Mint's Founder on Blippy: I Don't Get It  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/70051/mints-founder-on-blippy-i-dont-get-it/

<comment><USER2> Ok, two things that bother me about Blippy:

The first is mild. Why do I want other people, even my friends, to know what I buy?

The second is: which creepy "friends" of mine want to know what I buy? Maybe the only reason to create a temp account with Blippy. Any friend of mine that looks at that setup account, ain't gonna be my friend any longer. Can I find out which creep looks at an account I set up?

<comment><USER3> Blippy seems to be all about conspicuous consumption. I can see how it has a chance to be very profitable, I just don't think the world needs any more of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i've had my bank of america debit card hooked up to blippy since before they launched (and the product has come a long way since then). it's actually kind of entertaining with your friends -- contrary to what you would think, 99% of your purchases are boring.

they have really good privacy controls and already addressed the concern aaron patzer brought up in this article. if aaron wants to hide his lingerie purchase, he just enables "manual mode" and shows whichever purchases he wants (they'll be hidden by default). same for price. for example, you can show you were at banana republic and bought something without revealing the price you paid.

this pretty much feels like twitter, but instead of writing stuff, it automatically gets published when you swipe your card somewhere (or you can manually approve purchases, or retroactively hide stuff already published). there's still a social component where people comment on your purchases and ask you what you bought at certain places.

just wait until the celebrities get on this thing.

<comment><USER5> I personally don't believe that automatically streaming your actions is a good way to produce entertainment or meaningful information for your peers.

We played with automatic location updates in Jaiku, but it was boring. Current trend of check-in models is a bit more interesting: you, as a person, are communicating something when you check-in.

We had similar experience of streaming your last.fm feeds: it's just noise. We grouped last.fm entries to reduce noise. Once in a while, you could see one entry from persons last.fm feed and if you clicked it you could see more. It was kind of fun to see a glimpse of person's music taste now and then and some good comment threads emerged around these entries. But people _always_ commented that one visible entry, thus we could have same effect by picking a random song from person's daily last.fm feed and forget the rest.

Quote:

 _it's actually kind of entertaining with your friends -- contrary to what you would think, 99% of your purchases are boring._

This is the essence of it: how can something that is 99% boring can be entertaining?

I strongly believe that if you want to build services around showing your actions, make it easy to people "lift" certain actions to be visible for their friends. Make it easy to deliberately communicate without writing. Don't publish actions automatically, that just produces noise.

<comment><USER4> you may be right about the check-in model, and if that's the case, using a blippy card might be a better model to broadcast purchases. and it'd be an easier way to consume the data on the client (ie push notifications when your friends spend using a blippy card, it's practically no different than a check in at that point).

i use manual mode, and i don't publish the boring transactions like my gas purchases. you can decide whether to unfollow people if they have boring purchases, but it's still interesting to see which applications my own friends are buying on the iphone, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blippy seems like one of those services that people would use _only_ because other people are using it (not because it offers a particular benefit). It's like the UGG boots of internet startups--someday, people are going to wonder what the hell they were thinking.

<comment><USER7> Hey, UGGs are pretty damn comfortable.

But seriously, who thought it was a good idea to take Facebook's biggest blunder (Beacon) and turn it into a venture backed startup?

<comment><USER8> Sequoia Capital, August Capital, Charles River Ventures, Evan Williams, Ron Conway, James Hong, ...

<comment><USER7> Yes, I'm aware. I guess I should have phrased my question more explicitly as "why?"

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you should tell that group of investors how stupid their investment was. They must have been asleep during the pitch.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure they're not dumb, but it's not obvious to me why it's a good idea. Would you like to enlighten us? Because no one else here seems to have any idea either.

AFAICT it's not much different than Beacon, which was very quickly abandoned by Facebook after a huge backlash (and lawsuits). If it is different then I'm curious why.

Also, do you work at Blippy? Just curious... most of your comments here have been about Blippy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess <http://pleaserobme.com/> soon will list not only when you are not at home, but also what you have at home. So thieves know if it is worth it.

<comment><USER10> Considering that, statistically, most people are burglarized by people they already know like that shady neighbor, scheming friends, or crack-addict family member. This can only end in total goodness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can see the uncomfortable scenarios already:

Neighbor: Oh hai, can I borrow your circular saw.

Me: That one is broken, I got rid of it. (thinking: and you broke it.)

Neighbor: But I just saw on your Blippy feed that you bought a shiny new Makita.

Me: (thinking: Oh WTF? Damn you blippy!) Oh yeah, I guess it's not a problem. (now steaming inside)

</comment><comment><USER11> Blippy is not for use with your everyday credit card, you're supposed to get a card specifically for Blippy purchases. Then when you buy something you want your friends to know about (like a new video game, tickets, etc.) you use the Blippy card. Blippy will make money from affiliate links for all the stuff people post and from getting people to open new credit cards.

<comment><USER12> wouldn't it take at least a day for the charge to show up, and thus a day for it to hit blippy? wouldn't most people be talking about their new shiny purchase way before that?

you just bought an ipad, you get it home and play with it, send out twitter messages and facebook posts, and then the next day blippy tells everyone you bought it?

<comment><USER13> Actually the charge takes place hours later, but I think the authorization happens immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't get it either. I feel like people should be paying me for this info. Free _service_? Please.

</comment><comment><USER15> All this talk about Blippy reminds me of conversations people had about Twitter. If you were on hacker news in 07 and 08 people were trashing Twitter saying how stupid it is. I bet many of those same people wouldn't say that now.

In time this will become the norm once some safeguards are in place. Mint.com could facilitate and or create such a system (social banking/shopping) that has such safeguards and allows start-ups to plug into it.

<comment><USER16> I still would, and think the same for Blippy. I have nothing against people using Twitter, but I don't have a use for it personally.

God, can you imagine the conversations this will start? "So, I see you bought a new belt at American Eagle yesterday..." Kill me now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Blippy should adapt into consumables: barcode scanner at home or on the mobile: scan in anything you open. Then a Blippy for food. Then place a barcode or QR code on your forehead, get that scanned in too by Blippy friends when they meet you! I'm sure all this information would be worth something.

<comment><USER18> I really hope that's a subtle reference to this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat>

<comment><USER16> There may have been a subtle one, but I think what he was going for was the "let's report EVERY SINGLE THING IN OUR LIVES angle"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me or is Blippy really the multi-apex of everything that is wrong with web2.0, consumerism and what-not? I hadn't even heard about it before, and now I wish I didn't know.

<comment><USER20> totally disagree. i think it is one of a handful of services that is truly pushing the envelope of social media and is experimenting with what exactly we are willing to share.</comment></comment>


A Self-Made Billionaire Uses This Easy Trick for Decisions - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/3772262/billionaire-trick-for-decisions/?utm_content=buffer2b452&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> Interestingly this really is a click bait title, rather than the usual one that we misidentify identify as such as "Ten Ways a Programming Language is like a Religion."

This time.com title encourages you to click it with the bait of finding out who the billionaire is, the implication that they became self-made because of this easy trick and not stating the trick. Thus it is bait to lure a user in.

The misdiagnosed versions state exactly what the topic is about but encourages you with the promise of good content. The sting the user gets is that they notice that it is bad content, and the user reacts based on their experience.

In summary, a click bait title, like in this submission is a finely crafted memetic call. The more common observed "click bait" articles are more disappointing in content.

Click bait is about the click, not the content.

<comment><USER3> Would like to disagree on that... If you saw an article, for example 'FTL travel is possible'. You think 'Oh lol wtf, impossible' but you still click on it.

Inside you find a clear well-formed proof and whatever else you need to believe that it is indeed possible. Does that qualify as a clickbait as well?

<comment><USER4> > Inside you find a _clear well-formed proof_ and whatever else you need to > believe that it is indeed possible. Does that qualify as a clickbait as > well?

No, and you stated why: The article delivers on its promise. If you had said instead "Inside you find a theory suggested by a discredited maniac who scribbles nonsense on his psych ward walls" then yes, it would have been click bait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A chap I know uses a 'trick' to help him make decisions - he doesn't make them unless they're important. In a restaurant he'll just tell the waiter to bring him something good. In a bar he'll go for whatever is closest. And so on. The theory, called ego depletion[1], says that you have a limited amount of energy for making decisions and once you use it up you'll find it _much_ harder to make good choices. My friend sold his first company for upwards of $100m, so maybe there's something to it.

I've tried it but I found it incredibly hard. I want to feel in control over the little things too much.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion)

<comment><USER4> > In a restaurant he'll just tell the waiter to bring him something good.

I've seen people do this, and my first thought is "what happens when the waiter brings him something he's allergic to?" The patron didn't make the conscious decision to order that specific food, which makes me think the restaurant is now open to a lawsuit. If I were the waiter in that scenario, I'd ask the patron if he's allergic to any of the foods the restaurant serves, which would probably ruin his ego depletion game but would at least cover the restaurant (hopefully) if he then succumbs to his dinner.

<comment><USER6> If you're allergic to something and you tell a waiter to just bring you anything I think you have about 100% of the responsibility all by your lonesome and if you sue the restaurant from that situation I sincerely hope that you not only lose but will be forced to cough up the legal fees for the defending party.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to think you are correct, but (at least here in the United States) I can see the lawsuits piling up. People here sue over spilled coffee, it's not out of the realm of possibility.

<comment><USER7> The "spilled coffee" case was not a frivolous lawsuit.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So we went from one hard problem (the decision itself), to another another harder problem (ranking things on a scale).

<comment><USER8> No, we went from one big unwieldy problem to several smaller more manageable problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You might also find Charlie Munger's mental models useful:

[http://www.thinkmentalmodels.com/](http://www.thinkmentalmodels.com/)

<comment><USER10> Too bad it only works with iPhone. Is there a android / web book for this?

<comment><USER11> Check out, "Poor Charlie's Almanac" by Peter D. Kaufman [1].

Also this essay [2] is a good intro.

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

[2] [http://www.focusinvestor.com/FocusSeriesPart3.pdf](http://www.focusinvestor.com/FocusSeriesPart3.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I usually just flip a coin. If I have considered a problem for a significant amount of time and still have not come to a conclusion, it probably means that the two sides of an argument probably has equal weight and it doesn't matter which I choose. On the other hand, if I see the coin has landed on heads and I suddenly don't want to go through with the coin's choice, it probably means that I knew all along which was the better choice for me.

<comment><USER13> An optimization is to notice which side you wish the coin lands at before it lands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So HN now contains click-bait links that are not sarcastically click-baity titled, but are actual trash links without substance? Who upvotes this? Can we make a system where a mod would honey-pot users who upvote titles like this, black list them and make their upvotes not count?

</comment><comment><USER15> If you want something like that but with more rigor check out [http://lesswrong.com/lw/gu1/decision_theory_faq/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/gu1/decision_theory_faq/).

</comment><comment><USER16> The summary is by Shane Parrish. I can really recommend his site Farnam Street [http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/](http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/) for lots of good summaries.

</comment><comment><USER17> Would be nice to use for political elections! So that the least hated / most liked candidate gets elected.

<comment><USER18> When was the last time you elected someone you didn't like or did hate?

<comment><USER17> I mean the average among all voters. It relates to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant- runoff_voting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> See how the "Cookie Consent" button overlays the "scroll down" button?

Don't do that.

<comment><USER20> See the "Cookie Consent"?

Don't do that.

<comment><USER19> My understanding is that under some interpretations of recently still valid EU regulations it's legally required to have some sort of explicit cookie notification and consent.

I'm willing to be corrected, and specific references would be especially valuable.

<comment><USER21> I don't think it's as important any more. They relaxed the rules a bit.

<comment><USER6> I ignored them from day 1 and I'm fairly confident in that this will not lead to any trouble on my part. The best ones are the websites that block access until you've clicked the 'I agree' button without an 'I disagree' option (that still allows you to view the content).

Shift-ctrl-P should be the default anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why not go the full distance and use the analytical hierarchy process?

</comment><comment><USER23> "Decision-makers hate it."</comment>


It is optimal to not have enough people when your startup is growing - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1033003032835809280 <comment><AUTHOR> Tweet edited to fit in the title. Here is the full tweet:

If your startup is growing well, but there are some things you can't do because you don't have enough people, that's actually optimal. That's what it feels like in every great startup.</comment>


Owsley Stanley – Grateful Dead soundman and you know where this is going - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley <comment><USER2> The Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne", from the album The Royal Scam (1976), is loosely based on Stanley.

"I think the people down the hall know who you are."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apparently, he made the LSD that made the 60's; the hippie Heisenberg.</comment>


Is Hardware Really Cheaper Than Humans? - <AUTHOR> http://www.falvotech.com/blog/index.php?/archives/464-Is-Hardware-Really-Cheaper-Than-Humans.html

<comment><USER2> for something big that lasts a while, it almost always makes sense to optimize. the problem is that usually when you write something, you don't know if it will get big. You might write five or ten webapps that go nowhere before you get a hit. The optimal strategy, I think, is to throw hardware at it in the prototype stage, and then, if the program becomes popular, efficiently rewrite the slow parts as you grow.</comment>


Launchaco joins Namecheap - <AUTHOR> https://www.launchaco.com/launchaco-namecheap <comment><USER2> Can anyone estimate the purchase price?</comment>


500 StartUps Vs Y Combinator? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a product that I've built and I applied to Y-Combinator with it, they denied my request. Today I was reading TechCrunch and another company doing the same thing as me was on the list of the 7 most interested start ups at 500 start-ups.<p>what does this mean? Do I fail at life? <comment><USER2> No. A particular investor declined to participate on one opportunity to do business with you. 500Startups had opportunity to do business with someone else. These are mostly unrelated to each other.

FWIW: Investors being herd animals, noting fundability of a close substitute generally helps rather than hurts future pitching.

</comment><comment> rush-tea No, you don't fail at life, what it means is that your idea is just getting validated by other people that it has prospect. You should be happy. Now what you need to do is to see that startup's idea and figure out why his/her idea is better than yours, what makes it better than you, so now you need to focus on the competitive analysis and make yours better since technically your idea is still in stealth mode, no one knows. That means you have the advantage to play around your ideas and make it better. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> No at all. You may also want to read the following part, from YC FAQ page.

Why didn't you accept our application?

Strange as it may sound, the better your application was, the less likely there is to be an answer to this question. So don't take it personally. The fact is, even the best investors are quite bad at picking winners. VC firms consider themselves to be doing well if 4 out of 10 companies they fund succeed.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, you don't fail at life. PG et al makes a point to explain the team members being more important in the application process than the actual idea.

<comment><USER5> Oh great, thanks for pointing out that it's him, not his idea, that didn't make the cut...

<comment><USER4> Or: I'm pointing out that it may have been the team members of the similar idea (or the fact he was a sole founder) that made the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having a product is not a big deal,but the way it sell and the unique way of presentation that your product having that matters lot.See there are 100's of school management system but still our product fedena(<http://projectfedena.org>) enough no of clients and sales leads...so dont let you down..work hard......

</comment><comment><USER7> It's actually up to you whether or not YC made the right decision. If you stop now, they were right to not accept you. If you keep pushing forward, you can make them wrong. If you push forward and get some traction, they might realize their mistake when you apply next time. A co-founder is probably a good idea regardless.

</comment><comment><USER8> it means absolutely nothing. If you think you failed and give up then PG was right not to pick you, as you don't believe in your idea and don't have what it takes. Otherwise you just keep going and do whatever it takes to be successful.

What is the company from 500 startups ?

</comment><comment><USER9> Heads up! That your idea is similar / same as one of the 7 most interested start ups shows that you are on the right track! You should be happy! Find more customers and keep developing, maybe find a co-founder.

</comment><comment><USER10> I imagine they rejected you because you're a sole founder, plenty of companies who apply to YC and don't get in do well. YC don't have a magic ball that tells them who'll succeed and who'll not.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a possibility, I probably need a co-founder / more team members.

<comment><USER10> Very very few single founders get accepted into YC, those that do tend to have strong track-records and significant market traction</comment></comment></comment>


The Rust Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4186469/rust-all-hands-w2011/assets/fallback/index.html

<comment><USER2> I'm writing this comment in hope that Rust language designers read this thread.

It's very important to language designers at this time to avoid stop-the-world GC approach in Rust at any cost.

Google Go is beautiful programming language, but its key limitation is stop- the-world approach to GC which makes it very difficult to implement highload web servers, DB engines and other software with strict max-time-to-response requirements. Recent research [1][2] suggests that "normal" Go program spends more time collecting garbage than performing actual calculations.

[1] [https://days2011.scala- lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H...](https://days2011.scala- lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf) [2] <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/01/go_v_cpluplus_redux/>

Go programming language has gone too far to separate owning and non-owning pointers at syntactic level, to disallow changeable global variables, to enforce rules like "each mutable object is accessible from _only one_ thread", and introduce other means to avoid GC.

But Rust is new and young, already has 2 types of pointers, and it could avoid GC by RAII and reference counting. Objects linked in cycles with owning pointers would cause memory leaks, and I think this behaviour may be left as is, kinda "it's not a bug, it's a feature". Weak pointers could point to intermediary descriptor which holds owning-refcount and nonowning-refcount. Weak ptr behaves like a NULL if owning-refcount is zero and target object is already destroyed. This is to guarantee safe memory model.

In short please take all means to avoid main Go defect "Garbage collection takes more CPU time than actual computations". Please avoid stop-the-world GC approach which makes the language almost useless for real applications.

<comment><USER3> Garbage collection in Rust is thread-local. We never need concurrent GC; this invariant is enforced by the type system.

Leaking cycles is not really an option, sorry. At the very least we're going to have a cycle collector. It's too easy to make cycles, especially when you have closures (all you need is to close over an object that contains a pointer to the closure itself; this is very common for e.g. event handlers).

Besides, a lot of the problems you state can be addressed with generational or incremental garbage collection.

<comment><USER2> If there is no difference on the syntactic level between owning and non-owning pointers, like in Go programming language, like in Python, then I agree with you - it's extremely easy to make a cycle.

But if there's a difference between owning and non-owning pointer, then backlink to parent object in child object could be non-owning and other issues could handled in similar manner.

Cycle detector which stops the program with references to the source code where the cycle was created - is a good idea, because in server systems under heavy load it just could be disabled. Basically it's a debugging tool, once it was proven by the testing that there are no bugs, these checks can be turned off in production. Like a C assertion checks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sometimes I wonder why do all the programming language designers prefer to invent several different syntaxes for one concept...

From the third slide: we can see two different function definition syntaxes, a "normal" style and a "ruby" style. I really like the way of JavaScript, CoffeeScript and OCaml that have a single unified function syntax.

Also on this slide: why have a special syntax for importing submodules from modules/crates? Again, CoffeeScript excels here, an import is simply a variable declaration:

      {int, vec} = require('std')

Furthermore, it has always bothered me why generic types use <> brackets. I can understand it in Java and C# (where types are declared before values/functions), but in Rust, it's really unnecessary to introduce the 4th type of brackets into the language (apparently, they used [], but latter changed it to <>... I would really like to know why.)

<comment><USER5> > {int, vec} = require('std')

I don't know coffeescript, but this looks to me like "std exposes two things, and I am bringing them into this namespace as int and vec". Whereas the rust code looks like "std exposes int and vec, which I am bringing into this namespace, and possibly other things which I am not".

<comment><USER6> What this means, in CoffeeScript, is that std exposes int and vec, which I am bringing into this namespace, and possibly other things which I am not. If I want to use all of std, I would have to write

      std = require('std')

and access std.int, std.vec and so on.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for clarifying.

I think I like rust version better: when I see an '=' sign, I assume that the RHS returns _something_ which is assigned to the LHS, and _something_ doesn't depend on the LHS. Coffeescript violates that, and it feels much more like 'special syntax'. But without knowing either language, I won't go further than "this seems weird".

<comment><USER7> Actually, the genius of the coffeescript version is that it's just a use case of the general destructuring syntax. So

        { x, y } = { x : 3, y : 5, z : 3 }

is perfectly valid as well. Once you get the hang of coffeescript's destructuring, it's insanely powerful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Slideshare here for those having trouble with the Dropbox-hosted version: [http://www.slideshare.net/pcwalton/rust-all-hands- winter-201...](http://www.slideshare.net/pcwalton/rust-all-hands-winter-2011)

<comment><USER8> Could you give examples of macros-by-example, as the presentation puts it? I'm not sure how those would work in a non-Lispy context.

<comment><USER3> Check out the macro tests in this directory: [https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/master/src/test/run- pas...](https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/master/src/test/run-pass)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm just naive, but whenever someone says "systems language", I think "ooh, something better to write kernels in?" I guess I'm waiting for something semantically equivalent to C, but with better options for macros and code generation, and some compile-time guarantees. Just less tedium, more DRY.

I don't actually program C, I just have projects in mind where it seems like that's the best language, where performance and compatibility with other languages is important. But C seems like such a pain to program in that I really wish there was a better option.

<comment><USER3> Rust has an unsafe sublanguage you'll probably be interested in.

That said, writing kernels is explicitly not a goal of Rust. It may well work great with a custom bare-metal runtime, but we aren't letting the needs of OS kernels constrain our design space at this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The typestate concept seems like an incredibly cool tool for enforcing static guarantees. As far as I'm aware, not even Haskell has anything similar to that (feel free to correct me!)

<comment><USER11> I'm not clear: is typestate a compile time or run time guarantee? [Edit] That is, is the guarantee implemented at compile time, noting violations similarly to syntax violations, or does it generate "invisible" code that performs runtime checks which can throw something similar to exceptions?

<comment><USER12> A bit of both, actually. It's mostly compile-time checking, but you can also write assertions about the typestate of a particular variable. The compiler generates code to check the actual values at runtime - if the assertion fails, the program is aborted. The really cool bit is that the compiler can take the assertions into account when compiling code that _follows_ the assertions.

<comment><USER11> Thanks. When you say "aborted", does that refer to an Erlang-style (micro) process, or the entire OS-level process?

<comment><USER3> Failure only brings down the current task, not the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is probably minor, but one of the things that bugs me is the incredibly shortened keywords. Is it really that much of a slowdown to type "function" or even "func" instead of "fn"? Same with "ret" instead of "return".

<comment><USER14> The problem is not typing speed, but word size. It fills the screen with garbage and is typo-prone.

Small reserved words means I don't have another failed compilation because I typed "fucntion", or the small but significant mental pain of backspacing.

<comment><USER15> A huge one for me is that for some reason I can never correctly type the word "Length". As if to highlight my point to myself, I consciously thought about how to type it, and still ended up with "lenght" on the screen.

Python's built in function "len()" is a lifesaver in this regard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like the concurrency trend - channels & cheap threads like Erlang and Go.

The concurrency feature that stands out: _... no need for ... concurrent garbage collection._ (slide 17)

The upside should be amazing performance compared to simple GC.

The cost is developer effort for memory management hints (slide 22). We'll have to see if it's worth it.

<comment><USER17> I'm really looking forward to Rust being somewhat usable, I think it has made almost all the right choices. This is Google Go done right.

As a C++ developer I find my efforts on "memory management hints" to be totally worth it, due to the fact that you actually have to think about object ownership. Which in my mind makes for better designs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Older discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498528>

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks like it's going to be a great language. Compiling to LLVM should mean that it does tall call optimization, which is great and also means that integrating with C/C++ should be fairly easy.

The only thing it's missing that I'd like to see is support for CPS conversion like streamlinejs does. Even if it supports growable stacks that start at 1KB, with thousands of threads CPS conversion is still more efficient. Having said that, seeing as they are writing browsers, not servers, I can see why it's not a priority to do this.

<comment><USER20> Can you explain how CPS solves the growable stack problem? I haven't heard of this before.

<comment><USER21> It essentially lets you turn your stack state into closures on the heap which are passed to tail recursive functions.

<comment><USER20> but how is that related to CPS? (or closures for that matter?)

If you're allocating the stack frame on the heap, you can just replace the prologue (e.g. x86 intel syntax, cdecl calling convention)

        sub esp, LOCAL_SPACE_NEEDED

with

        push LOCAL_SPACE_NEEDED
        push ARG_SIZE_TO_COPY
        call allocate_frame

(where allocate_frame allocates enough space for storing link to previous stack frame, all args and all locals; then, it copies all arguments, return address and stack pointer, switches stacks to the new stacks and returns from the call)

You can modify the return to call "deallocate_frame" (which would switch stacks back before returning), or you can just make sure the return address on the new stack points to "deallocate_frame_and_return", and use a regular return in place.

[Actually, come to think of it, it's an excellent idea for a stack protection system that can be turned off for speed - the call to "allocate_frame" could be configured at runtime to patch its caller to just do "sub esp, LOCAL_SPACE_NEEDED" for maximum speed. Or it could just check stack overflow; or it could allocate frames on heap for better memory use; and it could mprotect/virtualprotect the edges of this frame for protection]

<comment><USER21> That's another option for doing it. However, writing in CPS implies that your calls are all tail calls, and they all take a continuation closure as an argument.

<comment><USER20> I know what CPS is. But Dan states that "CPS is more efficient than growable stacks", and I can't see how CPS plays a nontrivial part in the stack size optimization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good call on single threaded language bridging. Multithreading in XPCOM was either bad or worse depending on the phase of the moon. I almost had an important project tank because XPCOM "out" parameters (unfortunately used internally whenever a method had a return value) were not thread-safe. We ended up using a different threading library and only making synchronous XPCOM calls.

</comment><comment><USER23> I saw the C++ like syntax with std::stuff and stuff<T> and it turned me off.

<comment> loup-vaillant I saw the ML like syntax with `let r = 42 { stuff };` and it turned me on.

Frankly, your bits of syntax are no worse than `Std.stuff` and `'a stuff` (or `Stuff a`).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I only have a tiny bike-shedding comment:

I'd expect the arguments of the map-function in the example on page 3 to be the other way around. The 'grades' argument gets pushed down several lines in the current form.

</comment><comment><USER25> In chrome I am just getting a blank page with some javascript errors. In IE I only can see the right half of the presentation. Mozilla is supporting FF well though :)

<comment><USER3> I just used Keynote's export feature. I'll upload to slideshare.

<comment><USER26> Just dump a pdf of the slides in your dropbox, less hassle.

Works ok in FF on Xubuntu 11.10 but sloooooowwwwwwww

<comment><USER27> Seconded. Please just give us a plain old PDF that we can read in-browser or download, instead of making us screw around with all these weird friggin formats.

<comment><USER3> Here you go: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4186469/rust-all-hands-w2011.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks pretty cool and oriented at making a browser engine. (tl;dr version i guess)</comment>


250 hospitals plan to make own drugs and upend generic pharma business - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/civicarx-adds-12-new-health-systems-to-nonprofit-generic-drug-business-2019-1 <comment><USER2> nice idea but sadly generics are not the meat of the problem, that lies with the stuff thats still under patent</comment>


Turkey has no net neutrality laws. This is what Turkish mobile plans look like - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/doener_tech/status/903771230549008384? <comment><USER2> Or are they like Telstra in Australia and throttle you to hell and add random disconnects so that you can't use it?</comment>


JC Penney Appoints Jill Soltau as CEO - <AUTHOR> https://news.alphastreet.com/jcpenney-appoints-jill-soltau-as-ceo/ <comment><USER2> Good luck to her, its not going to be easy to turn that ship around, I don't work in any retail related industry so I'm not sure how mall-department stores are ever going to be able to be back in fashion.</comment>


RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags <comment><USER2> For some context, this is a very old stackoverflow answer. At the time there was a bit of a meme on SO that any question about regex and HTML would be answered with "you can't parse HTML with regex" which of course is true, but was probably applied a bit overzealously as while you can't parse the full HTML language with a reg ex, you can extract data in limited scenarios or subsets.

This post was the culmination of that meme.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand the replies on stackoverflow.

The request seems perfectly sensible -- write a regexp to parse a single HTML tag, without a closing slash. Then all the replies are from smart-alecs trying to look clever about how regexps can't do generic nested parsing. Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean, the replies are all jokes - that's why I submitted it. It's funny. Clearly the responders aren't trying to be helpful.

<comment><USER4> I'd argue they are trying to be helpful. The top post highlights that this question is asked on stack overflow frequently, and that it begins with incorrect assumptions about what the technology is capable of doing.

Parsing arbitrary HTML requires a stack, and you don't get that with regex. It's the wrong tool for the job.

Edit: Additionally, the regex proposed doesn't even come close to a solution.

<comment><USER3> The top post is just a nonsense meme, and also completely ignores the question, which is about finding tags of a particular kind. In many html parsers, information like if a tag is self-closed isn't easy to find (or may even not be stored), so they could at least show how to do what the questioner asks, rather than just mock them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so much part of programmer lore that I am wondering: is HN playing [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/) today?</comment>


YouTube's Recommendation Algorithm Has a Dark Side - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/youtubes-recommendation-algorithm-has-a-dark-side/ <comment><USER2> I know the argument that "YouTube is polarizing everyone" is a common one, but is there any evidence to back it up?

<comment><USER3> I think that is a consequence of maximizing engagement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is journalism worrying over people being able to watch what they want to. Notice that the things it is worried about you watching are not things that a left-leaning journalist would would find comforting.</comment>


Twitter may be better than Facebook for businesses - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/17/survey-says-twitter-is-better-than-facebook-for-businesses/

<comment><USER2> And what do "social media leaders" know about running a profitable business?

</comment><comment><USER3> From the introduction:

"If you were to ask "over 200 social media leaders" which social media site they would pay for if they had to, as Abrams Research recently did".

But they don't and they won't because both services are free.

If you had to pay for air, which is currently free, you probably would, but since it is free you don't have to, and despite the fact that this would make air a better business than say rock it really doesn't matter.

<comment><USER4> that's a weird analogy... You'd have to pay for air because it's NECESSARY for you to live. Does any business NEED Twitter or Facebook to stay alive?

Also, there are many services which offer free and paid services. In that sense, no one should ever pay because there's a free version available...?

Bottomline: of course it matters. Although there's a really huge gap between 'saying you would pay for' something and actually commiting to that...

<comment><USER3> yes, there is the necessity angle, that's true. But still, I think it holds for the most part, if you ask people if they would pay for a free service then that's absolutely content-free.

Something like facebook or twitter _needs_ to be free in order to succeed, just like air _needs_ to be free for you to live. Asking if someone would pay for air, facebook or twitter is a meaningless question, if you need it and you can only get it by paying for it then that's what you'll do, but in the case of facebook or twitter a free alternative would spring up overnight and run with your userbase.

<comment><USER4> Facebook/twitter need to be free for COMMON users (the majority of them) - specific users with specific needs could (actually SHOULD - that's what most startups hope, at least) pay, for those are the ones PROFITING from a given service...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What if aging weren't inevitable, but a curable disease? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614080/what-if-aging-werent-inevitable-but-a-curable-disease/ <comment><USER2> From a cynical point of view, the biggest problem with life extension is that you usually end up extending the _worst_ years of life rather than the best. The article somewhat covers this, but if anti aging treatments only manage to keep people alive who are barely functional, you've actually made things worse for society as a whole instead of better. We need ways to extend productive years of life and potentially keep people in the workforce (or at least the socially contributing force) longer. I'm hopeful for some of the treatments mentioned, but I think a lot of them are going to fall into the "we managed to keep people in a hospital bed for an extra year" category.

On a side note - has anyone heard anything from Calico recently? I seem to remember a lot of hopeful statements when they started up years ago with the intent of doing a lot of the research mentioned in this article, and then they went silent.

<comment><USER3> Re: Calico. Lots of turnover, lots of focus on basic science. Still recruiting wonderfully talented scientists. Still very secretive about progress. Note sure if that is useful or not!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it amazing that people unironically advocate the _deaths of literally everyone_ because they can't be arsed to deal with overpopulation. If immortality were the default, it would rightly be seen as batshit insane to force everyone to die to solve overpopulation.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if social progress or change at all would halt without death as an agent of change and creation? It seems like a great sci fi premise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That would mean we've invented a huge population problem, and hundred+ year working lives.

Do people really want to live forever? My impression amongst my now mainly middle aged friends is that no, that's for a hope for the naivety of youth. Or the hyper-wealthy who can fund a hedonistic century or three. In my fifties I am quite chilled and happy that I come with an as yet unknown expiry date.

Am I intrigued what life will be like in the 23rd century? Definitely, presuming we get past our little climate emergency, which I doubt. Do I want 300 years of mainly boredom and frustration working my way to get there? Most certainly not. :)

<comment><USER7> I think getting [human consciousness] software to run in other hardware will come before biological immortality, and once that happens there's no point in keeping a biological form.

The only pain point that I have as a software engineer, I have no clear idea on how to not shutdown the software before loading in to another medium.

<comment><USER8> > The only pain point that I have as a software engineer, I have no clear idea > on how to not shutdown the software before loading in to another medium.

It's not a problem. Live migration of running software is a thing. Whether it's actually possible for humans remains to be seen.

The principle is the same, though. In my view, it makes sense to see myself as a software process running on biological hardware, so if there were a way to simulate a live migration from one hardware to a compatible one, there would be no point which I could consider a discontinuity, since merely suspending a process does not lose information.

However, I do think that I'd prefer a method which gradually integrates my brain with a non-biological implant that eventually takes over. It seems more plausible.

<comment><USER9> Two points:

1) The "discontinuity" is a red herring. You get one of those every time you fall asleep.

2) It doesn't really make sense to speak of your brain as software running on hardware. That's a metaphor informed by the behavior of digital computers, whose state is comparatively easy to approximate due to their binary nature (and yet still very difficult, as anyone knows who's tried writing a 100% compatible emulator for a different computer). But in your brain, the software and the hardware are the same thing. It's just a hyper-complex object that interacts with its environment.There's no guarantee there's any way to abstract that above the molecular level without losing information, and even if you think you have, there's no way to verify that the behavior of a new system will match the behavior of the old system in every case.

Take a system you don't normally regard as information-processing, and see if it works the same way. Can we migrate the software process that runs a ball of plasma to compatible hardware? Or a rock?

<comment><USER8> This reply is a bit late, but I think I'll clarify myself anyway. The way I see it, it's not my brain or body that's "me". It's the ongoing process, which doesn't really exist as anything concrete (even though it's caused by a material body). Therefore if there were some way of seamlessly transition this process to continue in a different body, I would still consider it "me" even if the new body actually behaves differently (my body certainly doesn't behave the same way it did ten years ago).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's not quite right to put it in the same category as normal disease or initially have the goal of "curing" it, but I do believe that understanding and attempting to mitigate or at least partially reverse some of the underlying mechanisms of aging is the primary path forward for medicine.

I think the SENS approach is most realistic [https://sens.org](https://sens.org)

</comment><comment><USER11> Accidental death is ~50/100k/lifetime. So 0.9995^n = 1/2 is our accidental halflife. Works out to about 100,000 years on average. Someone please check;)

<comment><USER12> Of course it's not just accidents we'd need to worry about if we didn't age — there's also murder, warfare, suicide, infectious diseases, etc. I think Aubrey de Grey said the average lifespan would be ~500-1000 years absent age- related diseases.

<comment><USER4> I think people's risk tolerances would dramatically change with unbounded lifespans, and we would take any threat to life much more seriously than we do now.

<comment><USER12> For a while yes. Though I can imagine very old but fit people taking up extreme sports when they get bored with life and dying in entirely avoidable accidents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be more than enough to cure hair loss, it's almost the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Then there would be time enough for love.</comment>


OS X Notifier App Growl Goes Closed Source - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/palm/3/11/10/20/1757226_1.shtml

<comment><USER2> This is actually not true. See the FAQ on the Growl website:

<http://growl.info/documentation/faq-new.php#1.3source>

Where is the source code?

We will post source code. However, our bigger concern right now is fixing issues and providing support to folks on our discussions group, and on our support email address, and on Twitter. As soon as the flood of inbound requests slows down, we fully intend to push the 1.3 source over the wall.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how those statements contradict each other.

Growl 1.3 is clearly not open source at this moment, and the stated intend to "push the source over the wall" seems to very deliberately use wording that avoids any kind of commitment on licensing.

Never mind the odd reason for not posting the source code at this point, given that the entire infrastructure for this is already in place and used for 1.2. I.e., why should other concerns prevent 1.3 code from being published?</comment></comment>


How to game the new voting power system - <AUTHOR>

Just upvote all the stories that are already near the top.  If the system works at all, then these will consist disproportionately of "good" stories, thus increasing your voting power.<p>One way to combat this would be to give much larger voting power bonuses for "discovering" good stories while they're still only visible in the new queue. <comment><USER2> I love how people that use this site love the exercise of thinking of ways to game the karma system. Hacker News indeed.

<comment><USER3> ironically, that thought exercise is necessary in order to make it full-proof (and fool-proof ;)

<comment><USER2> Right. Generally, open systems are more secure for that very reason. People who care to keep it good plug the holes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously we're going to weight it by how early votes are.

<comment><USER2> This is great incentive to look at new content and mod. That is excellent, as submissions to other social bookmarking sites often get lost in the news with most people looking at the front page with news thats already hot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> PG-related questions/stories attract karma, so just upvote them early.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that'll do it. Remember that it's only the oracles' votes that decide which stories you can help your voting power by upmodding. I think the oracles are unlikely to upvote PG essays or anything similar that might have been posted as an attempt at karma-whoring. I certainly doubt that PG bothers to upvote links to his own writings.</comment></comment>


E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2019/09/e-book-library-publisher-buying-controversy-petition.html <comment><USER3> > There's a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations > that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the > reality that very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the > physical format

There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it _keeps_ the value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library.

With a digital book (or any other digital good) I lose all of that. Since I'm getting so much less, why should I pay the same price?

The digitization makes it impossible for businesses to control the distribution of their products, unless they go full DRM and effectively prevent people from owning the things they buy – but in that case, there should be no surprise that people don't want to pay quite as much.

<comment><USER4> As a consumer, the digital e-book is inherently more valuable than a physical book.

I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books.

There's all sorts of other value, like search functions, not having to fill my house or storage box with books, and avoiding that awkward every-other-page- sucks while reading a book laying sideways in bed.

<comment><USER5> I feel exactly the opposite.

I hate reading stuff on screens.

\- It hurts my eyes when I do this for hours.

\- It comes with lots of distractions.

\- Digital Annotations are a PITA

\- Zapping through a book works much better in hard-copy

If I am supposed to spent 1h+ reading your content. You better make sure I can buy a printed copy.

<comment><USER6> If you are reading on a proper* e-reader, eyestrain shouldn't be an issue.

*ie classic Kindle with e-ink or similar, not a tablet like iPad/Android equivalent or the annoyingly named Amazon "Kindle" Fire etc.

Not great for tech manuals, admittedly

<comment><USER7> Actually if you're willing to pay for it, you can buy 10+" eink screens with wacom digitizers on top (drawing pen support). They're quite good for tech papers and manuals because they're a similar size to real paper, no eye strain, you can draw notes directly on them, and ofc you can cram tons of papers/textbooks/manuals into something that weighs next to nothing.

Edit: if you're curious, look into the likebook mimas as a starting point. There are other options, that just happens to be the one I've used.

<comment><USER8> As a student that looks like exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm never going to shell out $400 for one when I can get an early-gen Kindle for free. Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.

<comment><USER9> > Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.

Unlikely to happen: similar to silicon, eink's yield (that is, amount of parts produced with no errors) goes down quickly (quadratic if not cubic, I forgot) with increasing size.

A system based on lots of eink chiplets with small enough margins that you can tile them could scale up, but the margins are also a difficult area.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the eink part of it has issues with yields since it's essentially just conductive ink and a suspension of particles, but the fancy transparent transistors they sometimes use certainly do. The real issue with eink is the economies of scale will probably never kick in. Most people would rather have a color screen, or a screen that exceeds 10fps, or something that doesn't have artifacts like an etch a sketch, etc. There's only 1 oem for the entire eink panel market (over 6") last I checked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note that pricing of ebooks for libraries is higher than for consumers - [https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/the- fu...](https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/the-future-of- ebook-pricing/)

>Among the Big Five publishers (HBG, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, PRH, and S&S), pricing for one copy remains excessively high, in the $50 range for two years of library access, compared with the $15 range for perpetual access by consumers. Four of the Big Five now employ a two-year access model, which poses challenges to collection development and preservation.

Note also that ebooks come with restrictions that inhibit inter-library loans.

</comment><comment><USER11> > very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format

Either that's bullshit, or the costs are entirely artificial. I really, really want "Concrete mathematics" by Donald Knuth. I really, really don't want to pay €80 for it. A good alternative for me would be the e-book, but it isn't any cheaper. I doubt if anyone will buy the ebook for that price while there are free copies available online.

<comment><USER12> It's entirely dependant upon volume. According to [0], the average US non- fiction book will sell under 3,000 copies in its lifetime. For the proceeds from that to pay the author, editor, and marketing... Well, that's not a lot of copies to amortize those salaries across.

The numbers are obviously very different for a New York times best seller, where physical goods costs will represent a larger fraction of the cost. But most books aren't NYT bestsellers, (even? Particularly?) When they're by Knuth on advanced topics. :)

you could call paying all of the people involved in the process of creating a book artificial, but if we don't, we don't get more books.

[0] [https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1394159](https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1394159)

<comment><USER13> Coincidentally, it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book. So, what, say $1 per book pays for that. The rest pays the author.

But wait! Authors only get a buck or two royalty per book. So why do they cost so much?

Use your imagination.

<comment><USER14> > it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book

It costs between $2000 and $4000 to print a book. It costs about the same to warehouse and distribute a typical hardcover.

It costs maybe $100,000 to market a book. Often much more.

Printing, distribution, and royalties are a small part of costs in the publishing industry. Marketing and amortized overhead are a large part of the costs.

<comment><USER15> Most books, especially non-fiction have incredibly small marketing budgets. Often it's up to the author to self-promote the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was just at my local library over the weekend, not having stepped inside one for a very long time. I was actually there to get my library card renewed, as I hadn't used it for so long it became out of date.

So, I'm browsing the stacks, and see a few books that look intriguing. But here's the thing: I don't have time to check them out and read them. There was a time I could and would do that, but age and responsibilities have cut that short.

So - I do what any 21st century citizen with a smartphone does - I searched for them on Amazon. I ended up finding all of the titles on Amazon, but the kicker was that the physical copies of the book (even hardbound!) were cheaper - cheaper! - than the ebook (kindle) version.

So - I purchased them; they should arrive at my door in a couple of days. I'll get to read them at my leisure, I won't have to worry about overdue fines or anything like that, and best of all - I have physical copies.

Overdrive goes away? Well - I can still read my copies.

Publisher decides to revoke the ebook license? Well - I can still read my copies.

Long story short: Nothing beats having a unencumbered, non-licensed, non- encrypted copy of a piece of information (physical or otherwise). Without it, you are just borrowing it from someone, and they can take it back at will, and you are SOL.

I'm not sure what it's going to take for people - ordinary people - <USER2> understand this. Maybe the 50,000th time they have to repurchase the "White Album"?

</comment><comment><USER17> > If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country's current No. > 1 fiction bestseller

> Public libraries are engaged in one of the most valuable series of community > services for all ages, for all audiences

> If you think about equitable access to information for everybody, there > shouldn't be discrimination or anything like that

Devil's advocate: the article (and many of the persons mentioned) seem to be discussing primarily works of fiction, not e.g. textbooks or technical reference books. How is this part of "a valuable series of community services"? It seems like they just want the ability to consume more entertainment media for free, and are trying to disguise it as part of the (noble) effort of trying to make access to information egalitarian.

<comment><USER18> To play an advocate from a deeper level of Hell: Why should the ideas in fiction be dismissed as uninformative?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting because these expectations from consumers began with rampant illegal file sharing in the late 90s.

Many people made the claim that music (and now books) cost nothing to distribute, so they should get it for free.

The actual cost of creating the first copy is always ignored.

I always thought it was worse than theft because at least when you steal a TV, the value of the entire product line doesn't decrease.

</comment><comment><USER20> > consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a > physical copy

That expectation is justified, because bits haven't been a scarce resource ever since Shannon's digital circuits drove marginal cost of copying a file to approximately zero.

> very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format

If the market isn't willing to pay that price, then their business model isn't sustainable. Blaming libraries and attempting to make their product artificially scarce (with rate-limiting contracts or technical tricks ("DRM") at best only postpone the business model's eventual failure. While it would be unfortunate if authoring books became unsustainable, the _publishers_ may not be needed. That's what capitalism does: it removes inefficiency, including middlemen that no longer strictly required..

> Potash said that studies consistently show library patrons to be more > frequent book buyers overall—which is another reason Macmillan's letter > stung. "They are taking their readers, their customers, their fans, and > intentionally trying to frustrate them," he said.

Giving your actual paying (even indirectly through a library) customers a worse experience than they could get by sim0ply downloading a pirated copy is always a bad idea. It takes a long time to rebuild from a bad reputation.

However, the bigger problem is failing to recognize that the real competition is for people's attention. Rate-limiting or otherwise restricting libraries is throwing away the most important resource: people's awareness that your product even exists. Do you want free advertising even when people read your book for free, or do you want fade into obscurity without even the _possibility_ of making a sale?

> The licensing model for libraries and e-books itself is complex and > difficult to explain to outsiders.

That's intentional, because they are trying to use complex tricks to artificially recreate scarcity instead of adapting to a new business model.

<comment><USER21> But the cost of printing a book isn't exactly high. Most of the cost of a book is in the author, editorial staff, and other human services. The manufacturing is near nil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What is more important, culture or company profits?

<comment><USER23> For a company, it's obviously profits. Without them, the company will cease existing.

<comment><USER24> You are confusing profit with revenue. Without revenue, the company will disappear. A company with revenue to cover operating costs but no profits will survive, even thrive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> With my local library (Santa Clara county), I've noticed that there is no requirement to revalidate my local address. After I move away, I would presumably join my new library, but I'd still have the option to log back in on my Kobo E-reader using my SCCL membership. I love Overdrive, but I think a lot of users abuse the system in this way.

<comment><USER26> they don't seem to care. my wife went around to about four libraries in the bay area so she could get easier access to some books which may not be available immediately in Santa Clara, but are available in San Mateo. I assume this is for the reasons stated in another comment: the licensing forbids individual libraries from sharing their copies with other libraries...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I feel it's only natural for this sort of thing to happen, as ultimately the purpose of libraries and the purpose of copyright are in direct opposition to one another.

In my view, the primary reason public libraries were created was to provide the public with free access to informational and culturally-relevant media (books, newspapers, movies, audio, etc). Previously, a library's effectiveness in fulfilling that mission was naturally limited by the need for the library to acquire physical copies of every article of media they provided access to, and by the natural geographical restrictions imposed by the need for members to physically travel to the library to view, check out, and return those articles. These limitations made it relatively easy for libraries to coexist with copyright law, as libraries would never be able to compete with the convenience of personal ownership of a physical copy of media.

With modern, digital media, such physical limitations are no longer present. Were it not for copyright law preventing digital media from being acquired and loaned out the same way that physical media are, it would be rather easy to build a public library system which would fulfill its mission so efficiently and with such convenience that it would supplant the need for personal ownership of media for the vast majority of people.

Imagine a national library purchasing 100 copies of a movie, then instantly "checking it out" to you when you stream it to your phone, and "checking it in" as soon as the movie finishes playing or you pause it for more than a minute or two. Such a system could be many orders of magnitude cheaper than our current public library system, while at the same time being far more convenient. They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business overnight. Now apply the same system to books, music, magazines, etc. Why would any significant number of people bother buying any of those forms media ever again?

<comment><USER28> >>Were it not for copyright law preventing digital media from being acquired and loaned out the same way that physical media are, it would be rather easy to build a public library system which would fulfill its mission so efficiently and with such convenience that it would supplant the need for personal ownership of media for the vast majority of people.

You've just inspired me. How do we make libraries the next "great disruptor"?

>>They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business overnight.

All of those services are also primary-content creators. They no longer just serve as repositories for content, they also produce unique content that adds value.

<comment><USER27> >> They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business overnight.

> All of those services are also primary-content creators.

Right, so they would remain in business only by distributing exclusive content that's not available in public libraries by virtue of the fact that copies of those media can never be purchased, only streamed directly from their original creator.

Thinking about where that would lead in a world where that business model suddenly becomes extremely profitable compared to selling copies of your movie... it almost seems kinda dystopian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As usual, RMS is right about DRM.

<comment><USER30> RMS unfortunately has picked a different hill to die on these days

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't think that libraries should purchase ebooks anyway. The checkout model translated to a digital file is awkward and un-natural- how does one checkout a single copy of an ebook? Why can't there be an infinite number of copies?

I'd rather see libraries give up ebooks entirely until there is a non DRM alternative. Libraries should not reinforce existing DRM regimes. Meanwhile, it would be great if they could function as the physical location for furthering the distribution of Free ebooks already in the public domain and helping to make these available to people, maybe by lending ebook readers instead! Imagine going to a library and checking out a cheap 2nd Feb Nook loaded with 1k of Project Gutenberg classics? Or being able to choose and load the ebooks you want at the library to a device and then taking it home?

</comment><comment><USER32> What is the logic behind this? A library e-book can be loaned at most 4 times during the 8-week hold off period. Are they after the potential four additional sale? Didn't make any sense to me...

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems like libraries should team up and combine their purchasing powers to get more equitable purchase agreements.

<comment><USER34> They should team up and use the existing copyright laws in a way that is more suited to their mission.

Which is to say they should create their own shared digital-lending infrastructure that does not depend on publishers supplying the e-books.

That would provide a significant incentive for publishers to be reasonable enough that public libraries don't cut them out of the loop entirely using the first-sale doctrine, with books purchased at retail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Macmillan should look into putting more covers up on their site for their own books as to the reason their sales are going down. When you don't have the motivation to properly merchandise your products its your own damn fault.

</comment><comment><USER36> Paper books are always better tha ebooks, but in terms of practicity, ebooks could make your like easier. Lightweight, storing, fonts format... But the top advantage is the fact that are water resistant.

</comment><comment><USER37> I didn't know libraries lent ebooks. Seems kind of strange.

<comment><USER38> Some (many?) libraries lend out WiFi hot spots so people can have free internet at home.

When I lived in New Jersey, the library lent out power tools.

The Chicago Public library lends out museum passes.

Libraries are about knowledge, not books.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Chicago Public Library also lends small toy robots for teaching children about programming: [https://www.chipublib.org/news/finch-robots-land-at- cpl/](https://www.chipublib.org/news/finch-robots-land-at-cpl/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems to me as though an interlibrary alliance could pool resources to create their own digitizations of print-version books. They already pay extra for the library edition of a print book. For that higher price, they are supposed to get more durable covers and paper. For a more expensive e-book, what do they get? Self-destructing DRM. Why would _anyone_ agree to that-- especially a library?

If it is legal to lend out that physical copy, what is the difference, philosophically, between taking that copy off the shelf and placing it in a reader-proxy robot that can turn pages and focus its camera on them? What is the difference between that and flipping through static photographs of the pages while the physical copy is kept in a "digital lending" vault? What is the difference between that and flipping through pages of OCR-digitized text that correspond to the photographs? And if the physical copy is permanently placed in a defunct mine and no one ever has physical access, what prevents the mine from lending the digital text to any partner library, so they can in turn lend the single digital copy to a person?

If the publishers want to play stupid games, award them stupid prizes. Buy the paperback/cheapest edition of the book, shear off the spine, scan both sides of each page in a machine at 1200 dpi, re-bind the pages (plus paper cover) into a corrugated plastic cover, catalog it, and put it in permanent storage. Now OCR the 1200 dpi images, downsample them to 96 dpi, and package the text and low-res images into an e-book. When a user thinks the OCR made an error, the low-res image can establish a page and location, and a rectangle of the high-res image can be delivered from a web interface. The user's guess at the text content can then be verified or rejected by AI--easier than OCR from scratch--and used to update the book file.

All the lending software needs to do is verify that no more than N natural persons are looking at the digital files for N real copies at the same time. The physical copy could always be retrieved from storage and shipped to the borrower, after all. The legal copyright model has nothing to do with the time and money costs of physical shipping. A property title can move faster than the speed of light, even when the property itself is immobile. Even if the lending model doesn't work, sell the beneficial interest in the book for $20.00, and then pay $19.99 when they sell it back, the $0.01 representing physical-book storage fees and bandwidth costs.

Whether or not the end-user can copy the files they receive is immaterial. I can already borrow a library book and scan every page at home. That would be _me_ violating the copyright, not the library. The burden on the library is to say, "please don't do that, unless it is for legal, fair-use purposes". And the burden of policing it is on the owner/assignee of the copyright. If going along with the copyright system voluntarily is reasonable, people will go along with it voluntarily. If not, people will pirate. This may seem tautological, but increasing forced compliance will reduce voluntary compliance.

<comment><USER39> Your scheme requires copying the work, probably several times, and distributing some of those copies, so it won't fly.

I'm pretty sure the fact that digital lending necessarily makes tons of copies of the work—consider live server disk, backups (possibly many copies there), copies in cache across who knows how many devices on the Internet, the copy on the user's device, copies in RAM all over the place, et c., such that there might well be twenty copies of a book before it reaches the eyes of a borrowing reader—is why publishers are able to put license terms on ebook lending in the first place, since _technically_ the whole process, practically speaking, involves copying the book a bunch of times.

<comment><USER34> What we know to be a copy by common sense, real world interpretation of the word "copy" is not necessarily what copyright law considers to be a "copy" for the purposes of enforcing copyright laws.

Is holding a book up to a half-silvered mirror making a copy of it? Is looking over someone else's shoulder as they read making a copy? Do the activation levels in a person's visual cortex count as a copy?

It may be useful to keep hairs unsplit, forget about the quantum mechanics of copying and focus on the observers. If there are two files with identical content on a filesystem such that only one user is authorized to read them, how many copies exist?

To me, that's two copies in fact, but one copy by copyright law, in that the second real-life copy is not separable from the first for the purposes of commerce. The act of changing the access permissions on the second identical file would be what makes it a copyright-copy, not the act of duplicating the bits.

<comment><USER39> In that case why are libraries bothering with jumping through these hoops and paying extra money for expiring ebooks anyway?

<comment><USER34> They want to be "good citizens" in the book-publishing ecosystem. They follow along with the publishers' schemes, to ensure that the channel for public access to the material remains open.

They don't want to risk the possibility that there might be knowledge out there that an ordinary person might be barred from accessing via the public library. And as long as the publishers are reasonable, even when charging a higher library price, that's cheaper than libraries setting up a different infrastructure.

The mission of most libraries is about access and public service, rather than raw price. The publishers can abuse that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Usually I'm against restrictions like this, but this doesn't seem that bad. It's only for ebooks and for first 8 weeks, with people waiting years for the next book of their favourite author, waiting 2 more months when they are not willing to buy that book is nothing.

<comment><USER28> The book is being bought. The libraries aren't getting these books for free.

If you, private citizen Hitton, want to buy this book the day it's released and then lend it out to every single person you know, you're able to do this. Why shouldn't the library?

Also, there are lending limits on e-books from libraries. It's not as if the library can buy the e-book and then lend it out simultaneously to 20,000 people. They're already required to rate limit how many people can have an e-book checked out at once.

<comment><USER41> The limit of 1 (one) copy per library described in article seems fully reasonable to you?

<comment><USER28> No, of course not. That's my point. OP is throwing out a "let them eat cake" argument about how he's fine with this state of affairs. I'm pointing out that the libraries are buying these e-books in order to lend them out.

Personally I feel that the publishers are misunderstanding their market. Library people are library people. It's a small, heavy-use userbase. People who buy books the second they come out aren't going to suddenly become library people because a few dozen more e-books become available early on. There's still limits on how the libraries are allowed to lend them (i.e. they can't buy one book and lend it out 100 times, but they could buy 100 books and lend those out 100 times).

This feels like publishers are misunderstanding their users, but at the same time I'm just one user, wtf do I know.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Former CIA Director argued for more appropriate responses to leaks - <AUTHOR> https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/sep/11/cia-leakers/ <comment><USER2> This document was written in 1984 and was publically released in 2008. Meaning it was written during the Cold War in an entirely different political climate. It's not stated in the article anywhere, it really needs to be mentioned somewhere...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. The reasoning is still sound.

It's the moral panic after 9/11 that made people and politicians to lose their marbles.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Comments based on title and not reading the article below this message. Thank you.</comment>


Ask HN: Government vs. Industry - a-ponderer Hello! I'm a university student just finishing up an ML research internship with a government contractor and I am desperate for advice. Most career advice I see is geared towards maximizing comp, which is definitely nice and all, but I find I relate better with what I imagine are the hackers of old, with their slightly irrational passion,  creativity, and taste for the eccentric. Working for the government was an awesome experience; it is the closest I have gotten to what I imagine bell labs was like.
I'm wondering, though, what am I missing? Working for a startup sounds like so much fun, especially since I love wearing many hats and the idea of constantly learning about unrelated foci. In addition, it seems like FAANG companies advertise something similar by allowing employees to choose their work. However, I also see many posts about startups' financial downsides. In addition, if what I hear is true, corporate politics and being locked in perpetual competition (FAANG) does not sound appealing.
My question is, how do I separate signal from noise? As more and more people enter the field for the money, I wonder if their experiences bias their views on the industry. Where can someone passionate about their work thrive? <comment><AUTHOR> In the government area, sometimes policy is prioritized over the mission. You can end up changing directions or jumping through hoops for basically no reason at all. My coworker told me that he worked for the government in a situation like that and the policies and procedures can kill your productivity and freedom. You still have competition in government contract companies to find a program to work on when your current one is winding down.

I haven't worked for a startup nor know anyone who has. I will say to stay away from large non-tech companies. I've see a lot of issues at my current company. You'll end up working on boring stuff like reports for the business quite often. Management and the business generally talk a big game but have no idea what they are doing. Half the time you can't get a process map or detailed requirements for an existing business process because the business doesn't know what they do or how to explain it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Which country?

<comment> a-ponderer Sorry, should have specified. I'm actually in the US, specifically California.</comment></comment>


ODROID C2 out of stock - <AUTHOR> https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=135&t=28809 <comment><USER2> You can get a Khadas Vim Pro which has very similar hardware. And like the C2 it's one of the few ARM dev boards that has partial mainline Linux kernel support. It has opensource Mali drivers thanks to BayLibre, but some outstanding issues with USB unfortunately. (the Khadas team is really small so unfortunately progress is slow :( )

</comment><comment><USER3> What is ts this due to?

An unusual event?

The time of year?

Or is it a sign of some new (potentially negative?) trend?

<comment><USER4> Dram and nand manufacturers have been under producing. The logic being that last time there was an undersupply everyone upped production and flooded the market. They see this as a massive negative as it dropped prices and sunk everyone into losses.

Dram and nand fabbing does not use the same process as cpus. Thus it has its own seperate supply and those machines can only be used to make that supply. Thus there is no simple mechanism for the market to self regulate. Unless a maker is willing to idle multi million dollar machines supply is fixed. Which is just another way of saying that a significant portion of the cost in dram and nand manufacturing are fixed costs and thus even if you lose money overall because you make money on the marginal unit you are forced to keep making more units even as you lose money.

Its a tough industry but for now they have a sweet situation going. Provided no new makers enter the market and no existing makers up supply they will keep printing cash.

<comment><USER5> I work for a tech company in Taiwan who package DRAM and SD cards.

The factory takes silicon wafers, grinds them down to the right thickness, cuts them up (dicing), bonds wires on, puts them into plastic chip packages, tests them, and puts the finished chips into pretty cardboard boxes with plastic windows that you see for sale in stores.

The testing and manufacturing machines are really expensive. The parent company invested too much in x-ray machines to test BGA chip packages, and almost went bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Management wanted to fire the expensive programmers in the IT department/call centre/automation.

My boss (the founder's son) just finished his Masters in Artificial Intelligence in the US. He wasn't going to let the programmers just leave. So he made a startup company in the same office, spun off, refinanced the loans, and now both companies work together closely but the IT department can also do contracts for other clients to help stay afloat.

Automation tasks are fun when I get them - lots of coding drivers for old hardware in the testing area. Most of the time the factory just keeps running though, so I can do data analysis on the log files to help optimise the scheduling.

Most cards are manufactured at high capacity (e.g. 512GB SD card, 400 GB microSD). When they fail a test, they are "reworked" \- the die is cut in half with an electron microscope, and tested again. Thus we get many small cards and a few expensive big cards.

The clients are the people with their name on the SD card, and they're the ones designing the silicon. If they order more, the factory has the capacity. But if the purchase orders are down, we can't make more unless they sell.

tl;dr - It's a market issue, not a factory issue.

<comment><USER6> > When they fail a test, they are "reworked" \- the die is cut in half with an > electron microscope, and tested again.

Are they actually slicing NAND flash dies, or just unstacking them and disabling defective blocks? (The largest NAND dies so far are 512Gb TLC, which is 64GB, so large SD cards need several dies.)

<comment><USER5> They're not literally cut in half; the arrays are designed with "jumpers" to disable blocks. But the capacity is halved, so that's why the 64GB dies become 32GB, 16GB, or 8GB cards. (the dies live again!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many knowledgeable people in this thread. I have a related question. I want to compile AOSP and run on hackable hardware (i.e. some dev board). The official instructions are for some slightly pricey board called HiKey/LeMaker. I was surprised about lack of RPi support. Any comments?

<comment><USER8> If you are ok with using older AOSP, Olimex Allwinner A20 based boards are a good bet. If you want a recent version of Android, I would look at Snapdragon 410c.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I bought an ODroid W back when it was still in stock. It uses the same CPU as the Raspberry Pi, is pin-compatible with the Pi's GPIO, and is smaller.

It's like the Pi Zero, but came out earlier and has battery management built in. It's a pity that's still out of stock.

<comment><USER9> Odroid-w will never be re-stocked because Broadcom stopped selling them the SoC (presumably because the Raspberry Pi Foundation didn't like the competition). I also grabbed two of them before Zero came out, for tenfold(!) price.

<comment><USER5> If you really like that SoC, the Egoman media dongle is using the same one. (disclaimer: they also make the red Raspberry Pi, and I worked for them for 4 months in summer 2013).

[http://www.globalsources.com/si/AS/Egoman- Technology/6008825...](http://www.globalsources.com/si/AS/Egoman- Technology/6008825991329/pdtl/Media-Sharing-Dongle/1141324732.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was about to leave here a pointer to elty.pl where I bought one a while back, and they were in stock just a few days ago, but they've become unobtanium there as well. Now until they become available again the closest thing to the C2 seems the NanoPI K2, which is close enough but not identical, so compatibility has to be tested.

Here's an article comparing the two. [https://www.cnx- software.com/2017/04/13/40-nanopi-k2-board-i...](https://www.cnx- software.com/2017/04/13/40-nanopi-k2-board-is-powered-by- amlogic-s905-processor/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Kind of highjacking the thread, but are there any SBC that support 4K HDR under Linux? I bought a OrangePi PC2 as the hardware does, but it only works at that resolution under Android.

<comment><USER12> Supposedly the ROCK64 does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They're selling it from the web store again.

21 day lead time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, When you try to place the order from there you get an error message that it's out of stock. The 21 days is just a placeholder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope this is sign that there is a next generation board coming out.</comment>