PowerVR SGX code leaked - <AUTHOR> https://libv.livejournal.com/26972.html

<comment><USER2> While the author is correct, the tone feels so _wrong_. It's terrible that laws exist that make knowing certain information a liability to embark on creative endeavors. Just a very real view on why IP laws are harmful (despite potential upsides).

Also, what are the kind of super secrets in drivers? If the secrets are so valuable, certainly competitors would have no trouble simply getting a spy to work as an employee. Or just RE from the binaries.

It reminds me of the idiocy of Canon and Nikon in refusing to document their raw formats.

<comment><USER3> > It's terrible that laws exist that make knowing certain information a > liability to embark on creative endeavors.

Why?

We don't find anything objectionable about the law extending property rights to, say, land, which we had no hand in creating and will continue to exist long after we're all dead, so why find an objection to Imagination having property rights over something that is wholly their creation?

I would argue that to the extent you can morally justify any sort of property rights, copyright and trade secret more more justifiable than nearly any other kind.

Furthermore, I don't see what _creative_ endeavor is being harmed here. It reduces the meaning of _creative_ to nothing if you apply it to reverse engineering efforts, which are the opposite of creative--they are derivative.

<comment><USER4> Private property is a system that's useful to reduce conflicts that arise from two properties of land: rivalry and scarcity. Ideas and other creations need to such system, since they can be shared infinitely and concurrently.

Also, the "wholly their creation" is often untrue, especially when it comes to patents. It's often just a result of having the money and/or knowledge to submit it. Multiple people can and have came up with the same patentable concept independently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _I doubt that IMG will now try to bullshit us with the inane patent excuse._

It's not inane. Their fear is a natural consequence of mixing ludicrous patent systems with cutthroat industry politics.

Most GPU vendors don't have massive patent war chests of their own. They have a lot to lose by exposing their implementations, because _of course_ they all infringe on various patents held by other vendors. Any program longer than hello.c is likely to infringe on various patents. When there's money at stake, the incentives all point towards keeping the driver sources private.

<comment><USER6> > Most GPU vendors don't have massive patent war chests of their own.

The largest by marketshare, nVidia and ATI (by belonging to AMD) certainly have a sh.tload of patents. Do correct me, but aren't IMG/PowerVR and nVidia holding the majority of the mobile GPU market share anyways?

<comment><USER7> NVidia is a minor player in the non-laptop mobile space. PowerVR and Qualcomm have the most popular GPUs, followed by Vivante and ARM's Mali as the second tier. NVidia's mobile GPUs are only used in their own SoCs, and the Tegra has never been that successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I take the exact opposite stance, since the practice of secretly studying "leaked" proprietary code is not new - one of the earliest examples I can think of is the Lions' book[1]. In fact, knowing how the proprietary version does it could be valuable in writing your own implementation, as then you can be certain you're not coincidentally doing the same thing and use an approach which could be better in some ways (more efficient, etc.)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th_Edition,_with_Source_Code)

</comment><comment><USER9> Given one reason gpu manufacturers use for keeping drivers closed is to avoid patent cases/trolls, can prosecution lawyers use leaked IP as a basis for a patent case? Would that then lead to a counter-suit for illegal ip access?

In particular I'm thinking of the current nvidia/Samsung/Qualcomm debacle ([http://www.anandtech.com/show/8715/samsung-nvidia-counter- su...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8715/samsung-nvidia-counter-suit))

<comment><USER10> "Given one reason gpu manufacturers use for keeping drivers closed is to avoid patent cases/trolls,"

No, this is what they state. IT is of course, not in any way accurate. Having access to source code does nothing for patent trolls, or anyone else. They don't go scouring source code and then suing people. They go suing people and then scouring source code.

Since they'd get source code access in discovery anyway, it doesn't matter whether they publish or not.

It's really that they think they have magic secret sauce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get what they author want to tell me. This not great for powervr because now their chips will be cloned and competitors have access to trade secrets.

Neither of that will get worse by some non commercial developers looking at the code. Nor will their code become a copyright infringement unless they do copy and paste. And with a VCS (that everybody with a task that big needs anyway) it's not hard, if trivial, to show it's not. And ever better, they don't need to show it's not, somebody else needs to show it is. Source to look at is a great thing for everybody who tries to understand powervr. Not less work, but more information.

Sticking the GPL to is of course bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER12> Everyone else is thinking it... So I'll just say it... It's about goddamn time.

</comment><comment><USER13> "I am horrified about the lack of responsibility of a lot of people. These are not some cat pictures, or some nude celebrities. This is code that forbids people from writing graphics drivers."

I'm not sure if that line is mean to be sarcastic but if taking literally definitely undermines the credibility of the writer !

<comment><USER14> He has a different set of concerns. That's all.

If we weren't able to narrow our focus, then we'd be all wound up about everything that's supposed to be an outrage and we'd never get anything done. How many outrages? How many people you got?

<comment><USER15> Besides, there are few better ways to feel morally superior than to find someone whose outrages don't line up with your own.</comment></comment></comment>


Tactics for Thriving in a Startup Relationship - <AUTHOR> http://stormental.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/7-tactics-for-thriving-in-an-startup-relationship/

<comment><USER2> It's even more difficult if you have kids. Though in some sense they get mad less easily. But a couple of things off the top that have helped me.

1- Have some time with the whole family first thing in the morning. This is basically his four minutes in the morning rule, but the temptation is to think it doesn't matter for the kids or to let them sleep in.

2- Have dinner together as often as possible. Even if you have to go back into work (or back into your home office). Or even if you don't eat much because you have a business dinner later.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear the things that have worked for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> this could be interesting, especially if from the trenches, supported by real- life scars (experiences)</comment>


Google Chrome pop-ups a link to buy Chromebook - <AUTHOR>

Open your Google Chrome, go to your Chrome 'home page', Yellow pop-up appears with a link. Clicking the link will take you to a page were you can buy chroomebook. <comment><USER2> I just started seeing this today. ಠ_ಠ</comment>


Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs.html

<comment><USER2> I really like the idea that with less day to day work to be done, people will be able to work on helping pull third-world countries forward. I just see first-world society having a real hard time letting go of the 40 hour/week, "earn your living" job. And how do we feed and house people without an income? Maybe the droid building companies (Google, Apple, IBM, etc) can/should fund these philanthropic movements.</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you rely on Google Adword vs. organic growth? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious how many of you guys rely on PPC systems like google, fb, or bing vs. growing traffic organically?<p>Is one preferred over the other? <comment><USER3> When comparing SEO to PPC the easiest comparison is to look at how PPC has instant results & can generate visitors early in a site launch in comparison to SEO. Similarly in terms of managing budget you can manage your budget and measure your ROI much more easily with PPC over SEO which often takes a much more long term approach (especially if you're going after generic competitive keywords)

\- 86% of web searchers trust SEO listings more than sponsored PPC listings AND 85% of clicks resulting from a search are on the organic links rather than the paid ads.

\- Although only 50% of web searchers are aware of the difference between organic and paid search results

However, PPC use declined 60% between 2007 and 2010 AND more importantly 50% of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link.

In terms of selecting one method over the other then I know someone personally who runs a very successful bootstrapped ecommerce company which started on eBay and has since expanded into real stores - he now has over 100 employees & makes tens of millions in profit per year. His whole business has been generated via PPC although recently he has started doing SEO by hiring some in house SEO staff.

However, ideally you should be looking at implementing _both_ strategies. SEO and PPC are both important & if you have an PPC ad slot and are #1 on Google then you have 2 of the first few results a user clicks on & from my experience - the first 5 results take up 88.1% of all clicks[1]

Statistics Used From: [http://killerinfographics.submitinfographics.com/wp- content/...](http://killerinfographics.submitinfographics.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/SEOvsPPC.jpg)

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3766000>

</comment><comment><USER4> My partner and I always thought that paid is great to start with then organic traffic should take over.

We have real difficulty getting results from organic traffic. We now are regularly number 1 or 2 on google organic search for our exact key phrase. We're seeing very little traffic and zero enquiries which is very disheartening.

However if we run a PPC campaign for the same keyphrase we get 20 - <USER2> enquiries per day (dependant on our budget) and 5 to 10 enquiries.

Our paid ad is above our own organic listing and the paid wins hands down every time. If we stop the ads, another ad beats us to the click.

I think ads are being clicked far more than we realise.

We would love to rely on organic traffic but only paid traffic gets results.

</comment><comment><USER5> It depends on your business, work out what the average revenue per visitor is and from that derive how much you'd be willing to pay for an extra visitor.

If that amount is greater than the cost of PPC advertising then using PPC is a no-brainer.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use both. Rather than rely on one or the other, they each have their own uses for specific things. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't. Reasoning varies a lot.

I should note that I don't think of organic traffic as purely SEO.</comment>


Concept train doesn't need to stop to pick up passengers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-train-doesnt-stop-at-stations-2013-12

<comment><USER2> This has been posted many times before, and it's a wonderful idea. I remember designing something like this when I was eight, I suspect in response to reading a short story in Analog. I should try to find that story again as it was quite a good one. It involved aeroplanes and shuttles rather than trains, but the idea was the same.

But I've started to think about it again. Suppose you have some sort of mini- shuttle that will rendezvous with the main transport. This mini-shuttle then accelerates and decelerates to and from each station. See the video, you'll get the point.

What happens if the door sticks? What happens if a passenger is partway through the connection when the separation has to happen? What about passengers with limited mobility? What if there are more passengers that need to get off than can be accommodated?

There are some major engineering challenges, _really_ major engineering challenges.

I'd love to see it working, but I wouldn't be among the first to ride in it, and I seriously doubt it would get approval in Europe or North America.

But it's a wonderful idea.</comment>


My kid brother wants to start programming/web dev, ideas where to start? - <AUTHOR>

is there some sites out there that will give him some intro lessons? sample problems?<p>He's 14. <comment><USER2> W3schools.com is an awesome place to get started. It doesn't teach how to make a site secure in the least, but as far as getting a kid stoked on the different web technologies out there, it can't be beat. Super easy tutorials, clean layout, and simple sample problems</comment>


What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.wsj.com/image-grid/year-end-science/ <comment><USER2> The percent change is often a much more informative value than the absolute change. Also, when something decreases by x% it requires more than an x% increase to get back where you started. Political discourse would greatly benefit from these two simple facts.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, I came here to suggest that knowledge of Simpson's Paradox ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox)) could resolve a lot of political fights. And Simpson's paradox is only applicable when data is presented as percentages, so the key to unraveling the paradox is to show the absolute numbers and changes, instead of the percentages.

The real problem is that percentages hide the size of the groups, and even if you show the sizes of the groups separately, focusing on the percentages still obscures the reality unless this is called out explicitly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Medians.

Average is last and first statistical measure that most people learn and it really isn't that useful. If we could just switch to medians and ban the average I would be really happy (and so would the world).

<comment><USER5> Median, mean, and mode are all types of averages. But yes, I was just reading Nassim Taleb today scolding the multitude for not recognizing the difference between median and mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wrongful convictions: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_fallacy)

Don't understand what your STD test really means: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox)

Correlation/causation conflation.

<comment><USER7> Both are basically people not understanding Bayes' law. Or, equivalently, the difference between (posterior) probability and likelihood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Backpressure. (Includes modeling something as producer/consumer in order to reason about it)

It boils down to learning how to say no, but in practice it smoothes out demand spikes and makes life much more predictable.

It can be applied to personal fines (only consume "wants" as fast as you can produce "surplus"), consulting (only consume "new clients" as fast as you produce "working fine") to maintain a decent work life balance, as well as many other areas.

</comment><comment><USER9> Order of operations. Pains me how so much of the population can't do simple maths.

<comment><USER7> These two are not equivalent. A few missing parentheses isn't what causes people to be unable to do simple maths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The scientific method itself.

</comment><comment><USER11> The thought relates to going back and refining your original theory such that:

1\. You create a hypothesis

2\. Prove your theory

3\. Publish your theory (and maybe discovery)

Most of the time it ends here. It should continue this way:

4\. Practically apply your theory

5\. Create a product or widget founded on your theory

6\. Put this product into the hands of consumers

7\. Make observations and watch how customers/consumers use it in ways you could never predict

8\. Use this data to go back and refine your original theory and start the cycle over again.

</comment><comment><USER12> Gravity (how it works with matter).</comment>


Ask HN: How much would you pay to have your invoices paid instantly? - aero- I'm wondering how much you would be willing to pay, either as a percentage or a flat fee, to have every invoice you send out to clients paid within 24 hours? <comment><AUTHOR> As a managed IT service provider - absolutely nothing. The current fastest method, credit cards, we don't generally accept. The rates we pay to accept credit cards or PayPal are already so high - I don't normally accept those types of payments unless the customer is willing to pay a service fee. In Canada, we have Interac, which is also instant. But not many of my customers want to use that either because, you guessed it, service fees. Even then, these payment methods make their lives easier, not mine. I've built my business around 15 days min to receive payments. 99% of them are fine with cheques. So there isn't much incentive for me to consider this.

<comment> aero- I feel like as somebody that works as a freelancer a big problem for me is transparent payment terms (net15, net30 ect.) and having money come in sooner is always better, net present value.

It seems so funny that delayed payments are preferred by so many but it makes sense. People want to get paid fast, but very few want to pay OTHERS fast.

<comment> aero- Also I think a more widespread adoption and onboarding to the ACH and soon the RTP rails would help a bunch. (USA)</comment></comment></comment>


The Covert NSA Agent Sitting Next to You - <AUTHOR> http://blog.baugues.com/covert-agent

<comment><USER2> I started getting worried about this after Google announced encryption between servers recently, because if they have spies there, then that move might not be much of an improvement. Google should start triple-checking everyone working on security there and with access to the encryption keys, even if they are "friends".

This is what NSA created, a society filled with paranoia. But after all the revelations about them having spies inside companies, and subverting standards bodies and so on, only extreme paranoia will protect us.

It might subside a little if we manage to repeal the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act, fire everyone at the top right now that has been in charge of this: the current president, the current FISA court, the current Intelligence Committee, and then dramatically cut NSA's budget, the "black budget", and establish much stronger oversight over NSA.

That doesn't seem easy at all right now, and it's going to take a while to fix everything, so start getting paranoid until then!</comment>


Discovery Communications Sells HowStuffWorks.com  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303825604579516010459640366-lMyQjAxMTA0MDIwMTEyNDEyWj

<comment><USER2> I really enjoyed HowStuffWorks back in the day. But it kind of failed to keep up. Discovery wanted to use it to extend their pseudo-educational, but actually entertainment, brand. I think that HSW would have been better suited to work towards education and not towards entertainment.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, if you look at the type of content they were putting out in 2003: [https://web.archive.org/web/20030404162012/http://auto.howst...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030404162012/http://auto.howstuffworks.com/four- wheel-drive1.htm) and the type of content they're putting out in 2014: [http://www.howstuffworks.com/](http://www.howstuffworks.com/)

Pretty stark difference.

<comment><USER4> I was going to complain that you aren't being entirely fair by comparing an article page to the main landing page, then I saw the actual article page as it stands currently. [http://www.howstuffworks.com/four-wheel- drive.htm](http://www.howstuffworks.com/four-wheel-drive.htm)

What. A. Mess.

The pagination above and below the article content is mismatched, the helpful "table of contents" style pagination is replaced with useless numbers that only display the section title on hover (which I discovered only by accident), and there's just SO much more distracting visual cruft.

And as an added bonus, the "More stuff to explore" section highlights Buzzfeed/Upworthy-style article like "10 People You Probably Didn't Know Were Black", and "5 Ways to Prevent Wrinkles". The latter is veering into Cosmo territory...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to love HowStuffWorks but their quality went way down. It became mostly ads, and 7 pages to click thru that should have been just one.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, it used to be inspiring for me as a student, and now has become such an embarrassment. "10 Sneaky Ways Technology Betrays Cheating Cheaters" is the most popular article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope Josh and Chuck's Stuff You Should Know podcast continues. I've listened to it for many years now. Does anyone have any information about it?

<comment><USER8> Me too. It's a great podcast. I never check out the website though, despite the pleadings from Josh and Chuck. I recall recently they were encouraging listeners to play the podcasts directly from the website, that the website has been revamped, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many years ago, HowStuffWorks was making amazing, in-depth technical explanation articles, but I think Wikipedia has won that game (and it links to more in-depth references if you want them).

The HowStuffWorks podcasts are pretty good. Maybe the new owner will let them go and they'll land safely at places like NPR, TWIT, or 5by5 (or even Revision3 heh).

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how this will effect their podcasts (e.g. Stuff you Should Know). Will they remain HowStuffWorks properties or will Discovery fully embrace them (they claim ownership by both companies at the moment).

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, $250 million in 2007.

<comment><USER12> Google is killing more and more companies. for Google to continue their artificial growth of 20+%, they need to send less people to other sites and more to YouTube, G+...hoping they click on ads. Google is eating its tail

<comment><USER13> Not if they continue to expand non-web related businesses (automated cars).

<comment><USER14> 95% of Google's revenue comes from ads, and they're probably at least 5 years away from drawing revenue from their auto/robot projects.

<comment><USER13> Are you suggesting that a company can't have current valuation based on speculated future returns?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What open-source projects are you looking at? - <AUTHOR> I have found reading code is a good way for me to improve my skills. I am looking at Mattermost[1] and Spectrum[2] to improve my React.js.<p>What open-source projects are you currently looking at?<p>[1] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp [2] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/servo/servo](https://github.com/servo/servo) [https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte](https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am looking at Singularity for my Go program developement

[https://github.com/sylabs/singularity](https://github.com/sylabs/singularity)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://github.com/autoai-org/CVPM](https://github.com/autoai-org/CVPM)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://github.com/godotengine/godot](https://github.com/godotengine/godot)</comment>


Ask HN: Software Recommendation for public facing wiki site - <AUTHOR> I would like to make a crowd sourced website where people can edit MVP, Tools, Organization structure, commentary on marketing of new startups. For this, I need a good hackable wiki site that is easily extendable (so I can potentially put ads on). Any recommendations will be appreciated. Mediawiki is good but not beautiful for my taste. Opensource would be great. <comment><USER2> A comparison of various Django-based wiki applications and projects: [https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/wikis/](https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/wikis/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Will check it out</comment></comment>


Germanwings Flight to Düsseldorf from Barcelona Crashes in Southern France - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/world/europe/germanwings-crash.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

<comment><USER2> Playback of the recorded flight:

[http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/d-aipx/#5d42675](http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/d-aipx/#5d42675)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://es.flightaware.com/live/flight/GWI9525/history/20150...](https://es.flightaware.com/live/flight/GWI9525/history/20150324/0835Z/LEBL/EDDL/tracklog)

It's scary how steep downwards the altitude graph looks like at the end.

<comment><USER4> It's not more steeper than a usual descent in a typical landing approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Live updates via the BBC: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/32030778](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/32030778)

</comment><comment><USER6> Am I wrong or is there a lot of plane crashes recently ? Are all those planes hitting some sort of expiration date mid flight ?

<comment><USER7> It is possible that you are under a false impression here. Factors for this might be the availability of news reports about crashes (e.g. you just didn't get to know about all those crashes in, say, Africa in the 90s) or an increase of air traffic while the flight:crash ratio might be stable I haven't looked up all those numbers but it is a good thing to keep these factors in mind.

A similar issue is the perceived increase of crime, while the actual numbers tell a different story: an astonishing decrease of crime rate since the 90s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is this hacker news?</comment>


Trump accepts deal for temporary end to painful shutdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47007081 <comment><USER2> The summary of his speech was:

Government will re-open through to Feb 15th.

Back pay will be paid ASAP.

He spoke about the wall for quite a while.

If congress doesn't agree to fund his wall, he will shut the government back down on Feb 15th.

<comment><USER3> I feel like I've repeatedly been proven wrong when I have these kinds of thoughts, but surely, he can't be stupid enough to try this stunt again. After 35 days of hurting people, he got _nothing_. He must realize shutting the government down to try to force his will is counter-productive, right?

<comment><USER4> Negotiations fail to come to a close due to both parties, not one party. Saying one party is "stupid", has been "hurting people" and "got nothing" is far from the full picture. Both sides are attempting to "force [their] will".

What may seem reasonable to one party may seem unreasonable to the other, whether or not either party shows it outwardly.

<comment><USER2> Yes and no. In this case, Trump is basically holding government hostage. If congress doesn't want a wall, he cannot force a wall on them.

EDIT: Better yet, according to that logic, a mugging is just a failed negotiation. If the victim was just more forthcoming with their money, it wouldn't have been a problem!

<comment><USER5> But the congressional/democrat leaders are on record from just a few years discussing the importance of border security including barriers. Now that Trump wants that, too, even the idea of doing so is considered immoral.

For a lot of people (obviously, not all, and I have no clue as to a percentage), it really has absolutely zero to do a wall or barrier, and it is completely about thwarting the president. The behavior of both parties is starting to disgust me.

<comment><USER6> I think his rhetoric has a lot to do with how people view it now. But the funding that you're talking about to repair and expand existing barriers was already used and the barrier exists to my knowledge. Dems also offered billions for immigration and border security that he rejected because he specifically wants a wall, despite the fact that it won't have the greatest impact which is visa overstays.

<comment><USER7> Democrats dont want to stop visa overstays either (they want to abolish ICE), so how is that an argument against the wall?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Top comment on New York Times says this is deflection from the Roger Stone indictment. I think it's likely this is true, since he didn't get anything solid politically. He might let the government shut down again and pull the same rabbit out the hat next time Mueller issues an indictment.

On a related note, one article I really enjoyed a few months back was the decreasing relevance of the nation-state in an era of prolonged peace. It seems like solid logic: power cannot exist where it is not regularly exercised, and in an era of conflict and deadlock power can be exercised most at the local level, where the error kernel is smaller.

[https://aeon.co/essays/the-end-of-a-world-of-nation- states-m...](https://aeon.co/essays/the-end-of-a-world-of-nation-states-may- be-upon-us)

</comment><comment><USER2> Off-topic, but damn HN... I submitted the CNBC _and_ CBSNews versions of this. One got zero up-votes, and the other got flagged.

<comment><USER9> Now this one's flagged. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER2> Oh well, I can see why HN wouldn't want every passing Trump scandal to show up on the front page, but this is pretty big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So if he's going to shut the government down on the 15th (because the wall isn't getting funded), what's the point of reopening it? His base will be ticked off, that's for sure.

<comment><USER11> >His base will be ticked off, that's for sure.

His base wants the wall, fully funded, and no quarter given to the Democrats or their agenda. His base also believes government is corrupt, bloated, wasteful and infested with leftists and globalist elites. This is exactly what his base wants.

<comment><USER12> His base includes a number of people voted into office. It's really kind of odd that they can't even trust when their own party has the entirety of government. I don't understand why people dislike any government, yet don't like if you call them anarchists either. The arguments aren't consistent. The odd thing is most people do not disagree with a wall in places that make sense. A wall for a wall's sake is just pointless. I'd rather put that into tools or manpower (or heaven forbid pay increases). A single drone with heat vision could scan entire sectors, be controlled remotely and wouldn't require using eminent domain. Also it couldn't be dug out, cut down, or climbed over or through. As General Patton is quoted to have said "fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man".

<comment><USER11> The wall doesn't make sense from a practical standpoint - there isn't enough illegal immigration over the southern border to justify billions of dollars to wall it off entirely, where existing security measures and changes in immigration policy might have a better effect.

It does, however, make sense as a symbol of right-wing xenophobia and populist defiance against globalism. If Trump's supporters are focused on the wall, maybe they won't notice any of the other promises he's not keeping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is this flagged?</comment>


Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html <comment><USER2> I have actually been rather obsessed with this lately. You'll see that there's a few problems he runs into that he deems insurmountable, which sounds like a challenge! Specifically, there's the issue with an instruction which is effectively a computed goto:

A jump instruction that takes an address and then jumps to the address STORED at that address. Since there is no way to know at compile time what addresses are going to stored at a place, you're forced to then dynamically emulate the whole memory space of the actual NES to accurately calculate it, thus defeating the whole point.

Is that the only solution though? a head scratcher!

Further are issues with parts of code that, on some level seems to be taking inspiration from genetics: Jump to one alignment, and the instructions get interpreted one way, jump to a different alignment and the same sequence of bytes is interpreted by the CPU as an entirely different set of instructions. I wonder if that could be resolved by creating a different source code path for each alignment using flow analysis- A space saving technique effectively getting uncompressed.

<comment><USER3> I suppose it's possible this could be considered "emulating the whole memory space," though I wouldn't consider it that, but you could just generate an offset table for all jumpable memory locations and use them to calculate the correct offset. It's quite likely you could even do that in less than O(n) space with some time trade-offs.

<comment><USER2> I was commenting on my memory of the article.

Upon rereading it, it seems the real insurmountable challenge is interrupts! It always seems like at that level of detail with this stuff, it becomes a decision to go slower in order to simulate NES hardware accurately. But my question is: how much code depends on that accuracy, and how much can you compromise for speed? A further question I have is can you do a cross game analysis of the whole NES library and find common patterns, reused functions, that you decompile into a kind of high level conversion that would hopefully or gloss over the need for specific functions to have that low level accuracy.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure Nesticle had nothing resembling accurate timing, and it could run most games.

You can go well beyond several of the NES's limitations by fiddling with PPU parameters between scanlines, but that takes careful timing and almost nothing actually does that. Might only be democoders. If you're willing to ignore the possibility that someone did that, you should be able to just process a whole frame's worth of PPU at NMI time.

Super Mario Bros spends most of its time in an infinite loop, waiting for NMI to pull it out so it can start processing the next frame. If NMI triggers before this, you get a lag frame. Plenty of popular emulators get the wrong lag frames, but only speedrunners and TASers really care. So, for this game, you could possibly toss out the timing entirely and trigger NMI when you hit a busy loop. Your emulator will completely ignore all lag frames, but most people won't notice for at least this game.

(It's been over a decade since I was into ROM hacking so my memory could be faulty on any of this.)

<comment><USER5> Interrupts need to be fairly accurate. Lots of games use them to have unmoving status bars, and rely on them triggering on just the right scanline.

<comment><USER2> I wonder if for things that happen between and among scan lines, how difficult it would be to statically analyse the code to find out what's running during that time, and precalculate when the writes would fire.

another approach could be getting runtime information from a running emulator, and record it onto a file the compiler could use to close the gaps you need but can't get from static analysis.

<comment><USER5> The issue is that nothing is stopping the developers from doing all kinds of crazy loops and jumps in the code that's invoked by the interrupt, making it into a halting problem.

Unless the interrupt handler is trivially simple, you can't know how many cycles it will take to finish.

<comment><USER2> the advantage the compiler writer has in this case is it doesn't have to deal with _any possible_ code, just this set of well known already released and frozen in time programs.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that really avoids the problem. I mean, what if you do a JMP to an address decided based on a value gained from player input? How is the compiler supposed to guess that in advance?

<comment><USER2> the mathematical proof of the halting problem, as I understand it, would in this context be based on the notion that user input could somehow direct the program to write a program in ram and get it to execute.

This has in fact been achieved in games like super mario world or pokemon!

It seems to me sometimes that educated programmers call halting problem too early on situations like this where you don't actually need a rock solid "provably correct" compiler, just a compiler that does something reasonable in this bounded set of cases, and we don't mind _that_ much if it crashes sometimes, since it's not like an NES game is a rocket or a therac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> here's the previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838326)

(i've realized; is this even necessary with the 'past' button?)

<comment><USER7> I never knew there was a "past" button...

<comment><USER8> Oh dear, I'm coming up on two and a half years on HN (time flies!) and I didn't know either...

<comment><USER9> Don't worry, it's recent and mostly just designed to help you figure out if you should flag an article as a dupe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't help it. Reading this feels a bit like hidden political propaganda. It's ridden with subtle and not so subtle negative references to gcc, the fsf and ideals.

Probably it's me reading too much into it but it makes it hard to enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have information with how some of the "multi cart" games worked, like Mario/Duck Hunt/Track Meet? Surely, all 3 games didn't fit in 32k right?... right?

[http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/3-in-1_Super_Mario_Bros._/_Du...](http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/3-in-1_Super_Mario_Bros._/_Duck_Hunt_/_World_Class_Track_Meet)

<comment><USER12> An educated guess (having coded the NES) is that it's simply a bigger ROM, and the cart contained some kind of MMC chip [0] which allows different sections from the ROM to be paged-in - the menu screen contains the code to page-in the applicable bank from the ROM, and then the game runs per normal, not being aware of any of this.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Too low level for me. But since that I've started go as my first low level statically typed language, I think I'll just bookmark this article and may be read after a few years!

<comment><USER14> > Too low level for me. But since that I've started go as my first low level > statically typed language

I don't think any garbage collected language can be called "low level". If you really want to go low level, learn C and ASM. Manual memory management is the real deal.

<comment><USER15> I don't think any compiled or assembled language can be called "low level". If you really want to go low level, learn Machine code and CPU architecture.

...

I don't think any executed language can be called low level. If you really want to go low level, learn hardware design, VHDL/VERLIOG

...

I don't think any hardware description language can be called low level. If you really want to go low level, build your own logic gates out of transistors

...

<comment><USER16> I'm with Nietzsche, the real low-level programming involves feeling new feelings and somehow communicating/philosophizing/programming them into other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> gcc -Wall -fno-diagnostics-color

If you are going to list architectures supported, also list the ones gcc supports - it's, basically, _all_ of them.

Llvm+clang is nice, but not better, drink the kool aid. Gcc performance is still higher, and gcc is _free_ software.

<comment><USER18> Clang is also free... Just not your preferred definition of Free.

<comment><USER17> Free as in free beer, not free as in free speech :P

<comment><USER19> The FSF considers BSD a free software license, it's just non-copyleft. There was a lot of discussion on Groklaw about taking BSD code, modifying it, and slapping a GPL license on top. I believe the consensus was this is OK, since you are still respecting the BSD license terms.

<comment><USER20> also from [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.en.html..](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html..).

>Freedom 3 includes the freedom to release your modified versions as free software. A free license may also permit other ways of releasing them; in other words, it does not have to be a copyleft license. However, a license that requires modified versions to be nonfree does not qualify as a free license.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NoSQL – Back to the Future or Yet Another DB Feature? - <AUTHOR> https://speakerdeck.com/u/mas/p/nosql-back-to-the-future-or-yet-another-db-feature

<comment><USER2> I hate it when speakers talk about "NoSQL" without specifying what they are actually bitching about, which in this case is clearly Key-Value/Document oriented databases. Of the non-relational databases, there are actually many which provide everything you want in a relational DB (separation of logical and physical within the DB) as well as storing the schema as PART of the data instead of a physically configured separate entity. These databases are called graph databases, and they are awesome. I am convinced they would have been the major databases of today, if not for the fact that it takes way more computing power and fancy algorithms to work with graph data models.

<comment><USER3> The real problem with graph databases is that they do not scale because the algorithms used parallelize poorly. Partitioning graphs is a longstanding challenge in computer science.

It is literally equivalent to the NoSQL "we don't do joins" algorithm problem. Unlike most NoSQL databases, the basic operation of a graph database is built on join algorithms (edge traversal is a relational join). If you figure out how to parallelize ad hoc joins on large clusters then graph databases become a viable solution for non-trivial databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always cringe a bit when people point to papers[0] when it comes to software that has is supposed to have real world usage. Just because a paper described a system that handles distributed transactions well doesn't mean that this software exists or will be anywhere near usable in the next 5 years. Even if they are, only very few papers actually talk about a system that is already in production use. The few that do (bigtable, dynamo) usually are great though.

0: [http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/calvin- sigmod12.p...](http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/calvin-sigmod12.pdf)

<comment><USER5> AFAIK the scalable SQL work _from the 1980s_ was actually shipped by Tandem.

<comment><USER6> (re that Tandem paper: it's IMS / a hierarchical DB that they describe though)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what you're referring to; Jim Gray's work looks pretty relational to me. [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/papers/Be...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gray/papers/Benchmark_NS2_TR_89.4.pdf) is just one example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't but help agreeing with this. However, I think NoSQL is an important tool when dealing with 'big' data (billions of records). NoSQL is also awesome for 'accelerating'/caching standard SQL (memcache to cache sql results, etc).

At the end of the day, both have important roles to play and, in many respects, compliment each other.

</comment><comment><USER8> By the time a NoSQL "database" is ready for prime-time, it will have all the features of a real database.

<comment><USER9> What is "unreal" about current NoSQL Databases?

<comment><USER8> I guess you're new to Hacker News?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3982142>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3954596>

Real databases have real features like transactions, and guaranteed writes to disk, and not retarded security. Crazy shit like a commonly-used query language and tool support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest problem with NoSQL (whatever that may mean) is that there is no formal framework to reason about NoSQL in a uniform manner as opposed to SQL systems and bare data structures where strong formalisms exist that can give hard results on costs. IMHO, this is because NoSQL is a "conceptual bag" in which anything is thrown that doesn't have a SQL interpreter in it. That has many contradictions.

E.g. Google App Engine's GQL, Facebook's FQL and Yahoo YQL not to mention Hive all have a very SQL like syntax. So what about all this is NoSQL ? SELECT, WHERE and FROM are OK in a NoSQL database?

Dig further and you'll find that these are all "No-Join" data bases and it's the badly scaling cost of the Join operation that gave SQL a bad name and the NoSQL community a bad category name.

Bottom line there needs to be a unifying formalism to talk about NoSQL as a category. Which ("Tada Boom!") gives me a seque and a pun to refer to a paper published in the IEEE about using Category Theory to describe NoSQL.

I will critique it elsewhere, but suffice it to say that if I have to do a PhD in Pure Math to design a database it's a non-starter. (Aside I have a "PhD" in Pure Math - everything but thesis)

So anyhoo bottom line - Missing: a formal framework to reason about databases that don't use SQL or Joins.

Without that it is not even possible to decide what is the membership criterion for something to be called NoSQL, especially when NoSQL is defined as "Not Only SQL" = SQL UNION ~SQL = the whole F __ing universe.

So NoSQL is a label that has no ability to make logical distinctions. And NoSQL as a grab bag of technologies has no formal way to reason about it.

To make any sense this needs to be fixed, before any arguments about this are even worth having.

[My creds: 20+ years in the DB world as developer, architect, instructor; including 4+ yrs in the NoSQL business, including one year as emp #2 and VP of BizDev at CouchOne, and including lead developer of a project that used CouchDB in an National Science Foundation funded project back in 2008/2009 (slashdotted and survived) and currently using Couch, Mongo, NodeJS in various projects]

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised to see no mention of postrelational/multivalue databases. Postrelational DBs played in the 80's and 90's, and are still widely used in the world of big iron.

It's historically inaccurate to state we went from file-based databases to relational ones and are now slipping back to file-based ones.

Rather, both the relational and non-relational DB worlds have taken many ideas from the post-relational world (even if not intentionally.)

The SQL/NoSQL + ORM + MVC stack of today is much closer to what postrelational DB's were like rather than what SQL apps were like back in the day. Every generation thinks they invented sex, and high level database programming...

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

<comment><USER6> You are right. In the talk I gave I briefly referred to Hierarchical Database for instance. It's not in the slides because of the timeframe for the talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> While the author may be making a good point, I couldn't understand it as presented. Instead of reading an interesting article, I stared at small screens of half sentences, tables, and pictures, with very little explanation. Slides without a narrator are a poor way to communicate.

<comment><USER6> Yes, several slides require more context. The talk was recorded and, hopefully, will be available online at <http://www.nosql-matters.org/> soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Beat a dead horse much? This has already been slashdotted to death. I like Erik Meijer's take: it should've been named CoSQL (dual to SQL): <http://bit.ly/feNxRE>

</comment><comment><USER14> A high level and theoretic NoSQL debate doesn't help. We know all the strengths and limitations of both SQL and NoSQL. And we know when to use what.

Moreover, NoSQL does not equal NoSQL—there're so huge differences between a Mongo, a Riak and a Couch. And there's much more than that beyond SQL (graph based DB etc.).

What matters: The experience.

I used MongoDB with Node one or two weeks ago for this first time and I was really impressed when I got it. There are many uses case where I wouldn't employ NoSQL or Mongo but there're as many where I would go w/ Mongo when usually relied on SQL.

Why: working completely without schemes and even migrations is awesome. Just save a record in Node/Mongo with the native interface and the system is setting up the respective table and even DB in the same moment if not existant. Schemeless is not always the way to go but if you want to prototype or to get quickly out of the door, it's an mind-blowing experience (and it's enough for many web projects). And with the JS interface it's just incredible and totally different to other NoSQL counterparts.

</comment><comment><USER15> NoSQL is trading off ACID transactions for scalability/throughput/latency. Both Calvin and Omid can add ACID transactions to any NoSQL for about nx decrease in throughput.

NoSQL is about choice. Period.

<comment><USER16> NoSQL is giving up FAR more than ACID. It is giving up the ability to consume the stored data in a beautifully concise and expressive manner.

edit: 'the ability to'

<comment><USER17> If my data is document based then how is SQL going to be more concise and expressive than JSON ?

Say I have a domain model that involves a primary object e.g. User with lots of maps and arrays then how is SQL going to be better then ? Lots of tables and joins better than a single document. I think not.

<comment><USER16> If your data is a User object with maps and arrays, and you design a data structure which gets you the result in exactly that format, you _are_ giving up the ability to ask other questions of this data. You are giving up the ability to ask _many_ different kinds of questions (expressive) in a relatively simple way (concise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't agree with calling these databases "NoSQL", because it grants the undeserved premise that SQL is somehow the center of the database universe. Politically that may be so, but technically, it's not. Nothing anoints SQL databases as being somehow intrinsically "right" or the logical starting point or standard by which all databases should be compared. SQL is merely popular.

<comment><USER16> I don't think the premise is undeserved. SQL IS the center of the database universe. If we use SQL to mean the general concept of relational databases, then it is true across even more dimensions of the universe.

Relational databases and sql should be considered the pride and joy of computer science AND software engineering (with logic and math being the grand parents in this increasingly confused and mixed metaphor).

<comment><USER18> "SQL IS the center of the database universe."

Politically, yes. SQL/relational wins the popularity contest. But so what?

Technically, no, it's not the center. It's merely the most popular, for the time being. This is a temporary state of affairs.

<comment><USER19> "Merely the most popular"? LOL. It's the only formally proven, mathematically correct representation and querying of data sets.

Not that most RDBMS conform to the relational theory 100% (or even 90%), but everything else is mere re-invention of the wheel badly.

As in: "Hey, let's trade ACID, security, uniform access to data by all apps" for cheap speed and ill-thought developer convenience.

<comment><USER18> "LOL. It's the only formally proven, mathematically correct representation and querying of data sets."

Someone led you down the garden path.

There is absolutely no proof that RDBMS is objectively correct in any _meaningful_ sense whatsoever. Did someone invent an _arbitrary_ standard to measure it by, and then prove that it met that standard? Sure. But that's a far cry from a claim that RDBMS's are somehow "formally proven." That's just pure mathematical silliness and marketing propaganda.

<comment><USER19> Who said anything about RDBMS? It's relational algebra we're talking about, and the reasonings pertain to the relational algebra operators.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Lexen.fun - <AUTHOR> https://lexen.fun <comment><AUTHOR> Hello! I would like to present my side project lexen.fun - a place for chatting and meeting people.

It was also a valuable learning experience for me - HTML/Javascript/CSS and SvelteJS (big fan!).

First time creating something from the ground up, hope you enjoy.

      - No ads
      - No email/phone/social registration
      - <USER2>
      - Public chatrooms
      - Users can can create/delete their own chatrooms
      - Optional password-protected chatrooms
      - Share chatroom links
      - Big collection of emoji (also markdown support)
      - Browse and add GIFs
      - Browse and add Youtube videos
      - Support for Avatars
      - Online presence system
      - Block/unblock participants
      - Private messages to one or more users inside chatroom (using '@@')
      - A simple help chatbot
      - Text formatting options
      - 'Mention' system (@) or (@@)
      - Optional sound notifications
      - Optional control of external images
      - An area for contact and feedbacks
      - A profile area to change Avatar and/or user password
      - Mobile friendly
      - Static site, without server side layer
      - <USER3>

Development tools (which I highly recommend):

       - https://svelte.dev/ (frontend)

       - https://sapper.svelte.dev/ ('export to static site' feature)

       - https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore (persistence layer)

       - https://firebase.google.com/docs/database (for online presence system)

       - https://github.com/zurb/tribute ('mention' system)

       - https://github.com/joeattardi/svelte-tabs (the tabs in emoji/GIFs/Youtube)

       - https://github.com/kaisermann/svelte-i18n (i18n)

       - https://github.com/joeattardi/svelte-click-outside (control of click area of some components)</comment>


Double Stealth - <AUTHOR> http://doublestealth.blogspot.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> Ah. Someone's posted Double Stealth. The follow up to my parody of the 'day in a life of a startup CEO' from the other day: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166183>

</comment><comment><USER3> This feels like a parody blog.

<comment><USER4> It is a parody blog. Took me a minute to figure that out too.</comment></comment>


"When we built Rap Genius, we were high the entire time - <AUTHOR> http://thehustle.co/4-thugged-out-internet-tactics-i-used-to-get-noticed-on-the-internet

<comment><USER2> Yeah well, most people wont accomplish much when they are high all the time.

<comment><USER3> Most people won't accomplish much.</comment></comment>


IBM Tests Controversial Brain Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/536326/ibm-tests-mobile-computing-pioneers-controversial-brain-algorithms/

<comment><USER2> I'm very excited by this and Numenta's work in general. I've been experimenting with their open source software, NuPIC [1][2], a lot on my own and I see potential. Its very different from existing machine learning algorithms, and they continually tweak it to reflect anything they learn about the neocortex.

[1] [http://numenta.org/](http://numenta.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/numenta/nupic/](https://github.com/numenta/nupic/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone familiar with the matter?</comment>


Spinner Rage - <AUTHOR> http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/10/spinner-rage/ <comment><USER2> (Sidetrack) Does the slightly rotated text look all jumbly to anyone else? Here's what I'm seeing <http://i.imgur.com/7KE3O.png>

I can think of a bunch of legit uses for CSS3 transforms, but rotating an entire body of text isn't one of them.</comment>


Automated Sports Reporters Coming This Summer - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/robot_sports_reporters.php

<comment><USER2> Also see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1213092></comment>


Inventor stumped by 43-year patent delay  - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-inventor01-20140301,0,255272.story

<comment><USER2> I've become extremely jaded against intellectual property recently. Far too often, IP law is used to for long, drawn out legal battles that do nothing to help society, while costing the tax payers a ton of money.

Property is a way to deal with _scarcity_. Two people cannot simultaneously wear a shirt, for example, so one of them "owns" the shirt. Two people cannot both drive a car to different locations at the same time, so one person "owns" the car. Of course, you can lend your shirt or car to someone else, but the final say as to how those two resources are used belongs to the owner.

The product of intellectual labor, using this scarcity condition, cannot be considered someone's property. The only tangential relationship IP has to property is that one person uses force, namely, the government, to prevent others from using "their" idea for economic gain. This scarcity is artificial because absent that threat of force, everyone would be able to use the idea freely. Physical goods are subject to scarcity as a consequence of physical law; a car acn't be in my driveway and your driveway at the same time. (This argument applies directly to patents and copyrights, but also to trademarks in that a word or phrase can't be used to market something for economic gain.)

Besides the moral argument, which I know some people don't care about (it is subjective, of course), there is a utilitarian argument. Some act as if, without IP law, no one would be willing to create new ideas; it's as if the only incentive for creation is economic gain from a government-granted monopoly on an idea. Just take a look at the news to see that IP law is more commonly associated with patent trolls and corporate legal battles than protecting Joe Inventor's new idea.

At the very least, I wish people would stop comparing downloading movies and music from the internet as stealing. If I steal your car, you can't use it. If I "steal" a song from the record label by copying the exact sequence of bytes that represent a song from my buddy's hard drive to my hard drive, we can both still listen to the song. I understand that some people support the song creator's claim to the song as "property," in the form of IP. However, even then, there has to be a middle ground between copying against the wishes of the song's creator, and _theft_ in the eyes of the law.

<comment><USER3> _At the very least, I wish people would stop comparing downloading movies and music from the internet as stealing._

Games released via Steam have shown evidence that when a singleplayer game is unavailable as a torrent for free, then people will pay for it. The counterargument to this is that most people who torrent wouldn't pay for it anyway. But I assert that there is a third class of people: those who first check to see if it's available for free, and if not, pay for it. Whether these people constitute a significant portion of revenue is an open question, but it's hard to classify their actions from a moral standpoint as something other than stealing.

The closest classification other than "stealing" would probably be "sampling." I've often been frustrated at an inability to try out a certain kind of dev tool before buying it outright, and their free version is usually missing features which I really need to test. But there needs to be a large-scale study as to whether people really behave this way normally, or if they just take what they can get for free. Unfortunately it's difficult to find an unbiased source of funding for such a study, so the resulting research paper would probably be slanted in one moral direction or the other instead of presenting the raw data.

It's not an easy question to answer. I think technological capabilities will decide how companies will behave, because those who don't accept reality will go out of business.

<comment><USER4> > Games released via Steam have shown evidence that when a singleplayer game > is unavailable as a torrent for free, then people will pay for it. The > counterargument to this is that most people who torrent wouldn't pay for it > anyway. But I assert that there is a third class of people: those who first > check to see if it's available for free, and if not, pay for it.

What about the fourth classification of people who search for a way to buy something and who torrent it when it's not available?

Don't forget the weird restrictions placed on regional DVDs by the industry, and the laws that prevent me from converting my player to a multiregion device.

<comment><USER5> I'll add a 5th class. Those who pay, can't use the crap they get for some reason, so torrent a functional version. I fit this category often. Got out a Sopranos series. DVDs wouldn't play over airplay for some DRM reason, and torrenting was quicker than ripping. Another time it was getting a Windows install onto a MacBook Air was so painful that a torrent was easier than some horrid workaround that involved a 4 hour drive to get a disc and a disc drive as no legal method of getting a download was available (from memory it was Widows 7 about a year and a half ago, but have struck the issue of having no legal download available with legacy Widows versions at other times too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hyatt's microprocessor patent was invalidated in 1996, but not before he extracted $70 million or so in royalties from Japanese and European companies.

More context:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/20/business/for-texas- instrum...](http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/20/business/for-texas-instruments- some-bragging-rights.html)

[http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/who-invented-the- mi...](http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/who-invented-the- microprocessorhyatt-v-patent-office?news=844054)

</comment><comment><USER7> '"I respect Gilbert Hyatt's work — the process of engineering is difficult," Bassett said in a telephone interview. "But innovations are more than ideas. The broader context matters. If Gilbert Hyatt had never existed, I believe the microprocessor would have developed in the same way that it did."'

This pretty much goes for every innovation..

<comment><USER8> True. But the stronger argument is that they would also happen at roughly the same time, as hinted by the fact that many ground breaking innovations were found independently by different scientists once the necessary prerequisites were discovered. This dependence on the scientific society as whole is often conveniently ignored by those arguing for strong IP[1] protection.

And even worse is that many patents actually severely hinder the spread of the concerned innovation. As an example in cryptography see the Offset Codebook Mode for authenticated encryption. Even though the authors have now granted free use for open source software it has remained an extreme niche solution. Or see NTRUEncrypt, probably one of the best shots for post-quantum public key cryptography.

[1] I don't like term _intellectual property_ , because in it lies the quiet acceptance of the idea in general, that thoughts and knowledge can be owned. Calling it IM - intellectual monopoly - is more to the point. We should not forget that a huge part of the fight for the public opinion is won or lost by the concepts our language provide us with and limit us to.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. And updating the terminology would be good. I have a blog post draft written up relating to perhaps using the word "times" and "monies" instead of merely time and money - as the brain is likely to see "time" and "money" as a singular, fixed object, which will not allow the brain to be as fluid when thinking about times and monies - more fixed, means more scarce - more fluid, means variability and more possibility, less pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My grandfather helped Hyatt to write his patent. Interesting to finally see any press about him.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. Was he a patent attorney?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Copyright protects work that people did from being copied. It is fairly narrow.

Patents protect "ideas". It is much more likely that someone may come up with the same or similar idea completely independently, than someone would come with up the same exact computer program or book. Patent protection is very broad. Especially in the US due to the Doctrine of Equivalents.

Soo... I am for copyright protection and not patent.

</comment><comment><USER11> Gilbert P. Hyatt's patent applications, assignments and lawsuits can be found here:

[http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=1391559](http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=1391559)

</comment><comment><USER12> The biggest problem I have with the U.S Patent system is cost. They should price the fee for issuing a patient on yearly income. This would level out the playing field. It just might prevent some entities trying to patient rounded edges? And it would allow the poor investor a fighting chance of protecting their idea. The Internet has changed Everything. Brilliant ideas will be lost because of lack of funds.

<comment><USER13> No, sorry, this is a terrible idea,

Every broke idiot with a pen would write up every idea under the sun.

Companies, with resources to actually bring those ideas to life, would have to pay way more to be able to do so, driving up the cost of innovation in markets.

Also, presumably, a company would just pay a broke guy to submit the patent on their behalf, and pay them a small fee. Leading to a horrific industry of 'broke guy recruiters'.

Lone inventors are actually the primary group harming innovation here, not large companies (contrary to what your politics and gut might wish for). They patent some broad thing they have no intention of making, and sell those 'inventions' on for a quick buck to holding companies who make their money from suing people.

Patents need to not exist any more. For all the noise companies make about patents being important, if you took them away tomorrow, the world would be exactly the same. Nothing would change.</comment></comment>


Virgin Galactic to unveil commercial spaceship - <AUTHOR> http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091207/D9CED36O0.html <comment><USER2> Details now available: <http://www.virgingalactic.com/> The unveiling itself is apparently scheduled to take place at sunset for dramatic effect.</comment>


More Descent, Less Gradient - <AUTHOR> https://koaning.io/posts/more-descent-less-gradient/ <comment><USER2> The author of this post has rediscovered some fundamental ideas in optimization just by tinkering around! Neat!

> The objective function for linear regression is quadratic (and convex). This > explains why Newton's method finds the optimum in one step--the local > quadratic approximation turns out to be a global approximation!

> Notice, however, that Newton's method requires us to invert the Hessian > matrix (f''), which is expensive in general. I don't think autograd software > can get around this limitation.

> The KeepStepping optimizer is performing "gradient descent with line > search", which is a more Googleable term.

For more about optimization for solving linear systems (as is the case for linear regression), I recommend Shewchuk 1994, "Conjugate Gradient without the Agonizing Pain" [1], which has some nice geometric insight.

[1]: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate- gradi...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate-gradient.pdf)

<comment><USER3> >The author of this post has rediscovered some fundamental ideas in optimization just by tinkering around! Neat!

I checked the guy's LinkedIn, he has 5 years of econometrics and data science education. I am honestly perplexed how anything in this article could come off as new to someone with such background.

<comment><USER4> totally possible to learn a lot of economics and statistics and never have formal coursework in numerical methods for optimization.

<comment><USER2> Seems to be the case here. Regardless of the author's educational background, kudos to them for continuing to dive deeper into the math. After a math degree and three years of graduate school, I still run into blind spots almost every day, for topics that people across the hall from me would consider elementary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _You can apply calculus to estimate the stepsize you need for the current iteration. If you do this in a principled way then my results suggests that for linear regression you may only need one gradient calculation._

Yes, it's called Linear Least Squares. Gauss discovered it in 1795.

<comment><USER6> It's newtons method that he rediscovers. Are people not taught numerical methods these days? We learned it quite early in the much more general context of finding zeros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author rediscovered Newton's method. Next in line is the realisation that Hessian can be approximated and we will see the rediscovery of BFGS, L-BFGS, etc.

<comment><USER8> It reminds me of this story from a decade back: [https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/06/0416250/medical-...](https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/06/0416250/medical- researcher-rediscovers-integration)

I somehow find it more worrisome that someone who works as a "resarch advocate" and previously a "data scientist" thinks he's had novel insight into optimization over the weekend than that a medical doctor can't recognize that he's rediscovered basic numerical integration.

<comment><USER9> That is hilarious.

"The total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas."

<comment><USER8> It's a shame that it only works for glucose curves. Imagine if someone could generalize it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you are interested in this kind of thing, there are a whole host of "derivative free" optimization methods out there. One I've seen used in particular at a previous job, the Nelder-Mead (downhill simplex) method, always struck me as pretty elegant and intuitive once you've seen it explained. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelder%E2%80%93Mead_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelder%E2%80%93Mead_method))

<comment><USER11> There's a family of such methods invented by Michael Powell:

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

From what i remember, they are "trust region" methods, which work by trying to fit a quadratic function to the local neighbourhood, then analytically finding the minimum of that. The clever stuff is in how you form and update the trust region efficiently.

<comment><USER12> Both Powell's and Nelder-mead are often the only thing I can get to work when the optimization is of a quantity derived from integrating a system of differential equations. Not sure why that is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As many have pointed out, this rediscovers Newton's method. The reason that this type of approach with a "hessian pre-conditioning" is not widely used in practice is that computing the hessian is costly. Avoiding that additional computation is the idea underlying "quasi-Newton" methods like BFGS and (more loosely) popular methods like Adagrad.

</comment><comment><USER14> Many comment here are about the first section (which is indeed rediscovering the basis of optimisation) but I find the second section much more interesting.

He notes that computing the gradient is much more expensive than doing a single evaluation and that the gradient tend to stay in the same overall direction. Thus he proposes to compute the gradient only a fraction of the time and to use normal evaluations in the meantime.

Following an old gradient and only updating it when it becomes clearly obsolete seems like an interesting idea to me.

<comment><USER15> > Following an old gradient and only updating when it becomes clearly obsolete

This sounds exactly like a linesearch [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_search](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_search)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't the Hessian take O(N²) space in the number of independent variables? Like, if you have one dependent variable and a million independent variables, isn't the Hessian a trillion-element matrix, albeit a symmetric one?

<comment><USER17> There are "limited memory" algorithms which use low rank approximations.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited- memory_BFGS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS)

<comment><USER18> Also techniques that only require the product of the hessian with some arbitrary vector, which itself is just a vector. That can be easy to compute in some problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfe_conditions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfe_conditions)

This is what you want for step length in a line search for most smooth continuous unconstrained optimizations. Really a lot more important than I had expected. The post is about LLS, which is a special case.

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot of adaptive GD algos work by kind of approximating the inverse Hessian, which is usually too expensive to solve at every step. Adagrad (my go-to) essentially finds a diagonal approximation to the Hessian, which often works well in practice.

There's fancier techniques to take low-rank approximations and that sort of thing, but I feel like they're usually more trouble than their worth.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've seen this before; it was called "over-relaxing the step", I think. The idea is that even if a step is too big, we can still show that the step was in the right direction. That's the same as the author's technique of taking multiple normal-sized steps in a single direction.

I don't know the name for the other part of the author's technique, where several Newton-Raphson steps are taken, but I've seen it before, too. Crucially, the author takes ratios of first and second derivatives, rather than of the original function and first derivative, which is the right thing to do for minimization but is going to be perhaps more expensive than the original gradient computation.

</comment><comment><USER22> For the first section, where he uses a Hessian and finds he really only needs one step for linear regression -- isn't he basically doing a newton method, and it works more or less perfectly b/c with the normal squared error term (L2 norm) his problem is exactly quadratic? I haven't unpacked his math carefully but I think (quasi)newton methods are often worth a look if (a) your dimension is small enough that the the D^2 hessian is ok, and (b) your data is small enough that you can afford to us exact derivatives rather than mini-batch estimates.

<comment> nil-sec Actually there is no need for gradient decent at all if you have a linear regression problem, because you can find the min/max exactly by inverting your weight-matrix (pseudo-inverse if degenerate). Additionally, second order optimisation, i.e. using the Hessian in addition to the gradient is a well studied problem in the literature. My understanding is that it is in general not worth it because calculating the Hessian is very expensive (see e.g. [https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.09018](https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.09018)).

<comment><USER23> It seems to me that gradient descent would be, often, a better solution than the moore-penrose inverse. Is it not more efficient in most cases?

<comment><USER24> I always thought you'd use Gram Schmitz for linear regression

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram–Schmidt_process](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram–Schmidt_process)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let's say I have a hyperparameter optimization task where I have to tune a simulation to some spec by varying 2-4 input parameters, and the output is a single number. I have no analytical gradient, though it's probably OK to assume the domain is smooth. Each sim takes hours to run, the entire search could take days, and I would like something that works well in parallel so I can speed up the search. What's the state of art here? Are there anything close-to-state-of-art that's useable out of the box? I've read a few papers but they don't tend to come with software.

<comment><USER26> I think Bayesian Optimization is what you're looking for here. There's an internal tool at google ("Vizier") for which a white paper has been published that solves this exact problem. I don't know if there are any public implementations of Vizier but you could probably reverse engineer some of it from the white paper: [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/46180.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment> ur-whale Read it hoping the topic was going to be sub-gradient optimization (or any kind of technique that follows an "interesting" direction when the gradient is either not available or "boring").

It's unfortunately not presenting anything new.

</comment><comment><USER27> The next step to investigate here is line search.

<comment><USER28> I think that's pretty much what he's doing in the second part of the post</comment></comment>


The consumer guys at Microsoft are just plain wrong - <AUTHOR> http://hal2020.com/2013/03/05/now-i-get-it-the-consumer-guys-at-microsoft-are-just-plain-wrong/

<comment><USER2> Agreed with a lot of the article up until: "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN".

This is likely the result of spending too much time inside a Microsoft cocoon and has no idea that most of the outside world isn't built on Azure, or even windows servers. The only thing Azure is going to win at is being the default/preferred cloud provider for Microsoft MVPs and other VS.NET devs primarily based on a Microsoft tech stack.

<comment><USER3> Azure is quite scary good but the main problem is that people really don't understand what it is. If they actually work through that, I fully believe it will win.

We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it is.

<comment><USER2> It's quite scary expensive. I got a better spec'ed server on Hetzner for 1/11th the cost of an Azure instance:

[http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what- istheserv...](http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what- istheservicestack-14819151/49)

<comment><USER3> Yep it is expensive, bit hetzner are unreliable, their kit performs poorly, their support sucks and you can't deploy a sql server instance quickly (the latter is quite useful if you use sql server).

<comment><USER2> Hetzner has never failed me, it processes 3k+ C# redis commands in <1s which was 8x faster than my previous old Linux server of Leaseweb (costing 4x more). Although my old Linux server did quite well with over 480 days uptime and processed more than 10M commands. <http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838> In cloud-speak, that's more than 99.99999% uptime.

The current Hetzner server is looking good over 176 days uptime having processed more than 9.7M+ commands: <http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/>

There have multiple Azure outages within the same time-frame my Linux servers have been happily chugging along.

It's trivial to setup PostgreSQL/MySql on Linux. I personally don't deploy my own stuff on expensive SqlServer instances.

<comment><USER3> Uptime is not a problem. Stuff breaks. Being able to contact someone, get a root cause of an issue and get help to mitigate it is what is important.

In our case, a trial with Hetzner found their support to be somewhat lacking if something went wrong.

The azure outages didn't affect us at all.

Out load characteristics are somewhat higher than that. We can shift 10 million http hits an hour quite happily.

<comment><USER4> "Stuff breaks. Being able to contact someone, get a root cause of an issue and get help to mitigate it is what is important."

This.

This reminds me of the article about Heroku's "intelligent routing" and a discussion about scaling/scalability and performance.

We pay more for mitigating and reducing risks. Cloud services, particularly Iaas and Paas, such as Azure, AWS, GAE reduce (or are at least suppose to) the downtime when crap hits the fan and also enable more flexibility, speed, and agility in building out solutions.

The interesting part about the Heroku discussion pertained to the following:

Assume we have a straight forward, minimum layered architecture and that the average response time is 1.45 seconds. Using average responses times is a bad idea for determining true performance but let's continue for purposes of illustration. To get this average lets say 19 out of 20 requests return in 1 second, 1 out of 20 takes 10 seconds (Please correct me if my math is off/wrong). If we could add a layer that would shorten our long tailed curve that would be an improvement. However, adding a layer will incur some overheard. Lets assume for illustration purposes this layer will add 500ms to every request but will reduce the worst case from 10 seconds to 5 secords. So, 1 out of 19 take 1.5 sec, 1 our of 20 takes 5 for an average of 1.675 seconds. The average time is worse! However, the worst case scenario is much better. We've mitigated the costs of the worst case.

Using cloud services and vendors that have expertise and the ability to quickly address hardware issues is suppose to reduce the risk and cost when things go bad. Yeah you might have hiccups here and there that put you down for a few hours. But that is better than being down for days! It's really all about risk mitigation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Blah, blah, Microsoft sucks, blah ... "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN"..

Wait, what? Either this is off the mark or I'm missing a major initiative that could change the internet and save Microsoft. Is there a great article lingering about explaining why Azure is going to win?

<comment><USER6> Oh I think Azure will do well. And win in the Enterprise market. Look, outside the bubble of the bay area startup land - the world is different. MS Office is everywhere; SharePoint is everywhere; Windows Server is everywhere.

MS is positioned very well. In the Enterprise world. Not consumer world.

Outside of the xbox (nd that has it's issues as well) MS has already lost the consumer market.

Consumers don't buy PC cause of Windows. The get Widows becuase it's the default OS on the PC they are buying. Most care-less what OS is running as long as they can check their email, play a few game and look at look/listen/create media.

<comment><USER3> Yep the consumers buy a laptop because it is pink or cheap which usually ends up running windows as its the only thing at the price point. When they buy a tablet, they buy a shit no brand one running an ancient android release, realise it sucks and just go and buy a shit windows laptop.

Less than ten percent of consumers are not moronic enough to buy something better the first time.

The businesses buy windows because its good enough and already works for what they need and they don't want to learn it all again.

I live in an expensive bit of London where people can afford i-this and that and everyone still had cheap pink laptops running windows. Phones are different but there is a definite shift towards blackberry and windows phone around me from iPhones. Most people whinge about their iPhone these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft has a very dedicated set of devs that like .Net, and for them Azure is lovely. I doubt if any of them are on Hacker News though. These will be the people this chap is talking to, so he won't see the existential threat of Cloud to microsoft.

<comment><USER8> There are also official SDKs for Windows Azure in Java, Python, JavaScript and PHP. You don't need to be a .NET developer to think it's a swell platform to develop for.

<comment><USER9> And node.js <http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lost me at "Let me make this clear, AZURE IS GOING TO WIN the cloud computing infrastructure and platform battle." without providing any further justification for this bold claim.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone who actually uses Azure want to chime in? I admit that I may live in a bubble, but if Azure is going to win, and I have heard almost nothing about it that gives it the edge over the Heroku/AWS/GAE triumvirate, I would certainly like to know.

<comment><USER12> I haven't used it myself, but I think in the enterprise market it actually is being used quite a bit. I have heard good things from people who used it, but am at a loss at giving you a concrete example. Maybe it's worth giving it a go, just to form an opinion...

<comment><USER13> Wasn't Apple using it for iCloud? Or was that just a rumor?

<comment><USER14> they were

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not entirely agreeing with everything here - there was a lot of communication going on through the Windows developer blogs, with (at times ridiculously long) postings on the state of Win8 development. The problem was however that this was a total one-way communication. The hundreds of comments (some angry, some reasonable) below were ignored. I don't think there was a single positive response to ditching the start button over the metro interface. Yet still they did it (and it's shit, as expected (imho)). Granted, there was a lot of whining about dropping the Glass look as well, and I have to admit that the new win8 theme looks quite nice now that I see it in real life. The fact however that the first thing I do is put a shortcut to a shutdown batch file on my desktop, so I don't have to jump through hoops to find that menu, says it all. I ditched win8 within days.

</comment><comment><USER15> So according to the author: 1.) Successful platforms keep devs in the loop, 2.) Azure keeps devs in the loop, 3.) ∴ "AZURE IS GOING TO WIN"

I'd like to see some data to back up his claims that Azure "has the Big Mo" and that it's displacing Amazon + Salesforce.

<comment><USER13> The piece isn't really about that though. Despite being an extreme claim, it's really just a tangential opinion. I think the piece can stand pretty well even if you disagree with this, but I would certainly be interested in a separate article on the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think that MS failed to ship SDK's because of some strategy. I believe that they simply weren't ready for release.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are many of us here I think.

But lets be honest for a minute, HN isn't exactly the right place to speak up about cool stuff you're doing with Microsoft tech.

</comment><comment> clark-kent Is there anyone using Azure with no Microsoft Technology on their stack? I'm really curious about this. I know there maybe some former .Net devs that are doing node.js on Azure. But is there any pure Linux/LAMP/php/python/ruby devs choosing Azure over AWS and others.</comment>


N95 Respirators vs. Medical Masks: A Randomized Clinical Trial (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2749214 <comment><USER2> Another study with SARS. Might be more applicable. Says masks reduce infection 68%, N95 91%.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190272/#!po=1....](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190272/#!po=1.08696)

<comment><USER3> Cochrane reviews (of which this is one) are the gold standard for meta- analysis and evidence-based medicine. I trust their work a lot

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It might be good to keep "influenza" in the title. I assumed this was about COVID-19.

</comment><comment><USER5> 2019 study. They do look at influenza, so similar to current situation but I am not sure if it can be used as is in the current pandemic

> Findings In this pragmatic, cluster randomized clinical trial involving 2862 > health care personnel, there was no significant difference in the incidence > of laboratory-confirmed influenza among health care personnel with the use > of N95 respirators (8.2%) vs medical masks (7.2%).

</comment><comment><USER6> Started to see groups hand sewing medical masks with the appropriate materials provided by the hospitals as a way of boosting production.

I know Disney had some forward work on fabric 3D printing, wondering if that will see a push in a new direction. A hospital able to "print" its own supplies seems useful to distribute the supply for emergencies.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ok, so, by "medical masks" they mean the cheap isolation masks that come 50 to a box and are in no way rated to block viruses?

I've been told they make literally no difference when it comes to the user becoming infected. Is this study indicating they're worth wearing if you can't get an N95 or P100 mask?

<comment><USER8> Told by whom?

<comment><USER9> I mean, if you're infected and cough its a physical barrier of sorts... it will reduce the amount of droplets in the air and def reduce sputum expelling.

If you're not infected it'll help stop you touching your mouth and nose at the very least.

These are not air filtration protections as such but they're def better than "no protection" and in their own way will help reduce the curve...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For influenza, maybe. Doctors in general dont take too many precautions with Influenza. I am pretty sure they are similar because the doctors are more lax about donning and doffing protocol. Now when everyone is super paranoid, the masks become the critical link.</comment>


Why I hate Funnels. - <AUTHOR> http://tinyletter.com/ben/letters/why-i-hate-funnels

<comment><USER2> You may be interested in the extensive discussion of this from last month:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6340722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6340722)

It's also been submitted, without discussion, on other occasions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334991](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334991)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331772)</comment>


Why Do City Dwellers Love to Hate Scooters? - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/09/scooters-pros-and-cons-city-rental-bird-lime-safety-mobility/597949/ <comment><USER2> This article addresses (and quickly dismisses) only one of the common urban complaints: safety. It either ignores or misses the point of many of the other complaints.

Other inter-related issues:

* Sidewalks are not free for all parking spaces. They are public spaces with accessibility concerns and other users.

* Rental culture with no one "owning" responsibility. Apps blame users and indemnify themselves. Users aren't owners and don't have reasons to care.

* Safety. People barely know their local bicycle laws. The apps expect them to know them, have/wear helmets, but do practically nothing to educate their users. (Then don't think the responsibility is theirs.)

It's great to see e-scooters replace automobile trips, but safety and responsibility (for parking, for safety education) shouldn't be casually dismissed. It's another case where "move fast and break things" generally doesn't work that well when the things you might break are real world objects people care about like people's necks and wheelchair access.

</comment><comment><USER3> These haven't come to my city (yet), but rentable bikes using a similar business model have. If the people using the scooters resemble the people using the bikes, then here's what gets me upset about them: the riders tend to be obnoxious. They ride in ways that are illegal and dangerous, and when they're done with the bikes, they just leave them wherever they happen to be -- very often in the middle of sidewalks.

Disclaimer: I ride a bicycle as my primary transportation, and I am the exact opposite of anti-bike.</comment>


The Unwelcome Return of Platform Dependencies - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/26/platform-dependencies/ <comment><USER2> There is zero insight in this article as far as I can see. Yes, if you are using someone else's API, it might change. Yes, if you aren't complying with the terms of service, you may have a problem. If you are adding features to someone else's product, then sure, they can implement those features too and make you obsolete.

In addition, I don't see what any of this has to do with the initial premise that the web provided a way of avoiding the complexities of cross-platform development.

<comment><USER3> _"I don't see what any of this has to do with the initial premise that the web provided a way of avoiding the complexities of cross-platform development."_

That was not the initial premise. It was about the web supposedly removing the platform dependencies. Not the technical ones but the business ones - basically an unremovable third party between the developer and their customers. Here's an example of such an article by Tim Bray:

[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

Quote: _"You're not a sharecropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you're building on the Web platform. If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you."_

The above is no longer true. The Web alone is not enough to avoid being a sharecropper.

<comment><USER4> "The above is no longer true. The Web alone is not enough to avoid being a sharecropper."

If I build a Web app, what unremovable third-party am I required to use?

<comment><USER5> Google, at least. Perhaps others, depending on if/how you want to monetize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are some interesting points, but the wrong conclusion.

The conclusions and lead-in should have been that as with the desktop market, on the web do not trust the platform providers. reply

</comment><comment><USER7> People really should read Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy:

<http://astore.amazon.com/hypernumbersc-20/detail/0684841487>

He points out that pricing power in a supplier relationship is held by whichever side would find it easier to integrate into the other ones space. So Apple vs App Makers, Facebook vs in-Facebook games, Twitter vs Twitter apps...

There can be a healthy acquisition route for successful startups in a supplier relationship - but only for the first one of its kind.</comment>


Softbank's Son Chases Boyhood Dream with $100 Bil Fund - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-21/softbank-s-son-chases-boyhood-dreams-with-100-billion-fund <comment><USER2> Had anything actually come of this apart from press?

We've been hearing about this fund for years... but... what has it actually done?</comment>


Secret data found in 14% of 156 random images on ebaumsworld.com - <AUTHOR> http:////deepsteg.com/domain/www.ebaumsworld.com/ <comment><USER2> the article says 0.14% (0.14102564102564102%), not 14%. that's quite the difference from the current HN title claiming 14%.

editing to add that since this comment, the "article" has been updated to say "14%", but the actual math still doesn't fit that assertion.

<comment><USER3> After looking at the archive.org link, claiming that it's an article is the bigger stretch.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191215221905/http://www.deepst...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191215221905/http://www.deepsteg.com/domain/www.ebaumsworld.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I agree with the deepsteg project. From the website :

"Fighting crime online

Steganography is used by criminals to send messages to other criminals secretly. It is used by terrorists, pedophiles, and other criminals. Spreading awareness and providing tools to expose hidden data can help fight crime. " I can think of several reasons people might use steganography, most involve personal freedom and safety.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a github repor [1] of a similar name that implements steganography using a method described by a paper[2]. Is this website just finding images that have messages encoded using this package? The website is down, idk. Also I thought the point of steganography was plausible deniability. How are they able to detect secret messages?

[1] - [https://github.com/fpingham/DeepSteg](https://github.com/fpingham/DeepSteg) [2] - [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6802-hiding-images-in-plain- sig...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6802-hiding-images-in-plain-sight-deep- steganography.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, check out the github repo for deepsteg.com, [https://github.com/mikejohnsonjr/deepsteg](https://github.com/mikejohnsonjr/deepsteg) (linked in the navbar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191215221905/http://www.deepst...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191215221905/http://www.deepsteg.com/domain/www.ebaumsworld.com/)</comment>