An Oral History of Apple's Infinite Loop - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history/ <comment><USER2> I was an Apple engineer from 2007-2011. Worked in IL2 and IL3, as well as across the street in De Anza 7. When I started, all the signage in the Infinite Loop buildings used design cues from classic Mac OS styling--the Chicago and Apple Garamond fonts, pixelated icons and bitmap dingbats from the Cairo font. Awesome geeky old Mac stuff.

After the iPhone took off they started removing all of these signs and replacing them with ones that were more "on brand." The building number signs, with their Apple colors and pixelated Chicago characters, were replaced by gray Myriad on solid white.

Everyone in my building either had their own office or shared it with one other coworker. I was a relatively junior engineer, a couple years out of college, with a window office to myself. Haven't had that since.

In early October 2011 I was looking for another job. I was actually at another company's office for an onsite interview when the interviewer told me of Steve's passing. Must have been awkward for him to deliver that news, but I did accept the job in the end. :)

Sadly, I joined the company too late to see the famous "Icon Garden." I think it was taken down in the late 90s/early 2000s.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, > because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every > person had an office.

And now they've regressed.

<comment><USER4> Beside cost saving, I wonder whether it is generational with Millenials having been closely watched over by the hovering parents, etc. all their live.

To the comment below: Not all Millenials may be explicitly asking for it, yet they definitely have lesser allergy/resistance to it which makes the cost saving measure of the "cool offices" more feasible. Other people have also at different times/comments (for example [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009641)) noticed that the open office is frequently used as an "ageism" filter.

<comment><USER5> Are the millenials actually asking for open offices? I think you're projecting a lot, and making pretty unfounded statements.

I don't know a single person IRL who prefers them that works as a software engineer.

Finally - I've never been hired somewhere that actually let me decide on my office format. I've been places that asked, but none have ever actually given me what I asked for.

<comment><USER6> I find no shortage of young engineers who've never experienced offices expressing a strong preference for open plan working arrangements. Sure it's not all of them, but it's a significant amount. Everywhere I've worked, if/when the topic of office layout redesign or move has arisen, the young folks desires for "bull pens" or big shared desks or similar has always won out.

I think popular culture has almost made the open plan office aspirational for some too, which is kind of hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if it's still there, but when I visited Infinite Loop 4 back in 2012, printed on the wall was one of my favorite Jobs' quotes:

"If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next."

<comment><USER8> I think you mean Infinite Loop 4 (the building with Town Hall & the Cafeteria). Last I saw it was still there.

<comment><USER7> Yes, you're right – thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked there for a while until a year before Steve came back. I always dreamed of working at Apple having spent most of my career up til then building stuff for Macs. But it was pretty depressing (they lost $1B while I was there) and I didn't want to be there when they died. But I liked working in IL, the cafeteria was great, so many cool people to work with. But it was obvious none of the execs had any idea how to fix all the issues. I wondered who would own IL afterwards. Of course I was an idiot for leaving, but telling the future was not my strong suit.

<comment><USER10> I think most companies in Apple's position would have folded, or hobbled on for a few years while they sell off more and more of their business. You did a reasonable thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > You see more young people than we ever had. You walk around and you're > hearing probably every foreign language being spoken around this campus.

That's been my first impression as well. Now that I work there.

</comment><comment><USER12> is it true the sushi guy was interviewed by jobs?

<comment><USER13> He was basically forced out of retirement for Jobs. Jobs loved his sushi

<comment><USER14> When did he stop being a fruitarian? Is that a myth about Jobs that he was a vegan who only ate fruit?</comment></comment></comment>


Why I Don't Call the Police - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/08/michael_brown_eric_garner_debra_harrell_just_three_examples_of_why_i_don.single.html

<comment><USER2> Title amendment: when a black person is involved, and the issue is not urgent. Because the response is disproportionate based on race.</comment>


Ask HN: Program to build webpages? - <AUTHOR>

i have an application that isnt too heavy on the webside of things, it is mostly the "program" that is the application.
now i wan to put it online and i im just bad at webdesign. im halfdecent at html but i just cant put together a goodlooking page.
is there a program that lets you build css/html/javascript pages easily? doesnt need to be advanced at all as long as it is  correct html4.0+ <comment><USER2> Someone on the Joel forum recently lamented the lack of decent prebuilt web app templates:

[http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.632032....](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.632032.11)

I quite agree. Open Designs: <http://www.opendesigns.org/> has bazillions of blog and corporate designs, so I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to expect a few more web app templates would be collected somewhere.

I suppose I should be the first to mention Weebly: <http://www.weebly.com/> I've used it to bang up a quick UI and it's fine if you can accept its current limitations.

<comment><AUTHOR> weebly and open design are both awesome, ty very much, exactly what i wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Emacs. By the way, you ought to attempt to improve your writing as well - it's painful to read something with a nearly total lack of punctuation and proper capitalization.

<comment><AUTHOR> what do you mean emacs? is there a builtin htmlpagecreator?

and my punctuation is good and it is the internets anyway.

<comment><USER4> Just because its the 'internets' doesn't mean that good grammar/spelling/etc. are not appreciated. The more clearly you communicate the likelier you are to get some help.

As for your initial question, perhaps something like Dreamweaver - <http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/> \- would be what you're looking for.</comment></comment></comment>


AT&T Hacker 'Weev' Sentenced to 3.5 Years in Prison - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/att-hacker-gets-3-years/

<comment><USER2> Who are these jurors? A lot of people want to blame the legal system, but what we have is a problem with our citizenry.

It seems many juries don't understand technology enough to form an opinion in cases like this. Also, juries in general don't seem to understand how jury nullification can work to properly constrain our government.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where are the AT&T executives who are being sent to prison? They exposed the data on a _public_ interface.

Weev didn't "hack" anything. He visited a sequence of public URLs.

He may have hesitated, but he did the right thing. He outed this... corporate malfeasance.

Those of us watching closely observe what this tells us about trusting both our "corporate citizens" and the government.</comment>


Startups are overdosing on ambition these days - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/startup-grind/you-dont-need-a-master-plan-you-just-need-to-start-9a3ec0455866 <comment><USER2> This is a great motivation to start.

I thought this was the order: 1\. Seed - delight hundreds of people and pull in thousands a month. Demonstrate your idea is viable in the niche.

2\. Series A - delight thousands to a million people. Demonstrate you can take that idea beyond the niche.

But there's a couple of capital intensive plays that have distorted the system like Magic Leap. For those plays, it seems like the main customers are VCs, not actual users.</comment>


The World Really Could Go Nuclear - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-really-could-go-nuclear/ <comment><USER2> "If we are serious about tackling emissions and climate change, no climate- neutral source should be ignored"

Well, exactly. The most noisy and alarmist aren't interested in producing energy at all. They are only interested in de-industrialisation and de- population.

Of course nuclear fission is the answer to large scale energy. It always has been. Weapons proliferation can be addressed with new designs and materials. Safety can be addressed with passive systems.

The technical answers are simple compared to fusion or elaborate harvesting of diffuse energy such as sunlight, wind or tides.

The logical conclusion is that the people making the most noise are not in it for the solutions, but for the noise and attention. I'm not the only one to think this, but expect the groupthink to smite my comment anyway.

<comment><USER3> I've been pro-nuclear for a long time, though the Fukushima disaster changed my mind a little.

What shocked me more than anything about the accident, is that when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan. We have no way of getting inside to stop things getting worse, or to contain what has already happened. We literally stood around watching, waiting, to see what would happen. When the highly contaminated water flowed into the ocean, the response was "where else did you think it would go?".

I'm aware that new reactor designs mean things going that badly is very unlikely in the future, but I still think it's scary we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad.

<comment><USER4> _> when things go horribly wrong with Nuclear, we literally have no plan._

What was your reaction when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened? We had no real plan then, either. And the aggregate impact of that incident was arguably larger than that of Fukushima. (For example, the "highly contaminated water" released into the ocean from Fukushima is probably going to do a lot less ecological damage than the oil released by Deepwater Horizon. The contaminated water will just get diluted to the point where it's indistinguishable from other ocean water. The oil, not so much.)

 _> we can build a machine with such immense power, and it can get to a point where we just stand back and watch it go bad._

First of all, a nuclear reactor that produces 1 Gw of electricity doesn't have any more "immense power" than a coal, oil, or natural gas plant that produces the same electrical power output.

Second, we have every right to insist that, before a nuclear reactor gets built, we have a contingency plan in case something goes wrong. But, to be fair, we should insist on that for _all_ sources of energy. Want to drill for oil? What's your contingency plan if there's a leak in the well? As I commented to someone else upthread, nuclear power appears to be the only energy technology where everyone focuses on the worst case; other energy sources seem to get what amounts to a free pass in this regard.

<comment><USER3> > _First of all, a nuclear reactor that produces 1 Gw of electricity doesn 't > have any more "immense power" than a coal, oil, or natural gas plant that > produces the same electrical power output._

Stop putting those control rods in there and see how much energy it will generate.....

<comment><USER4> _> Stop putting those control rods in there and see how much energy it will generate....._

Which is not what happened at Fukushima, or TMI, or even Chernobyl, so it's irrelevant. You might as well say, stop metering fuel into that natural gas plant and light it off all at once and see how much energy it will generate. If we are going to restrict ourselves to energy sources that can't possibly be misused, we won't have any energy sources at all. Even solar can be made to do damage if it's focused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article, like many pro-nuclear arguments, doesn't address the most basic problem -- is nuclear power cost effective?

Sure, it's cheap in theory, but nuclear power projects bring with them enormous project management risk. If you complete 90% of a wind farm installation, you get 90% of the power out. Completing 90% of a nuclear reactor gets you no power at all, and unexpected cost overruns can add up to billions of dollars. When a reactor shuts down for repairs, they sometimes take decades to complete. As of today, it can be argued that many countries' nuclear power programs were a financial mistake.

Then, once in a while, you find out that the original cost-benefit analysis was wrong. After the Fukushima accident left $200 billion of real estate uninhabitable, nuclear power plants across the world have revised their risk models, and now are spending more money for safety upgrades.

Finally, emerging technologies like wind and solar are showing immense promise, but predicting their future cost is equally difficult. All the best minds can only put together a very educated guess.

Yes, if we had started focusing on nuclear power 40 years ago -- and if we had done it carefully and properly the first time -- it would have been the right decision.

But we got it wrong, and the today risks of getting it wrong again are bigger than ever.

<comment><USER6> That's why there's such focus now on small modular reactors, with a bunch of startup companies attempting to develop them. The main impediment is the NRC, which has been slow to come up with licensing rules appropriate for small reactors or advanced designs (some of which have very good passive safety).

<comment><USER7> I tend to think the 'push' for small reactors, fifth generation reactors, and alternative designs is same as the 'push' for 'clean coal'. A political ploy to keep the government subsidies coming and forestall the eventual taxing of the industries externalities. And to hopefully prevent alternatives like solar from getting funding.

Seriously, solar is already at cost parity and the economics are getting better with time. Plus externalities are minimal. Compared to nuclear power which gets less economic over time and has very open ended externalities.

<comment><USER8> I agree that solar is already at cost parity, but not after battery costs. Furthermore I live in Canada, in the winter our solar power generates only 1 / 80th of the power, and unless we're going to tie our energy security to the United States, we're going to need alternatives.

Nuclear power in Canada is a complete success. We generate at 6 to 7 cents per kilowatt hour in the first 30 years, and the amortized cost continues to decrease after that. Yes there are maintenance costs, but do you know what else there are? Medical isotopes that the world desperately needs to keep our diagnostics working.

You can make nuclear cheap and safe. The problem is cultural, not scientific. If a society is too greedy and corrupt or too deferent to authority, then nuclear won't work. But in places like Canada, Sweden, and France they work very, very well.

Also, Thorium reactors are much less likely to cause problems and they are part of the fifth gen reactor designs.

We need both nuclear and solar.

<comment><USER5> I definitely wouldn't consider nuclear power in Canada to be a _complete_ success.

In 1999, Ontario Hydro's debt stood at $38.1 billion, most of which came from the construction of nuclear plants. For comparison, the entire government debt at the time was a little over $100 billion.

These plants will continue operating well into this century, so when all is said and done, all of the cost overruns (and the 17 year shutdown at Bruce) will hopefully be worth it.

But it's unreasonable to consider nuclear power to be a complete and clear-cut "home run" and to suggest that, as the original article stated, "only fear and capital" stand in the way of rolling out more nuclear plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not against nuclear as long as it's done properly and responsibly, but they usually aren't. As we all know, nuclear reactors can fail from either operational malfunctions or exterior effects such as earthquakes or tsunamis. However, when things go wrong, there are no backup plans in place for the backup plans when things go wrong, which is very much needed when we're talking about the types of consequences nuclear meltdowns can have. Not only this, but when things go wrong, the companies that run them try to keep the seriousness of the situation under wraps for as long as possible in order to protect the company and b then at which point it becomes too late to take more proactive measures.

To make matters worse, most nuclear reactors in the United States were built in the 1960s and 1970s and they were only designed for a lifespan of 40 years, which means most of them should be shut down. However, since a lot of money is at stake with how much reactors cost, regulators rewrite the rules and extend the useful life of the reactors and put us all in danger. That is what bothers me and that is why I am against nuclear reactors - because when money is on the line, all bets are off.

</comment><comment><USER10> I never really understood the arguments against nuclear.

From the data I'm able to find, coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours globally, compared to about 90 deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours generated from nuclear.

That would mean that burning coal for energy is nearly 2000x more dangerous than nuclear power.

Is there something more to the opposition's argument than safety? Or is this just a case of the public being misinformed?

<comment><USER11> >coal energy results in about 170,000 deaths per kilowatt-hour

Are you saying that running a gaming PC for 2 hours results in 170k deaths?

<comment> Syrup-tan If the PC is powered by coal energy, he's saying something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not that I need everything perfect, but these are my concerns:

\- The corporations building these things are hyper-corporations, many in the defense industry. Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral. To meet environmental, safety, disposal and cost concerns, they will go part way, but when they hit the knees of the various curves, they will convince Congress and citizens through advertising, co-opted scientists, and bribed members of Congress that everything is great and it's been taken care of.

\- Waste. After however many decades, where is all the nuclear waste? Are we finally implementing the long range plans, to take care of wast and make future generations safe? At least out hundreds of years I would expect. I think the answer here is effectively no. I think we're still just studying it, and all involved are hoping someone else will deal with it later. There will never be enough Senators to vote for specific locations in their states, and transportation through their states. "On site" will magically be found to be perfectly fine after all. And it will end up being Hanford and Rocky Flats, with leaks into the water table, and shit stored next to shit that shouldn't be.

\- Safety. What happens when we finally experience a catastrophe, because the corporations and governments kicked the safety can down the road so that these things could be built? It's going to happen, they're corporations and they must above all make a buck. What hyper-corporation could resist turning uranium into gold?

\- Environmental. These things need to be cooled. They're next to rivers and oceans because of that. Ecosystems dwindle and die, because downstream temperatures will always be "within acceptable levels" that were set by agencies suffering from regulatory capture that are funded by bribed Congressmen. No one wants to be the single point of failure on the money pipeline.

\- Cost. Balloon. Corporations make money no matter what. Even if a corporation is fined in proportion to its overrun, even if they refuse to pay and people are jailed (ha!), that money is still lost.

The only thing above that I'm inclined to give on is safety, it's probably an engineering possibility. But that's mere technical possibility, in the face of amoral corporations with a drive for profits stronger than the human drive for reproduction.

Color me sceptical.

<comment><USER2> "Corporations, especially at that scale, are at best amoral." sorry, but this is just wrong.

Lots of people posting and reading this work for corporations.

Do bad actors exist? Sure. Are all corporations at scale amoral? You make them sound like machines programmed by megalomaniacs, not places created by, worked at and invested in by ordinary people. Every 'corporation' I have ever worked at has been filled with people trying to do a good job under whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Brushing off the majority of good that large companies do as an argument is not correct.

<comment><USER12> I work for a corporation too. Lots of good people there. I'm good people.

I'm talking about hyper-corporations and billion dollar contracts. That many people, chasing that much money ... no one who's gotten to the point that they _could_ with authority say "Nah, we shouldn't do this, it's wrong," ever _would_ say that. No one at that level of accomplishment and tenure has it in them to say "Oh, and are the fish in that river really safe?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, and if we had done that 30 years ago when it made sense there would probably be far less concern about global warming today.

Today, with the rapid decline in the cost of solar energy, I'm far less convinced this would be a wise move.

</comment><comment><USER14> Both of the countries lauded in this article undertook their nuclear programs at least partially for strategic reasons. The U.S. has massive reserves of coal - 480 billion tons[1]. Our strategic need is much lower.

Also, isn't Sweden supposedly phasing out nuclear power?

[1] [http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=70&t=2](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=70&t=2)

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish we would. Caution over nuclear externalities and criticism of poor safety/risk management by various nuclear authorities over the years are laudable, but too many greens look at te downsides of nuclear power in isolation, rather than in the context of the even more problematic fossil fuel incumbents and the realities of high demands for energy in developed economies. There is a huge opportunity cost to this ecological purity theater. The US administration has not really provided any leadership here, but at least it has approved and helped finance the construction of the first two reactors to be built in the US in 30 years so I suppose that's better than nothing.

</comment><comment><USER16> I spent a year of my life digging through the relevant literature back in 2008-2009 when I was coaching policy debate and the topic was alternative energy.

Based on my reading, I decided that the arguments in favor of nuclear power were significantly better than the defenses of renewable energy. So I made the strategic decision to write affirmatives about uranium enrichment and targeted procurement of nuclear-powered vessels.

That was how we won the national championship.

In other words: Even when the best debaters in the country have a year to prepare their counter-arguments, nuclear energy still tends to come out on top. Like facts, energy density is a stubborn thing.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a very simple to understand yet very unlikely to be implemented standard of persuasion. Industry executives and engineers - and their families - should make a point of living near their plants.

</comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps the best argument for nuclear energy is that it's a nearly certain, affordable (if expensive) remedy to a catastrophic problem, climate change. How can we - how dare we - risk the lives of millions of people?

I'll add that we especially are risking other people's lives. While most people reading this have reaped the benefits of fossil fuels, likely we and our decendents mostly will survive while people in poor countries die.

</comment><comment><USER19> If only it didn't cost so much. And, about every 20 years, there's a Chernobyl or a Fukishima sized disaster.

China has 13 nuclear stations under construction, with 61 reactors and a total capacity of 40 to 75 gigawatts.

<comment><USER20> What's the youngest nuclear plant to have suffered a major (say, INES 5+) incident? Fukushima Daiichi was pretty old.

<comment><USER19> The US still has Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania. Same reactor design as Fukishima. If they ever lose cooling water pumping, they will have a meltdown, just like Fukishima. All the regulators know this, so they have a lot of backup generators in different locations, and nine ways to get cooling water into the reactor. But the design is still not a good one.</comment></comment></comment>


Pyjamas: build AJAX apps in Python (like Google did for Java) - <AUTHOR> http://pyjs.org/ <comment><USER2> I'd also suggest checking out pyjamas-desktop (<http://pyjd.org/>), which allows you to deploy pyjamas apps to the desktop

<comment><USER3> yeah it looks great. I think its a great idea to use more of the web for the desktop - there is so much work going on in browsers/javascript it makes sense to use it for offline work as well.

<comment><USER4> well, the point of pyjamas-desktop is that you can, if you choose, run an "online" app that happens to be a stand-alone dedicated app that runs on the user's desktop.

let me rephrase that :)

pyjamas-desktop can be used for "online" apps just as much as it can for "offline" ones. in fact, you _still_ need a web server, even if it's running on localhost, because applications that conform to the pyjamas API will _still_ have to use XMLHttpRequest to interact with the rest of the world.

that interaction is done behind a neat abstraction module, HTTPRequest.py, but it's still necessary.

so - offline / online, there's no difference.

what you _do_ get with pyjamas-desktop is a speed-increase in your application, thanks to no longer being forced to utilise javascript. in cases where your application morphs into something that requires 10,000 on-screen widgets (not inconceivable for complex business apps) the speed-up of direct access to the blindingly-quick WebKit (<http://webkit.org>) underlying library is absolutely essential.

not even GWT can offer this, because google haven't bothered to port GWT to the desktop: they believe that the "hosting" mode - running from the Eclipse Development Environment - a whopping 150mb download on its own - is perfectly sufficient.

<comment><USER3> But GWT doesn't require eclipse to run? that 150Meg I assume must mean the 10 tonne eclipse IDE? Not GWT.

<comment><USER4> if you want to run "hosted" mode, where the javascript and java is executed by eclipse, then yes, GWT requires eclipse.

GWT itself does not have a "desktop" mode, it does not have a "desktop" version, and so GWT apps cannot themselves be run as a "desktop" app unless you use the GWT Eclipse-basesd "hosted" mode - or you run the GWT-compiled javascript under Adobe AIR, Mozilla's Gecko / Spidermonkey, etc. etc. etc.

<comment><USER3> Right yes I don't think GWT is really interested in desktop - unless like you say you compile it, but then its quite different.

I have run it hosted just fine with no eclipse components (only for dev of course) - just the JVM and about 10 meg of jars (or 9 meg dev jar) - I am not sure where you get the 150 meg from though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool. But wouldn't it be better to generate docs from comments than refering to GWT docs?

Anyway, they also have an online demo which you won't find on the site. Their BookReader <http://pyjs.org/book/output/Bookreader.html> (ongoing documentation) is itself a demo.

EDIT: Oh! just noticed that the Bookreader docs is very linux oriented.

<comment><USER4> There are several bits of documentation auto-generated from the docstrings - here's one: <http://lkcl.net/pyjamas-desktop/docs/output/docui.html>

this is one i made by hacking the standard python 2.5 pydoc.py to auto- generated pyjamas code, which you then either run with pyjamas-desktop - <http://pyjd.org> \- or you run through the pyjamas compiler - <http://pyjs.org> and you get the documentation.

so it can and has been done.

re the docs being linux-orientated: yep, i'm a linux baby :) and i haven't encountered too many windows people who use pyjamas, surprisingly. it's self- contained and OS-independent, so works perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, can this be used for only javascript? As in, I write my own html but use pyjamas to generate my js (which can manipulate the dom of my html).

I'm down with abstracting javascript (good riddance), but I like to be picky about html.

<comment><USER4> yep, that's right. pyjamas has three components:

* a stand-alone javascript compiler

* a DOM-model library that can be used to do things like getElementById

* a UI-widget library that has things like HTMLPanel, Label, Tree, Image

pyjamas-desktop rips out the first of these, rips out all javascript in 2) and 3) and replaces the javascript with Webkit/Glib, thus providing the _exact_ same functionality. it's blindingly quick.</comment></comment>


At $8.5B, Shopping App Wish Worth More than Macy's, JC Penny Combined - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2017/09/20/wish-8-billion-funding-amazon/#7a6e6e0e61e1 <comment><USER2> Not profitable yet and spends the lion's share of its 15% take from sales on advertising. Rapid growth the key but given the prices mentioned I am not surprised that they have such growth. The real question is repeat customers or customer satisfaction with the Chinese made goods. Other apps have had rapid growth selling Chinese goods but attrition rates were staggering.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spends $100 million/year on Facebook ads...</comment>


Show PHP some love - <AUTHOR> http://www.redbeanphp.com/extra/why_php

<comment><USER2> The penelope link at the end of the article is WAY more interessting than all the php vs the world rant.</comment>


Why AI Failed (and a comment by Bill Gates) - <AUTHOR> http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/why-ai-failed.html

<comment><USER2> Written a dozen years ago, yet still interesting.

I often wish I had taken a bigger interest in math, because AI really, _really_ intrigues me. I'm finishing up a CS degree, but that hasn't stopped me from thinking how it'd be interesting working toward developing true AI. Unfortunately, without lots of knowledge in neuroscience and very high-level math, that's something I'll probably watch from afar.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those unfamiliar with Push Singh:

[http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0678.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> 1 AND 1 = 1, if operation is executed in < Time (T)

1 AND 1 = 0, if operation is executed in > Time (T)

IC should be smart enough to realize this difference.

Till then AI won't succeed.</comment>


Google Labs Aptitude Test - <AUTHOR> http://ifindkarma.typepad.com/relax/2004/09/google_labs_apt.html <comment><AUTHOR> _'... "How much aptitude do you have for the sort of mind-bending engineering problems encountered each day at Google Labs? ...'_

Relax, it's meant to be humorous. Great to read something that takes the 'p' out of recruiting. Btw, I thought it was:

_e^((-i) x pi)_ [0] instead of _(e)^(i x pi)_ for Q 12 as suggested.

Reference

[0] <http://www.google.com/search?q=e+%5E%28-i*pi%29></comment>


Express.js documentation updates - <AUTHOR> https://strongloop.com/strongblog/express-js-documentation-update-feb-2015/

<comment><USER2> Nice work Hage! Much appreciated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rand (the main docs guy right now) has been doing a ton of work on this, and still more to come!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the most interesting things in tech lately? - <AUTHOR> Second internet?  Bio-tech?  New cryptographies?<p>What are the most interesting things in tech you've seen lately? <comment><USER2> Decentralized Finance on Ethereum. Blockchain always gets snarky comments on HN, but it is a rapidly evolving space. Whereas the 2017 bubble was built on token ICOs and hype, what I'm seeing now is advanced financial products including decentralized money markets for car loans ([https://defimoneymarket.com/](https://defimoneymarket.com/)) and fractional investments in tokenized real estate ([https://realt.co/](https://realt.co/)). Stablecoins (tokens that trend towards the value of $1 USD) have also taken off in a big way, with Dai being one of the biggest decentralized examples ([https://makerdao.com/en/](https://makerdao.com/en/)). Lending platforms such as Aave ([https://aave.com/](https://aave.com/)) have created markets for various tokens, including stable coins, paying out variable interest on deposits.

User-friendly apps have cropped up that enable people to easily save and invest their stable coins and earn interest, such as Argent ([https://www.argent.xyz/](https://www.argent.xyz/)). People are creating Social investment strategies around tokens and pooling their funds together on TokenSets ([https://www.tokensets.com/](https://www.tokensets.com/)), these are basically social ETFs.

There are no-loss lotteries that simply invest the pool of funds to earn interest and then one lucky staker wins the interest ([https://www.pooltogether.com/](https://www.pooltogether.com/)). Decentralized funding of open-source Web3 projects ([https://gitcoin.co/](https://gitcoin.co/)).

I can really go on and on, I'm not even covering some of the developments with Non-Fungible Tokens, gaming, governance, etc.

Here are a couple newsletters I recommend for following the space: [https://thedefiant.substack.com/](https://thedefiant.substack.com/) [https://bankless.substack.com/](https://bankless.substack.com/)

<comment><USER3> I went though every link and there was not a single interesting or cool thing.

Outside of the real estate company they are all gambling and coin 'investing' companies. I was bullish on ethereum and still have ~$11k from early purchases but I lost interest as it's all people trading alt-coins to trying strike it rich without creating anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> GPT-3 is an interesting mention. What people makes out of it is the coolest part. Check out [https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304](https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304)

</comment><comment><USER5> smart algorithms for stratospheric balloon navigation. [https://medium.com/loon-for-all/1-million-hours-of- stratosph...](https://medium.com/loon-for-all/1-million-hours-of- stratospheric-flight-f7af7ae728ac)

<comment><USER6> I really don't get why HN won't upvote balloon tech.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=balloons&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

It can messed with as an amateur, it's steampunk (I also think cyperpunk). There's a lot of potential, Loon actually launching in Kenya seems like a big deal.

There's more people living in submarines than balloons which seems crazy to me. We'll talk about a balloon habitat on Venus, so lets start here.

Very cool link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> SpaceX Starlink.

We already have low latency, high bandwidth internet available in big urban areas. Starlink offers a real solution for the rest of the world (rural communities, boats, vacation homes, isolated industrial facilities, etc).

The era of being outside of internet coverage is coming to a close.

<comment><USER8> ...if you're carrying a satellite dish with you?

<comment><USER9> You mostly already do, for TV at least

<comment><USER8> I don't carry a TV with me.

<comment><USER9> OK - you don't, but _many_ boat and cottage owners do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple's push towards ARM in their desktop line. Apple appears to have both the right incentives and a solid plan to make the transition succeed, unlike Microsoft's half-hearted attempt at Windows on ARM.

ARM on the desktop would be one of the biggest things to happen in the desktop space, and it will be interesting to see if Apple succeeds with it, and if PC manufacturers follow suit as a result.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been hearing a lot about AI and blockchain but I'm more interested in VR.

If the hardware were just a bit better, I could see it completely transforming education.

<comment><USER12> I don't think the hardware needs to become better as much as it needs to get cheaper. You won't bring that tech anywhere on a large scale as long as you need a recent gaming PC and a $400+ VR headset to get more than horrible smartphone VR apps or a few PlayStation games.

<comment><USER13> It needs to get to the point where reading text in vr is comfortable, probably

<comment><USER14> I would pay a good amount of money ($ iPad Pro) to have an AR display+mobileCPU that was a good desktop/terminal and smaller/lighter than a laptop--preferably running a full OS (not iOS/Android).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The social trend to replace technology with marketing. The banishment of nerds from technical fields. The obsession with status and notoriety and money to the complete exclusion of intellectual curiosity.

<comment><USER16> > The obsession with status and notoriety and money to the complete exclusion > of intellectual curiosity.

To me this resonates with the idea that FAANGs swallow up promising engineers and have them work on mundane problems to help generate revenue.

Certainly there are novel or interesting problems to be solved even in these mundane areas, but I wonder what we may be leaving on the table as a species - if many of these brilliant people were to focus their energies on other problems or research, what could we achieve?

Tangentially, are there positive (but not necessarily profitable) uses for the pile of cash that big tech is just sitting on?

<comment><USER17> I've heard from numerous people that FAANGs hire talented engineers and give them busy work or projects that never launch in a way to keep them from working for competitors. Is this actually true?

Has anyone seen this in practice?

<comment><USER18> Yup. It's not intentional or malicious, but it's the end result.

You have teams that grow because the manager find work to do and no project is ever closed as finished or mature so tons of engineers are wasting time making incremental improvements to systems that already fulfill all requirements.

You also have these engineers see this and decide they can reinvent the system better because they're so immersed and knowledgeable about it and boom you have huge numbers of worthless initiatives the size of which depends on how persuasive the lead is.

<comment><USER19> Interesting - it is almost a paradox how "inefficient" the most valuable companies are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A few years ago I heard "HBO is trying to become Netflix before Netflix becomes HBO"

Today the news is trying to become Facebook before Facebook becomes the news.

<comment> blaser-waffle Good, glib quotes, and totally true. Not sure if they're "interesting", though -- mostly just depressing.

You media consumption will be controlled by <5 companies... that's not so great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > What are the most interesting things in tech you've seen lately?

Same old, same old. People revisiting old tech (linear algebra, newton- rhapson, euclidean graph theory, bfs etc etc.) and rediscovering its value are getting rich with new and interesting projects, people chasing new tech pipe dreams getting scammed or scamming others. The scene hasn't changed much recently.

<comment><USER22> At the sake of sounding naive, how does one who is new to the field find old tech to revisit?

<comment><USER21> At the risk of sounding r/IAmVerySmart I think there is great value in revisiting computer science lectures for inspiration, always keeping part of your mind busy with the notion of applying them to real world problems. Like when you see an article from uber/lyft engineering on how they solve their data collection problems or how they schedule their inter-dependent tasks, the whole project is most probably rooted in someone revisiting their CS courses and building upon ideas like state machines and boolean algebra. Even those fabled blockchains can be invented using undegraduate course on limit theory and a master's course on elliptic cryptography. It just seems like everything is just out there for the pickings.

<comment><USER23> r/SomebodyWentToCollege

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The push by people who identify as "conservative" to move to unconventional social media platforms. Parler being used to replace twitter. BitChute being used to replace Youtube. Gab being used to replace Facebook and so on. Seems to have gained more mainstream acceptance to move.

<comment><USER25> I'm in tech and I've never heard of either of the three. Who's moving to these platforms?

<comment><USER26> > people who identify as "conservative"

<comment><USER25> Is there any evidence or data to back this up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> AI progress including GPT-3, Biotech progress including anything related to solving aging and curing diseases, decentralization progress including everything from finance to chat to social media

</comment><comment><USER28> I find indoor cycling platforms like zwift interesting, and how the data can help people train

<comment><USER29> And Peleton. I use TrainerRoad, it is wildly effective at boost my ftp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Social media turning into ads.

</comment><comment><USER31> Deno

</comment><comment><USER6> OSINT

</comment><comment><USER25> GPT-4</comment>


Redis for your slice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2010/1/14/redis-for-your-slice <comment><USER2> Excellent news! Congrats Salvatore (antirez here on HN).</comment>


Slacker Founder Dennis Mudd Says Demand for Free Online Music Won't Quit - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/san-diego/2009/05/12/qa-with-slacker-founder-the-demand-for-free-online-music-just-won%E2%80%99t-quit/

<comment><USER2> Title so obvious you'd think it was an Onion article.</comment>


Salesforce Expands to the Internet of Things - <AUTHOR> http://www.salesforce.com/salesforce1/

<comment><AUTHOR> Salesforce1 is going to allow anyone (that they vet in their LONG process) to connect to their millions of sales professionals. They are leaving this open to ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that interfaces with an API.

See TechCrunch: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/17/salesforce-com-launches- sal...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/17/salesforce-com-launches- salesforce1-a-new-crm-platform-for-connecting-apps-services-like-dropbox-and- the-internet-of-things/)

I look forward to Salesforce sending handwritten letters ([http://maillift.com](http://maillift.com)) and offering better mail options ([http://lob.com](http://lob.com)). I'm pretty excited to see what comes of Salesforce1!!</comment>


15 Years after the First Slashdot Post - <AUTHOR> http://cmdrtaco.net/2012/10/15-years-after-the-first-post/ <comment><USER2> Normally I might not identify with this level of nostalgia, but in this case I find it hard to restrain myself.

Slashdot was a critical piece of Internet history. In my mind it was last big thing that came out of the Internet from the era when it was exclusively for geeks. It continued in the footsteps of what we had done previously with email, usenet, ftp/archie, and irc, and became one of the biggest websites for us old timers.

After Slashdot the next big thing was probably Napster, and at that point the chasm was crossed to traditional mainstream youth demographics. Never again would the biggest thing on the Internet also be the geekiest.

Godspeed cmdrtaco.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just want to say thanks for all of the great work over the years. Slashdot was never my home - I never signed up, always contributed as AC - but I've been a loyal reader for almost a dozen years.

It's not what it once was, but it's still the best at what it does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

<comment><USER4> No, thank you.

I'm 25 and I can honestly say that for all of us on Hacker News, Slashdot has been a part of all our lives, a huge one. I've checked Slashdot at least once every second day since 2000 (I'll admit more frequently in the past), and I couldn't have imagined the past decade without it.

It may not keep up with some of the better subreddits, Metafilter or Hacker News in many respects and I can feel its userbase aging when I read the comments... but...

It stands like a rock, and may it always.

I remember my being in high school, checking Slashdot on the school computers and telling other students about Wikipedia, their reaction being "anyone can just edit it?", in about 2001. Memories of the phosphorus on white school CRT with Windows NT 4.0 burning news of technology as it came along.

I will continue checking Slashdot for my fix of news just about every day, and may you find my IP in your access.log for years to come. A true verdant thou hast burnt in mine eyes and may it shine on brightly within them forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was an enjoyable read, and Id like to Point out that it is also a chapter in many of our lives. Maybe not as directly or deeply, but for me my discovery of slashdot coincided with my move back to the valley in 97 specifically to get into silicon valley IT.

I've grown a lot, slashdot was a part of that growth and while I don't visit it that often any longer, it's still a part of my professional and personal DNA.

Nostalgia is a good thing, after all; memories are the only things you have to think back on. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> It was great while it lasted!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> /. user #5825 here. I have great memories of the old days.

Let's start a list of funny and cool things that we learned about for the first time on Slashdot. Here's mine:

1\. Google - I still remember the first postings about their search engine and how awesome it was compared to everything else when I first tried it out back in the mid 90's.

2\. RootServers, a startup that sold colo'd linux boxes and would give you root--a big deal back in the mid 90's. I saw their ad on /. and was surprised that they were based in my hometown. They later morphed into Rackspace, which has been my employer for the last five years!

3\. Mac OS X. I remember the early posts about Rhapsody, which encouraged me to go buy a Mac at the just-opened second-ever Apple Store in DC. Been a Mac user ever since.

I'm sure there's more...

</comment><comment><USER7> Slashdot user #527 here. I feel as similarly as an outsider can to Taco's feelings. Slashdot did a lot to shape what I think of as a real community, both on and offline. It was based around news but there were also fun things like all the Natalie Portman's grits stuff that not only didn't detract, it added to the feeling. HN is a great discussion place but there's very little "frivolous" stuff that really makes a friendly community. It'll never really be replaced.

</comment><comment><USER8> I first got good at network programming by writing /. crapflooders in the late 90's and early 00's, and my profanity skills honed in the trolltalk salt mines still take my mother's breath away to this day.

Thanks for everything Rob!

<comment><USER9> It taught me what goatse.cx was, I'll always be grateful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Slightly OT, but I'm very glad that working at WaPo Labs feels like those early days of Slashdot. I very much believe in news organisations and I want them to have a future- hearing about this kind of innovation is fantastic. Someday I hope to able to get into a similar news labs environment myself.

<comment><USER11> No need to wait 'til "someday". Here at the Times, we're looking for a few folks to join the Interactive News team: [http://jobs.nytco.com/job/New-York- Interactive-News-Develope...](http://jobs.nytco.com/job/New-York-Interactive- News-Developer-Job-NY/2118423/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before HN, before Digg, before any kind of social networking or all encompassing tech news sites, there was Slashdot. I still remember when one of the first questions to ask a fellow programmer was, "You on Slashdot? What's your number?"

<comment><USER13> And /. still has better comment setup than anything out there today that supposedly 'surpassed' it.

<comment><USER14> Sadly, I think you may be right. We can do better though, because it still sucks. Something merging the innovations in thread sorting from HN and cherry picking from large amounts of comments from /. would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In 1998 I moved to VA for a job as an Account Manager with a web consulting firm. Their business model changed almost immediately and I had to learn how to sell Sun hardware if I wanted to stay employed. Reading Slashdot was an important part of my education into Unix, system administration, and system administrators. That lead to an interest in open source and ultimately to me installing Red Hat at home. Today I am much more comfortable in the FOSS world than I am in the Windows world, and it all started with me reading Slashdot. I finally removed Slashdot from my feed reader last year, when I realized I couldn't remember the last time I clicked through to read a story.

However, I am still waiting for the box of swag I was supposed to get to pass out at the 10th anniversary party that I organized.

<comment><USER16> I also arranged a 10th anniversary party and I had no swag to give out. Two weeks later, a box of 15 or so anniversary shirts showed up. I tracked a few attendees down, but most of the shirts remain in a box that follows me around as I move.

Which is to say, I'd be happy to provide a shirt. I've been wondering what to do with them. I've been thinking about setting up an auction and giving the proceeds to the EFF...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Semi-long time /. reader here -- six digit UID but just barely. If I had known it would have conferred bragging rights I would have signed up a week or two earlier.

Slashdot was absolutely the best community from the late 90s up through maybe 2005 or '06. I learned so much from both the news articles and the subsequent discussion. Still have never found a better comments section than what Slashdot had then, though I keep searching.

<comment><USER18> I am barely 5 digits long. Too bad I forgot my password a decade ago!

<comment><USER19> #79509 here and was AC posting quite a bit before ever signing up. I've actually got a few accounts there and my oldest was hardly used for posting even back then.

Surprisingly I still remember my password on /. though I hadn't used that password in many years.

Lucky thing I remember it too since the email account (firstname.lastname@example.com) registered to the /. account is long since dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think it would be fair to say that /. pioneered the 'the comments are often better than the articles' social news site.

I remember coming into the Uni IT labs and seeing everyone usually had /. up on the monitors of their Solaris Workstations.

Hat tip to you.

</comment><comment><USER21> Loved Slashdot from the very beginning (read Chips n' Dips on occasion before Slashdot). My second ID was 100612, and my first was four digits. I'd been posting anonymously before that.

When reddit came along, I was splitting my time about equally for six months or so. And then, I realized a few months after that that I hadn't logged into Slashdot in months, and hadn't really noticed. I came back to Slashdot a couple of times to answer questions about something I was involved in (like Y Combinator), and found that it still led to a huge spike to my company/Open Source project website...slashdot is, or was, a firehose of very focused traffic that may never be replicated (at least, not for really nerdy folks). reddit never sent that kind of traffic our way, and neither has HN, or any other single source.

Anyway, it must be hard to let go of something awesome. But, it's also hard to watch something awesome die while you try to save it. Slashdot may not be "dying" per se (any more than any of us are dying, at a slow but steady clip), but I'm pretty sure it's in a steady decline that will never be turned around, and that's tough to watch.

</comment><comment><USER22> Slashdot has been the only site where I've been able to spend two hours learning about hard drive technology just by reading comments. Good times...

</comment><comment><USER23> I was slashdot user # 404. Thanks, Rob.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a great example of solid writing that transcends the specific knowledge of any community. The nouns are all familiar, but the story would resonate even if they weren't. It's just about being human, and doing human stuff.

Also, thanks for building something awesome.

</comment><comment><USER25> Slashdot had an incredible influence on my perception of computers, the internet, privacy, and participation. Though I don't remember the subject, I remember printing out my first successful submission and posting it on the wall.

</comment><comment><USER26> Slashdot introduced me to ArsDigita, which introduced me to web programming and linux, leading me out of the depths of a corporate visual basic dead-end job. I'm very grateful for the impact this had on my life. Thanks, Rob.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm splitting my time between here and Slashdot nowadays. Karma is certainly a lot more difficult to get here but I think that's a function of the quite different communities.

I'm curious though, do you know if Dice has any plans for reviving Slashcode or creating a new version of it? It looks like it hasn't been touched in about two years.

In any case, thanks for everything, and I'm sorry that the site seemed to grow away from you. I think most people here agree that it was better when you were part of it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ah, the fond memories of hitting Slashdot at least 5x per day back when I worked for early Amazon (1998?). I remember all the memes from back then. Like many people attest, it was hugely useful to make connections to other FOSS and Linux users.

But the biggest thing I remember was 9/11 and the updates from /. users who lived in NYC, Brooklyn, and Queens right after the disaster happened...at the point when the only other coverage was CNN.

<comment><USER28> For nostalgia's sake, here are the 9/11 threads: <http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?startdate=20010911>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know what? I think over the years cmdrtaco has become quite a writer as well.

I started reading Slashdot when the first days of the "slashdot effect" for flattening websites was being mentioned. Late 90's?

It was always a go-to site for me, and for events like 9/11 it was a better news source, simply because the team was agile enough to swap to static pages to handle the load, unlike CNN etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> This was a great read, user #11637 here. I had a project many years ago called half-empty that made it onto the /. front page, which slashdotted my college apartment and got my cable Internet service cancelled within a few hours. This was my first taste of the crack-cocaine called "tail -f access.log". It was awesome. Thanks again Rob.

</comment><comment><USER30> I still have Slashdot in every browser as a bookmark, even though I rarely visit the site. I can't bring myself to remove it.

<comment><USER31> I'm the same. I still add it to everything, but I too rarely visit. I felt like it was over once cmdrtaco left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Slashdot will always be near and dear to my heart. Slashdot was a big catalyst in my early tech education, even if I had to wait for long threads to load over my Courier Robotics modem. I can't remember if my user number was 8811 or 8872 but I do remember how cool it was to meet cmdrtaco at an early Linuxworld in nyc.

Thanks for everything /.

</comment><comment><USER33> Long-time top submitter here (still top 4, although I think I stopped in 2005 <http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml>), many good memories, the sense of community helped shape my interests in many ways, influencing my career, so just want to thank for your great work.

</comment><comment><USER34> Still remember the moment six months into it's history when I found out that Slashdot was a Michigan company. You never heard about any cool Internet companies originating from Michigan in those days. I remember being dumbstruck and then proud, damned proud.

</comment><comment><USER35> good memories.

myself, i had a modest user number, a few mentions for my work, posted some book reviews, hosted timothy at my condo a couple of times, even got slashdotted a couple of times (including once to distribute star wars prequel trailers via a grad school server i ran, which should give you an idea of how old i am now). "focused traffic" is hardly an apt description, and we still call it "the slashdot effect."

good times.

thank you. what was always clear is that it was first and foremost a labor of love and interest, and that's a rare thing among the net's high profile sites. that has had a profound impact on the site's long term quality.

</comment><comment><USER36> I still find Slashdot one of the most valuable discussion sites on the Internet.

Thanks man!

</comment><comment><USER37> The slashcode site hasn't been updated in years. Did it fall to the wayside throughout the buyouts?

<http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/>

</comment><comment><USER38> #1221 here... I remember when Slashdot ware THE place to get the tech news and discuss them. I do not think it is anymore, but still have some fond memories from these times. Thanks for that.

</comment><comment><USER39> longtime /.r 2774,

thx @cmdrtaco for starting slashdot.

It really filled the gap on the web in Perl, Linux & FOSS, information and was the go-to place in startups I've worked in. Now for a few questions,

Q. /. for me was the start of 'social software' through commenting & friends (fondly remembering 'friends of foes' & freaks) - what lessons learned in moderating & story post moderation do you think HN could improve with?

Q. Is there any way to get a dump of old posts. I've got 'em back to '96 & wouldn't mind getting a copy.

<comment><USER40> Lol "perl"

Haha, I remember that one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Happy 15th birthday! I posted as AC for the first year or two and sadly missed out on the "low UID" boat. I was 15 at the time of its launch.

</comment><comment><USER41> Are you a hacker? Do you like news? If you answered "yes" to both of these questions, then HNAA might be exactly what you're looking for!

</comment><comment><USER42> I've never used Slashdot for even a moment, but I really enjoyed that article and I could really feel OPs pain as he let his baby go.

</comment><comment><USER43> Slashdot was the original (and nerdier) reddit.

I just wish there was a way to find out when my slashdot account was created!

</comment><comment><USER40> Cmdrtaco, whatever happened to Bruce Twickler?

</comment><comment><USER44> #977520. Thanks for all the fish.

</comment><comment><USER45> Next Up: Crackmonkey Nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've always wanted to have story accepted on /.

But I've yet to submit one. :)</comment>


Can India become a great power? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21574511-indias-lack-strategic-culture-hobbles-its-ambition-be-force-world-can-india?

<comment><USER2> Can we stop having economist posts once a week on how India is going to be the next big power? These economist articles are very disconnected from the reality on the ground</comment>


Physicists Cast Doubt on Neutrino Theory – Exotic Particle May Not Exist at All - <AUTHOR> https://scitechdaily.com/physicists-cast-doubt-on-neutrino-theory-exotic-subatomic-particle-may-not-exist-at-all/ <comment><AUTHOR> >Improved Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Mixing from Disappearance Searches in the MINOS, MINOS+, Daya Bay, and Bugey-3 Experiments

[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.071801)

</comment><comment><USER2> Truly terrible headline clickbait. Are scientists now doubting the existence of neutrinos? Better: "Physicists cast doubt on 'Sterile Neutrino' theory ' etc.</comment>


The market for paid iOS apps isn't dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/04/19/paid-app-market <comment><USER2> It's not dead, but discoverability is a huge problem. I still make decent money ($5-6k per month) on an app I first released in 2010, but the two additional ones since then are probably not even collectively over $1000 for their lifetime. Unless you're featured, have significant word of mouth, or are on Top Free/Top Paid/Top Grossing, the number of people that actually find your app is small. It takes significant publicity to get enough momentum in sales to where word of mouth even works.

Edit:

This isn't to say I won't make anything else. I have other apps in progress, but I'm going to apply the lessons I've learned to make them work. They are somewhat niche apps, but I've found those work for markets that are accustomed to paying for tools/software. None will be under the $14.99 price point. It's unlikely I'll ever make another one that is -- it's just not worth the effort.

<comment><USER3> Pay-before-play is a dead revenue model. The money flow in apps these days is in in-app purchase (pay for power ups), pay-after-trial, and in-app advertising.

<comment><USER4> The parent post just stated that he made 5-6k per month off of a single iPad app. Can you back up your claims with facts?

<comment><USER5> The parent also said that particular app is well established and that his newer apps do not fair as well. While paid apps might not be dead, they are significantly harder to get noticed these days as he also mentioned.

<comment><USER4> > The parent also said that particular app is well established and that his > newer apps do not fair as well.

Wrong. The parent post claimed that the higher cost app $12.99 led to much higher revenue than the lower priced apps at FREE with ads and $.99 to $1.99 cost. In fact so much so that the parent post wrote that no more low cost premium or premium apps would be developed.

Please, do your research so as to not waste people's time correcting you on this website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Marco seems to make this unjustified and unelaborated assertion that price has no bearing on popularity, and the only differentiation between prices in free vs. paid. I'm not sure why this would be so for the App Store. Purchasing software, like purchasing any product, is necessarily a balance between utility and price. I, as a value-oriented consumer, have a finite amount of money that I wish to conserve, yet want to maximize my utility from the product. I could buy a BMW, which would make me happy and increase my utility, but would also put me massively in debt and be fiscally untenable. Because of this, I'm more likely to purchase a low-end sedan, which will function adequately but not break the bank. At the more minute level, I have to decide between superior name brands and cheaper generics. This also entails evaluating cost and utility. The same is true of apps. If I'm presented a choice between an app that does 100% of what I want but costs $3 and an app that does 70% of what I want and costs a single dolar, I will be forced to evaluate the utility of that added utility of that app versus the larger price. That is how decisions in commerce work.

People make purchasing decisions based partially on price... I'm not sure why (or how) Marco is trying to refute that fact.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. I also think the "evaluation of utility" of Apps is poor. IMO, You can't really evaluate the utility by just the screenshots and reviews. It would be great if just like a car, you could "test drive" the App. Download a version that would work for x mins and would automatically present you an option to buy or delete after x mins.

<comment><USER8> Google play lets you return apps within 15 minutes. Does the app store not have anything similar?

[http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en- GB&...](http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en- GB&answer=134336)

<comment><USER9> There is no official way to get an App Store refund, but it does apparently happen, here is a guide on how one might do so:

[http://gizmodo.com/5886683/how-to-get-a-refund-from-the- app-...](http://gizmodo.com/5886683/how-to-get-a-refund-from-the-app-store)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is my app. Location based time tracking. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onsite-time- tracker/id470803...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onsite-time- tracker/id470803110?ls=1&mt=8)

Here are my sales [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Asp1Qlg4fVlzdFk...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Asp1Qlg4fVlzdFk2TUN4MU81NHdyWmFvMnJ3OU1Qanc&usp=sharing)

<comment><USER11> That's low. My sales yesterday: <http://i.imgur.com/9GxBLCX.png>

<comment><USER12> You actually created an account, just to put down the op and share that you made 1300 bucks yesterday?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I once had someone pitch me an idea for an app, which coincidentally I had actually built and was selling on the app store. He wasn't willing to pay 99cents for it (but had previously been willing to quit his job to make it hypothetically with me).

It is a weird world.

(for the record I like marco's work)

<comment><USER14> I hear app ideas all the time. I think at least a third of the time I can pull out my phone and find an app that does that already. If they haven't even looked at competitors, they're not serious. I've learned that one quick way to filter people is to ask to see what apps are on their phone. If it's just Facebook and Angry Birds, they're useless.

Out of all the app pitches I've heard, I'd say 33% are already done reasonably well by other apps. Maybe 25% or more are not possible to do on the iPhone (but sometimes on Android). At least 90% have a marketing plan of "just put it in the store and wait for the sales to explode."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Translation: Sure, the odds have gotten longer. Ticket prices might be higher. Consolation prizes might be smaller. But don't worry. If you pick your numbers just right you too can still win the lottery!

I understand things look different from his vantage point, but I just don't see a healthy market in what he wrote - I see a dying one. With the climb getting steeper and the asking prices getting higher, that just shrinks the potential market for paid apps more and more. That helps a culture of not buying apps (other than games) keep growing. To me, it seems clear where this will end.

<comment><USER16> You're mistaking the micro for the macro. Sure, the odds have gotten longer and ticket prices might be higher -- but from the app buyer's perspective, that's because there are just so many rides and they're so damn good. Can't try 'em all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an iOS developer I speculate that it's not the price that hinders people from downloading an App, it's the psychological barrier of paying for something (regardless of the price) that they haven't experienced yet. Sure reviews and screenshots help ease this tension as well as the standard $0.99 price tag, but I don't think it's enough. It would be really great if users could download the App and play around with it for a couple of minutes to "test drive" it and then be presented with an option to buy it.

<comment><USER17> This is a huge shortcoming of the current app store model, I agree. That Apple hasn't done anything in this direction for years strengthens my suspicions that they don't really care if the typical dev makes money on the store as long as the big players earn and the users keep buying phones.

<comment><USER7> I agree. If not for the dev, they should do it for the sake of the user experience. A "Try It Out" option would prevent customers from feeling duped when they buy an App that they think looks good but turns out to not be of their liking. Which right now contributes to the customer to be more hesitant of purchasing the next app tomorrow.

<comment><USER18> I suspect try it out would only reduce sales further, it adds a delay in the process and gives the customer more chance to change his mind.

It might help for expensive software but for something that is a few dollars I'd see it as a negative as a developer.

<comment><USER17> What's happened in practice is that the market is moving towards free apps + IAP to make money. I think this tends to ruin most games but for a lot of other categories I don't think it's a bad model.

<comment><USER19> As a consumer, I like this model when it's done right. I like being able to "test drive" an application and then paying for the app.

For example with a business app like Grafio, I want to test drive it to see if it works for me. Then I can pay a significant price for the app - if I am using it in a business setting my time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour and the prices of apps are not really a significant expense. I would want development of Grafio to extend further towards supporting my business needs, which is Visio import/export, and I would gladly pay for that feature.

I dislike when the free app is missing important functionality (this defeats the test drive aspect) and I dislike when the in-app is a subscription. I find it obnoxious when apps have too many in-app purchases. It becomes an annoyance to have to pay $1 to read, $1 to write, $1 to save. Just ask $3 for "full functionality" from the start. Don't be silly.

I like when the app is fully functional and I can choose to pay different amounts to support further development.

<comment><USER20> As a developer, I also prefer to have test drive option. Some apps can't be test drive (for example, casual games), but for productivity apps, it is a must have feature and windows phone has it from day 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Site has an almost unreadable font for me. Its ugly when in normal size:

<http://browsershots.org/http://www.marco.org/>

(Check the Firefox 22 shots)

And gets worse when I increase the font size:

<http://i.imgur.com/jU1swoq.png>

Why is that?

<comment><USER22> It looks great here. Change your browser, or perhaps change your font rendering settings if you're on Linux or Winblows?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I experimented with one of my apps (www.TommyTeaches.com). I made the mistake of releasing it as a paid app at first. It didn't do so well. I switched it to free and it took off. Everyone at my kid's school got it and they let others know. Through analytics I can see it is being used for long periods of time by many kids every day. Tried the teaching approach with kids with mild learning disabilities and it made a difference in a number of cases.

All of that is good, however the problem is that in order to be able to justify completing the series I have to show revenue. Placing ads in apps for 3~5 year old kids is not an option. One thought was to place ads in screens off the main game (Settings, etc.) to at least capture a minor revenue stream. I have that build but haven't released it yet.

The problem with the expectation of everything being free is what it does to the ability to innovate and explore. Apps don't cost zero to develop. As much as it hurts me to think it, I am not sure I can justify attempting to innovate at the early education market because there's virtually no money in it for the vast majority of developers. Even paying for logo and graphic design is impossible when your revenue is zero or near zero.

For me at least there seems to be far more traction and revenue in the specialized utilities segment.

On the other hand, it is hard to pay the iOS software world attention when we can charge $250 to $350 per hour for mechanical, electronics hardware and software development in certain verticals.

<comment><USER22> Just a thought, without knowing your app very well or the usage the kids make of it, but it sounds like some kind of new feature unlocked via an IAP may make sense.

Right now it looks like you're releasing each content pack as a new app, that's also free. There's your problem. Release content packs as IAP, give 3 away for free and charge $1 each for new content packs. There's your revenue stream. If the app is really teaching the kid stuff, parents will probably pony up and pay a few bucks now and then, since they care about their children's education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I put my first app into the App Store last July and had it selling for free until 2 months ago when I set it to $1.99. People continued to buy it even though I don't advertise it.

After that success (2 figure revenue!), I built another app and put it on the App Store for $9.99. People are downloading that as well. I admit that I am making more off of contract work, but based on my estimates the App Store converts really well, even at >$5 and has the potential to be profitable with paid apps.

(anecdotal evidence based on my sales of <http://free2goapp.com/download>)

<comment><USER25> Do many people sell their app for free first, and then increase the price? Interesting model. Can you provide some more specific data about the sales? That sounds like a good idea to get some traction and reviews. Were people upset at all with the price increase?

Congrats on the success!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have an app in the iOS photography category ranked about 100 in sales on iPhone and iPad. My monthly sales are $6000.00 US (after apple's cut) selling for 2.99. Not bad, I'm happy and all, but it's disappointing to think that there are only 100 developers in the photography category making more than 6000.00/mo (assuming that they have only one app)

The user interface that iTunes provides on the phone, tablet and desktop is super clunky and slow for exploring apps. Click, wait, click, wait. etc. Why no tabbed browsing so users can load and look at 50 app descriptions in the background?

<comment><USER2> And don't forget that many of the top 100 are Apple, Adobe, and large magazines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A very thorough analysis. I think it's lacking an important category, though: the free apps that generate revenue by (usually compulsive) in-app selling, a la Farmville. They seem to be common among the top grossing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does selling an app at $2.99 vs $1.99 reduce app sales? I can see where that might not affect sales in the US and Europe but what about Asia and other emerging markets?

</comment><comment><USER29> Easy to say for the one man company.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have a very niche app that brings in a small but fairly consistent revenue stream, whenever I hear crickets in the sales department I raise the price from .99 to 4.99 and slowly come back down every week tripping the "app on sale" wires. Usually works.</comment>


I made an app that lets you split a file into horcruxes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jesseduffield/horcrux-ui <comment><USER2> One related scheme is fountain codes, where you can split a file into a pseudo infinite stream of blocks such that finding N blocks will almost certainly allow reconstruction. Very useful in UDP / satellite transmission, where you can keep broadcasting these blocks and clients can listen at their convenience.

The state of the art codec is RaptorQ, I've got a Go library that uses the slightly older Raptor standard to do chunking

[https://github.com/sudhirj/pump](https://github.com/sudhirj/pump)

<comment><USER3> What happens if you can't get N blocks, but say N-1 or N-2? Can you get a partial reconstruction, or nothing at all?

<comment><USER4> It's actually probabilistic, though the probabilities very quickly approach 0 and 1 on each side.

But to answer your question, yes, you could recover some of the file if you didn't get as many pieces as you needed. Been a year or so since I did any work with fountain codes, but I believe most implementations send all the chunks, followed by n error correction chunks, so it would depend on how many real chunks you got. The error corrections wouldn't get you anywhere though.

<comment><USER5> online codes [0] just generate random linear equations of the source chunks and send both generated right hand side and the seed that generated the equation. This way there's no state to keep (now, which equations did I send ?) Most generated equations are of degree 2 (so an equation with 2 ones) some (about 1% iirc) are of degree 1 (so pure data). Having less than the critical mass of equations will give you partial reconstruction. But all bets are off regarding how much you will get. They were used in storage by Amplidata in their Amplistor at some point.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was almost posting a snarky comment about how this is just Shamir's Secret Sharing, which is in no way new.

But, hey, this is really cool. It was probably really fun to write, and luminates a cool scheme that too few know anything about.

<comment> ur-whale Turns out the only other shamir secret sharing app I know of that's actually usable (ssss or somesuch name) only does the deed for _keys_ , while this does it for _files_.

This is actually pretty useful, but sort of sad it drags the whole go ecosystem with it (who knows what go will look like in 20 years and if this app will still compile and work).

<comment><USER7> > This is actually pretty useful, but sort of sad it drags the whole go > ecosystem with it (who knows what go will look like in 20 years and if this > app will still compile and work).

This is something which the CS community needs to solve, imho. I.e. provide an executable language with a formal specification that is guaranteed to be available indefinitely. And to make this more useful, other programming languages should provide back-ends targeting this language.

<comment><USER8> For better and worse, isn't that what WASM is/has become/will become?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. Write your will;

2\. Split it into N + 1 horcruxes and distribute them to your N children; and a remaining piece to a lawyer;

3\. Force them to all come together to decrypt the will for fairness.

<comment><USER10> Then what happens if one child who knows they won't get anything, refuses to provide their piece?

BTW K of N cryptography is well known as Shamir's Secret Sharing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing)

<comment><USER11> Even worse, what if one or more children lose their bits and _can't_ provide their piece?

<comment><USER12> Have each child make horcuxes of their horcrux :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. Feels like you could accomplish the same effect with regular encryption though.

Base64 encode the key, pad it with random data that matches the size of splitting into N-1 parts. Then split the encrypted file into N-1 b64 encoded parts. For lowish values of 'N', you could then just decrypt with each "key" until something readable emerges. The key size, algo, etc, could be prepended to each part in plaintext.

Or, if you want a variation where no parts are optional, a piece of the key in every split part, with a sufficiently long key.

<comment> ur-whale Does your scheme support M-of-N recovery?

<comment><USER13> No, that's a good point. I was misled by some of the comments that assumed the posted scheme didn't either. However, I'm assuming _" all parts present"_ is one of many desired use cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> See also Dark Crystal[[https://darkcrystal.pw](https://darkcrystal.pw)], which uses Shamir's Secret Sharing to break your secret into "shards", allowing you to also set a number of friends that are needed to recreate the secret (less than the total number of shards). Sharing is done over your social network (currently Briar and Secure Scuttlebutt).

</comment><comment><USER15> There is also the CLI tool ssss that uses shamir secret sharing to split data:

[https://linux.die.net/man/1/ssss](https://linux.die.net/man/1/ssss)

<comment><USER16> Huh, so the predecessor to Horcrux is also an oblique Harry Potter reference, in that it is named in Parceltongue.

<comment><USER17> Boooo. Hiss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Q) This isn't really in line with how horcruxes work in the harry potter > universe!

> A) It's pretty close! You can't allow any one horcrux to be used to > resurrect the original file (and why would you that would be useless) but > you can allow two horcruxes to do it (so only off by one). Checkmate HP > fans.

Not buying it, and the fact that this is the first FAQ is evidence that the author doesn't really either. A better fit to Tom Riddle's horcrux would simply be a lossy compression copy of the file. Which would admittedly be pretty useless, maybe unless the copy contains a lossy copy of your soul.

But then Virgin Galactic is also a pretty good name even though they haven't yet left the solar system. That should be his defense: it's just a cool name.

<comment><USER19> Also I don't _think_ this program requires the murder of an innocent to create each horcrux.

<comment><USER20> Depending on your definition of "innocent", neither does a Horcrux, really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very cool! I built something similar for patent application about 5 years ago for proximity image encryption. Idea was that image was split into X number of encrypted pieces each still being a valid image (disorted or something custom). If you wanted to see the image again, you had to be in close proximity to other parties that have these parts. BLE beacon served as the proximity for the prototype.

</comment><comment><USER22> A friend of mine has made something like this for a blockchain hackathon once, around 2 years ago. The technics he used where relatively simple. It stats with some Elliptic-curve cryptography math to split up a single main key into multiple keys. Every person would than have a full copy of the encrypted files and when enough people combine there keys on the blockchain they would get the main key to decrypt the files and from then on it would be public that the files have been opened and by who.

This app seams to use Shamir's Secret Sharing, this is something where I am not familiar with, but from how far I understand the Wikipedia article about it. it works roughly the same but it is more general.

I'm interested to see if people will actually use this. If anyone has some additional explanations about the differences between these algorithms then that would be very appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER23> what is the difference between reed solomon erasure codes and shamir secret sharing?

i.e. if I just split the secret into a number of reed solomon error correcting blocks (where n blocks are sufficient to recover the full data), is that fundamentally different?

<comment><USER24> Yes, it's very different: if you split some error coded thing across several files, each individual file is going to give you some chunk of the data. It's not secret in any way, it's just that you've only got, like, 1/7th of it.

With Shamir's secret sharing, having anything less than the required number of files is useless, you can't decrypt _any_ of the data unless you reach the required number.

<comment><USER23> hmm, googling around after my Q found this

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.80....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.80.2829&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

where the authors explicitly write: "Shamir's scheme for sharing secrets is closely related to Reed-Solomon coding schemes."

now, my eyes glaze over when it comes to the math, so I'll need to look it through a few times before I understand what they are saying.

<comment><USER25> You could also look at [http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/FAST-2011.pdf](http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/FAST-2011.pdf)

You can combine the reconstruction properties of Reed Solomon (you need k of n pieces) with the All or Nothing Transform. Encrypting data so that you need all of the data to decrypt.

Then you can essentially do Shamir secret sharing witout storage overhead. A 1 MB file split so you need 5 pieces would have 200 KB pieces instead of 1mb pieces. This is at a cost of exchanging information theoretic security for computational security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> so is this an alternative to multipar / quickpar / par2 from the usenet days?

Looks good. I always try to build redundancy into my offline backups, as if the given backup in my hand is the last backup that hasn't been cooked / melted / flooded etc. ...because one day, it just might! Talking about worst- worst-case scenario, with triple redundancy of online-offsite (can be ransomwared), offline-onsite (can be flooded/burned), and online-onsite (1st line of defense, ie syncthing or a nas)

<comment><USER27> Par2 is current, still receiving bugfixes, and is used every day as part of my file backup system.

<comment><USER28> rar files having a recovery record is also really helpful for archiving files. I add a 3% redundancy to any archive I create with it because I've had some byte errors in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How efficient are these splits? If a 100mb file is split in 5, with 3 needed to recombine, we'd expect the pieces to be at least 333mb won't we?

<comment><USER30> Each share is (roughly) the same size as the original. In effect, all of them are just encrypted versions of the original.

<comment> ur-whale Ah, this is slightly disappointing.

For some reason, my gut was telling me each piece would be smaller than the original.

I wonder if this (horcruxes of size ~ 1/N) is actually possible.

<comment><USER31> Without some form of compression, I don't think it is.

In particular, consider your example (5 horcruxes with 3 needed to reconstruct). View the original file as the interval (0, N) and view it as a set covering problem. If each horcrux covers an interval of size N/3, then if any pair overlaps, there is no third horcrux that can complete the covering. This is a contradiction because 5 horcruxes of size N/3 must overlap somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Dropbox does something similar for cold storage: [https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-optimized- magic-p...](https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-optimized-magic-pocket- for-cold-storage)

</comment><comment><USER33> I love when the universe throws my own ideas back at me but with a slightly better implementation

The backstory on this was me freaking out when I had a newborn coming and I wanted my legacy to be handed to him at the right age if something happened to me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Recently similar: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23541949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23541949)

</comment><comment><USER35> heh, you seem to have messed up the bracket order for the markdown links. I memorise it as the mnemonic "square bracket": first the square [], then the bracket ().

<comment><USER36> [I have claimed something](here is my proof)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It would be a fun modification to require 6/7 or 5/7 files so that you needed to bring a certain number of pieces, but not every piece. Inspired by RAID 5 algorithm that has enough parity to allow one drive failure in a group of 3 or more.

<comment><USER38> It looks like this is exactly what the linked software does?

<comment><USER37> Right you are, it does support thresholds.</comment></comment></comment>


Partisanship at Eurovision is becoming more blatant - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/05/daily-chart-7 <comment><USER2> After all, EU countries don't exist in isolation and we are heavily influenced by our neighbours (economically, culturally, politically). It only makes sense that this influence makes its way into Eurovision. I think the "partisanship" between countries is part of the spectacle.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what the EU has to do with anything or why EU countries should be different from any of the other competing countries.

I suppose the "partisanship" can be interesting to observe, but considering all the hard work each of the acts have to do I feel it's a shame that they are judged mainly on geographical and political factors rather than on their musical ability and performance.

<comment><USER4> Despite the name Eurovision is nothing to do with the EU. That's why Israel, Ukraine and Russia sometimes compete.

Actual eligibility is defined by a relic of the early television broadcasting industry, the "European Broadcasting Area" the borders of which correspond to, I think, early telegraph networks.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Eurovision is not related to the European Union. Technically, it doesn't even have anything to do with Europe; Australia have been competing in recent years.

Eligibility simply requires the country to have a broadcaster that is a member of the European Broadcasting Union.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think half the fun of watching it is the collusion.

<comment><USER6> That's exactly the point of Eurovision. Eurovision is harmless entertainment where people can participate and play the game any way they want. You can make political or cultural points by voting, or create fads and feuds, show solidarity etc.

A Finnish horror rock band wearing masks won because people found it funny to rebel against typical second rate pop from second rate stars.

Bearded man in drag won because people realized that they could trigger homophobes.

Ukraine won 2004, the same year as there was the Orange revolution in Ukraine.

Ukraine won again 2016. Maybe it had something to do with the War in Donbass.

<comment><USER7> Or maybe these were the best songs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The effects of partisanship are hugely outweighed by the fact that each country gives points to 10 others, not just one. An extreme case of both the 10 and 12 points going to non-deserving neighbours still leaves 36 points to go elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> Except that for countries with lots of neighbours, they're likely to consistently receive 10 or 12 points.

Sure, other countries will also receive points, but far fewer, and therefore they are at a disadvantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the "big 5" would score higher if they weren't qualified for the finals by default. That way their songs would get a lot more exposure and become more familiar to the voters. Usually, people like best what they know.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, most people only watch the final, so I'm not sure that would make a major difference. And of course, considering how poorly the Big Five perform, it's likely they won't even make it into the final!

It would be interesting to see the results of such an experiment, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love it when people doing bad things get busted by statistical traces they didn't even realize they were leaving. There is a lot more room for this kind of detective work.

<comment><USER11> These results are not remotely surprising to anyone. It's been long known that closely related countries tend to vote for each other.

And it's not really a matter of people doing bad things, it's simply the general public voting for what they like. It doesn't have to be political at all; maybe people just tend to like songs that are culturally close them.

Look at the graph: Ukraine and Russia vote for each other a lot, despite their political friction.

<comment><USER12> The other thing is that the "general public" isn't a homogenous bloc.

Political friction might make some members of the 2 million strong ethnic Ukrainian diaspora in Russia _more_ inclined to make gestures of support for Ukraine in television song contests, for example. That public vote from within Russia doesn't get cancelled out if a much larger segment of the Russian public finds songs alluding to Stalinist annexation of the Crimea and repression of the Crimean Tartars actively objectionable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > There has been no such glory for the so-called "Big Five", who qualify for > the final automatically: Germany, Britain, France, Spain and Italy. These > countries have rarely collaborated with anyone.

I think I remember some "collaborations" between Turkey and Germany, mostly because of the migration and holiday connections between the two countries.

Not sure if that's statistically significant though.

<comment><USER14> Yes, Germany always gives 12 points to Turkey, because Turks are the biggest minority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why is there a link between Britain and Germany?

</comment><comment><USER16> The nordic brotherhood is strong

</comment><comment><USER17> Good luck tonight! I know I will most likely collude.

</comment><comment><USER18> Non-paywalled link: [http://archive.is/ojbuw](http://archive.is/ojbuw)

</comment><comment><USER19> Can anyone post a link that's not behind a paywall?

<comment><USER20> Here's the original paper, which is in an open access journal: [http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/21/1/1.html](http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/21/1/1.html)

<comment><USER21> Looks like paywalls become more blatant

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Decentralize the vote to the public and you destroy the risk of collusion. This is endemic in centralized systems.

<comment><USER23> Decentralize the vote to the public if you want to see botnets voting. No thanks.

<comment><USER11> Voting is done by phone or SMS and costs a couple of cents. As far as I know, it's totally legal to vote more, but that means you pay more.

<comment><USER15> I think this should be changed. I cannot imagine that this pay-to-win mechanic has any positive effects.

<comment><USER24> Usually it's more than a few cents (i think 0.5 to 2 euros). This is actually a great way to vote and fund the contest at the same time. There's little financial incentive to cheat (it's not like a lottery) so if you spend more money, on average, you care more. Also the amount each individual spends in generally very small (ie a handful of votes) so it's about as democratic as this can get without involving some kind of state-id based authentication.

<comment><USER25> Would you say the same thing about actual elections? Should billionairres be allowed to buy millions of votes because they care more? Should nations buy votes as a from of propaganda?

<comment><USER26> The stakes for Eurovision are about as low as a doorstop. If someone cares about it as much as they do about national elections, well quite frankly they deserve the opportunity to buy the vote :) there's worse things people can obsess about.

It's a game, it's a show. Technically, so are politics, but so far Eurovision has not cost any human lives, nor have pensions evaporated. To my knowledge.

Then again, judging by the reaction of some people, that might change soon :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Julian Assange: Sweden drops rape investigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39973864 <comment><AUTHOR> The british police still want to arrest him [1]:

"Westminster Magistrates' Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange following him failing to surrender to the court on the 29 June 2012. The Metropolitan Police Service is obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the Embassy."

[1] [http://news.met.police.uk/news/statement-on-julian- assange-2...](http://news.met.police.uk/news/statement-on-julian- assange-242877)

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14373951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14373951)</comment>


First and Long: Bill Hambrecht & Mark Cuban take on the NFL - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/sports/playmagazine/0603play-business.html <comment><AUTHOR> Attention YC bootstrappers: do not try this in your apartment ;)</comment>


Show HN: We built a serverless site to calculate cloud storage prices - <AUTHOR> http://coststorage.com/?ref=showhn <comment><USER2> Is this site opensource? I am curious to see the source for a Phenomic project.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dear god, Azure is cheaper than I thought</comment>