Get away with Google Flights - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/get-away-with-google-flights.html?m=0 <comment><USER2> I've been using Google Flights since the middle of last year and love it. However, as a frequent traveler for business/conferences, I think there are some things people should be aware of:

* Google's data seems to be not as fresh as Kayak or Hipmunk's is. There have been multiple times when I've tried to book a flight via GF only to be told that there were no seats left when I arrive on the airline's page. I suspect part of the greatly improved speed comes at the cost of aggressive caching that runs a risk of things being out of date.

* Google's data is all over the map on pricing. Very frequently the airline's price will be much cheaper than GF. And more than once (especially on United or American Airlines) I've noticed that if I book directly through an airline over a VPN, I save several hundred bucks versus if I click through from Google Flights or Kayak. Conversely, sometimes GF is less expensive and when I land on the airline's page it's more expensive.

I think the best thing to use it for is route discoverability: which kind of planes and which airlines fly to which locations, on which days at which times? It's also great for doing complex open-jaw routes or hidden-city fares -- and since those routes don't change very often, the data is more likely to be accurate.

<comment><USER3> Which VPN gets you the best deals?

Also, do you book on Tuesdays?

<comment><USER4> Assuming you're on google.com/flights, I'm fairly sure that using a VPN, changing your IP, flushing your cookies... none of that should change the availability and pricing you see on Flights.

And no, don't bother trying to time your bookings. It's kinda like the stock market; trying to beat the market, er, optimize your flights purchase time is likely to lead to sorrow and regret. From the research our Google Flights team did recently, we found that if you wait a week, on average you're gonna pay more for the same flight.

And no, we didn't see any universal discount on Tuesdays, either ;)

<comment><USER5> Actually If you save your itineraries you can see daily price change graph in saved flights view (star icon). A recent feature, small but interesting.

<comment><USER4> ah, good point, low_battery; I like that feature, too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the flexibility this has and after giving it a serious go I never went back to Kayak.

If you know exactly when and where to fly, Kayak is great. But with any uncertainty, Google Flights is better for exploring. Maybe you know when to fly, but not when you want to come back. Or maybe you don't even know where you want to fly, in which case you can get destination suggestions. It's also a lot snappier.

Now with this flight data they have, I'd imagine being able to just use Google Maps route search to go from A to B such that it would also include flights where applicable. While it kind of does, I am still able to think better routes myself. For example if I search from Tokushima, Japan -> San Francisco, USA, it suggests I should fly from Tokushima. Where actually it's a lot cheaper with almost no time difference to go by bus to Osaka first instead.

<comment><USER7> Kayak's explore is pretty nice when you have uncertainty: [http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/](http://www.kayak.com/explore/BER/)

Although unlike Google Flights, it doesn't let you search for specific dates.

<comment><USER8> nor does it allow you to search for specific times i.e. if i want to go somewhere for the weekend, flights at 6am on friday are not that useful...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure why they are just posting this now, it has existed for quite a while. It also has hotel searching.

Not all companies have prices displayed on the site, but it links directly to the companies rather than paying additional fees through a third party.

<comment><USER10> I wasn't even aware of Google Flights until I saw the article posted on HN. Go figure...

For some of us, the constant deluge of info, along with work and family life, makes it tough to stay on top of all the latest developments. Glad this service was "re-announced".

<comment><USER11> There's lots of travel sites popping up all the time, including accommodations sites. That's why I built [http://AllTheRooms.com](http://AllTheRooms.com), which aggregates all the different accommodations sites and deals sites, like Expedia, Groupon, Hotwire, and Airbnb

<comment> mh- decent site.

I'd update your copyright footer, if only because at a glance it makes me wonder if it's unmaintained.

I've been wanting a more powerful hotel search site for many years, but I think most of the features I'd care to see are limited by the messy data available about the properties (amenities, etc.) and the margins just aren't there to support an aggregator curating their own data. Maybe not even for a reseller like Hotels.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome. I can never understand what antiquated database and UI the other flight reservation websites are using. Simple database queries take 10+ seconds, and then you have to click N more times to get the taxes included.

Why can't I query for

        SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE sqrt((destination_latitude-desired_latitude)^2 - (destination_longitude-desired_longitude)^2) < 5000 AND abs(unix_timestamp(departure)-unix_timestamp('somedate'))<10*86400 ORDER BY (price+taxes+fees);

with proper geoindexing and sharding this query should take no more than a fraction of a second, yet airline websites want me to use some stupidly- designed UI that can't implement above query, takes 10+ seconds to return results, and doesn't include the taxes and fees. Thus I need to often manually enter every destination within 5000km and every date combination and manually waste half a day to find the cheapest ticket to "anywhere interesting".

Furthermore often times changing the language and country of the website changes ticket prices; a well-designed, globally-consistent database should not allow this to happen.

I hope that Google will disrupt and reengineer this ancient system.

<comment><USER13> For the same reason I can't just renew a domain at Network Solutions without going through eight different pages trying to upsell me things (and often defaulting to checking on those services).

Expedia, Orbitz, etc make money via nag screens and upsells. They have no incentive to make the experience positive or easy. Google seems to.

<comment><USER12> I switched to Namecheap; they sell stuff but are not annoying about it.

Google Domains also looks promising but I'm waiting for them to not be in beta lest they decide to scrap the product. Google would win me over if they offered free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry by doing that too. Nobody should have to pay for a silly cryptographic signature. That would disrupt NS and all the others who try to upsell stuff.

<comment><USER14> > ...free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt > the SSL industry

StartSSL already offers free SSL certificates - and they haven't disrupted the industry. Even if Google started offering free SSL certificates - it's only a band-aid to the problem not a solution.

<comment><USER15> Have you tried using StartSSL?? (a) They aren't free if you are doing anything 'commercial' (b) I decided to try and give them my money. I tried very hard. I gave up.

After uploading your documents 30 times, them claiming they didn't get them, you would too.

Oh, and uploading them each time was pretty painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey everyone, just spotted this thread and was really happy to see all the comments about Google Flights. Though I've been at Google for nearly 9 years, I'm pretty new to the Flights team, so there's still a lot I'm learning... but I'll try to tackle at least few questions below :)

(I'm also both an oldtimer and newtimer to HN; long time lurker, and I opened an account ages ago, but sorry I've not been active here before!)

<comment><USER16> Hey Adam,

I'm joining the flights team this summer. Could I maybe talk to you a bit to get some perspective?

Feel free to email me: email@example.com

<comment><USER4> Congrats... and done! Looking forward to having you onboard!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> ITA Software was acquired by Google awhile back.

[https://matrix.itasoftware.com/](https://matrix.itasoftware.com/)

<comment><USER18> This is an awesome platform, if only you could purchase through this!

<comment><USER19> Their plan is probably to enable it at some point.

<comment><USER20> Matrix has been running 10 years already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Don't know where they're getting their data from.

Boston-dublin in Oct is over $1300 on google flight with Aerlingus

Same flight directly on the airline's website is $940.

Good luck with that, Google.

<comment><USER22> Though I see $550 round trip tickets on Delta, so there's that.

<comment><USER21> Delta doesn't fly direct. For this particular journey I could elect to spend 26 hours in Istanbul for $700 and change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've used Google Flights before, but I almost always end up flying Southwest, which doesn't disclose their prices to aggregators. Does anyone know if Google has tried to strike a deal with them? If anyone could, I imagine it would be Google.

<comment><USER24> I suppose someone could get bold and attempt to do some scraping. Of course, my money would be on SouthWest stopping this behavior as a violation of their terms of service.

Here is their terms of service:

[https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and- con...](https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/terms-and- conditions/index.html?clk=MBSFTR)

They explicitly take ownership of the content, mention that the information is only for non-commercial use, exclude use of the information on their site for commercial use and additionally use for any other purpose. In case their message is not clear, they go even further and list a variety of prohibited activities.

The language of their Terms & Conditions is rather broad. It looks like virtually any activity on their website as a violation. Perhaps that is now the norm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Incidentally I reserved two tickets yesterday after finding the best prices with Google Flights. It linked me directly to the airline's reservation system a couple of clicks away from confirmation.

BTW, I used their map to find the most suitable flight. I could change dates on the fly and see the prices change instantly. It's a great service.

Now if they could do the same for railways, I'd gladly pay for the convenience.

<comment><USER4> chm, thanks much! Appreciate the kudos!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I want to be able to search by criteria like "somewhere sunny", "the mediterranean", "somewhere to party in the summer", etc. I thought this was it, but not quite :-(...

<comment><USER27> Not quite that level but check out Adioso.com. They have a bunch of natural language search queries that work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google Flights has been my first search destination for months...the graph is awesome

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been using Momondo recently, which has all of these tools and a much better UX. This just feels like a re skin of the ITA site and a bit of a poor effort at that.

<comment><USER30> The Momondo UI is nicer, but Google Flights has the "price in the calendar" feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> That notification about avg. delays is an absolute killer feature.

[http://i.imgur.com/Nb0EYDh.png](http://i.imgur.com/Nb0EYDh.png)

<comment><USER32> As someone who is always running late, I pick the flights that are most often delayed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? I find this really baffling. It is a service all customers want yet even the great Google can't seem to provide this. Meanwhile Google puts out so many "experimental products" that they later dispose.

There is talk of Google getting into cell-phone service and the are already getting into Google fiber. I wish Google would use its pricing power and buy entire flights between major cities domestic and international (eg, NYC to Chicago, LA, SF, Miami, Atlanta, and London). Moreover, an airline can really make its profits on airline fuel speculation since this is the most volatile component of airline costs.

<comment><USER34> > How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and > we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights > from point A to point B on certain dates?

Because the airlines have their own army of geniuses working very hard to make sure that this is difficult to do:

[http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air- fares-101-why-d...](http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air- fares-101-why-do-fares-change-all-the-time/)

Who are you? How much money do you have? How badly do you want these tickets? How often are you checking the price, what else have you bought? How are your buying habits compared to everyone else's? These are the questions the airlines are trying to answer in order to maximise how much money they can get off each individual.

<comment><USER35> Wow. So as a United "elite" member, just doing searches on their app or site but with my account, is gonna cost me? Because I've never seen this happen. I seem to get the lowest fare they have. I've not done serious tests, just seen when other people look up my flights, on say, Kayak, they get the same prices.

<comment><USER34> Try browsing for tickets with and without private browsing enabled, and from different geographic IP addresses, from different computers, and different websites (cheapair, Expedia, Orbitz...). You should definitely see a fluctuation in prices, for the same seats. I always do.

It may well be that elite members get lower prices, as this may be the way for the airline to maximise their profit off you. Their algorithms are quite inscrutable, intentionally so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would love GF to have a feature where you select a departure airport and arrival airport and dates, and make GF find me where to go in between. Like a search with multiple cities but so that you decide the departure city of the first flight and the arrival city of the second flight.

</comment><comment><USER37> Two complaints:

1) When I go to the front page ([https://www.google.com/flights/](https://www.google.com/flights/)), everything from and including the 'return/one way/multi stop' row down is fixed-width at about 650px even when my window is far larger. This sort of fixes itself once I start selecting cities, but is randomly narrower than the auto-sizing search bar + other stuff above it. I'm on Win7 x64 / FF 36.0.

2) Please localise currencies. You auto-detect me in Brisbane, Australia. If I pick a flight to Sydney on AU carriers, I don't care about prices in USD. You either convert it to USD in the first place (or just assume 1AUD=1USD) but don't when you display it to me.

</comment><comment><USER38> I used Google Flights back in November to plan a 10-day getaway during December. BWI->MIA, MIA->LAX, SFO->BWI. Total airfare cost: $420. It was far easier to do this with GF than with Hipmunk or any other website i'd tried.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think SkyPicker is worth mentioning here: [https://skypicker.com](https://skypicker.com)

If you are flexible where you want to go, when, how much you can stay, etc... then you get really good suggestions.

<comment><USER40> Minor: got a certificate error when I clicked on this url. However that disappeared when I manually typed in www.skypicker.com in the browser. Most likely cause it seems is because their site certificate is *.skypicker.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've been using this for quite some time... works very well. I only will fly one or two airlines, but I still use Google Flights to compare days, and departure airports because its so much easier!

</comment><comment><USER42> There are sites dedicated to scouring and curating the best deals found using the ITA Software Matrix. [http://Theflightdeal.com](http://Theflightdeal.com) is the best that comes to mind. [http://PointsBuzz.com](http://PointsBuzz.com) also aggregates the various different sites focused on flight deals and maximizing frequent flyer points for the most worthwhile trips.

</comment><comment><USER43> Open-ended destination is great, but I've sometimes wished for open-ended source. My usecase is something like a casual multi-stop trip, where you have an eventual destination in mind, but would like to save money, or see where else you can go along the way for a similar amount of money.

I've worked around it by manually checking nearby routes, or getting a feel for options with open-ended reverse flights and then searching the reverse again.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm a fan of [https://www.vamo.com/](https://www.vamo.com/) for multi-city trips. You put in your point of origin and all the cities you want to visit (and for how long), and it routes you between the cities on the best type of transportation and offers accommodation suggestions as well.

</comment><comment><USER45> I used to be a hardcore Hipmunk user and I still think I prefer it to Google Flights. I had some trouble recently with Hipmunk linking to flights that don't exist on the airline's websites. I've been using Google Flights ever since. Hopefully Hipmunk will get things back in order again.

</comment><comment><USER46> Tried and most flights between US and Europe were at least $1-300 more expensive than on the usual travel sites.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hmmmm. I'm searching New York to Europe (March 25th to April 23rd) and it's giving me a $303 round trip to Madrid. Thats absolutely incredible, but when I click through the fair jumps to over $800. Anyone else experiencing things of that ilk?

<comment><USER48> Exactly what I was saying. Google here is claiming that people don't often buy the cheapest listed flight... and the reason is because they can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Minor complaint: the first thing I tried to do was try to find a flight from anywhere in the UK to anywhere in Slovenia. Whilst it lets me be vague about my destination, it doesn't seem to about my starting point... Skyscanner lets me do this

</comment><comment><USER50> It's super fast which certainly cannot be said about other similar services.

</comment><comment><USER48> "cheaper isn't always better"

BS. Non-business flights are the most price-sensitive type of product there could possibly be.

Near 100% of people only apply a few very basic filters, e.g. no 12-hour layovers, doesn't depart at 5am, and then choose the cheapest. It's not some sophisticated "balance" that needs some advanced machine learning or personalization to accomplish. It's a few obvious filters that are the same for practically everyone.

I'd love to see partial dependance plots for each of the obvious filtering factors, vs how often people chose that flight. That's the best way to do this type of analysis.

Not to mention that many times the cheapest flight listed on these travel sites isn't actually available when you try to book it. Wonder how that may have skewed Google's analysis.

<comment><USER4> Hey solve, I thought the exact same thing you did! But then -- as someone who recently joined the Google Flights team -- I helped lead some research that included this topic... and was honestly surprised to find that about 40% of the folks searching on Google Flights DON'T pick the cheapest flight.

Price, certainly, is still a huge factor in folks' decision, but convenience plays a very significant role. And, from anecdotal evidence (not part of the same research), brand loyalty is definitely a factor as well (a very price sensitive travel blogger I know still prefers to fly on American, for instance).

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This makes me feel somewhat uneasy.

On the one hand, it works really well.

On the other, are Google aiming to take over every aggregation service out there?

Something about the dominant search engine moving into this space just doesn't sit right with me.

<comment><USER9> Search engines are all about aggregation, it seems like a logical step for them. Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites, so it is not just the dominant search engine, it is all of them. It is also nice to not have to support some third party by buying tickets through them. Just compare the prices and go directly to the airline.

<comment><USER51> _Bing, Yahoo, and even AOL also have their own travel sites_

The difference is, if I type _WAW to LHR_ into Google, I get flight listings with prices and availability.

You're right that Bing, Yahoo etc. have their own _separate_ travel sites, I've yet to see similar results in their search results.

<comment><USER52> > _The difference is, if I type WAW to LHR into Google, I get flight listings > with prices and availability._

Yes, and I think that's a _Good Thing_. Google rightly knows that when I type "WAW to LHR", I want to know about the flight, not about where to find out about that flight.

<comment><USER53> An implication of this difference is that google probably charges for that convenience by saving your itinerary somewhere and selling it to your insurance company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is this a purposeful reference to the late Lunn Poly [0]

"Flights with Google? Get Away!"

0 : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunn_Poly](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunn_Poly)

</comment><comment><USER55> I stumbled across Google Flights a couple of years ago back when it wasn't as pretty, but I've always found it to be incredibly useful, at least for traveling in the continental U.S.

</comment><comment><USER56> I just used this to book my flight to PyCon 2015 oddly enough. It was pretty damn easy to use and let me jump from its search results to directly booking with Air Canada. Pretty smooth...

</comment><comment><USER57> I just ran a comparison with Expedia (which seems to no longer be ASP.NET based as an aside); not too surprised, Expedia found the cheaper flights. Read, cheaper, not necessarily better.

</comment><comment><USER58> I find Momondo to have one of the better layouts of prices when trying to find cheaper days. [http://www.momondo.com/](http://www.momondo.com/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Very similar to kayak.co.uk/trips

</comment><comment><USER60> Tangentially related, does anyone know of any provider where you can e.g. make your own Hipmunk?

<comment><USER61> [https://developers.google.com/qpx- express/](https://developers.google.com/qpx-express/) is the API you can use to make your own service like Google Flights/Hipmunk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I've been using Google Flights for over 2 years. Why is it just now getting announced?

</comment><comment><USER36> Was it updated? I spent my whole evening yesterday planning the trip.

</comment><comment><USER63> I like daily price bargraph. Gives a sense of overall prices.

</comment><comment><USER64> A lot of the features seem highly inspired by Hipmunk.

</comment><comment><USER65> Right into the heart of meta engines. Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER66> The UI/UX on this product is not that great. Google is offering a similar solution as Kayak. But I'm not sure why they just didn't fully copy Kayak. It feels to me, 1 - google thinks they are smarter than Kayak, 2 - they didn't want to show they are copying Kayak.

For example, kayak does a great job of displaying all the options on the left column. Google is hiding everything in drop downs. So then they need to have a blog post to explain how their UI works where kayaks is just intuitive.

The same with bar chart pricing (which I like) why hide it behind a silly icon like that. Now they have to educate their users what that icon means. Call it "best days to fly" or even better show that at the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER67> I disagree. I spent nearly a year as a UI designer/engineer for a flight search/booking tool and evaluated all the major interfaces. The #1 killer feature google flights has which kills all other flight search tools (I have seen) is speed. They bought a company (ITA) for something close to a billion dollars which provides near realtime search results for flights.

Kayak (and others) do a good job of streaming search results, but you still have to wait seconds before you're able to make decisions.</comment></comment>


Comcast: Xbox 360 On Demand streams won't count against data caps - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/03/comcast-xbox-360-on-demand-streams-wont-count-against-data-caps.ars <comment><USER2> And thus we come to the real reason why data caps are being introduced by ISPs.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is the way network non-neutrality will creep in. Who would complain about a special deal for some customers?</comment>


Alan Kay: Computer Applications – A Medium for Creative Thought (1972) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJzi9R_55Iw <comment><USER2> Delighted to see this finally make the front page. I submitted it just a few days ago, but it was quickly buried: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309001)

My favorite part starts at 40:50: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJzi9R_55Iw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJzi9R_55Iw&feature=youtu.be&t=2450)

Paraphrasing:

"Our goal is not to measure "answers right per test", or "test passed per year", but rather Sistine Chapel Ceilings per lifetime."

That gives me goosebumps every time I think about it.

<comment><USER3> This is a strange quote, since a Sistine-Chapel-Ceiling can only be painted by an individual with great skill and thousands of hours of deliberate practice.

<comment><USER2> Well, the context is educating children. Particularly, Kay's premise was that kids are naturally creative, curious, and artistic. He was concerned with process of developing a child along their "stylistic" axis, which opposed the conventional process of education that "beats the style out of them".

Artistic skill is the product of thousands of hours of deliberate practice. But, there's an idea that the motivation for that kind of practice comes from a desire to develop a style that's all your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He is still around. Wiki gives his post-PARC resume: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay) Most recently he has been running a small research institute: [http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf)

<comment><USER5> One could say Alan Kay is still around, much like one could say giant redwood and sequoia trees are 'still around'.

Always glad to see someone discover one of the greats. :)

(edit) Oh wait, you probably already knew he existed. Tried to read too much into your post.

<comment><USER6> It's still strange wording. It's like saying Beethoven was 'still around' in the 1810's.

I don't know of a more prestigious group working on a more important area than CDG.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really liked Alan Kay's talk from 2015: The Power of Simplicity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs)

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow! An Alan Kay talk from the heyday of PARC. This is really something.

</comment><comment><USER9> For anyone serious about our field, this is a must read (watch).

</comment><comment><USER10> "Space War." Ahead of his time? ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> The music reminds me Jethro Tull and King Crimson.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it's a Jethro Tull tune called Bouree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> s/computer/dynamic medium/g</comment>


Tagmask now supports RSS of your personal feeds - <AUTHOR> http://tagmask.com/vladimir/posts/24

<comment><AUTHOR> Some people from here asked me about RSS on Tagmask so I decided submit the link to news.</comment>


Bitcoin Is Suddenly Surging Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-02/bitcoin-is-suddenly-surging-again <comment><USER2> Evidently it's due to the MMM Ponzi Scheme: [http://www.dailytradingprofits.com/5063/is-bitcoin-being- pum...](http://www.dailytradingprofits.com/5063/is-bitcoin-being-pumped-by-a- ponzi-scheme/)

Nobody knows for sure how big of an impact it's having, but it's likely not a coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER3> Which is weird. The volume has greatly increased in China, but we've never trusted their published numbers before. This is yet another China-driven rally - beware of the sudden drops we know very well from the painful past!

</comment><comment><USER4> Kids need their drugs for NYE/the holidays. I think we'll see this increase up until December, and just like mail we'll see it drop off.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is the typical behavior (behavior in terms of market dynamics, and impact on orderbooks) of market makers in up trending markets? General question, not specific to bitcoin.

<comment><USER6> If the _trend_ is upwards but there are still sells, then that's pretty normal for a market maker -- they continue executing their standard risk controls and don't really care.

If buys _greatly_ outnumber sells and the price is surging, that is problematic for the market maker, because that implies they're going to accumulate a short position and start losing money on it. You should expect them to start resizing/repricing their asks (i.e. offer to sell less at close- to-market prices), possibly terminating their short via buying (in extremis), and (if available) hedging their position via instruments other than the one which is surging.

A _very rapid_ spike up is indistinguishable for market makers from a _very rapid_ crash down: expect them to pull liquidity and wait for the market to stabilize before reintroducing it. Their mental monologue is "Sorry, but you guys don't pay me for this."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only surprising thing is the timing. My guess is that this has to do with all the attention from the Economist. The fundamentals of the Bitcoin economy have been developing at a solid pace for more than a year— they've been swelling for months.</comment>


The Cost of Poor Web Performance - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/web-performance/the-cost-of-poor-web-performance-infographic/ <comment><USER2> Irony of ironies: I can't even load this page since the server is overwhelmed from HN traffic.

<comment><USER3> I thought it wasn't irony, but rather the actual message.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! See everyone, this guy got it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get the presidential part. Lots of statements about response time being better, then the guy with nearly double the load time won the election? Not that I'm arguing against page speed, just found that odd in the info graphic..

Also, it wouldn't hurt to perfect your load times! [http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=h...](http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsmartbear.com%2Fhomed%2F) 54/100 mobile & 77/100 desktop when I tested it

<comment><USER5> Guessing in the dark from someone who didn't follow the US election -

Maybe Romney's campaign was doing better than Obama's three weeks before the vote?

I do agree though, the presidential thing sounds confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unreacheable, talk about irony.

<comment> mike-cardwell [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.s...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.smartbear.com/web- performance/the-cost-of-poor-web-performance-infographic/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Back in the days I used Opera Mobile for surfing on the phone, when there were no data-plans or 3G/4G as there is now. A compressed page with pictures were just a few kBs, and loaded fairly quick.

But now, since the mobile net is so fast, there's little optimization done for mobile other than layout. Loading the largest newspaper in my country's mobile version is a whopping 1.5MBs with all the pictures. 2.7MB in normal. I think this is sad.

<comment><USER8> I was under the impression part of that is because of how Opera Mobile worked, they have some kinda "Turbo" mode that compressed websites and reduced downloading times.

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

<comment><USER9> Including caching of optimized content.

Which played hell with the localization logic for many sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Direct link since page is down: [http://blog.smartbear.com/wp- content/uploads/imports/poor-we...](http://blog.smartbear.com/wp- content/uploads/imports/poor-web-performance-infographic%20final- resized-600.jpg)

[http://imgur.com/QDEAPuK](http://imgur.com/QDEAPuK)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well this is embarrassing, but the irony is not lost on us: [http://imgur.com/Miokv4f](http://imgur.com/Miokv4f)

<comment><USER11> Like a train-wreck happening, meme usage also 'incorrect', red indicates the 'positive' part of, blue the awkward juxtaposition.

<comment><USER12> It's usually the opposite. Red = bad/wrong/stop, Green/Blue = good/right/go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've just left my current mobile phone provider (Vodafone) because of the continual problems with their website. Throughout the call to request my PAC (unlock) code every employee I spoke with didn't believe me when I said that I wanted to leave because of their site. I was offered increasingly more desperate financial 'offers' without acknowledgement of my actual complaint. Some big business' still don't relate web performance with user happiness - disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting blip in the "Conversion Rates by page load time" graph. Wonder what the reason is for the conversion rate for 0-1 seconds being markedly lower than 1-2, 2-3, and 3-4?

Also, that graph really irks me. Not enough contrast, poor layout, and confusing axis labels which depend upon color. Also, is the 0.025 on the y-axis a percentage or a decimal (I think it means 2.5% conversion rate?)

</comment><comment><USER14> I really wish you wouldn't disable pinch to zoom on your website. The text on the info graphic was far too small to read.</comment>


Jointly Predicting Job Performance, Personality, Cognitive Ability, & Well-Being - <AUTHOR> https://deepai.org/publication/jointly-predicting-job-performance-personality-cognitive-ability-affect-and-well-being <comment><USER2> I can't help but think of the link between scientific management and slavery. [http://bostonreview.net/race/caitlin-c-rosenthal-how- slavery...](http://bostonreview.net/race/caitlin-c-rosenthal-how-slavery- inspired-modern-business-management)</comment>


First improvement of fundamental algorithm in 10 years - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/max-flow-speedup-0927.html <comment><USER2> Their "represent it as a matrix" approach reminded me of this Richard Feynman story:

       [...] Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior
      of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he
      presented his answer in the form of a set of partial
      differential equations. To a physicist this  may seem
      natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of
      boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is
      a bit strange.
      Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables
      representing continuous quantities such as "the average
      number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more
      accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof
      and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the
      number of 1's" with respect to time.

[http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection- mac...](http://www.longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/)

<comment><USER3> Great story. I'm a physicist and I've read most of the Feynman stuff, including many of his papers, but I wasn't aware he _worked_ at Thinking Machines Corp.

I submitted it as a stand-along link:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732952>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> from <http://theory.csail.mit.edu/toc-seminars/> (can't find the actual paper...)

 _Electrical Flows, Laplacian Systems, and Faster Approximation of Maximum Flow in Undirected Graphs

The maximum flow problem and its dual, the minimum s-t cut problem, are two of the most fundamental and extensively studied problems in Operations Research and Optimization. They have many direct applications and are also often used as subroutines in other algorithms.

In this talk, I'll describe a fundamentally new technique for approximating the maximum flow in capacitated, undirected graphs. I'll then use this technique to develop the asymptotically fastest-known algorithm for solving this problem. For graphs with n vertices and m edges, the algorithm computes epsilon-approximate maximum flows in time \tilde{O}(m^{4/3})_poly(1/epsilon) and computes epsilon-approximate minimum s-t cuts in time \tilde{O}(m+n^{4/3}) _poly(1/epsilon).

We compute these flows by treating our graph as a network of resistors and solving a sequence of electrical flow problems with varying resistances on the edges. Each of these may be reduced to the solution of a system of linear equations in a Laplacian matrix, which can be solved in nearly-linear time.

This is joint work with Paul Christiano, Aleksander Madry, Daniel Spielman, and Shanghua Teng._

</comment><comment><USER5> The article refers to the max flow problem. About all this article does is imply that the new method involves the adjacency matrix of the graph and provides little else in the way of details. A better article is needed, not this oversimplified press release.

<comment><USER6> Kelner is set to give a talk about it tomorrow[1]. Anyone know if they create videos for these?

[1]: [http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?s...](http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=2711)

<comment><USER7> The method sounds very interesting, but the title seems to overstate the work a bit. This is an approximation algorithm, meaning that it's an improvement on an _approximate_variant_of_ a fundamental problem, right?

<comment><USER8> I think the title is appropriate. The approximate solution is the interesting one, as the exact solution is believed to be intractable.

<comment><USER9> This is absolutely not true. The wikipedia page for the max flow problem lists several (slower) poly-time algorithms for solving exact max flow. Most theory-101 classes cover at least Ford-Fulkerson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very little info, but I'd argue that the parallel qualities of the new algorithm are at least of similar importance to the improvement in complexity.

Old speed: (N + L)^(3/2) New speed: (N + L)^(4/3). (n=nodes, l=links)

> _For a network like the Internet, which has hundreds of billions of nodes, > the new algorithm could solve the max-flow problem hundreds of times faster > than its predecessor._

Granted, it's massively useful for Internet-scale calculations. But it's also massively useful that this is just operations on a matrix - throw the sucker at a video card, and watch it finish _thousands_ of times faster on cheaper hardware.

edit: oh, and:

      100,000,000^(3/2)) / 100,000,000^(4/3) ≈ 21.5
      1,000,000,000^(3/2) / 1,000,000,000^(4/3) ≈ 31.6
      1,000,000,000,000^(3/2) / 1,000,000,000,000^(4/3) ≈ 100

Anyone know the scale of N+L for the internet? I somewhat doubt it's in the trillions. Which is not in any way to suggest there are not significantly larger applications - just nitpicking at journalism's grasp of numbers.

<comment><USER11> _throw the sucker at a video card, and watch it finish thousands of times faster on cheaper hardware_

This is nonsense even for dense operations. But this matrix is sparse, in which case GPUs are within a modest factor (2-5 or so depending on the matrix, whether you use multiple cores on the CPU, and whether you ask NVidia or Intel). And if the algorithm does not expose a lot of concurrency (as with most multiplicative algorithms), the GPU can be much slower than a CPU.

<comment><USER12> The right answer is in the middle. Of course speed up depends on what are you comparing, but if you benchmark GPU against decent four core CPU the speed up is in order of magnitude.

For dense Matrix currently is about eight times (<http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=172176>) on CUDA 3.1. That is before the CUDA 3.2 which claim 50-300% performance increase.

For sparse matrix the speed up against multi core CPU is about ten times (<http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=83825>).

All available as a public libraries (<http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_2_toolkit_rc.html>).

jedbrown, please provide a source of your estimates. Of course I'm interested in some highly optimized libraries like BLAS. Hand written code would be on both systems several times slower.

<comment><USER11> "On the limits of GPU Acceleration" (short summary from Richard Vuduc): <http://vuduc.org/pubs/vuduc2010-hotpar-cpu-v-gpu.pdf>

"Understanding the design trade-offs among current multicore systems for numerical computations" (somewhat more technical): <http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2009.5161055>

"Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth: an evaluation of throughput computing on CPU and GPU" (from Intel, but using the best published GPU implementations): <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1815961.1816021>

BTW, you may as well cite CUSP (<http://code.google.com/p/cusp-library/>) for the sparse implementation, it's not part of CUDA despite being developed by Nathan Bell and Michael Garland (NVidia employees).

<comment><USER13> Really great comment, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This sounds cool, but how is this not a solution that's already been considered? It seems intuitively obvious to me that you can use a circuit simulator to solve this problem pretty quickly by assigning conductances to the edges of the graph. Modern circuit simulators are pretty good at converging on a solution in the presence of strong nonlinearities, so in principle you could even have edges that are more than simple conductances.

(I have a CS degree, but I'm a circuit designer, so it's been a while since I've thought seriously about problems like this and I'm clearly not in touch with the state of the art. This question isn't snark, it's really a question.)

<comment><USER15> > This sounds cool, but how is this not a solution that's already been > considered? … I have a CS degree

Well… did you think of it?

<comment><USER14> Fair enough :)

(In my defense, I've been solving other problems instead...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The theme with these MIT announcements seems to be HCA: Hope, Certainty, and Assuredness by analogy to FUD and with similar use of misrepresentation, simplification, and appeal to authority.

</comment><comment><USER17> Actually, another case: Vladimir Yaroslavskiy recently came up with a dual- pivot quicksort method where the number of swaps is reduced from 1 _n_ ln(n) to 0.8 _n_ ln(n). Yes, he's only twiddling the constant factor, but the benchmarks have been promising, with some sorts being reduced to 25% to 50% of their previous running time. Josh Bloch, one of the shepherds of Java, took the time to implement it as the default sorting algorithm in Java 7 (whenever that gets released). More details at: [http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.core- libs...](http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.core- libs.devel/2628)

How timsort from Python stacks up, I don't know offhand. But that's a different beast instead of an improvement to a fundamental algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's a good background paper by Spielman that seems to lay the foundation for the methods used: <http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/spielman/PAPERS/icm10post.pdf>

Although not the actual result itself. But looks like a really good read.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's an approximate algorithm (nothing wrong with that).

I'm confused at how they claim O(m^{4/3}) (m is the number of edges) when even initializing an explicit n by n matrix is O(n^2), unless they assume that the graph isn't sparse (m>=k*n^1.5).

Or perhaps the matrix is sparsely represented.

<comment><USER18> On page 11 of the paper I reference above Spielman makes the following statement:

"The most obvious way that sparsification can accelerate the solution of linear equations is by replacing the problem of solving systems in dense matrices by the problem of solving systems in sparse matrices. Recall that the Conjugate Gradient, used as a direct solver, can solve systems in n-dimensional matrices with m non-zero entries in time O(mn). So, if we could find a graph H with O(n) nonzero entries that was even a 1-approximation of G, then we could quickly solve systems in LG by using the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient with LH as the preconditioner, and solving the systems in LH by the Conjugate Gradient. Each solve in H would then take time O(n^2), and the number of iterations of the PCG required to get an ǫ-accurate solution would be O(log ǫ−1). So, the total complexity would be O((m + n^2) log ǫ−1)."

I'm not really sure how you get O(n) 1-approximations of G (or even really what a 1-approximation is yet, as I haven't really read the paper), but that seems to be the idea, I think.

<comment><USER20> A 1-approximation is an approximation within a factor of 1. Basically that means that the solution is nearly exact. A 2-approximation would be no more than twice as bad as the optimal solution, and an n-aproximation would be no more than n times as bad as the optimal solution.

This is a common thing to use in randomized or approximate algorithms. For example, solving min-cut by assigning to 2 sets randomly is provably a 2-approximation.

<comment><USER21> I believe you mean Max-Cut can be 2 approximated with the trivial random algorithm. Min cut can be solved exactly, and that algorithm would give an expected n^2 approx factor (for min cut).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone have a link to the actual paper(s)?

<comment><USER23> I looked around, but the only links I could find appear to be selected textbook chapters that describe old ways of doing it. Even Dr. Dobbs just reprinted the MIT press release. So far, the only useful link I can find is to the scheduled talk and someone already posted that.

If anyone can find anything more than this link, it would be interesting to me, too: [http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?s...](http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=2711)

EDIT: Incidentally that page _does_ tell us a bit more about the solution than the press release everyone is reprinting. Specifically, it says: "We compute these flows by treating our graph as a network of resistors and solving a sequence of electrical flow problems with varying resistances on the edges. Each of these may be reduced to the solution of a system of linear equations in a Laplacian matrix, which can be solved in nearly-linear time."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As far as the article goes, this new solution could very well be just a different version of the Simplex method, which can also solve this kind of problem.

As some already said: better article needed.

</comment><comment><USER25> Couldn't this problem be simplified by considering the nodes and paths to be a resistor network, and solving for the effective resistance between the source and drain nodes?

</comment><comment><USER26> How about the processing overhead of converting the complete graph to a matrix in the first place? Wouldn't this offset(some)gains of the new algo?</comment>


Obama: China cyber attacks 'unacceptable' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34229439 <comment><USER2> Even if Information is considered the 5th dimension of war, I think the actions he refers to are more like "Psy Ops" because they can influence opinions but not physical stuff. It's a different story for some Chinese tanks which have been sold at a very discounted price because they actually were remote jammers, that is true information war, not information leaking (anyhow, lol at the tank buyers).</comment>


CVE-2015-0235 glibc gethostbyname Overflow writeup - <AUTHOR> http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/01/27/9

<comment><USER2> Here is a gist which contains source code for testing if a system is vulnerable: [https://gist.github.com/koelling/ef9b2b9d0be6d6dbab63](https://gist.github.com/koelling/ef9b2b9d0be6d6dbab63)

e.g.:

        curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/koelling/ef9b2b9d0be6d6dbab63/raw/de1730049198c64eaf8f8ab015a3c8b23b63fd34/gistfile1.c > gistfile1.c
        gcc -o ghost-test gistfile1.c
        ./ghost-test

        not vulnerable</comment>


BBC Digital Media Distribution: How we improved throughput by 4x - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/17d22fb8-cea2-49d5-be14-86e7a1dcde04 <comment><USER2> Varnish author here.

I'm several sets of information short of being able to say anything particularly precise about their results.

Their diagnosis is very detailed and useful, but I think the main thing we can learn from it is that the Linux kernels VM system is horrible when memory is overcommitted. At least to me that's not news.

I will also say that we in the Varnish project have not worked much on performance the last couple of years, because people have asked much more for features than performance.

Some of the stuff we have done have traded CPU cycles for flexibility, but if the Varnish users change their mind and decide performance needs a boost, we can do that too.

The reason we dropped sendfile(2) in Varnish was that nobody seemed to be able to show any credible performance improvement, and dropping it allowed us to implement on-the-fly processing of the HTTP bodies in a cleaner way.

We can certainly bring sendfile(2) back for "the straight" path if that's important to people.

The "file" storage was our first rather primitive storage engine and it has never been optimized to any extent. Varnish Software Inc. has a commercial offering that includes a "massive storage engine", but most people seem to just use the 'malloc' storage.

And no, Varnish is not dying just because BBC doesn't use it in the absolute far corner of high-end usage doesn't use it: If NGINX is the better tool for them, they should absolutely be running NGNIX.

</comment><comment><USER3> Direct link without two tracking redirects: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/17d22fb8-cea2-49...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/17d22fb8-cea2-49d5-be14-86e7a1dcde04)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is really interesting! But keep in mind, Varnish is blazing fast if you manage to fit everything in memory by using malloc. Also Varnish is more configurable than the Nginx cache. For example if you need to serve different content on the same url based on the Accept-Language header or a cookie, you can do this easily with Varnish by creating a lookup hash of the url + header value in VCL.

<comment><USER5> Came here to say this, feels as though they maybe didn't do Varnish justice in some ways.

Kudos on the huge improvement though, it's the results that matter not the means.

<comment><USER6> Seems to be that they did, but Varnish didn't suit their needs as they couldn't fit all the data in RAM. It's OK to change what you use because you outgrow it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not that it's a bad article (lots of nice detail in there), but the short version of this is: if you're web-serving disk-scale things, use a web server that's designed to serve from disk. If you're web-serving memory-scale things, you can use a memory-based web server. Even if you think you're just "caching".

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting bookend to this [1], which felt like the best possible endorsement for Varnish I'd seen, and was a driving factor in me building it out where I work. As others have pointed out, it seems more like an issue of being the wrong tool for the current needs, and not so much a problem with Varnish itself.

1\. [http://www.slideshare.net/grahamlyons/varnish-at-the- bbc](http://www.slideshare.net/grahamlyons/varnish-at-the-bbc)

<comment><USER9> Its worth pointing out that the BBC continues to use Varnish in the way Graham described in that presentation.

As you say, its about finding the right tool for the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Actual URL: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/17d22fb8-cea2-49...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/17d22fb8-cea2-49d5-be14-86e7a1dcde04)

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting line of reasoning. Definitely mmaping 8.6TiB into user space process virtual memory is gonna take a toll.

I tried to find why varnish doesn't use sendfile: [https://www.varnish- cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-dev/20...](https://www.varnish- cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-dev/2008-May/005891.html)

      By default [Varnish uses sendfile] never; there are problems with all sendfile() implementations

<comment><USER12> In the past I've found that sendfile is not portable. FreeBSD and Mac OS X require the file that is being sent be a regular file[0] while Linux will take any file descriptor[1]. That being said, I can't imagine what benefit memmapping would have in the context over the file system page cache.

0 - [https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sendfile&sektion=2](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sendfile&sektion=2)

1 - [http://linux.die.net/man/2/sendfile](http://linux.die.net/man/2/sendfile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised about the 6-year-old kernel on a server with those specs. Apparently its still maintained until early next year. Anyone know if that might play a factor on the benchmarks?

EDIT: nvm they did try other kernels but it only made minor changes in results.

</comment><comment><USER14> > The RAID 50 array appears to be the current bottleneck.

Any form of parity RAID is always going to be a bottleneck, and should never be deployed into any production environments this side of 2010.

If your application can gracefully handle IO balancing (and potentially replication) between individual block devices, and handle them dying in all of the weird and wonderful ways that they do, then go with JBOD. If not, then your choices are a mirror (E.G RAID1), or striped mirrors (E.G RAID10).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we went JBOD and saw the performance win as expected :)

> dying in all of the weird and wonderful ways that they do

It's only been a few months, but there have been plenty of great surprises thrown out by those disks. Both in the ways that they've failed and how the kernel has handled those failures!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That sounds like having wrong organisation of data and then using wrong tools to do the job. Interesting article though.

</comment><comment><USER16> What I want to hear from BBC is not how fast they can make a web server, but what are they going to do about those 1 million hours of archive TV and radio content they are sitting on. It's a shame for that treasure to be locked in copyright limbo, while YouTube collects 100 hours of cat videos per hour.

<comment><USER17> I used to record Jools Holland onto VCR every week, and then make mix tapes of my favourites. _I would happily pay 99p a track for my favourites_ \- and feel like a winner.

Simlarly with live lounge sessions. We get a selection of what some pratt at the BBC thinks were the best of the year in a compilation CD. WHY NOT JUST SELL THEM ALL?

I have been bitching about this for years, how has it not been made a thing?

<comment><USER18> I think the problem with music broadcasts (TV or radio) is that they'd need permission of the artists and/or publishers before they could sell it commercially. It's probably for similar reasons that they don't show all the Glastonbury stuff (mixed in with revenue sharing - some artists/publishers might want too much, for example):

> "On occasion an act may not wish to be filmed or recorded. Artists may also > agree to be recorded but only allow a limited number of songs to be aired. > This could be for a number of reasons for instance: the quality of some > parts of the performance, because they do not wish to broadcast new or > unreleased material, or they do not want to broadcast their entire live > set."

I do agree that it'd be a good idea to do, though.

<comment><USER17> I mean, obviously artists could opt out (and tracking them all down for back catalog perms would be a nightmare - I'm not without sympathy for the effort involved) but going forward could they really not set up a default agreement? The fact that they DO release some stuff commercially seems indicative it's entirely possible.

Glasto is indeed another great example of audio tracks I'd gladly pay for - funnily enough though by the time the BBC takes it's coverage down some valiant internet person has stuck what I want up on torrents.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bill Gates talks about why artificial intelligence is nearly here - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11833340/bill-gates-ai-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> "The first is, it will eliminate a lot of existing types of jobs. Gates said that creates a need for a lot of retraining but notes that until schools have class sizes under 10 and people can retire at a reasonable age and take ample vacation, he isn't worried about a lack of need for human labor."

Almost one hundred years ago Keynes predicted drastic cuts to the average worker's labor time, down to 15 hours or so a week. He expected living standards in developed countries would be between four and eight times higher and this would leave people far more leisure time.

Many countries have experienced massive productivity and standards of living increases in the last 100 years, and hours worked has not significantly declined. What makes anyone believe, 'this time is different'?

<comment><USER3> Yes, Keynes thought increased productivity would allow workers more free time --namely, to pursue leisurely activities.

Little did he realize workers would just channel that free time right back into their work.

<comment><USER4> People don't just happen to channel their free time back into their work. A full time job is still 40 hours a week. Depending on what you do, that might be exhausting, you may not have the energy to pursue leisure activities.

I doubt this is going to change any time soon. What incentive does a company have to reduce working hours? Declare that a full week of work is 32 hours instead of 40?

<comment><USER5> Happier, more productive employees?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Binded: A Copyright Protection Tool for Photos Based on Blockchain Technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.binded.com/?# <comment><AUTHOR> @floatingatoll's interpretation of Binded's Terms of Service is based on statements that are taken out of context. The complete ToS is at [https://binded.com/terms](https://binded.com/terms)

</comment><comment><USER2> Be very careful using this service.

> You understand by using Binded that anything you upload has a permanet > record of its creation on the Bitcoin Blockchain which cannot be erased.

> You will not otherwise copy, transmit, distribute, sell, resell, license, > de-compile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, publish, participate in > the transfer or sale of, create derivative works from, perform, display, > incorporate into another website, or in any other way exploit any of the > Content or any other part of the Binded Site or any derivative works > thereof, in whole or in part for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Combining these two terms of service from Binded's website, every blockchain participant that derives a block from their blocks containing Binded's signatures ("works") is illegally violating their terms of service, as it follows by common sense that the Blockchain output from the Binded site is a derivative work of the Binded site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your interpretation of Binded's Terms of Service is based on statements that are taken out of context. The complete ToS is at [https://binded.com/terms](https://binded.com/terms)</comment></comment>


You Can't Teach Height, But Can You Teach Programming? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/steverowe/archive/2007/03/14/you-can-t-teach-height-but-can-you-teach-programming.aspx <comment><USER2> _The authors speculate that this is because some people just can't handle the meaninglessness of programming_

I think he cited the paper wrong here: It's not the meaninglessness of _programming_ but the meaninglessness of _programs_. And it is obviously not meant, that a program makes no sense, but that a formalism can stand on its own, without any purpose. Programming, however, is creating programs for a purpose, thus, abstracting facts into a formalism and after running the program interpreting its results is not meaningless at all. I think I can back the observations of the original paper. I occured people which seem to plainly don't get what a program does. They are not talking about what they themselves told the computer to do but they are speculating why the program/computer isn't doing what it ought to do (what its purpose is).

I disagree with Steve's opinion that the level of abstraction is a general problem. I started programming early, and I hit walls all the time. Back from the early times to now I always found things I just couldn't grok. For long years I couldn't understand programming graphical things at all. I watched with awe how my three years older neighbor could program animations on his C64, all I managed to do were Fahrenheit to Celsius converters. Later I was crazy enough to start learning C++ with only knowing BASIC before. It took days to get 'Hello World' running. I kept trying and eventually I found the right book which made me understand OOP. Programming some graphics came very late. And the list still goes on... I can read a book without understand a thing. I come back to the book (or suddenly remember details) some weeks, months, years later and manage to understand what is going on.

The same applies to other areas: Playing piano is something where you hit your personal wall all the time. Sure, there is a natural anatomical caused level of virtuosity which simply can't be overcome. (See Robert Schumann, who tried to hack his weakest finger which ultimately failed) But there are "mental barriers" which can only be overcome (aside from exercising) by keeping cool and sometimes stop trying to come back to it later.

Another example: As a child I always divided the physical world from the living world (the christian heritage?). As such it was for a long time unthinkable that creatures are made from the same stuff as everything else. I recall that accepting this knowledge was really hard...

Regarding the original paper (they've done much research, I can only guess and tell from observation): The humps they observe, couldn't they just be the indication of a clear mental barrier which has to be overcome? Perhaps being taught and some pressure is just not enough to grok these abstract facts about programming? Perhaps, what is needed is just time to (un)consciously chew on the ideas? So, shouldn't be children exposed to 'some programming stuff' as early as possible?

In Germany at least it is left to chance when children become exposed to programming. In most regions there is no teaching at all before a pupil is about 16 years old (11-th grade).

</comment><comment><USER3> First, find yourself some tall parents. Also, make sure to hang out with a tall crowd. Standing compresses your spine, so spend as much time as possible in a reclined position. Measure your height every day to track improvements.

</comment><comment> alan-crowe The weakness I saw in The Camel Has Two Humps was the lumping together of the consistently correct and the consistently incorrent. See <http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/1624#comment-19778>

Trying to deduce anything from the success of the consistently correct group is fraught. It sure looks like they have some prior exposure. The interest lies in the consistently incorrect group. Perhaps their success points to the importance of having a consistent model, to be corrected by instruction. Or perhaps the consistently incorrect group all failed. We don't know how many were in this group and if there were very few the aggregation of the correct and incorrect into a single group could completely wash their fate out of the overall statistics.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Most people who take math long enough eventually hit a wall. There is some point when you can just no longer grasp what is being taught. No matter how much you study, you'll never become proficient at that level of math._

The argument largely hinges on the truth of this statement and frankly I have my doubts about its veracity. It seems more likely that people that manage to master certain math topics can master any topic, because the amount of extra abstraction introduced levels off.

 _For me, Discrete Math is something I've never been able to master._

I don't see how that subject introduces a huge new abstraction over the preceding subjects.

<comment><USER5> I dunno, that rang true for me. I have two degrees in math and found most of what I studied easy, but algebraic topology utterly humiliated me -- it was just too abstract for me to feel like I had any grasp on what it was talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think that the analogy is right : after all, when all the players are more than two meters, short players get an advantage over them.

I don't see why it wouldn't apply to programming.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just bad "science".

</comment><comment><USER8> on the 10,001st hour epiphany BEGINS at least according to [http://kottke.org/09/05/giving-110-in-defense-of-sports- inte...](http://kottke.org/09/05/giving-110-in-defense-of-sports-interview- cliches)</comment>


This is what Curiosity saw as it landed on Mars - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/UcGMDXy-Y1I

<comment><USER3> A nice play by play of the landing culled from the YouTube comments (attributed to "flyhighj65"):

      0:15 - Obviously heat shield separation

      ~0:25 to 0:30 - Back shell separation and powered flight

      0:31 to 0:38 - The rover banks to move towards the
      upper left corner of the screen (camera looks opposite
      direction of motion)

      0:38 to 0:41 - The rover banks the opposite direction
      and stops its horizontal motion to drop straight down

      ~0:47 - Skycrane maneuver begins

      0:48 - Wheels deploy (top left corner of screen)

      Touchdown is shortly after the video ends

Just as aside, it's amazing that people spend significant effort making intelligent remarks on YouTube (such as the above) only to see it get buried in a sea of inane comments. (It's already at 1,380 comments for this Mars video.)

<comment><USER4> FYI, it's sped up because they only take 4-5 frame per seconds. The heat shield separation is at +278s (278 seconds after atmospheric entry) and the touchdown is at +416s. That's a difference of 138 seconds, which in the video takes about 38 sec (0:15 - 0:53), so the play-back speed up is about a factor of 3.6.

<comment><USER5> I read somewhere that they have 720p full color video of the descent at 10fps, which will be transmitted eventually. I can't wait.

<comment><USER4> I know that a HD version will eventually make its way from Mars to Earth, but I have read in a couple of places that the Descent Imager only operates at 5 fps. That could have been a mis-statement though.

<comment><USER5> I (or perhaps what I was reading) may have had the descent cam's stats confused with the high-quality mast cam, which won't be deployed until next week. Still exciting, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was a discussion on Reddit about the instrumentation on MER - specifically that every concievable scientific instrument is on the rover, but no HD video camera or microphone. Apparently, the reasoning behind this is that these things are scientifically uninteresting.

But imagine the PR benefit of getting full-motion video and audio from Mars. Even if we don't learn anything interesting from this, the media effect would have been tremendous. People could finally see video and sound on the evening news, in HD...almost like being on Mars. It's too bad the MER team wasn't willing to do this, seems like it would have been a relatively cheap addition to the project.

But don't get me wrong, this is still very, very cool.

<comment><USER7> If i remember correctly, rover has a 720p video camera that records 10fps. And considering the speed of the movement of camera or robotic arm, any higher fps would have been redundant. I don't know about microphone though. Plus there is a novelty factor. The first full HD 3d 60fps video with 6 channel sound will probably be the most popular YouTube video of the year. But that's it, no one would watch the second video because all of it would be same. largely because rovers travels very slowly and also because it's just rocks and dust, just like any desert here on earth. The cost of the added weight and volume of more capable camera for just one popular video is not justified IMO.

<comment><USER8> Yes it does have a 720p 10fps camera; it actually has 17 camera's in all: [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/curiosity-mars- rov...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/curiosity-mars-rover- cameras/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The success of NASA in putting landers/rovers on Mars is spectacular. Maybe not in absolute terms but...

      NASA = 7 successes
      everyone else = failure

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline>

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't wait to see the higher definition videos. Also - there was quite a bit of dust being blown around there.

It will be interesting to see if there is any followup as to whether the SkyCrane maneuver is really required, or, whether in the future, we can land directly on rocket engines. Particularly with the Plutonium power supply - <USER2> need to be concerned about solar cells getting covered in dust.

Also - I seem to recall that there can be fairly significant dust storms on mars anyways - so it's not as though landing without rocket engines means that the Rover will be immune from getting struck by pebbles/rockets/dust.

<comment><USER11> A couple of people from the JPL team talked about why they used the sky crane rather than other methods and they mentioned that the amount of dust caused by using rockets all the way down would cause issues for the rover. So it seems like some dust is ok but too much would cause enough problems that the sky crane is worth it.

<comment><USER12> Might they want to minimise interference with the layers of dust/dirt on the ground, where possible? Probably not - maybe that's akin to explorers worrying about longboats pushing into the sand when they reached a beach...

<comment><USER11> They plan on driving a significant distance, so I don't think they're too worried about contamination of the landing site. I think the real issue is that they have many sensitive instruments and protecting against very small high velocity particles is difficult.

<comment><USER13> Andrew Bingham, the engineer of the hazcam dust covers, explains in detail:

[http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=29612.msg93...](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=29612.msg938852#msg938852)

 _"These dust covers were one of the last things added to the rover. The MSL HazCams are build-to-print copies of the MER HazCams. On MER, the cameras were protected inside the lander, and in over 10 rover-years on the ground they haven't seen dust building up enough to be worrysome. The Skycrane system was supposed to reduce the plume ground pressure during landing to the point where dust wouldn't be an issue for MSL."_

 _"But after Phoenix landed and everyone saw the pictures of pebbles ON TOP OF the pads on the bottom of the lander legs, and the legs themselves coated with a sticky looking layer of dust, some concerned folks looked at the issue more closely. It turned out there is a core flow in the Mars Lander Engines on the descent stage that stays strong all the way to the surface, even hanging at the end of the skycrane. And that can kick up a lot of dust+reaction products during the skycrane maneuver, some of which would go back towards the rover. There was a review of hardware in danger of being coated with "sticky" dust; everything was determined to be dust tolerant EXCEPT the HazCams."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's happening at the beginning there with that disc-like object that looks like it's free falling towards the surface?

Edit: ah, the Youtube description says the beginning part is the heatshield separating.

<comment><USER15> From the Wikipedia page[1], I would say it was the heat shield.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When does the parachute detach? When is the sky crane activated?

Is the cloudy stuff at the end of the video just dust kicked up by the rover, or an existing cloud (of dust)?

Also, I would love to see some image stabilization applied.

EDIT: Answered! <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4349125>

<comment><USER16> <http://i.imgur.com/hFoHy.jpg>

The cloudy stuff is dust from the powered descent. The top bit lowered the MSL down via cables which were 20m long, so the distance was short enough to blow up the dust but far away enough to not cause too much disturbance (they were worried about damaging the MSL)

<comment><USER4> Yea, I know the general idea. You're probably right, but how can you tell part of the dust wasn't already there?

<comment><USER16> Dust from where? Earth? The MSL is assembled in a clean room. You can see how much dust was stirred up in the video here:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I&feature=g-wl](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGMDXy-Y1I&feature=g-wl)

<comment><USER4> There are dust storms on Mars, even with its thin atmosphere.

I'm not sure why you linked me to the original post.

<comment><USER16> The image? Referring to this:

> When does the parachute detach? When is the sky crane activated?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Again, congratulations to the team responsible for that at NASA! Space exploration has advanced science like no other area.

What really rubs me the wrong way are some of those Youtube comments that go like "Why spend so much money on NASA?". Clearly, the spendings on NASA are minuscule compared to what the US spends on it's military or on the banks. That's a rather sad fact.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd love to see the video from the viewpoint of the sky crane.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it saw this - [http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/Cu...](http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/Curiosity+killed+the+cat.+source+smosh+facebook+page_06d5f5_3980829.jpg)</comment>


CERN publishes instructions for building your own particle detector - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/CERN/status/1260600298206302210 <comment><USER2> There was some good discussion about this kit two days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196177)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for pointing it out! When I had posted this initially, I had almost zero karma... ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can also make a DIY cloud chamber.</comment>


Try node.js in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://jsapp.us/#! <comment><USER2> I hope someone does "Try Javascript in the browser".

</comment><comment><USER3> anybody using node for their startup? I am not sure if it works for larger projects, but that opinion may well be tainted by my dislike of javascript.

<comment><USER4> We have some Node.js code (not yet in production) for <http://lanyrd.com/> for interacting with the Twitter streaming API.

My personal philosophy with Node.js is to use it for small, standalone network servers that complement the rest of my stack - basically anything that needs to handle large amounts of I/O. Everything I've written with Node.js so far has been just a few hundred lines of code.

So for templating, database interaction and so on I'll keep using Django. I'll use Node for stuff like comet/WebSocket pubsub services, handling file uploads, rate limiting API proxies, webhook dispatching, interacting with slow or streaming external web APIs, etc.

GitHub are using Node in this way at the moment: [https://github.com/blog/678-meet-nodeload-the-new- download-s...](https://github.com/blog/678-meet-nodeload-the-new-download- server)

<comment><USER5> Why is it good to use for large amounts of I/O? I'm in the process of making a twitter-based app and I'm debating whether or not I should be using Python / Django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice! Have been waiting for that since the tragic loss of AppJet. Do you plan to provide some sort of paid hosting in order to prevent going broke due to hosting cost?

<comment><USER7> AppJet is being hosted at <http://apps.jgate.de/>.

We also launched Erbix a few days ago: <http://www.erbix.com>

<http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1938066>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sadly, it doesn't look like it comes with socket.io, but I just hacked together <http://testing.jsapp.us/> which is a sort of real-time visitor counter.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks to matthewfl (<http://twitter.com/#!/matthewfl>) for putting the time in to make this. It's really useful for someone who wants to experiment with node.js.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool idea, but is it so hard to add _body { font-family: sans-serif; }_ (replace "sans-serif" with your favorite font if necessary) to your CSS?

</comment><comment><USER10> It's not really "in" the browser. It's more try Node.js using the browser.

That said, they've done a sterling job of it.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks great, gives me a good excuse to start experimenting with node.js

</comment><comment><USER12> Very cool! Would love to learn some more on how this was done?

<comment><USER13> i'm not sure how these guys did it, but one could do a similar setup. one of the issues to overcome is availability of ports. since most apps will listen on port 80, you can use the HTTP Host header to virtual host instances. a reverse proxy can be set up at nnn.jsapp.us, look up the nnn and get an IP:port of which (internal) node instance to pass the request to. you could internally use UNIX domain sockets so there wouldn't be a need to worry about TCP sockets, but your frontend proxy needs to be smart about this.

thus nnn.jsapp.us can be mapped to a single IP address. things get more tricky if you allow people to host arbitrary TCP servers that aren't reverse-proxy friendly. the jsapp.us implementation seems to ignore a port argument to listen(), which seems reasonable.

the jsapp.us implementation seems to be able to keep multiple node instances running. obviously, if more and more people start hitting the server with their apps, this could lead to resource starvation. they probably have a clever way of not keeping the node instances sitting idle. if a particular nnn.jsapp.us host exists and the node instance isn't up, start it on the first "cold" request to that host. this allows the service to keep only those instances up and running that have had recent requests. or maybe they shut down a user's instances only when they log out or close the editor page?

that's my take on it. someone (maybe the jsapp.us guys?) should put together an all-in-one node.js hosting service that has a nice web-based editor based on Bespin or Cloud9 IDE and integrates node-inspector for an awesome remote debugging experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> nice to see bespin used in the wild, and for such a cool project too!

<comment><USER15> At HP Palm, we're using Bespin as the editor for our Ares code environment for building webOS apps. See <http://ares.palm.com/Ares/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> ctrl-b pulls up my bookmarks, not run the code. Does it work for anybody else?

<comment><USER17> It works in Safari, but that's because the Safari command for bookmarks is Option+Command+B</comment></comment>


Why are engineers loyal to managers but not the other way around? - <AUTHOR> I often see engineers ask should I quit this job without a notice, should I quit in the middle of the project etc.
Do managers also ask the same when evaluating/firing an employee ?  I've seen leads/manager ask difficult questions in interview which they can't answer.
After joining the company one realizes leads are lead because they are friends and not because they are good at what they do.
Have you seen managers shown the same care that an employee shows ? Is it the fact that people won't trust an engineer easily ?
I've seen engineers spend 5-10 years working like a horse gaining the trust and then the company fires them just like that.
Does trust play a role in software industry today ? <comment><USER2> Most managers/entrepreneurs I know absolutely _hate_ firing & laying off people. It's their complete least favorite part of the job.

The difference is that managers are typically under more constraints than engineers, and then entrepreneurs are under both more constraints and more uncertainty than managers. As an engineer, your job is to make the machines do what your boss wants them to do. You may have many technical constraints, but you basically have only one human constraint: what your boss is asking for.

As a manager, your job is to keep the team functioning and keep _your_ boss happy. If your boss says that your budget has been cut by 40%, there's nothing you can do about it, you've gotta let 40% of your people go even if you really like them and they've shown you nothing but loyalty. If you've got a brilliant technical contributor but he's socially abrasive and half your team's threatening to quit if you don't get rid of him, you can fire him or you can lose half your team.

As an entrepreneur, your job is to a.) identify why the company should exist b.) hire the right people and c.) make sure that there's always enough cash in the bank. And if you have to lay people off, it means _you_ fucked up. But you do all three of these things under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Maybe the technical rock star that shined brightly in the coding interviews is a douchebag to women, and you have to fire him so that you don't lose every woman on your team. Maybe you hired in anticipation of growth, so that you don't burn out people, but then the market for your product turned out to be much smaller than you thought. Maybe you hit a recession and your whole sector contracts.

Remember that entrepreneurs are ultimately responsible to customers, and _customers_ show zero loyalty. If a better product comes out, or they hit on hard times, or they change their line of business, they have no obligation to keep paying for your product.

Trust and loyalty absolutely play a big role in the software industry today, but business is a lot more complex than it seems when you come out of college, and you learn quickly that you can't always do what you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why it is justifiable to treat an engineer as a tool ? And since you brought it up, let's start one on science/engineering solutions vs. management. Obviously you think the later is harder, I disagree.

<comment><USER2> Forget justifiable - no, it's not justifiable. It is _necessary_ , in many circumstances. There are circumstances where your continued employment with a company will lead to worse consequences _for you and everybody else there_ than if you're let go.

I also didn't say management is _harder_ than engineering, I said "more constrained". I believe that it's harder to be a _good_ manager than a good engineer, but it's harder to be an _average_ engineer than an _average_ manager. And that again comes from constraints: a good manager tries to do right by everybody, while an average manager doesn't care. You have the option of ignoring your constraints in both professions, but an engineer that ignores his constraints won't make any progress at all, while a manager that ignores his constraints can sometimes muddle through until all of his people quit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like managers do things that are not justifiable and get away with it, whereas brunt work is done by engineers. Managers can't be trusted then, because they can get away with it ? So who is to decide if the consequence to let someone go, block raise/bonus is not because of the need of the company but because of the greed of managers ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In startup world, we not just care but respect engineers :)</comment>


Bayonne: Bus driver left brain dead after being 'attacked over face masks' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53309424 <comment><AUTHOR> Note: "the passengers who had no tickets and were not wearing masks"</comment>


Ask HN: Is it illegal to hijack the result of an online poll? - <AUTHOR> Just for fun I'm trying to hijack the result of an online poll. Security of that thing is ridiculous: you just need to send POST to the server and use different IP's to keep your right to vote.<p>Assuming I'm not DoS'ing the server and no terms of service have been agreed do you think is illegal to do so (in your country at least)? <comment><USER2> These are unscientific polls, and if that poll does not mention it, they do not care much anyway.

If there is a funny aspect in the poll, those from 4chan might pick it up and abuse it for you.

Regarding legality, it is up to local cybercrime laws. In practice, you may get in trouble as a knee jerk reaction to some unexpected and unfortunate outcome of the poll.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the US, almost anything you do on a computer can probably be interpreted as "illegal" under the CFAA, given a sufficiently ignorant and/or over-zealous prosecutor. If you reside in the US, be _very_ careful.</comment>


The Elements of User Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.weeklypixels.com/books/the-elements-of-user-experience/ <comment><USER2> I often find book reviews interesting.

Putting "Book Review:" in the title might improve the submission by adding context.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do that next time. Thanks for the suggestion :)</comment></comment>


The Most Promising Careers of the Next Decade - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-promising-careers-of-the-next-decade-11567688400?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> #1 most promising career is manager...</comment>


Tyranny of the Page View Nearly Over? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tyranny_of_the_page_view.php

<comment><USER2> I'm periodically amazed how well MSN ranks, and then I remember it's the default homepage for IE. How sad.

Any ranking system that gets closer to measuring the number and intensity of users who love the site is good.</comment>


The DAO explained well - <AUTHOR> http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0516/dao.htm <comment><AUTHOR> "Imagine a world where Apple shareholders who've had it with Tim Cook and lose a proxy fight to unseat him set up a new company called Dapple with new top management. By right, Dapple starts off with those shareholders' aliquot share of Apple's legendary cash hoard – plus the right to their aliquot share in the profits from every Apple product on sale at the time of the split. Imagine the possibilities, and the perils."

<comment><USER2> What is that split worth if the shareholders of the original company hold the IP and other resources, like hard capital equipment/factories? It might just make companies under DAO hold more capital assets, no cash, and lots of debt... for that matter if you split off, do the new share holders take a slice of the debt too? Do they have rights to use or sell licences to IP of the original company?

<comment><AUTHOR> these are good questions. I hope some DAO experts show up on this thread :)</comment></comment></comment>


University of Phoenix owner sells as 50,500 students flee - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/08/pf/college/university-of-phoenix-online-sold/index.html?iid=ob_homepage_money_pool&iid=obnetwork <comment><USER2> Given that the buyer was Obama's Secretary of Education for the full first term, I wonder if this will result in a taxpayer-funded bailout of unhappy students' debt like Obama did for Corinthian.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> At the core of this is crackdowns on the promises made about job placement, income, etc. Will we see similar efforts in the bootcamp space?</comment>


Lector - A news reader for people who want one simple thing - <AUTHOR> http://mauriciogardini.com/post/53784250046/lector-a-news-reader-for-people-who-want-one-simple

<comment><USER2> This might be sufficient for a first draft but it's also a great illustration of a lazy cliche that I'm seeing a lot—especially in this newly invigorated field, feed readers.

This is the sort of app that leads to minimalist-style marketing. '...One simple thing: read'. The current crop of online text editors has a similar impulse: 'The app for people who just want to write.' What these apps' creators mean is that their apps strip down the experience to the bare essentials of the activity, and don't throw a lot of extraneous bullshit in your face when you're trying to get your reading/writing/weather-checking done.

Which misses the mark a little bit. If your interface is simply a recapitulation of the received wisdom around feed reading, or text editing—if your app looks like what you'd get if you took all the feed readers that have been made and incorporated only those features that occur in all of them—then you haven't achieved minimalism. You've achieved superfluousness—the very thing you were trying to avoid!

Minimalism, as we should all know by now, isn't simply _not including_ features. It's putting a lot of hard work into eliding the cognitive load around the accomplishment of a specific task. The text editing web app that sets my world on fire won't be another Markdown-enabled text box that lets me go to full screen, it's going to be a Markdown-enabled text box that understands my intention and fulfills it in ways that I, not being a brilliant application designer, have not yet imagined.

At the very least, if you can't or won't tout a new, whiz-bang feature, get me excited about what it is that you've cut away, what you've devised how to do without, to really deliver on the promise of simplicity (that is, simplicity of use—not design or construction) and essentialism. On the other hand, the promise of a wide range of features to come, many ideas to be implemented, seems to work directly against the header of this article. One's audience should not be, I believe, people who want one simple thing now and a bunch of neat gizmos later.

<comment><USER3> You got a point. About the features to come, I have to disagree with you tough. We didn't disclose on the page what features we're going to include, so I don't blame you. On the top of our list, there's pubsubhubbub (so your news get to you faster), a mobile webapp, offline reading and some interface tweaks that a lot of people told us they want. I don't consider this "neat gizmos", they are only supporting the one simple thing you want, which is reading. We'll not be adding tons of social features, fancy viewing modes or anything like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The one feature that I actually care about and no one seems to have is full text search of your feed history. This is a feature I'm willing to pay money for. Why isn't anyone doing this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's a feature that I want too, helper. We even discussed about it when we were deciding the features we would include in this initial release, and we decided not to include search at all. For now.

Full-text search is a feature that is very resource-intensive, and providing something like that for now would be like a shot in the foot: for us, that manage the servers, which would have a bad time trying to balance the things; and for you, users, which wouldn't have a good user experience.

So, yeah, it always've been on our mind, but not for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Signed up and added a few feeds, added a double by mistake, couldn't figure out how to remove it. Waited 10 minutes and still no items in any feeds. Could turn into something nice, but I think the $36/year is a little premature at this point. Will check back.

<comment><USER3> We're now finishing the interface to properly manage your subscriptions. Should be online within a week or so.

About the feeds, the updates are taking a little longer than expected, it's around 15 to 20 minutes now. HN effect probably, I'm working on speeding things up. Let me know if things are still not working for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The design of this seems very similar to yoleoreader.com. I'm not having a go; I suspect that as this market space becomes more popular, we will see lots of similar designs (even if they're arrived at independently) -- but it might be worth spending some time to differentiate yourself a little more.

</comment><comment><USER7> Certainly looks nice. I'm primarily curious as to whether there'll be mobile version (whether app or webapp). I couldn't see anything about it in the post or on the site.

$36/year might be a touch too much at this point, but if with a mobile app, I'd definitely be willing to pay it.

<comment><USER3> We're planning to add a webapp for mobile very soon, right after we fix the issues that invariably will pop up from the launch. We'll be avoiding native apps for now. Offline reading is also on our plans, if that's important for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If your app is designed to do one thing, please take the time to find a typeface that is incredibly legible, and then set it so that scanning long paragraphs is a simple matter.

That condensed typeface you've chosen, and the fit-to-width paragraph size make it harder than necessary for users.

</comment><comment><USER9> In light of all the recent talk of privacy, I'd want to know more about how this is handled by the service. The web page is remarkably lacking in any click throughs for detail on the bullet points. Definitely a sticking point for deciding whether to sign up.

</comment><comment><USER10> The fact that we have created news readers for people who just want to read news, and blogging platforms for people who just want to blog, shows us how much we have degenerated... This shouldn't be the exception, but the norm.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's missing "All feeds". ("What's new" has no list view)

Otherwise very good job! I like it :)

<comment><USER3> This has been requested a thousand of times already, and we're listening. It's on the top of our list. We're dealing with some problems about feed data right now, but as soon as they're fixed we'll start working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this service provide an emulated Google Reader API endpoint so I can point client programs at it (like iOS's Reeder)?

<comment><USER3> Not yet, but we wouldn't be opposed to implement it if there's enough demand. It may take a while though, as we have other priorities atm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://readable.cc](http://readable.cc)</comment>


Johnson and Johnson Under Criminal Investigation for Concealing - sahin-boydas https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2019/07/12/johnson--johnson-under-criminal-investigation-for-concealing-cancer-risks-of-baby-powder/#26fa8ebb66e7 <comment> cde-v This news is a month old.

Edit: As is the article.</comment>


Apple Stock went DOWN after the launch of iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S - <AUTHOR> http://www.hak9.com/wow-apple-stock-went-down-after-the-launch-of-iphone-5c-and-iphone-5s/

<comment><AUTHOR> Its going down every minute</comment>


The Philosophical Cow - <AUTHOR> http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/the-philosophical-cow.html

<comment><USER2> This article misses the fundamental point that steaks are tasty.

<comment><USER3> The author needed to beef up his argument.</comment></comment>


AWS Lake Formation – Build a secure data lake in days - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/lake-formation/ <comment><USER2> Simplifies a lot of tedious, manual, and error prone work for businesses on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER2> Simplies a lot of manual, tedious, and error-prone work for businesses on AWS.</comment>