Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-08/american-dominance-in-tech-wealth-creation-upended-by-asian-wave <comment><USER2> Count me skeptical about of some of these 'self-made' billionaires. Pinduoduo for example, as with many Chinese companies, has been accused of falsifying revenues to pump stock prices. Yes, this stuff happens in the US as well (we all remember Enron and Theranos), but to what extent, are the statements of these companies transparent and well-audited, and regulated by government differs by region.

And Bitmain? Is it tech wealth creation to sell pick-axes to desperate miners looking for a gold rush? This looks to me like instead, a zero-sum trade, wherein someone got rich, and everyone else was left holding the bag for a device that would be worthless in a few months.

Of all of those on the list, DJI looks like the most legit, self-made success story, producing a very high quality, Apple-like experience in innovative drone devices, devices now used extensively by the film industry.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Xiaomi is another one, their build quality is good and they make a whole bunch of actually useful non "tech" things like escooters, air filters, vaccuums. I don't know if they're shady with finances or data collection though

<comment><USER3> Xiaomi doesn't really make air filters and vacuums, they are made by their partners. Xiaomi is providing retail service to those partners. Xiaomi also provides partners other services, like pooling purchases to lower price and pooling loans to lower rate.

One financial analysis of Xiaomi I read (it's in Korean, I couldn't find anything in English) is that it is in part a lending company funded by float from manufacturing partners. Xiaomi has a personal loan product which grew by 100x in two years to ~1 billion. Liquidity comes from delay between retail sale to partner payment.

<comment><USER4> To begin with, money in China are super duper cheap to begin with. I guess, even "super duper cheap" was not enough for Xiaomi

<comment><USER3> Isn't interest rate much higher in China compared to US?

<comment><USER4> Nominally, yes... the "street rates" are completely random, and if you manage to qualify for any government endorsement, state banks will be ready to bamboozle any amount money on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I often wonder how much of this is because of China's government sponsored espionage and theft. It's a pretty clear pattern of APT hacks and then somehow a Chinese startup is making "huge strides" in advanced metamaterials manufacturing. Then they are subsidized with cheap (basically free) government loans which undercuts the market.

If the Chinese government steals trade secrets for its business and rigs the market in their favor, is that really "self made"?

Perhaps the title should be "party cadres and sons of the politically connected get richer".

<comment><USER6> Do you truly believe they are the only country on Earth committing corporate espionage?

Everyone is doing it, but in Western democracies you have to hide the fact because voters on all sides frown upon such cheating. Especially stealing from your closest allies who send their troops to die in your pointless wars.

The reality is China doesn't care about getting caught. Just like India shrugs off rescinding billion dollar pharmaceutical patents and starts exporting the generics around the world for huge profits despite never contributing a cent to R&D.

<comment><USER5> No, I don't think that at all. I just see it as ridiculous to pretend these are "self made" entrepreneurs or innovators in the slightest.

More like, Knighted by the Party?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's not good to frame wealth creation in terms of billionaires.

<comment><USER8> Came here to say that. Compared to making everybody richer, making one guy a billionaire is easy. It costs $1 billion. Even giving each Chinese person $1 would cost more than that.

Edit: Which is not to be all "America Yay!" and "China Boo!" like some high school rivalry. America's legendary wealth inequality objectively demonstrates that it, too, leans closer to "making one guy a billionaire" than it does to "giving everybody a dollar."

<comment><USER9> The median personal income in the United States is roughly 31,000 dollars.

So more like giving everyone 85 dollars a day, than one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Spending months outside of Beijing in multiple island cities and seeing the empty buildings and 90% built infrastructure everywhere I don't doubt China will always be poised to userp American dominance, never actually do it, but always close.

<comment><USER11> just saw a documentary about their international parternship efforts (middle asia, africa and bits of Europe like portugal and greece) .. it seems they might take the lead (unless large economic implosion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sure but China inflated its currency, that's a redistribution to asset holders. The acomplishments are admirable all the same, but the accelerated climb is probably boosted by inflation. I predict a correction in next year's list.

<comment><USER13> It's not really a redistribution to asset holders. These people get about the same in the long run. It's more like the removal of a subsidy on government paper. This promotes private asset creation.

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com/the-world-deserves-a-pay- rai...](https://email@example.com/the-world-deserves-a-pay- raise-302f25efd82a)

There is no reason for a correction if they continue running a sufficiently inflationary monetary policy.

<comment><USER12> That's a great article! I read about 3/4 and I'll come back for the rest. Your arguement is the ying to my yang.

Where I depart is: wages adjust much more slowly than assets. Wages are negotiated over long spans of time vs. liquid assets. Wage holders think they're negotiating for real value X but it's eroded. Just look at baby boomers. Their wage flows are ~ fixed. Sure many get the benefit of asset appreciation but the ones that don't (get word) are crushed.

<comment><USER12> The assertion that the gov has the equilibrium interest rate (price of money) set too high is unsubstantiated in the article. We've just been through quantitative easing, so it seems unlikely we're above equilibrium. If only we'd let the market choose!

<comment><USER13> The natural rate is hard to measure so this is a difficult one to answer. And right now, in the US, my argument probably no longer holds that well (I wrote the post a while back). It looks like the uncertainty surrounding the aftermath of the 2008 crisis finally dissipated and unprecedented government deficit spending has pushed the equilibrium up, making it easier to follow for the Fed. This means there is enough private investment to keep the economy running well and people employed.

Europe and Japan are still very problematic however.

The simple fact that people, businesses and banks hoard cash and government bonds instead of doing sufficient investment to keep people employed is strong evidence to me that the returns on government paper is above market. Excess reserves are high into these parts of the world.

A more widely recognized sign is that they keep undershooting their inflation target.

For arguments from real economists, look around these parts [https://www.davidbeckworth.com/popular](https://www.davidbeckworth.com/popular), [https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/nic...](https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/nick- rowe/) or [https://faculty.insead.edu/fatas/](https://faculty.insead.edu/fatas/)

One thing you can't rely on is the fact that central bank rates are zero in the problematic places. Zero is a high, above market rate when the equilibrium is negative. As I tried to emphasize in my medium post, negative rates can be quite normal and natural. If marginal private assets don't have a positive real rate on a risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted basis, the government shouldn't provide an artificial substitute. If they do, it puts a gridlock in large parts of the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It'd be interesting to be able to compare America and China through the lens of capitalism; at the moment I don't think China is transparent enough to really come up with anything meaningful.

America is a lot less capitalist than it once was [0, 1] total government spending has gone from 10% GDP around the 1930 great depression (so, 9 private dollars for every public dollar) to about 30% post 1950 including State & Local government (2 private dollars per public dollar). I'm not sure how to interpret it, but spending on military also seems to have plummeted since the 60s as a % of spending. The military spending was where the research for things like the internet was done, so that might be meaningful. It seems very reasonable that the impacts of research and tax impacts on savings play out over 20-30 year timeframes (low risk capital investment pays itself back over ~15-20 years which sets up a natural cadence).

As the world becomes competitive for the first time since the end of the cold war, issues of how to generate new wealth very rapidly become important. America won't be able to harvest resources from foreign climes (eg, the Middle East) as freely now that China is starting to move beyond its boarders; to say nothing of potential changes in India or other Asian countries.

[0] [http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/](http://metrocosm.com/history- of-us-taxes/) [1] [https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1930USpt_20ps...](https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1930USpt_20ps5n)

<comment><USER15> That's why undermining US foreign policy is a big BRIC priority.

The era of stupid we are in now will have dramatic impact on the rest of this century.

<comment><USER16> Republicans will find a way to blame democrats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What matters is durability and defensibility, not current market value which is very speculative if you ask me.

When they produce something like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google I'll reconsider my position.

<comment><USER18> Tencent and Alibaba are like those... and in many ways better.

<comment><USER19> They aren't international brands. Alibaba gets some traction outside of China for those who want to buy cheap Chinese goods, while Tencent has bought some foreign game companies, but otherwise no one outside of China really knows who they are.

<comment><USER17> This is about my familiarity with them to be honest. Brands I am aware of but haven't given a dollar to. Yet, I end up using Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft services/products every day in one way or another. I don't agree with everything each of them does but I support them because I respect them.

<comment><USER20> Maybe Tencent and Alibaba dont need to focus more outside of China. China in itself is a huge market. Also the reason we dont hear about these services is that HN is largely representative of the English speaking part of the world - a big part indeed but not the whole.

<comment><USER21> In addition, I wouldn't be surprised if HN is blocked in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is of course an exaggeration by Bloomberg.

Six of the ten richest people on earth are US tech billionaires.

Out of the 63 technology billionaires in the top 500 global richest that Bloomberg tracks in their billionaires list, 32 are in the US. China has 13.

Here's the breakdown of technology billionaires in the Bloomberg top 500 rich list by country (the list cuts off at $3.7b):

US 32, China 13, Germany 5, Canada 3, India 2, Japan 2, Australia 2, Brazil 1, South Korea 1, France 1, Taiwan 1

(Eduardo Saverin gets listed for Brazil, I'd probably list him for Singapore however)

Over time you realistically can't have a China with an economy the size of the US (the two economies will be larger than $30 trillion each before China reaches parity, assuming they ever do), without them having an enormous amount of tech wealth. The two will likely represent ~45% of the entire global economy in terms of output over the next few decades. In terms of millionaires, it'll be closer to 75% of all millionaires on earth between the two giants (the US by itself as of just a few years ago had about 45% of all millionaires; I assume China has taken a few more points in that time). The last problem the US has right now, is a concern about an upending of its tech wealth creation. Most of China's tech wealth is entirely isolated domestically, the US was never going to be allowed to own that market, and can't own that market going forward. China's tech companies can't own the US market and never will. It's the rest of the globe that is up for grabs, and the US will always win that battle because the rich liberal world trusts China drastically less than the US. So long as China retains its current system (as opposed to resuming the Deng liberalization path), that will remain true. Would I rather use business software from Salesforce (US) or Atlassian (AU) or SAP (Germany), or China? Or nearly any cloud software for that matter. Among the more liberal nations, that remains a very easy decision. China can't compete outside of its borders in most circumstances when data, speech/expression/social/media, privacy, etc. are involved.

Out of the top 100 software companies by sales in the world, the US currently has 73 of them.

Here's a short list of US tech companies which have either been founded or seen most of their growth over the last 10-15 years:

Facebook $477b, Salesforce $120b, Uber ~$80b-$120b, Airbnb ~$40b, Workday $41b, ServiceNow $41b, Square $30b, Stripe $23b, Twitter $23b, Palo Alto Networks $21b, Splunk $19b, Lyft $15b, Fortinet $14b, Pinterest $12b, Snap $12b, GoDaddy $12b, Twilio $11b, Dropbox $10b, Ultimate Software $10b, Okta $9b, Nutanix $9b, Zendesk $8b, DocuSign $8b, Grubhub $8b, Instacart $8b, Qualtrics $8b, Coinbase $8b, Slack $7b, Zillow $7b, Github $7b (acq), Proofpoint $6b, Zscaler $6b, Etsy $6b, Hubspot $6b, Tanium $6b, MuleSoft $6b (acq), Pivotal $5b, LogMeIn $5b, MongoDB $5b, Robinhood $5b, Carvana $5b, RealPage $5b, DoorDash $4b, Pure Storage $4b, Snowflake $4b, Alteryx $4b, Houzz $4b, Medidata $4b, Anaplan $4b, Credit Karma $4b, Qualys $4b, CarGurus, Box, Cloudera, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Stitch Fix, ZocDoc, Eventbrite, SendGrid, Reddit, Zuora, SecureWorks, etc.

You could add dozens of companies to that list. You could also split off AWS, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram as well, as large tech businesses whose growth has soared over the last decade. Netflix was a still small $3b company just ten years ago. Google has also seen the vast majority of its growth since ~2004-2005.

I don't see where there has been a slowdown or upending for the US in the last 10-15 years (which represents most of the China boom phase in terms of their value creation). China's expansion has been heavily isolated to its own territory when it comes to tech companies (Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Ctrip, ByteDance, JD.com, Didi Chuxing, et al.), leaving the US free to continue doing what it has been in tech for decades without having to actually compete globally with China in most tech segments. Their tech expansion hasn't come at the expense of the US in other words.

<comment><USER23> Can someone list the numbers adjusted for inflation? Because these days it seems billions are so common for companies whereas just ten years ago a ten billion dollar company was "super big". Where did all this wealth come from? Who lost in the zero sum game ?

<comment><USER24> Wealth is not a zero sum game, but more importantly, valuations are not actual money -- they're just what the company would cost _if_ you bought the whole thing at the same price as the last investment. If a company has a down round, billions may be wiped off the valuation, but actual losses suffered by previous investors are a small fraction of that.

<comment><USER23> Right but I just meant doesn't true wealth have to be injected at some point ? Like at some point someone actually needs to mine new resources and inject the resources into the economy ? I don't really see the last ten years, countries having mined a 100x increase (non inflation adjusted) in raw goods..?

So that leaves the investment. Then others are investing in all these tech companies.. it is a cyclic dependency graph if you trace through the millions of nodes (assuming you get through the offshore accounts which I presume function as sinks). Then ... these companies are getting huge valuations because everyone else is investing more and more into them? Including themselves investing into themselves ?? When does the buck stop? Doesn't this wealth need to be backed up ultimately by some gold bars ? Even if it's fiat and fractional reserve .. so someone's trust rating is ultimately taking a hit? Is the us printing this money out of thin air on the back of it's huge credit ? I know the economy is too complex to be boiled down like this but where are these 100x increases in billions coming from ultimately? People credit ratings summed over millions of people ?

I never took any Econ courses so admittedly my Econ is terrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? What's the significance of this? Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my home country to win? I'm happy for people that found success for what they've accomplished regardless of where they live. Good for them.

<comment><USER26> > _Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my > home country to win?_

What happens if Xi Jinping decides that he wants something that you do not want? He will not let you vote if one day his foreign policy goals involve nice Americans.

<comment><USER27> Just like the Chinese got no chance to vote on America's unilateral sanctions against Iran, but are still subjected to them.

<comment><USER28> Iran was under UN sanctions at the time Meng violated those sanctions. China is on the UN security council, and as a permanent member, they have a veto. They did get a vote, and they voted yes.

Are you somehow not aware of this? They were a founding member of the UN, and have been on the Security Council since it's beginning. They have abstained or voted yes on every UN action that involves the SC (international peace and security).

Meng violated additional US laws... which she is only subject to because she was operating in the US. Just as a US citizen is subject to Chinese laws when operating in China. Surely you're not suggesting that foreigners should be allowed to go into another country and violate their laws without consequence.

<comment><USER29> Are you somehow not aware of this?

The PRC became a permanent member of the Security Council (with a veto) only since 1971. Taiwan was the permanent member from 1945-1971.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> An AirBnb IPO may tip it back towards the US.

Or Pinterest, Palantir, Uber, Lyft, Slack, Postmates, Asana, Casper.

Not really sure it should all be cast as a competition, but the wealth creation engine of the US is alive and well.

<comment><USER31> Matress Casper is a Tech company now?

<comment> xkcd-sucks High growth data driven mattress sales is as much tech as high growth data driven taxi rides</comment></comment></comment>


Poll: Source Control Usage? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1KUYC7cEPvMpP5GpauhhsRSWnglEjJuJGCTszVoqX8Dw/viewform

<comment><AUTHOR> We have several responses, more needed. So far mostly git, then SVN, ClearCase, and MS TFS, although mercurial is a surprise. Which SCM do you use?</comment>


AdBlock, NoScript & Ghostery – The Trifecta Of Evil [Opinion] - <AUTHOR> http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/adblock-noscript-ghostery-trifecta-evil-opinion/ <comment><USER3> > _those ads pay my salary, as well as the other full time editors, > professionals writers, and dedicated server costs_

It depends. If your ads are pay-per-click, and if I would never click your ads anyway, did I hurt you in any way by not loading those ads in the first place? Pay-per-view is a different problem, but I have yet to see pay-per-view ads that I consider non-intrusive. After all, ads need to be intrusive in order to generate clicks. There's a conflict of interest right there.

> _The modern Internet MUST have Javascript. So when you use NoScript, you're > breaking the Internet._

No, I'm not breaking the Internet. I'm only degrading (or improving, depending on who you ask) my own experience of the Internet, which I have every right to do. Just like I have every right to tell my browser to display all text in green-on-black 12pt Courier, or in any of the thousands of unexpected ways in which a computer program can consume HTML. If I broke into your server and removed a couple of script elements from your home page, that would be breaking the Internet.

> _So even if a tracking script does follow some of your browsing habits, is > it such a big deal? At the very worst end of the scale ... they're being > used for what's called a behaviourally-targeted market._

I don't want behaviorally-targeted marketing, and if you'd like to convince me otherwise, you'd better give me a better argument than "I wanna make money." Plenty of honest people have made plenty of money without tracking people's behavior across websites. Just calling your opposition "conspiracy theorists" will not do.

If it is "evil" to make HTTP requests to some resources and not others, I would gladly be evil. If you don't like this, you are welcome to adjust your business strategies so that your main audience is too dumb to use AdBlock.

<comment><USER4> Strongly agree on the pay-per-click vs pay-per-view ...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we may be shifting towards this pay- per-click model. Remember GM pulling their ads from Facebook ? Views are still an important part of a marketing strategy, but it's harder to estimate the actual benefits of such a campaign (as opposed to clickthrough rate).

This is not the death of online advertising - companies are making huge profits with a cost-per-click model, eg Criteo... So yes, adblock is changing the way editors made money. But oh well, isn't the internet threatening the business model of the music/film industry ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a poor article. Some responses:

> [..] Ghostery appears to be the ultimate do-not-track plugin.

Then it's not evil, is it? If you have to manually opt-in by installing an add-on, how can it be evil?

> AdBlock silently removes all advertising and social buttons

AdBlock exists because users got fed up of massively intrusive advertising. If advertisers had thought a little more long term, AdBlock would be a dead project.

> What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while > happy to destroy our revenue stream – is also profiteering from the very > same free content model by asking for PayPal donations when the plugin is > installed. Talk about hypocrisy.

Asking for money via a different route other than advertising is not hyprocrisy.

<comment><USER6> > If advertisers had though[t] a little more long term

Quite. It is ironic that the author is appealing to users to think a little more long term and tolerate all these cynical, short-termist ads to support his preferred revenue stream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article conveniently ignores that advertising is a flawed revenue model in the first place, seeking to attack people who want to access content without being annoyed - this a natural market reaction. People don't want to be tracked, they don't want intrusive irrelevant ads, but they clearly want to access content.

I think AdBlock, NoScript etc. are symptoms of consumers reactions to this flawed revenue model, not attacks on content creators. Content creators need to either find some other way to monetize, or else accept that this is the risk they undertake by monetizing through ads.

Maybe a better way would be to draw down revenue directly from ISPs, since people access the internet to view this content and ISPs can track which IPs a given user points at. That does put us on dangerous ground with respect to net neutrality.

<comment><USER8> At least for me, NoScript is less a reaction to annoying ads, and more a reaction to "not wanting to see your god damn web 3.0 flashy bullshit." Unless I explicitly need to interact with a website, I'll just leave it in a dumb js- less state so I can read without having random signup forms, broken scrolling, moving graphics, etc. popping up in my face every minute or two. If those flashing blinky annoying things are ads, then those are disabled too, but it's by no means the main reason I use NoScript.

I couldn't understand if the article was serious or not. The point about AdBlock seems sort of in the right direction, if a bit missing the point - <USER2> the next two just left me scratching my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These guys seem to miss one important thing. The fact they have a business and try to earn money by doing some things does not put any obligations on me. They try to write free content and earn money by showings ads. Great idea. Unfortunately, ads are in 99.99% cases done so badly they really piss me off, so I don't want to look at them. Should I feel guilty that I am denying those nice guys earning a living by that? No more than I should be feeling guilty not going to McDonalds because I don't like the taste of their sauce (true story!) and this denying nice people that work there some of their revenue. If these guys say that if I'm not going to look at ads I'm not welcome on their site - fine, I won't come there anymore. I never heard of them before today anyway, and didn't feel a gaping void in my life. But I won't feel guilty because their business model makes me physically unwell. I tried browsing with AdBlock off, and it's hell. Most ads are crappy, repetitive, annoying as hell and completely irrelevant to me. I feel no obligation to subject myself in my home on my computer to this abuse. You want my money? Do something I want to buy. You want me looking and clicking on stuff? Do something I want to look on and click on. Your business model doesn't work this way? Do it without me or change it.

<comment><USER10> Is it so difficult to understant? I offer you a content which was paid by advertiser. You pay by watching these adverts. If you block my adverts it is like you sneaked to the cinema without bying a ticket. You do not like adverts on my site, ok fine, just do not read/watch my content. Or as another option, just pay me directly the same money I would get from adverts. It is a small amount anyway, and you and I will be happy

<comment><USER9> I didn't sneak in. I was invited in. If you don't want me in - put a gate in front, just like any cinema theater does. I just won't visit.

> just do not read/watch my content

I'm pretty sure I don't already, and wasn't really planning in the future either. Many content providers actually take considerable efforts to get me to read their content. I'll stay with them, I don't have too much time to waste on reading random stuff on internet anyway.

> just pay me directly the same money I would get from adverts

To get my money you first have to give me something that I value more than money. What have you got to offer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I couldn't use the Internet without Adblock and Flashblock. Just like I couldn't read a novel if it every page were surrounded by flashing neon and ads randomly inserted between paragraphs, I can't read your website if the content is dominated by ads. Let me spell it out - if your website is worse than a newspaper, it deserves to be adblocked. Every site I've seen with ads, well, they're worse than a newspaper.

As for feeling entitled, I just want to point out that bit torrents trackers have never had trouble supporting themselves without ads or paid content of any kind... (Despite which I'm happy to support things like my local public radio station.)

(Though I'm a big fan of Ghostery, too -- the amount of trackers sites use is ridiculous and who knows what someone is able to do with the data.)

Also, my new pet peeve: links that don't go where they say.

Google is especially bad about this -- any link in your Gmail goes to some Google URL that then sends you to where you really wanted to go -- though plenty of other site are doing it too. They could be sending you to malware-r- us and making it look like a link to happy-happy-choo-choo.com. I think browsers should refuse to display links that don't display the same location they're targeting, however it's done. I think it might be on the way out though -- it seems to have been 'undoned' from Google news.

</comment><comment><USER12> > What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while > happy to destroy our revenue stream – (...) asking for PayPal donations when > the plugin is installed.

So put a button asking for Paypal donations on your blog then?

> Not only do you drag webpages 10 years into the past, but you prevent > essential modern page components from loading

Actually I didn't mind the internet 10 years that much. There is quite a bit of content out there that I consume that looks pretty good as static content without js running.

> users enjoying our content, without creating revenue.

So? Stop posting content then.

This sounds a bit like appeal of the horse buggy maker when cars started to be popular. "Please keep us and our families in mind everytime you think of buying one of those new self-propelled buggies made by Ford..."

</comment><comment><USER13> While I can undestand (not share) his opinion about AdBlock, I have a more difficult time understanding his grudge against Ghostery.

Ghostery makes it very easy to block all social buttons and analytics (like google-analytics, that fails to load 1 time out of 10), that make my browsing slow, or even stall.

Moreover, tracking on the internet and advertisement tracking is not the same as the one on TV, which is just grouping ads with shows of the relevant category. On TV, even if noone was watching it, those ads would be put together. Not on the Net.

<comment><USER14> Do you have sky? Sky know more about your TV viewing habits than you think. And they have the technology to sell that information. Why do you think they've been pushing new Sky+ boxes at everyone. This isn't conspiracy, I've have a Sky representative tell me this.

<comment><USER13> No, I don't. I don't have anything more than the DVB-T and DVB-S channels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A publisher has, as I see it, three choices if they want to make money off adverts.

1\. They can ignore AdBlock, and spend money dealing with the support problems that the broken site causes.

2\. They can block AdBlock users, and spend money dealing with the PR backlash.

3\. They can take AdBlock into account designing the site, and spend money on a graceful enhancement JS system.

Option 3 is close to what Reddit do, and I think they've got the best approach: spot when people aren't using AdBlock, and thank them for it.

AdBlock, NoScript and Ghostery exist. _People will use them, and you cannot stop them_. This is just the cost of doing business.

</comment><comment><USER16> My problem with ads and social networking buttons is the latency they introduce in to browsing.

If a page load hangs, most of the time it turns out to be waiting for a response from a third party web site, which has no relevance to the content I want to see.

Since I installed Ghostery I find my browsing experience is much faster.

For ads, I use Adblock but I start with an empty URL list. I add servers that host obnoxious ads (animated or over-laying content) to the list as I go about my browsing. As long as a site uses a well-behaving ad network the ads will display.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the problem is that the post author assumes data tracking isn't too big a deal. E.g. he says, "If company X puts a cookie on the New York Times and MSNBC site, and you browse to both those and Wikipedia, it only knows about the two upon on which it was placed" but the more likely scenario is that company X puts a cookie in a dozen more sites, and then keeps that information on their servers for however long.

What they do do with it, how long they keep it for, whether its anonymous or not is all unknown. I'd rather use ghostery and not worry about all that.

I actually wrote how pervasive the tracking is a while back, [http://steadierfooting.com/2012/03/25/how-to-minimize- tracki...](http://steadierfooting.com/2012/03/25/how-to-minimize-tracking-on- the-web/)

</comment><comment><USER18> The author claims that Adblock asking for donations is hypocritical. It is not. Hypocritical would be if the Adblock+ website had advertisements which were automatically whitelisted [1]. This is just asking for money for a useful tool, which is where the internet is headed.

[1] I seem to recall this actually happening for a plugin, but couldn't find it.

<comment><USER19> NoScript used to unblock its own ads from AdBlock+ when installed:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript#AdBlock_Plus>

<comment><USER20> NoScript also whitelists the websites of its author by default. I have a bittersweet relationship with that plugin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why don't sites more often block (or just show a message to) users of Adblock? Is that traffic more valuable than not? Are they hoping visitors will link articles to non-Adblock using people? It seems to me like there is a value in users who don't see your ads, or you'd just block them.

I subscribe to Arstechnica premiere to remove the ads, I have Adblock disabled on overclockers.com.au, The Verge. I subscribe to offtopic.com at a level that removes ads. I contributed to the Penny-Arcade ad-removing kick starter.

Everything else has its ads blocked because you need to prove your worth and trustworthiness to me after two decades of sliding in to the abyss.

If you don't want me, block me. Don't let me see your content.

<comment><USER22> Smart sites detect Adblock and ask you to consider disabling it for their site. That approach seems to make the best business sense to me (as in: I do consider and disable Adblock for those sites, unless their ads are annoying in which case it gets turned on again).

<comment><USER23> This is probably the worst thing author can do. I personally close the page right away.

<comment><USER21> Why? As a user of Adblock it seems totally fair to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's a list of the trackers Ghostery blocks on his website: \- AWeber \- Federated Media \- Gigya Socialize \- Google +1 \- Google AdSense \- Google Analytics \- Twitter Button

I could see his point if he was just using Google Analytics to see traffic statistics for his website. You want to give free access to my personal and browsing data to all of these?! Go fuck yourself and your anti-Ghostery rant.

</comment><comment><USER25> Oh look, this again.

1\. The internet was already a pretty neat place before online advertising became ubiquitous. There was lots of good content online, lots of curated databases of information, lots of good reference sites. If a bunch of blogs gradually dry up and blow away because they can't be profitable enough through advertising anymore, fine. They'll be replaced.

2\. AdBlock is not destroying the internet. The internet was destroyed by advertising. AdBlock became popular as a direct result of the proliferation of websites that were 20% content and 80% advertising, fluff, and nonsense. It became popular as a direct result of blinking, jumping, moving, popping-under advertising elements. It became popular as a direct result of users having their browsers (and machines) compromised and infected by ad networks that did not vet their advertisers correctly. Content owners were perfectly willing to let the administration of advertising be somebody else's problem, and when that somebody else decided not to do their job either, users got screwed and they turned to AdBlock.

3\. AdBlock does not, to my knowledge, block most donation requests, so I don't get where he thinks it's hypocritical that AdBlock is donation- supported.

4\. AdBlock also recently rolled out a by-default "non-intrusive ads are OK" setting for all Firefox users. This led to quite a bit of controversy, which I think mostly illustrates just how sick of advertising a lot of people are. But, it stuck. So, now you can't even argue anymore that AdBlock is terrible because it's blocking all of your revenue.

5\. Users may not be entitled to your content, but you aren't entitled to your users' attention, either. For instance: more and more sites lately seem to be using a Lightbox on page load to ask you to sign up for their stupid newsletter, or follow them on Twitter, or like them on Facebook. As a content owner, you're certainly allowed to do that. And, users are certainly allowed to install an extension that will block that, too.

6\. I happen to agree that NoScript does more harm than good, as a practical matter, given current standards of web development. However, again, I fully understand why it exists: a huge number of attempts to compromise web browsers, track users against their will, or otherwise abuse their trust, is done through Javascript. Back when compromised Wordpress websites were a serious problem, _every single one I saw_ \-- not a small number, cleaning them up was something we did at the time -- used Javascript in the footer of one or more files to attempt to hit the browser. NoScript protected against that.

7\. I didn't think Ghostery would be a very big deal, but I installed it a while back and have been completely flummoxed at the sheer amount of stuff blocked by it on websites. Loading a site and seeing a 20-deep list of social network buttons is merely visually annoying; having them all load their own little scripts and other bullshit is enough to incentivize me to block them.

AdBlock, Ghostery, and NoScript aren't ruining the internet; uninhibited commercialism and a complete lack of respect for users is.

<comment><USER26> >The internet was already a pretty neat place before online advertising became ubiquitous.

It was already a very neat place when it tolerated almost no advertising at all.

Under the restrictions on "commercial use" that were in place until 1993 or so, although it was allowed for a job hunter to post his resume (to a newsgroup like ba.jobs whose purpose was to connect job hunters and employers), looking for _contract work_ rather than permanent employment was not allowed because it was considered advertising of consulting services and consequently a commercial use.

I liked the internet of 1992 a great deal. I couldn't use it to buy nutritional supplements or shoes, and I couldn't use it to reconnect with old friends from high school (since those old friends were not on the internet) but it was a better tool for learning than the community college I was attending at the time.

<comment><USER10> Really? You were happy without search engines, without google maps, without Microsoft or Apple download pages, without any social sites, without wiki? Maybe you were, I was not.

<comment><USER27> Wikipedia and OpenStreeMap would actually be possible since they are not commercial...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while happy to destroy our revenue stream – is also profiteering from the very same free content model by asking for PayPal donations when the plugin is installed. Talk about hypocrisy."

      What an idiotic comparison. The adblock author is directly asking money (voluntary donations actually) for something useful he made for your use. Straightforward quid-pro-quo. You know... commerce. What the hell is wrong with that ?

</comment><comment><USER29> Using Ghostery and Adblock feels like your Internet connection doubles in speed.

</comment><comment><USER30> Did not know about Ghostery (I am a lazy user) and decided to install it. Thanks for the article ;-).

</comment><comment><USER31> As long ad ad networks contine to try their hardest to track me online I will still unapologetically use these extensions. Maybe that all these things exist should show you where the real problem is.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think ads are just the things that destroy the internet! And its good there is an thing to stop the greedy basterds who "make money" with all their adverts!

</comment><comment><USER33> Very similar to the arguments against Tivo of 10 years ago.

Instead of dying the television and cable networks accepted the future, accepted technology, evolved and now provide time-shifted content viewing themselves.

And tracking may be useful, but it doesn't mean that users shouldn't have the option to opt-out.

</comment><comment><USER34> ads are an euphemism; as if they would only inform you of something, that then you would feel compelled to purchase. Instead, they track people. Build profiles. Store profiles. Which are the to be used. Sure, you can make your salary by being a collaborator, but history will set you in perspective:

"With hindsight, we didn't need this giant network of unofficial collaborators," he adds. "We were too worried about what might happen. We should have trusted people more."

But they did not trust the people when they were in power.

And thousands of fragmented lives, and fragmented documents, still bear powerful witness to how a secret police force spread throughout a society.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19344978>

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow what a interesting conversation we have here. I was surprised to find majority of the comments advocating against displaying ads and also against using tracking to deliver a targeted one, yet whenever a question pops up about the best way to drive traffic to your startup, the top voted answer remains using adwords. facebook ads so on. Keep in mind, ads: no matter how much we hate them, every company uses them for growth. Imagine a world where everyone uses adblock, there would not be any place left to advertise your product, and most will resort to spamming links across forums/blogs/emails. Just my 2cents thought.

PS: But annoying ads on the other hand are a completely different issue and needs to addressed.

</comment><comment><USER36> > The modern Internet MUST have Javascript. So when you use NoScript, you're > breaking the Internet.

All the Javascript, Flash, Webfonts, etc are breaking MY Internet. Why should I let everyone send executable code to my browser?

</comment><comment><USER37> All the social buttons and 3rd party crap on that website crashed Safari on my iPhone. Lord what I would pay to have Adblock and noscript on my iPhone.

<comment><USER38> [http://mathdotrandom.blogspot.com/2010/12/block-ads-on-pc- an...](http://mathdotrandom.blogspot.com/2010/12/block-ads-on-pc-android-with- uber-hosts.html) this should probably appply to iOS too...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting to read the comments here. It is an interesting dilemma that the web site finds itself in. My personal opinion is that if it cared that much about things like adblock it should just not load. I totally agree that it should have the right to not load and I have the right to not show ads if it did.

I agree with the author that nothing on the Internet is 'free', its just not necessarily paid for by the person kicking off the transaction. As advertising evolves you'll find that a whole bunch of sites will go away because they aren't worth advertising on (user's don't engage) and the owners can't afford to pay the costs. I saw an article in an advertising trade magazine that suggested nearly 25% of the current ad supported sites would go off the air if there was no click fraud. I've done a bit of research but not enough to confirm or deny how close that number is to reality. There was a pretty good sized group of smart people inside Google dedicated to ferreting out stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER40> <http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Disguised_Ads> are by far the worst ones, pretending to be part of the navigation. Browsing without blocking them is like driving on a road with posters covering the traffic signs.

</comment><comment><USER41> Advertisers have a financial incentive to track you as much as possible and are constantly engineering their trackers to do it even better. Users are on the side of a losing team if they don't stand up. I read 3 sentences one was "They can't track you in different tabs" baloney.

</comment><comment><USER42> My advice is AdBlock would have been a honest tool if the users were allowed to block the ads on a site when they are annoying rather than unblock them on a site when they are not - that rarely someone does.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm confused why there's no effective, tech-driven advertiser response to Adblock. Code wise, it seems to me that only a whitelist based blocker should work; blacklist based blockers can be subverted by ad networks routing through dynamic proxies. If I'm a DSP, I simply obfuscate my code and domains every two hours, forever, and defeat all blockers. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER15> It's a slippery slope and an arms race that doesn't end well for the advertiser. By using AdBlock, the user has expressed a definite preference _not_ to see adverts. If you manage to get your advert past that, what have you gained? You've associated your content with scummy practices and given a member of the public a negative impression of whatever it is you're advertising.

Of course, it's possible that you just don't care, but fundamentally what you're proposing is a technical solution to a human problem, and we all know how well they end up working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If your content is valuable then people will pay, advertising is not the only revenue model.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hopefully add-art will have a new release soon. "Add-Art is a Firefox plugin that replaces ads on websites with rotating curated art images." <http://add- art.org/>

</comment><comment><USER46> To all the folks with nice ads. Get them added to this list:

[https://easylist- downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...](https://easylist- downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.txt)

</comment><comment><USER47> Here's is my ONE issue with adblock.

We have a clothing recommendation engine that helps people discover clothes and we wanted to provide the service ad free. We chose a platform called viglink which affiliates the existing outbound links to the clothing vendors and if the user ends up purchasing something we are given a commission.

I think this is a fair model where we are compensated for our service and the user is 100% unaware and not bothered.

However, in the past month adblock has decided to block this despite the fact it provided zero nuisance to the end user. We managed to create work arounds but it's a frustrating issue.

<comment><USER5> When you brought this up with the Adblock folks, what did they answer?

<comment><USER47> We did not receive any response from them, I figure they get plenty of complaints about people's sites being blocked and ours just got lost in the mess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> What I find most annoying about ads is their repetitiveness.

How would you like to be asked the same question twice?

On a related note ...

How would you like to be asked the same question twice?

See, I managed to annoy you just by being mildly repetitive.

If an ad is only shown to me once and then never again, I'm more willing to look at it / click through.</comment>


Neal Stephenson: Mother Earth Mother Board  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

<comment><USER2> Link text should probably have contained, "From December 1996".</comment>


Wikidata II - <AUTHOR> http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/10/30/wikidata-ii/

<comment><USER2> Hi, I wrote that a few weeks ago, just a blog post appreciation of Wikidata, nothing original. Summary: [http://www.wikidata.org](http://www.wikidata.org) launched 2 years ago, following various much older proposals for structured data in wikipedia. Will allow for more cross-language collaboration, better info availability in smaller languages, much more...check out the coolest/most impactful development in wiki-land.</comment>


Tesla Is Going Public - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/01/teslas-going-public/

<comment><USER2> The U.S. government provided a $465 million loan to a tiny money-losing startup and got no equity in return.

Now Tesla insiders are leveraging that taxpayer loan to IPO.

Is this free enterprise or just corruption?

<comment><USER3> A) Compare that number to the amount that defense contractors receive for not even delivering anything. The Tesla car works.

B) Compare that number with the inflation-adjusted amount that the government has put into other research ventures. Like, say, THE INTERNET.

C) Tesla says that it is now profitable [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/tesla-says-it-is-now- pr...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/tesla-says-it-is-now-profitable- ships-109-roadsters-in-july/).

What's your problem with better technology here?

<comment><USER2> My problem is that taxpayers have the most at risk with this company, but get none of the upside.

There is a huge difference between government funding for basic research, and government funding to bring a privately owned product to market.

Even worse, since Daimler is a Tesla shareholder, U.S. taxpayers are underwriting tech that is partially owned by a foreign competitor.

<comment><USER3> The department of energy routinely gives low-interest loans to interesting energy startups because there's a compelling national interest in renewable energy.

So, yeah, we're on the hook for 500m. But we just spent a trillion in Iraq. And when we hit peak oil and hit a point of total supply inelasticity for energy, we're really gonna be up a creek.

There are literally thousands of companies that get these loans. I invested in one called Beacon Power, they build electrical grid stabilizers based on flywheels -- suck in excess power during supply peaks, then spit it back out if everyone turns on their AC units at once. Great idea. Helps the whole economy if they succeed, not just them. So the dept of energy took the long view and threw them a few million dollars as a loan.

All in all, this stuff adds up to way less than 1% of domestic federal spending -- which itself is less than 1/6 of the total federal budget. If a few of them pan out and we reduce our dependence on foreign oil, then it's a win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Holy wow. Maybe we'll get to see where these guys are spending their money.

<comment><USER5> Why wait?

[http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/0001193125100...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000119312510017054/ds1.htm#toc51863_4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it should go Government, then perhaps the outrageous prices and its haemorrhaging of cash won't seem out of place . . . just a suggestion.

I'd much prefer my tax dollars subsidizing my car than subsidizing cheap fishing and agriculture.

<comment><USER7> > its haemorrhaging of cash

Could you cite your sources please.

<comment><USER8> From the article:

The SEC filing provides the first clear look at the company's finances. It notes that Tesla has lost "approximately $236.4 million from our inception through Sept. 30, 2009"

<comment><USER9> From what I understand their inception is 2001, which means they've lost about $30mil/year. That doesn't sound excessive to me at all. Software startups normally count $15k/employee/month as a reasonable expense (including hardware, rent, benefits, etc.) Given how massive the equipment and production expenses for an auto company can be, I wouldn't be surprised if their number is three times as high. At only 500 employees (again, a very small estimate for an auto company) that would put their expenses at 45k/month * 12 * 500 = $270mil/year. Considering that they've lost only $240 mil in _eight_ years, they're doing _extremely_ well.

I can't even imagine the amount of effort and capital required to pull something like this off. If anything, I'm surprised how well they're actually doing so far.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry, but losing $30M in one year is bad. Losing $30M for 8 years is excessively bad. Tesla is bleeding cash left and right and its CEO is flying jets to get around while taking in $450M in taxpayer money for loans, and then files for an IPO a week later.

Musk (its CEO) had mentioned that Tesla would be profitable in 2009, and that's clearly not the case. Stating that losing $240 million in 8 years is doing "extremely well" is irresponsible to impressionable investors looking forward to Tesla's IPO.

<comment><USER11> As a data-point, Amazon lost $3b over their first 6 years before turning a profit (citation: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/dotcom- delig...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/dotcom-delight-as- amazon-makes-first-profit-after-3bn-losses-665950.html)) .

<comment><USER12> Apples and oranges. Amazon put profits back into their company. They had a business model that worked. Tesla doesn't.

<comment><USER3> Argument by assertion? You can't just state something like that and not back it up. Unless you want to look ignorant.

Tesla sells cars. After building them. For more than it cost to build the car. That's a business model.

And they're profitable as of this year, as I cited above, and you keep refusing to acknowledge.

<comment><USER12> 1\. Tesla is not profitable.

2\. Tesla currently has no profitable business model.

If you want facts, please Google them. Here's a start that's titled "Tesla Motors Files For IPO - So Much For The Profits": [http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/01/29/tesla- motors-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/01/29/tesla-motors-files- for-ipo-so-much-for-the-profits/?mod=rss_WSJBlog)

<comment><USER3> Well, there's different ways to calculate those numbers. If I had to guess, Tesla was referring to EBITA and the WSJ is calling them unprofitable after interest and taxes.

At any rate, it's ridiculous to try and claim that they don't have a business model. If they're selling the cars for more money than the incremental unit cost, then they do indeed have a profitable business model.

They may not be selling enough of them yet to have a profitable company but claiming that they don't have a business model is just being obtuse.

Are you claiming that in 2001, Amazon had no business model? Because that would be the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fail....ah heck...I'll probably buy a few shares anyways...who knows...

</comment><comment><USER14> Who's buying?</comment>


Show HN: Create your own marketing to-do list - <AUTHOR> https://tactictaco.com/ <comment><USER2> Keep getting this message: [https://imgur.com/a/bz0lGLU](https://imgur.com/a/bz0lGLU)

<comment><AUTHOR> D'oh! Total newb mistake. I'll go in and fix that. Thank you!</comment></comment>


I called the Wells Fargo ethics line and was fired - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/21/investing/wells-fargo-fired-workers-retaliation-fake-accounts/index.html <comment><USER2> If you rock the boat, the system will find a way to retaliate against you, unless you find a way to remain anonymous.

Having a formal process for whistleblower reporting which protects the whistleblower looks good on paper, but in practice it seems that the concerns often go into a black hole and the paper protections aren't a practical shield against retaliation.

The takeaway? Be very paranoid; if you're thinking of being a whistleblower, you need to either find ways to raise your concerns anonymously, or be prepared for whatever powerful people you threaten to do their best to ruin your life. Which means either finding someone more powerful to protect you, or accepting that if you do the right thing, there will almost certainly be very serious consequences for you, but only a small chance of meaningful positive change.

If I ever personally was in a situation like this and decided I saw something that needed to be reported, I'd go the first route -- total anonymity. I deeply respect people like Snowden who choose martyrdom instead, but I like living a comfortable life too much to be willing to sacrifice it for my principles.

<comment><USER3> Ethics aside.

The problem is there's a name for someone like that scapegoat. You best course of self preserving, none martyrdom action is to leave the situation as fast as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The bank earlier this month paid $185 million in penalties and has since apologized."

Wells Fargo has a yearly revenue of $86b, so the $185m fine is like someone who makes $100k a year getting fined $215.

<comment><USER5> Revenue != Profit

<comment><USER6> Your salary is revenue and not profit as well, the analogy is sound.

<comment><USER7> Not really. Any money you make above cost of living is effectively discretionary cash. And it doesn't cost money to get a raise. But with a business, it usually costs money to make money. As a trivial example, if you have a company with razor-thin margins, lets say 1% margin, then you can have very large revenue, such as $86b, but not a lot of profit (in this case $860m). And that doesn't even take staffing and fixed costs into account, which would drive that number significantly lower.

Or to put it another way, you can run a company such that you roughly break even, at which point it doesn't matter what your revenue is, $185m is still a big number. In that case hopefully you have a lot of discretion as to how you spend your money such that you can just spend less in one area to account for the $185m, but if you're breaking even because you can't do any better, as opposed to breaking even because you're putting all your profit back into R&D, then $185m might be hard to deal with.

All that said, for a company like Wells Fargo, it probably is basically just a slap on the wrist.

<comment><USER8> an individual's "discretionary income" can also be used as savings or investment. you're argument doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER7> Well yes, it's discretionary. That's what discretionary means - you can use it for whatever you want. Using it for savings or investment in no way invalidates my argument, because that's exactly what I'm talking about. If you have a bunch of money in savings, then getting hit with a $215 fine isn't a big deal, you can pull that small amount of money out and pay it. But the whole point is that since the extra "revenue" you get from a higher salary is discretionary, then you should be able to easily absorb a small fine, but a company with large revenues doesn't necessarily have a lot of discretionary cash.

Now it's certainly possible that your investments aren't liquid enough for you to free up the $215 to pay the fine, but that's a different situation (and is your own damn fault). Companies can be in this situation too, but don't mistake the existence of this situation as a refutation of my argument, because it's not. My argument at its core is that a person making $100k can be expected to much more easily be able to absorb a particular fine than a person (with the same cost of living) making $50k, but you can't necessarily say this about companies, because a person's salary isn't dependent upon how much they spend, but a company's revenue is, and so if company A has a higher revenue than company B that does not mean company A's profits are higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Which brings us to the first rule of whistle-blowing: C.Y.A.

I'm surprised they're talking to the news. If I were them I would be lawyering up right now.

</comment><comment><USER10> A class action from fired employees?

Not if they signed an arbitration clause as a condition of employment...</comment>


Monkey Peeler - Patent - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/patents?tbs=bks:1&tbo=1&q=monkey&btnG=Search+Patents

<comment><USER2> Wrong link, here's the Monkey Peeler:

<http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=ycyRAAAAEBAJ>

How can you patent something likes this? Isn't it just a regular peeler?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah - but he put a monkey in his picture</comment></comment>


OpenPose: Real-time multi-person body, face, and hands estimation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing-Lab/openpose <comment><USER2> Paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08050.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08050.pdf)

TLDR; convnet for joint localization, old school optimization techniques (graph coloring, etc) to put the pieces back together.

Re license, I don't at all mind research being commercialized, but the use of "open" in the name rubs me the wrong way. Who in their right mind would work on this? At best it will become a benchmark to compare other systems against.

The FSF requires a snail mail letter for copyright assignment. I don't know the specifics, but this suggests magical auto-assign copyright clauses may not hold up.

Personally I GPL my stuff that may be commercially valuable. It allows a community to maintain an open version and produce offshoots, while you maintain your own version with only code you wrote for licensing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like OpenPose. This area is progressing so quickly.

DensePose was published recently: [http://densepose.org/](http://densepose.org/)

End-to-end Pose was published late last year: [https://akanazawa.github.io/hmr/](https://akanazawa.github.io/hmr/)

<comment><USER4> At a very high level how do they differ?

<comment><USER3> All of them take 2d images of humans:

open pose -> 2d points of major parts. (generation of 3d points is under development)

end-to-end pose-> 3d mesh of human body

dense pose -> 2d uv maps that can be placed on a 3d mesh

I should also mention:

AutoHair -> 3d mesh of hair from 2d image

[http://gaps-zju.org/autohair/](http://gaps-zju.org/autohair/)

ClothCap -> 4d cloth transfer to different 3d human model

(this one doesn't do "2d image to 3d cloth" but probably something that can be done starting with ClothCap)

Face -> 3d mesh of face

[https://github.com/AaronJackson/vrn](https://github.com/AaronJackson/vrn)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The training data comes from

> _Check[https://github.com/ZheC/Realtime_Multi- > Person_Pose_Estimatio...](https://github.com/ZheC/Realtime_Multi- > Person_Pose_Estimation) for training questions. We are using their model._

[https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing- Lab/openpose/iss...](https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing- Lab/openpose/issues/47)

What is the difference between this one and the other one ?

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks promising. Any thoughts on the license?

<comment><USER7> no commercial use it seems.

Not 100% related, but the copyright holder(s) are not clear. There is a list of authors so I'd bet they are the copyright holders. But given the fact their email addresses somewhat point to CMU, I wonder if CMU is behind...

<comment><USER8> The Github account is from CMU perceptional computing lab. Thus I'd consider it reasonable to assume that CMU is behind.

<comment><USER7> I don't know CMU well, is it privately hold ? I really wonder if the work we see here was paid by taxpayers' money. I guess the papers are freely available but the implementation is not.

<comment><USER9> I'd say it would cost 5% royalty on sales assuming that algorithm was key. Ten years ago I negotiated a licencing agreement with CMU for a computer vision algorithm. I was leading an unknown startup. 5% with no upfront fee is what we ended at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a disgrace to the "Open" prefix. Guess we need a FreeAndOpenPose instead...

</comment><comment><USER11> How does it do on modern dance?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOZ6KnVPvIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOZ6KnVPvIU)

</comment><comment><USER12> Given two views of the same scene, could the output of something like (NotActuallyOpen)Pose theoretically be combined to create a marker-less 3D motion tracking solution?

</comment><comment><USER13> Couldn't this be used to automatize fire weapon aiming?

Or worse : a laser beam aiming automatically to the eyes. It'd be quite bad since it'd be cheap and unlike fire weapons, lasers are easy to build or acquire.

How long until a mass shooting uses such technology?

<comment><USER14> Realistically, if you wanted to do such a thing, you could have used a Kinect for a long time. Even face detection would work in your example, and we've had robust and cheap detection for a long time. So I assume that this is a movie- plot threat.

However, for a dramatic interpretation of your query, I suggest "Daemon" and "Freedom TM" by Daniel Suarez. The book shows groups using these technologies to great effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does this compare with just calling all the OpenCV functions in parallel then merging?

It kinda seems like what they did, which if it works - then kudos, but the licensing should be easy to avoid then.

<comment><USER16> Errr, what? This project uses huge neural nets for detection, nothing like that is available in OpenCV. I think they only use OpenCV for IO (accessing webcams etc).</comment></comment>


A startup is turning old hotels into housing for SF's middle class - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/a-startup-is-creating-communal-housing-for-middle-class-workers-2017-12?r=UK&IR=T/#residents-of-the-mission-community-also-maintain-a-communal-bar-cart-8 <comment><AUTHOR> This is cool!</comment>


Sulong: Finding Errors in C Programs [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ssw.jku.at/General/Staff/ManuelRigger/ASPLOS18.pdf <comment><USER2> " _Unlike higher-level languages, the C standard does not define any checks that could detect such erroneous accesses [ "buffer overflows, NULL pointer dereferences, and use-after-free errors"] and then abort the program._"

Stephen Kell, in "Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language", writes a simple and fairly strong argument that, for C, that's not a valid complaint. Since C is a systems language, the proper place to look for those (particularly runtime) checks is in the combination of the C standard and the system it's running on, particularly the hardware.

Edit: " _Compiler optimizations can lead to false positives . For example, a false positive that was found in an ASan-instrumented Firefox build was caused by load-widening [55] where a series of loads is transformed into a single load of several memory values at once while potentially exceeding the bounds of an object. Due to platform-specific alignment requirements, such an optimization can be correct at the system level; however, ASan classified it as a bug because the access would be out of bounds in C._ "

Yep, there we go.

<comment><USER3> Systems languages looked quite different in what it meant to be unsafe before C took the keys of the kingdom.

<comment><USER4> Right. I think a lot of people forget that C wasn't (and isn't!) the only systems language that was in heavy usage, and indeed a lot of its predecessors and contemporaries were much safer. But hey, worse is better, and C won, so I'm fighting a losing battle here I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Tl;dr: They created a run-time bug finder similar to valgrind by creating a LLVM IR interpreter in Java. It finds bugs and is much faster than valgrind (which is a win). They go on with:

" _In this paper, we have presented a novel bug-finding tool for C programs that is based on abstraction of the underlying machine. We implemented our approach in a tool called Safe Sulong, which discovered several errors in open-source projects that current bug-finding tools could not find. By using dynamic compilation, Safe Sulong reaches a peak performance that is comparable to that of Clang -O0 , and even that of Clang -O3 in some cases._ "

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like it may have similar coverage to tis-interpreter ( [https://trust- in-soft.com/tis-interpreter/](https://trust-in-soft.com/tis-interpreter/) ), but significantly faster.

</comment><comment><USER6> The idea is reminiscent of Miri for Rust: [https://github.com/solson/miri](https://github.com/solson/miri)

</comment><comment><USER7> " _we implemented a libc that is written in standard C and does not rely on any GNU extensions._ "

Does anyone know if such library is available somewhere?

<comment><USER8> [http://www.musl-libc.org](http://www.musl-libc.org) although it may not be absolutely 100% that way.

From the FAQ:

> When building musl, you will also need a C99 compiler with support for gcc- > style __asm__ statements and assembly source files, and weak symbol support > in the linker. gcc 3.3 or later (with the GNU assembler and linker) and > clang 3.2 or later are known to work.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I meant _their_ libc. That would be very useful if open-sourced.

They state that " _we provide our own libc that is written in standard C and is optimized for safety instead of performance_ ", but I don't see where to find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whoa, dolphins are so smart.</comment>


History tells us what will happen next with Brexit and Trump - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@theonlytoby/history-tells-us-what-will-happen-next-with-brexit-trump-a3fefd154714#.yvjf7w9ty <comment><USER2> You could spin the story the exact opposite way if you want.

Trump is elected. Relations with Russia improve because Trump and Putin can be in the same room long enough to agree that the lines on the map and the exact form of oppressive government in any particular middle eastern nation are mostly irrelevant as long as oil flows through the pipelines and money flows through the banks. Meanwhile Europe comes out better because the post-brexit panic causes the EU to seriously revaluate its immigration and related economic issues which results in meaningful improvement. Increased global prosperity causes China to sideline it's steady encroachment on its neighbors because who cares about some island when being on good business terms with everyone is far more valuable.

There's never a shortage of pessimistic opinions leading up to any change in leadership. The ability to publish any particular one online doesn't make it any more legitimate.

<comment> norea-armozel Or a Trump Presidency leads to a world war between China and America since he thinks backing out on trade deals with China is a good idea. But he doesn't seem to realize that China is kept in check by those trade deals since the CCP inner party would rather have their people happy, paid, and fed. A China that's isolated in the world market and without a means to turn a profit on private and state enterprises is a China that has few options that aren't militarist in nature. That means China has plenty of reason to invade Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines without question. Right now, we're pretty lucky China still hasn't a sufficient navy to combat our own but if Trump or his ideological successors take POTUS I can see China just throwing as much man power at the naval problem to kick our asses just as a matter of settling a (nearly) two century old score.

<comment><USER3> I see. So that's how World World 3 will start - all because Trump refuse to make bad trade deals with China.

<comment> norea-armozel Or he decides to cut off trade immediately under some provisions in existing trade treaties without any attempt to negotiate any new tariffs (which China has been receptive to in the last year) which gives them no other recourse than to expand militarily to aide in the growth of their economy.

<comment><USER3> Appeasement does not work. History has shown us that time again and again.

China: "Make bad deals with us, OR WE WILL EXPAND OUT MILITARY!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's easy to do a pessimistic forecast:

In order to sway the opinion Trump will need a fake attack on US soil around October, something big and spectacular.

Then join our TTT movement:

"Trump for a third term!"

</comment><comment><USER5> Title is "may", not "will".

<comment><USER6> It looks like the title's been edited after posting, as the url still says "will"\--it's definitely a change in the right direction, as while I think this is a good article, it's certainly a little hyperbolic in its language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I also recommend reading the first comment on that Medium article from top to bottom. Hits the nail straight on its head.</comment>


An Interview with A. Stepanov (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html <comment><USER2> > I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms > of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you > need multi sorted algebras - families of interfaces that span multiple > types.

Can someone explain what this means?

<comment><USER3> I think he's saying that most OOP languages have single dispatch, while multiple dispatch is more like the real world.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      > I have done a search on Lycos for your papers...

Now there's a blast from the past!</comment>


This Is Google's $70B Puzzle to Solve, as Facebook, Amazon Loom - <AUTHOR> http://www.investors.com/news/technology/youtube-valuation-soaring-profits-blurry-as-facebook-amazon-loom/?ven=YahooCP&src=AURLLED&ven=yahoo <comment><USER2> The long term issue of the TV industry is not millenials, it is kids born post-2000, who have never gotten the linear television habit.

I'd imagine e/i television was invented by a coalition inspired by Gerry Mander's arguments for the elimination of television. Watch a few minutes of it and you will wretch, it sends the clear message that television is boring. Kids programming on PBS programs the young to hate TV.

My 13 year old son watches Youtube all the time, he makes things that he sees people make on Youtube, he talks about things he sees on Youtube with the other kids at school, he even makes Youtube videos.

Once in a while we watch something on broadcast TV and I see he just doesn't have the attention span for sports, episodic television, or to sit through an ad break.

<comment><USER3> Even as a millenial, save for GoT and some sports (though I find it pretty much impossible to sit through an entire ad-drenched sporting event anymore), I've completely stopped watching TV and movies, and YouTube is a go-to when I want to veg out.

Thanks to the Kindle, I still read. I also listen to a ton of podcasts.

So all of my consumption is veering away from the big players and towards smaller, niche players. I've noticed a similar trend among friends.

A digital bazaar has sprung up, and people are leaving the Cathedral for it, which is definitely a good thing imo.

<comment><USER2> This even true for Xers (and probably some older folk too.) I find it very hard to fit my schedule around linear TV. Definitely there is some good stuff (like GoT) but to actually show up at a certain time is hard to do when you are raising kids, selling into different time zones and trying to get some exercise and sleep all the same time.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Countly – Open-source mobile analytics platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/countly/countly-server

<comment><USER2> Do you use the same codebase for all editions? Meaning, mongodb on all editions? Doesn't mongodb explode in disk-usage (no compression, field-names etc)?

Since everything is dynamic/realtime/no-batch-processes, how do you handle aggregations? With just group-by all the time, or keeping most requested dimensions with counters and other with on-demand-group-by?

Does on-demand-groupby get slow with big-customers?

If you do keep counters (example: daily revenue), what do you do to keep things consistent(so in then end you have the same number by reading the counter or doing group-by on raw data) (ie: no mongodb transactions) ?

Does mongodb aggragation-capabilities satisfy your app or do you need sometimes to group-by-in-code?

How do you count the "online-right-now" users?

<comment><USER3> Isn't it open source?

<comment><USER2> it has different editions (one of them being open-source)</comment></comment></comment>


TDD for product dev: Where we're going we don't need... roads - <AUTHOR> http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2010/10/27/tdd-for-business/

<comment><USER2> "At the end of the year they took an aerial photo and the tread-worn ground became the blueprint for the optimal sidewalk routes as chosen perfectly and implicitly by the student body."

I still think this was genius.

However, I don't see how it applies to software development. Do you publish an API that makes it possible to do -anything- with your system that is imaginable? How would you do that, direct SQL access? Anything less than raw access would mean you were building a LOT of sidewalks, then removing the ones that weren't used.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a shopping cart and why wouldn't I just write my own? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN-
I'm having trouble understanding a very basic concept.  I build an online store, and since I'm a programmer, I let the user collect their items in a table associated with their session id.  Then, I compute the order total. My server goes to the payment gateway server and charges the credit card.  Then I ship stuff.  What is the purpose of a shopping cart and why would I pay for a 3rd party one?  They all appear to require some kind of programming, but if I already know how to program, why wouldn't I just build my own?
Note: I'm not being a smart-ass, I really don't understand what I'm missing, but I'm obviously missing something.  Can someone explain what a shopping cart is to an e-commerce newbie?
Thanks for any help, Karl <comment><USER2> I think you're misunderstanding what an off the shelf shopping cart is. It's not just a way of storing the items a user has chosen along with their quantities, like you say, all that requires is a session array.

It's product management and categorising, product options, coupons and discounts, multiple tax rates, bulk buy discounts, user registration, payment gateway integration, promotions, image galleries, I could go on.

Basically when you buy an off the shelf system like zen cart, you're getting an entire e-commerce site that you just configure and style. And even if it's not a full site, but a PHP library to interface with your own site, it's a lot more than just the action of storing product id's and quantities in a session.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow, thanks Matt. This is the answer i have been waiting for. this is my misunderstanding. i get it now, it's not that a basic shopping cart isn't trivial, it's that it quickly expands to a full time job. thanks for enumerating specifics.

<comment><USER3> I would also add that an off the shelf cart system will come with a fully fledge back end. This is nice because you can make use of reusable product options, discounting, automated email receipts, etc. But it's even _nicer_ because you can get admin reporting like month to month sales figures, daily totals, most popular product rankings, and running discount totals. Sure you can track this in Excel but the point is that you don't have to. The ability to update, adjust and refund orders from an interface integrated with the store is nice, too.

Absolutely you can roll your own, but unless you have a really defined and limited product range it's just likely your needs will scale more quickly than your code, is all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some things your shopping cart might be missing which are non trivial.

      - Coupons or PROMOS ( X% off, $Y off, stackable)
      - Persisting a shopping cart between visits if an user doesn't checkout.
      - Saving items from a shopping cart to wishing list and vice-versa
      - Integration with multiple payment gateways but exposing a single interface

</comment><comment><USER5> You can definitely write your own shopping cart if you want, its just that its a problem that so many businesses have solved before so you'd likely just be wasting time reinventing the wheel when you could be building up other aspects of your business, finding clients, marketing, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> See, this is what I don't understand. Building a shopping cart is like 15 minutes of work if I'm already building my own e-commerce site, isn't it? Are 3rd party shopping carts for non-programmers? I mean, as far as I can tell, it's literally just a session-associated table of items. What _else_ is a shopping cart besides that? Why would I spend 2 days reading the "Zen cart" manual and API when I can finish my home brewed shopping cart in 15 minutes? Again, I'm not being a smart-ass, I really don't see what I'm missing. (thanks for your reply)

<comment><USER6> Robert Morris wrote Viaweb's shopping cart. He is a smart programmer, and he found it nontrivial. Years later he was still encountering bugs from weird combinations of user actions.

<comment><USER7> Dell finds it nontrivial as well. I just used their shopping cart. At one point it wiped out the entire contents of my cart when I added an item from a different section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Because you're going to get it wrong. No offence intended, I would too, but if you haven't been sleeping, eating, breathing security for a while, you're going to make a mistake, and it'll cost people.

And all the other points about it needing more functionality than you'd expect.

</comment><comment><USER9> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1607261> for tips about which shopping cart to use</comment>


Australian Government embracing social media/Twitter. Should govts do more? - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdragon.com.au/2227

<comment><USER2> We can only assume their own tweets won't be blocked by any content filter...</comment>


All the tech you need - <AUTHOR> http://www.talll.com

<comment><USER2> Providing RSS will be great. This [http://talll.com/?feed=rss2](http://talll.com/?feed=rss2) is of no use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sites that hijack my back button can die in a fire.

</comment><comment><USER4> Spam account created after 6 or 7 other accounts were banned for spamming this network of sites.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not bad. Although UI can be much improved.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nothing visible on page.</comment>


VUDU Office Break-in - Stolen hard drives with personal info - <AUTHOR> http://www.vudu.com/password_faq.html

<comment><USER2> March 24? I feel like customers should have been notified much more quickly than this. Although they claim passwords were "encrypted," giving the perpetrators over 2 weeks is giving them more than enough time to try and access accounts.</comment>


Cerevrum - <AUTHOR> http://cerevrum.com <comment><AUTHOR> Learning in Virtual Reality if fun! Let's play! #WeVRyou

At Cerevrum we use virtual reality to improve learning process in a whole new way.

That feeling of presence you can achieve in VR allows you to challenge cognitive abilities in a way that more closely matches the real world. Natural inputs like head rotation and hand tracking allow players to interact intuitively with the environments we create in our 2 projects - Speech Center VR and Cerevrum Game.

In Speech Center VR we give you a chance to prepare for a job interview or a product pitch for investors in a virtual office, practice delivering a presentation at a conference on a virtual stage or polish your wedding speech in a virtual cocktail reception.

In Cerevrum Game we combine virtual reality, cognitive neuroscience, and machine learning to improve cognition in a whole new way. Data-driven machine learning algorithms explore the data and adapt to everything you do in real- time, keeping you optimally challenged. This technology lets us integrate cognitive training into fun and innovative VR games.</comment>


Show HN: Pluggable vector space models - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kreeben/resin/releases/tag/v.0.31 <comment><AUTHOR> I might be misrepresenting him because I don't know him but I feel like the creator of Wolfram Alpha and I are much alike in that we don't know what the hell it is we're building. Is it a word2vec flavor powered by a query language? Maybe?

From this release and here on out you can plug your own custom made vector space model into my search engine thingamajig. Your model that you provide consists of algorithms for creating embeddings and serializing them and of a graph configuration determining how it will be built and balanced.

I provide you with a query language that works over any model.

I'm using this to build recommendation systems, chatbots, NLU.

End game: a machine that knows everything there is to know about the world, as a service.

Querying crumbles at the size of Wikipedia. Increasing querying performance is next. Writing is ok-ish. A cboc model over English Wikipedia takes ~4h.

Any questions?</comment>


Show HN: A cell phone designed for kids - <AUTHOR> https://www.privomobile.com/ <comment><USER2> I almost left the page b/c the landing page didn't look very impressive tbh. But then I went to the about page and saw the video, which was really good! I would've liked to see the video auto-playing on the landing page.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was recently looking for something that works for me like this. The problem that I bumped up against was that I needed access to whatsapp for international travel.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate any feedback on our concept, design, and product strategy.</comment>


Face recognition with Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.nodejs-news.com/fun-with-nodejs/face-recognition-with-nodejs/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't live up to the title.

Node.js just provides a bit of glue between the browser and the face recognition software ( FaceTracker <http://web.mac.com/jsaragih/FaceTracker/FaceTracker.html> wrapped in ofxFaceTracker ).

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working on OpenCV bindings that allow you to do similar things. <https://github.com/peterbraden/node-opencv></comment>


Shopify vs Etsy by the numbers - <AUTHOR> http://milesgrimshaw.com/shopify-etsy/

<comment><USER2> good numbers, but the post felt lacking...there's just enough to start to really compare the two, and not enough to get a strong feeling one way or the other</comment>


You have too many chat apps. Can Layer connect them? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173726/you-have-too-many-chat-apps-can-layer-connect-them

<comment><USER2> bitlbee is the hackers way of bridging them all.

[http://www.bitlbee.org/](http://www.bitlbee.org/)

xkcd comic: [http://www.bitlbee.org/img/comic_3.0.png](http://www.bitlbee.org/img/comic_3.0.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> Including patterns could be that next useful step up from being a bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great work!</comment>


Wikipedia Deletion Reviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.donarmstrong.com/posts/wikipedia_deletion/

<comment><USER2> Yeah. This is why I don't bother updating Wikipedia. I would have just let my picture get deleted rather than waste time defending it.</comment>


Drones Enter Construction - <AUTHOR> https://www.engineering.com/BIM/ArticleID/16686/Are-Drones-Becoming-Essential-to-Construction.aspx <comment><USER2> My experience is a bit dated, but in Germany construction seemed to be the most change-adverse field of work imaginable (and everything digital is already lagging behind compared to other countries). Even getting some of the bigger companies to use Excel over paper was a huge productivity win. So I'm not holding my breath and seeing anything fancy anytime soon :P

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me more like a "fun thing to do" than anything that will be generalized.

I mean, it may well replace some existing technologies, like aerophotogrammetry and - more generally - produce via aerial survey _more_ data, useful for designing, but it's not like in every construction project photogrammetry and/or aerial survey is actually needed or useful.

Surely there will be some niche where it may replace other surveying methods (where precision is not-so-vital) as an example I would see it as a very good approach to (large) mining and excavation works to create provisional progress reports, but I doubt its use can be extended to more that a few particular projects.

<comment><USER4> > It seems to me more like a "fun thing to do" than anything that will be > generalized.

That's your lack of imagination speaking. Heck, before you posted this comment someone already posted a practical example [1].

Personally, I'd look at robots (including drones) taking over manual labour and risky labour. An example would be cleaning windows on a skyscraper, or delving in mines. But we could also look for applications in nature. How about pollination, for example? (That example also fits the manual labour definition albeit for animals.)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16733277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16733277)

<comment><USER3> >That's your lack of imagination speaking.

More probably it is more my roughly 35 years experience on building sites and construction projects speaking (as someone noted before the construction field is usually rather "conservative").

I surely would like more robots making more useful (and risky for humans) things, simply, specifically, there are not many construction site that _need_ aerial survey at all.

The example posted you referred to is not in the construction field, but rather in the utilities maintenance and has nothing to do with the original article that is about "accurate" aerial survey via drones:

>In construction, the technology is particularly valuable for uses such as monitoring site progress and tracking material quantities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Watch a giant industrial drone de-ice a huge wind turbine

[https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/3/26/17163464/drone-de- ic...](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/3/26/17163464/drone-de-ice-clean- wind-turbine-aerones)

"The craft has a tether line supplying water, which it sprays at up to 100 liters a minute (with optional de-icing coating), and another for power, meaning it can stay aloft indefinitely."</comment>


Ethereum Blockchain Project Launches First Production Release - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-blockchain-homestead/ <comment><USER2> I have spent the last year of my life on the finest intellectual playground I have ever known. The task at hand is to rethink everything about the way humans interact in our economy and society, then build the software to help them do it better. Come play with me. Come learn Ethereum. Come join the decentralization movement.</comment>


Don't call me a software engineer - <AUTHOR> http://greendestinyonyc.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-i-hate-software-engineering.html

<comment><USER2> I agree, and I agree with the reasons the author listed.

But ultimately, I'd dismiss this as a minor irritation if it weren't for the efforts to license Software Engineers under the EIT/PE path. In the end, I don't care if they call me a hacker, or a programmer, or an analyst. If it didn't matter, I wouldn't even really care if they called me an "engineer" (though I'd put something else on my business cards). I majored in math and got a grad degree in Industrial Engineering. Call it math, call it engineering, call it hacking. Whatever.

But I truly agree that any attempts to license the people who create software under the PE path - ie., undergraduate ABET accredited engineering degree, followed by the EIT exam, an apprenticeship, and the PE exam, would be utterly stupid. The exams are difficult and rigorous, sure, but what to they have to do with code? Very, very little. I think that 5% of the questions may have something to do with software, and they're pretty lame questions. The path would deny entry to the most talented, and give a peripheral group tremendous power to decide what talented people can and can't do.

While the term "engineer" is pretty general (think "sound engineers" in the recording industry), I'd still rather avoid any ambiguity here. I absolutely deny licensed professional engineers any claim whatsoever over software development, and I'll avoid the term to ensure that I don't continue to confuse them and others about where I (and almost all the good hackers I know) stand on this.

<comment><USER3> Faulty software in a life-critical system can kill just as easily as faulty mechanics or faulty electronics. If society considers it important to license mechanical and electrical engineers for particular jobs why should the software case be any different?

The idea that licensure would keep the most talented people out if the field is absurd. Talented people by definition will find it easier than average people to meet the standard.

Most likely licensure of software professionals would play out similarly to that of electrical engineers; most practicing electrical engineers in the USA are not licensed as PEs. You only really need an EE PE if you work in the construction industry or for the government.

<comment><USER2> I'm not actually arguing against licensing software developers in principle. It may eventually make sense - though right now, I think it would be premature. What I'm most opposed to is licensing under the ABET/FE/PE path. I'm not sure if you've looked at the exam before - I'd recommend browing through some sample FE tests at the library or bookstore. Think about what they're testing, and what you think it takes to write extremely secure, stable software. The overlap is tiny. Software development also has something in common with mathematics. Should we require everyone pass an exam based on Real Analysis, Group Theory, and Topology to write code? That's only slightly more absurd than requiring that they pass the PE exams.

As for talented people... well, there are ways to get around the ABET degree. But if we license under the FE/PE route, physics majors will be at a disadvantage, and math majors will face major hurdles in sitting for the exam. So I definitely don't think that it's absurd to conclude that licensure would reduce the talent level in the field if that licensing is based on the PE route. Again, this isn't an argument against lisencing in principle, it's just an argument against favoring civil engineering majors over math majors where it comes to writing software.

<comment><USER3> I have not looked at the software exams and if your assessment of them is a common one then there are likely problems with the current exam.

I have looked at the EE FE/PE exams and I thought they were decent and fair. I suspect that most practicing non-PE EEs would agree with my assessmet. EE is a much more mature field however.

If the exam is done correctly requiring an ABET degree is probably not necessary. But frankly if math and physics majors want to pass the exam they should either take some engineering classes or be prepared to do some additional work on their own time. Truly talented people will be able to learn what they need to without much effort.

The apprenticeship is probably valuable.

Being required to produce evidence of significant engineering design work is critically important.

<comment><USER2> Yes, math and physics majors will most definitely have to do a lot of study outside their fields if they want to get involved in software, as will civil, electrical, or nuclear engineers. However, I don't really see why math majors should have to learn properties of materials to demonstrate that they are prepared to write reliable software, any more than engineers should have to figure out how to pass an exam on real analysis, group theory, and topology in order to get licensed to write software.

<comment><USER3> I speculate the general engineering requirements exist because the most complex engineering projects require an interdisciplinary approach. The different disciplines need a set of shared concepts and language to work effectively. Thus the idea of an "Engineer" who is both a specialist as well as a generalist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> how about _software architect_

<comment><USER2> This would avoid the perils of the PE land grab, and I don't think that licensed architects would try to force software "architects" to go through the architecture exams.

The downside - I think this title is an attempt to add status by distancing a technical person from the pedestrian act of writing code. All in all, I wouldn't want to work for an architect who doesn't code. I've seen it, and it's ugly.

It's frustrating that "programmer" was denigrated and has come to mean a person who, without any sort of creativity or judgement, types code to spec all day. I have never met anyone who did this, and I have my doubts as to whether it's really possible, but I have met a few people who needed to believe it to justify their existence as "architects".

But if programmer is a bad word, and hacker is too prone to misunderstanding, then "developer" will have to do.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Promote Your Startup or Project to 30K Daily Readers Cheap - <AUTHOR> http://thetechblock.com/indie-promotion/

<comment><USER2> Can we see some type of analytic; something that shows these stories are actually getting more than 5,000 views?

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking forward to submitting a project!

</comment><comment><USER4> if it sounds too good to be true...</comment>