Apple Survived '80s Thanks To Aldus PageMaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-survived-80s-thanks-to-one-piece-of-software-says-guy-kawasaki/90024 <comment><USER2> That's true, but a bit of simplification. The golden triangle were Apple LaswerWriter, Postscript from Adobe and PageMaker from Aldus. All of those three key technologies needed to be in place for the other technology to work.

Aldus was later acquired by Adobe, but it was an amazing software company. Not only did it produce PageMaker, but it also created Freehand, Persuasion (pre- PowerPoint!) and later After Effects which is still alive and well today.

<comment><USER3> The Apple LaserWriter is an interesting product. The existence of affordable, full graphic laser printers created the market that Apple would dominate, but it wasn't important to Apple to own the laser printer market itself. Corporate inertia took some time to realize that and let the printer companies fight to the bottom.

Nine years later Apple repeated with digital cameras. Digital cameras were expensive and not widely marketed in 1994[1], three years later after the QuickTake 100 had put a stake in the ground for price and brought digital cameras in front of people's eyes Apple was irrelevant in the then huge market and exited (under the newly returned Steve Jobs' axe). This was a win for Apple's Macintosh platform which at the time was perceived as superior for "graphic things".

In an alternate universe, where Apple decided to make their money on iTunes sales, the iPod could have gone the same way, the problem being that "reselling other people's music" doesn't provide enough to differentiate your experience to your users.

EOM

[1] I was looking at disrupting the MLS at the time. We ultimately decided that their business practices were too formidable, but a $700 640x480 camera would have kicked the snot out of the messy little black and white photos MLS used at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pagemaker 5 is still one of my all time favorite apps.

In fact, I think that it is STILL better than word and most other apps.

The reason is that the app acts more like a visio than a word processor.

In word, your editing text on a sheet. In pagemaker you organized elements and objects which were test-block objects or images.

I actually had just commented on this program recently, there are still very few apps that work as well.

I wish it hadn't died in the form that it was.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, MS Word is for _word_ processing whereas PageMaker is for _page_ layout. You invite pain and suffering when you try to use either as a replacement for the other.</comment></comment>


Removing User Interface Complexity, or Why [Mithril] is [even more] Awesome - <AUTHOR> http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog/an-exercise-in-awesomeness.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Leo Horie, author of Mithril, writing about how to re-implement some of James Long's "Removing User Interface Complexity, or Why React is Awesome" examples using Mithril (React-like client-side Javascript MVC framework).</comment>


Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here's a Simple Plan to Fix It - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/daylight-saving-time-is-terrible-heres-a-simple-plan-to-fix-it/281075/ <comment><USER3> Am I the only one that likes DST? I think that it has important function of enabling socializing and nightlife in the northern hemisphere.

I was never bothered by it. The switch requires day or two at most. And because certain hours are ingrained in the society fabric as late or early it is just not possible to achieve the same effect with mandating transport and businesses to shift an hour early/late.

It works a bit like central bank monetary policy - it is easier to devalue/strengthen the currency than to renegotiate a few billion contracts.

So it is better to shift the time an hour to have a better utilization of the workday than to have all of the time arrangements changes.

In the summer there is a lot of light that goes underutilized on 9 to 5 workday, but in the winter it is bad for people to start working while dark- ish outside.

if we want to remove DST we have to get rid of 9 to 5 workday. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER4> Why is it bad to start working while it's dark outside? The problem I have with DST isn't the summer time, but the "normal time". It just doesn't make any sense to me that it's light at 7am and dark at 5pm when you're working from 9 to 5. To enjoy any sunlight during the day you'd have to wake up way early.

<comment><USER5> This is it, I want to enjoy the sunlight in my free time, not use it all up while I'm commuting and working. A couple of hours of sunlight after I finish working would improve my experience of winter immeasurably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am probably part of the minority, but I actually quite like DST: you get to sit outside longer on warm summer nights, and winter days are balanced too. Since that is about the only thing where I feel that DST effects me, I'm really ok with it.

<comment><USER7> I'm Canadian and for me DST is pure hell. Imagine not being able to see the sun either in the morning while you jog before work, or in the evening while you walk home. That is my December, and that is in Toronto, it is even worse in Ottawa. I have one Turkish grandparent and the rest north-western european so it's not even _that_ bad for me compared with say a Jamaican, but combined with the interruption to my internal clock (which is normally very accurate) it really pisses me off.

<comment><USER8> December is during the regular, non-DST period, though. DST is March-October. So if you don't like the time of sunrise/sunset in December, it can't be DST's fault!

One solution could be to standardize in the other direction: instead of abolishing DST, go to year-round DST, i.e. year-round offset of ~1hr between solar time and clock time.

<comment><USER7> Ah, you are correct! I keep forgetting that because I think the summer time standard is way better! Who needs sunrise earlier than 6 am?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where > Americans (who don't live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other > countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia > and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour.

I find it hard to take this solution seriously when they can't even get the basic facts right. I'm sure this is some kind of argumentative fallicy but Australia's DST started in October and we put our clocks _forward_ one hour, because we're in the Southern Hemisphere and heading in to summer. This semi- makes the article's point about confusion... but really computers have fixed all that confusion for me anyway.

<comment><USER10> Humans program the computers, though, so the computers can't remove the confusion in places where the human government changes the rules a handful of days before a transition time. For example, this happens every year in Morocco. The entire country must update all their computers manually -- I don't see any way all devices could have correct tzdata in time for the transitions.

<comment><USER9> Hah, my first thought is "humans also make the government" and I know which one I'd optimize first... sorry about the snark though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is just the worst of both worlds. Some people are getting up when it's pitch black out for 3 hours part of the year. Some people are getting home 3 hours after sunset part of the year. Two time zones is not fixing anything, it's still sucky part of the time and you still have to know what time zone someone is in to know how to relate to their meeting invitations.

Yes, DST is annoying. But changing to two time zones? How is that better than 4? If you're going to do it, there's really only two ways to do it - <USER2> the way we have it now, where everyone can get up at 7am and have it be reasonably light out most of the time.... or have one global time and people might have to get up at 1500, because that's when the sun rises (note that AM and PM would lose meaning, which is also a good thing).

As a developer who has worked on programs that have to deal with time and days.... this would be awesome. As a developer that has international meetings every single workday... this would be awesome. Right now, when we want to move a meeting, we can't say "we're going to move the meeting to 11am" we say "we're going to move the meeting 2 hours later".... because the people at the meeting are in 4 different time zones. It's a pain in the butt.

Note, it's not just about meetings between two time zones, meetings between N time zones is horrendous with the current system.

Now everyone complains they won't know when shops are open... how do you know now? The shop could be open from 6am to 3pm (common for downtown Boston restaraunts that don't do dinner) or 9am to 5pm, or 11am to 10pm (common for restaraunts that don't do breakfast)... etc etc. So, yes, each place would need to define their own working hours, and yes, you'd have to look them up. Big deal. You already do.

<comment><USER12> >But changing to two time zones? How is that better than 4?

Jet lag for one thing. Flying from LA to NYC currently sets you back three hours. It will wreck your sleep schedule and leave you tired for three days. Change to two time zones, and it will set you back one hour instead, which is essentially the same effect DST has. You might be slightly tired, but you'll recover within a day.

Another benefit is communication. Communicating with people in different time zones is a pain, and the more time zones between you, the worse it is. With only one hour between them, you greatly increase the overlap of when people on different sides of the country are able to communicate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want to propose a solution to the problem, why not have everyone adopt UTC? Every programmer who has ever dealt with time deltas will give you a big hug.

<comment><USER14> That's called optimizing for the 5% use case at the expense of the 95%. I don't really want to get rid of time zones for the rare instances when I need to schedule transatlantic meetings at the expense of having no fucking idea what time shops are supposed to be open or that people are supposed to be at work without either reconstructing the time zone in my head anyway or keeping a massive table of local custom by region. If I fly to London and look at my phone (which compensates for time zones) and it says it's 1300, I figure it will be similar to 1300 at home in many ways: late but not too late for lunch, during normal working hours, and most everything is probably open. If I'm used to 2100 being that time of day, I am going to fly to London and see that it's 1300 and have no fucking idea what that means, except that back home I would probably be sleeping and thank you very much for that subtle psychological reinforcement of my jet lag, you've ruined my day just because you're a lazy programmer who doesn't want to worry about time zone conversions.

<comment><USER15> If you fly to Madrid and look at your phone you're still going to need that massive table of local custom by region, or you're going to be utterly baffled when most shops start closing at 13:30 and then reopen in early evening, and the restaurants are all closed at 18:00.

There's no shortage of international differences in opening hours, days and times and time-zones don't really get you very far towards understanding them.

<comment><USER14> But I would have to know that about Madrid either way. It would at least help to know when those times are relative to the local day cycle.

Time zones give me a few bits of information and knowing about local customs gives me the other bits, but the bits that are encoded in the time zone are bits I can ignore as soon as I change my clock, just as setting your zero helps you work out a physics problem. Instead you want me to worry about all the bits all the time. Why, to make it easier for computers? I thought computers were better than me at handling bits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Frequent travel between the coasts causes jet lag, robbing employees of > productive work time. With a one-hour time difference, bi-costal travel > would become almost effortless.

Jet lag is caused by traveling significant distances east or west at angular speeds moderately close to the earth's angular rotation speed; you'll see the sun rise or set quite a bit sooner or later than your circadian clock would've expected.

The unexpectedness of whatever time the wall clock at your new location tells is only a side-effect. Tinkering with the clock will not make the jet lag go away.

<comment><USER17> Really? I thought jet lag was based on your sleeping hours, not the sunlight hours. Does that mean I can get jet lag just by opening or closing a set of effective bedroom window blinds?

<comment><USER18> As someone who has worked alternating day/night shifts for several years, I can anecdotally say that going to Amsterdam a few weeks ago from SF completely and utterly kicked my ass, and then getting back was worse. Much worse than alternating day/night shifts in the same week. I was not nearly expecting anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article claims to fix DST but only offers a solution for the US. That's uncharacteristically insular for The Atlantic.

<comment><USER20> We had a bill to fix the summer time problem in the UK. Actually they weren't going to eliminate the time change they were just going to move to European time (GMT+1), but that would have been almost as good.

Unfortunately some stupid Scottish MPs filibustered it (I didn't even know that was possible here). Now I work in an effectively windowless office and only see the sun for half an hour each day. :(

<comment><USER21> Yes. We should change summer time because you work in an "effectively windowless office".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its not only done for reasons of energy efficiency; I'm sure theres UK research that says less children die in road accidents as they are going to school when it's light, not when its dark. About to run out so can't look up reference now.

Also the author goes on about people commuting or arranging meetings across time zones and how annoying it is for them. I get that, but I think actually the vast majority of ppl almost never do that.

<comment><USER23> By your argument, DST should be suppressed entirely.

If there are less accidents going to school during the day, then the switch in March to DST means that in many places people will go to school when it's still dark, which sucks..

<comment><USER24> In many places, people go to school/work when it's dark regardless of whether DST is in effect or not.

I would also wager that the risk of being hit by a jetlagged, drowsy driver offsets any dubious benefit changing the time twice a year might have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I always enjoyed this video to show how crazy DST is! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4)

</comment><comment><USER26> There is nothing simple about this plan. Here's a simple plan to fix DST: stop observing it.

Time zones solve a different problem than DST. Abolishing one shouldn't affect the other.

<comment><USER27> Well I agree with you. And I don't get why people want to overcomplicate this thing. People suggesting fewer time zones or even a single timezone (like UTC) in response to DST issues are just making it less likely to ever get rid of DST. When there are too many options, it confuses the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here's one change which will harm nobody:

Make DST chances apply on the same day everywhere in the world.

This will solve most of the troubles with scheduling international conferences and international flight schedules. There would be summer schedule and one winter schedule, and that's it.

First, get what can can be achieved easily. Then push for more radical changes.

Edit: Also stop the spring clock change from being on Sundays. That's just dumb.

</comment><comment><USER29> Due to how the sun revolves around the earth once a day time is very much about where that unshielded nucular reactor, as pushed by angels, is in the sky. With time zones we have a huge approximation of where that is, unless you live in Greenwich then you can be pretty certain that the glowing thing is not directly above your head at noon. So time zones are a compromise.

Given that everyone has a smartphone these days (well, the people that matter), why can't we go back to the pre-railways 'sundial time' and have always accurate, infinitely variable time? For instance, move across the room and the time will be ever so slightly different?

We could then have UTC more widely recognised and used for international importanty stuff. Obviously we would also have to get the phrase 'Greenwich Mean Time' to be used instead of this faceless 'UTC' mnemonic.

With this system there would be a lot more small talk chit chat about time, you could plausibly arrive a minute or two late and 'not realise the time'. Time could be vague yet oddly accurate at the same time. It would be a whole lot of fun.

Moving to this new 'n' zany system of timekeeping could be easy. All the scientific and computing community are on UTC already so there would be no change for them. A little deal could be done by the smartphone makers so that the default time shown was 'sundial time', auto updated by GPS, wifi or other geolocation. UTC could also be shown side by side, prominently so you could easily get the time in either system depending on your need. A special app, not installed by default, could then show retro 'timezone' time after you clicked through a few dozen menus. Obviously this would be laden with skuomorphic design but functional if you really wanted this legacy time system.

<comment><USER30> Seriously, the only thing more painful for me this week than reading this comment, was signing up to reply. Between three and sixteen letters my ass!

> Given that everyone has a smartphone these days (well, the people that > matter)

Really? The only people that matter are those with cell phones? When I was growing up, and even last night, I was told by local news to set my clock back an hour. They've actually been telling me since Friday night, which is great because I rarely watch the news and don't subscribe to cable.

Yes, I have a cell phone, and yes it's a smartphone of a recent generation, and no I don't like it that much.

> With this system there would be a lot more small talk chit chat about time, > you could plausibly arrive a minute or two late and 'not realise the time'. > Time could be vague yet oddly accurate at the same time. It would be a whole > lot of fun.

Great! I'll be in Belgium this week. Standup at the normal time?

<comment><USER17> >The only people that matter are those with cell phones?

People in the poorest countries in the world have cell phones... so yes, you can assume a cell phone.

<comment><USER30> Assuming a cell phone and indicating that only people with a cell phone are important are two different things.

And your cell phone doesn't tell you it changed times, it just changes it for itself.

<comment><USER17> >Assuming a cell phone and indicating that only people with a cell phone are important are two different things.

And the original post was the former, so it all works out.

>And your cell phone doesn't tell you it changed times

Is that needed? Well it's easy enough to add that feature.

<comment><USER30> I retract my earlier comment about the most painful thing I've read this week.

<comment><USER29> Well I am glad that I have managed to get someone to sign up and contribute!

I do enjoy writing with my tongue firmly in my cheek when a story is either a 'first world problem' or if it has been discussed to death many times already. Hopefully I brighten someone's day, even if scores of others mod me down!

Anyway, welcome from lurkerdom to contributordom!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Australian summers are a great way to experience the advantage of DST (though obviously only some states choose to do it). Even the early hours of the morning are bright and warm, and enjoying dinner with the sun setting late into the evening adds such a lovely ambience. I think, here at least, it does more good for our culture (tourism and the like), than any other reason.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'll never understand DST. Why On Earth change every clock in the country (and inthe process create bizarre things like missing hours and redundant hours) twice a year when we could simply change working hours and habits?

<comment><USER33> Okay, so today the bank opens at 8:30. Tomorrow it opens at 8:31. The day after that, 8:32. (or whatever, I'm sure my numbers don't match the progression of day/night cycles exactly).

That's why.

Ya, sure, I'm being silly, you say. But when do we shift, how many different opening times should shop have, is each place going to do it differently or will it all be legislated (good luck with that)? It would be a nightmare of logistics. "The babysitter needs to start leaving at 4 because her evening job just shifted time, but we aren't shifting for another two weeks, leaving the baby unattended...."

<comment><USER32> DST is already enforced by law, so enforcing a different system shouldn't be too complicated...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wouldn't it be easier to change what time you go to work than to change the clocks?

I for one think the entire world should switch to one time zone...

</comment><comment><USER35> Switching efforts are painless, so I would ditch DST in a moment.

Timezones, on the other hand, make more sense (it allows all businesses start at the same nominal time in all time zones).

However for me personally (as owner of a business that runs accross multiple time zones and as a person living on Internet), the most convenient would be to give up time zones too and use UTC only.

</comment><comment><USER36> I like the late hours of sun you get with DST, but I don't like switching. I'd be happy with a permanent change to DST. I don't understand the desire to have it get dark before 5:00PM in the winter.

</comment><comment><USER37> I complained about changing the clocks an hour twice a year.

A friend agreed. But he suggested that it would be less disruptful to the human circadian rhythm to change the clocks by 10 minutes every month.

I'm pretty sure he was joking...

</comment><comment><USER38> I just wish it was always light at 6PM when we go home. As soon as we go back an hour and it's dark at 5PM, it's like no-one can drive anymore.

</comment><comment><USER39> I might have dreamt this but I thought daylight saving in the UK was also a 'safety' aspect for children going to and from school.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is interesting though I'd be curious if diverging from solar time would be as easy as the author claims.

</comment><comment><USER41> Nah. People mostly live offline and have to interact with people in their community and region.

</comment><comment><USER42> why is it "on" in the summer (for northern hemisphere)? I'd think we'd want to 'save' daylight for the days. There's no need to 'save' it in the summer - there's already plenty.</comment>


Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Seeks Investors for New Company - <AUTHOR> https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/06/09/0024204/theranos-founder-elizabeth-holmes-seeks-investors-for-new-company <comment><USER2> 23 months ago, she was banned for 2 years from running a lab. Coincidence? [https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/08/theranos-ceo- elizabeth-h...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/08/theranos-ceo-elizabeth- holmes-banned-from-owning-a-lab/)

</comment><comment><USER3> oh my Gosh... she is crazy, her very own (so-called) "Reality Distortion Field" is even stronger, and more harmful more dangerous than Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER4> And how much are you willing to bet she won't find someone willing to fund her endeavor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought her plea bargain with the FTC / SEC deemed that she couldn't hold executive positions in any company within the U.S. for ten years?

<comment><USER6> Your almost correct: She is barred from being an officer or director of any _ _public_ _ company for 10 years

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Crazy. Anyone know what she's working on?

<comment><USER8> An amazing new method to scam investors out of millions?

<comment><USER9> blood-testing on a blockchain /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> her?</comment>


Advice: Just finish it - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/01/23/advice-just-finish-it/

<comment><USER2> "Just finish it" is terrible advice because software is never "finished". Bingo Card Creator, which is "pretty freaking simple" as far as software goes (v1.0 got released in 8 days after I had the idea to do so, and half of that time was spent on tasks other than programming), has been under development for 2.5 years. I just released v2.51 and, sure enough, found things to improve about it. I've already got an extensive list for what to add for v3.0.

My website has also been out for 2.5 years, and there are a million things to do there, too. It rained yesterday, and accordingly I scratched something off my rainy day list: implemented a serial key lookup. It is a minor little snit of a feature that will only be used by probably 5 people, saving me 15 minutes, a month. But when you aggregate those by the dozens, they are really meaningful.

My advice isn't just finish it. It is "just launch it". You'll have all the time in the world to improve the software later -- start getting users and feedback for it today. (Oh, and charge money, starting at launch.)

<comment><USER3> I think Just Finish It can mean different things for different people. I do think software can be finished. I wrote a site in college for a company that still uses it. The code remains unchanged, and that was nearly 5 years ago. It works fine, has scaled amazingly well, and is what I would consider finished.

However, some other things never are truly finished, and you're right, just require launching. I find just launching it is one of the hardest pieces of software development.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Proper way to fork a Linux distro? - <AUTHOR> Ubuntu makes a "mini" distro that is very stripped down. I'm using it and happy. Now I want to run this on other hardware but they do not provide a version for the architecture I want. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
My question is how do I get to a place where I have the sources/packages of this distro that I can compile for the architecture I want?
There are so many distros in the world now that fork other distros (Kubuntu, LUbuntu, Mate) but it is surprisingly hard to get started doing it yourself. I am reading the LFS/BLFS docs, but this would take months to get started I think.
Edit: typo <comment><USER2> I'm doing this as well, (Wanting to make a from scratch version of CoreOS). From what I have researched you can do a couple of things.

\- Could start with something like buildroot / Yocto project. Both projects have lots of archs. Buildroot would prolly be easy to bootstrap your OS.

\- Use something like Gentoo, Void, Alpine Linux. These distros have pretty good community support but you might be a little bit hard getting stuff started as you would have to set everything up using their tooling.

\- Look at Cross Linux From Scratch as it will probably help you will with bootstrapping your OS for your specific Arch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but don't I still need a package list, to know what sources I need to grab and start with? How do I get that from a prebuilt distro or don't I?

I see Buildroot and Yocto are pretty interesting and handle a lot for you. Thanks for mentioning them.</comment></comment>


Finding a new partner - <AUTHOR>

We have been running our startup for about a year and are looking to bring a third partner on to compliment our team.  What would be the best way to find someone to meet such a unique role. (i.e. equity over pay). <comment><USER2> It may depend on where you are. In Vancouver, BootupLabs (or the Vancouver Entrepreneur Society) is holding a 'Founder meet-up' night to try to connect start-ups looking for co-founders with people who might be interested.

First I'd make sure you know the skillset that you want. Then look through your connections to see who might fit the bill. Equity over pay shouldn't be the first thing you consider as a 'quality' of a co-founder. If it's the right person, and the right concept, go from there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Without knowing anything about your company, your service/product or what skillset you are looking to fill I think the standard advice is to participate in local hacker meetups and introduce your startup to those potential partners. Another route would be to place a job ad for the position, e.g. Craigs List under "internet engineers."</comment>


Crab crisis: Maryland seafood industry loses 40% of workforce in visa lottery - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crab-crisis-md-seafood-industry-loses-40-percent-of-workforce-in-visa-lottery/2018/05/03/bf397874-4ef0-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html <comment><USER2> Crabbing companies cannot reliably exploit cheap labor this year, whereas other companies will be able to for the first time, in a lottery system (for cheap labor). Seems ok to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Crab picking is hard work, and requires a lot of skill to do quickly and without getting bits of shell in the meat. Not just anyone off the street can walk in and do the job. These businesses are built around a decades-long, 100% legal, guest worker program that suddenly failed them. In addition, the lack of pickers harms not just the picking businesses, but also all the watermen who fish for crabs.

To compound the issue, these businesses are located in rural areas where there just aren't very many people around to do the work.

And, this is seasonal work - anyone local who takes the job will be laid off in the Fall, and then won't come back next year (because they will have found another job, ideally), so their training is lost.

</comment><comment><USER4> Costs will go up for consumers to provide enough margin for employers to pay a living wage to a local. The pain of the change will bankrupt small businesses and get the gop some bad pr.

</comment><comment><USER5> So what happens? I would hypothesize that one possible result is that the price of crabmeat goes up until it becomes economical to ship the crabs overseas for picking, and then shipped back for selling (maybe it already is, and there was just no reason to change the system until now). That's happened in other cases and it's effectively a way to move a factory abroad, with a larger chunk of the money involved also moving abroad. A worse outcome for the local citizen.

Alternatively, I suppose the wages demanded by local citizens could go down enough to be able to compete. I wonder how low that would be.

<comment><USER6> That may adversely impact quality and desirability of the meat. The costs of transportation will also pay transportation workers.

Also, it depends on the prior competitiveness of the crabmeat market -- was it a sellers' market (prices are already at a maximum) or a buyers' market (prices at a minimum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a process for the Division of Unemployment or for temp companies to get matched to local companies that don't get the visas they're seeking?</comment>


Ask HN: Code/Data collaboration tools for researchers - <AUTHOR>

I work with 3 other researchers that have limited experience with version control and bug trackers. Is there anything out there that can help us improve our code and data collaboration?
I've tried using git with the team but the overhead "feels like too much" for them. The feeling is that research does not fit well into existing software designed for supporting software engineering.
Thanks for any info <comment><USER2> Check out this SO question, [http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/748/is-there- a-g...](http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/748/is-there-a-git-for- data), which has many answers including [http://dat-data.com/](http://dat- data.com/)</comment>


Pwgen as a service - <AUTHOR> http://pwgen.zsh.io <comment><USER2> So you can get passwords over plain text and immediately toss them in the bin, I don't see the usefulness at all</comment>


FileRock will be discontinued as of Nov 20th - <AUTHOR> https://www.filerock.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the email I just received:

This e-mail is to announce you that the FileRock service will be discontinued as of November 20th 2013. We ask you to please back up all the files that you have stored with the FileRock service: after that date your data will no longer be available.

We would like to thank you for having used the FileRock service until now: your support and feedback has been invaluable.

Note that while the FileRock service is being discontinued, the top-security technology at the heart of FileRock is being embedded in another product with a completely revisited offer. If you are interested in receiving more details, please let us know by writing to email@example.com.

If you have any questions or issues, please don't hesitate to write to email@example.com.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find the companies you want to work for? - <AUTHOR>

We often hear about how horrible recruiters are, how as developers do you find a company with a good culture that you love to work for? <comment><USER2> I haven't found a perfect answer to this, but here's a few questions I've asked in interviews that I've found useful:

1) Do you do exiting interviews?

If they say no, that's a huge red flag. Even in a small company, asking someone "why are you leaving?" isn't hard and doesn't require a tremendous amount of resources.

2) Following up from question 1: What do most people state as their reason for leaving?

I've never met an interviewer that could rattle off statistics like "last year X% of resignations were attributed to issue Y" - but I'd be seriously impressed by one that could. Retention of talent is a huge issue for employers right now, so if your interviewer is in management they should have at least a vague idea what the answer to this question is.

3) How would you describe your company's culture?

Every answer you get to this question will be biased. It's virtually impossible for anyone to objectively measure culture, and it's even harder to do from an insider's perspective. At best, you'll get an answer where you have to read between the lines. At worst, they'll totally bullshit you. If your bullshit detector is finely tuned, then this can be a very revealing question. Either way, the resulting discussion is often more illuminating than the answer itself.

4) What's your intellectual property policy? Can I work on open source projects on my own time?

I've received answers to this question that span the full spectrum from totally incompetent ("I have absolutely no idea") to totally absurd ("we own every line of code you write, regardless of context").

</comment><comment><USER3> Ask about the schedule of meetings and the normal work hours of the developers on the team you're interviewing for. Inquire about the work environment, is it cubes / walls, or large tables and open work spaces. What are the projects they're working on and technologies they're using? What are they looking for?

I feel you can get a sense of the vibe from talking to the interviewers, seeing how they act, what they say, and how they are leading the interview.

However, sometimes you don't know about the culture until actually working there, so it is good to try to interview them while they're interviewing you to make sure it's a place you want to work.

</comment><comment><USER4> I tend to take the open source project route. Basically I work on projects that interest me and take note of the companies that are major contributors to these projects. I find that, while not 100% the case, companies that allow their employees to work on open source projects tend to be a bit more developer friendly. It's how I found my current position that I'm quite happy with.

Granted this is for the IT sector, and you should always checkup on the company in more depth to ensure it's completely the right fit

</comment><comment><USER5> Attend technical talks by some of the companies you're thinking of working for. While you're there, chat with some of their employees and continue the conversation over email/linkedin. Ask them what it's really like, workflow processes, and anything else they're willing to tell u.

That's how I landed my current gig. Product designer at one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups. True story :)</comment>


Tom Cruise gives lesson in TV settings and 'motion smoothing' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46449906 <comment><USER2> It's fascinating that this all comes about because movies are still filmed at such a low framerate, and people find it no longer looks 'cinematic' when the framerate is better, just because they're so used to movies having a low framerate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah but the look is associated with cheap tv series productions like soaps, the whole magic of the film as the director wanted it dissolves. Of course, the acting seems to suffer a bit to, I watched some movie on high frame rate and lost interest rather quickly. It may be a learned thing sure, but why bother going through that unpleasant unlearning experience when a setting could do it. I talked to some young people who grew up with hd and high framerate and still prefer the cinematic feel of lower frame rate..</comment></comment>


Show HN: Epoh - Social Network of Quotes - <AUTHOR> Hi, few months ago I started Epoh where users can share they thoughts through text and image, you can like, dislike, comment, tag users, follow, unfollow users and most importantly you can share your content anonymous to everyone and to the people that follows you.
I would like to ask you guys for some feedback on it, if you like the idea of it, would you ever use it, what can be improved, what can be added/removed and what should I do to attract more users to it.
I'm currently working an APP version for Android and IOS.
http://epoh.me
Many Thanks! <comment><USER2> So, it's basically like imgur, Instagram, and the like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but focus on images with text, in a way that is simple to just scroll down without needing to put any #hastags or searching for something and be able to see all the content that has been posted on the site by the users. Also, you can choose to only see the 'Hot' posts and the posts from the users that you follow.

You can also see on the user profile how many likes and dislike he has given and received, how many posts he posted, how many followers he has and how many people are his following.

But more importantly, is that you can share your thoughts anonymous to everyone even for the people that follows you, so if you follow me and I share something anonymous you wouldn't know that was me who posted it.</comment></comment>


Delivery apps like DoorDash are using tips to pay workers' wages - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/22/20703434/delivery-app-tip-pay-theft-doordash-amazon-flex-instacart <comment><USER3> I'm confused why this has become a story again. Recode reported this back in March and there was a bunch of controversy about it raised back then, with Instacart reversing course and DoorDash doing nothing.

I think it speaks more to how quickly we get outraged and forget than anything else.

<comment><USER4> Because DoorDash still hasn't reversed their policy and because a lot of people still don't know that DoorDash does this.

<comment><USER5> People also don't know that restaurants do this. People generally are not aware of, and do not care about, the specifics of labor practices outside of their own industry.

<comment><USER6> I think the thing that's making it look a lot worse for Doordash is their hypocrisy in things like this: [https://blog.doordash.com/introducing-project- dash-bbc61ac0c...](https://blog.doordash.com/introducing-project-dash- bbc61ac0cb8c)

the critique goes :

1\. rip off workers 2\. workers are poor, cant afford food 3\. launch BS "anti-hunger" initiatives which address about 1% as much hunger as they cause, but make customers feel like they are doing a good thing using the service.

it's not unlike how big oil companies like BP run tons of advertisements how they are so "invested" in renewable energies like solar, spending a tiny fraction of the money they gain by profiting off of generation of greenhouse gasses and also dumping millions of gallons into the gulf of mexico every now and then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazon Flex does this as well. I signed up to do deliveries last year to see how it worked, and on a couple occasions gamed it such that I was able to deliver an order I placed to myself (which is really just ordering from a nearby restaurant and hoping you get the offer). The advertised pay I would get for the delivery before accepting it was $7-12 (the range is supposed to account for tips, and across all deliveries, when everything settled it was almost always the low end of that range). With Amazon Restaurants, you had to tip when you ordered, and couldn't change afterwards, and my tip was $3. When everything cleared, I got $7, and I knew $3 of that was my own tip to myself. Had I tipped $0, I would still have gotten $7. I always felt it was a crummy thing to do to people -- your tip was just making Amazon give the driver less money. Not being able to change the tip also sucked, as I don't like tipping when I haven't received anything yet. That's more of a "name your price" service fee.

Amazon has dropped out of the restaurant game, but they still probably do this for Prime Now and Whole Foods (package deliveries aren't eligible for tips). The funny thing with restaurants was during peak times, when they didn't have enough drivers, they'd send out guaranteed $22 offers to delivery maybe $20 worth of food, which I always pounced on as it was incredibly easy money. It's no wonder they couldn't keep that business going.

Tips sometimes worked out well, though -- on some Prime Now routes where it was maybe $20-30 guaranteed, I'd get over $60 after tips. So they weren't always keeping everything to themselves. I could never figure out the rhyme or reason behind any of it.

<comment><USER8> > Amazon Flex does this well.

I feel like you intended this to be "Amazon Flex does this AS well"

... which is the difference between saying "they ALSO do this" and "they do a good job at this".

<comment><USER8> Odd that someone downvoted me AFTER the OP stated it was a typo and fixed it.

<comment><USER8> Also odd that someone has already downvoted this comment.

Attention downvoter: You should probably downvote my other comment here too: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20502359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20502359)

<comment><USER9> Would you please follow the site guidelines? They ask you not to go on about downvotes. Yes, they're annoying, but everyone gets them, and it's not a good reason to add noise to HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note that lots of restaurants do this too. Federal law lets an employer steal the first $5.12 of tips and many states have similar laws.

From wikipedia:

"The United States of America federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips.[4] If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any week, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate.[5]"

It's phrased to sound like a top-up but it's theft in my opinion.

<comment><USER11> I agree.

I'd like two things:

1) Tips to actually be tips, and OPTIONAL.

2) Real wages that are static for the restaurant (a base wage, calculated to properly compensate the employee without tips).

Please stop adding a hidden tax to items on menus.

<comment><USER12> It works like what you mentioned in most of the world but for some reason, it works differently in United States.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> DoorDash also has _terrible_ customer service which caused me to stop using them long ago. This policy in particular should be illegal without disclaimer (I'm intending to give money as a tip to my dasher, not fund DoorDash Inc) and is atrocious business practice.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is just what tips are.

People (in the US) are used to tipping in restaurants but many don't realize that in almost every case the restaurant is using those tips to top up the wages they should be paying the servers anyway.

So the restaurant can pay the server much less than the minimum wage - <USER2> tips just make up the difference until the server makes some minimum. What DoorDash is doing here isn't any different except that servers usually manage to make more in tips.

In conclusion, tipping culture sucks and the sooner employees start paying decent base wages the better.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you're going to tip, do it in cash and hand the money directly to the person that you're tipping. It is a fairly safe assumption that a third party collecting tips is going to pull some nonsense on that worker.

<comment><USER16> Tipping $0 on the site with the intention of handing cash to the driver means the delivery payout (which includes the site tip) displayed to drivers will be lower. Drivers are more likely take your delivery job if it has a higher payout. I don't know if the system breaks out the site tip in the delivery payout. If it did, people could enter a magic number to signal to drivers that they intend to tip in cash on delivery.

<comment><USER17> I've been setting my tip in app to be the number I intend to tip in cash and then I just 0 the tip out afterwards. Don't use apps that don't allow me to change the tip after the fact (but hopefully drivers don't get dinged for that change somehow)

<comment><USER18> Do these apps have freeform text boxes, "special instructions" or whatever? Could put a note in there, or make it your middle name displayed with the order, "Bob ITipInCash Smith"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just another nail in what should be coffin of the general "tipping" culture. If I enjoy the food, I should be able to tip the cook, why I need to tip someone who's job is to drive the order to me?

<comment><USER20> Servers generally tip out a percentage to the guys behind closed doors. That means cooks, dishwashers, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is why, instead of essentially promoting the next wave of "too-big-to- fail" monopolies, we should be trying to franchise things like this.

I had the idea a while back when someone I knew was getting the run around by Uber.

If someone developed a platform that catered to _franchisees_ instead of end- users (and contractors) it would be easier for everyone. Easier to price the service, easier to pay the workers, easier to negotiate, easier to run the business in a smaller scale.

So instead of Uber or DoorDash having 2,000,000 contractors, they have 10,000 franchises with each one maintaining it's own affairs. Everybody wins!

<comment><USER22> why would that make anything better? sounds like you would just add an additional rung of people who don't actually drive anywhere but still need to be paid.

<comment><USER21> I think the savings from reduced liability and simplified corporate structure would offset the costs. Let's face it, Uber doesn't make money as it is and neither do Uber drivers once you factor in all the expenses.

But if you can shift the liability for driver satisfaction and compensation off of Uber and onto it's franchises suddenly Uber isn't making 10,000,000 transactions per day. They're only making 10,000 transactions per month. That's money making interest for Uber instead of drivers. Also, Uber no longer makes money from rides. They make money by selling franchise rights and access to the platform for franchisers. The franchise is responsible for turning a profit from rides, and also for ensuring their employees are compensated.

There would also be an increase in efficiency. Currently my friend starts off 30m south of Boston for Uber, but her rides typically take her north of Boston within a few hours. Uber doesn't care how far out of her way she's going. When she inevitably shuts off her app she must then drive 2 hours to get home. If each franchise had it's own "turf" this could be organized and reduced. The result is less wasted fuel/time for the drivers and a smoother ride because drivers stay in areas they're comfortable and familiar with.

<comment><USER23> So basically, after "disrupting" cab companies, Uber would be transitioning into a software vendor for cab companies.

<comment><USER21> I guess so. It would throw both business models a lifeline and help to stabilize the supply/demand problem ( _right before automation creates a whole new supply /demand problem_).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ah, I thought this was for sure a repeat, but apparently only some places changed when this first broke earlier in the year...

"Following outcry, Instacart scrapped the policy and promised to retroactively compensate workers. But DoorDash and Amazon Flex didn't budge. They still use tips to make up base pay on some of their deliveries. Even more annoyingly, it can be difficult for workers to know when this is even happening because of a lack of transparency in how they're paid (DoorDash, though, recently rolled out changes to make the source of earnings clearer)."

</comment><comment><USER25> they say 'tip in cash', but I never have the physical cash to tip. This always brings me anxiety when I dont have the physical small bills to provide. I would ensure I use a platform (as mentioned in the article, like grubhub or seamless) that doesn't garnish the electronic tips for pay.

<comment><USER26> It's gotten to the point where I almost always use a card to pay for things, but I also have some cash with me most of the time (on the order of $50, including $5s and $1s) just for occasions like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I went to the bank and got an envelope of $5ers that I keep around just for delivery drivers now.

I'd love to see how much DoorDash's "tip" revenue has declined since this seems to now be much more widely known.

</comment><comment><USER12> Always pay the tip in cash to avoid this kind of tactics from companies.

</comment><comment><USER28> Restaurants do this. They are required to pay minimum wage if the $2.15/hr + tips doesn't average out to be at least minimum wage. As a restaurant owner, you can add lots of hours at $2.15/hr before you have to pay anything extra out of pocket.

That's how they are able to force waitstaff / bartenders to do setup / cleanup for $2.15/hr.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think this should just be consolidated into the original article discussed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20490687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20490687). The verge really isn't adding much

<comment><USER30> The thread you're linking to only has 2 comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The website lets you pay $0 for tip so you can tip in cash. I haven't found a way to set the tip in the app. Unfortunately, the website is much less reliable than the app and frequently has issues.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a relatively frequent customer of DoorDash, I have a pet theory working. I have tried this "pick $0, tip in cash" approach and it works fine for the driver - they get the money, I get the satisfaction of knowing they got the whole tip, and I get to extract the maximum value from all the VC money subsidizing these delivery companies.

But I have also seen that I am now getting deliveries where I am 3rd or 4th stop and by the time the food arrives, it is cold. My conspiracy theory is that doordash is trying to drive me away from their platform because of my $0 tips. Anyone else notice this when tipping $0?

<comment><USER33> both good reasons for your future boycott of door dash! Are there other food delivery services who have clearly explained fee structures?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I applaud this article for calling this what it is... Theft.

</comment><comment><USER35> Then don't tip.</comment>


The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/ <comment><USER2> My company sent me to Boca Raton in 1983 to learn how to use the PC. It was a week long class with hands on experience configuring PCs and BAT file programming using "EDLIN".

I had PC serial #7 in the class and serial #1 was at the front of the classroom.

The instructors were very excited that they could use BAT files and were bragging that the whole class roster was entered and managed on the PC using only the tools that came with PC-DOS.

The course set me on the path of systems and programming and kept me fat and happy for the next 35 years.

<comment><USER3> > the whole class roster was entered and managed on the PC using only the > tools that came with PC-DOS.

Having once written a depth-first directory tree traversal using edlin and batch files, I can only imagine what this must have entailed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First time I used an IBM PC I thought it was awful. I was used to 8 bit micros that had: colour, OS in ROM, BASIC in ROM, and sound.

You couldn't do anything with it before you used at least two disks: one for DOS and the other with an application.

I thought business people liked them because they wanted boring machines on purpose.

And then came the 16 bits machines: Amiga, ST, etc. And then the Acorn Archimedes. And IBM PCs were still awful. They started to make sense to me when 386s came about.

<comment><USER5> The 386's weren't even that great for games/graphics. Most games were still 286-compatible, and if you had a 386SX you might as well have had a 286. I remember being blown away by a friends Tandy because of the graphics and sound card it had, even though it was basically an IBM PC underneath.

The CGA graphics options on the IBM really didn't do them any favors. EGA wasn't much better but at least you could do games like Commander Keen. I remember playing games like Prince of Persia, BattleChess, and thinking "Finally. My friends with Atari and Amiga (and even Apple) computers have had these games for years."

It really took a 486 and a VGA card to let the PC start to shine. And then once the 3D games started coming out (Doom, Descent), you didn't even need a console anymore.

<comment><USER6> Correction , a 386 with SVGA card I played Doom, Descent, Wolfstein 3d, Dune, Dune 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Warcraft II, Sim City 2000 and Hexen on a simple AMD 386@40 with 4 MiB of RAM and OAK SVGA 1MiB that my father build self.

<comment><USER3> The 386/40's were definitely fast enough to be pushing into the 486's performance envelope (at least for integer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> Rather than talking of an open architecture, we might do better to talk of a modular architecture. The IBM would be a sort of computer erector set, a set of interchangeable components that the purchaser could snap together in whatever combination suited her needs and her pocketbook. _

Has this been achieved with software components in any niche? Other than early IETF protocols, software mutation tends to challenge interoperability. Containers are making progress in this direction.

On the hardware front, [http://www.opencompute.org](http://www.opencompute.org) has increased choices for those who can buy servers in large quantity. But small business has less choice these days. Even Dell, pioneer of build-to-order PCs, now favors pre- configured PCs.

On a positive note, it is now possible to buy some PCs without a Windows tax. Dell offers Linux and HP offers Linux/FreeDOS on select models. Is there room for PC OEM/ODMs to innovate in (free, non-bloatware) software components to increase the value of their mix-and-match hardware components?

<comment><USER8> > Has this been achieved with software components in any niche?

Isn't this what "programs" and "files" do? There used to be a time when computers were really one (or few) trick machines but since the time when anyone could install any program on their computer and have programs work with any file (regardless of which program originally made it), software on the whole is as modular (if not more modular) as hardware.

(which is also why i dislike the trend that iOS created with software being isolated both in terms of execution and file access, except a few preapproved holes here and there)

<comment><USER9> > There used to be a time when computers were really one (or few) trick > machines

You mean the time when programming was done with plug boards?

Computers have been more or less universal since the time RAM was used to execute the programs, the fact that files are a convenient way to organize data does noes not detract from the fact that the internal structure of a file needs to be known if you want another program to make sense out of it.

In that sense the text file is the most enabling element here, and binary files with unknown structure the least.

The ability to quickly load a program quickly (rather than to load it in through elaborate means such as plugboards, switches, punched cards, paper tape or magnetic reel-to-reel tape) definitely has had a lot of effect on the universal application of computers but that doesn't mean they weren't universal machines.

And even in the time of plug boards there were tricks that would keep multiple programs active by means of switching out an entire bank or segment of configured boards for another.

Software is as modular as the hardware it runs on permits, but it can also very effectively restrict or expand that modularity, a nice example of this is virtual machines which present a machine entirely different than the one that the original hardware embodies.

<comment><USER10> > _Computers have been more or less universal since the time RAM was used to > execute the programs, the fact that files are a convenient way to organize > data does noes not detract from the fact that the internal structure of a > file needs to be known if you want another program to make sense out of it._

> _In that sense the text file is the most enabling element here, and binary > files with unknown structure the least._

text files haven't always been universal. There used to be different text encodings (ASCII hasn't always been universal) and even different sizes of byte (eg some systems would have 6 or 7 bits to a byte). And even if two machines you're wanting to share data between were both an 8bit ASCII system; there's no guarantee that they would share the same dialect of BASIC, LISP, Pascal or C.

<comment><USER9> ASCII isn't universal even today (the page you are reading is UNICODE), but all text was much more readable and in general easier to process with ad-hoc filtering or other manipulation than binary formats.

This is what underpins most of the power of UNIX, but at the same time is something of a weak point: good and error free text processing is actually quite hard.

<comment><USER10> > _ASCII isn 't universal even today (the page you are reading is UNICODE)_

That's not really a fair point because Unicode and nearly all of the other extended character sets (if not all of them) still follow ASCII for the lower ranges. This also includes Windows Code Pages, ISO-8859 (which itself contains more than a dozen different character sets) and all of the Unicode character sets too.

> _but all text was much more readable and in general easier to process with > ad-hoc filtering or other manipulation than binary formats._

Text is still a binary format. If you have a different byte size or significantly different enough base character set then you will still end up with gibberish. This is something we've come to take for granted in the "modern" era of ASCII but back in the day "copying text files" between incompatible systems would produce more garbage than just a few badly rendered characters or the carriage return issues you get when switching between UNIX and Windows.

<comment><USER9> So, essentially you are trying to make the point that even ASCII has its problems and that all data has to be encoded somehow before processing can be done on it. The latter seems to be self-evident and UNICODE is a response to the former.

<comment><USER10> That's not what I'm saying at all. ASCII is just a standard for how text is encoded into binary. However it hasn't been around forever and before it there were lots of different -incompatible- standards. It was so bad that some computers would have their own proprietary character set. Some computers also didn't even have 8 bits to a byte and since a byte was the unit for each character (albeit ASCII is technically 7bit but lets not get into that here), it meant systems with 6 or 7 bits to a byte would be massively incompatible as you're off by one or two bits on each character, which multiplies up with each subsequent character. This meant that text files were often fundamentally incompatible across different systems (I'm not talking like weird character rendering; I'm talking about the file looking like random binary noise).

ASCII changed a lot of that and did so with what was, in my opinion at least, a beautiful piece of design.

I did a quick bit of googling around to find a supporting article about the history of ASCII: [http://ascii-world.wikidot.com/history](http://ascii- world.wikidot.com/history)

There was also some good discussions on HN a little while ago about the design of ASCII, I think this was one of the referenced articles: [https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column- ascii/](https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/)

The history of ASCII is really quite interesting if you're into old hardware.

<comment><USER9> ASCII wasn't nearly as universal as you think it was.

And a byte never meant 8 bits, that's an octet.

ASCII definitely was - and is - a very useful standard, but it does not have the place in history that you assign to it.

In the world of micro-computing it was generally the standard (UNIX, the PC and the various minicomputers also really helped). But its limitations were apparent very soon after its introduction and almost every manufacturer had their own uses for higher order and some control characters.

Systems with 6 or 7 bits to a byte would not be 'massively incompatible' they functioned quite well _with their own software and data encodings_. That those were non-standard didn't matter much until you tried to import data from another computer or export data to another computer made by a different manufacturer.

Initially, manufacturers would use this as a kind of lock-in mechanism, but eventually they realized standardization was useful.

Even today such lock-in is still very much present in the word of text processing, in spite of all the attempts at getting the characters to be portable across programs running on the same system and between various systems formatting and special characters are easily lost in translation if you're not extra careful.

Ironically, the only thing you can - even today - rely on is ASCII7.

Finally we've reached the point where we can drop ASCII with all its warts and move to UNICODE, as much as ASCII was a 'beautiful piece of design' it was also very much English centric to the exclusion of much of the rest of the world (a neat reflection of both the balance of power and the location of the vast majority of computing infrastructure for a long time). If you lived in a non-English speaking country ASCII was something you had to work with, but probably not something that you thought of as elegant or beautiful.

<comment><USER10> With the greatest of respect, you don't seem to be taking much attention to the points I'm trying to raise. I don't know if that is down to a language barrier, myself explaining things poorly, or if you're just out to argue for the hell of it. But I'll bite...

> _ASCII wasn 't nearly as universal as you think it was._

I didn't say it was universal. It is _now_ , obviously, but I was talking about __before__ it was even commonplace.

> _And a byte never meant 8 bits, that 's an octet._

I know. I was the one who raised the point about the differing sizes of byte. ;)

> _ASCII definitely was - and is - a very useful standard, but it does not > have the place in history that you assign to it._

On that we'll have to agree to disagree. But from what I do remember of early computing systems, it was a bitch working with systems that weren't ASCII compatible. So I'm immensely grateful regardless of it's place in history. However your experience might differ.

> _In the world of micro-computing it was generally the standard (UNIX, the PC > and the various minicomputers also really helped). But its limitations were > apparent very soon after its introduction and almost every manufacturer had > their own uses for higher order and some control characters._

Indeed but most of them were still ASCII compatible. Without ASCII there wouldn't have even been a compatible way to share text.

> _Systems with 6 or 7 bits to a byte would not be 'massively incompatible' > they functioned quite well with their own software and data encodings. That > those were non-standard didn't matter much until you tried to import data > from another computer or export data to another computer made by a different > manufacturer._

That's oxymoronic. You literally just argued that differing bits wouldn't make systems incompatible with each other because they work fine on their own systems, they just wouldn't be compatible with other systems. The latter is literally the definition of "incompatible".

> _Initially, manufacturers would use this as a kind of lock-in mechanism, but > eventually they realized standardization was useful._

It wasn't really much to do with lock-in mechanisms - or at least not on the systems I used. It was just that the whole industry was pretty young so there was a lot of experimentation going on and different engineers with differing ideas about how to build hardware / write software. Plus the internet didn't even exist back then - not even ARPNET. So sharing data wasn't something that needed to happen commonly. From what I recall the biggest issues with character encodings back then were hardware related (eg teletypes) but the longevity of some of those computers is what lead to my exposure with them.

> _Finally we 've reached the point where we can drop ASCII with all its warts > and move to UNICODE, as much as ASCII was a 'beautiful piece of design' it > was also very much English centric to the exclusion of much of the rest of > the world (a neat reflection of both the balance of power and the location > of the vast majority of computing infrastructure for a long time). If you > lived in a non-English speaking country ASCII was something you had to work > with, but probably not something that you thought of as elegant or > beautiful._

I use Unicode exclusively these days. With Unicode you have the best of both worlds - ASCII support for interacting with any legacy systems (ASCII character codes are still used heavily on Linux by the way - since the terminal is just a pseudo-teletype) while having the extended characters for international support. Though I don't agree with all of the characters that have been added to Unicode, I do agree with your point that ASCII wasn't nearly enough to meet the needs for non-English users. Given the era though, it was still an impressive and much needed standard.

A side question: is there a reason you capitalise Unicode?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting I had no idea about this passage:

>"In September of 1975 the company introduced the IBM 5100, their first "portable" computer. ("Portable" meant that it weighed just 55 pounds and you could buy a special travel case to lug it around in.)"

6 years later the "luggable" from Compaq became a real thorn in IBMs side. If you enjoy this type of computer history I highly recommend watching "Silicon Cowboys" a documentary about the rise of Compaq but also a bit about the history of the IBM PC and "clones". It's pretty fascinating and it's available on Netflix as well as free on Youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oylmFdZswCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oylmFdZswCM)

</comment><comment><USER12> Computing was more fun when hardware and software were separated. Unfortunately the trend is now going in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER3> How far back do you want to go with that? I remember assembling computers out of video boards, motherboards, etc.... but there are some people that remember soldering chips together... or transistors... or tubes... or relays. The trend towards higher levels of integration in computing extends back to the 50's (or maybe 40's).

> Computing was more fun

Fun is where you choose to find it. Modern machines are so good that they can be fun too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting the 8 inch floppys look similar to the ones used in the IBM displaywriter hard sectored and made a distinctive "graunching" sound when the drives where accessed.</comment>


Dreamhost Under Attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2013/05/13/networking-issues-affecting-us-west-data-center-los-angeles-ca/

<comment><USER2> Dreamhost is always experiencing some level of problems in the years I've used them as a host. You get what you pay for...</comment>


New FAA Guidelines Permit More Device Use - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/31/new-faa-guidelines-permit-more-device-use-all-the-way-from-take-off-to-landing/ <comment><USER2> I have flown a lot (IE: 100K+ miles/year) at various points in my career, and I'm disappointed by the commentary here about flight attendants. Think for a moment about their job - every day they are interacting with hundreds of people, assessing which ones might be a problem and trying to deal with each personality type with a smile, all while balancing (often in high heels) your drink at 30,000 feet in a vehicle traveling hundreds of miles per hour AND to add insult to injury, doing so on little sleep and for very little pay. Give 'em a break, eh?

Separate from that, even as a frequent flyer, I'd rather people _not_ have their attention stuck in their iDevice during takeoff and landing. Those are the times when a problem on the aircraft is most likely to materialize, and I'd rather not lose my ass in an accident because your attention was on Angry Birds. Further, in those minutes at the beginning of a flight if you are fooling around with your phone/kindle/etc and blocking the isle, you delay expedient loading and unloading of the aircraft. I've had colleagues busy on their [device] say things like "but, but I was just wrapping up a call, why was the flight attendant so rude!" No asshole, you were blocking the plane from loading / unloading. Think of others for a whopping ten minutes and put down the device so we can all safely load / unload and get on/off the ground.

<comment><USER3> I think of flight attendants as firemen (or firewomen) serving us drinks and food. Because that's what they are. They will be the ones saving your ass if the situation comes to that.

<comment><USER4> How so?

<comment><USER3> You could look it up by yourself, but here's the gist of it: the flight attendant's top priority is your safety, not your happiness or comfort. They are trained in emergency procedures and if at all possible they will be the ones who make sure you get out of a cabin full of smoke after a crash. To cite a recent example: [http://jezebel.com/no-ones-talking-about-the-flight- attendan...](http://jezebel.com/no-ones-talking-about-the-flight-attendant- heroes-in-t-706818871)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just want to be able to read my kindle on takeoff and landing. I hope this goes into effect soon. The device uses the exact same power sitting in my lap with the case closed as it does while I'm reading it.

<comment><USER6> I've tried to explain this to flight attendants before, but they don't care.

"Turn your device off!"

"This is _off_. It's really neat, actually! Once the screen is rendered to the eink display it stays there until...nevermind, okay it's off now"

/sigh

<comment><USER7> You know that Kindle can actually be turned off[1], right?

Arguing with low wage employees while they're having to deal with hundreds of passengers during the short pre-flight legally mandated checks makes you appear like an arsehole. They don't know every device on the market, nor whether that device is using 3G or wifi or is just sleeping or is off. And they don't need to know, they've been told to make sure that everything is turned off and that there are serious consequences if it doesn't happen.

The fact that the regulations are idiotic is not the fault of the busy, underpaid, low-skilled, attendants.

[1] [https://kindle.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle_User%27s_Guide_Englis...](https://kindle.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle_User%27s_Guide_English.pdf)

Page 20

> Power switch — puts your Kindle to sleep, wakes it up, and turns your Kindle > on or off. The power switch is located just to the right of the micro- > USB/power port. To put your Kindle to sleep, slide and release the power > switch; the screensaver appears on the display. While your Kindle is asleep, > other keys and buttons are locked so that you don't accidentally change the > place in your reading. For Kindle with Special Offers, the center of the > 5-way controller is not locked while your Kindle is asleep. To turn your > Kindle off, slide and hold the power switch for seven seconds until the > screen goes blank and then release.

<comment><USER8> > Arguing with low wage employees > ... > low-skilled, attendants

I down-voted this comment because I found it to be condescending. I don't know anyone who works as a flight attendant nor have any relationship to the airline industry that I know of.

What you said is simply mean-spirited. Not everyone is an engineer. Not everyone understands technology. Not everyone needs to. How much they earn and how skilled they are at technology is no measure of a person. That's really offensive.

I know many people who are virtually poor and uneducated who are better human beings --by far-- than some PhD's I've come across in my life. Why must some in technology behave as though these people are beneath them? This is shameful. What a horrible thing to say.

<comment><USER7> You make a very good point. I'd like to apologize for my poor choice of words.

> Not everyone understands technology. Not everyone needs to.

This is more what I meant, and what I should have said. I agree that "low skilled" is really offensive.

<comment><USER8> I'm glad you see it this way. This could easily be the result of shooting off a post without taking a moment to read what you've written.

You are not the first person to do that, nor the last. I've done it plenty of times. Life goes on.

Sometimes I think these fora need to have a selectable posting delay setting. Let the user choose whether posting is immediate or not. I would probably set mine to at least a 15 minute delay. I'd sure save me from making an ass of myself on occasion.

<comment><USER9> _Sometimes I think these fora need to have a selectable posting delay setting. Let the user choose whether posting is immediate or not. I would probably set mine to at least a 15 minute delay. I 'd sure save me from making an ass of myself on occasion_

Actually there is (at least here) look for the "delay" setting in your user page. It's the number of minutes between hitting submit and a post going live.

<comment><USER8> RTFM. Funny, I guess I never paid attention to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish one of these articles would quote some actual regulations. As far as I understand, the CFRs (FARs) have been more advisory than regulatory in these details, generally leaving it up to the airlines to decide their policies on personal electronics, then approving those policies. The 10k foot rule that Techcrunch refers to was never in the FARs, as far as I've read, rather it is/was an FCC regulation. Seriously, I'd like to see the actual regulations that have changed, if anyone can find them.

<comment><USER11> FAR 91.21 is the rule that is being enforced:

(a) Except as provided in paragraph (b) of this section, no person may operate, nor may any operator or pilot in command of an aircraft allow the operation of, any portable electronic device on any of the following U.S.-registered civil aircraft: (1) Aircraft operated by a holder of an air carrier operating certificate or an operating certificate; or (2) Any other aircraft while it is operated under IFR. (b) Paragraph (a) of this section does not apply to— (1) Portable voice recorders; (2) Hearing aids; (3) Heart pacemakers; (4) Electric shavers; or (5) Any other portable electronic device that the operator of the aircraft has determined will not cause interference with the navigation or communication system of the aircraft on which it is to be used. (c) In the case of an aircraft operated by a holder of an air carrier operating certificate or an operating certificate, the determination required by paragraph (b)(5) of this section shall be made by that operator of the aircraft on which the particular device is to be used. In the case of other aircraft, the determination may be made by the pilot in command or other operator of the aircraft.

Advisory Circular (AC) 91.21-1B is the recommended implementation of FAR 91.21 and includes the take off/landing and operation below 10,000 rules and seems to be what everyone is using.

I assume that it's AC 91.21-1B that is being modified. Its text is too big to paste here but you can read it here: [http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/A...](http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/AC%2091.21-1B.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is nothing about flight that "defy physics", in fact it is physics as to how airplanes fly

<comment><USER13> That phrase irked me too. Why the magic around airplanes? Saying "seemingly defy physics" would be a huge improvement, though it retains the tired metaphor. After all, it's a lack of sensible scientific thinking which led to the FAA maintaining this ban for so long!

<comment><USER14> It's... a joke.

<comment><USER15> If it was, I must have missed the punchline.

> Don't start celebrating just yet – this doesn't mean you can continue > playing Candy Crush while waiting for your massive, heavy hunk of metal to > defy physics and launch itself into the air as of this very moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Link to the FAA.gov page: [http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId...](http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId=15254&cid=TW189)

</comment><comment><USER17> I was thinking about this the other day with all the smartwatch news. I can picture attendants telling passengers to shut off their watches.

</comment><comment><USER18> Part of me likes this.

Another part of me hates this.

I usually don't really do much during takeoff and landing. The thrill of an aircraft's takeoff and landing may wear for some, but it pretty much never does for me. I just stare out the window (if I'm lucky) observing the spoilerons deploy and close, and those flaps deploy and retract. I love hearing that slight loss of engine power for climb after takeoff to prevent overspeed.

Cruise is pretty boring, but when I'm somewhere over Nevada or any picturesque area, I put my S7 to sleep and just watch the beautiful scenery.

The pragmatist in me is saying, "Yay, now I and everyone else can work round- flight!"

The Transcendentalist in me is saying, "How I wish others could see the beauty of a mass of metal rising to the heavens, and all that we can see below from above..."

<comment><USER19> I have a message for the Transcendentalist: most of us would love to enjoy that beauty, but having no leg space or access to a window kind of hamper us ;)

<comment><USER20> First class is not that expensive anymore.

<comment><USER21> Are you joking? Or are you not in touch with what constitutes "expensive" for most Americans? My recent coach-class round trip from Kentucky to Washington state and back cost $500. That's expensive. I looked into business class for the same trip, and it was about twice as expensive. Didn't even bother looking at first.

<comment><USER18> Well, FWIW AirTran used to offer <$60 business class upgrades. Not sure if they still do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is fantastic news for people who fly a lot.

I know that a "2-hour flight" for me _could_ mean a really good sprint on something, if it weren't for the interruptions that tell me when to put my computer away and ask me if I want peanuts.

<comment><USER23> I'll find this even more useful in short, 1-hour type flights. Out of the whole flight, you usually only get ~30 mins at altitude to pull out your tablet or laptop.

<comment><USER24> But you're still welcome to pay $16 for in-flight WiFi during those 30 minutes!

<comment><USER25> 1 hour pass is usually "only" $4.95, but I get your point.

I just pay $40 for a monthly pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Please, let this be one area where Europe promptly copies the US!...

</comment><comment><USER8> A number of years ago I wrote a bunch of Verilog code and ran simulations during a flight from LA to NY. The code, save a few minor issues, worked perfectly when tested on hardware. What's remarcable about this is that I wrote the code with pen and paper and ran the simulations similarly by hand on graph paper. No computer involved.

After a couple of similar experiences I've resorted to using flights as an excuse to unplug for a few hours. A set of good noise cancelling headphones and a notebook can give you an opportunity to explore and think in ways that might be nearly impossible at the office.

<comment><USER27> I've gotten out of the habit of this, and honestly don't know if I'm better off for it. When I didn't have access to a computer, I would fairly regularly 'implement' designs with pen and paper and test it too. As you experienced, these would then work perfectly or nearly so on actual systems.

Now I almost always have a computer or computer-like device at hand so there's just no need. Sometimes it feels like this results in more experimenting, but less thinking.

<comment><USER8> > less thinking.

That's exactly my point in a way. I realized that I am always immersed in technology. There are one or more screens of some sort in front of me nearly any time I am awake. A lot of us have lost contact with the idea and practice of thinking. Of talking to yourself. Perhaps doodling in a notebook to explore ideas and thoughts in your mind. For some reason I started to use flights as an excuse to practice thought. As noisy and uncomfortable as that environment can be I have found it amazingly effective for the simple task of letting my mind take trips in various directions with nothing but a piece of paper and a pen in front of me. I no-longer do paper-coding in flight. I think.

<comment><USER27> Flights are unpleasant enough for me that try to find some mindless entertainment to make the time go faster. I'm too tall to comfortably use a computer in my seat (especially when the ass-hat in front of me inevitably reclines). I don't know when unapplied thinking dropped from my list of entertainment options...

I have a trip coming up next week, seems like it might be a good opportunity to try to do something a bit more useful.

Thanks for your original comment and the sidebar conversation that led me to realize it'd be a Good Thing to get back to it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can anyone tell me what city is shown in the main picture?

<comment><USER29> San Francisco. That's the Bay Bridge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Fortunately, FAA regulations also seem to require the flight attendants to sit in their seats during takeoff and landing.

Once the flight attendants are done "policing" the isles and get in their seats, I just take out my Kindle and start reading again.

So far, I haven't caused any aircraft crashes... and my fellow travelers have never called me out on it: apparently they also think the rules are stupid.

<comment><USER31> And what's so difficult about following the rules and being inconvenienced for 20 minutes?

The amount of entitlement in this HN discussion is nuts.

<comment><USER30> I spent a large part of my career working for a small company in Silicon Valley that became a Very Big Company.

One of the things that the CEO liked to do for a while is have a "lunch with the interns" during the summer. He'd chat with them and give them an opportunity to ask questions. As the manager of a lot of interns, I was also invited, and I often went. I was (and still am) on a first-name basis with the CEO.

One time an intern asked, "what do I need to become the CEO of a company like this?" The question made me laugh, because I already knew the answer. The answer is that there is no answer. You must have a vision about what you can do, and you must believe it. If you allow every idiot in the world to draw a box around your behavior, you won't accomplish anything.

I know that the Kindle (with wifi off) isn't going to crash the airplane. Amazon knows that the Kindle isn't going to crash the airplane. So why should I respect the opinion of the flight attendant? The flight attendant is, after all, a flight attendant because they would have never had make it through differential equations without sleeping with the professor. So why should I give that ditz any respect?

This isn't about 'entitlement'. Take all that crap your professors at the university told you and put it in /dev/null where it belongs. Reframe the issue in terms of what is right and what is possible.

If you want to be truly successful, you must learn about breaking the rules. (And by "truly" successful, I mean truly successful. If your goal is to accumulate $800K in your 401K and own a house in Sunnyvale, California outright… well you can do that by following all the rules and following Company Policies.) Write your own rules in life.

Perhaps I already answered your question, "And what's so difficult about following the rules and being inconvenienced for 20 minutes." And if you don't feel that I did, it means that you'll never find the answer.

Maybe you'll find success. Or maybe you won't. But the feeling will be liberating. There is no man like a free man.

<comment><USER32> Thank you for proving the parent's point about entitlement. "So why should I give that ditz any respect?" Seriously? "There is no man like a free man"? As if reading your Kindle during takeoff is going to turn you into a Randian ubermensch ready to disrupt every industry in the world?

<comment><USER4> Sometimes, people actually _are_ entitled. Something to think about.

This isn't to say that the engineer is necessarily correct and the flight attendant necessarily incorrect, and I don't agree that the "sleeping with the professor" statement can necessarily be applied in general, but following rules 'cause rules are rules is not really something to aspire to. It's unfortunate that for many, blind conformity seems to be the order of the day.

<comment><USER32> I agree with you. I think the rule is asinine as well, I'm glad it's dead, and I think we should be pushing back against stupid things. And following rules for rules' sake is a stupid thing.

But I don't think that meaningless platitudes or misogynistic stereotypes are a good justification for entitlement. Someone who's read the literature and understands why there's almost no way consumer electronics can affect a modern airliner's avionics might be more entitled than someone who thrives on 'breaking the rules' and thinks flight attendants are stupid 'ditzes'. What happens when that stupid ditz says something that turns out to be right?

<comment><USER4> >Someone who's read the literature and understands why there's almost no way consumer electronics can affect a modern airliner's avionics might be more entitled than someone who thrives on 'breaking the rules' and thinks flight attendants are stupid 'ditzes'.

I'm not really sure that we disagree here, although you seem to suggest that there is some mutual exclusion between people who are informed and people who enjoy breaking stupid rules, which is silly.

>What happens when that stupid ditz says something that turns out to be right?

I don't know, what happens? I didn't suggest that flight attendants are always wrong, nor that stupid people are always wrong (nor that flight attendants are always stupid). Though I think that my issue here is less about being factually correct and more about providing adequate justification for why you're correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does Canada Provide Young Entrepreneurs the Resources They Deserve? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/young-entrepreneurs-resources-2013-03-27

<comment><USER2> "Deserve"? There's no deserve -- an entrepreneur must prove the value of his ideas, he must sink or swim based entirely and solely on the merit of his ideas, not a childishly narcissistic conception of "deserving" something.</comment>


Human-in-the-loop computing is the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3004013/robotics/why-human-in-the-loop-computing-is-the-future-of-machine-learning.html <comment><USER2> 1950 - work is 9-5, but your free time will soon be liberated by machines!

2015 - work is 8-6, but machine processing time will soon be liberated by humans!

2016 - we cached your workflows and did enough analysis on it to extrapolate functionality, but best of luck in convincing your sociopolitical handlers of your relevancy

<comment><USER3> I don't think that is an accurate characterization. A time use study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston[1] found that the time a male worker spends at the workplace decreased from 51 hours in 1965 to 40 hours in 2003. The average male in 2003 spent most of that extra time on leisure activities. That's only one study, of course, but it squares with what I have consistently heard. Another study, which I can't find right now unfortunately, looked at leisure time enjoyed _at_ the workplace. That would be a contradictory concept in 1965, but today, many people spend an hour per day or more reading, playing games or visiting social media sites.

[1] [http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.pdf](http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.pdf)

<comment><USER4> You can come to all kinds of satisfying conclusions, when you ignore the fact that a lot of the productivity gains of the developed world comes of the backs of dirt cheap labor in the under developed world.

It's a safe bet that, for the most part, the human in the loop computing is going to be built on the cheapest humans available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These ideas are not quite "emerging", but now is certainly a great time to implement them! Consider this quote:

"Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information- handling machines we know today."

Licklider, J.C.R., "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, Mar 1960. [http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> _" As the CEO of CrowdFlower, I've..."_

It's supervised learning with the supervision coming from something like Mechanical Turk.

</comment><comment><USER7> I see it as it always "human-in-the-loop" since the beginning of computing. Human using spreadsheet to do accounting is a human-in-the-loop operation with human deciding what to add, and computer doing the adding. The key difference with AI is that it's now more difficult for the human to understand what the "smart" computer is doing and how to cooperate with it. For e.g., how do the self-driving take over control from and hand over control to human/ How to visualise and give directions to complex algorithms / how gain business insight from data.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is how I imagine how Google can bring it's self driving Uber-like taxi service to market. They can have a bunch of "remote drivers" that can take over the cars if the machine is not able to decide what to do. Anything 100% automatic is pretty much impossible, there is always an unsolvable or never seen before problem on the street.

</comment><comment><USER9> No mention of the IP value/licensing of these human signals, sometimes unwittingly donated?

<comment><USER10> Shush now. Intellectual property law is for investors, not workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We are a social animal. We care what others think about us.

But we don't care what computers think.

So there is also a role for humans in mentoring systems. Software can remind us and track whether we've met our objectives. It can do the boring, repetitive work.

But the interactions really only mean something if your mentor is in the loop. He or she might be asking you a question. Or maybe its the software, with the mentor having only approved the question and seeing the response.

This blended system could greatly reduce the effort involved in mentoring someone. And if everybody knows its the software asking repetitive questions (Is this done yet?), the mentor doesn't come off as a nag either.

<comment><USER12> I am not convinced we don't care what computers think, or will care in the near future. I don't see any innate ability for humans to distinguish a decent AI-like opinion from human opinion.

<comment><USER11> So when a computer tells you that you made a mistake, would you get all embarrassed and apologize to it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I prefer to think of it as intelligently precomputing options for a person, or setting an automatic helper to solve most of the cases.

</comment><comment><USER14> I read the title as "Congratulations, you're now a x87."

</comment><comment><USER15> > While the concept of chess being "solved" is still considered rather remote > (there are at least 1043 board positions to account for)

What does this 1043 refer to?

<comment><USER16> Typo for 10^43, a rough estimate of the number of possible chess positions, originally due to Shannon [1].

[1] [http://www.pi.infn.it/~carosi/chess/shannon.txt](http://www.pi.infn.it/~carosi/chess/shannon.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me.

"Luke, you switched off your targeting computer! What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm all right."

<comment><USER18> Which reminds me of:

Loke Groundrunner: I'm going to trust my feelings and use the power of the thumb.

Voice of Oobedoob Benubi: Use the instrument panel, Loke.

Loke Groundrunner: What?

Voice of Oobedoob Benubi: The instrument panel. That's what it's there for. Advanced weaponry designed to hit tiny targets.

Loke Groundrunner: Ok, ok.

<comment><USER19> Which reminds me of (emphasis mine):

Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means _Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space_. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?

First Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!

Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!

First Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!

Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this husk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. _That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!_

Second Recruit: Sir, yes sir!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M)

<comment><USER20> But the physics of that is entirely wrong. See Olbers' paradox. Eyeballing it is fine; if you miss you will almost certainly never hit anything - it was considered fine to eyeball AA in WWII, and the odds of hitting a friendly fighter there were worse; also there are already plenty of big rocks going fast in space.

<comment><USER19> If you want to be charitable towards it you can assume it was meant to scare those recruits into submissions so they won't waste precious ammo in deep space battles. Also, the explanation holds in orbital fights when you're shooting downwards (wrt. closest planetary body).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>