Bitcoin just crossed $7.00. - <AUTHOR> http://mtgoxlive.com/orders?10-07

<comment><USER2> The reason for that is the death of Bitcoinica. Bitcoinica offered shorting, which stabilized prices at around $5. When Bitcoinica went out of business, the only way to make money on Bitcoin is to speculate its' price increase which will drive demand; which will drive its' price even more.

That being said, it might be the right time to buy Bitcoins, and sell before the bubble bursts. However, for a more stable Bitcoin, we need a shorting system and enough traders.

<comment><USER3> That's nonsense. Bitcoinica have virtually no effect on the market.

<comment><USER2> No it did. The shorting stabilized prices, and if you don't have any economical background, you can check out Khan Academy videos on economics.

The price of Bitcoin started to raise since Bitcoinca ended operations. Certainly, it won't skyrocket in 24 hours. It'll take many days (and maybe weeks) to visualize the trend.

<comment><USER3> Nonsense, as there were shorting tools that were available after bitcoinica shut down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For further amusing reading, look at <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91661.20>

User pirateat40 is running a BTC investment scheme with super-high returns (BS&T: Bitcoin Savings & Trust, a name suggested by investors). So high, that the community is split between the believers who can't resist the ROI and the non-believers who are convinced that Pirate is running a Ponzi scheme.

But that's not the fun part. The fun part is that pirateat40 and another member have agreed to participate in a sort of bet to settle the issue, which involves certain payouts under certain conditions. Mostly it's a bet that pirateat40/BS&T will default within a couple of months. Both have put _5000 BTC_ , ie. roughly 30k USD on the line.

<comment><USER5> Both those users are probably the same guy, and its an attempt to gain credibility, when he wins... ;-)

<comment><USER6> That's a funny idea, but as someone who pays attention to bitcointalk.org, it's extremely unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What goes up could also go down. I've seen it happen in my adult life to gold (in the 1980s), to housing (twice, once mostly in Texas, completely killing off the savings and loan industry nationally, and more recently all over the world), and to petroleum multiple times. As I have posted before here on Hacker News, perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. Many of the ideas about how to mine Bitcoins, store Bitcoins, and trade with Bitcoins as a medium of exchange illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of any other medium of exchange in a world full of human beings. Seeing the discussion of Bitcoins here on Hacker News reminds me of the last time that the price of gold (in United States dollars) crashed, and the arguments beforehand that such an occurrence was impossible, for instance. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is still an important principle of investment.

<comment><USER8> Last year it went up to over $30 before hitting $3 over the course of a few months--no one knows what goes up just come down more than bitcoin.

It's steadily risen back to $7 on a much more stable trajectory. The interesting thing this time is the relative stability over the last 6 months.

<comment><USER9> Ah so this time it's different! The battle cry of every bubble.

<comment><USER10> If the bubble keeps repeating, it is still an opportunity for speculators who can do the timing right.

Personally I'm long on bitcoins, I do dollar-cost-averaging. Good way to do this is for example bitcoinbuilder.com, or 10-line python script will do the same thing.

<comment><USER11> > _it is still an opportunity for speculators who can do the timing right._

Gamblers - it is still an opportunity for gamblers who can do the timing right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps a bit off topic, but would a finance nerd recognize this style of graph better? I've never seen such a thing before, and it took a little while to understand what the instructions were saying. But once I got it, I was immediately confused that there aren't more commonly known high information financial visuals beyond the standard two axis graph.

Is it just that most exchanges somehow don't publicly publish such granular data?

<comment><USER13> I thought the same thing. And I don't think it's offtopic since hackernews is a place for development discussion.

<comment><USER14> I also felt the same way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't bitcoin trade on like a few million dolars per day globally according to some really rosy estimates ? If I'm reading this correctly it has 1.6M$ on the bid side. Do people realize that with such low liquidity the price is irrelevant ? Real news would be it doing $100M transactions in a day or having $100M on bids, not that it would be significant but that would show some real growth, this is just a few people playing with their savings.

<comment><USER16> My guess is that bitcoins are mainly used for college students' and drug hobbyists' $50 purchases of LSD and the like on silk road and not for big transactions.

<comment><USER3> Silk Road is famous, but it doesn't mean that illegal activities are the main economic activities in bitcoin.

 _The number of accounts is currently at about 22000, and the largest number of people online at any given time is 126 – a stable community, but much smaller than those who see Silk Road as being the single shadowy force keeping up the Bitcoin economy behind the scenes imagine._ \-- <http://bitcoinmagazine.net/the-silk-road-report/>

<comment><USER17> The problem is that CCs and PayPal is much easier to use and it is much safer than Bitcoins.

So I for one see no reason to use bitcoin to purchase anything other than products that can only be purchased via bitcoins

<comment><USER3> _The problem is that CCs and PayPal is much easier to use and it is much safer than Bitcoins._

If you never use bitcoin, you wouldn't realize how convenient it is in some situation. For example, when I brought an album, I just sent some coins to the address and then it was a done deal. I don't have to enter my credit card information or enter my username/password.

If you aren't convinced about bitcoin but you have time, you should experiment and find if there's any usecases for bitcoin rather than just dismissing it outright.

Let also note that the security pressure by criminals have lead lot of bitcoin sites to adopt 2 factor authentication. Some figured out that they don't need their wallet online at all and can get away with just using the blockchain to process payment. This meant even if the server were to get hacked, there's no bitcoin to steal. The bitcoin team themsleves are also working on adding multi-signature transactions.

<comment><USER18> Also, I'd argue that BitCoin is very simple to use. Put in an address, type in the amount of money, and wait. Sure, transactions can take a while, but it's not very complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Apparently we're in the "pump" phase of the Bitcoin pump-and-dump cycle. Really, the entire Bitcoin market would fit comfortably inside the volume of your average OTC penny stock. Does anyone _not_ think the Bitcoin game is rigged?

<comment><USER6> _Does anyone not think the Bitcoin game is rigged?_

There are significant reasons why having a deflationary, digital currency (or commodity) would be quite useful, at least for certain people and use cases.

If there were no use case for Bitcoin, calling it a scam without presenting evidence would be much more reasonable. Given that there are use cases, calling Bitcoin a scam without presenting evidence is completely arbitrary.

To make an analogy - if I ask you to invest in my company that makes a brand new food item with no nutritional value or flavor, it's probably a scam. However, if I ask you to invest in my company that makes a tasty and nutritional food item, regardless of whether you think my food will do well in the market in the long run, it requires evidence to claim that it is a scam.

<comment><USER19> I didn't say Bitcoin itself is a scam, only that the market is so tiny that a single player could easily manipulate it. And if someone can, someone will. And while I see Bitcoin's legitimate use cases, few ( _very few_ ) people are using it for actual trade. The market seems purely speculative, with no underlying Bitcoin economy to stabilize it (save possibly the money-laundering business).

<comment><USER6> I agree that the market is largely speculative. But I think the speculation is mainly very long-term speculation - so people predominantly want to get more bitcoins, or they want to hold them. This will tend to drive the price up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm persuaded that _in the long run_ \-- that is, over many years -- Bitcoin is likely to appreciate far above current levels as it gains further adoption worldwide. Here's why: [https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the- potential-adop...](https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential- adoption-and-price-appreciation-of-bitcoin-in-the-long-run/) \-- I wrote this more than a year ago, and still think it's correct.

However, I would _not_ bet on the direction of Bitcoin prices in the short run, because I have no advantage over the many short-term traders and speculators who make up the daily Bitcoin market. (As Warren Buffett says, "if you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy." I don't want to be the patsy.)

<comment><USER6> I haven't read your post, but I agree with your projection. I'm happy to put a significant but disposable amount of my money in bitcoin _while I can still afford to get a significant percent of all bitcoins ever_ (which I still can).

(EDIT: And by that I mean, say, something like .01%.)

<comment><USER20> Thank you. FWIW, my post both outlines the reasons why Bitcoin would appreciate and makes an effort to quantify potential appreciation under different worldwide usage assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only one who can't read this graph? It looks like it's rotated 90 degrees and there's no time axis so I don't see what this is representing. I don't understand what the legend for the Y axis means.

<comment><USER22> It's a market depth chart - the orange line on the left represents the cumulative standing buy orders, the blue line represents the standing sell orders, the green line is the historical price per trade with the latest trade (thus value) being at the bottom. The Y axis is a representation of the bitcoin value, and the X axis is the representation of the USD buy/sell prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I lost a lot of money in bitcoin. I learned a valuable lesson that's better than anything I learned in collage.

1) Easy to make, easy to lose.

2) Whatever you are thinking of doing, so is everyone else. _If you're planning on outsmarting thousands of other people, just remember, they are planning to outsmart you._

3) Any market with a high volume of flippers (buys to resell and make money) vs users (actually use a product or service) might be a bubble. _High rise bubble, mortgage bubble, housing bubble, Miami condo bubble_

4) The worst time to make decisions is when you feel like you're going to lose out on something spectacular. When you have visions of grandeur. When the emotional side of you is most active, the logical side of you is being repressed. Watch out for that.

5) "This time is different!" is bullshit _(when relating to bubbles and re- occuring events)_. Each new generation brings the same humanistic flaws of the last generation. Doomed to repeat itself forever and ever. Humans will be humans the same way sharks will be sharks. We are cursed with a primitive instinct that might have worked thousands of years ago in a tribal society but now is working against us.

6) Whenever you take a gamble, ALWAYS assume you are going to lose. If you're ok with the outcome of losing and find the gamble to be worth it go ahead and take a risk.

I didn't lose too much money in bitcoin but lets just say it was money that I was saving up for braces. That was the deal I made with myself. I'm still angry that I lost, there's no point in lying, emotions will be emotions. But the way I see it, I didn't lose the money in bitcoin, I invested it in some really good "real world economics" classes at a good collage somewhere...

<comment><USER24> _5) "This time is different!" is bullshit._

There are times when it is indeed different. When Columbus landed, it was genuinely different. (Especially for the natives.) When general artificial intelligence arrives, it will also be genuinely different. (Especially for us.)

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure if you just implicitly suggested that we (humans) will be mistreated by the general AI (and its offsprings) just like the natives were mistreated by people who followed after Columbus.

<comment><USER26> Or on the flip side, we might treat the AI's worse due to being so scared of them, as in the situation in Neuromancer where all the AI's legally have to be built with a kill switch.

<comment><USER27> How is that bad treatment? I for one would welcome an instant, painless death.

<comment><USER28> But would you welcome living in fear of being killed at any moment ?

<comment><USER24> ...that's what it is to be a slave

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS0Rc45tj60>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The last thing Bitcoin needs is another speculation craze based on its high value. If Bitcoin's value is growing, that's fine, let it keep growing naturally. Don't start publicizing it so it starts another speculation roller coaster, at least until the Bitcoin market is big enough to not be impacted much by speculation-based transactions.

<comment><USER30> Obviously, you are absolutely right. Then again, as much as I despise myself for it I did make a killing last time a bunch of idiots started buying them for >20$ a pop so I wouldn't mind. Taking money from speculators and giving money to geeks... I'm sure someone could spin this into something positive.

I don't think it's going to hurt bitcoin, it's proven itself to withstand it and is here to stay.

<comment><USER31> > _"Taking money from speculators and giving money to geeks... "_

Classic fallacy. "Those rules don't apply to me!"

Guess what? You _are_ a speculator, no better or worse than any other speculator out there, be it in gold, houses or mortgages. Sorry.

<comment><USER30> I don't think I'm a speculator. I just started mining back in the day when CPU mining was still viable. Early in the day when we got a 50 bitcoin batch every other week. I didn't buy a single bitcoin. I just sold the ones I mined. Is this really speculation?

<comment><USER32> You speculated that the electricity you used to mine the bitcoins would be worth the cost of mining them. I'd say it was as safe a speculation as one could make. =pp

<comment><USER30> By that definition any and all investment is speculation. Does this word mean anything on its own then? Though the fervour with which I deny being one proves it must.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's a new currency, it would be illogical to assume that the price of bitcoins will be wildly irratic as it catches on. The one thing I know about bitcoins is that I don't know what they'll do. The volatility makes bitcoin trading attractive to me, also, you can only lose what you put in, the trading costs are ridiculously low, and I started my account with $100 bucks. Initially I lost value but I just waited it out and turned $100 into $130. That's a huge return in less than a year. Obviously this is more of an exercise, I wouldn't get stupid with how much I put into bitcoins, the whole thing could collapse tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been asked in the past if I could accept Bitcoin. I believe there are even services that convert Bitcoin on the fly to US dollars for you when you accept a purchase. It doesn't really seem like a smart business decision though. What are the legal ramifications of accepting money that came from Bitcoin? Is the IRS going to come knocking at your door? My gut tells me to avoid BTC like the plague, but it does intrigue me.

<comment><USER35> Why would the IRS come knocking at your door? Take the same laws that apply to any other currency transaction and apply.

<comment><USER34> Would they/why would they, these are the questions I'm asking because I'm uncertain how these things even work. With currencies backed by nations I can see the IRS not caring, but Bitcoin isn't just "any other currency." It's a currency not made up or backed by any nation. In a way it's money out of thin air. That's what worries me.

<comment><USER36> The IRS doesn't care where your income comes from. They care that it is (1) reported, and (2) correctly valued. They have, for example, rules for reporting bartered income[1]. Barter is certainly not "any other currency" either.

[1]: [http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=187904,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=187904,00.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> [http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=1985065&mc=34...](http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=1985065&mc=34&forum_id=2)

they are way too cumbersome to buy, why invest in a currency that the average computer user can't figure out how to buy?

<comment><USER38> I'm not advocating the purchase of bitcoins, simply providing an answer. I have no opinion on whether or not bitcoins are a good "investment."

The transactional friction is a reason the market is small. If it's easier to transact and more people can do it, the supply/demand curves will push the price up in the future. Assuming demand is proportional to the size of the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Will be interesting to see how high it goes. Will we see a return to $31.91/BTC?

</comment><comment><USER40> Here we go again...

</comment><comment><USER41> Ok but given current pricing of GPUs, is it profitable to mine the coins, given I have access to free electricity (my office building does not charge for that).

<comment><USER42> [http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-mini- rig...](http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-mini-rig/)

This might make a lot of GPU setups obsolete.

Edit to add more info: I'm told the expected generation output, from 1000000 Mhps, at current difficulty 1751454.53534068, is 574.2818 BTC per day or 23.9284 BTC per hour.

<comment><USER43> $4,000/day at current exchange rates, it should pay for itself in less than 8 days. Of course the rate of BTC generation will go down over time, but it looks like these rigs would easily pay for themselves for several years yet.

<comment><USER44> The bitcoin system adapts itself to keep the rate of coin creation constant. So it's impossible to say what their return will be in the future. Perhaps a few monts later someone puts out a run of 28nm ASICS at 1/4 the price with 4x the performance and they're bought in massive waves.

<comment><USER43> Yes... and maybe a supervolcano under Yellowstone will destroy half the USA. But there's no evidence that will actually happen anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I was a big opponent of bitcoin- still wouldn't use it for anything that matters- but there are some great use cases.

With government bans on online gambling bitcoin could really take over(that market). And, of course, there is the illegal drug trade.

When people say that "it's not backed by anything" all they need to do is fire up tor and take a peak at silkroad. It's backed by one of the most in-demand products ever.

<comment><USER46> I wonder if it's liquid enough to do an "instant trade". Essentially, you could route (possibly international) financial transactions through BitCoin and avoid big fees by doing a buy on the buyer's side, transferring the coins to the seller, then having them sell the coins in their local currency.

The best part about this is that neither the buyer nor the seller needs to have the slightest interest in BitCoin and it doesn't matter at all if the value of the currency is reasonable so long as it's _reasonably stable_. Even better, neither side needs to know the other's bank details, just a throw-away BitCoin account number. This isn't just an IMT-killer, it's a PayPal killer as well.

Assuming the BitCoin market is more or less efficient relative to currency markets, and assuming those transactions could be cleared within ~1 day, you could absolutely kill the international transfer market (known for high fees, long delays and shitty exchange rates).

<comment><USER47> This can be done but I believe it is a bit more expensive than via banks, since you have exchange fees and the spread as liquidity isn't quite high enough (assuming you want to transfer ASAP. If you are willing to wait on both sides you can do a lot better)

Example exchanging 500 GBP to EUR (via intersango at current rates):

Buy 104.6 BTC @ 4.76GBP Fees for instant trade: 0.95% = ~1 BTC. Balance: 103.6BTC

Sell 103.6BTC @ 5.8EUR = 600.88 eur Fees for instant trade: 0.95% = ~5.71. Balance: 595.17EUR

500 GBP went to 595.17EUR. Exchange rate: 1.19. (google tells me the exchange rate is about 1.26 at the moment, so this is quite poor)

<comment><USER46> You're right, that's not good. I imagine it would get better if people started doing things like that in higher volumes, but that's a bit of a Catch 22.

Until then, there are a couple of mitigating factors:

\- You may not get the market rate from anyone. The UK post office is only giving me a rate of 1.2260 to the Euro.

\- If you need to pay a fee for a transfer it could be worthwhile for small amounts. The UK post office doesn't charge a fee, but it has a min transfer of £250. www.tranzfers.com charges £7 or $15AU. I've paid more elsewhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why all companies should have a Heroku-like platform for their developers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@anubhavmishra/why-all-companies-should-have-a-heroku-like-platform-for-their-developers-ee96a6fc6bc0 <comment><USER2> Hello all, I am the author of the blog post. Just wanted to clarify a few things. This is a older post when Deis Workflow was being actively maintained. It is no longer actively maintained: [https://deis.com/blog/2017/deis- workflow-final-release/](https://deis.com/blog/2017/deis-workflow-final- release/)

Also, the intention of the post to show that there is value to create a PaaS for allowing developers to rapidly try out ideas without waiting on infrastructure to be provisioned. If these ideas were proven, they could then deploy the applications to a maintained production grade environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious, what are the benefits if any of configuring Deis on K8s on AWS instead of just Heroku Private Spaces, for standard CRUD apps without huge scale?

<comment><USER4> Closer mirroring to production environment and having one provider needing to be maintained.

<comment><USER5> That's only true if you are testing with Heroku but deploying to something else. But if you use Heroku for production you still only have one provider to maintain.

<comment><USER4> I assumed since they were asking they were using something else for prod. If you use Heroku for production, I'm not sure why you'd use something different for Dev.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TeamSQL becomes DataRow and drops all features except Amazon Redshift - <AUTHOR> https://teamsql.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a sad news for me. I loved their product, and really enjoyed the fact that it worked great on Ubuntu. Oh well... :-(

From their website:

 _Hello,

TeamSQL has been a great platform to experiment with modern UI and powerful features to help you manage your popular databases with collaborative features.

Over two years later after launching TeamSQL in 2016, we've learned a lot about how to make database management better. As we look to the future, we want to take a more focused approach that will help us bring the best database management experience. As a result, we're planning to rebrand TeamSQL as DataRow, starting with focusing on Amazon Redshift and say goodbye to TeamSQL. All TeamSQL services will be shut down on February 27, 2019 (00:00 UTC). We introduced the beta of new DataRow to our Amazon Redshift users in January this year, and now it is publicly available to everyone. DataRow comes with new features, which helps you work faster. Visit DataRow's website at DataRow to learn more about how the features in DataRow can help you manage your Amazon Redshift better.

We are always here to help you switch from TeamSQL to the new DataRow with ease. Please contact us at contact us if you have any questions. See you there.

Sincerely,

Eren Baydemir CEO_

</comment><comment><USER2> This was truly a good product. We mostly MySQL at my workplace and MySQL workbench gave me a lot of headaches due to it being sluggish(this may just be me experiencing it) until I discovered TeamSQL. It worked really well and I loved the fact that my queries were synced to my account and I could access those queries anywhere. Plus the most important thing was that, TeamSQL was really light weight and fast. Can anyone suggest a similar product?

<comment><AUTHOR> For my part, I was using it with Postgres most of the time. I'm on Ubuntu, so there aren't a thousand alternatives. For now, I'm back at using the command line for everything. But the command line sucks when trying to debug/find/compare some data in large tables. :-(</comment></comment>


Ask YC: How fantastic is Mister Splashy Pants? - <AUTHOR>

I stop by reddit once a day for a quick skim. And I have no idea what the true story is. But since it keeps hitting the hot list, and it's working in the actual poll by a ridiculous margin, how fantastic is the name as a marketing gimmick for Greenpeace? Not only has it given me a smile each time I read it, but I had a few belly laughs too. Even better, while some stooges could see it as a hijacking of their contest, it's obvious that the name will have the intended effect - to raise awareness of these mammals and to rise above the normal pr din. <p>Well done, reddit! <comment><USER2> At what point do we get to treat YC as its own entity, and not some kind of add-on for reddit?</comment>


Is HackerNews anti Facebook? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It looks like it because Facebook-related stories always attract the same comments (pro-privacy, anti-time wasting, etc), but I don't think that's particularly representative of the community as a whole. There's very little benefit in posting to say Facebook is awesome if you enjoy using it, so we don't see that side of the argument here. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER3> So basically HN community has doubts about the usefulness of Facebook. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is probably related to the fact that this site usually offers value as in information being usable for practical IT related issues, which is encouraged by e.g. spam, ads or pointless clickbait articles being downvoted.

Facebook is basically the opposite of that.

So you might guess that in the context of Hackernews a site like Facebook could be the anti-thesis or enemy.

Take it with a a grain of humour.</comment>


The story behind Michelin stars - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181024-the-ingenious-story-behind-michelin-stars <comment><USER2> FWIW, the Gault Millau is imho vastly preferable to the Guide Michelin. Cares more about food quality than decor, and is actually reliable on its lower spectrum (< 1 star Guide Michelin recommendations are worthless, and 1 star is already very expensive; if Gault Millau recommends something, then it is always good; and the ratings and descriptions are relatively meaningful).

</comment><comment><USER3> In The Netherlands a restaurant owner want's to get rid of it's three stars because he feel it lays too much preasure on him.

Unfortunately Michelin doesn't want to drop them.

<comment><USER4> It's pretty tough to get that third star; by simply changing the decor, laying off some staff, or closing the cloakroom the third star would go.

But this does remind me of a restaurant in Palo Alto (chef trained in a 3-star restaurant in Burgundy) whose owner asks people to leave bad yelp reviews. Basically the customer base is almost entirely regulars and that's enough to make it a good business. They don't want so much business that the regulars couldn't get a table.

<comment><USER5> Well, at this point, I'm really curious to know what the restaurant is!

I promise I will keep the secret, and if needed, happy to leave a bad Yelp review :)

<comment><USER4> It's Bistro Elan which moved to Birch St. No big secret, but they have only a few tables.

<comment><USER6> Seems improbable to me. They have a very nice web site which includes their (very favorable) Zagat and Michelin reviews. Why would they do that if they don't want to drum up more business?

More likely this is an urban myth. Or a shrewd marketing ploy.

<comment><USER7> I can see the owner trying to discourage those who use Yelp to find places to eat - it's probably a different kind of patron than those who are aware of the restaurant and looking for information on it.

To that end, it's 3.5 stars on Yelp (137 reviews), but Google reviews shows it as 4.5 (52 reviews). That difference alone seems that Yelp could be specifically targeted.

<comment><USER8> Yelp is probably just holding his positive reviews hostage until he pays up.

<comment><USER9> Is this a joke? Or is there something I missed?

<comment><USER4> Yelp has that reputation though I believe it to be false. Certainly they have put their finger on the pan for paid customers, but they have to be careful about it.

IN BE's case (and that of several other restauranteurs I've spoken with) she is unhappy with the general behavior of "yelpers" (obviously the nice ones she'd never notice :-))...I won't go into that. If the restaurant is always full you don't need new customers. This restaurant doesn't have the room for it, but I've seen yelper gatherings at larger restaurants and asked the waitstaff and they never seem happy with it.

I've used Yelp successfully when passing through an unfamiliar place (on the west coast of the US...less success elsewhere). It's a shame because the idea of Yelp/Tripadvisor/etc seems like it ought to be a useful one, but human nature seems to $^* it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to think restaurant guides were invented in America, with the publishing by a salesman named Duncan Hines of his favorite stops across the country. But his guide started with a Christmas card list in 1935, while the Michelin guide goes back to 1900!

</comment><comment><USER11> Had a ~20 minute conversation about this yesterday.

I find it fascinating to ask what makes food taste good. We agreed it was a combination of texture, flavor(pairings, aromas, and basic taste like salt, sweet, acid, etc..), atmosphere/presentation.

What the conversation boiled down-to- are foods that use 'all the cheat codes', ie, adding sugar, salts, fats, acid; going to taste better than foods that are traditional?

I contest that American-Italian will taste better than Italian because it wins the Pepsi Taste Challenge. Where tradition doesnt allow you to use sugar in traditional Italian culture, American food has no rules.

From a biological point of view, the food with a sugar in it will win a comparison.

The goal I was looking to understand- If I can make American Thai Food that causes friends to eat until they have a stomach ache, does that beat traditional thai food that tastes good, but not addicting?

<comment><USER12> Of course, "traditional" Italian cuisine gets much of its sweetness from tomatoes introduced from the Americas.

<comment><USER10> Right! I often marvel at what Old-world cuisine was like before American influences. No tomatoes. No potatoes. No chocolate OR vanilla. Heck, no tobacco or coffee! What did they do after dinner?

<comment><USER13> Coffee is from the old world. It's native to Ethiopia.

<comment><USER10> Wow! That's news to me, thanks. I wonder if Ethiopia still has any old lineages of coffee growing...

<comment><USER14> Ethiopian Yirgacheffe is a pretty famous coffee. [http://www.blackpowderroasting.com/all-about-ethiopian- yirga...](http://www.blackpowderroasting.com/all-about-ethiopian-yirgacheffe/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How people use devices in the real world - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/ostmodern/this-is-how-people-use-digital-devices-in-the-real-world-d62b0d8431fb <comment><AUTHOR> Great UX, great product design: a user research adventure on how different devices are used in 2019 by different user groups.</comment>


Fedora 31 is officially here - <AUTHOR> https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-31/ <comment><USER2> I'm building a home server in a week or two to replace all my single board computers. Instead of running one system I want to do it in VMs to help me keep them separates and easily backupable.

I have very little experience with that, and I just want to ask whether fedora silverblue would be the distro for me? Does anyone have any experience?

<comment><USER3> Consider using toolbox[0][1], a tool built by and for Fedora (especially Fedora Silverblue and CoreOS).

Essentially, you enter an unprivileged container (no root, no daemon), but keep your username and home directory. What this means is you can switch operating systems but keep your environment and kernel.

I enter toolbox to build packages using build-time dependencies from Fedora Rawhide. Outside toolbox, my packages get updated as well.

As of 2019-10-30, only Fedora-based images have been officially created; however, others have made functioning PRs for Ubuntu and CentOS-based toolboxes.

Your containers can be saved to a special location that gets backed up. I back up mine with rclone[2] to my school's unlimited Google Drive storage.

[0]: [https://github.com/containers/toolbox](https://github.com/containers/toolbox)

[1]: [https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora- silverblue/toolb...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora- silverblue/toolbox/)

[2]: [https://rclone.org/](https://rclone.org/)

<comment><USER2> I think I will go with fedora server, since this will double as my desktop system from time to time, and for that I use a lot of Guix stuff. Using Guix on silverblue seems like asking for trouble...

<comment><USER3> You can use Guix inside toolbox!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Stay tuned for a planned contest to find a shiny name for the IoT edition!

Throwing a vote in for Fedora Feather</comment>


Twitter: Years After the Alphabet Acquisition - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@karan/twitter-years-after-the-alphabet-acquisition-3f5b5b168fb5#.60mrti2fe <comment><USER2> Someone should append a (2019) to the title.

<comment><USER3> Or a (fanfiction).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Way overpriced. All the cool kids are using GnuSocial/OStatus anyways ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus)).

</comment><comment><USER5> This is an unreal post: "When Alphabet bought Twitter back in June 2016 for almost $29 billion", you can easily check Twitter valuation at $10 billion here: [https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&ei=gHO_VpH9GsnB...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&ei=gHO_VpH9GsnBe- iwiZAN) so... spending 3X the public market valuation will be crazy.

And speaking about science fiction, what will Alphabet/Google do to turn around Twitter?

Also the posts saying: "I quit Facebook" are nonsense, how many people around you removed themselves from FB? Most probably, very few.

<comment><USER6> > spending 3X the public market valuation

Just last year, Twitter's market cap was more than double what it is today. Since then, they have managed to grow revenue by 48% while reducing the losses by 9%. So, with all that, I think $29B is a steal for the acquisition.

EDIT: my last response here was uninformed.

> And speaking about science fiction, what will Alphabet/Google do to turn > around Twitter?

Clearly you have not read the post, and are jumping to conclusions.

<comment><USER5> > 3x is not a crazy multiple for a company that has grown revenue by 48% and > decreased losses by 10% (yoy)

Tell me please of other public companies which also were acquired by public companies for that multiplier.

> Clearly you have not read the post, and are jumping to conclusions.

I read the post and it offers a childish reason why Twitter should be acquired by Google.

<comment><USER6> See my edited response in the parent comment.

<comment><USER7> I don't know about childish but the argument seems very 2012 or something. Twitter is going to keep bigger 'cause social is the thing! That's it?

It seems like there's good evidence that Twitter is limited by the Twitter - most people don't like to scream at the world (post a stream of public crap) and for those that do, Twitter is kind of the lowest quality pedestal to stand while you do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> $29b in cash and stock?? Man, I'm really looking forward to the 150% run up in TWTR before Alphabet makes that $43 tender offer. brb calling my broker

</comment><comment><USER9> From the article: "Twitter is live".

Now that's a useful concept to focus the business. That tells Twitter what not to do. Twitter should do only things that are happening right now. All retrospective uses of Twitter data would be via Google and Google accounts.

Monetization of Twitter might not involve ads on Twitter. Google could data- mine Twitter for ad-targeting data. That might be more useful than "paid tweets".

Google's AI capabilities could be used to digest the Twitter flood and create news alerts. A Google Maps overlay of where things are happening on Twitter right now, for example. Enough activity, and a Google satellite (yes, Google has their own spy satellites [1]) would focus on the target area as soon as possible.

This could work out.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-10/google- buy...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-10/google-buying- satellite-company-skybox-imaging-for-500-million)

</comment><comment><USER10> I really hope google will buy twitter so it can put back real time search in twitter stream a few years ago as an experiment.

<comment><USER11> I hope they buy it for a different reason: so they could drain this useless sea of vapidity and narcissism, and drive the company into the ground within 3 years tops. Or maybe Dorsey will do it on his own, who knows. Twitter's chance of death goes up dramatically if it's not a standalone entity.

<comment><USER12> > Twitter's chance of death goes up dramatically if it's not a standalone > entity.

Currently the whole TWTR management is looking to please short-term "investor" and "speculator" scum.

Companies don't exist for 3-month intervals and maximum gains, they exist for creating LONG TIME wealth (and that's the mistake Capitalism does).

Existence inside a huge, rock-solid company frees management from the cognitive and financial round to be hyper-effective for capitalists instead for their users (who actually create the work that makes Twitter exist).

<comment><USER11> It also frees the management from "fear of God", which results in ridiculous investments and initiatives, accelerated (and unnecessary) hiring, proliferation of middle management, empire building, politics, etc, etc.

<comment><USER12> > It also frees the management from "fear of God"

It doesn't really matter if the "God" is Wall Street or a holding company like Alphabet.

Only that I'd trust a holding company to be forced to maintain the company in order to not risk its value. A stock holder on Wall St just wants as much profit as possible as fast as possible, and if it goes bust then you can always sell shorts and still profit.

<comment><USER11> It does. Alphabet would care a great deal more if Twitter lives or dies. Wall St doesn't care in the slightest.

<comment><USER12> On the other side, Google doesn't always follow this rule and I wouldn't trust them much more to look after Twitter than Wall St.

Google has killed off (or left to rot, and then kill off) projects with _huge_ user counts/business outlooks in the past... remember Google Reader and Google Code?

Both could have kicked Feedly's and Github's/SF's asses multiple times over with a bit of investment, and Google basically let them rot until the backend of Google's infrastructure changed too much to justify the needed adaptions on the projects.

<comment><USER11> User counts were so pitifully small in those projects that they were destaffed for years before they were shut down.

<comment><USER12> Reader had iirc at least a million users, that's only small when you compare it with FB/Instagram/Twitter/Youtube/Snapchat.

Most startups would kill for a million highly engaged users.

<comment><USER11> I believe G+ had 300M+ users at the time, and G+ was still considered a failure. 1M is a rounding error by Google standards. They can get 1M users by releasing _anything_ that does _anything_ at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is there an earnings call if it's wholly owned by Alphabet?

<comment><USER14> OP states that Google keeps Twitter as its own entity that reports, runs, and operates independently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So Periscope and Moments would be the saving grace of Twitter? On what planet does the author live?

<comment><USER16> Moments is pretty amazing. Have you used it? Seems to me like it is miles ahead of snapchat's stories

<comment><USER17> Apples and oranges. Snapchat is personal, moments is more like news.

<comment><USER16> >snapchat's stories

I was referring to the stories that are local or worldwide events that are curated. much like moments.

<comment><USER17> While I don't have hard data, my understanding of stories is that they're a huge part of snapchat usage now -- as a private story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In a similar vein: [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

</comment><comment><USER19> You have a typo, in the section about Twitter's business tools you said they have '"millions of" of users'.

<comment><USER6> Good catch. Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ha ha...April Fools came early this year

<comment><USER21> I think you mean it came early next year.</comment></comment>


Selfies reveal your smartphone PIN - <AUTHOR> http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/10/22/selfies-reveal-your-pin/ <comment><USER2> I mocked CSI's "enhance enhance enhance enhance ah we can see the face of the killer reflected in the dirty wheel nut of that truck driving past" for years but these techniques are amazing.

Edit: will SF now include matte contact lenses for people in secure areas?

</comment><comment><USER3> Also possible to get a heatmap of a keyboard to see what keys were pressed last. I've seen this attack carried out in a youtube video, where a hacker could log back into a kiosk terminal simply by grabbing the heat signature emitted from the last few keys pressed.</comment>


Researchers wrestle with a privacy problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-wrestle-with-a-privacy-problem-1.18396 <comment><USER2> This is an interesting dilemma, but it's only one minute example of the very real toll that "privacy" inflicts on society. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the benefits outweigh the costs, but we should talk more openly about the downsides instead of reflexively treating privacy as sacrosanct.

The value that we know as "privacy" is far more arbitrary and historically contingent than most of us realize. In societies where resource scarcity forces people to share bedrooms, the acceptable spheres of privacy are radically different from the ones that modern American life inculcates.

Are other social boundaries equally flexible? And if so, should we test them?

Perhaps so. There is an intrinsic tension between the pursuit of privacy and the hacker ethos that information wants to be free. By definition, privacy is an act of sacrifice: a denial of information to other nodes in the network that forms civilization. Our laws already recognize narrow circumstances in which the costs of that sacrifice outweigh the benefits, such as when there is probable cause to believe that an individual is abusing his or her right to privacy in order to undertake criminal activity.

Yet there is a social taboo attached to radical opposition to privacy. For example, an integrated network of ubiquitous surveillance could offer incredible benefits to humanity. Violent crime could be virtually eradicated. People could be held accountable for anti-social behaviors, like littering or cutting off other drivers. Our entire society could operate more efficiently in innumerable ways. But open advocacy of a surveillance state is only a few degrees away from fascism according to our modern political mores.

In the example from the story, it's clear that our collective welfare could be increased by analyzing reams of restricted data. Are we willing to intentionally tolerate greater human suffering in order to preserve the amorphous right to privacy?

I contend that it's more useful to look at the discrete harms that flow from disclosure of specific information. How could people be harmed? What kinds of safeguards could be put in place to prevent that concrete harm?

Those are useful questions, which allow us to make informed choices instead of switching off our brains and discussing "privacy" in the abstract.

<comment><USER3> In practice, mass surveillance is a great tool for corruption and control (e.g. blackmail, market manipulation, following ex-lovers, trumping up charges, crafting threats of violence), because the people placed in positions of power have insufficient checks to prevent them from abusing their access for personal benefit or for cementing corporate / government institutional authority. Ubiquitous electronic surveillance makes many types of authoritarian abuse much cheaper, and thus changes the possible scope of control.

The same folks who are in favor of unlimited surveillance of the public tend to be opposed to public access to their own back-room decisionmaking process, and in favor of censoring embarrassing information in the name of "security" interests.

The "hacker ethos that information wants to be free" is going to run up hard against majoritarian attempts to scapegoat, shame, change, or destroy the different or weird. The life in a small village full of nosy neighbors which you mention was normal in the past was also a life of social conformity and harsh punishment of nonconformists. There's no a priori reason to believe it would be different in a higher-tech society.

"Violent crime could be virtually eradicated", except in the case of police corruption, which is in many places endemic, and which ubiquitous surveillance makes only more alluring.

<comment><USER2> That's a fair description of the existing political coalitions, but that doesn't mean we have exhausted the range of approaches to these competing interests. From a systems engineering perspective, radical transparency can simultaneously increase government power and accountability. Government privacy (e.g., via state-secrets laws) is just a special case of the problems that occur when we restrict access to data.

Right now, we seem trapped in the worst of all worlds. The government engages in mass surveillance, so a rogue actor within the state could exploit the accumulated data for the unlawful purposes that you mentioned. And private corporations have access to almost as much information, with equal opportunities to abuse it but fewer democratic checks on their power. At the same time, we forgo virtually all of the potential societal benefits of data aggregation.

If surveillance is justified to prevent terrorism (and I realize that most here would dispute that), why is it not appropriate to use the same data to protect people from risks that claim thousands more lives every year?

I don't think that ubiquitous surveillance necessarily makes police corruption more alluring. One of the most recent policy responses to police misconduct has been the nationwide push for body cameras on individual officers, which is itself a form of surveillance. But it's one that obviously increases accountability, so it doesn't have all of the usual stigmas.

When placed within a proper governing structure, I see no intrinsic reason that other forms of surveillance could not be enlisted for the same purpose. Wouldn't it be better if we had actual surveillance video of what happened in the Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown cases? Do you believe that constantly being monitored in that fashion would increase police abuses of power?

In a broader sense, most of the responses to my comment illustrate the very phenomenon that I'm describing: i.e., an instinctive defense of "privacy" in the abstract instead of a detailed analysis of the costs and benefits of increasing transparency in specific circumstances.

I'm not faulting the authors. After all, I have raised this issue in a very broad sense, and so it's only natural that they would reply in the same fashion. But the way that we seem to be talking past one another illustrates how difficult it is to have meaningful discussions about "privacy."

If I could make three major points, they would be:

1\. _The need to acknowledge the futility of restricting access to certain forms of data_

Most privacy advocates cite benefits that do not correspond with the facts. For example, the government already has the power to tail individuals in public without a warrant and to watch everywhere that they go. Thus, a rogue operative committed to malfeasance has the ability to compromise the privacy of his target. We will never eliminate that power.

The question is, given its existence, would there be benefits to a more comprehensive surveillance system? More specifically, would the marginal benefits of broadening the system outweigh the attendant costs? In my opinion, there is a real debate to be had.

That is especially true in modern America, where we have essentially delegated unlimited surveillance powers to the government, subject only to legal restrictions on the purposes for which the collected information can be employed. Any actor willing to flout the law in order to pursue coercive goals will be able to summarily defeat the obstacles intended to deny access to the current fruits of state surveillance.

If anything, providing the NSA and other members of the intelligence community a monopoly on access to this information seems to increase the risks of misuse, by making it easier for a modern day J. Edgar Hoover to seize power by exploiting the asymmetry between his access to information and that of his foes within the government. I would be more comfortable in a society in which the state transparently employed the data it collects for worthwhile ends instead of pretending that it only uses it for narrow purposes like counter- terrorism.

2\. _Not all data is created equal_ When we talk about privacy, people naturally begin framing the debate in Orwellian terms. Isn't it possible for us to approach this topic with more nuance?

For example, if we allowed the government to know which books we are reading (something the NSA already knows...), then political activism could be directly compromised, and the benefits would be limited. The same is not true of expanding public surveillance on city streets or highways, to give one example.

The problem with "privacy" in the abstract is that it simultaneously encompasses legitimate concerns and ones that cannot withstand scrutiny. Why is access to our medical information so privileged? Do we want to subsidize the livelihood of people with medical problems by artificially eliminating the ability of employers or insurance companies to take into account all of the available information?

The answer might well be yes! I certainly benefit from that policy judgment. But I'm not sure that it's the correct one, and I wish that we could enjoy an open debate about whether the gains in aggregate economic efficiency would outweigh the costs to individuals. At minimum, shouldn't we explore alternatives like increasing social welfare payments for medically disadvantaged individuals while simultaneously allowing information about their medical histories to improve the accuracy of public and private decision-making? Maybe that approach wouldn't work, but I have not even heard it discussed.

3\. _Are we utilitarians or deontologists?_ One of the major dividing lines in these discussions is an implicit disagreement over the appropriate moral calculus.

I default to consequentialism, so in my mind the foreseeable harms from criminality are equivalent to the potential for police abuse. Yet most people process the two in very different ways emotionally.

My well-being is threatened much more directly by criminal gangs than it is by an oppressive state. Only a few months ago, I nearly lost my life when I was attacked in an alley by two thugs.

Should I be forced to be a martyr for privacy when increased surveillance could have deterred their actions?</comment></comment></comment>


Frenetic: A Network Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.frenetic-lang.org/

<comment><USER2> Examples are Python: <http://www.frenetic-lang.org/examples/>

It looks like a DSL-ish library for Python rather than a new programming language.

</comment><comment><USER3> temptation to go on about a Philly Frenetic...

</comment><comment><USER4> just curious, but what are the most popular alternatives - just C/java "socket" programming ?

<comment><USER5> I'd like to know this as well. Given all the various DSLs that are available for other uses, I'm surprised there isn't one for network programming. Every time I had to do something network related, I've had to fiddle with C.</comment></comment>


Show HN: GraphQL Cache – A caching plugin for GraphQL Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stackshareio/graphql-cache <comment><USER2> Wow, thanks for submitting this! I'm the creator of this gem and kind of stunned to see it on HN. If anyone has any questions or comments let me know, I'd love to hear them :)</comment>


The History of Push-Button Cuisine - <AUTHOR> http://luckypeach.com/history-push-button-cuisine/ <comment><USER2> Should be titled _Aerosol Cuisine_.

There were many 'modern' achievements in food tech in the 1950s. Check out this automated hamburger restaurant [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE) ... which is uncomfortably close to (and far ahead of) [http://momentummachines.com/](http://momentummachines.com/) (7 years in?).

Last month I founded _Infinite Food_ , an automated food preparation and retail service startup (based on actual fresh ingredients and just in time preparation) here in mainland China... currently we have a minimum functional prototype, a mechanical demonstration, a strong business plan and financial projection and are seeking additional seed, see [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> "A canister of No More Tea Bags emits a nitrogen-propelled stream of concentrated tea into hot water, allowing tea-sippers to adjust the strength of their beverage to their precise specifications. ... 'particularly with younger consumers, the response is that it is cool and modern and not at all off-putting' "

Given how famously fussy the British are about their tea, I'm really quite surprised that the response was 'cool and modern' rather than vulgarities and threats of physical altercation ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> All of this was made possible by Robert Abplanalp, who invented the leakproof spray-can valve. He had over 300 patents, most related to spray cans. His company is still in business, making valves.[1]

Of course, today he'd be derided as a patent troll.

[1] [http://www.precisionglobal.com](http://www.precisionglobal.com)

<comment><USER5> Patent trolls neither develop patents (or if they do it is BS maths as a process or otherwise obvious patents), nor do they use the patents themselves. They make money from licensing / extortion.

Mr. Abplanalp is the opposite of a patent troll.</comment></comment>


Java at 25: Features that made an impact and a look to the future - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/07/30/java-at-25-features-that-made-an-impact-and-a-look-to-the-future/ <comment><USER2> Strange no one mentioned invokedynamic and how it enabled (or improved) dynamic languages such as Groovy and Clojure on top of the JVM</comment>


Scheme on the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://web.mac.com/Jay_reynolds_freeman/My/Pixie_Scheme_III.html

<comment><USER2> I feel that a lispy language on the ipad should not be text-based, but tree- based: you create and manipulate the tree structure using the touch interface.

For example, you touch, and that creates a node.

       o

Then you can type something inside that node. Then you drag lines out of it, and you create child nodes, and so on.

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

The node doesn't have to be a circle, it could be a long rectangle with atoms inside

       [  ____   ______    ______ ]

You can drag out an atom to turn it into another node

       [  _____   ______    ______ ]
            |
            |
            |
            |
       [ ___  ___ ]

<comment><USER3> Something like this?: [http://lispgamesdev.blogspot.com/2010/12/iosketch- progress-r...](http://lispgamesdev.blogspot.com/2010/12/iosketch-progress- report.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I seem to remember other programming languages (and programs that run code not included with the application) being banned on the app store. Did something change? Or are you compiling down to JavaScript to get around the limits?

<comment><USER5> They dropped those rules. I hope Scratch gets released now because of it.

<comment><USER6> They dropped the rule against using interpreters, and the rule against having your original code be in other than C, Objective-C, C++, or Javascript.

However, I don't think they dropped the rule against being able to download code. If this thing lets you load files from the net that are interpreted as Scheme programs, it could be in violation of that rule.

<comment><USER5> Ah, thanks for the clarification - that's too bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to use scheme on any platform with JavaScript, check out WeScheme [<http://www.wescheme.org>]

The server uses the Java AppEngine API. Yes, we did run into issues with requests exceeding the AppEngine timeout. At one point (this may still be true) we were able to compile our compiler on AppEngine. Which brings us to Moby-Scheme, the heart of WeScheme! It's a self-hosting (Scheme -> JavaScript) compiler. [<https://github.com/dyoo/moby-scheme>]

WeScheme was written in support of BootStrap [<http://www.bootstrapworld.org/>] an educational initiative aimed at using computer science as a vehicle for teaching algebra to middle-school students.

There is a semi-working structured editor for WeScheme that is a pile of jQuery hooking interactions with content-editable. In retrospect we should have just gone for HTML5. There's also the inkling of a scratch-like interface which is works by swapping in a new style sheet. I'm afraid I can't find the latest version, in my younger days I was a bit sloppy about version control. An older version is available at <http://ch4n.org/editor> Your mileage may vary.

</shameless plug>

</comment><comment><USER8> I wast thinking that interface such as Scratch [1] for kids or BYOB[2] for adultus would be so fun on the ipad.

Scratch is an MIT project based on squeak that allows kids to program by dragging blocks in the screen.

And BYOB is an extension to scratch to use functional programming.

[1] <http://scratch.mit.edu/> [2] <http://byob.berkeley.edu/>

<comment><USER5> MIT submitted Scratch for iPad a while ago and was denied. Hopefully they resubmit now that the rules have loosened.

<comment><USER8> As a matter of fact they loosened the rules, as direct result of the efforts of John Mcintosh to be able to run Scratch on the Ipad.

However his efforts although were enough to change apple policy, they weren't successful enough to get Scratch to run on the ipad. :-(

Here is a quick summary of the story: <http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/Scratch.html> [http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/2010/12/john-mcintosh- at...](http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/2010/12/john-mcintosh-at-smalltalk- solutions-11/)</comment></comment></comment>


Can a military base become a tourism hub? - <AUTHOR> https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2018/can-a-military-installation-become-a-tourism-hub/ <comment><AUTHOR> "In that, Albania's now-entrepreneurial leaders see opportunity. Tourism already contributes €1.5 billion to the country's economy and there is room for many more visitors. Officials have suggested building luxury hotels on the island and converting bomb shelters into wine cellars. One failed bid mounted by a group of Las Vegas-based investors would have made it a giant casino."</comment>


Ask HN: Open source and modern elearning plataform - <AUTHOR> Hello, I am a university student, and from what I realize nowadays, the quality of the e-learning platforms are very bad, they do not engage the students at all, much less the teachers. It has a difficult and complicated user experience to interact with. I am graduating this year and would like to build a modern e-learning platform and open source, to offer as an option to existing platforms, with a modern look and mainly easy to interact. Integrating some open source platforms for video conferencing, collaborative chat, etc. Do you think it could be useful or would it just be one more in the sea of existing LMS? Ideas will be welcomed :) <comment><USER2> Try [https://moodle.com/](https://moodle.com/)

Lots of plugins</comment>


Ask HN: Coinbase took my money, what should I do? - <AUTHOR> Okay, bit more details:
I am an Indian working in Sweden transferred money (5000$) to my coinbase "euro" wallet from my Singaporean bank (under my name) to avoid the hassle of converting SGD -> SEK -> EUR. It is four months since that tranfer, but yet to show up in my coinbase account.
Their support replied once to my ticket about two months ago, after that no communication. Tried calling them, creating new tickets but zero response from their end. What are my legal options now? <comment><USER2> Make a stink on social media especially reddit .</comment>


Recreational fisherman to be sentenced for lying about red snapper he caught - <AUTHOR> http://m.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Recreational-fisherman-to-be-sentenced-for-lying-12390585.php?ipid=hpctp <comment><USER2> "..for lying about red snapper haul" is a better title as the current one suggests he caught a single fish.

Instead, he was "lying about a massive haul of red and vermilon snapper he said was meant to supply an Easter fish fry. He later admitted the fish were to be sold to restaurants."

That's "488 red snapper and 154 vermilion snapper", when the limit is "10 vermilion and up to two red snapper per trip."</comment>


Navy to Drop All-Caps Communications - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/12/navy-to-drop-all-caps-communications/?mod=e2tw

<comment><USER2> OK, this earned a chuckle out of me. When I was in college I had a professor who used to be in the Navy who would also send ALL-CAPS emails to us.</comment>


What Happened When I Moved My Company to a 5-Hour Workday - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3063262/lessons-learned/what-happened-when-i-moved-my-company-to-a-5-hour-workday <comment><USER2> I may be an anomaly here, but in my experience, at companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel, engineers already only code productively for a few hours a day. That has been my observation.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. I think my dream work situation is that all meetings before, say, 2pm are banned. I'm _so_ much more productive, coding-wise, in the morning than in the afternoon. Afternoons can accommodate meeting time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? I find I don't get up to steam until 12 noon. Before then I'd rather have my half asleep self in meetings. If you want to change that schedule though, consider working at a satellite office for a place where HQ is in an appropriate time zone (say you're in CA, try to work at an Australian headquartered company).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. Not being a morning person I'd find the 8am start hard, I wonder if anyone has done this with a later start?

<comment><USER5> Not at all a morning person either, but I think I could adapt: since I know that I can nap in the early afternoon, most of the stress of waking up without having slept enough is gone (one might take it as a split sleep in some case), that's already a major thing.

The stress of having to do never-ending hours too.

Also the stress of wasting a full long day if I am not in condition, and having little chance to recover for the next one because their is little available time to do so. I would know that I have a much greater chance to recover, that I have wasted only a short day of work, and that I can easily make up for it on the next day because there is a lot of available time to make extra hours and yet not arrive at home at late night.

Then there are more opportunities to practice a bit of sport or any outdoor lighter activity every day or every other day (you don't have to put everything on the only available day(s) of the week and hope that you are in a shape, that you have time, and that the weather is OK, and then cancel...), and that's often good for the sleep, the morale and such.

I was living (and working) much better when I had a 8-4 job (7:55--16:05 home departure--arrival) then when I had a 9:30/10-6/7 job (8:45/9:00--19:30/20:00 home departure--arrival). I could have a life after work, especially an outdoor life, and that more than compensated the often tough wake-up (I mean 'tough' for me, I know it is nowhere close to 'tough' in absolute value :-) ). Pair this with an even earlier ending, and I should be OK.

But yeah, I could take the 1PM-6PM shift too :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to hear the story from an employees point of view. Are they having to come in evenings/weekends to get it all done? What work is the boss not seeing?</comment>


Tulip tower: Mayor rejects plans for London skyscraper - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48989805 <comment><AUTHOR> _The London Review Panel concluded The Tulip "does not represent world class architecture, it lacks sufficient quality and quantity of public open space, and its social and environmental sustainability do not match the ambition of its height and impact on London's skyline"._

What real architects call a "one-liner".

</comment><comment><USER2> Let's face it, it would have been called 'The Dildo', not 'The Tulip'.

<comment><USER3> The 'plug</comment></comment>


A Startup of Ex-Muslims - <AUTHOR> So you used to think that the book is literally the word of god, then you found out it isn't.
But you didn't dwell on that, yet deep down you know, if it weren't for the internet you will be deep in delusions, and let's admit that is part of why you love technology.....
The 2 biggest issues for a startup are recruiting and culture, a startup that has a mission like "offer Ex-Muslims a home & a ticket out" will make for a very strong culture, and it will make for one hell of a drive for everyone.
Also, companies are not built on a single product, just imagine Apple with a mission that has the word "computers" in it, and a mission that drives people no matter what the problem or the product is the best mission you can ask for.
What do you think guys?
P.S. If you feel as much passion to this as me & you are in Israel, message me.. <comment><USER2> Sounds ridiculous, how would you make money, what do you offer that other online communities don't offer?</comment>


Learn Istio: A Service Mesh and Istio Resource List - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/askmeegs/learn-istio <comment><USER3> I often find teams are legit spending more time configuring containers and the ecosystems around them. Far more than using classic servers and more than using server-less. Although the tech is great it seems to bloat quite a lot as of recently. Just an observation. As a consultant i love it tho - <USER2> take far longer to complete.

<comment><USER4> It's not like the underlying problems and learning curves didn't exist before this, though. You had to learn to use and configure Ansible/Terraform/Puppet/whatever to get your "classic" servers up and running. You have to deal with secrets and configuration management somehow. You have to manually deal with your dependencies and inter-dependencies, and any possible conflicts that came along with that. Logging, service discovery, metrics collection, etc.

And for some folks it's better to continue using that "classic server" strategy and deal with those problems. Maybe they've already invested the time to learn to deal with those problems, or they already have systems and practices in place to deal with that stuff in an elegant way.

But a lot of folks are seeing the enormous benefits of containers and the ecosystems that come with them. For them it's worth the trade-offs and the time to take to learn how this stuff works.

Anyway, it's pretty clear at this point that this stuff isn't going away any time soon, and in fact only becoming more and more popular and useful. Clearly there's a reason for that.

<comment><USER5> When I think of before, I remember how 13 year old me "deployed" a PHP scripted (gaming) website over FTP to be used by 10k concurrent users on a shared hosting server that I later found out to be run by a single 16 year old guy (that company is the country's largest hosting provider today). Everything worked flawlessly and was fast; the hosting guy wasn't a wizard as well.

<comment><USER6> A lot of the complexity comes from wanting to avoid single points of failure and building for scalability. Your shared hosting server was an orange, modern cloud is apples.

Sometimes you want an orange.

<comment><USER7> My thoughts as well. If you don't need high availability or any horizontal scaling, you can still do it as simply as the GP did. These days customers expect your site to never go down however, and that forces complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is there any indication that K8S will incorporate this type of functionality in the future? Istio seems well thought out, but it feels like it might eventually get pushed out.

<comment><USER9> There is indication that it will not, in that the teams that designed both projects sit next to each other.

One thing that is happening: Kubernetes is designing a new set of ways to define how traffic should be routed in a cluster, to replace Ingress ([https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/service-apis/](https://kubernetes- sigs.github.io/service-apis/)), and Istio is going to sit on top of those. You'll see this in "experimental" in the upcoming Istio 1.6.

<comment><USER8> _" the teams that designed both projects sit next to each other"_

Interesting...that's not obvious from their website or docs. Is there somewhere I can read about the relationship between the two teams?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Bird Song Identification in the Browser - <AUTHOR> https://whatbird.herokuapp.com/predict <comment><AUTHOR> Like Shazam, but for bird songs, running in the browser. Run it in Safari on IOS or Chrome on Android. It's very early days: I have just exposed the model to a website really. Lots of field testing and no doubt refinement (or complete reworking :)) to do now.

How it works:

Little website built with Next js. When you click the button, I open a websocket and stream the audio to a google cloud bucket via the web server.

Then I kick off google cloud function to run the audio through a pre trained Tensorflow model to get bird predictions.

Cloud function returns the result to the server, which then hands it on to the browser.

The Tensorflow model is a CNN I trained on songs from 36 species of birds found around where I live.</comment>


How to do server side processing with ngReactGrid - <AUTHOR> http://www.josebalius.com/how-to-do-server-side-processing-with-ngreactgrid/

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Looking forward to next week's post about the resizable column feature.</comment>


Deep reinforcement learning doesn't work yet - <AUTHOR> https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl-hard.html <comment><USER3> "A friend is training a simulated robot arm to reach towards a point above a table. It turns out the point was defined with respect to the table, and the table wasn't anchored to anything. The policy learned to slam the table really hard, making the table fall over, which moved the target point too."

Seems as though the problem of learning unintended techniques sometimes may be better described as the model being too creative! Hitting the table is a really clever solution for the problem it was given. These examples show that the real challenge for researchers is constraining the models enormous capacity for creativity without stifling its ability to learn.

<comment><USER4> Can't wait to see how "creative" our future autonomous drone strikes will be.

<comment><USER5> Like if we program our AI overlords to minimise unavoidable deaths, and it learns the best way to do in the long term is to sterilise everyone and wipe out the human race!

<comment><USER6> Well, sure, 7 billion quick deaths means less death and suffering than even a measly one gruesome random accident per year for 8 billion years in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was a good talk at NIPS this year about the difficulty of reproducing results and benchmarking in RL. In supervised learning you can easily compare results on standard datasets. In RL though, once the actions of two policies diverge, you're at the whim of the PRNG. Even with the same random seeds, gradient descent hyperparameters, etc., it is not possible to meaningfully compare two policies with a single training run. Even if you hold everything else constant, random seed had a huge effect. Ideally papers would show aggregated data over 100 runs for each setup, but RL is too computationally expensive for that.

It is frustrating, but also exciting because the field had so many open problems.

On other hand, it really sucks that those with the 1000 machine cluster have such a huge advantage over smaller labs.

</comment><comment><USER8> >Whenever someone asks me if reinforcement learning can solve their problem, I tell them it can't. I think this is right at least 70% of the time.

This seems to be a really strange calibration for "doesn't work". If you replace "reinforcement learning" with other well known technologies, and ask "of the instances where someone asks if X is a good solution, what percentage of the time is it actually a good solution?" I feel like 30% would be on the high end of the scale.

The rest of the article seems has a lot of interesting discussion about RL's limitations, but it seems weird to make the article's thesis that RL doesn't work, rather than just "RL still has a lot of limitations".

<comment><USER9> You don't understand that quote. It's saying 70% of the time when people think reinforcement learning is the solution it's not. Not saying that 30% of all problems are solvable by reinforcement learning. Sometimes I can't tell if people here you included are intentionally misreading things to further their agenda.

<comment><USER10> > _Sometimes I can't tell if people here you included are intentionally > misreading things to further their agenda._

More likely, sometimes people are just tired, distracted, or after consumption of alcohol/drugs.

Personally, every other week I find myself writing a comment - sometimes long - and then deleting it a minute later, after re-reading the comment I was replying to and realizing I completely misunderstood it, and/or was arguing against a strawman of my own creation. And every other month I have a comment wrt. which I realize my mistake only few hours later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a shame how data hungry DRL is (even when compared to DL), but the DRL framework encompasses all the standard classification/regression tasks and also includes decision making, planning and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Model generality and data efficiency are in an inverse relationship and a lot of research has been in moving up or down this hyperbola. On one extreme, tailoring models to specific use cases/datasets/environments, on the other end transferring learning across domains. DRL is stuck pretty high on that generality end. Some breakthroughs seemed to have moved progress to a higher level curve, optimizers (Adam, DQN, TRPO) have gotten better which helps everything in general, core structures like CNNs or memory cells, which seem to be somewhat universal (or our best guess yet), but there's still something fundamental that seems to be missing. Or maybe this is all there is and we just need a computer with a richer/higher-resolution sense field and the flops to process them.

<comment><AUTHOR> but the DRL framework encompasses all the standard classification/regression tasks and also includes decision making

Except labelling data, correct ? which is non trivial effort.

<comment><USER12> > Except labelling data, correct ? which is non trivial effort.

Choosing choice of labeling is a RL problem too.

If you're choosing environment actions to learn how the environment 'labels' them, that's the classic topic of 'how do we make DRL models explore' well (and arguably is the Achilles heel of the model-free DRL approaches OP is criticizing: the NNs can _easily_ learn to optimize their actions, even tiny NNs are more than enough, but they just don't get fed the 'right' data ie. exploration is bad). Relevant papers: [https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flair%3AExp&sort=new&restrict_sr=on)

If you're being very narrow and considering a classification problem, well, that's a RL problem too: you can optimize which datapoints you get labels for based on how informative a datapoint is (most datapoints are simply redundant) or how expensive it is to label. That's called 'active learning': [https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reinforcementlearning/search?q=flair%3AActive&sort=new&restrict_sr=on) It's particularly natural if you are doing large-scale image classification and have a service like Amazon Turk plugged in to get (or correct) labels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm watching an AI agent right now learn to play Texas Hold'em and after 75,000 hands, starting with zero knowledge, it plays about as well as some of my friends.

What should I try to teach it next?

<comment><USER14> 75K hands seems very low to me

Can you give more details ?

Is it HU ? NL ? Using just self-play from 0-knowledge ?

How many roll-outs do u perform for each game action?

<comment><USER13> Home-brewed AI, not a NN. Similar in some ways to AlphaGo Zero's MCTS.

Learns to play with 0 knowledge. No training data. No rollouts. It squeezes a lot of info from each hand, more than a NN, which is why it needs less trials.

Currently 100k hands and most respectable play.

<comment><USER14> Would love to chat and exchange some info

firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I do not have the experience to support or refute the author's claim, but he writes:

"The paper does not clarify what "worker" means, but I assume it means 1 CPU."

That seems like way under-powered to me. It's deepmind and so I would assume that 1 worker is 1 GPU/TPU _node_ , meaning there are multiple GPUs for each worker. I could see how not having enough compute power could result in a poor solution

<comment><USER12> DRL is different from regular DL in that it tends towards CPU-heavy, not GPU- heavy. It's hard to saturate a single GPU/TPU since you're using tiny little NNs and only once in a while updating them based on long episodes through the environment.

It might not be using GPUs/TPUs at all! If you look at the algorithm which that DM paper is based on, PPO, the original OpenAI paper & implementation ([https://blog.openai.com/openai-baselines- ppo/](https://blog.openai.com/openai-baselines-ppo/)) doesn't use GPUs, it's pure-CPU. (They have a second version which adds GPU support.)

Or in a DM vein, look at their latest IMPALA which you might've noticed on the front page a few days ago: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.01561.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.01561.pdf) Look at Table 1 pg5's computational resources for various agents: note how many of them have 0 GPUs whatsoever. Even the largest configuration, 500 CPUs, only saturates 1 Nvidia P100 GPU.

(So, 'worker' could hypothetically refer to a server with X cores and 1 GPU processing them locally, but this is almost certainly not the case since it would imply scaling up to thousands of CPUs which is actually highly difficult and requires careful engineering like with IMPALA.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In this run, the initial random weights tended to output highly positive or > highly negative action outputs. This makes most of the actions output the > maximum or minimum acceleration possible. It's really easy to spin super > fast: just output high magnitude forces at every joint. Once the robot gets > going, it's hard to deviate from this policy in a meaningful way - <USER2> > deviate, you have to take several exploration steps to stop the rampant > spinning. It's certainly possible, but in this run, it didn't happen.

This is extremely human. Once you're deeply committed to something, it's hard to imagine alternatives, never mind embrace them.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is an excellent write-up.

<comment><USER18> I might show this to that Uncle who talks about Kurzweil and the Singularity at Thanksgiving.

<comment><USER19> Even AI researchers fall to the Singularity (imo) fallacy, including Schmidhuber:

[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/history.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/history.html)

Although at least there's some display of self-skepticism:

"Kurzweil (2005) plots exponential speedups in sequences of historic paradigm shifts identified by various historians, to back up the hypothesis that "the singularity is near." His historians are all contemporary though, presumably being subject to a similar bias. People of past ages might have held quite different views. For example, possibly some historians of the year 1525 felt inclined to predict a convergence of history around 1540, deriving this date from an exponential speedup of recent breakthroughs such as Western bookprint (around 1444), the re-discovery of America (48 years later), the Reformation (again 24 years later - see the pattern?), and other events they deemed important although today they are mostly forgotten."

Which is a little rare, if you know the curious character of Jürgen Schmidhuber :)

<comment><USER20> Well, in a way, they're right. You could consider the printing press, or the aeroplane, or electricity, or the telegraph, to be a mini-"singularity" event since it drastically changed the world in ways unpredictable beforehand. "Singularity" doesn't necessarily equate to "rapture of the nerds where AI gods make everything awesome (and/or kill us all)", it just means "point where things get weird and we can't predict what will happen next."

<comment><USER19> Well that's IMO devoiding the word of original meaning then. You're referring to a revolution, which is a well established term, not a bona fide 'Singularity', which comes from mathematics as a point where the speed of change properly diverges -- as would be the case if we had a geometric time series of events with constant improvements.

This usage of the term really originated in the context of rampant intelligence growth (through a supposed explosive self-improvement), see the wikipedia article:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't like the title of the article. I think is sensationalist. Deep reinforcement learning has beaten a human at the game of Go. It does work. The model are not easy to train for most of the laymen out there and it has a lot to be addressed to make it production-ready. But it does work. Great write up overall. Thank you for the effort.

<comment><USER6> The current AlphaZero system has little in common with deep reinforcement learning; the NN-guided MTCS is effective but not something that can be applied to general reinforcement learning tasks. And the first AlphaGo system was highly reliant on standard supervised learning (training the value network and policy network on grandmaster games).

If anything, AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero are illustrations of how "pure" deep reinforcement learning is insufficient, that the non-RL parts have an enormous impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can autonomous vehicles work without deep reinforcement learning? I thought that things like negotiating entry into a crossroad required DRL.

<comment><USER23> Of course they can. DRL is a very very specific set of techniques to train decision-making over multiple timesteps.</comment></comment>