The Body Is Not a Computer–Stop Thinking of It as One - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/the-body-is-not-a-computer-stop-thinking-of-it-as-one-1795067037 <comment><USER2> This article is terrible. Of course the body and brain are complicated. But that doesn't mean they don't operate based on rules and systems and mechanics. Just because we can't control how the machine works 100% doesn't mean we currently aren't "Hacking" it today and won't be able to even more in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just skimmed the text and read the comments here TBH, but I can already see were this is going. Of course the brain is complex and we don't understand it and even if Elon might not succeed with Neuralink (in the decade to market plan) it is still worth exploring. So stop hating gizmodo.</comment>


Miniscript - <AUTHOR> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2019-August/017270.html <comment><AUTHOR> Miniscript language for Bitcoin is unveiled. "It's a language for writing (a subset of) Bitcoin Scripts in a structured way, enabling analysis, composition, generic signing and more."

Also here: "Pieter Wuille Unveils 'Miniscript,' A New Smart Contract Language for Bitcoin" [https://www.coindesk.com/pieter-wuille-unveils- miniscript-a-...](https://www.coindesk.com/pieter-wuille-unveils-miniscript-a- new-smart-contract-language-for-bitcoin)</comment>


Analysis behind 'Harlem Shake' virality - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21624109

<comment><AUTHOR> Potential viral trends need to be picked up by "someone of higher standing in the social media world", he says - Have you guys seen any good apps/sites to identify 'amplifiers/influences' in specific topics - across many social media?</comment>


Show HN: Chrome extension to open both link and discussion in new tabs on HN - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-link-%2B-commen/bipcipdhbhamgbiikepkjidomimaoame?hl=en-US <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this extension after seeing a really similar feature in the popular Reddit Enhancement Suite. It's open source here: [https://github.com/quadnix/hackernewslc](https://github.com/quadnix/hackernewslc)

</comment><comment><USER2> I really like the idea, but it doesn't seem to work for me. It opens two tabs: the second is the link but the first is just the homepage of HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thus is very odd. Why is it better than right-clicking?

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice idea, but all this seems to do is hide the post.</comment>


What US Software Companies Should Understand About the Rest of the World - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@did_78238/what-us-software-companies-should-understand-about-the-rest-of-the-world-783e8dbca758#.35q23dyrh <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11503585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11503585)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The "No Fluff" License - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/conradkleinespel/the-no-fluff-license

<comment><USER2> This is basically a BSD/MIT license plus a CLA/DCO style clause. Please don't create a new license; just use ones that already exist.

[https://julien.ponge.org/blog/in-defense-of-contributor- lice...](https://julien.ponge.org/blog/in-defense-of-contributor-license- agreements/) [http://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin](http://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading it. That's exactly what it is meant to be. I don't feel like making every single contributor sign a CLA and manage the signed CLAs... I'd rather have that built into the licensing. And since I haven't found a license that does this, I decided to write one up. However, if such a license already exists, I'd love to see it. Would you know of any?

<comment><USER2> The article quotes this part of the Apache license, which may meet your needs: "5\. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions."

<comment><AUTHOR> This is in fact exactly what I was looking for, it seems. I'm just going to remove the git repo then. As you say, if a similar license already exists, there is no need for a new one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/shortcuts/2013/jul/05/national-security-agency-recruitment-drive?CMP=twt_gu <comment><USER2> "Some studies have estimated [sociopaths in government] to be as high as 20%. About 8% of the general population fall into this category and they make up 40% of prison population." Jef Nance, CFE, Conquiring Deception, p.86.

So the NSA recruitment pool is probably full of sociopaths. Not a problem.</comment>


Is the mobile reception on iPhone XS Max even worse than iPhone X? - <AUTHOR> https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-the-mobile-reception-on-the-xs-max-even-worse-than-iphone-x.2140854/ <comment><USER2> > What can be said definitively is the iPhone XS and XS Max exhibit lab tested > RF performance for antenna gain and radiated power output (EIRP) that almost > invariably measures lower than the same metrics on 2017 iPhone variants and > other recent, comparable handsets.

[https://www.wiwavelength.com/2018/09/antennagate-2018-youre-...](https://www.wiwavelength.com/2018/09/antennagate-2018-youre- getting-my.html)</comment>


Why ML/OCaml are good for writing compilers (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html <comment><USER3> For web developers who are looking for an industrial strength functional language instead of JS, OCaml probably has the best story here.

Actually it has two OCaml->JS compilers of very high quality The first one, js_of_ocaml, could bootstrap the whole compiler several years ago(probably the first one there).

The recent one, [https://github.com/bloomberg/bucklescript](https://github.com/bloomberg/bucklescript), push the JS compilation into next level, it generates fairly readable code, good FFI story, and its compilation is _extremely_ fast, check out the compiler in JS version([http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js- demo/](http://bloomberg.github.io/bucklescript/js-demo/)), and imagine how fast it would be for the compiler in native version. BuckleScript has a good story for Windows, and generates fairly efficient code, see benchmark here: [https://github.com/neonsquare/bucklescript- benchmark](https://github.com/neonsquare/bucklescript-benchmark) BuckleScript is already used in production by big companies: for example Facebook messenger.com 25% is powered by BuckleScript, the new WebAssembly spec interpreter by Google is also partly cross compiled into JS by BuckleScript.

Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of BuckleScript

<comment><USER4> I'm optimistic about Reason, Facebook's new syntax "skin" on top of OCaml. I find OCaml's syntax to be quite gnarly; of the MLs, F# is probably the cleanest and most modern-feeling. Something like F# without the .NET stuff could have been amazing.

<comment><USER5> I find OCaml's syntax simple and clear. I don't get the reason for Reason, but hope it leads to more OCaml adoption.

<comment><USER6> OCaml might be simple and clear, but starting from Standard ML - there's a number of differences that feel like warts and needless complications for no discernable gain for the _programmer_.

I do think Reason fix up a few of these ancient and partially crumbled stone walls making the ocaml landscape easier to criss-cross for a new generation of programmers.

<comment><USER7> > there's a number of differences that feel like warts and needless > complications for no discernable gain

Such as?

<comment><USER6> It's been a while - but pretty much what Reason address - although I'd prefer filling in SML for js-ish syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After learning Elm I wanted to understand ML/OCaml a bit more, so I worked through some documentation from the OCaml site and walked away pleasantly surprised.

After using it for a couple of weeks I am confused why ML/OCaml aren't more popular. They are safe, functional, stable, fast, and have great tooling. They seem poised to take over the functional domain.

While the syntax took a little getting used to ( emphasis on little) once you are used to it, it's very natural. Union types are wonderful, and the implicit type safety within programs was nice.

<comment><USER9> Crappy windows support for OCaml. F# is similar to OCaml, but is very difficult for beginners and those not familiar with .NET. I also don't see a lot of beginner material for OCaml.

<comment><USER10> At computer science at the University of Copenhagen F# has been used for the introduction courses the past couple of years, which as far as I know has been a big success, so I'm doubtful of it not being beginner friendly

<comment><USER9> Mileage is probably not representative when you're in a university setting being taught by professors in an intro course versus a professional trying to use a multitude of the data science libraries and having trouble tying it together. Python has a zillion books published and a large percentage of them are beginner oriented. F# has only a few books and they are almost all for experts.

<comment><USER11> The community surrounding F# today is very supportive and helpful with people of all experience levels. Compared to when I learned F# in 2010 it is orders of magnitude easier and more social. So many resources: the F# Foundation website [http://fsharp.org/](http://fsharp.org/) is a good place to start. [http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/](http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/) and the book form of the site's articles on github [https://swlaschin.gitbooks.io/fsharpforfunandprofit/content/...](https://swlaschin.gitbooks.io/fsharpforfunandprofit/content/site- contents/index.html) has great information for people at all levels. And finally just get on twitter #fsharp to start meeting people in the community.

<comment><USER9> I've gone through all of those and although it's nice, it is not what I'd call beginner friendly at all. Python has books teaching you to program in Python which is a really good way to learn a programming language. Scott's tutorial using Frankenstein to explain Monads is interesting, but I need to see how to build simple programs and modules first. How does one organize a program using pure FP, or what's the best way to mix in OOP and it is really confusing to learn all the pragmas and compiler directives. I'm not sure if I'm using the right terminology, but a lot of example code uses FSI which has to call the modules differently than if you make an executable. I really would love nothing more than F# to be my go to language, but I need a little more help getting there. I realize not all users have this problem though.

<comment><USER12> i am an expert and Scott's website is usually bananas to me. For some people his approach doesn't seem to click.

A good beginner book for F# is a good idea.

<comment><USER9> Glad to hear I'm not the only one lol. I'd spend top dollar for a beginner's book focusing on creating short 1/2 page programs like guess my number, hangman, plotting graphs...etc and only mix in things like currying and monads later in the book along with C# interop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll note that some of the aspects don't necessarily work out like that in practice:

1\. The GC part is true, but one has to remember that this was written at a time when GC was still a bit of an unusual feature in mainstream languages.

2\. Tail recursion doesn't really make much of a difference for walking trees, which is recursive, but (mostly) not tail recursive.

3\. OCaml in particular uses 63/31-bit ints due to implementation details, which isn't a good fit for 64/32-bit integers. The strings and bignum part is mostly right, though.

4\. ADTs can be good or bad for describing ASTs. Once you enrich ASTs with semantics shared by all variants (such as source coordinates), inheritance can become a better fit than ADTs.

8\. Type inference doesn't really extend to module signatures, which you have to write out explicitly (though tooling such as `ocamlc -i` allows you to let the compiler help you write them). I also generally find it better to explicitly annotate functions with types. Not only does it make the code more readable later in its life, but you get fewer truly impenetrable type error messages because you forgot parentheses or a semicolon somewhere.

That said, there are several good points still.

<comment><USER14> >2\. Tail recursion doesn't really make much of a difference for walking trees, which is recursive, but (mostly) not tail recursive.

Non-strictness helps here more than TCO in a strict language.

>4\. ADTs can be good or bad for describing ASTs. Once you enrich ASTs with semantics shared by all variants (such as source coordinates), inheritance can become a better fit than ADTs.

Since this article was written we have better ways of augmenting/annotating ASTs. There's a lot of this out there, but here's one example: [https://brianmckenna.org/blog/type_annotation_cofree](https://brianmckenna.org/blog/type_annotation_cofree)

There are other alternatives that are like inheritance but with better reasoning properties as well. Finally tagless comes to mind.

>I also generally find it better to explicitly annotate functions with types.

This Haskeller whole-heartedly agrees for all the reasons stated.

<comment><USER15> > Non-strictness helps here more than TCO in a strict language.

Can you explain? Assume I want to fold a function over a large tree _and_ fully inspect the final result. (For example, to compile a large expression to a piece of code.) If I use non-tail recursion, my stack will be exhausted. How does non-strictness help with stack usage?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nv-vn The problem with this article is that it's missing an answer to why one would choose ML/OCaml over Haskell. Haskell has many more features, a more advanced type system, arguably superior syntax, and much better library support. However, I believe that OCaml/SML are often a better choice for a number of reasons.

First of all, OCaml/SML are the best choice in terms of example code for compilers. They're historically the choice of many compiler/interpreter/type theory texts (Types and Programming Languages, Modern Compiler Implementation in ML, and an ML is even used as a language to interpret in Essentials of Programming Languages). Andrej Bauer's PLZOO is also written in OCaml. Equally important is the fact that there are a variety of ML implementations, all of which are much more approachable than GHC. The OCaml compiler's codebase is a reasonable size that an individual could get a good idea of how it works in a few weeks or so. SMLNJ, MLKit, MLton, CakeML are all open source and on Github, and all seem to be fairly approachable in comparison to the monolith that is GHC. And that's not even mentioning other compiler in ML (Haxe, Rust's bootstrap compiler, Facebook's Hack compiler, etc.). The fact that there are real-world compilers with perfectly approachable code bases (even without great familiarity with the language; compilers in Haskell might require an in- depth understanding of many of the core type classes and language extensions available) that are open source is highly attractive to novice compiler writers.

Additionally, the feature set in MLs is a good choice for compilers. While they lack some of the cooler features of Haskell, MLs make up for it in simplicity; lots of the features in GHC's type system (especially with language extensions) mean very little for 90% of compiler writers, and getting rid of them from the get-go helps keep the code small and easy to reason about (even if you won't have as much type safety in the compiler itself). This also means that there are a lot less ways to do a single thing, which can be nice when you're not sure exactly how you're going to implement a certain feature. However, one thing I really find incredibly useful is OCaml's polymorphic variants. These are pretty much perfect for statically enforcing a nanopass- like system in your compiler and are a great way of designing your AST/data types in your compiler. I feel like this gets passed up a ton (as far as I know I'm the first person who's used them to create nanopasses), but it's quite convenient and makes OCaml a good competitor for Scheme in this regard.

<comment><USER9> Haskell may indeed be one of the most advanced languages out there in terms of raw power, but it is very complex (how many monad tutorials does it seriously take to teach one of the most core pieces of the language) and how much category theory do you need to know to be moderately effective? Also, the ecosystem could use some work. An example is the main string library isn't used in favor of a different one. Using the first and obvious one leads to performance worse than python and perl even after you compile. I'm being nitpicky, but anytime someone writes a blog post comparing a programming language to playing darksouls (game where you die thousands of times) I'd say you have an issue.

<comment><USER16> I started to write a toy compiler in OCaml. I had some previous experience with Haskell, but in no way an expert. I.e. no category theory background, only shallow exposure to monads.

My "problems" with OCaml started, when I wanted to "map" over a data structure I defined. I ended up having to define custom mapping functions for all container-like data structures I wrote and call them in a non-polymorphic fashion (where I would have just used fmap in Haskell).

Sure, in OCAML I needed to use a parser generator where I would have used megaparsec in haskell, but it was also a tolerable inconvenience.

Trouble started when I needed to track state in the compilation process. I.e. I was generating variable names for temporary results and values, and I needed to track a number that increased. In the end I used a mutable state for it, and it turned out nightmarish in my unit tests.

After a while, I just ported the code base to Haskell and never looked back. The State monad was an easy fix for my mutable state issues. Parser combinators made the parser much more elegant. And many code paths improved, became much more concise. It is hard to describe, but in direct comparison, OCaml felt much more procedural and Haskell much more declarative (and actually easier to read).

The only advantage of OCaml to me is the strict evaluation. I don't think lazy evaluation by default ins Haskell is a great idea.

<comment><USER17> I assume you were just not interested in passing the state around to the functions that needed it, and preferred the fact that the state monad hides that plumbing for you via bind and return. It's worth noting that there exist Ocaml libraries that provide the same operators and even similar do notation syntax that desugars to bind/return operators (via PPX).

Ocaml does tend to be more verbose than Haskell - it's just the nature of the language syntax. E.g., in Ocaml, one says (fun x -> x+1) vs (\x -> x+1). Similarly, ocaml is cursed by the excessive "in"'s that accompany let bindings. "Let .. in let .. in let ...". That can get annoying.

Interestingly, I had the opposite experience with a commercial compiler project. Haskell's syntactic cleverness (monadic syntax, combinator libraries, etc..) eventually got in the way - it became very difficult to understand what a single line of code actually meant since one had to mentally unpack layers of type abstractions. Migrating to ocaml, the verbosity eventually was more tolerable than the opacity of the equivalent Haskell code once the compiler got sufficiently complex.

My experience may vary from yours. I've been doing Haskell/Ocaml in production for many years, so the pain points I've adapted to are likely different than one working on toy compilers or weekend projects. And no, category theory exposure is not and never has been necessary for understanding Haskell or FP unless one is a PL researcher (and even then, only a subset of PL researchers are concerned with those areas). And one can be quite productive and prolific in Haskell without a deep understanding of monads and monad transformers - <USER2> blogosphere has given you the wrong impression if you believe otherwise.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the thorough reply and it sounds like you're quite experienced here. Any chance going into more detail with what you do for a living? Do you maintain a compiler for something more mainstream?

<comment><USER17> I cofounded a company recently that is using code transformation and optimization methods to accelerate data analytics code on special purpose hardware. Our compilation toolchain is all ocaml, and the language that is compiled/transformed/optimized is Python. Prior to this venture, I did similar work - code analysis and transformation, but in that case largely around high performance computing for scientific applications. That tooling was mostly ocaml/Haskell, but not production focused - it was mostly research code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For anyone interested and isn't aware yet Facebook is developing Reason, a layer over OCaml. I've been fiddling with it for the past couple of weeks and coming from JavaScript I personally found the experience generally enjoyable.

[https://facebook.github.io/reason/](https://facebook.github.io/reason/)

<comment><USER19> Hah! Thanks for the link- I discovered this gem just now in their list of comparisons to JS syntax:

      Javascript    | Reason
      </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
      const x = y;  | let x = y;
      let x = y;    | reference cells
      var x = y;    | No equivalent (thankfully)

<comment><USER18> :) Yeah, unfortunately JavaScript can only be improved by educating people not to use the horrible parts (rather than fixing/deprecating them which is not possible). const and let were extremely necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree that Ocaml is just extremely well suited for making new programig languages. If you are interested in Ocaml+programming languages check out the plzoo: [http://plzoo.andrej.com/](http://plzoo.andrej.com/)

I personally think that Ocaml is really good at this, because I started converting the Scheme examples from the PLAI book to Ocaml and it's just felt right(maybe because I'm not fan of the scheme syntax).

</comment><comment><USER21> Currently taking a compilers course that uses SML/NJ and it has been an absolute delight. The functional paradigm is a little strange to get used to at first, but after a while its strong suits make themselves known. The trivial type inferences and pattern matching capabilities make it easy to efficiently describe complicated and precise program situations.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a relatively young developer (three years older than Java) and don't fully get the thing about exceptions (point 7). It sounds very familiar to the solution I know from Java, and it does not make safety - or even feeling about it - any better. If you can still write code that can throw exception and an explicit assurance about it is the only way to prevent the crash, it doesn't change anything, actually.

P.S. I'm not really familiar to ML/OCaml, but have decent experience with large code bases in languages that are not very keen to protect you from yourself.

<comment><USER23> Exceptions in ML languages are very similar to those in Java. The reason for that is simple: they are simply a good way of dealing with computations that might fail. Having said that, exceptions are best used (in any language) where you want to deal with the failure way up in the call stack. If you catch the exception right where it occurs, you should just use a safe method that reports a failure in the return value.

Speaking as a Haskell programmer, never use exceptions. You can get away with this advice because the _Either_ monad allows you to have the behavior of exceptions (namely, at any point you can "fail" a computation and have the error automatically propagate up to the handler). However, this approach relies heavily on having a type system more advanced than OCaml's in order to be reasonable.

<comment><USER24> The Either pattern for errors works great in OCaml; most of the code I write uses it. I'm not sure what problem you're referring to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> FP is based on recursion, and recursive types, inductive algorithms are essential for linguistic processing and transformation.

</comment><comment><USER26> How are simple parsers written in ML (or ocaml)?

You can't use the coding style used for recursive descent in the Dragon compiler book, without using mutable variables.

Do you have to use parser combinators, which have their own limitations?

<comment><USER27> Parser combinators tend to work by recursive descent, so cannot handle left recursive grammars [1], and tend to be really slow. The latter is not a problem for many applications, but removing left recursion can be irritating even for small grammars. It is possible to build combinator parsers that can handle all context-free grammars [2], but I'm not sure any of Ocaml's are built that way.

In any case, Ocaml has parser generators that are fast, do bottom-up parsing (hence handle left-recursion without issue) and _not_ based on parser combinators, e.g. ocamlyacc [3].

I'd use parser combinators for quick prototypes, and, if measurement shows a performance problem, replace them with a generated (e.g. by ocamlyacc) parser. As far as I remember the parser in Ocaml's (superfast) compiler is generated by ocamlyacc.

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

[2] T. Ridge, Simple, functional, sound and complete parsing for all context- free grammars. [http://www.tom-ridge.com/resources/ridge11parsing- cpp.pdf](http://www.tom-ridge.com/resources/ridge11parsing-cpp.pdf)

[3] [https://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual- ocaml/lexyacc.html](https://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/lexyacc.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> OCaml has the potential to be great for almost everything with some work and a bigger ecosystems. F# as well (very similar). i can only imagine how great the world would be if a standard ml had accidentally become the web browser language and all that mind share had gone into evolving it and optimizing it and its tools.</comment>


Show HN: PenguinTrace – Show how code maps to assembly and step through it - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/penguintrace/penguintrace <comment><AUTHOR> This is a side project I've been working on, which is intended to help see how code maps to assembly and how it runs on a processor by stepping through the code and assembly simultaneously.

A bit more background to the project is available on the website at [https://penguintrace.org/2019/04/29/welcome-and- background.h...](https://penguintrace.org/2019/04/29/welcome-and- background.html).

The easiest way to try it out is probably through Docker (instructions on github), any feedback or suggestions are welcome.</comment>


New Content Management System - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I am simply a hard worker, very professional and very effective. I'm working a new content management and sharing platform and it is amazing, one can get it at [https://www.getlucid.app/](https://www.getlucid.app/), just install it in your cpanel and you're good to go..

</comment><comment><USER2> The page is very empty, so it's difficult to see if it is useful. Try adding more content.

For this kind of projects sometimes it's better to make a blog post where you explain the technology stack and some problems you have to solve.</comment>


How to pin blocked content to Pinterest - <AUTHOR> http://blog.initlabs.com/post/18226946517/how-to-pin-blocked-content-to-pinterest

<comment><USER2> Should be pretty easy for Pinterest to add proper server-side validation of pinned pages. (This trick is based on removing the meta tag from the DOM in the browser.)</comment>


Story of the Roku Player (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3004709/inside-netflixs-project-griffin-forgotten-history-roku-under-reed-hastings <comment><USER2> Roku has made, in my mind, a horrible mistake by trying to be more than a hardware vendor. My first Roku was great -- select the app you want, play video. A lot of the streaming services were very immature and had terrible UIs; Netflix's was particularly good and Amazon remains one of the worst. They had a headphone jack on the remote (genius!) so that I could listen to content while other people in my household slept.

Then on the next generation, they started requiring a credit card on registration (boy did I have to hunt to find out how to set it up without that). I am perfectly capable of getting credentials for the services in question, why would I ever put my credit card information with a service where I never expect to use it?

Then they started peppering the UI with ads. The net effect here was basically just to make the interface less navigable by wasting a bunch of space advertising channels and programs on a device I paid for?

Finally they added a bunch of buttons to the remote to take you to specific services, which I only every use mistakenly, and of course includes "Rdio", where all I get when that button gets mashed is a message saying "this service no longer exists". Their interface with the big tiles is very well done; I don't need these shortcuts.

I would gladly pay extra for a version of the Roku that cut all of these features; like Amazon hardware and the "with sponsored content" where I can pay an extra $20 to get the vanilla version. It's still the best of the devices I've used (Amazon Fire Stick/Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast) but it's a shame they keep trying to suck more ongoing revenue out of it.

<comment><USER3> It seems like nobody is content to maintain a commercial product that does one thing: play media well. Plex Media Server is now going down the same path: They're trying to do their own streaming services, be a portal for podcasts, have a partnership with TIDAL, etc. They recently hijacked the home screen UI to shill their library of completely awful TV shows and movies that nobody wants to watch (though it can be disabled easily). Seriously considering a move to Emby at this point.

<comment><USER4> Well, at least in Plex's case I'd assume it's to generate a reoccurring revenue stream to continue development. I question how sustainable the "Plex Pass" feature is with so many people (at least that I know) who bought a lifetime subscription ages ago. I personally bought a Plex Pass for like $49.99 around 6 or 7 years ago and hasn't given them a cent since then. I support their efforts like Tidal and ad-based TV and Movies if it means I get new features without having to move to a monthly or yearly based subscription service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I 'upgraded' my parents Roku 3 with the Apple TV 4K, but they ended up going back to the Roku exclusively.

The remote on the Roku is much more intuitive and the d-pad allows them to select what they want with confidence. The apple tv's remote with its touchpad is unwieldy by comparison.

<comment> dynamite-ready The Roku remote is an unsung example of great design. You can tell the parts are cheap, but it feels great, and is very easy to use. My partner is a luddite... It took roughly 30 seconds to teach her how to use it. She barely knows how the TV itself works!

<comment><USER6> Great design but poor implementation? My remote randomly stops working, there is often a long delay when I press a button, and it uses up batteries very more quickly than anything else.

It's easily the worst remote I have ever used, although there are no problems with its design.

<comment><USER7> I've owned 6 roku premiers and have never had any of those issues with any remote. Maybe you got a dud?

<comment><USER6> Different models of Roku use different technology for the remote. Since some of them use WiFi, they can suffer from connectivity problems like WiFi does in general. This will depend on the location and RF environment.

Maybe you got IR remotes? Maybe you live in a location with low levels of interference? Maybe your model doesn't suffer from the design flaws that mine does?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a Roku. Replaced it with a second hand Apple TV after software updates stuck ads all over the menu.

Pretty shit thing to do to paying customers, and one of the main reasons I'm so hesitant about IoT gizmos in general. Might start out great, but the provider can turn it to shit at a moment's notice with no recourse.

And it looks like this continues to get worse since I bailed: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20902423/roku-tv- interact...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20902423/roku-tv-interactive- pop-up-ads-automatic-content-recognition)

They made a "more ways to watch" feature to automatically find when content is available on a streaming service, and then two years later gunked it up with advertising that you can't disable short of turning off the feature entirely. Cool.

Makes you wonder if the real reason they built that feature in the first place was as an excuse to monitor everything you watch and monetize that data.

<comment><USER9> Investors want to see a recurring revenue stream. Almost all hardware you'll eventually be able to "buy" will have some sort of avenue for recurring revenue stream. I recall reading something about the people who made LynQ (portable GPS thing) and investors wanted to know how they intended to keep getting money out of the people who bought it.

The future is going to suck.

<comment><USER10> Probably best to buy hardware from privately owned companies then if your worried about this kind of thing. I don't mind paying an extra premium for hardware if it means I wont be bombarded by ads or be spied on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had one of the first generation Roku boxes. And all it did was play Netflix movies. Which was why I bought it.

But then one day I turned on my TV and the Roku has upgraded itself. Now I could watch Amazon, Netflix and other channels.

It was a very pleasant surprise.

<comment><USER12> Roku has, until recently, tried to support _all_ of their devices with current software updates. It's very refreshing to see a company not abandon their devices. It's likely so they can maximize the number of clients, but it's still a nice gesture.

<comment><USER13> This is why I bought a RokuTV. Every other smart TV vendor has multiple generations of abandoned platforms under their belt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I continue to love my Roku and some of the oddball niche channels. But their ad serving is really immature. From seeing the same ad 3 times in a row to Overt aggressive insertions to sometimes freezing on an external ad feed to the rampant ad scams, it becomes frustrating to watch anything but The no-ad subscription channels which may not have that culty flic.

I don't mind supporting folks with ad viewing, but I also expect some variety, freq capping, and a bit of targeting. On the plus side, when all those Spanish ads come on, I can recognize almost half the words now.

<comment><USER15> I also like my Roku. Recently upgraded to an Ultra so I could take advantage of a free year of AppleTV+.

WRT advertising, I run a Pi-Hole and it does a great job blocking such things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've bought TVs with Roku built-in, Chromecast built-in and other weird tries at streaming built-in. All but the Roku are basically worthless as the manufacturers did not ship upgrades, basically making what was a smart tv, just a tv. The Roku TV happily updates itself, and seems to have more and more channels and apps every week.

</comment><comment><USER17> I had no idea Roku was born from Netflix, they did a good job at distancing themselves. I think this origin story also speaks to Reid fully understanding what he set out to do with Netflix, which is to stream entertainment over the internet. From the name to this move it seems very clear that's has taken that mission VERY seriously. It is really hard to invest in something so much and when you realize it is wrong viciously distance yourself from it. very few companies rarely pivot from their original mission. The only thing I would have done differently would be to open-source the hardware and Software of the Roku, basically creating a ton of competitors but at the same time pushing the mission of streaming movies further and getting Netflix to more screens. It still worked out regardless

<comment><USER18> No-one could have competed on hardware price without placement and ad deals anyway. Those are why the hardware can be so cheap.

<comment><USER2> The hardware initially was cheap, and had no placement ad deals. Possibly they were selling at a loss, who knows?, but for sure at one point their business model was to sell a hardware device that was good at streaming.

<comment><USER18> Did the early models not bundle apps for any services?

From what I've seen in the space, consumers want to spend $30-50, retailers want a giant percentage to put you on their shelves, and that doesn't leave much for hardware assuming you want _any_ profit. Then there's support, design & R&D... A few ad deals or some sponsorship for placement/bundling and suddenly hitting an acceptable price seems _almost_ feasible.

[edit] and of course price expectations are so low because the competition's selling at-cost and making money on the side deals. You're on the shelf next to something with ads but that doesn't go on the price sticker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The decision to separate out the hardware from the streaming was prescient -- no need to cannibalize deals with other hardware vendors, and get support for Netflix to be universal.

I only wish that Netflix had been as prescient about its original content division. If they had spun that out as another company, then it would have been possible for Netflix to continue to score content deals, instead of steadily losing content.

<comment><USER19> Spinning out the content might have staved off losing content for a year or so, but pretty much every single one of their 3rd party content providers has their own streaming service now, so the writing was on the wall for content deals even before their original content division started.

<comment><USER2> We don't have access to the alternate universe where this didn't happen. But Netflix was king of streaming -- other services had to bring themselves up in order to avoid being killed off by Netflix promoting their own content above those of other providers.

If Netflix had made it clear that they were not going to compete in content, then maybe those services would not have to exist.

Then again, maybe the move in this direction was inevitable; if the FTC had put its foot in to get something like the consent decree [1] with movie theaters and studios, then we would probably be in a world where streaming services had to differentiate on the quality of their streaming, platform support, application, funding model, etc. instead of just basically competing on the content, while steadily getting worse at everything else.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My main beef with the roku is the sluggishness of the UI. And I have a few of them in the house (ultras or whatever the top of the line one was as of six months ago. Amazon had a sale and I bought a few). I also have a bunch of Apple TV 4Ks.

Say I am watching Plex and then want to switch to Netflix and then maybe go over to Channels to watch some News on MSNBC. The Apple TV can do this without reloading the app or losing my place in the video. It is nearly instant. The Roku has to reload the entire app taking a minute and losing my place.

But I do like the Roku remote. So there is that.

<comment><USER21> Interesting. I have the 4K Apple TV and sometimes apps feel extremely sluggish. Netflix clearly has some sort of compounding problem (maybe a memory leak) where simply scrolling through the app gets progressively slower until it's nearly completely unusable. Killing and restarting the app fixes it temporarily.

<comment><USER20> I haven't noticed that in Netflix. But 80% of my use of the Apple TV is plex and a little app I wrote that reads directories on my computer running Apache and shows everything in a directory structure. And a bash script that runs through everything calling HandBrakeCli (if needed), generates thumbnails with ffmpeg, and then creates the xml.js file the app reads.

It took around six hours to build and I had zero experience with any tvos or ios development. Just a fun covid-project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Original? I had the Roku Sound Bridge. It was purely for music. It hardwired to your stereo and could connect to your iTunes library by WiFi. You controlled it via a remote and the box's display. _When it worked_ , it was great.

[https://images.crutchfieldonline.com/ImageHandler/trim/620/3...](https://images.crutchfieldonline.com/ImageHandler/trim/620/378/products/2004/593/x593M1000-o_MT.jpeg)

Seems like it should have been part of the origin story, no?

I still have it actually. Someday I'd like to figure out if it's possible to re-purpose it.

<comment><USER23> It's complex and weird, Roku was started in 2002 by Anthony Wood, but then eventually he ended up a VP at Netflix? Reed I think saw a need for someone with a little distance and hardware experience (Wood founded ReplyTV) but not too much such that they couldn't own the experience.

All that said, the Roku streaming player by `Roku` is the first product they called the `Roku` so it's a fair way to title it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems that the name Roku curses your product (or programming language) into not being used.</comment>


Beeps and melodies in two-way radio - <AUTHOR> http://www.windytan.com/2019/03/beeps-and-melodies-in-two-way-radio.html <comment><USER2> Every time she posts I feel simultaneously excited of what's to find in there, and dumber because I haven't gone this deep into something. Such great writing where the subject matter is both compelling and the author has done their homework.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, she is undoubtedly an inspiration for me! Really awesome explorations of interesting things.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention her site is a lesson on how to make articles easily readable. From the use of greys to text and links colors, the lack of too light images and the barely noticeable background pattern: everything on that page is gentle to the eyes. This is how web pages should be designed. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the most concise explanation of Gaussian peak interpolation from the article that I can find. Unfortunately it's a pdf, but it does have a full example:

[http://www.add.ece.ufl.edu/4511/references/ImprovingFFTResol...](http://www.add.ece.ufl.edu/4511/references/ImprovingFFTResoltuion.pdf)

        RFFT_SIZE = 256
        magAddr: points to array of FFT magnitude results
        sample_freq = 8000Hz
        TI_FFT(): TI optimized function to calculate FFT
        maxidx_SP_RV_2(): TI optimized function to find maximum value in array

        TI_FFT(); //perform TI FFT analysis.
        int max_bin = maxidx_SP_RV_2(magAddr, RFFT_SIZE>>1); //find max bin
        float freq_rez = (float)sample_freq/RFFT_SIZE; //calculate frequency resolution
        float inter_bin = max_bin + log(magAddr[max_bin+1]/magAddr[max_bin-1])*0.5
            /log(magAddr[max_bin]*magAddr[max_bin]/(magAddr[max_bin+1]*magAddr[max_bin-1]));
            //calculate the intermittent bin on continuous spectrum using GI
        freq = (unsigned)(freq_rez*inter_bin); //calculate max input frequency

I believe that the above is C code, so the array indices are 0-based.

I can't find anything on TI_FFT except a bunch of PowerPoints, so you'll probably want to use a better documented FFT function:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=TI_FFT&tbs=li:1](https://www.google.com/search?q=TI_FFT&tbs=li:1)

Here is the maxidx_SP_RV_2() function:

[http://read.pudn.com/downloads543/sourcecode/embedded/224236...](http://read.pudn.com/downloads543/sourcecode/embedded/2242363/C28x_FPU_LIB/maxidx_SP_RV_2.asm__.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> The 1:20 decimation could probably be done more efficiently with CIC filter, I would look into that.

Love the terminal user interface! I would like to write something like that for a shortwave raspberry pi transceiver we are building, [http://tujasdr.com](http://tujasdr.com).

</comment><comment><USER7> This mostly seem to center around someone doing analysis of a FRS like radio service.

Generally professional radios don't send roger beeps over there air. Not have I ever heard of "STE" \- and certainly not as the method described, normally you'd change the phase of the CTCSS tone by 120 degrees, which is the signal to the radio that the transmission ended. The phase reversal method was used because of the amount of time it took vibrasponder reeds to stop vibrating, but changing the phase you could end the vibration faster.

<comment><USER8> Not " _someone_ ". Oona Räisänen, consistently fascinating writer on all things rf, and orders of magnitude deeper into her fields than I could ever even imagine myself into anything.

<comment><USER7> She may be fascinating, that does not make her technically correct, nor an expert in this field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You would enjoy hackgreen. The displacement fields end up generating a sequence over nuclear reticules so you get a signal into the wire and that pletes into your own over some ranged wifi or something and you can literally find yourself in a wide band screener for free. Ecosia search for hackgreen. It's bad ass.</comment>


DIY Paper iPhone Dock - <AUTHOR> http://emilychang.com/2009/09/diy-paper-iphone-dock/

<comment><USER2> Pretty slick. If you want to go even simpler, you can make a a stand using scissors and a business card: [http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple- business-card-iPhone-...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-business- card-iPhone--iPod-stand/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure why the original post (linked at the very beginning of the post) wasn't used instead:

[http://www.dessinemoiunobjet.com/iphone-and-itouch-paper- sta...](http://www.dessinemoiunobjet.com/iphone-and-itouch-paper-stand-dock/)

Note there's a link to the US Letter format.</comment>


Fun Things to do with a Raspberry Pi (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/desktops/25-fun-things-to-do-with-a-raspberry-pi-50009851/ <comment><USER2> I'm currently mounting two rPi boards to two external hard drives. I'll leave one at home and one at work and run BitTorrent Sync on them to create my own little distributed / decentralized Dropbox. Would a blog post when I'm done be interesting?

<comment><USER3> Shameless plug: I just did exactly this over the weekend and wrote about how well it works here: [http://blog.travisthieman.com/ec2-for-23-cents-and-your- own-...](http://blog.travisthieman.com/ec2-for-23-cents-and-your-own-cloud- for-less/)

Short version: BTSync is awesome, ownCloud makes the Pi struggle pretty hard

<comment><USER4> By the way, if you're looking at ownCloud check out Seafile as well. After hearing about ownCloud's performance issues I decided to try Seafile instead and I've had a very positive experience. I'm running it on a VPS in the cloud but they have a release compiled for the Rasberry Pi as well. [http://seafile.com/en/download/](http://seafile.com/en/download/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I saw some references to it scattered about but was sort of turned off by the team-centric presentation. Are you just using it for your own personal stuff?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm mainly just using it for a personal backup/synchronization and it works great for that. The team stuff is nice to have available too though. It was trivial to set up a shared folder between myself and my girlfriend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really need to get myself a Raspberry Pi. It seems like me and my kids could have a lot of fun with it.

I'm actually almost considering getting one, a cheap monitor/keyboard/mouse and setting it up for the kids to use as their own computer...seems like it could be a cheap investment to get them to learn how to use Linux.

</comment><comment><USER6> How would one go about creating a quick/cheap custom enclosure for their Pi and a touchscreen? I have both, but I'm completely lost looking into 3d printing for it, and most things I've found have been pretty expensive. Are there any quick prototyping tools or materials I could use out there, or even services/startups to get something made?

</comment><comment><USER7> Another thing to do with a Raspberry Pi is to colocate it: [http://raspberrycolocation.com/](http://raspberrycolocation.com/), [https://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi...](https://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/).

Caveat: the delivery time, at least with PC Extreme, is long (ETA = 90 days); I've been waiting for my RasPi to come online since July. Also note that when I signed up for colocation it was offered for free [1].

The CPU performance on the Pi will not compare favorably to even the humblest x86-based VPS but I rather like the idea of getting to play with a dedicated ARM server at a remote location.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5946940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5946940)

</comment><comment><USER8> I use a Pi as an air-gapped system for stuff that I really want to be secure. Master keypair was generated on the Pi (which has a hardware RNG in the SoC), and the only way I get data on/off it is to sneakernet it. The small size of the device makes physical security much easier as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are interested in the Pi also check out the BeagleBone. I love how easy everything with the Pi was. I'm hoping to do more home automation with either another Pi or a BeagleBone. As for now my Pi is controlling our detached garage, and has done a nice job surviving a Louisiana summer.

Shameless plug: [http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a- raspber...](http://itsbrent.net/2013/03/hacking-my-garage-with-a-raspberry- pi/)

<comment><USER10> If you are interested in the BeagleBone also check out the Cubieboard. It's a more powerful Pi, essentially. Dual core, 1GB of RAM, SATA.

[http://cubieboard.org/](http://cubieboard.org/)

<comment><USER11> Another nice option is the Hackberry.

[https://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry%20A10%20Developer...](https://www.miniand.com/products/Hackberry%20A10%20Developer%20Board)

<comment><USER10> The Cubie eeks out the Hackberry in the latest revision, if you're interested in CPU power. Allwinner A20 rather than A10.

<comment><USER12> All of the Allwinner boards have mostly-closed Mali GPUs and closed but partially reverse-engineered CedarX VPUs.

Outside of Android the Mali GPUs are a bit of a bear to get working at all, much less use for anything useful.

For headless tasks I agree that Cubie/Hackberry are faster dollar-for-dollar than the Pi, but the Pi's VideoCore GPU, while still blob-encumbered, at least provides a documented interface with working drivers for both the "traditional" X11 stack and Android, as well as a real OpenMAX video decoding interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just recently setup a bit torrent sync server on my rPi. So nice to sync with LAN speed as soon as I wake my MacBook as the data is already on the Pi. \o/

<comment><USER14> the rPI can hardly reach 100Mbits over LAN. Its nice and has its uses but i wouldnt use it for file related stuff inside a network, just too slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Wargames_ -style: reverse engineer oldschool RS422/RS485 multi-drop 2 or 4-wire command & control protocols for physical security / surveillance / access control systems. Plug in a pi via [http://www.bb-elec.com/Products/USB- Connectivity/USB-to-Seri...](http://www.bb-elec.com/Products/USB- Connectivity/USB-to-Serial-Adapters/In-line-USB-to-Serial-Converters.aspx) to an arbitrary cable (maybe with servo-automated sensing/tapping of cable cores for speed/precision), and have it detect channels, passively map devices and grant full control of the network. Jumpstart with [http://wiki.wireshark.org/FieldbusProtocolFamily](http://wiki.wireshark.org/FieldbusProtocolFamily) dissectors and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socketcan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socketcan) library. Probably loads of firmware bugs on that era of devices...

</comment><comment><USER16> Might as well be titled "25 things to do with a computer", since very few are anything to do with the Raspberry Pi itself.

<comment><USER17> 25 things to do with a low-cost ARM based computer that has seen widespread community adoption doesn't really have the same ring to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got a raspberry pi to see if I could replace a noisy htpc with Raspbmc. It worked a lot better than I anticipated but I found that I was sacrificing speed for the 'cool' factor of running it on a Pi so I ended up going back to a PC.

Still looking for a project to combine my Rift and Pi.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been trying to find a good way to power my pi with a solar panel, but haven't found many suitable options. Anyone?

<comment><USER20> Not sure what you consider a good way, but getting a decent sized panel, and use it to charge a lead acid battery would be the way i'd expect. Then run the pi off of a 12v usb adapter (usually find them for cars). That'll give you a number of advantages, it'd let you have a battery to deal with cloudy periods where you won't have enough juice to run the pi, and let you run for a while after the sun goes down. if you then want to add hardware to let you shut off when the panel voltage drops for too long it'd also be possible with just a diode before the battery (also not that hard to get) or with a sense line on the charging hardware you use.

take a look at stuff like [1], that should work fine for the pi, as long as you aren't trying to power huge amounts more.

[1][http://www.amazon.com/Instapark%C2%AE-Black-Mono- crystalline...](http://www.amazon.com/Instapark%C2%AE-Black-Mono-crystalline- Charge- Controller/dp/B005LR9IOG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1379695831&sr=8-2&keywords=12v+solar+charger)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Regardless of the ethics involved, try out this security penetration testing project."

...

</comment><comment><USER22> Being able to run Windows 3.x sounds like the coolest among the list.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am in the middle of constructing my own piMAME powered arcade cabinet. I've wanted one for years and building it has been one of the most fun things I've done.

<comment><USER24> As the maintainer of the PiMAME distro, Thanks! If you have any questions we have an active forum at [http://pimame.org](http://pimame.org)

-Shea

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I used mine to make an ambient backlight for my TV. The rPi drives individual LEDs in a strip by processing the video signal directly from my cable box.

<comment><USER26> This sounds like a really interesting project. Have you written it up anywhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Some time soonish I plan on picking up a Pi and a GPS module that I can wire in to the GPIO pins, and have a Stratum 1 NTP server on my LAN.

</comment><comment><USER28> The link for number 9, the robotic arm seems to be down. Does anyone know where I might find that story?

<comment><USER29> It's called robotic arm edge. I'll let you duckduckgo it.

<comment><USER28> Thanks but I am more interested in the writeup regarding how to connect it to a raspberry pi, (and possibly how far it can throw a frisbee...)

<comment><USER30> I've read Instructables and such for modding it with potentiometers to give control feedback on the movement, hooking it up to an Arduino for control, things like that. I haven't personally seen a version of this for the Pi, but the interesting part is getting it talking to a CPU controller at all, and it ought to be a pretty short leap from an Arduino to a Pi.

It's definitely not plug and play if you want to do anything interesting with it, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Has anyone tried to setup ownclod on their pi? How is the performance?

<comment><USER32> Allegedly bad.

<comment><USER33> folks talking about seafile in other thread...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Also: FM Radio transmitter. (Which will also be my next project) :)

<comment><USER35> I automatically read your name as 'TobbenFM' ^_^

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The best thing I did with a Raspberry PI was to setup openvpn on it to connect to my server where I have minidlna running and a lot of other services, then give them to my friends and hook up to their Smart TVs and routers. Now all my friends can view my music and family pictures on their TVs, with basically no setup, just pushing buttons on the remote - the Raspberry Pis openvpn connects the UPnP/DLNA at the openvpn server to anyone that is connected, and so my friends can share their family pictures with each other in a very secure way - no third party, its all going over the vpn and they can use a web-interface to add pictures to the server directly, or let the rasppi mount their images on their NAS for those who have that. This one was a bit tricky to setup, since minidlna needed to index remote content.</comment>


HN Tokyo Meetup – 21st of October, 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/events/6123

<comment><USER2> As always, this event will be a blast. Hope you can all make it!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm going to miss this one again, such a shame :(

</comment><comment><USER4> Looking forward to it!</comment>


"I'm a PC, and more happy is coming" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU <comment><AUTHOR> I like that they've switched tactics from "Let's passive-aggressively nitpick at Apple" to a pure "Look at how awesome we are!"

<comment><USER2> It's actually a fairly effective technique if you look at history.

Apple always used to make commercials about their own products which led to Microsoft's "nitpick ads". Now Microsoft's going positive and Apple has, for reasons I don't quite understand, chosen to go on the defensive (The most recent "Puddy" ad is obnoxious)

I have no solid numbers to back it up but I personally like Ads where companies tell me why they're great much better than Ads that tell me why their competitor sucks.

<comment><USER3> Apple's not exactly on the defensive, but I do think their Get A Mac campaign is nearly at an end. They're sniping with those. I much prefer their industrial design commercials.

This ad was unexpectedly great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting how effective this commercial is without actually doing much of anything... I like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically, you'd have to be a major-league asshole to _argue with a kindergartner_ over technicalities.

<comment><USER5> A kindergartener _with pictures of bunnies and kittens_. Pretty much any attempt at rebuttal is null and void.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been happy and responsive..... and it has never had to come..... OS X!!!!!

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the original better...before they Photoshopped out the black cat!

<comment><USER3> That's one of the most adorable Internet photos by far.

EDIT: <http://i.thefairest.info/cutest_thumbs/sP3GqA.jpeg></comment></comment>


Show HN: "Ask and Yeah" a Twitter-alike service for Q&A with pinterest layout - <AUTHOR>

I want to show you my new web app "Ask and Yeah".
http://askandyeah.com
it's like a twitter-service for questions and answers with a pinterest layout :D. People can ask wh-questions (what, where, when, why ….) using max 140 characters. Others can answer questions using max 50 characters. You can use hashtags to categorize questions (@ for person, # for thing, ! for place). For example: what did @JFK say in his famous #speech in !Berlin in 1963?
My main goal creating this app (beside learning new programming skills) is helping people quickly find questions about a specific topics when they need some. For example: teachers looking for question for their students, families looking for quizzes for a quiz-night, or people looking for fun.
Feedbacks are appreciated. Also if you have new ideas for "Ask and Yeah", please let me know. It's mainly my side-project, but i desire to develope it further.
Thank you An <comment><USER2> I hate the fact that the register pop-up will not go away unless I sign in.

<comment><USER3> I feel the same. I've registered using email, and it seems the email does not have to be validated, which just makes it pointless.

Other than that, the layout seems pretty friendly. The main issue of course will be what kind of community will build around this, there being so many question-answering forums in existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> The community for Ask&Yeah will actually not be hackers :D. My goal is a repository of questions and answers that can be used freely in education. For example, teachers can find questions about a specific person in specific place (@JFK in !Berlin), ask their students collect the answers. Ask&Yeah is still mainly a side project for me to learn about jQuery Mobile, responsive design and backend development.

If you have any better use cases for Ask&Yeah, please let me know. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://askandyeah.com></comment>


Being a female software engineer - <AUTHOR> http://femalesoftwareeng.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> So I'm a female software engineer (the only one on our team of ~50), and I couldn't really identify with most of the posts on here. Am I just really lucky, and work for one of the few good companies out there?

<comment><USER3> That's awesome! I'm so glad to hear you're in a good place. Of the many places I've worked, I'd say about half were kind of hostile for women and half were pretty okay. I've found that conferences are more consistently in the former category.

Now let's figure out what to do about that other half.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a male software engineer, I find this smart, educational and entertaining. But then again, what the hell do I know about it?

How can I show support for this without sounding like an idiot?

<comment><USER3> You just did. Thank you and all the other allies out there. It's important for me and my cohort to remember most people are well-intentioned and many are even enlightened, in tech and elsewhere. (Source: this is my blog.)

<comment><USER5> Where "enlightened" = agrees with all my views, simplified into dumb animated GIFs?

The "What about the menz" trope is as sexist as the behavior it's pretending to decry. Calling yourself enlightened while stereotyping the opposing gender is sheer hypocrisy.

I'm a male dev who has been subject to some very unpleasant behavior because of my work... I didn't have the privilege of summoning my white knights with a simple retweet, as you see women do over and over again in any online sexism shitstorm. I was expected to justify my choices through logical argument, and just accept the fact that people said I should be shot for publishing a Github repo. There was no outrage over that, no brotherhood to back me up.

See, if women make less money because they ask for less, it's considered a problem that needs to be solved _for_ women. It's the fault of society that women are conditioned to be insecure about their real value!

If men self-select into technical disciplines and don't develop appropriate social skills by being immersed in competitive, meritocratic environments, it's considered a problem that women need to be protected _from_. The best those men can hope for is a "re-education" from the feminazis, so he knows the leash is not optional.

Isn't it funny how female empowerment seems to require the men to do all the work in making changes?

That's what "What about the menz" is really about. It's a way for women to hold on to the privilege that when both a man and a woman are crossed, it's the woman's needs which are tended to first. Women and children first, it's been around forever, and it was practiced religiously. That's why 80% of the people on board the Titanic were men, and 80% of the survivors were women. Even when faced with a certain icy death, men across all of society agreed that women 'deserved' to be saved more.

The reason it's hard being a female software engineer is because people pay attention to you when you walk into a room. That has its upsides, and its downsides, and it's often not the kind of attention that you want. But you have it anyway. You can't decry the negatives, while continuing to coast on your own privilege of not being called out on your bullshit.

<comment><USER6> The women and children first thing on the titanic was an EXCEPTION: [http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/31/3554854.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/31/3554854.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a serious question... is this a west coast thing? A midwest or southern thing? I've worked for over 13 years in Boston, in several companies with several smart female engineers... no one ever treated them differently that I saw. So... anyone seeing this in Boston? Maybe developers here are more enlightened? Maybe all the women coders need to come to Boston. :)

<comment><USER3> "No one ever treated them differently that I saw." This is a common and understandable reaction, but it's important to remember how hard it is to be an accurate observer in these situations. For instance, I have almost never witnessed evidence of racism in my workplaces, and yet I know for a fact that in those places racism was real, common, and huge problem for racial minorities. There are 500 incidents you don't see or maybe notice for every one you do. This is why I didn't really try to answer the last question here: <http://femalesoftwareeng.tumblr.com/answers>

Another issue is that some places are far more enlightened than others. Gaming companies, for example, tend to be much worse for female developers. So it's very possible you've never worked somewhere that was very bad. Or maybe your coworkers just never spoke up about it for fear of ridicule/backlash.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for responding to my late addition to the thread. You're right, of course... I may have missed a lot of it. And I haven't worked at gaming companies - not a lot of those in Boston, and the "kill yourself working just to get fired 2 months after launch" thing is not really my cup of tea ;)

I'll talk to a couple female ex-coworkers and see what they have to say. I hope I didn't come off as not believing sexism exists in the software world, because I absolutely believe it.

Anyway, thanks for bringing this up. I looked through your tumblr, and luckily do not see myself in any of the gaffes that you posted about (but I'll try to keep an eye out for things I or other coworkers might do without realizing). I am saddened that there are so many on the list. I can't believe there are men who still act like that in this day and age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am curious why "tits or gtfo" is on the list, considering that it is designed to piss off women. It's still awful and is probably one of the most vulgar things you could say to anyone... but do actual professionals say stuff _that_ offensive in software engineering settings?

I don't mean to be combative, just curious.

<comment><USER9> #ruby-lang irc logs: <http://irclog.whitequark.org/ruby-lang/search?q=tits>

It happens. I don't know how often.

<comment><USER10> How much of this happening do you think can be attributed to how young the Ruby user base tends to skew? How often does it occur on the Python or Perl IRC channels?

<comment><USER9> I don't have that data, but you could probably get it by parsing all the irc logs that are around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is awesome and really sad at the same time. My last computer science class was 60-70% women and yet it seems like female representation in tech is only 30% if that. The good news is that it seems that in larger companies the ratio is closer to 50%

<comment><USER3> Wow, really? I've worked at a few large companies and the percentage of women in engineering seemed to hover around 15%. Where is this wonderful 50% land so I can go to there?

<comment><USER11> I don't think there are many large companies with 50%, but they at least have a significant amount of female engineers. I thought Google was at ~40% but I can't find the reference anymore (searching just shows Google+ stats). I know 10gen (MongoDB) has at least some female engineers just because one of them helps run the local python meetup

<comment><USER12> Google? 40% female in eng? I don't think so. You wouldn't be able to find that number online since it's embarrassingly low, and they guard it jealously even internally.

In 4.5 years on 3 different projects (SRE team, dev team, different dev team), I was all alone. I should tally up all of the names of my coworkers and see just how it worked out. People came and went but it was always guys replacing guys.

<comment><USER3> Agh, I was hoping I was wrong. This is more in line with my experience.

It's a shame they don't release the numbers because it's easy for "40%" to float around the Zeitgeist, concealing a very real problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It took me a minute to understand what you meant by "coworker gets touchy". At which point my reaction was as portrayed in "lady problems".

I am changing careers to something less male dominated. I am taking up long distance truck driving.

</comment><comment><USER14> As a male Software Engineer, when I encounter the "rare and elusive" (he he) female Software Engineer I automatically assume they are smarter than me and not afraid to get their hands dirty with some low level goodness..</comment>


Why do people still believe in conspiracy theories? - <AUTHOR> https://physicsworld.com/a/why-do-people-still-believe-in-conspiracy-theories/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR:

"The use of mathematics creates a rift between those unable to understand this special language and those who do, making it easy for the former to distrust the latter. Galileo's Gap, as I call it, has widened in size and consequence in the four centuries since then, feeding the frequency and severity of conspiracy theories."

"To reduce the impact of conspiracies, there's little point quoting mainstream experts, citing scientific papers, appealing to facts, or even teaching more science, for all these things will be said to belong to the conspiracy."

"Far more effective is to provide people with better tools to make sense of their personal, political and social experience. Yet the disciplines that cultivate these interpretive tools, collectively called the humanities, are largely having their resources redirected to the sciences."</comment>


Billionaire bunkers: How the 1% are preparing for the apocalypse (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/style/article/doomsday-luxury-bunkers/index.html <comment><USER2> How many of the people who pay for these things were entrepreneurs who felt they could change the world with their new products and services when it would profit them, yet when it comes to changing the world to stop growing so much and steward our resources for future generations, they say, "we can't change human nature" and build bunkers and rocket ships to escape the devastation they accelerated?

<comment><USER3> Some of them. That was an easy question. Many of them, though, are not for changing the world, just for maintaining the status quo that empowers them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't quite understand how a nuclear bunker is useful. MAD means you would have maybe 30 - 60 minutes to get into them? Plus, if I was attacking the country where the bunkers are located, I would make sure to blow them sky high, since I can't verify what is in them. Maybe in a pandemic they are useful, although using SARS-CoV-2 as an example, you can't be sure you aren't locking yourself up with someone carrying the virus.

<comment><USER5> Nukes don't work like that, it's not used to blow things up to the sky, it is detonated near ground to maximize it's blast zone and send the shockwave and heat as wide as possible, make an area uninhabitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I watch an apocalyptic movie, it always strikes me that the help gets free refuge.

If the bunker entrance is sold with a ticket, the security personnel and the engineering gets to live as part of their jobs when the rich need to pay 1 billion euros per ticket.

However, those real-life rich peoples bunkers are much more individualistic. They don't seem to intend to keep a social structure down there.

I find the movie version of the apocalyptic survival more realistic.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure bringing the help with you is that realistic. it would be hard to convince people they need to work to earn their keep when all the resources you have to offer them are already in the bunker. why wouldn't they just kill you and consume your (likely disproportionate) share of the provisions? your leadership skills aren't worth much in a small bunker.

the only way I see this working is if you set up the security people as a privileged class so they aren't incentivized to side with the common workers to overthrow you. there's probably a minimum scale (ie, number of people) needed for this to be stable. it would still be hard to prevent the security from realizing they could just kill you and add your share to their own.

in a weird way, an (ex)billionaire commune might be the only viable bunker society.

<comment><USER8> The type of billionaire that wants a shelter only for himself isn't the type of person that would form a bond of friendship with his security guards or treat them with respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These are glorified man caves. They exist to be written and talked about.

Yes, they ostensibly have a purpose. But as comments here call out, most would never function as actual shelters.

<comment><USER10> Agree completely. All of us accumulate useless junk to various degrees in our lives. The extremely wealthy just tend to have junk that looks extremely nice, but no more useful than the Bluetooth shower speaker I got for Christmas that's never been opened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If it's the nuclear apocalypse then just accept your fate. A bunker will just prolong the pain. However if it's something like a global pandemic and you don't want to encounter any other people for a while, then I'd much rather own a resort on a Caribbean island or the like.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what's the "odds of death" tipping point where the society/world devolves into something you no longer want to be part of. If the chances of dying without a bunker are 1 in 1000(0) it may help. If they're 1 in 10 most likely not.

So the bunker could help survive the initial strikes of a nuclear war, assuming your country can quickly retaliate and end it before substantial or permanent damage is caused. Then again in a country as big as the US the chances of a nuclear warhead penetrating the defenses and landing close enough to be a real and immediate danger are relatively low.

But if we're talking about prolonged nuclear war, anything that would really upend social order, or actually endanger the survival of the species (nuclear winter), such a bunker is just a fancy coffin. They will never get the chance to get out of it. If they do there will either be scorched earth waiting for them, or some sort of society that would see the protected elites as enemies and a cache of resources

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This makes me think about the bunker that was discovered by the monk at the beginning of A Canticle for Liebowitz, where rubble on the exterior blocked the door from opening and the people inside died. The moral of the story is: make sure your doors open inward?

</comment><comment><USER8> The idea behind a bunker makes some sense as temporary shelter. However, a nuclear bunker feels completely pointless. The luxury "amenities" will cease to function once all the power plants are down. If the bunker isn't located near a farm then you're going to run out of food. You're going to abandon it in the long run. It's a much better strategy to live away from population centres and next to food production. A last minute emergency bunker is practically useless in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER14> Every time I hear about doomsday bunkers I think of Megadeth's _Polaris_ lyrics (1990) [1], in particular:

 _Bomb shelters filled to the brim_

 _Survival such a silly whim_

[1] [https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/megadeth/rustinpeacepolaris....](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/megadeth/rustinpeacepolaris.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Good luck to the billionaires when all your slaves are dead. Power and clean water don't just randomly exist.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pathetic headline. Most of these projects are only concepts, some not even built and several years old now dug up for the purpose of this apparently fake article. Finally, you don't need to be a billionaire to afford those in Poland or Czech republic.

</comment><comment><USER17> And once the apocalypse is over, they can live altogether in a devastated world where money has no meaning, and where true skills are the only riches. No one to steer the yatch, no pilot for the aircraft, no petroleum.

So much money is wasted in this world.

Wait, couldn't it be used to live in a better world altogether ?

<comment><USER18> Plenty of rich people can pilot their own boats and planes. It's a skill they can _afford_ to acquire as a hobby.

<comment><USER17> A medium-sized yatch needs a crew of 6+ people. An airplane needs to be replenished in food and supplies, and be taken care of, and frequently inspected and repaired. We often forget how brittle technology is...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good for them to save their own lives with money they stole from the proletariat.

</comment><comment><USER20> Send the concrete mixers round ;)</comment>


Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/technology/cryptocurrency-facebook-telegram.html <comment><USER3> >The coins from the other messaging companies are likely to look more like traditional cryptocurrencies, with fluctuating values and a decentralized design that would give users more control.

This doesn't seem right. MobileCoin from Signal is going to be a centralized Stellar network, no? I'd imagine FaceCoin will look similarly centralized.

</comment><comment><USER4> It will be 10x better in software quality than Bitcoin or Ethereum with 10x better adoption by regulators.

Problem is, it can't induce a speculative bubble (being a stablecoin), so 99% of the reason to be excited over a cryptocurrency no longer exists with this.

</comment><comment><USER5> If FB only wants to enable cross-border commerce, they could use an existing open, distributed, independent cryptocurrency.

Instead they're creating their own token.

That tells us all we need to know about whether it will be open, distributed or independent.

</comment><comment><USER6> A Facebook coin and "Bitcoin Failed" in the same sentence?! This must be #8918293948192849th "death of Bitcoin" proclamation. The price/value is the least significant feature/advance of what Bitcoin enabled.

Seriously, a Facebook coin now??? After all the recent Facebook's privacy failures and whatnot. I understand they're trying to build a similar ecosystem to what WeChat has in China, but really.

</comment><comment><USER7> The media is funny, first they hype something, then they trash it - were in reality Bitcoin is just what it is. Some appear at times frustrated or desperate that they can't put a label on it. It's been there for quite a long time now too.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://outline.com/CFmKXB](https://outline.com/CFmKXB)

</comment><comment><USER9> How did Bitcoin fail? If you're referring to transaction times, IOTA solved that problem.

<comment><USER10> I mean seriously though. I love how various media platforms ALWAYS talk about Bitcoin as a failure. What? But then again, they only think of "success" as some idea cut from the same cloth as current capitalist alternatives - <USER2> very alternatives bitcoin was meant to disrupt. Bitcoin is an incredible success IMO

<comment><USER11> So you're saying I can't buy my steam games with it and that it is not supposed to be used for paying for things?</comment></comment></comment>


Wirecard's real business relied on small number of customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/7c466351-02fe-4d66-85a1-53d012de7445 <comment><USER2> Copy of article (minus a graphic) available at:

[https://geekly.co.uk/wirecards-real-business-relied-on- small...](https://geekly.co.uk/wirecards-real-business-relied-on-small-number- of-customers/)

One, among many, interesting bits:

> _The German company appears to have an unusually lucrative relationship with > a collection of almost 4,000 porn, dating and related customer service > websites registered to 175 companies in the UK and Cyprus.

Pornographic websites in the network typically advertised three-day free trials, before charging $39.95 per month after that. Wirecard kept about 15 per cent of the transaction volumes generated by these customers in the first half of 2017, according to documents reviewed by the FT.

That compares with rates of about 3 per cent the German company charged larger porn purveyors, such as Luxembourg-based LiveJasmin and the US-controlled Chaturbate.

Charging such a high rate raises fresh questions about Wirecard's compliance with anti-money laundering regulations._</comment>


The China Cables: Leak Reveals the Scale of Beijing's Surveillance State - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-25/china-cables-beijings-xinjiang-secrets-revealed/11719016 <comment><AUTHOR> Only quote that needs to be read...

"While the grounds for suspicion are not spelled out, a Xinjiang police notice published in 2014 listed 75 indicators of "religious extremist". These included:

1\. Owning a compass 2\. Abstaining from alcohol 3\. Wailing, publicly grieving or otherwise acting sad when your parents die 4\. Not letting officials scan your irises (!!) 5\. Telling others not to swear 6\. Not allowing officials to sleep in your bed, eat your food and live in your house 7\. Being related to anyone who has done any of the above "</comment>


Heated seats as a service? BMW wants to sell car features on demand - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/07/heated-seats-as-a-service-bmw-wants-to-sell-car-features-on-demand/ <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of the apartment doors and coffee machines in a Philip K. Dick story that charged a fee each time they were used, and refused to operate when the protagonist was behind on his rent.

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

From Ubik, by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1969 [http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1615](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1615)

<comment><USER3> It also reminds me of "Unauthorized Bread" [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized- bread-a-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near- future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No wonder BMW drivers are often seen as assholes. Being nickel and dimed for minor things after spending such huge amounts of money on a new car would certainly make me bitter and resentful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tesla really is changing the auto industry quite a bit. I wonder how much they would save if they made every 3 series with the fully loaded specs and locked them behind software? I imagine you could gain a lot of efficiency in the supply chain and the manufacturing process as the cars become a lot more fungible.

<comment><USER6> Oddly enough in 2010 I did some consulting with a Manufacturer in Spartanburg (;D). It took 24 hours to _hack_ the control system and unlock all the features. Last I heard they'd decided not to go that path. I often wonder though, if it will come back. What I fear though is, Additional monthly service fees (ala their annual Car Play fee they were charging) ultimately adding to the cost of the vehicle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At least with software features that require a subscription to work you don't pay any penalty if you don't subscribe, assuming the software is running on hardware that would be there anyway for non-subscription purposes.

With a feature like this which involved hardware that is useless to non- subscribers those non-subscribers are paying a penalty of the extra energy their car uses to haul around the extra hardware.

As a matter of principle, I'd be fine with making it illegal to include such features on new cars. Any hardware you include in the car has to be functional without a subscription.

They could still sell a subscription seat warmer. They just could not include the hardware with the car. They would have to wait for the customer to actually order the subscription and then install the hardware.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wonderful feature: to get nickel and dimed for everything after you spent $80K on a car. Best of luck with that, BMW.

<comment><USER9> I was under the impression that BMW already did that, and not many people were willing to pay extra for the turn signals package.

<comment><USER8> Brilliant business idea, IMO. Do you work in their marketing team? Round wheels, brakes, windshield wipers, window transparency - those could also easily become options costing hundreds of dollars each month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real problem is how we don't own our things anymore. We don't own the car or the heated seats - they are licensed to us under non-negotiable terms that are awful - how many stories in the first 3 pages today about apps snooping our clipboards and microphones?

Where do private property enthusiasts stand on this? Do they support the idea of these contracts as voluntary, or oppose them because it erodes the whole concept of private property and ownership?

</comment><comment><USER11> In-app purchases of $500/sec for anti-lock brake engagement coming soon?

And $10k to wipe the last 8 hours of location data...

</comment><comment><USER12> Stick to mainstream manufacturers even if you've the money. My Mitsubishi SUV has all the safety features I need that don't even come standard in the some of the mid-range BMW models that cost twice as much. Buy a Lexus if you want luxury!

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm so tired of pretty much every car manufacturer offering jacked up extras that should just come as standard.

Trying to sell us on the idea that we can customise the car to our liking. Put out one version of every model car and just look people pick the color & engine size.

Don't own Tesla but god-damn do I like that every model is gonna be the same tech wise (excluding the Full Self Driving and battery size)

Not 300 different possible combinations.

</comment><comment><USER14> Even Racing transponders run on subscription service now :/ [https://www.mylaps.com/transponders/](https://www.mylaps.com/transponders/)</comment>


Ask YC: why should I not switch from Google search? - <AUTHOR>

I have experienced so many times that I get desired results by searching on Yahoo than Google, this is not recently but from the time when Google was not so popular, it was hard for me to switch from Yahoo to Google and I still wonder why I shouldn't switch back to Yahoo?<p>Have you experienced the same and do you have any compelling reason to only use Google and nothing else? <comment><USER2> You lost me on this one... If you like Yahoo better, use Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you locate what you want on Google then use it. If you don't find what you want try another search engine. I find it hard to believe people consciously ONLY use Google and don't go elsewhere if they cannot find what they are looking for.

</comment><comment><USER4> Peer brand pressure? (lack of a better word). I liked Creative much better than Ipod(really), but I did end up using ipod more often.</comment>


ASK PG: Why can't you bury or downvote submissions? - <AUTHOR>

It would be nice to have more than the flag option for submissions. <comment><USER2> If a submission is offtopic it should be killed. Hence flag. If a submission is on-topic, you have to depend on votes to rank it. It seemed from watching Reddit fairly closely that downvotes were, on average, made more reflexively than upvotes. So we just use upvotes.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it aint broke...

Honestly I think that's something to consider in the event of a decrease in quality. The current system is working fine at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER4> The flag option suffices. The curators here do a good job of looking at all flagged submissions for whatever problem they present. You may not have heard that a submission that is flagged a defined number of times by users with power to flag will be autokilled, removing it from view of users who don't have "showdead" turned on.

</comment><comment><USER5> 'you' can downvote submissions, but You (&I) cannot.

If I recall, there is a certain user point threshold over which downvoting is enabled.

<comment><USER4> _If I recall, there is a certain user point threshold over which downvoting is enabled._

Downvoting comments or downvoting submissions? (The latter is the subject of the thread. I'm not aware of anyone other than curators having any power but flagging submissions.)

<comment><USER5> I guess I just assumed it applied to both then. I don't know.</comment></comment></comment>


NASA Enterprise shuttle does NY flyby (Story & Video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17874273

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the Enterprise is ridiculously sexy - the tail semes different from other shuttles, very modern-looking.

Damn shame, really. All of it. The organization that built an entire space shuttle "just for testing" without ever flying it, the organization with people that dared to do the impossible, against all odds and under the least expected of circumstances just scuttles their entire shuttle program. Ridiculous, perhaps even blasphemous.</comment>


Ask HN: please rate my failure: Heicos - <AUTHOR>

Today I took off the frontpage of my website the link to the page of the first app I made: Heicos, a mac app to track Zone Diet. Zone Diet is an alimentary lifestyle that is hard to follow because it requires a lot of calculations. So I made this app to ease the burden. After having it available for sale for one year and a half, I just sold three licenses, so it was a complete failure from a sales point of view (but I learned a lot in the process, of course). Taking it down from my website I thought this could be a good occasion for me and other people to learn from my mistakes (I already did learn, of course, but there could be something I missed). Here on HN we speak often about new cool startups/apps but very rarely about projects gone bad. Maybe this can be a valuable topic for someone.
Given that Apple is releasing the Mac App Store in the near future, I was wondering if the app is worth another try. I will decide based on the feedback I get from this thread. The page for the app is still available (I will take it down a few days from now, when this thread will be done): http://pawn-soft.com/heicos
This was my first application and I wrote it some years ago, when I was very naive. It took me a long time to write it (I was still inexperienced) and when I released it I was very excited and had big dreams of glory and success. But the app never took off.
My first error was that I did not have any marketing plan whatsoever. I just followed the old flawed adage "if you build it, they will come", and of course they didn't. I just started shooting in the dark after the first release on my website. The first thing I did was posting it to the Apple website and to other app listing websites (like VersionTracker, Softpedia and the like). I got some traffic and downloads, but not sales. The second action was a press release (through prmac.com). After this I started looking for blogs that targeted the Zone Diet niche, only to discover that it was really hard niche to reach. Almost all the (few) blogs I found were dead from a long time. I wrote to the few that were still active, offering a free license in hope of a review. Of these only a couple answered, but there was never a review. I posted it to the internal Apple website for employees, giving them a free license and, during the whole period, I received 700 license requests, which makes think that maybe the app os not so worthless and there was maybe something flawed in my whole marketing process.
After this I started losing faith in the app and I moved to other projects. The software has been downloaded almost 4000 times since the beginning, which could mean that there is some interst in it, but there was never any feedback apart for two emails (yes, only two) just asking to put more food in the initial app database. But these feedbacks came in very lately and filling the app required a lot of long and tedious work, so I never did it considering it not worth the effort, since the app was not selling (maybe this was a big mistake?).
After all this, what do you think about it? Is there enough evidence that the project is not worth spending time on it? Or maybe I am just missing something really obvious? <comment><USER2> It might just be that the diet program itself is too niche...I've certainly never heard of it. I think if you were looking for blogs that covered the diet program, and only found a few (that were long dead), that should be a pretty strong clue that maybe there just isn't enough interest in that program to warrant an app.

Also, pawn-soft is not a great name for a company...I realized after going to the site that you meant a chess piece pawn, but at least for me the first thing I think of when I see pawn is a Pawn Shop, which has a lot of negativity associated with it in most people's minds. Especially on the Internet where a lot of folks are already wary of getting scammed, you might want to change the name to something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not being an english speaker, I did not know the connotation of the word. Even looking on google, I still don't get what exactly a pawn shop is.

Anyway, I will definitely change the name, then! Thank you for this feedback, nobody ever made me notice this.

<comment><USER2> No problem, and I didn't know if you were in the U.S. or not. In the U.K. I think they're called "Pawnbrokers"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the niche is too narrow, can you adapt the software to target the broader diet/nutrition market?

I agree with silverlight that "pawn" doesn't have the greatest connotation in the U.S. (your company's "Ltd"; are you in the U.K.?).

If that's a concern, and you're committed to the company name, one option would be to build a product-based site targeting your market with the appropriate keywords/content, while pushing the company name into the background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I was based in the UK, but now I'm moving it to Amsterdam. So the name is not a concern. It will require some redesign for the logo, but that's not a big deal. Thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://pawn-soft.com/heicos></comment>


Amazon must compensate customers because of illicit business practices [Austria] - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fdiepresse.com%2Fhome%2Fwirtschaft%2Feconomist%2F5643833%2FAmazon-muss-PrimeKunden-entschaedigen <comment><AUTHOR> If there is demand for it, I can go into detail why some price increases were deemed illicit and which business practices were unfair.</comment>


PPGTT: Dynamic page table allocations, 64 bit addressing, GPU mirroring (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://bwidawsk.net/blog/index.php/2014/07/future-ppgtt-part-4-dynamic-page-table-allocations-64-bit-address-space-gpu-mirroring-and-yeah-something-about-relocs-too/ <comment><USER2> PPGTT is short for the Per-Process Graphics Translation Tables. [1]

It is a feature supported by Intel's Ivy Bridge+, enabling GPU process isolation. This enhances the security by providing a per file descriptor address space / context.

Phoronix has been covering the process of PPGTT development [2]

[1] [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTUzNzQ](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTUzNzQ)

[2] [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=PPGTT](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=PPGTT)</comment>


Laser Weapons Ready for Use Today, Lockheed Executives Say - <AUTHOR> http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2016/03/15/laser-weapons-directed-energy-lockheed-pewpew/81826876/ <comment><USER2> So next we will hear about this amazing new armor (aka. mirrors) on all our enemies vehicles?</comment>