go, the first three factors have absolute theoretical limits while the fourth is theoretically unlimited. Google Glass represents a development in which all three of the theoretical limits are reached simultaneously, while the fourth has the lid taken off. Thanks to our survey instruments, we can expect to map the entire globe with millimeter precision, and locate any object within similar precision. Tools like Glass provided a realtime overlay of information that could, at one stage, only be gotten by consulting a map and plotting a course. And with billions of sensors on Earth and in Space feeding data to enormously powerful processing centers, the range of inputs for cartographic overlays just gets bigger and bigger.

I've become firmly convinced that our arrival at this points represents a seminal moment in human development, one that will stand out in the history of our species for centuries, if not millennia to come.

<comment><USER3> As someone with a degree in geography, this is a bit hyperbolic, and a bit of a one-sided, urban, first world, view of cartography that might be nice for advertisers in big cities with pervasive 4G or wifi, but will also be ignored everywhere else.

Mapping is _traditionally_ about sensemaking and placemaking. Precision and accuracy are two different things, and both are entirely context dependent. There's a famous book, _How to Lie with Maps,_ all about it. Maps are how we take things from others by drawing a line in a different place, or how we explore boundaries by drawing what we know and wondering what's everywhere else. They are stories on paper that sometimes have legal or royal or personal meaning, but they are always still stories. Geography is a social science, and cartography is as much art as it is evidence.

In _Sketching User Experiences,_ Bill Buxton tells a story about maps, where your Google Glass example breaks down:

 _Imagine that you were kayaking off the coast of Greenland, and needed a chart to find your way. You might have a paper chart, but you will probably have trouble unfolding it with your mittens on, and in any case, it will probably get soaked in the process and become unreadable. From the urban perspective, an alternative solution might be to go to your PC and use a mapping program on the internet... However, there is a minor problem here, too. You don't have your PC with you in the arctic, much less in your kayak. We all know about internet-enabled cell phones and PDAs--they might provide another alternative. Why not jump on the internet using your cell phone, and get the map that way?

But here is the problem. You probably can't get cellular service where you are in your kayak. And even if you can, your battery is probably dead because it is so cold. Or, your phone won't work because it is wet. Even if your mobile phone does work, and you have service, you probably can't operate it because you can't do so without taking your mittens off, and it is too cold to do so.

Now let's look at a third approach, one that the Inuit have used... This shows two tactile maps of the coastline, carved out of wood. They can be carried inside your mittens, so your hands stay warm. They have infinite battery life, and can be read, even in the six months of the year that it is dark. And, if they are accidentally dropped in the water, they float. What you and I might see as a stick, for the Inuit can be an elegant design solution that is appropriate for their particular environment._

There are entire cultures where your Euro-centric view of mapping does not compute, so much so that researchers at my alma mater would go into jungles and teach third world tribes how the usurping white man views their world so they can make maps that you, the outsider, can understand what they had previously only expressed emotionally. There are entire continents where your "Mirror World" cannot _accurately_ represent _anything,_ and I feel that puts your seminal moment much further away than you imagine.

<comment><USER7> "There are entire continents where your "Mirror World" cannot accurately represent anything, and I feel that puts your seminal moment much further away than you imagine."

Really? Entire continents? Nothing whatsoever? Not even a coastline?

For what it's worth, I am acutely aware of non-western cartographic traditions. One of my own teachers is among the world's foremost experts in Chinese mapping, which (as you know) is astonishingly different from its European counterpart. I have also studied the cartographic traditions of the South Pacific, India, and Arabia, all of which combine different interests with different ways of thinking about them, and have resulted in wildly distinct senses of the world.

None of this changes the fact that the model now proliferating with GPS enables smartphones is, at heart, the Western one. And if you really think these things are limited to the rich world, you are simply unaware of what's actually happing all around us. By 2016 there will be more of these things on the planet that people, and not because everyone in the rich world owns half a dozen.

Whether or not the perspectives developed elsewhere can find their way into this framework is the thing I find fascinating. Even if they don't, the sheer scale of the economic changes wrought by the presently-unfolding geospatial revolution will secure this moment's place in history for ages to come. That's the thing about studying the world's cartographic traditions; you reach a point when you can recognize a big deal when you see one.

<comment><USER3> > _Really? Entire continents? Nothing whatsoever? Not even a coastline?_

As I said, accuracy is context-dependent. Satellites in space can tell you that sacred temple moves every time it is rebuilt, but everyone on the ground will tell you it has been the same temple in the same place for a thousand years. Which is accurate? Which matters? To whom? For what purpose?

> _Whether or not the perspectives developed elsewhere can find their way into > this framework is the thing I find fascinating._

To say that GPS and Western conceits about mapping are going to take over the world whether cultures with different concepts of place and time like it or not -- they can adapt or not -- has a lot of manifest destiny behind it, and I find it pretty professionally offensive. I think we lose a lot when you're expected to make a map so the souls of the dead can find their way using ArcGIS.

<comment><USER7> You, sir, have raised pedantry to a level I've never seen before on HN. But I'm not afraid to be servicy, so let me retroactively preface my remarks with the qualification that they apply only to members of the living, and not members of the dead and / or other residents of any spirit world currently known, or waiting to be discovered in this universe or any other.

Separately, I don't know why you're interpreting remarks about people around the world who are buying tools that improve their lots in life with "manifest destiny" which was a religious justification for the genocide of Native Americans in the 19th Century. For a guy so concerned about the meanings of precision and accuracy, this interpretation is hilariously devoid of either.

But please, feel free to elaborate.

<comment><USER3> Pedantry? No, geography. A traditional use of maps is for the living to draw the locations with emotional significance to the deceased (and then you'd post them in their tomb). Chinese and Japanese maps both were more concerned with political and emotional importance than absolute scale.

So it is with many tribal cultures. Map-making as Westerners understand it may be completely foreign. Certainly it was for the Native Americans, and you see maps in tribal cultures reference landmarks and geographies that you simply can't see or understand without a deep understanding of the flora and fauna, with (what we would call) "distortions" applied to emphasize danger, or emotional meaning, or cultural import.

Except they're not distortions. They're accurate _to the user of the map._ They're just not accurate to your GPS system. Absolute scale is the only thing GPS is concerned with, but being able to define anything absolutely is an incredibly modern thing.

I don't see it as "people around the world who are buying tools that improve their lots in life." I think you are expressing a very imperialist mindset with the words you are using. A GPS system which cannot _innately apply emotional or cultural distortions to match the worldview of the user_ is, by that very nature, imposing the worldview of the GPS creator on it.

So, yes, I think manifest destiny is exactly what you're advocating for in your comments here.

<comment><USER7> Did it ever occur to you that cartographic paradigms are like languages? In the same way you can learn French without giving up Italian, did you know you can learn to see the world through a new lens without abandoning one that's very different?

I'm asking because you note that "Chinese and Japanese maps both were more concerned with political and emotional importance than absolute scale." Like I said before, this isn't news to me. I've spent a fair amount of time with traditional Chinese cartography. I understand (and greatly appreciate) how fluidly it's related to Chinese poetry and literature, incorporating them in ways that are largely alien to the western map-making tradition.

But I'm also aware that China is launching its own GPS system, and that people in China do, in fact, use GPS to find their way around. Indeed, they're investing in it heavily. I'm sorry, but "choosing to invest in a technology" is just not the same as "being murdered en masse by foreigners claiming divine justification."

<comment><USER3> While I'm sure there are lots of people who use geo-aware devices to improve their lives, being both a geographer by education and a UX designer by profession means I'm also sure lots of them would prefer to use a geo-aware device which takes their cultural preferences into account.

While a culture doesn't "have" to abandon its old ways, when a militarily superior presence arrives and says "we own all of this now because this GPS- made map says so" and you have no way of representing your territorial boundaries except in terms of "that sacred land on the third loop of this animal's migratory trail" and "twelve generations of reconstructing this holy temple in the same spot which moves because it's on the shore of a river that changes course and width and breadth constantly," and your kids who were previously happy hunting in the forest by day and smoking around a campfire by night now want guns and jeans and Nintendos because they're novel, it's hard to reconcile the two. Now you have to figure out French without anyone wanting to teach it to you, because then they don't get to pave over your Italian land if you figure out how to explain that it's yours in French, and also stop your kids from becoming indentured French servants just to spite you. It's a technology that's been forced upon you; you haven't been given the choice to "invest" in it on your own terms.

These are real things that happen. This is not a contrived example. This is what geographers at my alma mater dealt with, teaching non-first-world peoples how to use GPS against encroaching developers and governments, and how to translate between their native cultural "distortions" and the emotionlessness, meaninglessness, absolutism of GPS and GIS.

<comment><USER7> Right, that's about as many reversals as I can handle in one thread. Good luck with the job hunt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It might be instructive to get the, er, perspective of someone who has used augmented vision for several years already. [http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why- sm...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-smart- glasses-might-not-make-you-smarter)

</comment><comment><USER9> Can't wait to see all Google Glassers stumbling around addled by pop up advertisements.

<comment><USER10> Just like all those pop-up advertisements Google has put elsewhere, correct?

<comment><USER9> GMail is pretty infested with ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does Google Glass comprise of only a micro display? I assumed the technology was a little bit more sophisticated than that.

<comment><USER12> Here is what is currently known about Glass:

\- Transparent microdisplay, front-facing camera, touch-sensitive controls, audio I/O, internals "equivalent to a Galaxy Nexus", IMU, WiFi</comment></comment>


Kim Dotcom, Megaupload founder, loses latest appeal to avoid extradition to U.S - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/kim-dotcom-loses-latest-appeal-to-avoid-extradition-to-us-megaupload-2018-07-05/ <comment><USER2> As an American, our prisons are worse than 3rd world + Medieval dungeons [1][2]

I would highly advise Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants to procure a private boat or private jet ride to Indonesia, who (at least on paper)[3], will not extradite them to the United States. It may not be noble, but it's better than rotting in a US prison on non-violent charges for the rest of your life.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy- post/wp/2018/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy- post/wp/2018/02/07/a-british-court-rules-that-sending-defendants-to-the-u-s- prison-system-is-a-human-rights- violation/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bea50549d4d0)

[2] countless anecdotal pieces of evidence you've surely heard, seen, and felt your entire life

[3] Cambodia extradited Gottfrid Svartholm to Sweden without any legal authority to do so</comment>