Portugal's Economic Revival - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/22/business/portugal-economy-austerity.html <comment><USER3> As with many things, I think the truth lies exactly in the middle! Let me explain..

In 2011, Portugal applied to an IMF bailout. What do you do when you beg someone for their money? You comply! You don't come out for the streets saying you won't pay! You say creditors exactly what they want to hear. You (seem to) reduce costs, you cancel holidays, you go even beyond what creditors ask you to do. You get smart, you understand you're in a weak position and take the best advantage of it. You don't do like the Greeks who let their egos be greater than their brains, and be on the spotlight for being over-spenders by saying they won't pay their creditors. That's what the government did in 2011-2015 and it worked! We got out of the spotlight and stop being perceived as over-spenders..

In 2015 a new government was elected. With the influx of tourists, and being seen as people who saved some money (and learned their lesson), the new government was in a really better position to try "the revival". They started reinvesting and giving the appearance that we are growing (and some things are, but also government spending). And it seems to be working so far...

So, what really seems to work? Both things. When you're in a weak position you comply, and then when you get to a stronger position, you negotiate. So both type of governments were needed at exactly their time.. A good timing - <USER2> think that was the key to the current success!

<comment><USER4> Our _sucess_ boils to a tourism increase (driven from political instability in other countries and a very laxed tax system for foreigners), cheap oil (that gave room to increase taxes on petrol) and historically low interest rates.

<comment><USER5> > a very laxed tax system for foreigners

Do you think this is one of the reasons (or the major one) that so many Portuguese people live abroad? [1]

[1]: [https://i.redd.it/2683a6np1g621.jpg](https://i.redd.it/2683a6np1g621.jpg)

<comment><USER6> No. The reasons some many people live abroad, IMO:

1\. A culture built on world exploration. Our golden age myth is sailors leaving the country to find new lands. Our great epic book is "Os Lusíadas", a celebration of the discovery of a sea route to India by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama inspired by Virgil and Homer's epics.

2\. Many people left the country between WW2 and 1974 (due to a ruling dictatorship, a colonial war, and economic difficulties). These were mostly uneducated people that went to France, Germany, Switzerland to become low wage workers.

3\. A newer wave of emigration (of much more educated people) due to low salaries in Portugal. I know a lot of people (mostly engineers) that more than tripled their wage simply by moving to more developed countries: Germany, UK, Sweden... Similar to moving to SF/NY when you're in rural US.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a Portuguese person living in Portugal, this article is quite misleading. Portugal is one of the countries with highest income and social security taxes in Europe (not to mention VAT and other types of taxation).

The economy is growing, yes, mainly thanks to tourism. However, austerity is still much in place and taxes have only gone up since 2008 for middle and higher class (for low class people the conditions are much better of course). In order for a country to have a "revival", it needs to be growing in multiple industries but Portugal is evermore dependent on tourism which doesn't scale that well. Entrepreneurship is very limited to due to insane levels of bureucracy, high taxes, difficulty in firing people and most talent leaving to the UK/Germany/Switzerland in search of better salaries and better "value for money" taxation.

<comment><USER8> Austerity doesn't mean high taxes. Austerity means cutting social programs and public investment.

<comment><USER9> This is incorrect.

Austerity can involve tax increases, spending cuts, or combinations of the two. It's not limited simply to spending cuts.

That said, it very much matters what "kind" of austerity one engages in, as research indicates that tax increases and spending cuts have different respective effects on an economy.

<comment><USER10> Like most economic principles, there's a big gap between theory and practice.

In reality Austerity is defined by tax breaks for the very rich, combined with spending cuts and privatisation - i.e. economic enclosure, debt peonage, and asset sweating - for everyone else. Sometimes that includes tax increases, but if som it usually means indirect taxation.

Austerity is purely ideological. Even the IMF acknowledges that recent Austerity regimes have underperformed expectations while examples of stimulus spending have had the opposite effect.

<comment><USER11> > In reality Austerity is defined by tax breaks for the very rich, combined > with spending cuts and privatisation

This is objectively false, and a poor atempt at forcing a particular spin on a very objective definition.

Looking at Portugal, the bailout program enforced tax increases exclusively on the middle and upper class, along with publix sector workers who are by far more priviledged than private sector workers. For example, the bailout program saw the introduction of a new tax bracket for the richest taxpayers which forced a 53% income tax rate.

And also privatizations are implemented to avoid additional austerity pushes by providing the government with one-off sources of free cash thus avoiding further spending cuts or tax increases. Therefore, they are in fact an alternative to austerity, not a consequence.

> Austerity is purely ideological.

This statement is so mind-numbingly wrong that it boggles the mind how anyone in this point in time could be so disingenuous or clueless to keep parroting this silliness.

Let's look at Portugal, who doubled its sovereign debt fron 60% of the nation's GDP to over 120% in about 5 years prior to any mention of austerity, and did so by piling a string of yearly deficits of over 10% including a structural deficit of around 3%.

If your state is so dependent on overspending that it needs loans after loans to keep working and pay up salaries, who in their right mind will argue that they don't desperately need to cut spending and/or raise taxes to avoid going bankrupt or even to keep functioning?

If austerity was actually "purely ideological", how exactly would it be possible for Portugal to keep their 10% spending deficits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article refutes its own premise:

Net spending cuts, rather than stimulus: "Mr. Costa made up for the givebacks with cuts in infrastructure and other spending, whittling the annual budget deficit to less than 1 percent of its gross domestic product, compared with 4.4 percent when he took office. The government is on track to achieve a surplus by 2020, a year ahead of schedule, ending a quarter-century of deficits."

Growth is slowing, minimum wage is lowest in the eurozone: "Growth is cooling from 2.7 percent last year, as Mr. Costa keeps public investment at a 40-year low to cut the deficit. While he restored public sector salaries to previous levels, they have barely budged since before the crisis. And the minimum wage of 580 euros a month, although up, remains one of the lowest in the eurozone."

Gov cutting taxes as well: "To cement the growth cycle, the government is putting what little investment it makes into targeted initiatives like tax breaks for foreign companies and training for the unemployed."

<comment><USER13> Well, the article is just stating the truth, that is the deficit is going down mainly because public investment in that last few years is being almost null (mainly in infrastructure) and now Portugal can go to the markets after seeing removed the "trash" title from the public debt. (Not) The only problem is that a big part of Portugal's infrastructure is starting to be outdated and should have have been renewed.

The actual government is mainly taking advantage of tourism growth and the stimulus from the Central European Bank ([https://www.ft.com/content/7514a734-6fbe-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92...](https://www.ft.com/content/7514a734-6fbe-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914)) and is selling the recent growth as being a consequence from their measures of lowering taxes (which is not exactly true, also - [https://www.pordata.pt/Portugal/Receitas+fiscais+do+Estado+t...](https://www.pordata.pt/Portugal/Receitas+fiscais+do+Estado+total+e+por+alguns+tipos+de+impostos-2765), and yeah I know that if more people have a job more the total amount of taxes collected is higher) and others.

Being a Portuguese living in Portugal, it is obvious that the economy is improving but that improvement is not sustainable IMHO.

<comment><USER14> > The only problem is that a big part of Portugal's infrastructure is starting > to be outdated and should have have been renewed.

Meh, you should see the sad state of affairs in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's a bit overoptimistic...the real estate prices in Portugal are CRAZY because of the tourism boom + shared economy, the taxes on food and especial gasoline are really high, so the Portuguese go to Spain(a country that's richer) to shop, as it's cheaper...salaries are a bit of a joke, like making more than 1000EUR is to be considered lucky.

It's true that the "Contraption" in the government is working better than Greece or Italy, but still...

<comment><USER16> Portugal != Lisbon. You can get reasonable prices everywhere else.

<comment><USER17> Too bad they don't get reasonable jobs everywhere else, or a job at all.

<comment><USER16> Not true.

While Lisbon has a big chunk of the jobs, other cities also have plenty of opportunities. YMMV of course.

I work remotely, so I'm outside the local job market, but I still get plenty of offers for local companies in my mid sized city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The premise of the article seems to be: "In 2015, it cast aside the harshest austerity measures its European creditors had imposed, igniting a virtuous cycle that put its economy back on a path to growth."

The thing is, less than 3 years is absolutely not enough time to draw any conclusions. Much of the improved results are explainable by an uptick in tourism, and low interest rates, therefore attributing it to this government's policies seems premature. In truth, no true changes are being made. Taxes remain high (which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself), public spending remains inefficient in some areas. No actual, _really meaningful_ reforms have been made, no truly new ideas. The old "systemic" problems, if you will, remain. Corruption remains an issue. Beaurocracy has been somewhat improved, but still needs lots of changes. The judiciary remains slow. Etc, etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it true that in Portugal when you issue a receipt as a shop (e.g. when some person buys something and you issue a receipt for the client) the client gets automatically a number for a national lottery from the machine which is directly connected to some central government's lottery & tax department (kind of controversial, hehe)?

A portuguese colleague told me a few years ago that this was one of the measures taken by the government to lower tax evasion (and I thought "cool, why not") but I don't really know if that's true nor if it's still used nowadays.

<comment><USER20> It is true. The prize used to be a car, now it is government bonds.

It is fully automatic. You just tell the cashier your tax id number, and you are set. No need to keep the receipt.

<comment><USER19> Thx!!!

Yes, I now remember my colleague mentioning a car :)

But well, I wouldn't have enough faith in XXX cashiers. I'd want a hard receipt (confirmation of submission on paper with some kind of checksum which I could confirm online if I wanted to).

<comment><USER20> You do get a paper receipt, which is just your normal sales receipt (which usually I just throw away immediately).

You can also check all your receipts online, on the Finance Ministry website.

<comment><USER21> Screw the car. I want my receipts downloadable!

<comment><USER22> Portugal is moving to digital receipts for individuals in 2019. If you give the cashier your VAT ID, no paper receipt is produced, and you may download the receipt from your IRS dashboard.

Anonymous paper receipts will remain valid, indefinitely (i.e. they are not being phased out).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would take this news with caution and let's see how long this boom lasts.

This being said, I don't live in Europe but I speak Portuguese. I plan to buy an apartment in Europe. Lisbon was always a serious consideration. But prices are through the roof. Golden Visa did not help either. I am also skeptical on having too much money invested in real estate in a, comparably, poor country. Real Estate taxes are a bargain compared with some US states. This could change (outch!). But basically they priced me out already. Overtourism does not help either.

</comment><comment><USER24> I remember when Brazil was "taking off", president Lula was called "the man" by Mr. Obama, Eike Batista was heralded the modern Brazilian industrialist and the seemingly limitless "pre-salt reserves" was going to turn the country into a leading oil producer.

Since then, we've learned this short-lived economic boom was really just attributable to outsized Chinese demand for commodities which went away as quickly as it came about. The Workers' Party spent its ~16 years in power fostering the centuries old crony capitalism that has fundamentally defined that South American nation since it was a Portuguese colony, throughout its 19th century monarchy, its 20th century republic, the congress-appointed military regime in power between 1964 and 1988 and all of the democratically elected presidencies since.

Eike Baptista was indicted and convicted for fraud and embezzlement, his companies sold for pennies on the dollar.

Lula's anointed political successor, Dilma Rousseff, was ridiculed, impeached and couldn't even win a senate seat in the last elections.

Lula himself was indicted, tried and convicted, along with hundreds of other politicians – not to mention the countless more the country hasn't yet gotten around to convict.

The populace radicalized to the point of destroying families and friendships before fatally electing a bizarro president – when the alternative was keeping the Workers' Party in power for another 4 or 8 years, Brazilians opted instead for a diabolical Faustian-Orwellian blend.

I'd love to hear Obama's take on how wrong he was. And I caution others to resist the temptation of extrapolating from a handful of moderately successful economic years, thinking their countries have fundamentally changed overnight.

You know what causes extreme changes overnight? A revolution. Brazil hasn't experienced one, and I doubt Portugal has.

<comment><USER17> The article is just a fluff piece, stating some facts but sugarcoating their full meaning.

Pretty much everyone in Portugal ( other than the usual ones ) rolls their eyes when the read stuff like this.

Although not at the same level of Brazil, politicians in Portugal do the same thing depending of how arrogant they are in not getting caught. It's full of bottom feeders trying to get some cushy position for themselves, I think it's our main problem right now, the sheer amount of money sucking parasites from top to bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting fact: you can become a resident (and then citizen) under the Golden Visa program by buying 350-500k EUR of property in Portugal.

<comment><USER25> (Which is incidentally approximately free if you have access to capital, since your returns from airbnbing the right property, net of management costs, will exceed the mortgage. There's risk, obviously, that the rental market could change or real estate value could drop, but it's a pretty good deal. Each EUR 350-500k includes spouse and dependents, so it's up to 6 people. Very popular with people from China right now.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Like many libertarian leaning people I used to be a fan of "Austrian" type economics. In the past few years as a result of watching both the recovery and the cryptocurrency experiment I've changed my mind. I now think that Keynes was at least largely correct in the essentials.

I think two things trip people up. One is blind extrapolation of good personal and business financial advice onto macroeconomics. It's clear to me that macroeconomic systems seem to have their own rules. Secondly I think some of the disdain for Keynesian ideas comes from dislike of the power concentration inherent in central banks.

The latter is still IMHO a valid criticism. There might be different more transparent or decentralized ways of achieving what central banks achieve. But the overall history of macroeconomics seems to fall on the side of Keynes and his successors.

<comment><USER27> The biggest problem with Keynes is a psychological one.

It makes sense to spend more during tough times, but it's a career suicide for a politician to suggest tightening the purse strings when the times are good.

In essence, modern Keynesian politics oscillate between "The times are bad, we have to spend more", and "The times are good, what do you mean we can't afford to spend more".

<comment><USER28> > it's a career suicide for a politician to suggest tightening the purse > strings when the times are good

Not necessarily. In 2014, California Proposition 2 (originally 44) passed with over a 2-to-1 margin [0], reforming and expanding the "rainy day fund" created by 2004's Proposition 58. California now has almost $30B in surplus [1].

[0] [https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_2,_Rainy_Day_...](https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_2,_Rainy_Day_Budget_Stabilization_Fund_Act_\(2014\))

[1] [https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2018/dec/18...](https://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2018/dec/18/jerry- brown/does-california-have-budget-surplus-nearly-30-bill/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is absolute crap. We've been growing a bit under the european average which we've always done, other than during the crisis, at which time we greatly fell behind. We haven't recovered any ground to the rest of the european zone. Ireland for example has pretty much recovered and in the last 4 year grew 50% more than Portugal.

There's a name for a rule that escapes me right now, on when the news writes about a subject you know about, that's when you realize all news reporting is utter crap. This was that moment for me.

</comment><comment><USER30> Portuguese people in this thread mention an alternative narrative to the events. I'm curious: is there any English-language site that you'd recommend to follow about Portugal?

<comment><USER31> Life is visibly better in Portugal

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://outline.com/qnEaGZ](https://outline.com/qnEaGZ)

</comment><comment><USER33> Let's see how lithium mining will do then.

</comment><comment><USER34> Obligatory [https://outline.com/qnEaGZ](https://outline.com/qnEaGZ)

</comment><comment><USER35> is this because they decriminalized drugs? seems like when the government lets people do what they want, it helps the economy.

<comment><USER36> You can't "do what you want", there is just no jail time for possession.

<comment><USER35> > no jail time for possession.

isn't that the definition of 'do what they want'

if you are not going to put people in jail for drugs

people will do drugs.

<comment><USER37> People will do drugs regardless, the threat of jail has, historically, not worked.

What Portugal showed was that punishing them is actually counterproductive.

<comment><USER38> Portugal has of, if not the, lowest drug usage and overdose rates in the world.

<comment><USER35> ah interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Short film shows a frightening future filled with Google Glass-like devices - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/27/sight-systems/

<comment><USER2> The frightening part of this is unlikely. When was the last time you looked at something and lost control? I mean, besides in the Apple store.

</comment><comment><USER3> SnowCrash showed a frightening future filled with Glass-like devices. Published in 1992. Still an instructive read today.</comment>


Why CSP matters I: Keeping things in sync (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.reaktor.com/blog/why-csp-matters-i-keeping-things-in-sync/ <comment><USER2> The FDR4 checker [1] looks pretty slick. I'm not that familiar with the area, though, so I'm wondering how it compares to model checkers? How does using a model checker compare to using a refinement checker? (I've read that there are model checkers for TLA+.)

[1] [https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/projects/fdr/](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/projects/fdr/)

<comment><USER3> I used FDR4 extensively for a week. It's as much a simple IDE as anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if the real solution here is just better UX... The WhatsApp model for message delivery gives visual confirmation when a message is sent, and then more once it's been ACK'ed by the receiver's phone. This manages the uncertainty, instead of trying to solve it. I know that my change to the grocery list isn't 'real' until I've gotten ACKs back from everyone.

<comment><USER5> iMessage almost does this if the recipient turns on "Message Receipt" \- you get sent to server, and then received by the person.

I fully understand in a privacy conscious scenario wanting to have the option to opt out of the second step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Differential sync is not a very clean solution, because it doesn't encode the intention of differences.

If one person increments a variable from 10 to 11, and another person sets the variable from 10 to 11 independently, does that mean that the final value should be 11 or 12?

Of course, in practice, you can work around cases like this. It is just not very clean and feels like a hack.

</comment><comment><USER7> Saw "CSP" and immediately thought of constraint satisfaction problems [0].

Unfortunate acronym.

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

<comment><USER8> When I saw "CSP" I thought of Content Security Policy instead [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP)

<comment><USER9> Me too.</comment></comment></comment>


RocketConf 2015: the web in outer space - <AUTHOR>

Astronauts and web developers will gather in Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam on November 12 and 13 to discuss the future of the modern web.
The future where your coffee machine, your car, your house, and even the International Space Station are connected to the internet is here. This requires a new generation of modern web developers — those who love to write beautiful code and create magnificent things that really matter.
The web developer profession covers a wide spectrum, and this is reflected in the two day conference. RocketConf doesn't focus on one single technology. We believe you can learn even more from people with a different perspective. The connecting element are the web and its developers.
Main guest of RocketConf is Dr. André Kuipers, astronaut and ambassador of Earth. Having visited mankind's biggest technological achievement, the International Space Station (ISS), not once but twice, Dr. Kuipers will share his view on technology and innovation.
The other speakers from home and abroad are prominent programmers, writers, thinkers and hackers — the people who build the web.
The day before the conference, November 11, workshops will be hosted where you can get a real hands-on experience by learning from the experts in the field.
More information, including an overview of all speakers, can be found on rocketconf.eu or the @RocketConf Twitter account. <comment><AUTHOR> For your convenience: [http://www.rocketconf.eu](http://www.rocketconf.eu)

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice!</comment>


Hadoop vs. an RDBMS: How much (less) would you pay? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/data-centerservers/238091/road-hadoop-part-2-how-much-less-would-you-pay

<comment><USER2> For raw storage Hadoop beats an RDBMS, sure I'll buy that argument. It's not the same thing though and it doesn't do the same job.

Hadoop excels at data processing, trawling vast quantities of unstructured or semi structured data and extracting information from it. It's a poor platform for random access to specific elements of that data though.

RDBMS are great in exactly the places Hadoop isn't, getting access to random elements of data in a structured manner. Executing structured queries on that data. Things you know you'll do a lot of and can optimise.

There are column and table data stores built on top of Hadoop, and it can be argued that they could be used as an alternative to an RDBMS but they aren't drop in replacements and for the most part they're not meant to do the same job.

The most interesting uses of Hadoop aren't going to come from replacing existing RDBMS infrastructure with a Hadoop cluster. They're going to come from pushing data into a Hadoop cluster to process it. Collecting data that would otherwise be impossible to collect because it's either unstructured or there is simply too much to put in a RDBMS at a cost effective scale.

Hadoop and the NoSQL movement is exciting when you start to think about processing that data and pulling what's useful back out into your existing infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Hadoop really approachable for most businesses who don't have a some sort of large-scale need for analytics?

Last time I looked there were things like Pig (<http://pig.apache.org/>) but the use case was "big data". Many businesses use RDBMs exclusively and can easily use analytics tools like Business Objects. Companies may be dealing with what they consider to be a lot of data but it pales in comparison to what many web startups are dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article seems to misinterpret scale-up vs. scale-out.

>Yahoo and Facebook are excellent examples of how Hadoop can scale up; but little is usually said about how Hadoop can scale the other way..

It says this right after mentioning that those operations have 5-digit sized hadoop clusters.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sure, Hadoop is cheaper than Oracle, but the article seems to completely ignore that mysql and postgres exist.

<comment><USER6> Well, Oracle is more prevalent in big enterprise. But if you look at the equations at the end of the article, a mysql/postgres DBA costs probably 80-90% of the Oracle DBA. The licensing costs are less, but the hardware cost for the big-iron and big-SAN to run the RDBMS is pretty much the same.</comment></comment>


At this Bengaluru school, robots teach and teachers mentor - <AUTHOR> https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/at-this-bengaluru-school-robots-teach-and-teachers-mentor/articleshow/70867664.cms <comment><USER2> That robot looks scary as hell!</comment>


Ask HN: Why the GitHub/GitLab integration is so terrible? - <AUTHOR> It's like they don't want developers to have a presence on both services (without a lot of hassle).<p>Wouldn't it be in GitLab's best interest, being the newcomer, to integrate way better and enable a smooth transition? <comment><USER2> Which part of integrating with GitLab do you find difficult? We'd love to talk about it and improve.

Maybe we could open some issues and talk about what you'd like to have but is missing, or some things you think we're doing wrong.

* You could use our API to integrate with GitLab [1]

* You could develop a fullblown project service and contribute it to the codebase [2]

* You could use custom webhooks to add custom functionality [3]

[1] - [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/)

[2] - [https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/integrations/project...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/integrations/project_services.html)

[3] - [https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/integrations/webhook...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/integrations/webhooks.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's git. Just add the gitlab remote and push.</comment>


Was Your Name Stolen to Support Killing Net Neutrality? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Was-Your-Name-Stolen-to-Support-Killing-Net-Neutrality-140801 <comment><USER2> If this tool is down (edit: looks like it's not down, it's just slow), you could always check [http://comcastroturf.com](http://comcastroturf.com) (but it looks like both tools depend on the FCC website, appearance is it's actually the FCC's search that is slow.)

I have no idea if these two tools do exactly the same thing, but I was able to identify about 60% of my family whose names were used (all NY residents, but the addresses that fake comments were submitted under were all from other states.)

And yes, it's possible that people with the same name as my family members were actually at those addresses in those other states, but it's extremely unlikely that they all decided to have the same opinion nearly word for word, all clustered on the same couple of days in May and July of this year.

<comment><USER3> I'm getting a 503 Service Unavailable from the call to the FCC service.

FCC Message Alert!

      An FCC error has occured

      We're sorry, an unexpected error occurred with your request.

<comment><USER4> Even better if you watch that API call (and it actually succeeds) you will see lots of personal info (emails, etc) that are not rendered in the HTML results.

<comment><USER4> And taking these email addresses and googling them only yields search results from some kind of random correlated "free public info" type sites. So I am assuming these accounts were put together by using info on these sites and then mass uploading them to the FCC. So it doesn't look like this is some sort of massive hack or anything of that nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _wow_.....my name was used against NN. that being said, the event was reported from a different address, but after investigation the address does not actually exist from which it was reported... so my initial thought on it simply being another person have changed.

<comment><USER2> "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation" ... ?

My experience is the same. Most of my family apparently decided to take up fake residences in other states and coincidentally have the same opinions, word for word, on a few days in May and July of this year.

<comment><USER6> Yes, me too. My name, not my address, similar comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My name was not used, and it found my actual submission asking to keep NN, so at least I know it worked.

<comment><USER8> Seconded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apparently someone used my name to support net neutrality. I'm pro-NN but its still disconcerting.

I can't tell if it was a bot, or an overzealous friend.

I hope the dystopian future won't be ruled by those with the best bots/spam.

<comment><USER10> A relative of mine's name was used (or this person actually submitted it, which is likely.) I'm sure the relative really doesn't understand the issue, and this is what was submitted:

 _The current FCC regulatory scheme known as "Title II" represents an unprecedented increase in government control over the internet. Such over- regulation is hurting our economy and suffocating innovation. I support Chairman Pai's plan to return to a commonsense regulatory framework that allows for the internet to grow without useless government interference. The internet has flourished for decades without the heavy hand of government over- regulation. It's time we return to what works._

Obviously, it was sold to this relative as a push against the heavy hand of the government ...

If I had to guess, it was a viral facebook post pro-trump administration that gave boilerplate to paste in.

<comment><USER10> Well, the relative claims ignorance of the post... so likely a fake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is the form the NY AG published. Once the FCC search results finally load (may take a couple mins, or more), you'd need to click on your name under the "Top Filers" box to the left. The first batch of search results don't appear to be fully filtered against the name you entered into the NY AG form. [https://ag.ny.gov/fakecomments](https://ag.ny.gov/fakecomments)

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like my name was used but I can't see the whole comment or address.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not surprisingly, FCC search appears to not be working.

</comment><comment><USER14> It just gives me a blank page on search.

<comment><USER15> Other comments have suggested the FCC's site is running slowly. That might be load, or even deliberate "go away and stop trying to look at the man behind the curtain".

Just because it doesn't load immediately, doesn't mean it's time for "WELP!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know of an example when public comments actually changed a government decision?</comment>


Andrew Ng Interview with Geoffrey Hinton (2011) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=089U2maCg0Q&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop <comment><USER2> This interview was from the original ML class online back in 2011 I think, one of the first MOOCs

*I have the free Certificate of Accomplishment signed by Andrew Ng

<comment><USER3> Year added above. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I appreciated the Hinton's advice that basically said 'follow your intuition because if its bad you're screwed anyway'</comment>


Large screen phones: a challenge for UX design, and human hands - <AUTHOR> https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/large-screen-phones-ux-design/ <comment><USER2> "Why the iPhone's screen is 3.5″ and will most likely never be bigger than 4″"

[https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/07/why-the-iphones- scre...](https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/07/why-the-iphones-screen- is-3-5-and-will-most-likely-never-be-bigger-than-4/)

From 2011, of course. I had to look this up, because I was beginning to think I must have dreamt the whole history of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone with small hands I wish I could shout this from the Apple rooftops. I've owned every iPhone from 1-8 and I'm dreading the day my 8 becomes ineligible for iOS updates. The bigger iPhones require me to use both hands. Even this one is too big. It's taken two toilet baths and had the screen replaced from a drop.

I would _happily_ pay a premium for an iPhone with only four or five rows of icons again.

</comment><comment><USER4> Someday we'll admit that the touch screen, with "virtual" controls, is a complete failure. It'll probably take a few more years. Like LCD screens, where "no one wants more than 1920x1080" was apparently a Law handed down from on high for so many years.

<comment><AUTHOR> That will prob. only happen when something similar to the google glass can last more than 30 minutes on one battery charge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why don't we have the option to buy a modern small (normal) phone anymore? It's baffling.

<comment><USER6> Same answer as "why does nobody make phones with physical keyboards?": there aren't enough buyers to make it worthwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally I'm glad that there's screen space when it's used for things that I'm reading or watching. However I'm bothered by all the geniuses implementing the 'material design' sticking the drop-down menu in the top right corner. My hand is busy keeping the phone from falling down here, yer doofuses!

I even seem to vaguely recall that in early versions of the two mobile OSes, more menus occupied the full width of the screen, thus being essentially full- blown dialogs. What prevents menus from working about the same way _and_ scrolling all the way down so I can tap the top element at the bottom of the screen? They're modal anyway!

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd really like to see how an average user holds their phone...

I have quite averagely sized hands and I've never once dropped my phone because it was "too big" (currently on the 5.8" iPhone XS, before that I've had the gigantic Note 3) and I can comfortably reach about 80% of the screen with my thumb...

<comment><USER9> I've seen increasing usage of PopSockets. From what I can tell it helps people with smaller hands hold the phone because they can grip the PopSocket instead of having to stretch their hand out to fit the phone.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, those are really cool but I'm not sticking that unremovable 3M monstrosity to my 1000 dollar phone or my 60 dollar (overpriced AF I know) case...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311841)</comment>


Pirate Bay Is Not Getting Rich from Bitcoin Donations - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-not-getting-rich-from-bitcoin-donations-or-190922/ <comment><USER2> This should really help readjust the expectations of the "just pay websites directly with tips instead of ads" crowd. TPB is a massive website who's users have to be the ideal adblocking, early adopter, crypto-supporting crowd. If this is what a website can expect then continue to expect adtech to invade your privacy and crash your browsers.

<comment><USER3> An interesting counterexample is the many private trackers that do just fine off of crypto donations. Without naming names I'm personally aware (as in, I can go look at the donation status pages) of at least four that rake in $500+/mo with a small fraction of TPB's usercount.

I think this says more about the type of user who hits up TPB vs. the type of user who has accounts on private trackers - it's probably a reasonable generalization to say that a member of a private tracker has a higher level of tech sophistication, including with cryptocurrencies, than the average TPB visitor. Heck, my boomer relatives use TPB on occasion. Interactions with TPB are also a lot more ephemeral and anonymous - private trackers can give donators a cupcake forum icon or whatever whereas I'm sure 99+% of TPB visitors have never made an account and probably aren't even regular visitors. Similarly, users of private trackers are likely on average significantly more invested in the continued success of the site and therefore more willing to cough up, in contrast to many TPB visitors who probably ended up there via a general search and wouldn't really notice if they were grabbing a torrent from any of the other big public trackers.

So, I think it's fair to say that expectations for certain types of sites - ones that have a low/no barrier to entry, are functionally replaceable units, serve less technically-inclined users, and have a rep for legal sketchiness - need readjusting. Others, especially ones that provide persistent, difficult- to-replace value for users, seem to do ok.

<comment><USER2> Your anecdotal evidence is certainly stark compared to TPB. It just seems bewildering the largest website in the field has such limited donations. They have had multiple takedowns and legal issues. It just seems to me it would have had a more successful donation drive.

I just don't think the whole shift of web revenue is remotely feasible for most websites. Hell, we get paywall complaining on some of the major news outlet posts on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > When we add up all these figures we come to a total of $13.16 per day, which > clearly can't keep The Pirate Bay afloat.

I ain't so sure of that. That'd be enough to pay off the monthly bill for a small VPS every day or so (so 15-30 VMs - or one or two giant ones - would fit in a monthly budget), or to cover the power, networking, and other colocation expenses for physical servers. TPB is a popular site, but the computational load should be minimal; the only thing TPB hosts is the metadata for the torrents (whether in the form of a small downloadable file or a magnet link); a rack of older servers (5-10 years old) should be able to handle that mostly- static load.

Banking on the idea of Bitcoin et. al. getting more valuable is probable, though.

<comment><USER5> What about the search engine? I don't know what TBP concurrents is like, but I'd imagine the the search index is the most expensive part of their infra aside from bandwidth.

<comment><USER4> Good point; forgot about search. I don't imagine it to be particularly sophisticated (probably just substring matching), and last I checked it has a minimum search term length (i.e. ignoring any search terms less than three characters in length); between those two factors it could probably be kept pretty simple and lightweight.</comment></comment></comment>


CSS Equivalent of Prototype? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkingserious.com/2007/10/13/css-equivelant-of-prototype/ One of our programmers had the following comment in a recent Subversion commit: "Verified to display correctly with IE6, IE7, FF Ubuntu, FF, Galeon, Konqueror". Sigh... don't you hate when you have to do that? Frameworks like Prototype and Symfony has made development life much easier, but sadly CSS cross browser hell still brings the pain. So I ask, can some brave master-hacker create a Prototype/Symfony like framework for us poor CSS/HTML programmers? <comment><USER2> There are actually quite a few CSS frameworks out there, just none which provide the tools the author asks for. As someone mentioned in the comments, YUI Grids provides much of the desired functionality. Another which comes to mind is Blueprint, a typographical layout framework.

</comment><comment><USER3> i use the blueprint framework, which also takes care of typography btw. it's great, well-structured, and I encourage everyone to take a look at it

<comment><USER4> I recently converted my personal site to Blueprint, and found it quite nice. I did have to hack it a bit, but at least it's hackable.

Blueprint is best for layouts with columns of fixed width. For a layout with a variable-width content area, you might want to take a look at <http://alistapart.com/articles/holygrail>.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Solid – meetings management app - <AUTHOR> http://getsolid.io/?ref=ycombinator&r=yc <comment><USER2> Cannot.wait.to.try.it.out! Good job!</comment>


Ask HN: AI educational keyboard app which can shape how you communicate - <AUTHOR> http://www.alphanumb.com <comment><USER2> This seems well-intentioned, but I can't help but find ghastly the idea of a keyboard which applies some vague heuristics to police expression in the name of "positivity".

I'm reminded of an old Buttercup Festival strip:

[http://www.buttercupfestival.com/39vol2.gif](http://www.buttercupfestival.com/39vol2.gif)

"My parents didn't want me drawing depressing pictures as a child, so they only gave me yellow crayons. I mostly drew our canary getting struck by lightning."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone I just launched my MVP, would appreciate if you could try it out and give some feedback, would be really helpful. A great app for your kids. EDBoard is an AI keyboard which can guide your children to type more positively. Children spend 7-9 hours a day on a smartphone or tablets. This is a great app to help them learn while they chat with friends or family.</comment>


California's housing crisis – it's even worse than you think - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconvalley.com/2017/08/29/californias-housing-crisis-its-even-worse-than-you-think-7/ <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/marketplace/20170828/califo...](http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/marketplace/20170828/californias- housing-crisis-its-even-worse-than-you-think)</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I buy 10-100 iPhone 3GS - <AUTHOR>

I'm located in the Canary Islands, Spain. Any suggestions on where I can buy 10-100 iPhone 3GS and how much it will cost me? My intention is to buy 10 devices a month initially and I want to be able to use them with any carrier, no contract. <comment><USER2> [http://www.buy.com/prod/apple-iphone-3gs-32gb-never- locked-l...](http://www.buy.com/prod/apple-iphone-3gs-32gb-never-locked- legally-unlocked-gsm-cell-phone/q/loc/12435/211493259.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's rather un-economical at $1,000 per device, even accounting for the USD/EUR exchange rate. The price, shipping and customs fees are gonna kill me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you going to offer some kind of rental service? That would be an interesting business model...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I would like to rent iPhones in my local market, pre-loaded with certain applications.

Problem is, I may not be able to do this economically and may have to go with Android instead. I suspect it will be far easier to buy hundreds of HTC Heros directly from HTC than to buy iPhones from Apple or distributors.</comment></comment>


How Many C Programs Are There? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/689

<comment><USER2> There'd be a whole lot of programs.

There's a good reading that approaches a related subject, but isn't specific to _C_ programs: <http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html>

In short, `busy beaver number' -- number of steps that a halting Turing machine with dictionary of size N can have -- grows pretty fast with N; faster than Ackermann function anyway.

Also, supposedly _a katamari is the only thing which outgrows the busy beaver sequence ;)_ <http://www.xamuel.com/katamari-damacy-growth/>

<comment><USER3> > _faster than Ackermann function anyway_

Alas, it grows faster than _any_ computable function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Anyway, I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this_

I would rather try to evaluate the size of the abstract syntax tree. I think this is more relevant since int main(){int a;} is obviously similar to int main(){int b;}

<comment><USER5> The author already address this issue:

> How many non-alpha-equivalent C programs are there?

and then goes further:

> How many functionally inequivalent C programs are there?

The "this" you're refering to is itself refering to this last question.

<comment><USER4> Yes I have read this, and using the abstract syntax tree is how I would do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it would make more sense to start by looking at research done on grammars. For instance:

<http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~yuvalf/CFG-LB.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER7> _How many functionally inequivalent C programs are there?_

Surely this is undecidable?

<comment><USER8> Of course. But we ought to be able to establish _some_ kind of bounds on the number.

<comment><USER9> > _some_ kind of bounds

Definitely. I can give a lower bound right off the top of my head: twelve. There are at least twelve functionally distinct C programs.

<comment><USER8> > For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and > wrong.

You probably want your bound to be a function of the length of the program. Because for programs of length 1, there are not 12 distinct C programs.

<comment><USER10> Zero is a good lower bound for all programs. Or minus one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you have printf, then "printf("long string")" where the string might be modified should give a good bound, say Omega(200^S). If you don't have it, what is the program allowed to do? Only return from main, without checking arguments? Then you have as many extensionally distinct programs as integers.</comment>


Long-term research: Slow science - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/long-term-research-slow-science-1.12623?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20130321

<comment><USER2> It's amazing how at least some fields of science have been able to exponentially improve their experimental methodology, thanks to present-day social networks.

Milgram's 1967 small world experiment that introduced the "6 degrees of separation" term consisted of 300 people trying to send physical letters to 1 target, this stock broker in Boston. 80% of the letters never reached the target, and of the ones that reached, the average number of hops was 6.

Fast forward to 2008. A summer intern at Microsoft Research attempts to re-do this experiment. He constructs a graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges using MSN Messenger data, and finds the average path length between users to be 6.6. [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/horvitz/leskov...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/horvitz/leskovec_horvitz_www2008.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I normally expect the Next and Previous buttons on sites like Cracked.com that want me to generate more ad revenue with more page loads, but why five clicks for a simple article with no ads, Nature? Why can't you let me just scroll through your content, particularly when this equates to a blog post (and a Top N formatted post, to boot)?</comment>


Show HN: Debbit – Automate spending requirements for high-yield bank accounts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jakehilborn/debbit <comment><AUTHOR> Extremely low interest rates have cut high-yield savings account interest rates from over 2% to ~1%. Most folks would be better off with a high-yield checking account, which pay between 3% and 5%. However, high-yield checking accounts typically come with a catch; you must make `n` debit card transactions per month. Depending on the bank, `n` can be between 10 and 60.

I created Debbit to automate meeting these spending requirements. Debbit will programmatically buy 50 cent Amazon gift cards and/or pay your cable bill in small increments throughout the month. It's built to be a set it and forget it solution. Run it once and it will execute in the background using headless Firefox month to month. Behind the scenes Debbit is a hand rolled scheduler + Selenium automation.</comment>


macOS lock screen: "I just sent my session pass to my whole team" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BenoitLetondor/status/939127296266588160 <comment><USER2> Oh, wow - I've reported this problem along with na example exploit to Apple about 6-7 years ago. Never got any recognition for it, but It was fixed some time after that. It's quite sad to see old bugs getting new lives like that.

For those interested, the sample exploitation that I've discovered was connecting any iPod/iPhone device to a OSX laptop while screen was locked was taking the focus away from login prompt 'into' the system, where iTunes was gaining it and from there it was just few OS level keyboard shortcuts from gaining network access to the system, while still locked: launch finder, go to tools folder, launch terminal, launch `nc` in the terminal to get the access via network. Lots of blind typing but it worked more times than not.

<comment><USER3> > Oh, wow - I've reported this problem along with na example exploit to Apple > about 6-7 years ago

Any proofs? Perhaps you can demand a bounty payout or sue them ignoring!

<comment><USER4> You can't demand a bug bounty payout, especially because Apple didn't have a bug bounty back then (and their bug bounty today is invite-only).

Also, if you read the rest of the comment, Apple _didn 't_ ignore it. They fixed it.

<comment><USER3> I did read the rest of the comment. So I am asking if someone is either making this up or if not it's important to shame Apple for its secrecy. That's my view on responsible disclosure; either ack someone's hard work or let every bug free in the wild. What's the point when your work isn't being acked?

<comment><USER4> > _What 's the point when your work isn't being acked?_

To get the bugs fixed?

Also, we don't know why they didn't get recognition. The simplest answer is someone else may have reported it first. But it doesn't really matter. And I really don't see how "secrecy" comes into play here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With no disrespect to the developers at Apple, et al, each one of these problems that goes viral before reaching "proper" channels is a well-deserved slap in the face of these behemoth organizations.

Perhaps, if the entire tech community regards Apple as a joke, they will start paying attention.

"Responsible disclosure" is great stuff for creating a culture of free outsourcing of tech companies' most imporant feature (security) to the same people that paid those companies thousands of dollars for that privilege.

<comment><USER6> Responsible disclosure is about preventing the bug from being exploited before it can be fixed. Knowing about this bug doesn't help me compromise someone else, but it does help me avoid getting compromised.

<comment><USER7> So, security through obscurity. No thanks. I'd rather know about the exploit ASAP so I can implement a workaround, rather than wait months for the vendor to get off their ass while my systems are getting hacked by the hundreds if not thousands of hackers that have 0-day knowledge.

Calling what you describe as "Responsible" is intellectually dishonest.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you can write a patch or mitigate effects of (say) an OpenSSL bug. I can't. Certainly not for the myriad of devices that embed well known libraries in firmware images that I don't get to modify myself.

I'd much rather that those things which are remotely exploitable across millions of devices to be kept quite for a small period of time (30-90 days depending on the complexity of the fix required) so that I can get patches from our vendors and schedule an update at the first available opportunity.

You might call it security through obscurity, I call it keeping shit from burning down.

<comment><USER7> There are numerous potential workarounds besides authoring a patch. And they can be distributed in a user-accessible fashion, like the workaround for the macOS blank root password was.

Not telling the world about it does not keep shit from burning down. Eliminating vulnerable targets is the only thing that does that. And that is more expediently served by full and prompt disclosure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to pile on, but my MBP (with "TouchBar" which will assuredly not exist in another year) is always in clamshell mode and connected to two external LG 4K displays. Whether, on which screen(s), or in what state the Mac wakes each morning is completely random. Sometimes it doesn't wake at all. Sometimes I have artifacts on one screen and a desktop on another screen. The sleep/wake sequence is a complete mess, and it doesn't surprise me that the focus might sometimes be on apps running in the user session behind the lock screen.

<comment><USER10> Same problems as you, but I disagree on the touchbar. It's one of the better things Apple has added recently.

But holy hell do they need to work on their external monitor support. Yesterday I had one of my monitors randomly go black for a second. I've had audio over usbc just not show up anymore and it refusing to see my gigabit ethernet when waking up unless I unplug the actual ethernet cable. Simply amazing this passed their QA - and Id find it hard to believe no one at Apple uses clamshell mode with two monitors.

<comment><USER11> > but I disagree on the touchbar. It's one of the better things Apple has > added recently.

Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as "better" than hardware keys. Maybe if they moved it above the FN row and we regained the hardware escape key, while making it a build to order option. Even then, I personally would have no interest in it, and neither would anyone else I know. I do not want to look at my hands while I type, ever.

<comment><USER4> > _Strongly disagree, and I can not conceive of how it could be viewed as > "better" than hardware keys._

I hope this is hyperbole, because it shouldn't be hard to understand. The TouchBar is absolutely an improvement. I can't remember the last time I actually used a laptop keyboard's F-keys for anything, but the TouchBar makes that space useful.

<comment><USER12> > I can't remember the last time I actually used a laptop keyboard's F-keys > for anything

Not even F5 in a web browser?

<comment><USER4> That's Windows. F5 doesn't do anything in Mac browsers.

<comment><USER13> What? Fn+F5 works fine in chrome.

<comment><USER4> Funny, I actually tested Chrome before commenting just to make sure it wasn't doing something weird, and F5 definitely doesn't reload Chrome on my computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> FWIW this is a known security bug at Apple. I filed a bug about similar behavior where you can see the desktop briefly without logging in. Apple marked it as a duplicate. [https://imgur.com/YxXtU2y](https://imgur.com/YxXtU2y)

Here are the steps to reproduce:

\- Start Mac

\- Login

\- Turn on Screen Lock: System Preferences > Security > General > Check "Require Password" and Select 5 Seconds.

\- Turn on Hot Corner Sleep Display: System Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners > Select upper left > Put Display to Sleep > Ok

\- Attach external monitor

\- Activate hot corner by dragging mouse to upper left corner of screen

\- Wait 6 seconds

\- Click the mouse to trigger waking the screen

\- See brief flash of the desktop without logging in!

<comment><USER15> The desktop flash happens regularly to me when simply attaching an external monitor to my closed locked machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, Apple has the most available cash resource of any company out there (or at least close to). Yet, bugs galore, and strange product decisions. The obvious conclusion is that their management is failing to staff accordingly to the work that needs to be done. This could be because they are not aware that work needs to be done, which means engineers are not telling them, or that the management is not succeeding in hiring enough people to do the jobs.

My gut instinct says that a some former people at Apple used to do a lot of undocumented QA work and sanity checks, and that as the company has grown and changed, nobody picked up the slack when they left. Now, they'll have to go through a formal process of re-identifying QA steps that need to exist, and hiring against them. It's been a hell of a month for them, though.

<comment><USER17> I'm guessing that it's going to be pretty difficult to hire an engineer who is:

\- Very good

\- Wants to live near Palo Alto

\- Is able to live in the US

\- Wants to be subjected to Apple's privacy rules

\- Wants to work on fixing bugs instead of making new features

In the software engineering game, money only goes so far.

<comment><USER18> If I could work from a European Apple office, this would be 100% my dream job. When you implement new features, you are slave to your marketing department - I'd hate to waste my time on pointless gimmicks like the macOS Siri UI, for example. Maintenance work is much more satisfying because you're directly serving your users (usually skewing towards power users too!).

Also, I don't think the privacy restrictions would be so bad. Apple's UIKit engineers occasionally chit-chat with indie devs on Twitter.

The problem is that this job would be absolutely futile. If Apple hired 100 great engineers to fix bugs, management would simply double the amount of features that go into each yearly release.

<comment><USER16> For a company that loves minimalism so much, you've hit it right on the money WRT management.

The TouchBar, while interesting, is the perfect example of this. I'd love to have had it along with the physical buttons - there's plenty of room. Alone, though, it is pretty weird.

I assume that the real problem is that Apple's managers do email and web browsing, and that's it. They probably don't spend enough time in pro apps or trying to be productive to understand that a window manager built in, or physical keys or an improvement to their native text editor would be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I did something similar too - I was typing in the password while the Mac was being unlocked by the watch using that unlock-with-the-watch feature.

I was used to hammering return a few times to wake the machine up, then typing in the password, then hitting return again.

The few times I hammered return woke the machine, the watch unlocked the mac and the password plus the return key went into the app that had focus which for me also was Slack.

Is it possible that this user had the same thing happen to them? When I disable the watch unlocking, I can't make the password go anywhere but into the login screen (10.13.1 here with last weeks security update applied)

<comment><USER20> Because of the short delay between waking the Mac and the display lighting up, I always either use spacebar or command key, or click the trackpad/mouse a couple times to wake.

Return is a dangerous key!

<comment><USER21> I hit the shift key

<comment><USER22> I used to hit the Shift key to manually triple-verify keeping my laptop 'alive' during long videos/presentations but have since switched to the Ctrl key. Thanks Sticky keys!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I worked at an open source shop where almost everyone ran Linux and used IRC for chat. For a while I made the mistake of having the screen black time lower than the screensaver timeout, so I'd unlock my screen and see my password go out in IRC. I ended up changing my password to something that looked like a shell command.

<comment><USER24> I worked in a mixed shop, and when my Linux box showed the BSOD screensaver, my Windows-aligned co-worker helpfully rebooted my machine for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> These lock screen issues go back further than 10.13, I believe it was 10.10 or 10.11 my child was able to bypass the lock screen by mashing on the keyboard while the screensaver was fading out the login dialog.

I witnessed it. I was not able to reproduce it in 10-15 minutes of testing. She did NOT type in the password. Just banging on the keyboard, playing with the screensaver.

<comment> drunken-serval I have a computer on 10.10. Has this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Lock screens are harder than they first appear: www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html (Which, you'll note, mentions this exact failure case in the "Transfer Grabs?" section.) There's some X-specific stuff in there, but there's a lot of general issues in there, and with just a bit of imagination most or all of the X-specific issues can be seen as general issues as well.

<comment><USER24> Fair warning: Jamie doesn't appreciate the discourse this crowd brings to his site. Visit this URL without a referrer for the best results.

<comment><USER27> No idea why you wouldn't just make it clear the site will open an inappropriate image when linked from HN

DON'T OPEN THAT LINK

<comment><USER22> Yes hopefully the commenter will edit in time to remove the [http://](http://) prefix so that it is not clickable.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11135200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11135200)

>sirsar: _JWZ used to detect the hacker news referrer and redirect all links that originated on hacker news to goatse. Now it 's only slightly less graphic_

<comment><USER26> Sorry. Pity. It's actually crammed full of good stuff, which is why I linked it. It's a classic easy-looking problem that gets really hard when you get down in the weeds.

<comment><USER22> Not that it's somehow my place to say it, but I appreciate the spirit of your apology; you too are among the victims who deserve no blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Left Slack open with focus, allowed MBP to sleep, woke with space bar, login field had focus, tried with closing lid and opening while Slack was open and focused, again password field functioned as it should, unable to reproduce, macOS 10.13.2

<comment><AUTHOR> Difficult to reproduce, can be when we lock the session, close the macbook, plug a second screen and re-open. Or in another order. Personally I remember not having the focus on the password input by opening my MacBook onetime, I often plug and unplug screens

<comment><USER29> I was in a huge lecture hall and the presentation from the head of school was going to talk. He plugged in, turned to look at the display from the projector and it hadn't come up yet. He types in his username and password and stood there waiting. When the projector came to life he had typed it all into the username field. He fixed it up then displayed his desktop to us with all the pending final exam papers sitting there. No one in the hall showed any obvious sign of realising what had just occurred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have slow Macs that I share with family.

I've seen similar behavior when switching users. The full-screen password entry login comes up, but focus is still on regular apps.

</comment><comment><USER22> I often wonder how many authentication log files contain passwords because people in a hurry append it to the username on accident (not visually confirming the Tab/Enter/switch to the password entry).

This is also vaguely similar to the 'test SSL submit' security technique of first entering enough data into login forms to process a submission, and then entering real login info into the 'login failed' retry page after verifying SSL. This has lost some of its luster as non-SSL form submission has fallen out of wide usage.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, pretty sure mine is in clear text in some ssh auth.logs. Yeah yeah, I should use encryted keybased login (I try to mostly do it.)

<comment><USER22> I typically require both when others are involved since proper key security can't be enforced (hardware 2FA is the dream).

AuthenticationMethods requiring both wasn't availabe in OpenSSH prior to v6.2 (May 2013)[1] and I'm on Windows anyway so I went with [https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-server](https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-server).

[https://serverfault.com/a/562899](https://serverfault.com/a/562899)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Say what you want about Windows, but no amount of sneakery can steal input focus from Winlogon window station (yes, there's a separate kernel object for that in NT/Win32K).

<comment><USER33> It is the (secure) desktop, not the window station.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This has been a very sporadic issue that I've seen once or twice per year at most, for quite a while with OS X - somehow, another window is able to steal focus from the login screen. I've never been able to reproduce it reliably or find a common element in all of the times it has happened, but it definitely has happened to me and I've also seen co-workers dropping their login password in a chat window due to this. But it is pretty rare, so hard to pin down.

I've also noticed another thing happening more lately - locking the screen, only to have it automatically unlock itself a second or two later. I always have to make sure it actually stays on the screensaver for a few seconds before I trust it will actually lock.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm really bothered. While I had relatively no issues with the fresh OS X update, I'm having a hard time with the iPhone 7 and the new iOS that is supposed to run their flagship device: iPhone 10.

While most of the bugs have disappeared with the recent update, there are still some minor ones that really pisses me off: Screen freezing unresponsively for 30-60 seconds before things get back to control; and music playing randomly (happened a few times. Everything calm. Boom, music starts to play).

I'm pretty sure this mess wasn't here before the update to iOS 11.

Edit: Just found there is a new update. Let's see if they are getting their shit together this time.

<comment><USER36> Wouldn't be surprised if it was intentional. Apple is known for planned obsolescence for their products, especially iPhones.

<comment><USER37> I hear this line a lot and yet iPhones get the latest iOS updates for many years after release while many Android phone are lucky to get 1 year of updates.

<comment><USER36> I would be much happier if Apple didn't "force" me to update my iPad with a pop up message every day. It was running smooth like butter, even with an older version of iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have had this happen with 10.12 and 10.11 on rare occasions. To my knowledge, I'm not doing anything different on the occasions that it does happen.

It wasn't Slack-specific as I've only started using Slack recently.

<comment><USER39> It happened to me as well, but with HipChat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Although this bug still sucks, the class of problems of pasting passwords into chat may have a simple, worthwhile, and general solution. A colleague at a former company always changed the key bindings is his IRC/Jabber client to include a control key with Return for sending a message. Does Slack have this option?

</comment><comment><USER41> Even more fun if the focus happens to be on a terminal window...

<comment><USER42> I knew I shouldn't have picked 'rm -rf /' as a password

<comment><USER31> Haha, tried that a couple of months back before wanting to do a reinstall. The system stopped me with some warning :) I think it was Arch but could have been Ubuntu or Solus.

<comment><USER43> There's a way to still do the rm -rf / bypassing the warning but you shouldn't do that.

Ever since systemd was a thing, that command has stopped being 'safe'. It no longers solely affect the filesystem. It can wipe your EFI variables and make your comnputer unable to boot at all, even unable to boot installers to reinstall linux.

[https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402)

Don't think of the file system as just the file system. If you keep thinking of / as only meaning 'whatever's in that hard drive' you will not like what you may encounter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I also typed my apple id password to my peer, not into chat, but into another mac in the same room. Mac keyboards can disconnect and connect to wrong devices if used with them once.

That specific setting was: my keyboard was used to setup his mini, mini was turned off and on later. My keyboard, already properly reconnected to my mac at that time, disconnects on timeout (or for whatever reason it does that few times a day). Mini "grabs" my keyboard when it goes back on air. I wake my sleeping mac via trackpad and try to type my password into focused password field. Non-obviously, no characters appear on _my_ screen.

</comment><comment><USER45> Definitely done that before. Sent my password through Messages to a friend. After that, I learned to keep the finder or a web browser as the thing in focus before I lock my computer.

</comment><comment><USER46> Last week I was resizing a window in High Sierra, and I noticed that the Chrome app in the background was also scrolling. That was completely unexpected. It's long been the case that the window doesn't need to be on top for this behavior, but in this case it wasn't just a focus issue, it was that I was in resize mode. Completely jarring when it happened, but seems related.

</comment><comment><USER47> Sounds like the assumption is that the lack of focus means that the first password got sent to Slack? But it seems more likely that it was the second entry of the password that was sent to Slack, and it was just that the keyboard input was being buffered? (So the first password-enter eventually got processed, and then the second one got processed but after unlock.)

</comment><comment><USER48> A similar thing happens to me sometimes with 1Password on the web. I'll click the extension's icon and type in my password and realize I'm typing it into a text box on the webpage. I've tried to reproduce it and I can't, so I have no idea what the issue is. It freaks me out though.

</comment><comment><USER49> Microsoft employee saide. "Same issue as with using windows 10 with multiple monitors/screens."

[https://us.teamblind.com/article/wtf-apple- uBXwbJMc](https://us.teamblind.com/article/wtf-apple-uBXwbJMc)

</comment><comment><USER50> Could not reproduce that. For me its impossible to not have the password field focused. Hm?

<comment><USER51> Same here. Running 10.12.6

<comment><USER52> I think this is a 10.13-only bug, likely tied with some of the other password entry bugs that have popped up due to a bunch of rework with how user login/authentication work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I had this bug once a long, long, LONG time ago, since then my password is a sentence that's doesn't look like a password. Of course I'd still change it if it went out to slack :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have ran into this before, figured it was a generic login bug. Now I wonder what/where my login credentials went. Lovely.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm always worried about this too... sometimes my session doesn't lock because I was watching a video and I go ahead and type my password before looking when I come back (some websites log all keystrokes).

</comment><comment><USER55> Not surprised by these bugs any more.

The sheer amount of bugs in High Sierra is ridiculous, with the exception of the root password bug, I've personally experienced the following bugs with my Thunderbolt display:

* In 10.13 or 10.13.1 the built-in web camera was broken. The video would freeze after a few seconds when attempting to use the camera in FaceTime. This was fixed in 10.13.2.

* In 10.13.2 USB audio devices connected to the TB display no longer work properly. After playing audio through the device (USB DAC in my case) for 30-60 seconds, some sort of interference/electrical noise appears for 5-10 seconds every minute or so. I assume this has something to with "Improves compatibility with certain third-party USB audio devices." from the 10.13.2 release notes.

<comment><USER56> For me it is impossible to update macOS too.

App Store is not working.

Downloading fix from website tells that my fusion drive is not compatible with this kind of install. Use App Store.

I don't even have a fusion drive.

<comment><USER57> Why you are still using it then? Operating systems are very complicated beasts, none is perfect but I like Linux the most. There are issues too but I feel like I have more control over it.. Sometimes work reasons force people into Mac/Windows though... :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This sort of shit wouldn't fucking happen if they put the login/lock screen into its own separate and independent desktop like Windows does.

When _Windows_ is more secure than you, you have big problems.

In case someone thinks desktop Linux is better, it's not. It's much worse: [https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/i-told-you-so- again/](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/i-told-you-so-again/)

<comment><USER59> FYI, that link now redirects to a somewhat NSFW imgur page mocking HN.

<comment><USER33> That has been already discussed on this very page at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15879470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15879470) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is really Slack's fault for not automatically turning the password into stars. IRC has done that for years!

<comment><USER61> Citation: [http://bash.org/?244321](http://bash.org/?244321)

<comment><USER62> Amazing.

Reminds me of people being told in chat to hit F10 to enable cheats in Counterstrike Source. Half the gamers would exit immediately.

<comment><USER63> Have you seen the feature they added to the latest release of BitchX and irssi?

Try it out: /disco party

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is why Windows NT ensures no user process can intercept Ctrl-Alt-Del.

<comment><USER33> No. It is nothing to do with secure attention.

This is why Windows NT runs the log-on user interface, the screen saver, and the elevation consent UI on separate desktops that have restrictive ACLs disallowing interactive user processes from creating windows there.

<comment><USER64> The SAS is _specifically_ so no one can hijack/spoof the password dialog. When you enter it you can be 100% certain you are talking to NT.

<comment><USER65> You're kinda both right. But the focus-protection part has nothing to do with SAS.

<comment><USER64> Consider [https://superuser.com/a/61772](https://superuser.com/a/61772)

<comment><USER66> Not really sure what you think that adds.

Nobody is denying that the "anti-hijacking" forcing of CTRL-ALT-Delete adds to security, what they're saying is that it has nothing to do with this topic.

This topic is about keyboard input focus. In Windows, due to the process hierarchy the login UI isn't running in the same context as desktop applications, so stealing focus or focus drift couldn't occur.

<comment><USER64> _This topic is about keyboard input focus._

Yes, and the SAS guarantees that after you enter it, nothing else can have keyboard focus. I don't see why this is such a controversial point. You will never come to unlock your NT workstation and find that the keyboard focus is somewhere you don't expect, because you need to enter the SAS first.

<comment><USER67> > I don't see why this is such a controversial point.

Because It's untrue. The SAS is a sanity check.

If something is spoofing a login screen on your desktop and you press CTRL+ALT+DEL, you will get a system menu instead of a password prompt.

If you are in the login screen, which is able to hook CTRL+ALT+DEL, it will switch to the password prompt.

Here's the clincher: even if you have the SAS disabled (which it is by default on Windows 10) there is still no way for an app to steal focus from the login screen. The keyboard focus assurances are handled by something completely different - protected desktops (these also handle the UAC prompt for the most secure setting).

Full circle: even though nothing can ever steal focus from the login screen (unless it is running within that protected desktop), if you don't use the SAS there is no way for you to know that you are looking at the real Windows login screen.

<comment><USER68> Normal apps can't, but it is possible to access other desktops, such as the login screen, from a system service. I work on software that does it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The quality of the software and the sacrifice of key functionality in the hardware (dropping of MagSafe, which was a huge differentiator, going to just USB-C ports which almost nothing supports, not even Apple's own in box phone chargers) demonstrates that Apple is purely a design house lately. It has completely faltered on the engineering side. Tim Cook is not an engineer and Jony Ive is not an engineer. There are engineers at the company but they don't seem to be getting a seat at the big table.

<comment><USER70> You talk as though you're stating facts. However I very much like USB-C for the usual reasons. Of course it's in the early stages, but personally I hook up all my peripherals to my laptop with a single cable. Much convenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> on .2 already. Never had an unwatch to unlock. The ghost typing happened to me yesterday. I never found out what got my password. hopefully it wasn't slack. I assumed it just went to the "root window" (does quartz have the same concepts as X?) of the lock screen

I usually press control key to wake up every computer (shift doesnt work on some). that one time I woke it up by tapping on the touchpad.

</comment><comment><USER72> Windows handles this nicely with User Account Control (UAC) and Secure Desktop mode.

Many of OSX's problems come from trying to shoehorn security on top of operating system concepts that were developed in 1969.

</comment><comment><USER73> I may be wrong, but Slack might be hijacking the window order, there's def some monkey business going on there.

<comment><USER74> Nothing should be able to hack outside of of the lock screen. That should require some crazy special permissions.

<comment><USER75> The system allows things like key-triggered screen grabs during the login password window (found this out when my 1 year old hit a bunch of keys), which already seems like nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Apple has a bug bounty program where they'll legitimately pay you to report bugs directly to them. What's with everyone reporting them to Twitter instead and forgoing the extra cash?

<comment><USER77> People post on twitter because it actually gets a quick response. According to Lemi Orhan Ergin, the root password bug had been reported to directly to Apple five days before his tweet, but there was no response/fix. Then he tweeted about it, and it was fixed the next day.

[https://medium.com/@lemiorhan/the-story-behind-anyone-can- lo...](https://medium.com/@lemiorhan/the-story-behind-anyone-can-login-as- root-tweet-33731b5ded71)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Map showing distribution of the IMDb top movie filming sites in London - <AUTHOR> https://go2cinema.com/filming-location-map/ <comment><USER3> Just a thought but if there was a way to browse by film also, that would be a nice additional option :)

Oh, and if you could click the other locations for a film, once you have the details open, and have it move to that location on the map.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its my weekend project. I have written an accompanying post explaining how I got the data. [https://medium.com/@gajus/filming-sites-of-the-imdb- top-1000...](https://medium.com/@gajus/filming-sites-of-the-imdb- top-1000-movies-f8b171e99da7)

<comment><USER4> Did you customize the Leaflet marker clusters or create your own? Great design

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool! (I just discovered that part of 'Criminal' \- with Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot,...! - <USER2> filmed just streets away from where I grew up!)

Now if only there a was to get the filming locations in advance...</comment>


Be sure to mind when you change your mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/be-sure-to-mind-when-you-change-your-mind.html

<comment><USER2> This is more of a matter of coming to terms with facts and/or arguments. Often times people will form (knowingly) form opinions without having the data necessary to draw any sort of conclusion.

What is being demonstrated here is the willingness for people to override their intuitions with facts or arguments. When they educate themselves, the original intuitions are forgone and overwritten with conclusions extrapolated from new data because their first opinions never had any structural (logical, rational) foundation to begin with.

So to clarify, it's not so much that opinions are changing, because their innate feelings on the subject likely don't change dramatically. It's the arguments and facts presented to frame the situation in a way that has been adapted to their ideals.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another reason that journaling - and re-reading - can help you seriously grow as a human being. It's been a great boon to me.

All humans tend to believe that if they feel REALLY STRONGLY about something, they're right. The only way to disabuse yourself of this idea is to recognize, in your own words, how you felt REALLY STRONGLY in the past about a lot of stupid things, and to follow that to its logical conclusion.</comment>


Hy: A Dialect of Clojure Embedded in Python - <AUTHOR> http://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/quickstart.html <comment><USER2> Misleading title. In the first place the proper title is "Hy: Quickstart". In the second, Hy is nothing like clojure. It is a LISP like clojure is, true, but it doesn't have any of the libraries or even syntactic constructs of clojure, such as built-in maps.

It _is_ a LISP built on CPython. That's cool, but it feels more like you're writing homoiconic python than clojure, down to the mutation-centric control flow and keywords.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hy is beautifully imperative. For people put off by functional programming Hy is absolutely awesome.

The return/if/while/break/continue actually work without making you jump through hoops.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is not a dialect of clojure, please fix the title.

<comment><USER5> The following function is valid in hy and clojure.

(defn fact [x] (if (< x 2) 1 (* x (fact (- x 1)))))

Yes, hy and clojure don't have access to the same libraries, but then neither do clojure and clojurescript, yet you'd agree that clojurescript is a dialect of clojure, yes?

<comment><USER4> It is a lisp, with visual similarities to clojure. Library access is irrelevant. The features that differentiate clojure are not there.

\- Immutable and persistent data structures as the default

\- Functional programming (no early returns or mutable bindings) as the default

\- Reader literals for those data structures

\- Concurrency primitives (including core.async)

\- Protocols for polymorphism

From the hy docs: "Hy derives a lot from Clojure & Common Lisp, while always maintaining Python interoperability". Borrowing nice features where you find them is great, but it doesn't make it either a common lisp dialect or a clojure dialect. It just makes it a lisp with some similar stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very nice. I wonder if all the examples from SICP will run in Hy?

The tutorial is very well written and show all the language features: [http://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/tutorial.html](http://docs.hylang.org/en/stable/tutorial.html)

Funny quote from the quickstart:

       #! /usr/bin/env hy
       (print "I was going to code in Python syntax, but then I got Hy.")

</comment><comment><USER7> This has shown up on HN a few times but the only significant discussion seems to be from 2014.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8696975)

<comment><USER7> Actually [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14909786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14909786)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Hy%20lisp%20points%3E10&sort=b...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Hy%20lisp%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the concept of Hy, but has anyone used it for something "serious"?

<comment><USER9> In other words, apart from parenthetical syntax, what value does it add over just writing Python? For example, what macros are useful "in the wild"?

<comment><USER8> The canonical example of macro that is useful "in the wild" is embedding SQL in your code. See for example [http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-an- mp3-database.ht...](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-an- mp3-database.html)

(Disclosure: I am just an occasional LISP dabbler)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It "feels" like Clojure for whatever that is worth. I find myself more naturally doing functional programming in Hy than in Python. The threading operators encourage this.</comment>


Seedbank – Collection of Interactive Machine Learning Examples - <AUTHOR> http://tools.google.com/seedbank/ <comment><USER2> I was initially skeptical of Colaboratory notebooks when it was first released, but the value of a free GPU (and Python 3 support eventually added) makes it worthwhile to use. I recently wrote a tutorial on training a text- generating neural network based on Colaboratory here: [http://minimaxir.com/2018/05/text-neural- networks/](http://minimaxir.com/2018/05/text-neural-networks/) (and I have trained many-hours-worth of models with it!)

The only problem I have with the Colaboratory Notebooks is that file I/O is a pain in the butt (and requires Chrome).

<comment><USER3> fwiw we have an example notebook for I/O:

[https://tools.google.com/seedbank/seed/5646239437684736](https://tools.google.com/seedbank/seed/5646239437684736)

Transfer from Google Drive is particularly fast (many GB is no problem) since it's google datacenter to datacenter.

<comment><USER4> If you don't mind me asking: It seems like you can just run arbitrary stuff in a cloud instance for free using colab including GPUs. This doesn't sound a like a sustainable offering.

This sounds a lot like the old Google, which offered a lot of stuff for free but had to shut it down. Do you have any thoughts on that? Are there plans for a paid offering?

<comment><USER5> It sounds to me they want people to learn about deep learning and tensorflow. In the long term there will be more professionals and the salaries will go down. That is how they will make profit from this type of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow this seems like an incredible resource. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER7> What a terrible name.

<comment><USER8> I literally thought it was a sperm bank.

<comment><USER7> "Like Uber but for sperm banks"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Could not access the resources needed to display output. This is probably because third-party cookies are not allowed by your browser.

:(

<comment><USER3> Can you elaborate on this ? Do you get this when just accessing tools.google.com/seedbank or inside a Colab notebook ? What browser are you using ?

<comment><USER9> I clicked into one of the featured seeds, then clicked to open the seed in colab. [https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/magenta/music_va...](https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/magenta/music_vae/music_vae.ipynb)

Then I click the first little play button for "Setup Environment" then it gives me that error. I'm on chrome 67.0.3396.99 on OSX, and I do in fact have third party cookies disabled (for the usual privacy reasons).

Specifically it is `NotSupportedError: Failed to register a ServiceWorker: The user denied permission to use Service Worker.` which is probably due to the privacy settings?

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately I believe Colab needs this to work :/</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Job interviews are useless - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-04/job-interviews-are-useless <comment><USER2> OK, and what do you propopse? Oh, wait, you're Bloomberg, you don't propose anything constructive.</comment>


Google is removing ads from the right-hand side of search results - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/20/11077472/google-search-ads-change-position <comment><USER2> A decade ago, other search engines were selling the top spots in their search results as unlabelled advertisements, and Google was able to claim moral superiority by clearly distinguishing advertisements from organic search results. As time has passed, the distinction has gradually weakened; the advertisements' background color got whiter and whiter until it was the same as the organic results, the fonts and colors got closer and close and became a perfect match. Now the only difference between advertisements and natural results will be the word "Ad" in small, white-on-orange text. How long before they find something even more subtle to replace it with?

</comment><comment><USER3> Extremely interested and slightly wary as to how this will affect ppc. My informed predictions:

\- CPC increases across the board

\- CTR increases across the board

\- AdWords loses smaller ad buyers who simply can't compete for a top 3 spot

\- More stringent requirements about ad content

\- Awareness ads (not directly leading to a purchase or conversion) will be unable to compete on cpc

\- Longtail keywords become more important, overall number of keywords brands are targeting will increase

Ultimately I think this helps big brands who can afford top spots. They can afford higher cpcs, and better keyword bid strategies. Google's revenue will increase, but the number of ad purchasers will decrease. Ad quality (if there is such a thing) will become "better" by aligning more with users search intentions (Read: ads looking more and more like organic results).

I work at a digital agency, so these are only 90% bullshit predictions.</comment>


LinkedIn Plans to Open Up in a Closed Sort of Way - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/linkedin-plans-to-open-up-in-a-closed-sort-of-way/index.html?hp

<comment><USER2> I think they're going the wring way with this. Instead of approving specific companies to to development they should open the API, let anyone develop and then approve specific applications.

<comment><USER3> It's an odd proclamation. Even if it's an open API, I don't think people will write hamburger throwing apps for linkedin because that's not what people go to linkedin for in the first place. Most people log in there to do business- like things. Apps like 'throw hamburger' probably wouldn't be added by most, especially in light of being seen as unprofessional, in industries where it still counts. So only the apps that help business-like things will be added.

However, that's not to say working people can't be inane and juvenile. My guess is if there was a "watercooler" app where you can anonymously gossip about your coworkers (what truemors should have been, imho), or if it was something to count #meetings vs # of bathroom breaks, there might be an uptake on that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the most effective forms of emotional conditioning? - <AUTHOR>

I don't mean Pavlov. I'm talking about mental toughness. Emotions are arguably the most important thing to manage in life. In some respect, that's what we do all day long.
I'm wondering if any of you know of any techniques to become emotionally stronger/resilient.
The most effective strategy I have found is listening to motivational/positive audiobooks.
Boot camp? I started making a list of hypothetical situations that would elicit the most nervousness/fear from me in various parts of my life (career/spiritual/relationships/health/etc). Just writing the list was difficult. Anyways, made me think some smart guys hear would have some hacks for managing emotions. <comment><USER2> Group physical activities can be good. Group because emotions are social and you can't develop them without peers, physical activities because everyone's strengths and skills are different and, and there's no hiding a difficulty or weakness behind rationalizations. There are many different contexts where this can be applied; things I've done at different times include construction work, rock climbing, martial arts, and dancing.

There are plenty of volunteer work activities with a physical component, and recreational kinds can be competitive or just participatory. You get some healthy exercise but it also pushes you out of your comfort zone and requires you to interact with other people in a different way. Chances are when you start doing something you won't be that good at it, while being surrounded by those who are much better; accepting that and then working to improve your abilities will boost self-confidence and interpersonal skills as well your physical abilities.

</comment><comment><USER3> daily exercise. daily.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is microtransactions not a solved problem already? - <AUTHOR> Why is microtransactions not a solved problem already? Im not talking about crypto specifically, just in general; what stopped anyone from creating a payment solution that didn't charge tons of money for each transaction? Whats so hard about microtransactions? <comment><USER2> 1\. Psychologically, people do not want to pay small amounts. People think that people are more likely to pay small amounts. The reality is that even though amounts can be very small, cognitive cost of making a decision to pay is great and stops people from spending that way.

Even if we had micro transactions with zero fees, it wouldn't take off.

2\. Most people use credit cards / debit cards / paypal. Processing fees for those are just too big and Visa etc. is not interested in changing their business model.

So you would have to built an alternative payment system that doesn't interface very often with banks / credit cards etc. but that's pretty much impossible.

And if you built it just for micro transactions, people wouldn't use it because #1.

<comment><AUTHOR> > So you would have to built an alternative payment system that doesn't > interface very often with banks / credit cards etc

Why could it not interface very often with banks / credit cards?

<comment><USER3> They charge a minimum per transaction [https://www.valuepenguin.com/what- credit-card-processing-fee...](https://www.valuepenguin.com/what-credit-card- processing-fees-costs) "These fees are often presented as some percentage plus an additional fixed amount - usually no greater than $0.25"</comment></comment></comment>