Ask HN: As a Co-founder, whats the best way to drop out of a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I am a co-founder in a start-up. We have worked on it for over a year, launched the product, seen ups and downs. It seems to me that the business is not going anywhere. The other co-founder is still really into it, granted it was his idea and he fronted some money to get started. I have other projects, one of which is really good idea, I think. I will be moving forward with the new project without my co-founder, since his skillset and experience dont really apply to this new business. We are still on good terms but it will probably be lethal for his business should I leave at this point. How do people handle situations like this? <comment><USER2> If I was in his shoes, I would want to know right away how you feel. I think the best thing you can do is help him find someone to replace you as best you can. Obviously, not an easy task, but that's a show of friendship and mutual respect. Also, while the start-up could die without you, it could also be successful with a new person who takes your place. Even if doom is looming, you should express optimism that he can be successful and as a show of good faith, offer a signed agreement that you will not go after a cut of his future success. And most importantly, mean it.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as 'the human aspect of situation..'

Leave and do not waste your time. Your friendship might end but life goes on. If so maybe it wasn't friendship in the first place. I just left my team. 4 or 5 months ago I pitched in my idea to a group of friends (none of those guys had any real knowledge of programming, design, media, print and they still don't know). About a month ago they all turned into designers, programmers and now everyone knows everything. One of them said that he took nootropics (probably he learned all those things in a week) So I said goodbye and moved on. Since then I started several other projects and I have never been happier. There is no reason why you shouldn't be as well. I know you probably do not have the same issues as I, but in the end it is all about being happy.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think there's a good way of phrasing it that doesn't hurt anybody's feelings and ensures your partner doesn't feel betrayed: say you lost interest and motivation in the product and at this point you're more of a liability to the company than an asset. Say you don't want to bog down the progress of the project and that it's in everybody interest that you move on and let people who are truly passionate about it give it their best.

</comment><comment><USER5> I usually rip the bandaid off as fast as possible once I'm sure it has to come off. Be honest with him - in the long run you'll both be better off.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is good and straightforward advice. I have been feeling hesitant since we both have invested a lot of time in it and it will def be awkward to quit, akin to dumping a girlfriend or something....funny I have the same feeling I had in those situations. Probably better to just get it over with...

<comment><USER6> Don't let sunk costs arguments drag things on...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you have an operating or partnership agreement? These should explain how, otherwise you both probably want something in writing to protect any future IP or assets you acquire or create and to protect your co-founder from you coming back and claiming any ownership.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we have an operating agreement which explains "legally" what I need to do. But I was wondering how people handle the human aspect of situation..

<comment><USER7> Oh in that case, I would just say, "I don't want to work on this any more, goodbye." So many terrible things happen in the real world every day, this is an absolute zero on the human aspect scale. Personally, I would love it if I noticed perhaps one of my co-founders wasn't really committed and he/she decided to leave quickly without a fuss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> i would be up front with him on what i think about the business.. however, if he still persists, try to help him out in the way of suggesting potential replacements for myself</comment>


Ask HN: Why Does This Site Peg My CPU? - <AUTHOR> https://www.dividendyields.org/sp-500-dividend-aristocrats/<p>Within a few seconds of loading, this site pegs the CPU on both Chrome and IE on Windows 8. Wondering how the devs can think this is ok... <comment><USER2> There's an embeddable JavaScript crypto miner in page source:

>script src="[https://coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js"](https://coin- hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js")

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246145)

</comment><comment><USER3> The devs of the site don't care, it is not their CPU being pegged.

The reason is most likely some javascript they have on the site. Opening it with NoScript in deny all javascript mode shows no CPU usage once the page renders.</comment>


How a 30K-member Facebook group filled the void left by Uber and Lyft in Austin - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/how-a-30k-member-facebook-group-filled-the-void-left-by-uber-and-lyft-in-austin/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook <comment><USER2> The title and content of this article couldn't be farther from the truth.

1\. Uber and Lyft's absence has created a huge void that remains to this day. There are crazy long lines at the airport.

2\. There are multiple ridesharing companies that have sprung up in the meantime. Arcade City is just one of them.

3\. I'm pretty sure Arcade City will disappear once either (a) U/L return or (b) one of the newer companies (Fare, Fasten, etc.) get more drivers.

Transportation in Austin is terrible right now. Arcade City hasn't changed that fact.

<comment><USER3> This is the perfect time for an upstart to provide a service which does conform with city regulation and it or they will be able to swoop in when or if other cities institute similar requirements to the dismay of the incumbents.

<comment><USER4> I'm hoping for the opposite. I am hoping that the voters who wanted the extra regulation (or just wanted to spite Uber/Lyft out of anger towards their campaign practices) receive sub par service. As a counterbalance, sometimes it's good that there are consequences to added regulation that makes businesses want to cease operations (regardless of who is "right" here).

<comment><USER5> > I am hoping that the voters who wanted the extra regulation ... receive sub > par service.

Why?

<comment><USER4> To encourage compromise in other areas of the country/world where citizens and voters often think there is no downside to adding regulation. So I guess in a precedent-setting way (unfortunately to the detriment of the minority that was against the additional regulations). Too often I feel locales make regulations, even if the majority of the citizens want them, that they feel have very little downside purely because they don't think companies are willing to leave.

As egregiously capitalistic as it may sound, I like that companies have to bend and so do consumers instead of either the company's leverage being too large or the government/citizens' leverage being too large. In the ride sharing space, I believe that Uber and Lyft have bent more than municipalities.

<comment><USER6> It seems to me that Uber and Lyft have not bent much. From my (maybe ignorant) perspective it looks like their entire practice is to completely ignore all the laws about taxi regulations until a city threatens to kick them out, by which point they have enough leverage to change the laws in their favor.

Only this time they played chicken and lost the battle.

<comment><USER7> Considering that the government wants them to buy taxi medallions at $0.5M each, there isn't a lot of bending they can do.

Everything else is a smoke screen over the issue of losing medallion sales.

What people forget during these discussions is that this is _not_ free money for the city, it's money out of every rider's pocket for an overpriced service, some small percentage of which trickles down to the city.

As for the battle, Uber is busily serving people elsewhere while Austin is stuck with cabs. The people of Austin are the losers in this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I live in Austin, and at this time there is still a void, but it's being filled faster than I expected. Fasten launched last week and I've used it four times already and there's not much to say other than it works just like Uber and Lyft.

The price is $1-2 more per ride and a I have to wait a few more minutes, but it does the job. The drivers I've talked to also prefer the compensation structure more than Uber and Lyft. Fasten's cut is fixed at $1 per ride (vs 20-28%), or $12 for the day. And like Uber, they get paid every Wednesday.

It's not available at the airport, but there's a city bus that drives from the airport to downtown (where getting a rideshare is easy) in 30 minutes for $1.75.

EDIT: Clarified Fasten's commission.

<comment><USER9> How is liability being addressed? For example, if a Fasten _et al_ rider is injured in a car accident, who is liable?

<comment><USER8> From their page on rider safety ([https://fasten.com/safety](https://fasten.com/safety)):

"""

From the moment your ride starts, our goal is to provide the maximum level of protection for both you and the driver. Fasten provides coverage in the following areas during your ride:

* Commercial auto liability and uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage up to $1,000,000 per occurrence (this covers you as a rider)

* Contingent comprehensive and collision coverage up to $50,000 per occurrence

"""

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Few journalist know that UBER & Lyft are operating under more restrictive regulations in NYC. These regulation include fingerprinting, drug test, medical test and a couple of classes. The cost to comply is at least $600 per driver to start. There are other cost like special license plates.

Essentially you have to be a professional to drive an Uber/Lyft in NYC, legally. They comply in NYC so I'm not sure what Uber & Lyft are complaining about. At least one of them should have stayed, especially Lyft this a missed opputunity for Lyft.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if they formed a coalition for this to ensure No Separate Peace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I live in Austin, and it's really the other apps like Fare, Fasten, and Get Me that are filling the void. Fasten ends up being the best price (they also have the best app coincidentally), coming out to a few dollars more than Uber or Lyft.

I ended up buiding a web app that keeps track of what apps work where (for example, Fasten currently doesn't work from the airport), along with the relative pricing this past weekend:

[https://ridefinder.io](https://ridefinder.io)

<comment><USER8> Hey I saw your post on the Austin subreddit last week. Thanks for building it, it's been useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've always wondered how necessary something like Uber or Lyft really was. Centralized networks lead to critical mass and that's what I always saw as the appeal. No one wants to hunt for something manually.

I feel like something like craigslist, but with an ebay-like "95% driver approval rating" would do the job well enough. Sure, there are people that won't use it for security reasons and lack of standards, but if that's the case an alternative should prop up that ensures these things with standards for their drivers. One being cheaper as all funds go between driver and driven, the other providing a middle man that spends some of these funds to filter bad actors.

In my opinion, the mandatory regulation isn't really necessary if competition is healthy. If there's enough demand for finger-printed drivers, a service should crop up to provide it. Facebook though sounds like a terrible medium for this kind of thing. People will use what's familiar I guess.

<comment><USER14> One of the best parts about Uber is that you just request a ride and it shows up. The whole process takes seconds to complete, and a driver is there within a few minutes.

If I had to peruse a list of drivers close to me, find a balance between price, rating, and proximity... then request a ride from that driver.... and then have to repeat that process when the driver declines the ride or has already taken another fare.. I think I would call a cab.

The entire key to the success of Uber is the ease with which you can get a ride fast. Your idea of a craiglist-ebay hybrid for selecting a ride wouldn't work.

<comment><USER13> I think you're right. It's not perfect, I just gave a lowest-tech example that would be serviceable to some people with low middle-man cost.

A lot of Uber drivers aren't loyal though, they'll have both apps open in order to get fares and I think that's the end-game. Discovery services often live and die by their exclusives and if there's no viable way to force driver exclusivity, the discovery medium becomes way more important than the driver.

I'm sure I'm being naive, but I don't think Uber is all that special of a service. It handles queues, paths and estimation. Other services could out- feature it with relatively low-tech provided the regulatory overhead isn't prohibitively expensive, especially if U/L chose not to operate in a that geographic market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's a Texas Tribune article from today detailing other Austin ridesharing developments in the wake of the Uber/Lyft withdrawal: [https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/07/austin-post- prop-1/](https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/07/austin-post-prop-1/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm amazed that anybody can organize anything via Facebook groups. It's like pounding a screw.

<comment><USER17> I use FB groups all the time and have never had an issue. Something like lyft/uber seems difficult, but they fit many other use cases just fine.

You're basically saying "I'm amazed that anybody can organize anything via <every forum software ever>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, to steal a line... capitalism interprets regulations as damage and routes around them?

<comment><USER19> Completely withdrawing from a location is not really "routing around."

This is a case where capitalism is attempting to dominate the political realm.

<comment><USER18> Uber and Lyft completely withdrew, but _capitalism_ didn't. To the contrary, capitalism routed around the lack of Uber and Lyft, by spawning a (poor) alternative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh that's too funny.

So instead of having fingerprints of all drivers, now they don't even have verified names, but simply completely anonymous people.

Great going lawmakers!

Some things you just can't legislate.

<comment><USER21> The Austin City council members that promoted the ban had received campaign contributions from the Texas Taxi Lobby. It was never about having verified names, it was about making money for Taxis.

<comment><USER22> Don't mess with Taxis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love how the only effective way to market an Ethereum dapp seems to be to create a Facebook group and let people pay with good old cash.

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh, but the decentralised model just presents way too many risks for both riders and drivers, and the lack of fees means AC is not incentivised to protect either.

<comment><USER24> Muggles don't care about decentralization or freedom or privacy. They want to press a button on their phone and something happens, no matter the consequences.

There are risks in everything. The only thing any ridesharing app at the end of the day can truly offer consumers of any meaningfulness in terms of driver / rider security are public ratings on both from all their previous customers and clients. Anything else is some artificial gating metric that tries to break people down into historic footnotes.

I hope that AC has such a feature, but even if it does not if its an Ethereum app you can very easily include ratings per contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looking at this post if Arcade City can provide a background check for people who use the service and also insurance then they would actually have the people who drive for the service be closer to contractors instead of the faux one that Uber/Lyft try to pull off.

</comment><comment><USER26> This brings the empire building nature of Uber into question.

If a group of people on a Facebook group can replace its functions for a significant group of people in a few days, why is this company valued in the billions again?

<comment><USER14> I love Uber, and I would never use this facebook group.

Uber is awesome because I hit one button and a ride shows up. I don't have to call anyone, I don't have to type out a message, or delete a thread, or negotiate a deal with a driver. I don't have to wonder which drivers are close to me, or even think at all.

I hit button, car shows up.

People are using this sub-optimal solution because it is the only option at the moment. It is not a replacement for Uber.

<comment><USER26> The point is, the lousy Facebook group thing is still better than a cab.

Once Uber runs out of war chest dollars to subsidize rides, what is stopping competitors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can someone explain why Uber had to shut down? Couldn't they have just complied with the regulation by fingerprinting drivers?

<comment><USER27> They argued it as a supply-side issue. They see quick onboarding as a key feature to supplying the demand in a given city. They argued that with the fingerprint requirement, they would not have enough drivers on the road quickly and thus create an inferior user experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I heard this the other day on the Radio Motherboard podcast. You can listen to it here: [https://soundcloud.com/motherboard/when-uber-left- austin](https://soundcloud.com/motherboard/when-uber-left-austin)

</comment><comment><USER29> FB normally starts choking off group notifications after a group reaches a certain size. I wonder if Arcade City is paying to keep the group up and running.

<comment><USER30> The group doesn't rely on notifications to work. Drivers watch the stream of posts and riders post into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's some dirtiness and shenanigans around the whole thing too.. including the Mayor holding a secret meeting with the Uber/Lyft competitors and the City Council investing taxpayer money in them. I've dug up some of the details but more to come:

[https://medium.com/@CaseySoftware/mayor-steve-adler-is- scamm...](https://medium.com/@CaseySoftware/mayor-steve-adler-is-scamming-the- austin-tech-community-399d12b976e9)

<comment><USER32> That's just the Mayor and the City Council "disrupting" the current ride sharing duopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> When you enact prohibition, people don't stop drinking, you get moonshine and stills blowing up.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you identify what is a small initial market? - <AUTHOR> I have heard a lot about going after a small initial market and try and get a few dedicated users to love your product before expanding out. My question is what are some good tips for identifying a small initial market? What's too big? Should it be geographical? <comment><USER2> In the context of startups, my understanding is that it's not enough to identify a small initial market (e.g. Julius Caesar impersonators), ideally it should have some reasonable potential to be huge in the future.</comment>


Ask HN: How to avoid compiling all the time? - <AUTHOR> Do you have any tricks to avoid compiling every time you do a modification? I would like to write more code before trying to compile and test my modification. <comment><USER2> What language are we talking about? Certain languages (C# and Java) support hotloading/edit-and-continue your code, where changing code in a class doesn't necessitate a full recompile.</comment>


Ask HN: Providing cheaper EdTech tools for rural zones - <AUTHOR> We are building a company (http://www.keedo.tn) to reduce the gap in education accessibility between urban and rural zones and private/public systems. We provide web apps and learning tools (we already started developing some tools like a virtual piano, body anatomy viewer, maps for geographic subjects, stories reader and so on) and we are fully cloud based, so everything is accessible and shared over the network.
Our big challenge is to provide a cheap computer with internet connection, (wifi/3G) support and acceptable performance. For information, the family income for our first clients in such regions, is on average $130 per month.
We love the OLPC_XO http://laptop.org/en/laptop/ project idea (worldreader.org also) but their price is still high for our target clients and we try to avoid  donations as much as possible.
First we thought about low cost white label tablets (most are china ODM/OEM providers), but from experience and reviews, they seems to be less performing with intensive usage.
Now we have two solutions, either we use an already proven SOCs like PINE A64, Raspberry pi or we develop our custom pc.
 Any pointers, suggestions or collaborations will be highly appreciated! <comment><USER2> I would encourage you to forget about hardware and concentrate on the software and applications.

Based on my experiences (I work for an ISP but we have a "sister" company that's an MSP that provides IT services to, among others, several K-12 schools in such rural areas), most of these schools either 1) already have available hardware (iPads, Chromebooks) due to existing 1:1 programs or 2) have decided to not (yet) pursue that (usually because of financial reasons).

In the former case, they already _have_ hardware and don't want to buy even more. In the latter, they simply _don 't have the money for it_ (it'll be an even harder sell if it's not "general purpose" and can only be used with your stuff). Even if you manage to get it under $50 per student, that's still a lot of money that they could likely spend elsewhere.

Develop your applications and concentrate on targeting the most popular platforms (iOS and Android) and forget about trying to sell them hardware they can't (easily) reuse. Definitely forget about cellular connectivity and stick to Wi-Fi instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you jlgaddis ! Really, we don't try to be a hardware company, we just try to find a reasonable way to a child fo owning a device with internet access and 'reasonable' performance. Our freemium business model really didn't focus on such areas neither in hardware, if we found a hardware provider partner that offers affordable plans ( such as paying 5$ per month during a year instead of all), this will be great for us so we can focus only on software apps. In The zone that we target, they never used computers before, most use cellular phones or cheap smartphones but this is for parents not children.

<comment><USER3> Have you considered pre owned laptops from urban areas. You could try running a campaign if you haven't already.

I thought important thing in this setup is transparency. So if a particular user or teacher can not afford, you add them to a page. A donation can be old or pre owned laptop.

<comment><USER4> the problem with old equipment twofold; first, there's a lot more maintenance. Next? when you are dealing in cast-offs, you by necessity have a heterogeneous fleet of hardware.

(The market for obsolete server hardware is interesting because often you pay _more_ if you want a whole bunch of the same thing)

If you have to pay someone to maintain the obsolete hardware, it's probably cheaper to just buy everyone new chromebooks or something.

On the other hand, If you can sell that as part of the program, teaching the kids to fix the hardware, that could work out really well. But the point is that there is a lot of labor involved in using a heterogeneous fleet of cast- off hardware; a lot more labor than in using a homogenous fleet of newer hardware.

It is, however, labor that I think you can teach kids how to do. Fixing a computer isn't any harder than fixing a car, and is probably a lot safer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, from the .tn URL and family income listed, I am inferring this is based in Tunisia.

Can you optimize this for a cheap smartphone? I think that would probably be a better solution.

I am American. I was homeless for 5.7 years and I began learning to make money online while homeless. This is part of how I got back into housing. I have some experience with various tablets, laptops and phones. Phones have proven to be a surprisingly robust internet solution for me.

I currently have a $30 smartphone (brand ZTE). I have Tracfone service with it and I can use it on Wi-Fi. Although the screen is tiny and storage is limited, it has overall better performance than the $70 tablet I have. I rarely get on the tablet. My sons use it, but I spend almost all my time on my phone at home, plus I go to the local library to access a proper computer.

From what I have read, phones are a much bigger thing in Africa than tablets or laptops. I have read that everyone in Malawi has their own sim card even though an entire village might have a single phone.

I can do a surprising amount on my phone. I can blog, take photos, play games and do online banking. I have to be mindful of storage limits and I have to periodically clear my cache and do storage management and I have to be a little pickier about limiting my apps to the essentials. But it does a surprisingly good job of letting me do most of the things I want to do online.

When I was homeless, battery life was a big deal. Large screens on tablets really burned up the battery life. A phone or small tablet was generally better in that regard. Devices with good battery life were vastly more useful. I had access to electricity during the day most days, but I was on battery power at night. How much I could do was very dependent on battery life.

Large parts of Africa will have limited access to electricity. I have read that in some areas, one person will collect up all the phones in the village once a week and hike to the nearest paid recharging station and get them all charged.

So I will suggest that a cheap smartphone with a long battery life is probably the best solution for this project. Then design your program with those constraints in mind.

Edit: I will add that a $200 laptop was generally worse than a $50 tablet. We had to spend $300 on a laptop to get one we didn't hate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi DoreenMichele, Thank you !! And I greet you for your self learning.

Yes you are right, we are based in Tunisia. Really, we don't have a critical issues to access electricity compared to other african countries.

With 50$ (120 Dt) in average, you can buy smartphone and tablets, most are chineese brands either with their names or under white labeled 'Tunisian' brands, and some known brands (huwaiey, sumsing, ZTE) that provide some low- cost of their products dedicated to developing countries.

We first thought about tablets because it's provide large screen and they gave us the possibilities to develop the system. The smartphone is a great choice also but we need to adapt our apps in a responsive way so can be rendered in multiple screen sizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My thought? E-waste.

This is how I got my first computers; obsolete and broken computers cast off by people wealthier than I was. [1] It's great, because you get to learn how to fix the computer as well as whatever it is you learn on the computer. I imagine my life experience is super different from those you are helping, but I can tell you that early experience fixing obsolete computers has vastly helped my career.

It _is_ a lot more labor intensive, because you have to have someone to teach the kids how to fix the damn things, (for me, my dad and a copy of minasi's "upgrading and repairing PCs") but once you have that skillset locally? it's probably sustainable, because the rich will always be throwing out last years gadgets.

In some ways it will be way easier for you than for me; when I grew up in the '80s and '90s, there wasn't a lot of standardization, so with my 'catch as catch can' hardware acquisition strategy, I'd have to completely change my software stack every time I got new hardware. These days? Most educational software runs in a browser (I use and heartily endorse Khan Academy for the parts of learning that can't be done from a book alone) and so you can have a diverse fleet of hardware and even operating systems, and as long as you have enough local skill to bring the things up to the point where they can run a browser, you should be good to go.

The big problem with this plan is power; Nicer gear from the aughts ought to run a browser just fine, but it will chew up a lot more power. If you have to pay for unsubsidized electricity, more modern gear might make more sense.

[1]There was also this really juicy (for me) sense of acquiring "means of production" \- I _owned_ these computers that others had cast off as worthless or broken, and I turned them into a useful resource for myself. I think that if you could work something out so that the kid in question gets to keep the computer they fix... that might be extra gratifying. I know it was for me.

<comment><USER6> Any good references for folks interested in recycling (as a hobby)? Phones/laptops etc.

<comment><USER7> In case you're not aware of it, freecycling is a movement in many cities over the world, where people advertise their old stuff that they don't need any more, for anyone who's willing to go and take it off their hands. A lot of people are hesitant about throwing away workable but old or mildly damaged things, but also don't want the hassle of putting it on ebay or craigslist and responding to a thousand questions.

In recent years, a significant portion of the items listings I've seen are about old electronic stuff that people have moved on from and want to give away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As you likely know, you will need to be _very_ careful when developing web- based applications for the resource-constrained devices you mention. A typical bloated web app as made by most companies will often not run well in resource- constrained environments like many ARM SOCs. I would encourage you to approach the app design process with an extremely minimalist approach, striving to avoid libraries and use vanilla JS as much as possible, use tiny assets, and keep allocations to a minimum (maybe consider object pools for certain applications). If you use a minimal framework, Mithril JS might be a good choice, or domvm, or something similarly minimal. You probably want to stay away from React and Angular.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're looking at any kind of volume, you should be able to get Chromebooks for under $100 direct from China. When I was at a K12 school about 3 years ago, our purchase of ~250 Chromebooks allowed us to knock nearly 25% off the per unit cost to get them down to ~$150/device. And that was going through a third-party that was white labeling the devices.

The machines we ended up with were 2GB of RAM/16GB storage devices with 11" screens. Basically they were the reference designs Google released a while back when they opened up Chromebook manufacturing. And for the 4th-12th graders we gave them to, they were amazing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you patrickserrano !! This is will be great if we establish an affordable plan with a 3 or 4 year engagement. We can support this if we found a partnership or an investment, that's will be a good option for better quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recovering olpc volunteer here. Happy to hear of your labors!

One of the concepts a related project explored was using live / persistent USB disks to preserve student ownership and facilitate unscheduled explorations.

Multiplexes hardware across students at different times, facilitating students using a consistent environment at home on old P4 desktops and at school on whatever's available.

Even large (32+GB) portable storage devices are available under $50.

Check out "sugar on a stick" and "open1to1" for related trains of thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very interesting, Thank you daniher !! Sharing and portability are nice features and these systems are so important, as they have already a lot of pre-build tools. Still need a pc or a raspberry pi like system to read usb. But thanks again !

<comment><USER11> You can mount a USB stick on a phone. But a phone for each child would serve the same purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We are working in Zambia to building tools for people who want to create their own electricity supplies using local resources.

[https://localelectricity.org/](https://localelectricity.org/)

We are also working closely with a local NGO who do coding workshops for rural communities.

Would love to chat and explore possible collaboration opportunities. Email is Samson [at] localelectricity [dot] org

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know where you are thinking about implementing your"solution". There are a lot of people trying to solve the problem you are solving, even governments have. I am writing from Ghana and the government has tried two times and failed. Two questions you need to address: 1. does your solution really align with the people's need ? 2. Is it sustainable? After you have found interest, you ask if the people are also interested in managing the program, after you are gone. Is there the required infrastructure to support. I am in development work and this is really core to making impactful change, I was going to say lasting change but I took it back. There are other level of questions but please answer the two questions above before you even move ahead with your idea otherwise it's a waste of resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi sammidelali, thank you for your interest. There's no 'our solution' in in the exact meaning of word, the hardware is a way for access to internet. Our goal is to provide (via internet or computer technologies) a lot of inaccessible software tools in a fun/animated way and that's may be achieved using computer, tablets, Tv with usb disk ..

This project was propsed 4 five years ago and i started by talking to education responsables who thought that's 'unmanaged and hard to set up'. The idea is simple, we believe that every child 'should' access to learning ressources in a virtual way regardless his location. For the sustainablity part, i think that the average age of a large numbers of electronics is limited, and may be recycled after that. We are talking about a game like tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this is amazing, and credit should be given where credit is due. Are you basing your concept on learning management systems like moodle. Is that what you are? I know, you're probably so much more. But I need to ask, how do you organize content that's already available into bite-sized lessons easily digestible by children? And it's easy to get muddled into providing content, along with a medium for that content. And then you go into grade levels, standardizing, not to mention having proper internet access, along with power. I mean how do you do it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, Thank you kazishariar ! Right now, we are not using a special framework for managing system, Edx maybe our primary choice if we think about a all-in- one system. But instead, we decide to build apps by categories instead of building a generic one. We are focusing on the way we create content by subject.

We started developing a story editor with basic images, texts, and sounds (so we can add effects in the story). We also developed a small version of a simple sheet music editor with a virtual piano and sounds. For geographic, historic and animals anatomy illustrations, we use a map-like editor, so the teacher can draw shapes, add voice, timelines ...

For the internet access, there are many places that already covered by 3G service, What's good for us, is that the area size of the country is small, so, network providers can extends theirs services without huge investments.

Tell me if i replied your question or missed something !

<comment><USER11> What you're doing sounds incredibly expensive in terms of developer hours. Are you certain you've explored the world of pre existing open content?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You should reach out to the folks at learningequality.org. They focus on totally offline use cases but have a huge global partnership network and could definitely give you hardware advice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you dlnb ! I really liked the idea, nice to know about it !! this will be very helpful !

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meta question, do all text submissions get to include active links in the text or is that handled manually by the HN team? I noticed some Launch HN: submissions over the past year have been doing it but AFAIK this is the first for a non-YC company.

</comment><comment><USER17> Refurbished Chromebooks would be hard to beat. Lots of sub $200 choices, and has the keyboard and monitor built in. You can also download a new Seabios ROM for most of them and run regular Linux.

Affordable rural internet access might be a bigger hurdle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you @tyngq! Chrome OS will be beneficial to us, as it already supports all of our web based solutions. But even with the prices of refurbished solutions, it still expensive, as we target a maximum 50$ solution for each child. Also, our business model is not the hardware part.

<comment><USER17> Hmm. As you mentioned, you can get developer boards for less than $50. But, does your demographic have HDMI televisions to connect them to? Keyboards? Storage?

<comment><AUTHOR> For keyboards, we can deal with refurbished or used. For storage, you are right, SDcard is the primary option, in a standalone product, it's not cheap (about 20%) comparing the total board price but we can find a more suitable formula if it will be included within the board. But the display will still a challenge if we choose to build custom board. HDMI TV are not such used in rural zones, they still need some time to be accessible in price and popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice to see something new going on in EdTech space! I'm the CTO of bibliotech.education, a subscription textbook company and happy to have a chat regarding collaboration or contacts in either the US or Europe.

</comment><comment><USER19> Design the app to work in smart phone. Families might benefit have cheap smart phone for multi purposes. Cheap smart phones will help students as they grow up to familiarize the mobile technology.

</comment><comment><USER20> I know of a company Learning Equality([https://learningequality.org/](https://learningequality.org/)) they also work in this space.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm sorry; but the cheapest laptop I've seen is $90; don't think you'll get to $50 unless you want a cheap tablet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you ronsor ! We really need a web browser, enough memory and kind of 'performant' CPU / GPU to run html and js applications. So, a customized os like chrome os will be suitable if we choose to build our custom solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> These guys do a cheap computer [https://pi-top.com/](https://pi-top.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey, check out zaya.in, they too are solving similar problems.

</comment><comment><USER24> Would this be helpful? Https://build.games

</comment><comment><USER25> Check out Kiwix.org There are different cheap options.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you hux_ !! will check it !

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do you have any reason to believe computers are a better learning medium then the no-power-needed, high resolution device known as a "book"?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't aim to replace the standard ''book' support, our goal is to provide the inaccessible tools and based on child curiosity we open new opportunities to learning subject such as astronomy, music... I'm a computer engineer who born in a such region, and i only touched the keyboard at the university. We are talking about places where the school is the first and the only source of learning and the TV is the only source of entertainment. No public libraries, no clubs, no house cultures .... Our education system is designed to provide a standard vision for all kids in the country regardless their interests, cultures, communities background. They are designed based on 'old' vision for the industrial jobs needs, and as these jobs still decreasing, the unemployment rate in Tunisia is about 20% for graduated people (this rate does'nt include the dropouts). So, we all know sure that something wrong with current system, but this is not our first goal. Our main goal is simple, provide fun learning tools for kids (virtual telescope, piano, guitar ...)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Getting started with local (non-cloud) movie and music collection? - <AUTHOR> For my home, I'd like to get started with a home movie and music collection. In particular, now that I have kids I'd like a curated collection and not have to rely on Prime/Netflix/Google.<p>A bunch of sub-questions:
-Any good software/hardware for getting this setup? Prefer to have multiple devices in the house (iphone, computer) be able to access the "central storage" via wifi.
-I'd like to grow a MP3 and digital movie collection. Any good "getting started" guides for getting those? E.g. ripping my CD and DVD collection.
-I know my local library has some good content to incorporate... any other hidden gems of content? <comment><USER2> > I'd like to grow a MP3 and digital movie collection.

Don't use mp3, use flac. You might not be able to hear the difference, but storage is cheap, and if you're collecting mp3 now, you can't just say "I want flac now", you'd have to start over. Go with flac, you can always convert to mp3 if you want to put something on a simple player or a usb stick for you car.</comment>


Build PineTime Firmware in the Cloud with GitHub Actions - <AUTHOR> https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-mynewt/articles/cloud <comment><AUTHOR> Learn to build PineTime Smart Watch Firmware in the Cloud... No computer needed!

[https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust- mynewt/articles/clou...](https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust- mynewt/articles/cloud)</comment>


Urban Myths about SQL (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://docslide.us/technology/urban-myths-about-sql.html <comment><USER2> This seems suspiciously like a marketing presentation for VoltDB more than debunking myth about SQL.

Tl;Dr; SQL is too slow ? No, VoltDB is Fast !

<comment><USER3> I agree. This is basically marketing material from VoltDB.

I've flagged it, not because it's not interesting (some of it is), but because marketing propaganda can't really be trusted as a source of information.

<comment><USER4> While it is clearly propaganda for VoltDB, it does a good job of adressing some of the myths of SQL-slowness that we don't see very often.

Usually a lot of people saying SQL is slow is because they don't really use it well. He doesn't talk about indexing and statistics [1] for example.

But he talks about ODBC/JDBC because, while it is usually fast enough, a lot of people overlook the fact that these interfaces hold transactions externally.

Besides, the presentations comes from Stonebreaker himself; of (Turing prize, Von Neumann Medal, ingres, postgres, cstore, vertica, hstore, SciDB, Tamr, Streambase)-fame.

[1] [http://use-the-index-luke.com/](http://use-the-index-luke.com/) is a very good resource for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure this is Mike's GlueCon 2010 presentation verbatim. Not sure why it says 2015.

Plenty has changed since 2010 about VoltDB. If people have any questions I'm happy to answer.

<comment><USER6> Is it still stored procedures only?

<comment><USER5> No, you can run arbitrary SQL. You can even send it over an HTTP/JSON API.

If you want a multi-statement transaction with logic, you still need to use a procedure. 1TXN = 1RndTrp is still true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Use stored procedures instead" \- in most use cases this is prolly a really really bad idea.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention, stored procedures mean having a DBA, or developer well versed in DBA, available when you want to make changes to your app, which isn't always an option.

<comment><USER5> Most VoltDB customers have no DBA. DBAs can sometimes be pretty hostile during POCs because with VoltDB and many other non-tradtiional systems, they often have a smaller role.

Some DBAs are great though and bring experience that can be really valueable when building an app. Depends on how open-minded they are.

<comment><USER2> Isn't one of the main reasons to move logic into the database is so that you have a dedicated DBA handling everything in the best way possible ?

<comment><USER5> Well, you often have data-centric developers. Whether their title is DBA is variable. These people are rarely divorced from the application implementation and design the way traditional DBAs are.

I see old-school DBAs as people you give logical schema to, and they make the physical schema fast and keep the system up. That role feels pretty dated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not SQL that is slow, but when you try and distribute a relational database you lose Referential integrity, Transactions, Unique Indexes and other such key features which are why you actually chose a relational database in the first place.

I'm yet to see a database which does all of that and still is truly distributed.

<comment><USER9> I sometimes wonder if the "cloud first" mentality has led people to distributing databases way way before the need for it. I get that "big data" is in the in thing right now, but non-distributed databases still scale to huge amounts of data. I suspect there are plenty of services running over distributed servers instead of a couple of appropriately sized principal/witness servers.

Beyond that, it's better to distribute by splitting databases across services or uses, so instead of having a mono-database running over a cluster, it's better for example to have an OLTP database and a separate OLAP database for reporting. It's easy to split those out to different servers rather than having a mono-database distributed over a cluster.

Going beyond that, data partitioning is more sane, so you partition the data so that different sets of non-interacting data are in different places. So you can for example partition by customer, then each of those partitions can be arranged to different servers where appropriate for load. There shouldn't be a need to have transactions hitting more than one partition at once when partitioned correctly.

And none of that breaks referential integrity.

<comment><USER5> Well, even for smaller use cases, systems with peer-to-peer clustering over a lan have better high-availability profiles than primary/secondary replication systems.</comment></comment></comment>


24 Hours of Privilege - <AUTHOR> http://stilldrinking.org/24-hours-of-privilege <comment><USER2> Warning: this has nothing to do temporarily beating a system's computer access control.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat, I bet you could prove just about any point by fabricating a fictional character and attacking their constructed ideas. I'll have to give it a try sometime.

<comment><USER4> This is like the third time I've been accused of being fictional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Too real

</comment><comment><USER6> For some people the difficulty level of life is on "Easy."

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a great exercise for those practicing stoicism.</comment>


The lost art of Nomography - <AUTHOR> http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/JournalArticle/The_Lost_Art_of_Nomography.pdf <comment><USER2> This is fascinating. I'm a programmer, and somewhat familiar with digital circuits. I'd never really understood how someone would go about constructing an analog computer. This is it, bang on. Resistors for linear changes, capacitors for exponential curves. Pretty neat, an array of meters coupled with a bunch of analog components would solve (approximately) really complicated stuff.

It's also pretty neat you can get an approximate solution in a single step, rather than cranking through a bunch of operations. It seems like a compression problem in information theory, especially when you consider the two step or multi step graphs.

<comment><USER3> Capacitors (well, RC systems) are exponential in _time_ , but their relationship between voltage and current is purely linear. So if you want to use capacitors to do exponentials, and your machine inputs are in voltage or current, you need a way to convert a voltage or current to a time delay.

More typically, I think electronic analog computers used the exponential region of a semiconductor diode to do logarithms and exponents, and thus multiplication and division, in nanoseconds, using 1950s technology. You can use capacitors and inductors to integrate and differentiate time-varying functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I upvoted this article because it is really interesting, but unfortunately I disagree that nomography can be relevant today. It is forgotten so easily because its not worth the effort with the availability of computers. Computers aren't hard to use and to learn how to use. Try doing through the exhaustion of doing numerical calculations for a day with a slide rule and nomograms to see why.

<comment><USER5> I disagree with the sentiment that nomography has lost relevance. Anybody worth their salt doing interface design for complex systems is exploiting these principles and combining nomography and computing.

For example, a power plant is littered with sensors, reading various pressures, temperatures, valve settings, etc. The traditional interfaces—a dial for every value, as per Three Mile Island—does not help a human operator in understanding the relationships in the data. Today, interfaces are designed to better explain how different parts of a system interact, and a nomograph can help an operator build a better mental model of how a change in a series of inputs affects an output.

A simple calculation on a computer can produce all of the numbers defining the operating point of a turbine, but a good nomograph will convey the physical relationships of the system.

I realize these types of displays aren't seen by most people on a regular basis, but they're far from irrelevant.

<comment><USER4> I imagine something like a dynamic bode plot, from which you can judge the stability of a system.

But that is a plot of data, not an analog computing method on paper. You can simply improve the presentation or organization on data. I suppose operators have computers nowadays :-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nomographs are often used in airplane manuals. When your power plant dies, you still want to be able to calculate your range based on speed, altitude etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm probably older than most of the people here, but the slide-rules that I used for 10th grade chemistry were essentially nomographs (fortunately I had a calculator by the time I took physics in 12th grade). I have a couple that I keep around for sentimental reasons but haven't used them in years.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a CBRNE specialist, and we use these for estimating yield of nuclear detonations based on various paramaters (flash-to-bang time, angular width of cloud top, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised the author didn't mention the Smith chart: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_chart>

<comment><USER10> First thing in the series of blog articles: [http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2008/01/09/the-art-of- nomo...](http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2008/01/09/the-art-of-nomography-i- geometric-design/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Meta-comment: I know I saw something about this before, but why is it that any PDF gets a [scribd] tag, even when it has nothing to do with scribd.com? It doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER12> Because HN promotes scribd (A YC company).

<comment><USER13> I don't get scribd. It's annoying to get a link to their site with various limitations and cludges screwed on top of otherwise perfectly readable document.

Since this is YC company, don't you happen to now if there is some not- trivially-googleable place where I can read about their agenda or fundraising pitch?

<comment><USER14> Scribd is awful and it's an embarrassment to this site and to Y Combinator. There have been countless posts here decrying paywalls set up by academic journals, yet while Scribd is hardly any better, they're accepted and even promoted within this community.

On the surface, the ability to convert a PDF to an almost-lossless HTML document is great technology for those who use archaic browsers that balk at PDF files. For this, I give them a pass for inserting obnoxious dynamic advertisements in between pages of the document and in the sidebar.

The actual service, however, is misleading and downright hostile towards users. Let me try to download the linked PDF from Scribd, using the attractive green "Download" button. Oh, I need an account. Let me log in with Facebook. This is what it requests from me:

* My name, profile picture, gender, networks, list of friends, and other shared profile information.

* My e-mail address, so it can send me e-mail.

* The ability to post to my Wall.

* The ability to access all posts in my News feed, including friends' posts.

* Access to my data even when I'm not using Scribd.

Mind you, this is just to download a PDF, which Scribd did not author!

What's worse, after some amount of time, the linked PDF will be moved into the Scribd Archive, from which it can only be downloaded after you upload something new, or agree to pay at least $5. After opening up your private life to Scribd, you can open up your wallet too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Living The Dream - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dislocatedday.com/living-the-dream-5 <comment><USER2> As a matter of record, I don't think everything I write is really Hacker News material, even if this does partially relate to startups.

That being said, I still thank my buddy John for submitting it without my knowledge, and hope those who accidently read it enjoy themselves :)

<comment><USER3> I want the dream. Thanks for writing this piece - its a great reminder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally? I love working till I drop, sleeping till I'm done, and doing it again. Usually it means going to full vampire mode, which was much, much easier in NYC.

<comment><USER5> why easier in NYC? because of the 24/7 nature of the city or something else?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Silicon Valley is not particularly amenable to being up all night.</comment></comment></comment>


Has anyone done brain stimulation? Is it really better than caffeine? - <AUTHOR>

Apparently it's pretty safe and companies are coming out with brain stimulator products that work better than coffee. The research on creativity + athletic abilities is inconsistent, but it seems to consistently work at waking you up and helping with concentration.
I've heard foc.us has unsafe devices that spike in currents.
Has anyone tried a tcds device? Did it work? Who did you buy it from or did you make it yourself? <comment><USER2> My friend is a neuroscience Ph.D. and has done research into tDCS.

She says that tDCS devices sold to the public are certainly a scam, and they may even be unsafe. Don't buy them.

She also said that high-quality studies have pretty much uniformly debunked tDCS as having any sort of effect. The only studies with positive results were impossible to reproduce or didn't hold up with larger, better-controlled trials.

Whatever positve effect people are getting, they're likely feeling a placebo effect. My friend also often says that the most important factor in alertness (assuming at least a few hours of sleep) is motivation.

So someone who gets up to do a job they hate will believe they have less energy, even if they badly _want_ to be awake. Likewise, someone getting up to do a job they love can hardly wait to get up, and they feel extremely alert, even with the same amount of rest.</comment>


Harvard study: Political 'dysfunction' crippling U.S. economy – POLITICO [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/problems-unsolved-and-a-nation-divided.pdf <comment><USER2> This is an excellent report.

</comment><comment><USER3> Then support a voting system that incentivizes "bridge building", rather than partisanship and division.

[http://www.fairvote.org/proportional_representation](http://www.fairvote.org/proportional_representation)</comment>


Future of file storage in cloud– don't cancel your dropbox just yet - <AUTHOR> http://marisantons.com/post/22185376203/future-of-file-storage-in-cloud-dont-cancel-your <comment><USER2> > One more- Google saves file revisions, so this is +1 to them, since Dropbox > doesn't do this.

Dropbox saves earlier versions of your files for 30 days, or indefinitely for Pro accounts.

Not the same as the easy revision history in Google Docs, but Dropbox's version history has actually saved me a couple times.

<comment><USER3> Actually Pro accounts still only get 30 days. You have to subscribe to the Pack Rat feature to get indefinite storage.

<comment><USER2> Ah, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I had missed this one. My bad. Just found the revision section. Then this isn't +1 google. Hope you don't see reading that blog post as a waste of time...

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the article, sorry for piling on just for one point :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dropbox does "version" files for 30 days. It's not as "transparent" as Google's since DB doesn't "understand" the contents of the files, but it still keeps versions. And you can upgrade to the PackRat which keeps versions forever. <https://www.dropbox.com/help/11>

</comment><comment><USER4> > One more- Google saves file revisions, so this is +1 to them, since Dropbox > doesn't do this.

Now this isn't true at all. I've used Dropbox to restore an old revision many times.

</comment><comment><USER5> This post if poorly written and poorly researched.

<comment><USER6> it would be great if you could give a reason for your thoughts.</comment></comment>


Do people still use Mention tools? - <AUTHOR> We are planning to launch a new mention tool.
The concept is simple: Tracking mentions worldwide for any given keyword or phrase. (Your company, brand, your competitor, keywords of a campaign, anything) The data is crawled from all the search engines, news websites, social media sites, blogs, forums, communities, review websites and video sites. The launch plan is to give free subscription to 1000 users. And the platform will be closed for signups and it will be invite-only, every user gets 3 free invites. There is another option, by submitting your details and we may approve you to be a free user.<p>But my question here is will this low-end disruption model work? Do you guys use mention tool and if not, would you use if given a free one? <comment><USER2> I use my mention tool to monitor mentions of my mention tool. I hope you don't mind, I included your post in my blog: [https://medium.com/syften/how-to- monitor-your-competitors-be...](https://medium.com/syften/how-to-monitor-your- competitors-before-they-even-exist-799a0d44a3e9)

I don't think you should be asking if anyone would use a free account. Ask if anyone would pay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Getting paid is the end goal obviously. But the whole idea is to show people where our tool actually stands even when it's free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you heard of awario? (www.awario.com)

I've come across it in use online, but don't use it personally in any of my work. As for your question, if I had a need for it and it got the job done, I'd use it if given a free one.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, you said you don't use it for your work? Is there a specific reason for that or you just don't have the need for it in your office?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of people use mention tools. I built a tool with a much narrower scope than yours, and it has a few thousand users now.

<comment><AUTHOR> What were the initial issues faced when you launched your mention tool? Is there something I should be aware of before the launch? I am just planning to get a few good people to use it to give me an idea if it will stand a chance in the market.</comment></comment>


Could cryptocurrency mining kill online advertising? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/could-cryptocurrency-kill-online-advertising-carl-whalley/ <comment><USER2> Disclosure: I own Bitcoin, Dash, and Sia, but I've sold most of my Bitcoin.

I'm surprised I even have to spell this out for people, but here goes:

Mining stops the double spend problem just like market makers solve the liquidity problem: A little bit is great, but at scale it's divorced from the public good it provides. We don't need the amount of mining that is going on in Bitcoin right now. It's just wasted cycles because of the economics of the damn thing.

What fundamental good does spreading any PoW to millions or billions of devices accomplish? Nothing. That is why cryptocurrency mining will never take over advertising.

What _should_ take over advertising (if anything) is micropayments built into the browser. Maybe with some sort of probabilistic or web-of-trust mechanism on top to prevent the bookkeeping burden from overtaking the payment amount.

The problem with advertising is that it rots peoples minds and makes certain classes of goods compete on brand instead of competing on quality.

<comment><USER3> Advertising will never go away. You pay for cable, yet cable still has ads. Micropayments could potentially be adopted as a short-term alternative, but if it were ever to become the status quo, publishers would just start adding advertisements on top. Then we'd have a system where we both pay money directly, and also have ads, which would be worse.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't take that much machine learning to identify an ad and if micro payments were built into the browser they could be trivially tuned to only award payments on non-advertisers.

<comment><USER4> You can participate with this now using Brave, a Chromium-based browser that uses cryptocurrency-based micropayments to pay for content while blocking adds: [https://brave.com](https://brave.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although outraged by the idea at first, I have to say that there are some benefits here:

0\. This starves the advertising industry, which has insatiable apatite for private information, and questionable practices of obtaining it.

1\. Payment is done using only CPU power and you electric bill which are private, and the process itself could be made secure and efficient by incorporating it into browsers.

2\. Sites no longer have to trick you or your ad blocker into watching something you don't want to watch (or clicking on it). Instead, they are motivated to keep you on their site longer. It's not perfect, and trickery still might be involved, but it still seems like a better motivation. Heck, some sites might even try to keep you by producing solid content.

3\. Journalists get an income source without any political strings attached, they don't have to worry about writing something bad about some major advertiser.

However, I'm really not sure about the economics of all of this. How many CPU cycles does it take to replace a single ad?

Plus, wasting all of those CPU cycles on mining produces nothing of actual value. I'd much rather auction off some of my CPU time to the highest bidder or contribute it to some worthy cause.

<comment><USER6> > 1\. Payment is done using only CPU power and you electric bill which are > private, and the process itself could be made secure and efficient by > incorporating it into browsers.

Not really private... my electric meter broadcasts my power consumption in plain text on the 900MHz ISM band every minute... I used this program to read the meters of all my neighbors: [https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr](https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr) ... You probably also can buy the data from the power companies...

<comment><USER5> Ok, so it's not 100% private. But still, no one knows who you've contributed to, and how much. Heck, no one even knows whether you've contributed anything at all; maybe you just ran your washing machine.

As far as passing money between people goes, it's more private than giving someone cash in a back alley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Like others have mentioned, the economics are not good, mining is too competitive to be done on commodity hardware. Consider that over half of browsing now happens on mobile, and it becomes clear that very few people can participate.

<comment><USER8> That's not actually true - some coins are designed to be used on "commodity hardware". Monero is one, and it's what Coinbase uses.

Last I counted, my estimate on profitability was 0.006 cents / computer / minute.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/62m5mu/eli5_why_can...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/62m5mu/eli5_why_can_you_still_mine_monero_on_a_laptop/)

<comment><USER9> In what way does Coinbase use Monero?

<comment><USER10> I'm sure they meant Coinhive, not Coinbase.

<comment><USER8> ya, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone did the math on this, right? I thought the amount of revenue generated was a complete pittance.

More likely, this is just something sites start doing _on top_ of advertising.

<comment> aaron-lebo They did the last few times it was attempted.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=javascript%20miner&sort=byPopu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=javascript%20miner&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

There's this great blurb:

 _We 're a bit saddened to see that some of our customers integrate Coinhive into their pages without disclosing to their users what's going on, let alone asking for their permission. We believe there's so much more potential for our solution, but we have to be respectful to our end users._

[https://coinhive.com/blog/status-report](https://coinhive.com/blog/status- report)

It'd be awesome if someone did a comprehensive breakdown. If you scale this up to remove ads from 10% of the net or 30%, does it stay valuable with that mining power added to a single coin? Or does this business model require the continued pump and dump of worthless coins? What kind of energy and workload is this putting on user machines (in many cases without permission)?

If I run across a site that is mining without notice and permission, I'll never visit again, as best as I can. I don't want to support that. Hosting websites is relatively cheap, if companies weren't writing such bloated software, their costs would be much lower. Fix that first without adding more junk to the tech community, please.

<comment><USER12> Yea, the problem is the debt-based economy leading to things like the ad bubble in the first place. Mining is a process leading to a block reward too, and obviously typically as hashrate increases the difficulty increases too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Hey, we spent a good fortune to make this site run on all devices, > responsive and usable. Lets slow it down to mine *coin, we'll be able to > make dozens, DOZENS !!

<comment><USER14> Depends on the traffic of the website and how long the visitors stay on it.

According to coinwarz you can make $5.1 for 24 hours of mining on CPU/GPU, but realistically (for an average visitor) probably closer to $1/24hrs. If we take Reddit, which has 13 minutes average visit, probably between 5M and 50M daily visits.

That's $45K - $451K daily revenue.

That's probably more than their ad revenue.

[https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/reddit- stats/](https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/reddit-stats/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No. It's a bottom-feeder thing and doesn't generate that much revenue anyway.

</comment><comment><USER16> Advertising is only valuable when the user is engaged with the device. It's a very poor model for mining. Why not:

1\. Sell compute when people aren't using their machines and split the spoils (not actually profitable for people who pay their own electric bills, but you don't have to say that)

2\. Just create malware miners that run all the time.

</comment><comment><USER17> Never because if everyone adopted this the difficulty rating would go up by a factor of everyone.

Currently it will take you two years of one the newer computers running constantly to even meet half of the min payout on coinhive.

The more people the greater the difficulity. Lose-lose for everyone.

Ads are great. The current trend against them is shortsighted. Without ads we would be paying for content in walled gardens with less share-ability. Content would he hoarded and tokenized as opposited to widely shared.

Out of the 60 top thread would you micropay to read them all? No but someone does for each one and writes a summary in the comments. Lose-lose because the site gets less money/traffic the readers rely on secondhand information and no one is better off aside from the micropayment provider who takes a cut.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's an interesting idea but I don't trust that websites will use "a little bit of my CPU" to mine cryptocurrencies. All they have to do is increase a number somewhere to earn more money which is too tempting.

If people complain they'll just do it very slowly.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain briefly how this works? I was under the assumption that you need to download the blockchain to be able to mine. Or in-browser mining just takes stabs in the dark?

<comment><USER20> Mining is typically something like:

Hash(nonce + Hash(chain[including with new transactions])) < value.

So in some sense you need the chain but you can pass Hash(chain) to a client and let that just increase nonce and hash it.

Without synchronisation the found block might be for a stale chain but if you're using someone else's power you don't care, and the nature of distribution here means it's likely to be fresh anyway in the unlikely chance something is found.

<comment><USER21> For anyone who was thinking, like me, "If that formula is correct, couldn't you precompute hashes and then subtract Hash(chain) to get the desired nonce", it's more like

Hash(nonce + 2^256 * Hash(chain[including with new transactions])) < value

Still an oversimplification, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article's premise is about how we are on the edge of new disruption. They seem to think it's all been done rather than we are now sitting on innovations that require an unwritten playbook. Kinda like google, smart phones, or Amazon/eBay in the beginning. The talent pool is small again and specialized. The story is far from written.

<comment><USER23> Written?

<comment><USER22> Thanks. Sorry on mobile in an airport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You mean all that slow down when I visit Mashable isn't from generating crypto coins?

</comment><comment><USER25> Revenue sources are rarely killed, usually supplemented. The only way to kill online advertising is if it stops being profitable for advertisers.

</comment><comment><USER26> No. It user experience and so conversion rate. It also kills battery life and therefore everything on the planet

</comment><comment><USER27> Never gonna work. The publishers will simply add advertising again at some point so they're gonna reap double benefits.

These people need to care for pigs. Or better yet, go homeless and dig for peach pits in a dumpster.

They won't _ever_ learn.

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER29> Url changed from [https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/10/22/1839226/could- crypt...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/10/22/1839226/could- cryptocurrency-mining-kill-online-advertising), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER30> As I've said before, when a headline asks a question, the answer is almost certainly "No."</comment>


The Security Architecture of Qmail (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://hillside.net/plop/2004/papers/mhafiz1/PLoP2004_mhafiz1_0.pdf <comment><USER2> I ran qmail for a _long_ time in a lot of places and it was by and large a good thing. While I watched the sendmail folks periodically scramble to cover the _vuln du jour_ debacle, there was never much that took the piss out of qmail. Unfortunately, the idiosyncratic license meant that I spent more and more time cobbling up a set of sources and patches that supported the latest email requirements and finally decided postfix was far less overhead with close to qmail security.

The I decided life was too short to run my own mail server. Don't judge. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> qmail is an excellent example of isolation and least priviledge security design. But I'd really like to hear how production systems used by major ISPs or gmail work.

<comment><USER4> Yahoo! Mail ran qmail back in the day.</comment></comment>


Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest App Store? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/will_java_be_the_world <comment><USER2> This is rather disturbing. Not only does it abuse the idea of trusted updates even more, since it's bundled with an important runtime you probably won't be able to opt out completely.

Certainly not what the users signed up for when they bought that computer or installed that runtime. And now every company with some installed base is going to try this. I can't wait for the Claria/Gator/Yahoo/AOL App Store!

</comment><comment><USER3> "As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution - but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. "

I mean, come on...

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that made me gag too... their PR department is really over-selling things. They also overlook a very embarrassing fact: in spite of all those "users", I bet they have almost no brand recognition whatsoever with at least 75% of them. Most average consumers install Java because some website told them that they have to and they've long since forgotten about it (or at least until the updater nagged them from the Windows task bar that updates were available).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Java may have a great development platform, but it's not a great end-user platform. As a user, I'm never going to go to the Java App Store to shop for software.

<comment><USER6> You don't have to. They can push it to you with an update, and damn near everyone has it installed already. PR is hyperbole of course, but they do have a very large installed base, who are used to it being on their machines even if they're not sure what it does.

The trick will be to invite users in such a way that it doesn't look like a browser popup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest Crap Store? (sun.com)

There fixed that for ya. Java might be extremely popular but it is not known for its aesthetic qualities. You can get away with it on the back-end but I don't believe they really know how to appeal to users/consumers (hence the roaring success of JavaFX or any other Java UI tech /sarcasm).

</comment><comment><USER8> No.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sun has a habit of using JavaOne to beat developers over the head with whatever shiny, new idea is perceived to make it the most money (or, in past years, will cause analysts to increase price targets). Schwartz loves to talk about "billions and billions" like Carl Sagan, but his numbers are irrelevant when it comes to predicting partner revenue. His reasoning is much like that of an entrepreneur saying, "If we only capture one percent of this market..." Nevermind, in this case, that there are fewer and fewer reasons to build a desktop app instead of a webapp.

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome. Fresh off of the incredible non-success of our client-side Java Applet, Java Web Start, and JavaFX platforms, we're going to take advantage of our required JRE download to push out software that users probably don't want it. (I mean, if the user _really_ wanted that stuff, they could just go to the vendor's web side, am I right?). If you thought the default Yahoo toolbar was annoying, we're just getting started!

</comment><comment><USER11> So why do they still get to ship their runtime with Windows? Is that a relic of the anti trust settlement?

<comment><USER12> Separate lawsuit after MS broke the Java license with their own semicompliant JVM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> No. because all Java desktop apps run like crap.

<comment><USER9> Many do, but they don't have to. Look at Eclipse as an example of what can be done.

Also, there's no indication that the store will be limited to Java apps. Sun is basically selling slots inside its Trojan horse.

<comment><USER14> While Eclipse is indeed one of the best Java desktop applications I've seen, it's still much worse than most "native" desktop applications (at least on OS X) in terms of polish and performance (though it certainly has a lot of functionality)</comment></comment></comment>


The Neanderthal correlation (2008) - Digit-Al http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7194/full/453562a.html <comment><AUTHOR> Just to be clear, is this fiction, or a dramatization of reality?

Both would please me, but not knowing which does not.

<comment><USER2> Fiction. See the author's website: [http://www.jeffhecht.com/fiction.html](http://www.jeffhecht.com/fiction.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To put it bluntly, the "you can't handle the truth!" bit is because Neanderthal genome is present in European and Asian populations, but _not_ in Sub-Saharan African populations. But that analytical intelligence would have been a "gift" from the Neanderthals, like the article states, is afaik not backed up by any data.

Here is one interesting TED talk by Svante Pääbo, one of the leading experts on the Homo Sapiens/Neanderthal link: [http://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inn...](http://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inner_neanderthal)

Edit: eggs on me, I didn't get that the text was fiction

<comment><USER4> As per skywhopper's comment ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607542)), this piece is fictional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> ... she smiled so broadly that she looked almost attractive despite her unkempt red-grey hair and nondescript clothes._

Why is this necessary?

<comment><USER6> It's necessary. Read the story again and see if you realize why.

<comment><USER7> Feeling kind of dull, but I still don't get it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The gang gets DNA tested and discover Sheldon is descended from cavemen, while Penny is related to Einstein! Meanwhile, Leonard and Raj have a run-in with the building super (Harrison Ford guest stars)

<comment><USER9> I don't understand the appeal of that show. I almost cringe every time I see a clip, and the popularity suggests that the world actually thinks nerds are like that.

<comment><USER10> I watched the first few seasons and really liked them; they resonated with my inner geek pretty well. Actually, at some point I got quite worried about the extent to which I can relate to the main characters. I also liked the fact that I could actually understand the quantum physics jokes that to most people sounded like "blablabla science blablabla hahaha" ;).

<comment> T-hawk There's a disconnect in the show's treatment of parts of the characters' lives, which accounts for the divisive polarity of opinions on it. The show manages to be both pro-intellectual and anti-intellectual in different areas.

The _professional_ side, the _science_ , is held up with great respect and considerable accuracy. These guys are doing really neat stuff at the university and we get to see their enthusiasm and success with it. That's very cool and appealing and a positive light on STEM professionals that's uncommon in popular culture.

The _personal_ side, the _geekdom_ , is held up for mockery. The show brings up comics and science fiction and video games mostly as punching bags for the girls to trash and feel socially superior. That's the negative vapid stereotyping that critics complain about.

Whether you like TBBT depends on which of those has more impact on you. If you like the science and don't mind the anti-geekery, you'll like the show. If the anti-geekery hits too close to home, you'll hate it.

(Side note, I'm conflicted on whether to participate in this subthread. It's Reddit-style topic drift on intentionally misinterpreting the submission title and ignoring its content. But there's good discussion happening here anyway.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These are wonderful! They recently had a micro-short-story competition (200 chars or less). This was one of the runners up:

"off that switch, Professor! Your time machine can't travel back in time past the moment of its own creation and instead will trap the Universe in an endlessly recursive time-like loop! Take your hands"

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v508/n7494/full/508144a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v508/n7494/full/508144a.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Spoiling the joke at the end of the article:

"I don't know how you'll survive when our genes are gone."

The woman has the genes of the Neanderthal that is the mathematic and logic skills, while the boss has the genes of social intelligence. May the day come when she pass away, no intelligence will be left, so he will be in trouble.

Edited: Grammar 3 or more times. I have an additional theory, that allow you to classify yourself, those without Neanderthal genes would never read the last lines since that is too much to ask to such a social intelligence creature. (Just want to add my own joke, sorry for that).

<comment><USER13> Could this explain the exponential growth in ASD diagnoses we are observing? (i.e., neardenthal genes are dominante and we are becoming less and less sapiens as times go by) ?

<comment><USER12> I don't think being an intelligent and logical parent is correlated with having children with ASD. It could be that nowadays exigent jobs, with long hours for parents and stress, can contribute to less time for the family and this one can be a source of disorders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > I'd always succeeded before; that was why after two decades at the > university I was department chair and Beth was still a research assistant.

Maybe it's because she is a woman.

<comment><USER15> I assumed they were both women. Care to point out which part of the text states otherwise?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_accelerated_region_1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_accelerated_region_1)

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a couple of things I don't understand about the Neaderthal interbreeding and the Denisovan stuff:

(1) If we interbred, doesn't that mean we're the same species. IE, These were two subspecies like dogs and wolves. (2) How does the idea of distinct human populations without Neanderthal DNA work with the genetic bottleneck theory? Wasn't there a bottleneck after this interbreeding took place>

<comment><USER18> I think of it like this: there's not really any such thing as a "species" in nature. It's an abstraction we developed to make sense of the world. In reality, organisms exist on a huge continuum composed of individuals which are more or less genetically similar/related. Often there are huge "chunks" missing where lines died out or went their separate ways. We arbitrarily declare that such-and-such collection of organisms between this point and that point on the continuum are a distinct species. Sometimes, this species can interbreed with another and even have fertile offspring, but they just don't - even if they live in the same locale! Sometimes two species are even more genetically similar than the first example, but they can't interbreed at all. Sometimes two organisms could interbreed, but it's physically impossible for some reason (very small dogs and very large dogs) without some kind of assistance. Sometimes they can, but the offspring is not fertile. And as you get further and further away on the continuum, the less likely they can interbreed at all. In nature there's really all kinds of different scenarios like these and it doesn't necessarily make sense to demarcate the species-line where we do - but it was done that way for historical reasons or simply because that's the best we can do with our abstraction.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra "There's a gene cluster linked to advanced mathematics skills, information processing, logic, analytical intelligence, concentration skills, obsession–compulsion and Asperger's syndrome"

Is there such a gene cluster? I guess that finding such a cluster will be an enormous discovery on itself.

Otherwise, the plot is pretty obvious. And reeks of New Age mythology.

<comment><USER19> Thank you for asking. No, there is no such gene cluster. This fictional story submitted for our discussion here on Hacker News (I don't like that it was submitted, really) is much more optimistic about the results of gene association studies than the actual study results warrant. So far, genome-wide association studies (GWASes) have proved only that almost any human behavioral trait of interest is influenced by dozens or even hundreds of genes of small effect, with unknown interactions among the genes, and most genes still not detectable with very large sample sizes, because statistical power of GWAS is weak when gene effect sizes are small, as they always are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This would make a great science fiction piece, if elaborated on. The moralizing at the end, however, was a little heavy-handed.

</comment><comment><USER21> The winners create the notion of writing history books.

</comment><comment><USER22> Weird little speculative fiction piece.

From Wikipedia:

Although some populations of modern humans share some nuclear DNA with the extinct Neanderthals, the two species do not share any mitochondrial DNA,[32] which in primates is always maternally transmitted. This observation has prompted the hypothesis that whereas female humans interbreeding with male Neanderthals were able to generate fertile offspring, the progeny of female Neanderthals who mated with male humans were either rare, absent or sterile (in line with Haldane's rule).

While interbreeding is viewed as the most parsimonious interpretation of the genetic discoveries, the authors point out they cannot conclusively rule out an alternative scenario, in which the source population of non-African modern humans was already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa.</comment>


Youngest Finance Workers Don't Fear Robots Will Replace Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-23/finance-s-youngest-workers-see-no-danger-robots-to-replace-them <comment><USER2> Inexperienced people bad at predicting future - film at 11

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this include front or back office?

Front office newbies have tons of options career wise. Back office? Not so much.

</comment><comment><USER4> Plot twist- young finance workers have robotic life.</comment>


Do The Work. Write Before You Die. - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwenbell.com

<comment><USER2> Interesting, though I'm not sure I'm up to a year's worth of daily meditation on my death.</comment>


My data scientist doesn't know how to properly start an EC2 instance - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/my-data-scientist-doesnt-know-how-to-properly-start-an-ec2-instance-b1b9f4920359 <comment><USER2> While this a useful post to help those tasked with managing infrastructure, your title suggests a Jack-of-all-trades approach. Stikes me asking a data scientist to deploy EC2 instances is a waste of valuable skills.

It is preferable for a data scientist to spend her valuable skills on understanding the problem domain, adapting data to modeling the problem and interpreting results. With the shortage of qualified data scientist this seems to be analogous to asking a commerical airline pilot to be able to carry out a jet engine overhaul.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, write a script for your data scientist, so they can have an easy one liner that sets up the environment correctly.</comment></comment>


Siri creators show off Viv, a personal assistant AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/9/11639992/viv-digital-assistant-ai-artificial-intelligence-siri <comment><USER2> I can see how non-techies will be wowed by this. For me, all I saw was massively improved natural language parser (and there are many people in this space doing exactly the same right now), and multiple references to 'our friends xyz...' which seems to infer that they've worked with these sites to build a common (possibly closed?) API that works with Viv.

Yes, this is the ongoing evolution of 'assistant bots' but it's hardly ground breaking stuff so far. There's still no real AI going on, and it's clear that Viv (and everyone else currently working on 'next gen' bots, to be honest) will be putting the onus onto the 3rd party developers to actually create anything useful.</comment>


70% of Rich Families Lose Their Wealth by the Second Generation - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/ <comment><USER2> Now I will know how to talk to my kids when I make millions climbing the corprate ladder.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because the key to gaining wealth and keeping it are different. Gain it by focusing on one thing and hope it becomes popular. diversify to keep it.</comment>