Ask HN: Is AI useful in industry? - <AUTHOR>

So I was thinking, I really like AI, but I don't want to be an academic.  So I'm wondering, are there any industries where AI is actually being used?  I've heard of some projects like tumor detection and ever some use in finance, but do people actually trust it enough to use it? <comment><USER2> I'm getting my PhD in Machine Learning right now, so I'll try to give you some ideas.

First of all Machine Learning will be useful to you, because you'll understand much about statistics, data mining, optimization and efficient programming. If you don't get to work on an ML project in industry directly, some of the enabling techniques might come in handy.

Now, ML is also interesting for industry. Google is essentially a Machine Learning company. They use statistics to evaluate and display data, be it website ranking, recommender systems, or whatnot. Some goes to some extend for MS, Facebook and Yahoo.

Now, there is also increasing demand in the computational biology community for ML methods. Pharma companies are producing terrabytes of data that will need to be analysed with intelligent algorithms, so that might be an interesting direction to consider.

In times of unlimited data access, studying how to teach computers to learn from data seems like the right thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you kidding me? Statistical AI is the _hottest_ thing in computing now. You might have heard of it as "Machine Learning".

However, you wont see any of the human emulators that were being conjured up in the 70s and 80s. The new AI is in the business of synthesizing massive data into intelligence.

<comment><USER4> Right, AI isn't recognizable as the Scifi thing you might have in mind... it's automatic financial trading software, or it's robotic path finding or target acquisition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answers. I guess I was really asking if anyone is actually using the techniques.

E.g. in finance, I'm under the impression most people still use standard pricing models as opposed to something like an ANN (or other statistical learning algorithm). The reason that I was told is that people are afraid of using some generic black box and instead prefer something like black-scholes (or whatever) that has an explanation they can understand.

<comment><USER5> Online advertising uses all kinds of machine learning.

When companies are running billions of impressions across multiple ad networks and using different creative variants, it takes serious algorithms to cut through the noise and find the inventory that's performing well. It's a tricky problem because typically you'll get tiny click-through rates, meaning you're looking to group a few points of data among millions of impressions.

Contextual analysis (figuring out the context of the page where the ad appears) is a big deal now also. That's a lot of natural language processing on some of the most diverse (read: difficult) content available.

I happen to work for a company that does both of these. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool. Do you know any good resources on what kinds of algorithms are used?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's plenty of applied AI out there, but since the '70s people prefer to call it something that sounds more practical, like 'machine intelligence' or 'soft computing'.

Part of the reason people don't notice it is that many of the applications are 'hidden' in embedded systems, especially control systems and computer vision. Also, any practical application is likely to be limited in its ambitions and there are always disputes over how 'intelligent' something has to be to qualify as AI.

</comment><comment><USER7> Any AI in use won't look like AI. When it becomes useful it gets decomposed into controllable components and then used. But it is used in many places.

<comment><USER8> An excuse to quote the AI Glossary (<http://www.stottlerhenke.com/ai_general/glossary.htm>)!

\---- AI Effect

The great practical benefits of AI applications and even the existence of AI in many software products go largely unnoticed by many despite the already widespread use of AI techniques in software. This is the AI effect. Many marketing people don't use the term "artificial intelligence" even when their company's products rely on some AI techniques. Why not? It may be because AI was oversold in the first giddy days of practical rule-based expert systems in the 1980s, with the peak perhaps marked by the Business Week cover of July 9, 1984 announcing, Artificial Intelligence, IT'S HERE.

James Hogan in his book, Mind Matters, has his own explanation of the AI Effect:

"AI researchers talk about a peculiar phenomenon known as the "AI effect." At the outset of a project, the goal is to entice a performance from machines in some designated area that everyone agrees would require "intelligence" if done by a human. If the project fails, it becomes a target of derision to be pointed at by the skeptics as an example of the absurdity of the idea that AI could be possible. If it succeeds, with the process demystified and its inner workings laid bare as lines of prosaic computer code, the subject is dismissed as "not really all that intelligent after all." Perhaps ... the real threat that we resist is the further demystification of ourselves...It seems to happen repeatedly that a line of AI work ... finds itself being diverted in such a direction that ... the measures that were supposed to mark its attainment are demonstrated brilliantly. Then, the resulting new knowledge typically stimulates demands for application of it and a burgeoning industry, market, and additional facet to our way of life comes into being, which within a decade we take for granted; but by then, of course, it isn't AI."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Short answer: No

</comment><comment><USER10> Video Games..

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not really up to date on video games. I realize there is a lot of AI in the sense of smart opponents, but is there a lot going on with learning? I.e. enemies that get better at defeating you by seeing your tactics?

I've thought about this could be applied in RPGs... if you have a recurring opponent that learns how you fight each time you face off and gets better. Is anyone doing something like this (even at a basic level like "he uses magic a lot")?

<comment><USER11> I have only programmed very little AI for games (standard Alpha Beta Pruning), but I think I can already understand why AI in games is not better. It simply takes a lot of time to create a very good AI. It is not done with having a good baisc idea (like Alpha-Beta Pruning for chess), you then also have to tweak it endlessly.

I think if you can come up with an effective way to create good AI, game developers would be delighted to use it. It is only time constraints that makes most of them stick to "good enough".

Also, the game has to remain fun for the humans.</comment></comment></comment>


Not Anonymous: Attack Reveals BitTorrent Users on Tor Network - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/not-anonymous-attack-reveals-bittorrent-users-on-tor-network.ars

<comment><USER2> Basically, Tor only works if the protocol you're running on top of it doesn't do stupid things. For instance, Tor doesn't work if your browser helpfully sends geolocation information. Likewise, Tor doesn't work if you happily make un-Torred connections to possibly malicious IP addresses retrieved via a Tor link, which is more or less what the vulnerable Bittorrenters were doing. (You _can_ run the entire Bittorrent protocol over Tor, but it's painfully slow and a big load on the network.)

In short, Tor may have real issues, but this is not Tor's fault.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have some questions about the significance of this claim. If I'm reading this correctly, the attack is that someone hosting a malicious Tor exit node (and we assume that _all_ exit nodes are compromised -- just common sense) can correlate tracker requests over the Tor network to chunks being sent to the non-anonymous IP _not_ over Tor.

In other words, this isn't really groundbreaking at all -- if you're requesting data to be sent _not_ over Tor, and instead _only_ proxying your tracker requests, of course that data can be correlated. You're anonymously asking for chunk 5429817, but telling the tracker to send it to your real IP address. An interesting issue, to be sure, but it's certainly not "breaking" the Tor network.

A lot of people are complaining about how one shouldn't BitTorrent over Tor anyway, for courtesy of the network--and I agree--however, this is _just_ the tracker data being proxied. That is, if you _were_ actually sending the BitTorrent data over Tor (which _would_ slow the network), then you're protected from this kind of attack because your unprotected IP would not request data from the honeypot.

From the article:

 _When one of the malicious exit nodes sees an attempted connection to a BitTorrent tracker, it intercepts the response and adds the IP address of one of the honeypot clients under researcher control. The user's BitTorrent client then attempts to make a data connection directly to the honeypot without using Tor, thus revealing the user's IP address to the honeypot._

The article goes on to mention that users who _do_ tunnel their traffic through Tor are still vulnerable if they use DHT, because DHT works over UDP while Tor only proxies TCP traffic.

</comment><comment><USER4> See also, direct from the Tor blog: [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt- go...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea)

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't use Bittorrent over Tor, people. It's bad for the network itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was a big proponent of Tor circa 07-09ish. However, I don't think it's really the best solution out there for those who need/wish-to-have private, anonymous internet usage. There are a number of issues I could list including how slow and unreliable it can be, but the worst by far is the fact that vast majority of the exit nodes are sniffed on or are honeypots to catch dissidents.

There is no way to know who the hell you're tunneling your traffic through, and it's really unsafe. It's much, much more safe to setup your own VPN service on another outside box/server that you personally control and tunnel everything that way.

And yes, don't ever use bittorrent on Tor, not just for the security exploit mentioned here, but the fact that that eats up __alot__ of bandwith and slows things down for everyone, dramatically.

The UofWash project mentioned in the end is a better alternative to straight bittorrent btw, in that there is __trust__ and you know who you're connecting to. Or you could just get an astraweb account, but I digress...

<comment><USER7> Anonymity is not the same as privacy. Tor is more about anonymity than about privacy.

That exit notes can sniff traffic has been known for a long time. Compromised exit nodes do not compromise anonymity as long as you don't give up personally identifiable information in traffic that gets routed via exit nodes.

More problematic is that compromised exit nodes could inject or run man in the middle attacks on your outbound traffic. These could then make you give up your real IP. This is why you shouldn't run exploitable protocols when exiting via Tor (ie. don't use javascript, flash, etc. if you want to remain anonymous).

<comment><USER6> If you're engaging in sensitive escapades via Tor to conceal your true identity, shouldn't the intentions and identity of who you're tunneling all your traffic through be one of your top priorities?

How do you know if that node with the pretty flag saying it's in Switzerland isn't logging all IPs, DNS requests, and packet headers straight to another Room 641A?

I just dislike when people suggest things like Tor without having used it themselves and seen the glaring issues and essential deficiencies with the tool.

Especially when there are such better and faster solutions available.

<comment><USER7> Because of Tor's design there's no need for trust at the exit node. Plus, you hop between exit nodes at 10 minute intervals, giving any one node at best a scrappy picture of your activities. You can also blacklist exit nodes that you consider suspicious.

Even if an exit node's logs are compromised an adversary wouldn't know your identity if you haven't given it up in the compromised traffic.

What better solutions are available? As far as I know Tor is still the most resilient option out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Jeez, did anyone read the article? It said that bitorrent users commonly only use TOR to access the trackers, then use a NON-TOR connection to the peer.

The researchers then recorded the user's IP address from the non-TOR traffic. Nothing magically going on here.</comment>


The Unix C library API can only be reliably used from C - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/CLibraryAPIRequiresC <comment><USER2> This is a fairly common problem when trying to interface other languages with any C API, not just errno. The FFI-library of your language can usually call straight into C-functions but then it turns out half of the C API is implemented in macros which can't be called nor converted automatically, so you have to be re-implement them all in the new language.

Funny because usually the reason for having a C API is to provide universal compatibility to be called from any language. If you are doing this, please avoid macros.

<comment><USER3> I ran into that at work a few years back. I was tasked with integrating OpenSSL into the commercial Smalltalk used for the project (last updated in 1999, for more or less good reasons). A priori, not an unreasonable task as the Smalltalk had a pretty good FFI mechanism. Except of course the neverending cavalcade of functions documented in the OpenSSL docs that were actually preprocessor macros. In the end I wrote a Python script that parsed the C headers and generated FFI entry points for normal functions and Smalltalk code for preprocessor macros that weren't simple literals. The result was a small mountain of code, but it made all of OpenSSL available to our application, which was great.

<comment><USER4> You're still lucky it wasn't like DirectDraw or something WinAPI in general. I had to reinvent entire preprocessors and investigate implicit compiler defaults to be able to wrap that, and still there was LOWORD, MAKE_XYZ, etc, which were official arbitrary code-in-a-header interfaces. Preprocessor is a scourge of an API.

<comment><USER5> The main problem with C macros is their usage when a regular function would do just fine. That goes for a lot of the cruft in the Windows headers.

Having said that, while I object to most ideas that "C is missing", I do think that better constant expressions and expression macros (functions on the syntactic-expressions level) would be a usability improvement in APIs compared to (token stream) preprocessor macros. Even though in the presence of the preprocessor, constants and expression macros would be somewhat redundant.

One advantage of expression macros is that you do macro expansion _after_ parsing to an AST. You get a valid AST parse with macro expansion if and only if you get a valid parse _without_ expansion. Expression macros are regular AST elements, and are scoped just like regular functions or variables. They don't have a weird textual scoping scheme with conditional compilation or un-/redefinability. Getting rid of that should make it easier to translate them to other languages.

Another advantage is that they allow you to actually know which constructs in an interface are part of the API. An expression macro is always supposed to be used directly by the consumer of the API, or at indirectly through another macro that is. That particular problem of the C preprocessor could in fact be solved if headers cleaned up after themselves, but in practice, preprocessor is just to messy so nobody does that.

<comment><USER6> Isn't this what rustlang did?

I have to admit that I'm coming around on rust. I still think that their fanboy marketing is obnoxious...but I need to get over my penchant for finding reasons to be angry.

<comment><USER7> We have two forms of macros: one that's basically fancy pattern matching, and another that lets you manipulate an arbitrary series of tokens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The issue here is that you shouldn't need to interface with C, unless you need to talk to some C Code. You absolutely shouldn't have to interface with C to talk to the kernel.

I come at this from a Linux perspective, but to me the user/kernel interface (sys calls etc.) should be the well defined abstraction boundary. The C library is a useful api making that easy to use, but to dictate that people can only make sys calls through C is silly and ends up with these sort of problems.

<comment><USER9> There is quite a bit of variation here. Linux and, AIUI, quite a few microkernels, have a defined ABI at the user/kernel boundary. BIOS, a bunch of hypervisors, and some RISC-V M-mode interfaces are similar, albeit with "user" and "kernel" replaced with other execution modes.

OpenBSD and, very notably, Windows instead have a defined library interface. Windows has somewhat stable "system calls", but only through NTDLL.dll. The real stable interface is kernel32, etc.

There are arguments in favor of both approaches. One significant, if rarely appreciated benefit of the user/kernel approach is that it enables user programs that don't use the C ABI at all. Go on Linux is like this, and Go and the vDSO have interoperability issues because the vDSO is a bit FFI-ish in Go, and Go's FFI is not very fast.

<comment><USER10> A stable syscall ABI is a Linux peculiarity and was never a part of the UNIX tradition.

Here's a talk where Bryan Cantrill describes the tightly coupled Solaris kernel/libc combination as a "welded unit", and mocks the Linux "libc ecosystem" and the complexity of ENOSYS handling in glibc.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs#t=29m10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs#t=29m10)

<comment><USER9> Mock it all you like. Old static binaries, old containers, and old chroots continue to work on new kernels. This is a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A function internally called by `errno` macro is part of an ABI, and changing its name will break all already compiled applications for no real reason. Most operating systems provide stable libc ABI (exception: OpenBSD). So it's a rather safe thing to depend on.

<comment> ainar-g > (exceptions: FreeBSD, OpenBSD)

These are some pretty significant exceptions though, especially in the networking-related fields. I don't want the programmes on my router to suddenly not boot after a system upgrade. Especially when I don't have the source code or if the compilers haven't caught up yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Back in the day, other languages had their own bindings to the POSIX/UNIX API's. There are standardized bindings for FORTRAN and Ada; not sure if others exist.

</comment><comment><USER13> The complaint is that the underlying function which returns the thread-local errno pointer isn't a public API, isn't standardised, and its name varies from OS to OS (__errno or __error or __errno_location)

This specific case would be resolved if some standard (ISO C, POSIX, etc) defined a public API to do it, e.g. errno_r

(Of course, that doesn't fix any other cases where some public functions are really macros to private functions, but this appears to be the most significant such case.)

</comment><comment><USER14> The whole C interface is clunky because C does not support multiple return values. More advanced languages should not be forced to deal with it.

<comment><USER15> You can return structs from C functions (note, I don't mean pointers, I mean whole structs). You can pass in structs too. It's not commonly done and is a bit clunky compared to returning a tuple, but it is possible.

<comment><USER16> What's the difference? My understanding is as follows: A struct is a tuple. It's just some structured memory. Where a tuple would be indexed numerically, a struct is indexed with names of the fields (equiv in Python to NamedTuple)

<comment><USER17> Tuples can pull their contents from different memory locations whereas structs are laid out continuously in memory (modulo padding if enabled). Of course you could store pointers in the structs you return but that would defeat the whole 'single return' concept, then you may as well return a pointer to a struct which is ugly because it will never be thread safe and is a particularly nice pitfall regarding ownership of that struct.

So either return the whole struct as values or, alternatively - and this is the way most library functions do it - call the function with a pointer to an empty struct which the function then fills. That leaves the return value for error status.

<comment><USER18> > So either return the whole struct as values or, alternatively - and this is > the way most library functions do it - call the function with a pointer to > an empty struct which the function then fills.

Mind you, under the hood all your structs will be returned through pointers to caller-allocated memory, unless it can fit into 8 bytes.

"To return a user-defined type by value in RAX, it must have a length of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 bits. [...] Otherwise, the caller assumes the responsibility of allocating memory and passing a pointer for the return value as the first argument."

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/x64-calling- conve...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/x64-calling- convention?view=vs-2019#return-values)

<comment><USER17> Yes, but that's literally an implementation detail and this could be done in many different ways. The idea here is to gain some amount of expressiveness, if that is the goal then implementation details should be of lesser importance.

Moving structures around 'by value' rather than 'by reference' is wasteful in my view, but if you have to then you should no longer worry about the underlying mechanism until optimization time rolls around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it is time to create the new POSIX standard, with better portability and safety/security. Decades of experience can help to design the better API.

<comment><USER20> It will never happen, because POSIX is literally the UNIX part of C libraries that did not land as part of the ISO C standard library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the worst offenders is statvfs with its use of __USE_FILE_OFFSET64...

</comment><comment><USER22> > There is no useful errno variable to load in your own language's runtime > after a call to, say, the open() function

FWIW, in rust there is std::io::last_os_error().

libc::perror works too.

<comment><USER23> The point of the article is that there's glue code needed for this, I think.

It seems like Rust also needs this, either through linker magic or extern C:

[https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=er...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=errno&type=)</comment></comment>


The Lost Modernist: David Jones - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/03/the-lost-modernist <comment><USER2> _But nothing is gained by Dilworth gratuitously interjecting the observation that, in regard to this or that aspect of Jones's life, "A Freudian might say . . ." That is a sentence that need never be completed (any more than one beginning, "A carnival fortune-teller might say . . .")._

This prompted a smile. Bravo!

[EDIT:] I also really enjoyed Jones's description of the tension, for an artist, between a candle and "an electric bulb".</comment>


I don't want to share, identity is Mine Mine Mine - <AUTHOR> https://fusionauth.io/blog/2018/12/03/single-tenant-vs-multi-tenant <comment><USER2> Are you a seagull from Finding Nemo? MINE</comment>


Relational Reasoning with Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01427 <comment><USER3> Can someone go in to more detail about how certain neural networks inherently are able to encode and interpret particular structures? Why RNs capture relations and Recurent neural networks can capture sequential data?

<comment><USER4> Basically, you can encode your (human) assumptions/intuitions about the data/task into the math. Neural networks are just big math equations with a bunch of tunable parameters, and there is a lot (a LOT) of freedom in what those math equations can be. So, CNNs assume spatial locality (stuff being near each other) matters, which turns out to be super true for images - <USER2> image is not at all the same if you just shuffle all of its pixels around. All it takes to do that is a simple tweak to the math (make a small set of weights that is the same for a bunch of patches of the input, instead of separate weight per input). This RN concept is also a simple math tweak, it's just a function designed to do a pairwise sum over pairs of 'objects', which they claim is a good way to enable the neural network to learn about relational concepts. RNNs are also a simple math tweak, just make the function recursive (sort of, it's trickier in implementation, but close enough).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not familiar with research on relational reasoning, and the subset they're working with seems pretty well defined, but even so this seems like a pretty meaningful step forward. Can anyone involved in the research comment further on how confident they are that RR is generalizable across dissimilar domains to the one tested?

</comment><comment><USER6> Very cool! Not quite the same, but brings to mind SHRDLU, which was recently discussed here.

The first few thoughts I had on seeing this: 1) Of course this is by DeepMind! Why would I think anything different. (I love the "basic" research they are doing on NNs & Deep Learning, and am always excited to see a new paper by them).

2) I would love to see more investment into this kind of basic ML research. (By that I don't mean "easy", but addressing the fundamentals of how to approach different types / classes of problems). A lot of where the DeepMind guys seem to be finding these big wins is in combining "classic" AI / CS techniques with Deep Learning / Optimization.

Examples (And I'm a novice at deep learning, so someone PLEASE PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong): AlphaGo - Take a technique like Tree Search for playing a game, and combine with deep networks for the tricky bit of evaluating play positions Deep Reinforcement Learning - Q-Learning and other reinforcement techniques have been around for a while, but they adapted them to a deep neural net architecture Neural Turing Machines - Took a classical model of computation and made it differentiable, alowing for a neural net to "learn" algorithms like sorting. Deep Neural Computing - Figured out how to add and address external memory in a differentiable computer, allowing a neural net to solve problems like path finding on a graph.

Where I think a lot of cool stuff is going to continue to come from is by revisiting classic techniques, and figuring out how they can be adapted to a differentiable / optimizible architecture. Or taking a classic problem and finding an efficient way to evaluate "goodness" of an answer that lends itself to being used in an optimization problem. Again, not saying it is easy, but I wonder how much "low hanging fruit" there is in revisiting classic algorithms and GOFAI techniques, and asking "can I use this in a Neural Net or adapt this to be differentiable so that I can learn or optimize the tricky bits?"

I'm sure I'm glossing over a lot / missing the point of a lot of it - like I said, just a noob whose super excited about this stuff :-)

<comment><USER7> I recently went to a talk at the London Machine Learning meetup ([https://www.meetup.com/London-Machine-Learning- Meetup/](https://www.meetup.com/London-Machine-Learning-Meetup/)) on "End-to- end Differentiable Proving" ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.11040](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.11040)).

Basically, this was about building neural networks based on propositional logic (e.g. Prolog-style statements), which was how some traditional expert systems were built.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a video of the presentation, and I can't find the slides anywhere.

If you're based around London, the London Machine Learning meetups are always worth attending!

<comment><USER6> Oh that is awesome, and I'll have to check the paper out! That's actually something I've been wondering -- about combining the power of deep learning with the domain expertise of old style expert systems, whether for bootstrapping the neural net, or as a rule base it can consult.

It seems like it would be very powerful to be able to harness Neural Nets for dealing with fuzzy inputs (images, natural language, spoken words), but adding a propositional rule-base they can consult for whatever the actual task is once you have dealt with that input.

On that, if it was learning a rule base, it might also be really helpful with getting insight into what your model is doing, if you could somehow introspect on / view the rules that it learned on a higher level than "when these neurons fire, we do this to the output"

(I woouldn't be surprised of course, to find one day that the DeepMind guys are already on top of it, and come up with a "Neural Warren Abstract Machine" at some point)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> here goes my phd thesis :( They are too fast for a single mind to beat.

<comment><USER9> Do you know which academic groups are doing this kind of fundamental research in neural networks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks interesting. I'd love to train a GAN with relational constraints.

</comment><comment><USER11> Could this be useful for multivariate statistical analysis, such as Basketball Player A has more steals than Player B but only when Player C is on the court? If so, it might get pretty busy on FanDuel

<comment><USER12> Standard MLPs already capture this kind of non-linear relation. The huge impact of RNs, it seems, is in how it organizes the computation of these relations in a more elegant/efficient way (object pairwise, rather than all at once)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, it's a much more interesting idea than a usual hype article with yet another application of the statistical inference.</comment>


Gidigames Android Board Game is Going Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://denvycom.com/blog/gidigames-android-game-is-going-open-source-happy-new-year/

<comment><USER2> Misleading title; I assumed it was talking about [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39339/android](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39339/android)

<comment><USER3> I don't know, when talking about "Android" board game going "open source", I tend to think that the source code of an Android board game app has become available.

<comment><USER4> agreed. Im a big board game fan and know of the board game "Android" and it didn't cross my mind.</comment></comment></comment>


How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2011/02/ocr-video/

<comment><USER3> This is awesome. Who cares that it's a little cumbersome - it works!

On a more national scale, could something like this be done for Congress? C-SPAN already does most of the hard work of filming and uploading to the web, so perhaps it won't be too difficult. I think it would certainly attract a lot of interest... maybe I'll give it a go.

<comment><USER4> And one could combine it with closed-captioning of the audio track for a pretty cool searchable result.

<comment><USER5> The lovely and fantastic Internet Archive has exactly this, for US News TV (Eg. C-SPAN IIRC) and they say they have clips from 594,000 shows since 2009 available. From what I've read and heard, they basically eat the subtitle/close caption track that's baked into the video/audio stream.

Feel free to check it out at [https://archive.org/details/tv](https://archive.org/details/tv) and search around for some fun terms/words.

If you really like it and if you like the Internet Archive, feel free to donate a one-time sum or set up a subscription at [http://archive.org/donate/](http://archive.org/donate/) \- they're a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation - so donations are tax deductable if you're US based.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the code on GitHub: [https://github.com/openva/video- indexer](https://github.com/openva/video-indexer) It's terrible (I wrote it for a very narrow use case, and only run it ~200 times each year), but it's enough to get the idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I ran across this while researching a way to OCR data from a video of a frequency counter and digital multimeter. I didn't use his exact workflow, but it got me pointed in the right direction. Much better than manually typing in data every second of a 20 minute video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> His OCR errors (Del. Jennifer L. McClellan -> Del. Jennifer L i\1cCie1ian) look like something that would be easily fixable at the right spot - <USER2> dictionaries and language models used by Tesseract.

While a spellchecker might fix Jenn1fer -> Jennifer, at the OCR stage there is much more information to do it properly; but it obviously doesn't know that McClellan is valid word and thus a much more likely alternative than i\1cCie1ian, and it needs to be told that. The list of speakers on those videos is limited, and their surnames can be added to the appropriate dictionaries to improve their recognition.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2011/02/ocr- video/)

Google cache of the site if it's unavailable (I'm getting a database error).

<comment><USER6> Memcached wasn't running for some reason. I've just fired it up, and all's well now.

<comment><USER9> I recommend monit for keeping processes like these running.

[http://mmonit.com/monit/](http://mmonit.com/monit/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would think the first few steps could be combined into one, faster step by using Handbrake to rip DVDs directly to MP4. But I also don't see why that stage takes hours on his machine, even on my 2006 rig it took less than the playtime of the DVD.

<comment><USER6> I don't want to rip directly to MP4, because I retain a copy of the VOB files. I was doing all of this on a Mac mini that I bought in 2006.

<comment><USER11> Nevertheless, I would still strongly recommend using Handbrake or something else that uses x264— that's the best H.264 encoder. x264 has good presets for various speeds/qualities, or I could help you optimize the settings for this type of content if you're interested.

Handbrake has a CLI in addition to the GUI, ffmpeg is another good CLI option.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I've tried both Handbrake and ffmpeg (and mplayer), and spent a lot of time tweaking the settings. I prefer MPEG Streamclip for this process—its ability to add new files to the queue after I've already starting the encoding process is particularly useful. Handbrake sometimes chokes on the DVD files generated by the legislature (I have no idea why), which is a dealbreaker For basically any other video encoding/decoding task, I use ffmpeg or mplayer Thank you, though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The title is very misleading for me, I expected magic but it was kind of disappointing. They don't even OCR actual video, instead they just take a few screenshots.

<comment><USER4> I can't think of a better way to OCR video though. You have render a frame to scan for text. And he automates it. You could hypothetically do that on more frames if you see it missing text.

<comment><USER13> maybe grabbing the frame before the video compression and use 100% quality JPEG when grabbing a frame would help for the OCR</comment></comment></comment>


Covid, Twitter, and Critique: An Interview with Carlo Caduff - <AUTHOR> http://www.americananthropologist.org/2020/07/02/covid-twitter-and-critique-an-interview-with-carlo-caduff/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting quote:

the virus has killed many people; it's dramatic in many ways. But when you look at the numbers, you need to compare this with other kinds of disasters and diseases that are happening every year. We know that tuberculosis kills 1.3 million people every year; HIV/AIDS kills 770,000; malaria kills 400,000. And then there's dengue. And then there's diarrhea. Influenza, in a severe season, kills up to 500,000 people. In 1968, there was an influenza pandemic that killed between 2 and 4 million people. We don't see these numbers of TB, HIV/AIDS, and malaria deaths displayed on TV on a daily basis.

So that, then, raises the question: Why are we responding in such a huge, massive way for COVID-19, but when it comes to TB or AIDS or malaria or even influenza, we're not mobilizing as many resources?

Are these deaths acceptable? What's the politics of acceptability? Why is it acceptable that so many people are dying from TB or malaria each year? These are preventable and treatable conditions. To me, this is a question of justice, equality, and solidarity—a question of understanding how we determine the value of life and the inequalities we find acceptable or not. And then there are the people who will die due to the lockdown, due to lack of food, loss of income, and disruption of ordinary medical care.</comment>


'I crashed AOL for 19 hours and messed up global email for a week' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/16/who_me/ <comment><USER2> So, I didn't actually crash the network itself — that was a result of a misunderstanding between the network ops team and our upstream network provider, plus a miscalculation of how long it might take to completely reload a full route table. But when the network went down, all hell broke loose in the e-mail world.

They didn't print the story exactly as I had written it, but their editing process probably did make things more clear. And shorter. So, except for the bit about me taking down the network itself, I don't have any issues with what they published.

Oh, and my name is Brad, not Bert.

</comment><comment><USER3> Part of a series of Epic Fail stories

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/who- me](https://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/who-me)</comment>


Tictail: an easy, pretty and social way to sell stuff - <AUTHOR> https://tictail.com/

<comment><USER2> Go Siavash!</comment>


Ask HN: Germans, how to work legally remote? - <AUTHOR> Hey there,
being a freelancer in Germany is possible and well-known if you have multiple clients throughout the year and follow some rules.
However, being a remote worker and employee of a US corp/startup seems to be a grey zone to me because German law requires to work maximum 80% of your time for one client only.
How do you solve that problem? Is there even a legal way to do that?
I also thought about incorporating a GmbH which then creates invoices to the US company. Nevertheless, this would introduce additional costs and probably risks (e. g. when you are no longer an employee of the US corp).
I asked some tax consultants. Nobody of them really understood what I want to do and additionally, the bigger problem seems to be the German Rentenversicherung and not only the Finanzamt.
More info: I want to stay in Germany and am a German citizen. I want to be for a significant time at the company (3y+). <comment><USER2> I did this for a few years. Here are your options:

Employment by the US company:

They're allowed to employ you and have you "stationed" in Germany. You pay no US tax, and DE tax on 100% of this income. For Sozialversicherung, Rentenversicherung etc it's just as if you were selbständig. Since you're allowed to give up all sorts of rights in DE conteact Law, the US based contract is probably fine.

Contractor for the US company: this is OK too. Since the company does not have a DE presence they can't run afoul of the Scheinselbständigkeit rules. You really should register as a Gewerbebetrieb, GmbH or English Limited company though, as that solves a lot of tax questions for you. In any case as a selbständiger in Germany You should expect to get audited in the first few years... And this makes it less likely they'll find things you have to pay.

I am not a Steuerberater... But I've been in a two selbständig household in Germany for 7 years. My income was from international tech contracts, just like yours. And I went through a Steuerprüfung, where they decided that since I dont have a degree in CS, I can't be selbständig in that field. Didn't matter that I have a long resume of big organizations, and a letter of reference from the CTO of one of the biggest companies in Germany. I had to form a Gewerbebetrieb and pay back taxes for it. It sucked.

Also, good luck on finding a Steuerberater who will help you optimize at all. Technically tax optimization is illegal, so most are very cautious even talking about it. 99% are just form fillers.

<comment><USER3> Employment by US company: Did that for five years working remotely from Germany for a US Incorporated. I'm German, had a German contract with all the standard provisions for Germany (mandatory vacation, termination protections etc, employer contributions to health-care etc). Worked without a hitch, like being employed by a DE entity. The only gotcha is that my monthly pay would have social contributions and health-care contributions already deducted, but would not have income tax deducted. So you'd have to save up enough money to pay income tax yourself at the end of the year (or quarterly, depending on how competent your local tax office is). After five years the US parent incorporated a German subsidiary, and since then the taxes were obviously deducted as well.

Personal take on tax accountants or anyone in that profession: They're more than useless. As parent poster said, 99% are form fillers, so if you tell them that you're working for a US entity that is not paying income tax on your behalf some of them will flat out say "but that's not even possible" (yes, someone told me that). My tip is just to read up on some topics, band together with co-workers in a similar situation and then just do the taxes yourself using one of the popular services.

<comment><USER4> > They're more than useless.

Can attest to that. Had similar situation - Being DE tax resident however working for my own company that is not based in DE.

I had just a simple question - when and how do I pay my taxes here from the money I bring from my company that is not German. And they could not help me because they really could not understand that someone might be living in Germany but not working in Germany.

<comment><USER5> Did you ever find an answer to that question? Facing a similar scenario.

<comment><USER4> Nope. Best I got was - Send money as salary and do yearly returns as additional income.

<comment><USER5> I think taking a salary is the only way to do it. I've been reading about the concept of opening a German branch of the foreign entity as a more formal thing. But obviously I will need to seek out a professional who actually has a clue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can join any "IT-Genossenschaft" like [0] or [1], which legally saves you from falling into the "Scheinselbstständigkeit" category. One-time cost is about 100-200€.

[0] [https://www.4freelance.de/](https://www.4freelance.de/)

[1] [https://www.it-projekt-eg.de/](https://www.it-projekt-eg.de/)

<comment><USER7> That contradicts their own statement in their FAQ:

[https://www.it-projekt- eg.de/freiberufler/service/haeufige_f...](https://www.it-projekt- eg.de/freiberufler/service/haeufige_fragen)

 _Reicht zum Schutz gegen Scheinselbständigkeit der einfache Eintritt in die Genossenschaft?_

 _Nein. Unser Modell schützt Sie dann vor Scheinselbständigkeit, wenn die IT- Projektgenossenschaft eG der Auftragnehmer ist und den Auftrag an Sie übergibt. Die Mitgliedschaft alleine reicht nicht aus._

That basically translates to "A membership does not protect you from Scheinselbstständigkeit. It will only protect you if the Genossenschaft is the contractor and transfers the job to you."

This might not be possible for all cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Be aware that if you incorporate, you still will have problems with Scheinselbständigkeit - being a small UG/GmbH does not prevent you from that!

Reg. your tax consultancy; we also do international business with freelancers and other contractors. Write me a mail, we might be able to sort that out.

<comment><USER9> How so? Is there a problem with having a company with only one employee and one client?

<comment><USER8> Yes, if you have an incorporation (UG/GmbH/...) where you are the only managing partner (Ein-Personen-GmbH) and you only have one client, you're handled as if you were a freelancer with only one client. It was an easy way to circumvent several obligations until they "closed" that "loophole".

<comment> rooam-dev Could you be more specific what loophole?

I am in a similar situation, I am full time employed (as a developer) by 1 person GmbH. I work with a tax agency that has not said anything about this.

Thanks.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, that just b/c someone at the tax agency said something, doesn't mean that it is right nor respected when they audit you. A lot of things in this area are not clearly defined and thus open to interpretation leading to all kinds of weird decisions.

The following article (German) is a good read on that: [http://www.schwerd.info/sozialversicherungsrecht/scheinselbs...](http://www.schwerd.info/sozialversicherungsrecht/scheinselbstaendigkeit- vermeiden/1641/)

<comment> rooam-dev Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, if I understand you correctly you'll be working on a contractual basis for a single client, full-time for a prolonged period of time.

This kind of arrangement indeed is quite likely to be classified as "bogus self-employment" by the German state pension system, no matter your legal setup. I wouldn't bother setting up a GmbH (private limited company) because it most likely won't help you anyway.

Unfortunately, there are no clear rules yet on when something is considered "bogus self-employment" and when it is not. However, there are some criteria for a setup to be more likely classified as "bogus self-employment" and other than the remote working part yours sounds more or less like the prototypical case.

The question remains, who would have to pay outstanding social security fees in that case. Usually it would be your employer. However, given that in your case they're in another jurisdiction social security might not be able to enforce that. Still, it might cause some trouble and costs for yourself (apart from the ethical issues that come with avoiding social security costs in such a manner).

The way remote employment (not consulting, which as you've mentioned, involves having multiple clients) could work relatively hassle-free in your case is your US employer setting up a company in Germany (a UG for example, which is a relatively cheap variation of the GmbH) and simply pay you from there, including taxes and social security like any other local employer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that my employer would do so only for me (given that I don't even have an employer right now, I'm just speaking generally here). But I agree this would indeed be the best option.

Is there a way that I can pay the social security fees from day one on my own to completely avoid all hassle and possible back-payments after a Prüfung (audit)?

<comment><USER10> I suppose there are legal constructs that allow you to do this. For example, you could set up the UG mentioned above yourself and be its only employee with all the taxes and social security costs that implies.

However, that will get complicated rather quickly:

You'll not only be that company's sole employee you'll also be its managing director. A managing director who owns a majority in the company usually is considered to be self-employed. A managing director also is responsible for filing annual accounts and tax statements. This is both expensive and time- consuming.

Another point to consider is that you'd effectively cover for employer's share of the social security costs (unless they will be paying that on top of your salary, at which point they might just as well set up the UG themselves).

Not only is this a dodgy practice but you'll also have pretty rough deal.

In any case, because this will get complicated you'd have to ask a lawyer who's well-versed in both corporate law and social security law about the specifics.

It'd be much easier if they either were your client rather than your employer or if you were a co-founder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One way to set this up is using some form of consulting/temporary worker company as an intermediate. I was employed in that form for a while. So legally that company hires you and then invoices the U.S. corporation taking a cut. In my case that was Kelly Services and was hassle free (I got my salary as negotiated in time, only interaction I had with them was signing a contract and terminating it) no idea how hard this is to setup or what the cut is they take.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone else will make huge money only because bogus laws in Germany which probably won't be fixed even in the year 2100.

Anyway, I really like the idea and it sounds totally hassle-free. I will contact them and ask. Should I give you as a referral? Maybe you get a check if it works out for me.

<comment><USER11> About bogus laws: I think the employee protection in the German system is a factor (not the single one) on why German economy did quite well and populists for a long time had limited success. The strong safety gives guarantees so that one has less fears and representation of employees on the board ensures long term perspective over short term gains. (With the downside that employees on the board represent current, not future employees and leads to more conservative operation as change is hard) Anyways, that's a different complex debate.

I don't know if that company is best. Just gave it as reference, also for finding competitors. I think for most part you'd need a company with a representation in U.S. and here, so that your "practical" employer can do a contract under U.S. terms and you do one under German terms ... and not sure they'd remember me - it's 10 years ago :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm in a similar situation (German citizen living in Germany, working as a freelancer for a company in Asia). As far as I can tell from some research, the only "risk" is that I might have to do some back-payments into the Rentenversicherung.

But if I were to be employed regularly to a company (in the EU?) the same would apply.

In either case, I have to pay for the health insurance, so there's no real "avoiding the cost of social security".

<comment><USER13> Wrt to social security stuff, one should proactively run a "Statusfeststellungsverfahren" \- you fill out some forms and the authorities will tell you how they declare you. That puts you on a safer side.

Also there _is_ an "avoiding the cost of social security". If they consider you properly self employed and independent, you do not pay gov social security stuff, but you need to insure yourself (using private insurance companies). That is why the process mentioned above is important. If you register self- employed but later they declare you as dependently-employed, gov social security has to be paid! Something you should avoid upfront, can be super expensive. So => "Statusfeststellungsverfahren"!

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the hint about Statusfeststellungsverfahren, I will research that. I had previously filled the questionaire from Finanzamt and they had accepted my status of "freiberuflich" w.r.t. software dev.

The possibility to use private insurance depends on having some minimum amount of income.

Also, I currently use the option to use public insurance (voluntarily) so that I can easily switch back to it once I become employed again in the future. Apparently, there is some risk of not being accepted by the public insurers after one had quit.

<comment><USER13> "Statusfeststellungsverfahren" is an (gov) insurance thing (the process is run by the "Rentenversicherung" (the pension fund)), it has (I think, not a lawyer) nothing to do with the Finanzamt (German IRS). That is an entirely different thing.

> The possibility to use private insurance depends on having some minimum > amount of income.

This is incorrect. If you are self-employed you are off the state records. You can yourself choose to insure yourself using the gov insurances ("Freiwilligenversicherung"). But that is _usually_ an awfully bad deal (though ethically the right thing to do and I personally hope they eventually do the "Bürgerversicherung", which will level the terms for everyone).

The minimum income thing is only for dependent(regular)-employees. They are forced to be in the gov-insurance unless they exceed a certain income. If they do, they can choose (which often makes sense because private insurance has way better benefits and is way cheaper if you (consistently) have a high income (I don't know the current rate, 14% for the employee and 12% for the employer [and both if you are self-employed?])).

> Also, I currently use the option to use public insurance (voluntarily) so > that I can easily switch back to it once I become employed again in the > future.

They have to take you back unless you are 50+ I think (google the details). If you are dependently employed you _have to_ be in the gov insurance unless you exceed the minimum income. Buckle up, it's the law! Because of that many privately insured people therefore often seek to get back into regular employment if they get closer to 50, to properly exploit the system.

> Apparently, there is some risk of not being accepted by the public insurers > after one had quit.

This is age specific. Generally at least the "AOK" (kinda the fallback gov insurance company) has to always take you. In fact I think even private insurances _have to_ take you since quite a few years now - it's awfully expensive, but you are never supposed to be uninsured in Germany.

<comment><AUTHOR> I might be wrong, but they only have to take one if you are below a certain age _and_ below the border income (Beitragsbemessungsgrenze). Always be careful w.r.t. these kinds of decisions because they could cost you an awful amount of money later.

<comment><USER13> If you are above the border income, the private version is less expensive (I might also be wrong, checkout [https://www.finanztip.de/pkv/pkv- basistarif/](https://www.finanztip.de/pkv/pkv-basistarif/)). It only really affects people below that income (way too many!). It is the reverse, staying in the gov insurance costs you an awful lot of money upfront. It's the ethical but financially stupid thing.

<comment><USER12> True, the private insurance is typicall less expensive _now_ (when I researched, it was 50%-60% of what I pay), but you have no guarantee that it will stay that way. They could just increase the fees for everybody, in the future, or just increase it with your age, as the health risks go up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Feel free to reach out to me. We have seen this case couple of hundred times already and I'm sure I can provide some direction. Certainly a Trade Office registration or own limited company is the way to go. Can talk you through the costs as well. My email is ck at firma dot de.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, thanks for your help :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In Italy there is a similar law for freelancers, but it's only valid if the client is another italian company, so if I work only for a US company for example there should be no issues.

In any case I suggest you ask a German lawyer, he know best for sure.

</comment><comment><USER16> Scheinselbständigkeit also takes into account other properties than "only one customer".

There are plenty of freelancers working only for Daimler, Bosch, etc.

Can you decline projects?

Do you control your work times/place.

Do you have to handle on your own authority etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to let me know the additional conditions. As an employee I wouldn't be able to control that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can be employed through a third party deployment company (ArbeitnehmerÜberlassungsGesetz) for up to eighteen months. Such companies (known in other countries as Employer of Record / GEO / PEO / Umbrella companies) have an AÜG license. We offer this to our clients in Germany. After eighteen months your company could setup (in order of complexity) a representative office, branch or subsidiary. Or you could pursue one of the self employed models.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm in a similar situation, except I'm a British citizen looking to move to Germany. I already have a sole director, UK limited company set up for contracting / freelancing.

I've head rumours of German contractors using UK limited companies instead of the local GmbH/UG entities. How does that work generally? Are people setting themselves up as German employees of the UK entity and collecting a salary? Or is there something I'm missing here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Without being able to contribute to your question: in hindsight of Brexit (UK will leave the EU) this might not be possible (as easy?) as in the past anymore.

<comment><USER13> I think the "only" real change is that he will need a work visa, the other aspects should remain the same. A EU citizen can freely choose his workplace in the EU (which is a reason why the British voted exit, they specifically didn't want that).

<comment><USER5> Thankfully freedom of movement is still in effect until the end of October. So no visa's required just yet. As for residency after the brexit date that's completely in the air but I would rather be already inside germany than outside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I avoided the Gewerbeproblem by proving that I am a free Systems Developer, in contrast to Application Developer. A true Freiberufler, even without a CS degree.

Of course the tax office did their "Steuerprüfung", but compared to my Steuerprüfung in Austria it was very simple, and needed just one day in their office.

No Gewerbe tax, 100% (independent, systems) work for big US companies.

I never spoke to a lawyer or tax assistant, I did remote work most of my life.

</comment><comment><USER19> Either make your own UG or use individual W8 form for US company (reverse charge in DE, no VAT). Still, you need to have at last 20% of your income from another source if you stay a freelancer. Ideally if the US company had two legal entities and you could issue invoices to both. Most people start their own GmbH with all the increased taxes it brings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't that still be a grey zone to just invoice two different legal entities even though they are technically the same?

<comment><USER19> I don't know, it's best to discuss with a lawyer of course. Still, if they are two different entities with two different TINs, why would that matter to the tax office?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How long do you want to stay for?

I'm by no means an expert, but when I looked at this recently (same scenario - remote worker for a US company), I found the only real option was to apply for a Residence / Long Stay Visa.

I was only looking to stay for ~1 year in theory.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean VISA in the US? I want to stay in Germany (I am a German citizen).

I would plan to be there for a significant time, more than three years.

<comment><USER20> I'm sorry, I completely missed that you were a German citizen and assumed you were a US citizen who wanted to move to Germany. Nothing I posted is relevant to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://bluemarblepayroll.com/about/](https://bluemarblepayroll.com/about/) might be able to help? needs your employer to set this up tho

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will have a look :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You could stay in Germany for less than 183 days a year and in Austria/Switzerland/etc. for the rest. And have permanent residence somewhere like Georgia.

<comment><USER23> Nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it really that expensive to set up a company in Germany ?

<comment><USER25> Bulgaria if you want Eurozone incorporation. The benefits are too huge to ignore. (more a comment for anyone browsing and thinking about it)

<comment><USER14> Yes, corporate tax rate in Bulgaria is attractive. However, how does this help if op wants to stay in Germany. Immediately cross-border tax issues are introduced you have to deal with. Only the tax accountants and lawyer are winning in this case with their billable hour. Also do not discount the language barrier too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just use a Gewerbe and make sure you issue a few invoices to other clients. I have done that for years and never had any problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have and I don't want to have any other clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> You should give the Rentenkasse an call. They are happy to tell you, if this would be Scheinselbständigkeit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I already know the answer: yes, it will be Scheinselbstständigkeit. The question is how to legally avoid that classification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Off topic, but why are Ask HN posts displayed in gray like a negatively voted comment? This entry has 35 positive points currently so shouldn't be made so low contrast...

<comment><USER29> It's to de-emphasize post bodies. It's like that for all post bodies on HN. I believe the rationale was to focus on the title/link and any comments.

<comment><USER30> For me, the title is also gray:

"Ask HN: Germans, how to work legally remote?"

<comment><USER31> I think that's the styling for a:visited. (It links to itself.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


OxiPNG: PNG optimizer written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng <comment><USER2> For the curious, I replicated some benchmarks from ~1yr ago ([https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/48vkjy/oxipng_a_multi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/48vkjy/oxipng_a_multithreaded_png_optimizer_written_in/d0n7h6b/)).

Note in that thread that the author implies that the optimization levels between the two tools are not necessarily equivalent or stable.

        $ optipng --version
        OptiPNG version 0.7.6
        $ oxipng --version
        oxipng 0.16.3

Ran on a 2016 MBP, i7.

Time:

        opt-level    oxipng    optipng
        2            148.63s   30.80s
        3            9.56s     45.99s
        4            23.82s    90.57s

Size of resulting image:

        opt-level
          original      12M

                     oxipng    optipng
          2          12M       12M
          3          12M       "already optimized"
          4          12M       "already optimized"

TBH I don't really know how to interpret these results. But with the strange exception of `oxipng -o 2`, it does seem like the naive parallelism offers some real performance wins. Disclaimer: this is an incredibly amateur attempt to benchmark, I really don't have enough knowledge to produce something authoritative.

<comment><USER3> It would be more useful if you didn't round the sizes to "12M", because I have a hard time believing they were all exactly the same. Bytes are a discrete and exact quantity, and ideally would be displayed to full precision to allow useful comparison.

<comment><USER2> It would probably be more useful, yes. But that would require remembering what my ls alias without `-h` is, and also would maybe give more confidence in the results of the quick 'n' dirty analysis than is justified.

<comment><USER4> You can type `/bin/ls -l` to skip your shell aliases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" complete rewrite of the OptiPNG project, which was assumed to be dead as no commit had been made to it since March 2014"_

Version 0.7.6 of OptiPNG was released 2016-apr-03.

Not super recent, but it seems reasonable, given the limited scope, that it would stabilize and not change much after a certain point

<comment> unkown-unknowns First commit of OxiPNG was 2015-12-15. The way I read the part you quoted is that they originally assumed OptiPNG to be dead, not that they are saying now that it's dead.

Absolutely agree with your point about reaching a stage where not so many big changes are necessary though.

<comment><USER5> Ahh, I did miss that, but the OxiPng readme doesn't mention that OptiPNG has had a release since their initial observation either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great example of the use of Rust to add parallelism to existing algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did the increased parallelism lead to meaningful performance gains?

<comment><USER8> It appears so. I did a quick test with a huge PNG (80 megabytes), just to see what would happen. optipng took 5m9s, oxipng with "\--threads 1" took 3m21s, and oxipng with the default number of threads took 2m00s. Not quite "half the time", but not bad.

<comment><USER9> I imagine most usecases where this performance would matter would be if you were compressing a ton of pngs at once. In which case wouldn't it be much faster just to run several different processes instead of one process using multiple cores?

<comment><USER10> But running several different processes can be a nuisance...better performance by default is still great.

<comment><USER9> Well it must have taken them a ton of work to parallelize their algorithm also. It would have been better to just have a batch mode that lets you process multiple images at once on different cores.

<comment><USER11> Well, not really, because implementing a batch mode is more work than letting xargs or GNU Parallel or Make handle the multiprocessing for the "many files" case.

Parallelizing the algorithm helps in the "single file" case, which is still important.

<comment><USER9> Well parent comment was complaining that it would be more work for the end user. I was just noting it would be less work to include that convenience in the tool itself than trying to make the algorithm parallel for less benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does this include the work from zopflipng? That usually makes more of a difference in size than OptiPNG does.

<comment><USER2> There are CLI options for supporting zopfli, not sure whether it's from zopflipng.

<comment><USER13> It is not. It uses the native Rust implementation of zopfli [0], which doesn't include anything from zopflipng.

[0]: [https://crates.io/crates/zopfli](https://crates.io/crates/zopfli)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Windows users will need to ensure they have the Visual C++ 2015 Runtime installed.

Why?

<comment><USER15> > I'm not sure how easy this is to resolve in Appveyor, but I would also > prefer to have Windows binaries compiled statically. I'm much less familiar > with compiling Rust binaries on Windows and don't have a Windows machine > readily available, so I'll have to fire up a virtual machine and experiment.

> Worst case scenario, I'll need to add an instruction for Windows users to > install the Visual C++ 2015 runtime. I'd prefer to avoid that though. This > also likely won't be a problem with the GCC-compiled version, but this > runtime is a dependency for all programs compiled by MSVC.

[https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng/issues/49](https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng/issues/49)

<comment><USER3> You should be able to link with MSVCRT.DLL, yielding a small binary that will "just work" on a variety of systems going all the way back to Win95(!) (provided you don't use newer API calls):

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166412/how-to-link- aga...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166412/how-to-link-against- msvcrt-dll-instead-of-msvcr100-dll-in-vc-10-0)

Microsoft doesn't seem to like this, and will say it's "officially not supported" (if I remember correctly, there's a very strongly worded post by Raymond Chen on the topic...), but this is how essentially all the apps that come with Windows are compiled, and I believe MingW does it too.

[http://planet.jboss.org/post/fighting_the_msvcrt_dll_hell](http://planet.jboss.org/post/fighting_the_msvcrt_dll_hell)

<comment><USER16> Microsoft's the one to blame here. If they made sure their systems automatically come with MSVCRTs pre-installed, and new ones downloaded through the update system, this problem wouldn't exist in the first place.

Asking your users to install some sketchy 'runtime' won't work. And not every app should need or want a specific install script to verify for the umpteenth time that something as basic as the C/C++ runtime library is available.

<comment><USER8> AFAIK, you are supposed to distribute the MSVC runtimes as merge modules within your MSI package, which is what for instance LibreOffice does.

<comment> Const-me > you are supposed to distribute the MSVC runtimes as merge modules

Right, that's what MS tell.

What they don't tell is these merge modules aren't compatible enough. E.g. it's impossible to install VC 2015 runtime DLLs (so-called Universal CRT) on a never updated Windows 7 SP1 machine.

<comment><USER17> Well my work laptop is Windows 7 up to date, with VS 2015 Update 3.

So it got installed there somehow.

<comment> Const-me The problem only affects PCs that aren't up to date.

Specifically, PCs without KB2999226 installed.

Not all people update their Windows. Some just don't care. Others people don't want to connect PC to the internet. There're also people who use mobile internet and pay for bandwidth.

When they're unable to run the software they've paid money for, I don't want to update Windows for them, I want my software to work. Hence, no dynamic CRT.

<comment><USER18> So you're refusing to have a basic update installed? Let me guess, you're going to complain and say Windows is insecure because you got WannaCry'd because you didn't update your system and blame it on MS instead?

(you = whoever "doesn't care" about updates)

<comment> Const-me It's unlikely to get WannaCry unless the PC is connected to internet or LAN.

The software we're offering doesn't require to be online. It normally works unattended for hours, controlling some specialized industrial hardware. Not unlike embedded software. For this particular use case, being offline has it's upsides: no downloads, no updates, no reboots.

The users who discovered that bug (initially I did include these CRT merge modules in my installer, as recommended by MS) didn't even send us a screenshot. Instead, they took a photo of their PC's screens with the error message, and sent us that. Then I was able to reproduce on an offline Win7 VmWare machine, and deliver a fixed version with statically linked CRT, which BTW worked OK even on a vanilla Windows 7 sp0 from 2009.

Personally, I would recommend updating Windows instead, and I do update the PCs I own. But I can, and do, support running my software on a never updated system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales - <AUTHOR> http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm so excited about this, it's actually a little bit embarrassing.

I've got two geo-related projects that are half-finished -- both because I was dealing with poor / non-existent geographic data. I haven't had a chance to plug this new data into my code, but I can already tell it's vastly superior to any other free sources out there (OpenStreetMap may have more data, but it's not as conveniently packaged).

<comment><USER2> Excellent find! One of the best discoveries all week :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh gosh, haven't tried the downloads yet, but good geodata is really hard to get without going through a bunch of hassle.

</comment><comment><USER4> I know next to nothing about geographical data / cartography, but it would be nice to have these in SVG, like in this how to from Flowing Data:

[http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county- th...](http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-thematic-map- using-free-tools/)

<comment><USER5> I haven't looked, but it should be fairly easy to convert.

Unless the data is in one of the proprietary GIS formats, then you're in for a late night hellride. GDAL/OGR may be your friend, or may not.

It looks like a nice dataset, but only has center lines for rivers -- no polygon data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am literally in the process of changing out Stormpulse.com's maps for something higher res (BlueMarble at 500m), and this shows up. Awesome!</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find startup culture?  - <AUTHOR> My current (and favorite so far) read is Zero To One by Peter Thiel.
To say that I've enjoyed this book so far would be a vast understatement. Chapter 8 on Secrets is fantastic, and Chapters 3&4 on Competition V. Monopoly was mind blowing.
Though chapter 10 prompts a question about culture that I can't seem to find an answer to.
The idea fascinates me, but I question: Where do I find such a culture?
As a mid twenties developer who loves to build things, I find it near impossible to find passionate people about software near me.
I don't know if it's my location in the bible belt, that near everyone I graduated with has 2 or 3 kids already, or if this kind of culture only exists on the coasts.
But where in the world do I go to find such a culture? <comment><USER2> Obviously, the Valley is its own thing. However, beyond that it's really just a spectrum from urban to rural. There are thriving startup scenes (or at least established companies with passionate technical culture) in virtually every LARGE American city (e.g. New York, Chicago, Atlanta, etc).

There are also strong scenes in certain midsize markets that buck the larger trend (e.g. Austin, the North Carolina triangle, etc).

However, if you are in a midsize or small market outside of that handful of exceptions... then there are either few tech job opportunities at all, or the only jobs available are "line of business" type work that no passionate developer wants. It doesn't matter if you're in Memphis, Tennessee or Syracuse, New York. The problem isn't regional, it's market size.

Whenever I hear people griping about technology and "The Bible Belt", etc... I picture people fresh out of school who have never been anywhere and spend WAY too much time trading political memes on Reddit. Nonsense. There are plenty of technology hubs in large Southern cities, and plenty of backwoods hicks in the Pacific Northwest.

<comment> chao- Couldn't decide whether to respond to you or to bglazer above, but I particularly agree with the _" any major city"_/ _" large Southern cities"_ part in both of your posts. If this were 2009, I wouldn't have as many charitable things to say about anywhere outside SF (or maybe Seattle or Austin), but five years makes a world of difference.

I can speak most intelligently to Texas' large cities, as I spend a lot of time traveling between Houston, Austin and Dallas. Back in 2010 or 2011, you might find two tech (or tech startup) events going on in a particular week. Now all three places have 2-3 events happening _on any given night_ , and you can hardly choose which you want to go to, or if you want to spend the night just hacking and getting shit done (because that matters too!).

An example: In order to help run an event for Houston's Lean Startup Circle this past Thursday, I had to skip a talk at a startup speaker series and miss the launch party of Texas Medical Center's new Healthcare Accelerator.

Austin, has a better reputation (or just visibility?) on HN, but if you're comparing for places to live long-term, I wouldn't necessarily put it above Houston or Dallas in any absolute sense. My honest take is that tech in Austin feels more visible and "Valley-like" because of how small Austin is. Technology is simply larger in terms of percentage.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any resources to discover some of the events that you are referring to? I'm currently in Houston (albeit a bit south) and would love to find out more.

<comment> chao- Absolutely. For historical reasons (not worth rambling about), a lot of Houston's early startup "scene" was organized via Facebook group, and somewhat remains so to this day.

Single biggest resource is the Startup Houston blog/site [0], followed by the Houston Startups Facebook Group [1], and the Startup Digest calendar [2], both of which are linked to from Startup Houston. The calendar can be a bit cluttered, so working with the Lean Startup Circle [3], I help compile a monthly, semi-curated list of events that gets sent out to anyone who subscribes to "organizer announcements" within Meetup.

Plans are in the works for a unified calendar/feed for Houston's many, many Tech meetups, which currently have no central point of organization. Example of what I mean: there are 2 (or 3?) Python meetups, 3 separate UX meetups, and while there is a broader "Functional Programmers" meetup, the Clojure folks have their own separate one in addition.

Lastly, the three major coworking spaces inside the loop [4, 5, 6], as well as the SURGE seed accelerator [7] all put on good events. Not _all_ of those events reliably make it onto the startup calendar, as each has its own little calendar page, but that's being worked on as well.

[0] [http://startuphouston.com/](http://startuphouston.com/)

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/groups/houstonstartups/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/houstonstartups/)

[2] [https://www.startupdigest.com/digests/houston](https://www.startupdigest.com/digests/houston)

[3] [http://www.meetup.com/leanhouston/](http://www.meetup.com/leanhouston/)

[4] [http://www.starthouston.com/](http://www.starthouston.com/)

[5] [http://www.platformhouston.com/](http://www.platformhouston.com/)

[6] [http://whitespacehou.com/](http://whitespacehou.com/)

[7] [http://www.surgeaccelerator.com/](http://www.surgeaccelerator.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in much the same situation as you are, as I'm squarely in the bible belt. Memphis TN to be exact. My suggestion for finding this "startup culture" is to go to meetups, hackathons, and makerspaces. I don't know your exact location, but nearly every major city in the South supports a small but growing culture of people who enjoy building and designing new things. Additionally, these people will have connections to the actual startups that are present in that city.

You didn't ask for this, but here's a rather weak plea not to move.

Please don't leave us for San Francisco!

Why I don't feel compelled to move:

1\. I feel connected to the "startup culture" via the twitter, HN, etc. I understand the desire for physical co-location but really, this is why the internet is so powerful.

2\. Brain drain is a real phenomenon. You'll be leaving the bible belt a worse place.

3\. You can create the culture! Be on the ground floor! I helped to organize a hackathon in Memphis ([http://hackmemphis.com/](http://hackmemphis.com/)). It was exhilarating.

4\. This will be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I find many aspects of the stereotypical "startup culture" to be repugnant. The obsession with status. I didn't go to Stanford, MIT, Indian Institute of Technology, or even lowly Berkeley. Fuck me, right? Also, the greed and cut-throat competition.

5\. There are massive opportunities that won't be visible in the somewhat insular urban environment of coastal cities.

<comment><USER5> > 2\. Brain drain is a real phenomenon. You'll be leaving the bible belt a > worse place.

A word of caution - not everyone considers this a bug.

<comment><USER6> Well, it's a bug if you're worried about income inequality or the continuing polarization of America. It's a lot like White Flight.

<comment><USER5> I, personally, am not keen on trying to live in places where I am pointedly made to feel unwelcome.

<comment><USER6> Good to know, but that has nothing to do with what I said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who has been in SF, Chicago, Atlanta and now lives in Mobile, Ala., I can tell you that you aren't going to find tech culture outside of a major city. My suggestion would be to plan on moving to a near major city—New Orleans, Austin or Atlanta would probably be your closest good bet.

I actually started a podcast, Signal Tower, to keep in touch with people in the community. It is wearing on me though. I'm clearly out of place in this town.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll definitely be tuning into your podcast.

[http://signaltower.co/](http://signaltower.co/) right?

<comment><USER7> Yep, that's it!

I suppose it is more of a publication, but I turn each interview into a podcast as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I don't know if it's my location in the bible belt

Yes. You really need to start looking for either remote jobs that are headquartered elsewhere, or start looking to relocate to one of those places. The second will likely get you more culture, there are plenty of good remote companies but also plenty of bad ones.

SF seems to be the commonly-referenced location, but really any city. Portland, DC, New York, really anywhere that's not bible belt.

<comment><USER9> Didn't think Charlotte and Atlanta would get overlooked so easily.

<comment><USER10> They don't fit the narrative that you need to live in one of a handful of cities to be a "real" developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Partly a location thing. There was an excellent comment [1] in the last few days about how coastal business has always had a mercantile growth culture, while midwest business culture has centered on commodities and thrift. Please, please don't buy into to Valley hype - it's good for fundraising and hiring but by no means your only option.

(I liked 0->1 too, especially chapter 8, but it's being massively overrated. Go read PG's thoughts on rhetoric - 'a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it' [2] - then go back and look at 0->1\. Thiel is compelling, but his paragraphs feel like advocacy rather than the unveiling of new information.)

Recommendation: check out Founders at Work, Revolution in the Valley for some fun firsthand accounts of startup culture. Then move to a big city, not necessarily a coastal one.

1: [http://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/2j3g14/walmart_provi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/2j3g14/walmart_proving_once_again_that_they_are_the/cl87fnr)

2: [http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> There are some Tech Startups in the bible belt. There's stuff going on in Atlanta and Austin. And my startup, EdgeTheory, is located in Jackson, Mississippi. Yes, it is harder to find like minded people in the South, but they're out there.

As other commenters mentioned, I suggest finding meetups in your area or driving to a larger city and attending one if there are none where you live.

<comment><USER13> Seconding Atlanta. I moved here from San Francisco in the spring, because living in SF just didn't seem sustainable and at my (not old!) age I was starting to feel old. There are lots of startups here although I took a job at a large company.

(Don't move here if you don't like traffic, though.)

<comment><USER14> Thirding Atlanta. My point of reference is Philadelphia (not in the bible- belt). Atlanta has significantly more startups and acquisitions than in Philadelphia, at least in the areas that I interact. Even with Philadelphia being home of First Round Capital, there isn't a lot of hometown investments in their portfolio compared to their SF ones.

This bashing of the 'bible-belt' is just silly. It's just as close minded and prejudiced as what the bashers accuse the residents of the 'bible-belt' to be. Go out to Western PA or northern New York and tell me about the 'startup culture' there vs. the bible-belt.

My guess is that nearly any metro area is going to have a superior startup culture compared with nearly any rural area. As far as comparing city vs. city, I would guess there isn't a real solid rule to follow. Probably requires some investigation and also factor in your own personal likes and dislikes.

<comment><USER13> Philadelphia has a good number of startups as well, as I discovered when I was doing job searches in Philadelphia and Atlanta simultaneously. (I'm originally from Philly and my wife went to college to Atlanta and loved it, so both were places we had ties to when we decided we'd had it with San Francisco.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "location in the bible belt, that near everyone I graduated with has 2 or 3 kids already"

there's your problem!

"this kind of culture only exists on the coasts"

there's your solution!

</comment><comment><USER16> Add Ann Arbor, MI to that list. We (FarmLogs) relocated here after YC W12. It's often off the radar, but there's several Series A or later companies here[1]. University of Michigan consistently puts out great talent, and MHacks in particular is one of the nation's largest hackathons.

[1]: [http://www.madeina2.com/](http://www.madeina2.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Almost any major city now has some people trying to make startups happen in their town. Find a co-working space or local startup accelerator and ask/pay to work out of it.

Tangibly you experience startup culture in three ways:

1\. Being at a hub where that scene happens (almost always a co-working space or accelerator), 1871 here in Chicago is such a place, and it's a co-working spot 2\. Having access to an organization that hosts events and alerts you to events and dispenses local news, BuiltInChicago is our local site that has keeps an up to date event calendar and where announcements happen. 3\. Working with a startup, freelancing for startups or building projects at hackathons. Where you know, "work" actually happens.

If you find those three things you'll get more startup culture than you need, and it doesn't have to happen in a big city. I'm pretty sure Kansas City fits that bill. Omaha definitely does. Nashville, pretty sure.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you want to stay in the heartland, you might look at Chicago, Denver/Boulder and Austin -- they all have burgeoning startup-tech cultures that would be a step up from the sticks. I'm from a small town in the northern Great Plains, and I know that empty feeling you're talking about!

<comment><USER19> I can vouch.

Currently working for a startup in Boulder, and it is really awesome.

<comment><USER20> Do you have recommendations for companies in Denver/Boulder that are doing cool things? (I'm from Denver but live in SF, so I know the area well.)

<comment><USER19> Currently working for Kapost. It is pretty kick ass.

What's your stack? shoot me an e-mail erik.mingo at kapost.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm in a similar situation. I've found myself with a job I love, working remotely, which has afforded me the opportunity to move back to the small rural (unfortunately very much bible-belt) town where I was born and have roots. I enjoy most aspects of small town living, being with family and old friends, low cost of living, etc.

However there is near zero startup/tech culture to be found (duh). My idealistic streak would like to change that somehow ("forty acres and a emacs MULE"), but that's unlikely.

Anyone in AR, feel free to message me to geek out.

<comment><USER22> There's a start-up scene starting to grow around Northwest Arkansas somewhat. Innovate Arkansas and the ARK Challenge are a local source of seed funding.

NWA TechFest [http://nwatechfest.com](http://nwatechfest.com) and Little Rock TechFest [http://lrtechfest.com/](http://lrtechfest.com/) are good events for networking.

There's a good network of local .NET User Groups across the state, too. NWA, Little Rock, Fort Smith, Jonesboro all have one. If that's too Microsofty for you, I'm pretty sure there's a Cocoa group in NWA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Tulsa TechFest is in your hometown - [http://techfests.com/Tulsa/2014/default.aspx](http://techfests.com/Tulsa/2014/default.aspx). It was actually the first of the TechFests, and draws over 1,000 people.

I've attended both Dallas and Houston TechFests, and Tulsa usually comes-out on top even though it's in a smaller city.

Also looks like Steve Wozniak will be speaking at the Mabee Center in April, 2015.

</comment><comment><USER23> Swing through Denver/Boulder sometime. There's a startup week in both (you just missed Denver), but there is usually something going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard really good things about both actually!

Was it [http://www.denverstartupweek.org/](http://www.denverstartupweek.org/) ? I couldn't find any in October, but this looks like the one I missed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Trying to define "startup culture" could feed your reflexion. I did that a few months back, and made a blog post about it: [http://rudyonweb.net/what- startup-culture-actually-is/](http://rudyonweb.net/what-startup-culture- actually-is/)

Hope that helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a ton, I'm reading it now and so far find it very insightful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure where you live but Meetup.com has put me in some pretty awesome startup culture networks.

</comment><comment><USER26> You don't need to move very far to find a good startup. If it's a major city, there's probably going to be some sort of tech scene with at least a few startup culture companies. Regardless of whether or not it's a on a coast.

</comment><comment><USER27> Definitely check out www.startupdigest.com. It sends you a weekly digest of the best startup events in your city, where you will meet young people like you who also want to start a tech startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely pay the site a visit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Where in the Bible belt are you? There are some budding places that are technically in the Bible Belt.

You may not need to relocate as far as you may think, or HN might suggest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Tulsa, Ok. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Where's the Detroit startup scene?

</comment><comment><USER30> what city are you in?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Tulsa, Ok.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Medium charges $75 for pointing the blog to my existing domain? - <AUTHOR> I was under the impression that Medium lets you point to a custom domain if you already own the domain.  But I contacted support and they say that a one time $75 payment is mandatory.<p>Same goes for Wordpress.  They charge $99 per year even if you own a domain.  Is this something common?  I have talked to people who say they use these features for free, as the domain is already owned.  Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Hey, I have two Medium blogs that point to my custom domain. They didn't charge me any money, and in fact the Support guy went above and beyond to help me the issues I was having with my domain name provider. But, I see now they are charging $75 for it and I'm a bit taken back.

If all you need is a blog, might I suggest Tumblr? They (as long as I remember) don't charge you a thing. You won't get an SSL certificate though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, it's extremely common. Pay to have your own domain and remove the wordpress/medium branding.

<comment><AUTHOR> In spite of the fact that I already own and have paid for the domain with Namecheap?

<comment><USER4> Think of it as a one-time license fee to white label the Medium tech. Pretty cheap, imo. Surprised they didn't make it a recurring fee, tbh.

Out of curiosity, what benefit do you see getting from having the content be on your own domain vs. Medium itself?

It's probably just me being quirky, but when I'm reading a Medium article on someone's custom domain, I get slightly annoyed that it's a little harder to get back to Medium itself to get to the rest of my reading list.

If you decide against paying the fee, I doubt I'm alone in saying that I don't judge the content itself on whether it's on medium.com vs. randomtechguymusings.*.

Publish good, thoughtful, valuable content and your work will speak for itself regardless of domain name.

<comment><USER3> It's fun you'd say that because there are quite a few discussion on HN saying they don't read medium.com domains anymore. The articles are too low quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They are elitists, or they think they are :) and trying how far they can go. And people here adore them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure what the case is with Medium but with Wordpress you are better off hosting it yourself so you have full control of everything.

$99 a year seems excessive but, I guess, for those uncomfortable with self- hosting it may be worth it?

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't recommend running your own WordPress unless you're willing to update plugins on a moment's notice. Lots of plugins have security holes and once an exploit is in the wild, mass hacks of WordPress blogs are very common. If WordPress hosts it for you, they will close the holes much faster than you can.

<comment><USER8> It's quite easy to install a plugin that will auto-update all of your plugins for you, and WordPress itself auto-updates by default now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you are looking at custom domain + self-hosting, I suggest looking into cloudron.io. They have wordpress as an app (but I recommend looking into Ghost as well).

</comment><comment><USER10> I was just trying out WordPress.com's personal plan, it was only 36$ a year for hosting and pointing my domain (which is I registered on Namecheap).

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it come with SSL?

<comment><USER10> Yup builtin in SSL.

BTW I cancelled the plan because they didn't let me customize permalinks. I was moving an existing blog to WordPress.com, so it was important to preserve links structure.

<comment><USER11> Why not just 301?

<comment><USER10> There is no way to upload your own .htaccess file on WordPress.com. I didn't really look deep enough into it. The most of info about setting up redirects were for self-hosted WordPress.

But I gave up quickly because self-hosted blogs are working fine. (And there really isn't that much extra work in keeping those blogs secure and up to date.)

<comment><USER11> oh duh, I didn't consider that. I've had similar problems on squarespace with no way to edit the robots.txt file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They don't charge you for the domain itself but for some part of their service. What's so hard to get about this?

</comment><comment><USER13> Tumblr on custom domain is free, I think.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post was removed by mods. It's cool. I got my answers. Thanks everyone.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think doing so on Heroku was costly as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's actually a relatively difficult thing to bolt on to some apps, their custom domain setup is not very easy.

(shameless plug)

We let you put custom hostnames + ssl in front of hosted apps, we have a really early attempt at a medium one in progress. If you'd like to try it, send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com

(/shameless plug)

</comment><comment><USER16> You may own the domain, but you still have to find some way to store the files and serve the necessary bandwidth. That's why you have to pay extra. However, $75 or $99 is excessive. Hostgator charges less than 3 bucks a month, you'd be much better off with a small shared hosting like that.

<comment><USER17> um... medium hosts the files and handles the necessary bandwidth already. Adding a custom domain doesn't change that at all. I don't disagree that you'd be better off with other sites but those are NOT the reasons it costs $75

<comment><USER18> I think custom domains are a tool for price segmentation* (like a student discount). Medium and Wordpress want offer a free product (for marketing/network effects), but also have their higher-end users pay. They do that by limiting a few features their higher-end users need to the premium product to force them to buy. In this case, it's custom domain that lets you look more professional.

You see this with email too. Want to use your own domain and look like a real business (vs. some dude with small-time aspirational business-hobby run off of gmail)? Then you pay $5 a month or spend your time being a sysadmin.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination)</comment></comment></comment>


CTR Surge for Some Google Adsense Publishers - <AUTHOR> https://www.seroundtable.com/google-adsense-ctr-increase-20173.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I came into the office today to notice unusually high Adsense activity on my site: ~10x increase in earnings and clicks. As much as I'd hoped it was legit, it sounds like there is some sort of bot activity happening across many sites.

</comment><comment><USER2> I had a 25% surge in earnings for sunday due to CTR surge. Still investigating.</comment>


What Sank Yahoo? Blame Its Nice Guy Founders - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-25/what-sank-yahoo-blame-its-nice-guy-founders <comment><AUTHOR> Brief history of Yahoo! and mistakes it made.</comment>