Open Source FPGA Toolchain Builds CPU - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2015/07/28/open-source-fpga-toolchain-builds-cpu/ <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see someone put JOP on FPGA through the toolchain:

[http://www.jopdesign.com/](http://www.jopdesign.com/)

Then maybe academics in INFOSEC can try to put JX OS on it for secure, embedded apps:

[http://www4.cs.fau.de/Projects/JX/](http://www4.cs.fau.de/Projects/JX/)

Native Java means no breaking out of JVM's model down to weird native code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Icestorm and yosys are cool!

Since then even more CPUs are working on ICE40:

[https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32](https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32)

Or a really small and slow one (smaller than J1, but needs more RAM): [https://github.com/combinatorylogic/soc/tree/master/backends...](https://github.com/combinatorylogic/soc/tree/master/backends/tiny1)

<comment><USER4> But does it use an open source toolchain? Also, where does it say that it runs on ICE40?

<comment><USER5> PicoRV32 absolutely runs on iCE40 and the open toolchain. Check out scripts/icestorm and [http://www.clifford.at/papers/2015/yosys-icestorm- etc/slides...](http://www.clifford.at/papers/2015/yosys-icestorm- etc/slides.pdf)

<comment><USER6> The target is the iCE40 HX8K according to the slides (p17) not the icestick unfortunately.

It uses 1521 LUTs with Yosys. The icestick is a HX1K which has 1280 LUTs I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Will put this here just in case anyone is interested, it's a FPGA Hat for the Raspberry Pi, based on the iCE40 FPGA.

[https://github.com/xesscorp/CAT- Board/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/xesscorp/CAT- Board/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER8> I was looking at IceStick kits the other day and they appear to be backordered > 11 weeks.

<comment><USER9> I bought one a while back ago, then I realized the number of I/O's was very low for what I wanted to do. Would have been nice to have access to all the 95 I/O's of the iCE40HX-1K instead of just 16 (or is it 26?)

<comment><USER8> I agree. The FleaFPGA has GPIO IO but still not all the IOs.

[http://www.fleasystems.com/fleaFPGA.html](http://www.fleasystems.com/fleaFPGA.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always thought the advantage of a FPGA is that they are very fast when programmed for a specific task. This seems like an interesting project, but is there a case where this would be preferred over any given CPU?

<comment><USER11> You can add instructions on the fly or switch CPU architectures on the fly. Go from a MIPS clone to an ARM clone. The main advantage of FPGAs is flexibility.

<comment><USER2> Flexibility and lower development costs. ASIC developments cost hundreds of thousands to tens of millions. FPGA's give you low development cost but relatively-high, unit price.

<comment><USER12> Also at a higher power usage as well.

<comment><USER2> Yes. There's been good work in that space to make some of them use hardly any power where unnecessary and asynchronous ones (eg Achronix) could take it even further. Yet, always will be behind on ASIC's on power usage. I don't see them getting around that.

<comment><USER7> There's also the idea of 'baked' FPGA's, which are a middle ground in performance between FPGAs and ASICs, but at a much lower cost than ASICs.

EDIT: Looks like Altera no longer offers the HardCopy option, do any of its competitors offer something similar?

[https://www.altera.com/products/general/asic.smartphone.html](https://www.altera.com/products/general/asic.smartphone.html)

<comment><USER13> Xilinx advertises "EasyPath" as an ASIC alternative, but I'm pretty sure that's just a form of cost reduction for the exact same FPGA chips (by enabling them to use defective chips where the specified bitstream doesn't hit the defect?) rather than an actual "hard" option.

<comment><USER2> Now _that_ is interesting. Ive neither heard of nor though of that in FPGA's. It's a proven trick given it was used by AMD for Tri-Core processors which were Quad-Core processors with a faulty, disabled core. Now I'm wondering if I should ask more vendors about for discounts haha.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Is [dead] censorship excessive? - <AUTHOR>

I just noticed we have some new properties of dead stories, like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348974
Not only is the once-top story dead (hidden from people who haven't opted into seeing dead stories), but my upvotes seem to be disregarded, new comments are disabled, and the story URL has been stripped out.
Isn't this a bit much, considering I've opted into seeing dead stories? <comment><USER2> No, it's not too much. Discuss politics elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't necessarily have to be a story about politics... the example was just the latest one I saw. I'm just curious why an opt-in system for dead stories isn't enough?

<comment><USER3> It's simply that the software doesn't (yet at least) have different categories of deadness for links that are offtopic vs spam. Most dead links are spam, and with those you want to be fairly severe.</comment></comment></comment>


What are the best tools for identifying the hottest startups? - <AUTHOR> Compiling a list: What are the best tools for identifying/tracking the hottest startups? (beyond Angellist, Mattermark, ProductHunt...)? <comment><USER2> Read a ton of different sites and then mentally filter for hype.

Also, depends on what you are looking for. If you want to work at a "hot" startup, by the time you heard of them you are probably out of the really good equity opportunity.

If you just want to know what's is up and coming then I would focus on developer user groups and code sites where people will share examples of their work. A lot of startups start out as "hey, I built this this cool little thing..." and then grow based on word of mouth and social use.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love PH, but I'm not so sure that's a good indicator of the hottest startups. A good amount of the hunts are just standalone products with no business around them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends on what you mean by 'hottest' really. Newest? Fastest growing? Most novel? Most cutting-edge? Most recently funded? Other?

<comment><USER5> "Located in areas with the highest average temperature"?

<comment><USER6> Probably startups with the hottest funders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorting profiles for current Founder/Co-Founder titles on Linkedin yields some interesting gems.

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't that what TechCrunch is for? [joke]</comment>


Meet America's Money Destroyers - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/the-destruction-of-money-who-does-it-why-when-and-how/236990/ <comment><USER2> Not the deepest bit of journalism you'll find on our monetary system. He leaves out quite a bit; money creation other than printing, measurement (M0, M1, ...), and a complete picture on how the Fed attempts to (or believes it can) control money supply.

<comment><USER3> Although I agree that the issue of money supply is not described well here, it's not a very long article, nor is it really aiming to explain all that. I think it's fun to see the average lifespan of bills. Who'd'a thunk that most small ones are in use for less than 5 years??

<comment><USER4> I noticed that they left out $2 bills. Many people save them for some reason (they're lucky! they're rare!) and some of the charts showing lifespans that include $2 bills show their lifespan about 10x the life of other bills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be more interested to hear how they prevent theft by employees of the money to be destroyed. How hard is it to steal money that nobody will ever be looking for again?

<comment><USER4> There is a mint here in Denver, and I've chatted with some of the mint employees on the bus and light rail a few times. I'm going by memory here, so things might be a little messed up (some things they mentioned were fascinating to me at the time, others were boring and forgotten). This mint makes coins and there is no "employee discount."

One of the security procedures is that you are not allowed to carry money into the facility at all. Basically, you empty your pockets at the locker room and if you have more than about $20 in cash, it has to be documented and held by the shift supervisor. All entrance and departure is through a sally port at regular times. If you're late for work, they're not letting you in. Randomly, people are stopped and searched.

Finally, they take a no-mercy stance when it comes to prosecution, as theft from a US Mint has draconian penalties (like 18 years in the pen for stealing $100). Any arrests and prosecutions are covered quite well to the other employees (probably to remind them to "don't do this"). One of the thefts involved someone with one of the larger music players (it might have been a CD player) who had hollowed out part of it to be able to stash dollar coins in them, taking out about $20/day.

A friend of a friend worked at one of the large megachurches in Colorado Springs. People working in the mailroom would be required to change into pocketless jumpsuits before their shift as many people mail cash to the ministry, and opening an envelope with thousands of dollars in cash was not rare. With casino-grade surveillance cameras and pocketless clothing, this made it difficult by design to pilfer cash. People worked in pairs (someone in front of you and watching you makes it hard to stuff cash down your sleeve) and the pairs were rotated (so you could not make deals with some partner).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The big question I wanted answered and this article failed to address is the actual cost of destroying and reprinting bills. Is it trivial and something we shouldn't worry about? Does it cost tens of millions of dollars, and would there be a benefit to finding longer lasting currency solutions? I believe Switzerland uses plastic based currency which lasts much much longer.

<comment><USER7> How about a no currency solution? I use credit cards for most transactions over $10. There should be a way to pay for small items with no transaction fee. Real cash will last much longer and payment lines will move quicker.

<comment><USER6> HN readers aren't your average slice of America. A large chunk uses cash for everything, and can't get even checking accounts, let alone a credit card.

<comment><USER8> "A large chunk uses cash for everything, and can't get even checking accounts"

If you mean day laborers or migrant workers, I've seen first-hand some employers now pay them with rechargeable AmEx or Visa cash/gift cards like Green Dot. Keeps the shift supervisor from having to carry conspicuous wads of cash around, and it's directly deposited on their card at the end of the shift, so no need for lineups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most banks have $2 bills available that appear in quite good condition considering their age, too.

</comment><comment><USER10> So when the fed sells a security does the money destroyed exactly equal the money it originally created when it bought the security? Not if the bank that bought the security lent out the money from the fed. The magic of the fractional reserve banking system multiplied the money from the original security multiple times over. I don't think this article addresses this fact.

<comment><USER11> Of course it does. Eg.

Fed creates $100 by buying a security X. Bank gets $100, lends it out, earns $5 in interest, has $105. Fed sells the security, destroying the $100.

The Fed created $100 then destroyed $100. The $5 used to pay the interest on the security wasn't created as a result of the Fed's buying the security, it was paid with money already in the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting how the banks are allowed to sell "securities" to the Federal Reserve.

<comment><USER11> It's a pretty clever idea.

It's always surprising to me that technology-saavy people are so skeptical of the monetary system. Corruption aside (which undoubtedly exists), it's a neat solution to a complex real-world problem. Put simply:

Money is just a level of indirection. You could have a barter-based economy based on goods and services, but you introduce money as a proxy to simplify transactions.

The problem is: how much money do you have in the system? You want enough so it serves as an efficient proxy for the actual value of the goods and services. If you deviate from that amount, you're in trouble.

The problem is complicated by two things: 1) the amount of goods and services which money must proxy for is constantly increasing; 2) money must proxy not just actual goods and services, but enforceable promises to provide goods and services (ie: debt).

(2) is the most complicated issue to deal with, because it's highly dynamic. As society becomes more stable and secure people are willing to commit to obligations that are further in the future. There must be enough money to serve as an accurate proxy for those commitments.

The fractional reserve system is actually a fairly elegant solution to this problem: money is dynamically created when loans are made, and destroyed when loans are repaid.

<comment><USER12> What bothers me personally about the system is that it is not fair. When I am forced to participate in a system, it should at least be objectively fair.

One point of unfairness is that certain entities, and therefore people, are guaranteed a profit. This is not fair. I can't take loans from the central bank at 0%, why?

Saving is also no longer an option. That, I feel, is unfair. We have already taken risks to create the wealth and now we have to take even more risks just to keep the value of the money. Of course, The Bernank and his successors don't have to worry, they just increase their own salaries and retirements.

I actually like fiat money because it decouples resources from wealth. In an economy that increasingly depends on ideas, that is good.

It's the implementation which needs an overhaul before it destroys the entire world. I'm still connecting the dots in my head.</comment></comment></comment>


I don't like your web browser, so I programmed a new one - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@voidnill_28965/i-dont-like-your-web-browser-so-i-programmed-a-new-one-199f45fa8cd8 <comment><USER2> This is one of the projects that go a step too far for me in terms of minimalism. No bookmarks, what? No, we don't need complicated bookmarking with tagging etc., but what's wrong about having a text file with one URL per line, like qutebrowser does?

And without JavaScript this browser has even fewer features than suckless' surf, the browser that doesn't even come with an address bar. To be quite honest I would love to be able to surf the web without JS, but nowadays the amount of websites still working with that restriction just isn't enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> [Dev] I understand your arguments well and accept your criticism. The problem with the bookmarks has been solved so that the user can send them by email. The links are stored centrally and I can access them directly from my computer, laptop or smartphone. A text file on my OS is cumbersome and I can access it very badly with other services.

Yes, it is really difficult to surf the Internet without Javascript. But I deliberately decided against it, because Javascript is not necessary for my information retrieval. I need information and I need it fast. I don't have time to load hundreds of single JS scripts, only to display advertisements, blink features and unnecessary menus. The web has evolved into a massive blob of additional features in recent years. That's ok if you want to be entertained. The browsers have adapted to it. But, so now I have to ask a question, why does news.ycombinator.com allow me to login and comment without javascript? Because the focus is on a good and fast service. And this is what the Alligator Browser is designed for.

<comment><USER2> Well, I simply sync my bookmarks file with Syncthing between PCs, and on my phone I usually only use the browser for quickly looking up random stuff. Email could work too, but I guess I just prefer to have the bookmarks cleanly separated from anything else.

I fully understand your point about JavaScript - I would prefer it if most websites were like this one. But for me, the tradeoff when blocking all scripts isn't quite worth it. A good ad blocker(and notification block) handles the vast majority of annoyances. The only thing I'm still missing is a way to block all videos by default. It would be nice to have that without just getting rid of everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> [Dev] I'm not a fan of syncthing, but that's up to everyone. Why I used email is because I often have to send links from websites to other contacts. I click the right mouse button and send the link. I like to combine several applications to save time. At first it sounds like a marginal time difference, but it's the total time of a year. The browser has evolved as it turned out to be best for my very special way of working. I can't please all people and I don't want to.

I am not satisfied with the previous Javascript solution. Yes, an ad blocker can help, but this is at the expense of loading time. I hate to wait until a website is loaded. Since most videos are implemented as Javascript application, they are blocked by default in the alligator. I don't want to missionize you here either, because there are enough web browsers on the market. My main goal is to get to know other points of view so that I can develop a better product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: He didn't!

He wrote a UI for a browser engine (Webkit, of couuurse). Using a UI toolkit (Qt). In a scripting language.

Which is more putting wallpaper on the walls than constructing the building or even painting the walls.

<comment><USER4> I don't know who would downvote this. There are lots of articles about someone creating their own browser and they all turn out to be a variation of 'they didn't create their own browser, they made their own skin'.

<comment><USER5> Many different browsers use the same engine at the core. That doesn't mean they aren't different pieces of software. just that they use the same engine.

(In this case, one might nitpick that "programmed" suggests something different, but I don't think that's clear cut)

<comment><USER4> At some point surely there is a line when the whole headline is 'this is bad, I made my own'. That would be like me saying 'modern OSs are bad, I made my own' and it actually being a new task bar for a Linux distribution.

At some point people need to take responsibility for the titles they write.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but it's IMHO clearly arguable where that line is. The underlying engine is only a part of the user experience of a browser, and browser based on a common engine are commonly described as different products.

Chrome, Chromium, new Edge, Brave and Qutebrowser all use the same engine, but even the first two are not uncommonly considered to be different products. Same with Safari, Chrome and Firefox on iOS, despite Apple only allowing their own browser engine on iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is webassembly port planned? /s

<comment><AUTHOR> [Dev] So far I had not included webassembly in my planning. I will read myself into the topic. At the moment I can't make any promises if WA will be implemented at some point.</comment></comment>


Text Normalization using Memory Augmented Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00044 <comment><USER2> I don't think the paper highlighted enough that this was a Kaggle competition entry.

The write up on that (from Google, who organized it and provided the data) was really interesting: [http://blog.kaggle.com/2018/02/07/a-brief-summary-of-the- kag...](http://blog.kaggle.com/2018/02/07/a-brief-summary-of-the-kaggle-text- normalization-challenge/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The model specifications used for the Kaggle competition was a lot different than the one mentioned in the paper. The paper compares on the same test set used by [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00068](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00068). DNC showed significant improvement over LSTM as a recurrent unit of a seq-to- seq model with almost zero unacceptable mistakes in certain semiotic classes. LSTM, on the other hand, is susceptible to these kinds of mistakes even when a lot of data is available.

<comment><USER2> I'm confused. On [https://github.com/cognibit/Text-Normalization- Demo](https://github.com/cognibit/Text-Normalization-Demo) it says:

 _The approach used here has secured the 6th position in the Kaggle Russian Text Normalization Challenge by Google 's Text Normalization Research Group._

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. The reason we added the sentence because the model used in the competition was also based on DNC. But, changes were made when writing the paper, for instance, we did not use any attention mechanism at the seq-to-seq level in the competition. Besides, the paper concentrates more on comparing the kinds of errors made by the DNC network (avoiding unacceptable mistakes; not the overall accuracy), which shows an improvement over the LSTM model in the paper ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00068](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00068)). On the other hand, overall accuracy was more important for the Kaggle competition.

We modified the sentence to say, "An earlier version of the approach used here has secured the 6th position in the Kaggle Russian Text Normalization Challenge by Google's Text Normalization Research Group".

<comment><USER2> Ok, got it I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The conclusions you draw from the results that are presented seem to be a bit of a stretch. From the accuracy table it is pretty clear that the LSTM model outperforms your DNC model in most classes (for both datasets the LSTM achieves the same or better accuracy in 10 out of the 14 classes).

You then argue that the number of "unacceptable errors" is a better measure of model performance, which seems reasonable. However, you don't really show any analysis of these errors other than a table with some hand-picked examples. I would spend some time trying to actually quantify these errors so you can analyze them and show a proper plot or table that summarizes the results.

I think the work is interesting but I would be careful how you present the results. I would suggest adding more plots/tables to back up your claims in a more objective manner or tone down the conclusions a bit. This is meant to be constructive criticism btw, it's not an attack :-) I think with a bit more work you'll be ready for a proper peer review.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the great feedback.

The paper by Sproat and Jaitly which introduces the challenge rightly notes that the acceptability of errors and quality of output is more important than accuracy for a real application. The number of instances in all of the critical semiotic classes is too low (1-2k for some, even less than 100 for others) for a meaningful comparison in accuracy.

But you are right to point out that the 'unacceptability' of errors could be analyzed better. However, we could not think of a way to quantify or form a metric that measures such errors. These 'silly' errors are subjective by their very nature and depend on a human reading them. As you have suggested, we are working on preparing a table of sorts to summarize all these errors and show a link between the availability/frequency of particular types examples to the performance of our model on those particular types. Something of this sort for example:

* The training set had 17,712 examples in DATE of the form xx/yy/zzzz. Upon the analyzing the mistakes in DATE class we did not find any mistakes made in the dates of the above form.

* On the other hand, if look into the mistakes made in MEASURE class we find that the DNC network made exactly 4 mistakes. The mistakes were reported in the units (g/cm3, ch, mA). Upon searching for the occurrences in the training set of these units, we found out that 'mA' occurs 3 three times, 'g/cm3' occurred 7 times and 'ch' occurred 8 times, whereas other measurement units like kg occur 296 times and cm occur 600+ times.

If you have any other ideas on how to analyze and report the results, please let us know. We will be glad to improve the quality of our work (By the way, we are undergrads and this is our very first research paper). Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "...while avoiding the kind of silly errors made by the LSTM based recurrent neural architectures."

Only in arXiv you could get away with that kind of language :). Good paper though! Kudos.

"Another direction to go from here would be to increase the size of the context window during the data preprocessing stage to feed even more contextual information into the model."

Could you comment on how the training time would scale with increasing the size of the context window? Is there a sweet spot?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the review! We will surely correct these mistakes before submitting for final publication.

The memory requirements of DNC is quite high. We used GTX 1060 for training. Increasing the context window anything more than 3 increases the sequence length by a huge amount, causing memory problems. However, we also found that DNC works quite well even on small batch size. We used a batch size of 16 for all our experiments. The training time for a batch size of 16, context window of size 3 and 200k steps is 48h on a GTX 1060 system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good paper, I was wondering what is the state-of-art of using Neural Networks for Text Segmentation, Text Lemmatisation, Part-of-speech Tagging. Morphological approaches is dominant in this space.

</comment><comment><USER7> Text normalization, i.e. the transformation of words from the written to the spoken form. Uh, is this speech synthesis?

145, i.e. "one hundred and forty five". Oh! This is immediately obvious what you're doing.

<comment><USER8> "text normalization" just refers to that sort of thing. it's a subcomponent of the "front-end" of a speech synthesizer but it can also be used for speech recognition (if your training data contains things like "145" you may want to convert it to read "one hundred and forty five", for various reasons) and information extraction (perhaps you want to treat "145" and "one hundred and forty five" as the same).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seq2Seq DNC looks interesting.. any implementation on github yet?

<comment><USER10> Their code is here: [https://github.com/cognibit/Text-Normalization- Demo](https://github.com/cognibit/Text-Normalization-Demo)

Official DeepMind DNC code is here: [https://github.com/deepmind/dnc](https://github.com/deepmind/dnc)

They use "an unmodified version of the architecture as specified in the original paper", and it looks like they copy & pasted the core code.

This paper lacks some further explanation. Why do they use XGBoost for predicting whether some word is to be normalized? And why do they use DNC for the seq2seq model? I think a single shared model for both tasks might be a cleaner solution. E.g. an encoder which with output layer for the prediction and also this encoder is fed to the decoder. The motivation for DNC is also not too clear, although I can guess that they think this is too hard for a LSTM. But for DNC, to get the advantages out of it, it should support some time for doing internal calculations, which you could get by introducing internal computation steps. They don't do that. Also, in their results section, they do not compare to any other model, so it it not clear whether XGBoost is the best choice, and also not whether the DNC really helps here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, we tried using a single model for the entire seq-to-seq task but the number of examples in PLAIN is huge which causes the model to perform worse on other classes. The reason we used XGBoost was to separate the two very different tasks (predicting whether a word in normalized; predicting the sequence of normalized tokens).

On the other hand, as mentioned when comparing text normalization systems it is more important to look at the exact kinds of errors made by the system (not only the overall accuracy). Our model showed improvement over the baseline model in [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00068](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00068). DNC showed improvement in certain semiotic classes such as DATE, CARDINAL and TIME making zero unacceptable predictions in these classes, LSTM was susceptible to these kinds of mistakes even when a lot of training data was available. Yes, we do not use internal computation steps, the model replaces a standard LSTM in a seq-to-seq model with a DNC. However thanks for the suggestions it would be interesting to see the performance improvements if the internal computation steps are increased.</comment></comment></comment>


Mt. Gox Bankruptcy Court Trustee Report - March 7, 2018 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20180307_report.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The main revelation made at the creditor meeting today is that the bankruptcy court trustee recently sold 35,841 BTC and 34,008 BCH to cover the amount of approved normalized claims.

What happens with the remaining ~166K BTC remains to be seen.</comment>


Cancer Deaths Continue to Decline - <AUTHOR> https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-deaths-continue-to-decline/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, what caused a very visible, short term peak of cancer incidence in 1991?

<comment><USER3> It could be an increase in cancer _diagnosis_ rather than new occurrences, i.e. as a result of more aggressive care.

<comment><USER2> Still, it must have been some particular event. Like a law change or new insurance scheme.</comment></comment></comment>


Moving Forth, Part 1: Design Decisions in the Forth Kernel (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm <comment><USER2> I've always thought that writing a threaded interpretive language (TIL) is a good experience for every programmer. It really changes the way you think. It is also possibly one of those things that might come back into fashion. Since it is easy to fit a FORTH kernel in a few kilobytes, one can imagine sticking the entire kernel into cache. Higher level functions are simply jumps to things that are already in the cache. Along with favouring stack allocation to heap allocation, this goes a long way to creating an environment friendly to multi-processing.

<comment><USER3> I have trouble imagining a comeback because Forth's unique value is in staking out the tiny-and-simple end of the efficiency frontier. But Lisp is almost as simple if you can spare more resources, while if you're OK with complexity there are compilers that optimize better.

It'd be nice to be wrong, since I'd love to work in a system where every bit is handcrafted and known to me. I didn't quite get there back in the 80s in my summer job at FORTH, Inc. but it did teach me a bunch and I enjoyed scrounging out a few bytes here and there.

<comment><USER4> Kay and his team are coming along nicely at that in their STEPS's project at VPRI. In LISP + DSL's. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Always was fascinated by Forth. There is a trend of going back to roots, I wouldn't mind seeing Forth finding it's place.</comment>


Mitsuba – A physically based renderer - <AUTHOR> https://www.mitsuba-renderer.org <comment><USER2> Mitsuba was referenced in the recent Siggraph paper by DICE (battlefield4) as the source of ground-truth for verifying their new volumetric rendering system.

[http://www.frostbite.com/2015/08/physically-based-unified- vo...](http://www.frostbite.com/2015/08/physically-based-unified-volumetric- rendering-in-frostbite/)

(Starting at slide 31)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is fascinating. If I'm reading it right, this is a "research" renderer, rather than a "production" one, since it uses the CPU, not the GPU, for computation?

<comment><USER4> A lot of production renderers use the CPU as well - most Dreamworks Animation and Pixar films are still mostly CPU-based rendered. I've used Mitsuba and it is pretty slow and incomplete compared to production renderers (Mitsuba's scene definition format is just brutal compared to Arnold or V-Ray or PRMan), but some of its results are not yet available in production renderers.

<comment><USER5> It's a bit unfair to compare the speed of Mitsuba with the speed of Renderman. Mitsuba only has a simple KD-Tree (although highly optimized), while RenderMan most likely has a state of the art BVH, which utilizes SIMD instructions. RenderMan also has a lot of sampling controls, while Mitsuba's path tracer has always traces one light and one BSDF sample on each intersection. There are multiple software engineers at Pixar that solely focus on optimizing RenderMan, while most of Mitsuba is implemented by a single person, who is a full-time researcher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> how does this compare to maxwell render?</comment>


The Public Shaming of England's First Umbrella User - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-public-shaming-of-englands-first-umbrella-user <comment><USER3> "But the famous 'insularity' and 'xenophobia' of the English is far stronger in the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are more national than the rich, but the English working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they are obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly."

From George Orwell - England Your England [http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye](http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye)

<comment><USER4> What's worse, that or not speaking a perfect Frankish language of when in the land of Franks? At least the English tolerate all kinds of foreign mangling pretty well.

<comment><USER5> > At least the English tolerate all kinds of foreign mangling pretty well.

That's because they mangle their own language awfully enough.

I'm not a native English speaker but I've heard quite a few native Englishmen and their accents are horrible. Received Pronunciation is obviously nice to hear and quite clear, but those local accents... oh my!

I'm not saying that my accent is any better, but at least I try to make my sounds be as close as possible to the actual letters used in the word! :)

<comment><USER6> There's no letter-to-sound correspondence in English. English probably - <USER2> least compared with other European language - is one of the most irregular languages in terms of pronunciation:

[http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/english1.html](http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/english1.html)

This is simply due to the language having been heavily influenced by a host of other - quite different - languages over the centuries, Old Norse and French in particular.

There's also the interesting fact that as the first human language in history English is spoken by more non-native speakers than native speakers. Some linguists say we might very well see some sort of International English that's highly influenced by foreign accents.

In fact there already is such a variety although it's only used by a rather small group of people: The kind of English used by the European Union, its officials and bureaucrats. EU English is littered with bureaucratic expressions, loan words and false friends (particularly from French).

<comment><USER7> There's pidgin English in Nigeria.

When you first hear it you think it's a different language.

<comment><USER8> There's all kinds of pidgin Englishes (and Frenches and cetera...)

In fact, it's almost impossible NOT to spontaneously invent a pidgin when there's a language barrier between two people or peoples. When I was in Vietnam, my friends and I adapted our English ad-hoc depending on who we were speaking to. With merchants with very little English, we'd speak only in numbers and yes/no, and maybe say please/thanks in each others' languages. With our tour guides who were much more fluent, we could speak in complete sentences, but still tried to keep things in present tense, and tended to ask questions by using a declarative word order with a rising tone ("we go to the hotel now?").

And we did this all instinctively--it's easy to see how well-defined pidgin languages can arise from this sort of linguistic adaptation between two or more populations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "In the minds of many Brits, umbrella usage was symptomatic of a weakness of character, particularly among men. Few people ever dared to be seen with such a detestable, effeminate contraption. To carry an umbrella when it rained was to incur public ridicule."

This sentiment is very much alive today. I'm always surprised how I seem to be the only person carrying an umbrella in London when it rains. Especially bankers seem to prefer getting soaked.

<comment><USER10> In Dublin, I think it's considered, if not rude, at least not the height of courtesy, to use an umbrella in dense areas where you will be bumping in to people and essentially pushing your water on to them.

However, my feeling is that the real lunacy here is having very narrow pavements (sidewalks) carrying dozens or hundreds of people while having streets, which might be carrying ten or twenty people along the same stretch of road in taxis (which most cars are in Dublin city centre on a weekday morning), get 8-10x as much space. (I am much more sympathetic to buses).

<comment><USER11> The same crowded street problem happens where I live in NYC, but it generally works out as people get into a rhythm of either raising their umbrella up over the level of the other person's umbrella or lowering it down below the level of the other person's umbrella.

But then in NYC you develop a much closer "personal bubble" when you have to endure being crammed onto the train like a sardine during rush hour, so in comparison a little umbrella bumping is barely noticeable.

<comment><USER12> Screw the personal bubble, I'd prefer it if short people would avoid stabbing me in the head with the ribs of their umbrella. If you can't lift your umbrella high enough to go over the tallest person in the crowd, you should buy a rain coat instead.

<comment><USER13> yes agreed everyone should cater to you specifically in life.

<comment><USER14> ISTM "refraining from stabbing" isn't really the same as "catering".

<comment><USER12> I think the other guy was right, I'm being very selfish. It's really my fault that my glasses have been scratched by the ferrules on the ends of umbrellas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Steve McClaren was the first England football manager to use an umbrella in the dugout. It didn't go down well. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2236344/St...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2236344/Steve- McClaren-Wally-Brolly-defeat-Croatia-year-anniversary.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> As a former pedestrian commuter through the City, I'd love to see the goons who think a golf umbrella makes a suitable and sociable rainscreen pelted with fruit.

I almost considered setting up a Tumblr of ridiculously oversized umbrellas at one point, knocking people off pavements.

<comment><USER17> I'm with you - I'm tall enough that the little metal tips of most umbrellas are usually at eye-level, and have received many uncomfortable jabs to the eyeballs (and more often than not people are annoyed that their umbrella was nudged, instead of being sorry)

<comment><USER18> "I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In medium wind, the most practical umbrella is the clear plastic dome-shaped kind that you can hold in front of your face but still see through. Maybe there will be a new Jonas Hanway who pioneers men carrying this style of umbrella.

I used to think that men wore whatever was practical and only women were bound by fashion. This may be true of shoes, but this style of umbrella revealed to me that it isn't true in general. Men (including myself) will eschew practicality for our own fashion. I'll keep carrying my impractical black umbrella for now.

<comment><USER20> Both are bound by fashion. But since somewhere around WW1, mens fashion have been somber and largely static (the largest change being the reduced use of hats since JFK).

<comment><USER21> I think the crystallised male fashion is a massive cultural achievement. Right up there with shaking hands, sending letters and using cutlery. Shame about the loss of hats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Cabbies. They probably deserved umbrellas then as much as they deserve Uber now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Umbrellas are still taboo in some branches of the US military. The local paper a while back had an article about this. The Air Force wouldn't let some officer carry an umbrella to the Pentagon, but it would pay to replace or repair his hearing aids when they were damaged by the soaking.

</comment><comment><USER24> Those of us who live in Seattle tend to feel the same way. If you see someone carrying an umbrella here you can bet they're a tourist.

<comment><USER25> Portland as well. It's seen as a sense of pride, probably because the rain here is light.

<comment><USER26> I think the reasons are more practical. It's rare that it rains very hard in Portland. Carrying an umbrella throughout six to eight months of the year just in case is inconvenient, and you'll probably end up losing it anyway. A light rain jacket is easier to deal with and also blocks the wind. I don't think pride has much to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Having developed a mobile app called "Umbrella" for Security management, this headline nearly gave me a heart attack... :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Someday, maybe it's already happened, someone will market an umbrella drone that floats above your head. And something similar will happen.

<comment><USER29> Yes. [http://www.popsci.com/watch-umbrella-drones-float-through- ai...](http://www.popsci.com/watch-umbrella-drones-float-through-air)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've always found umbrellas annoying. When walking down city streets they get in the way of trying to pass people. Sometimes people unfurl them without looking to see if there's enough space, and people let them dry off on public transit seats, making them a soupy mess for the next rider who wants a seat.

</comment><comment><USER31> Maybe this is the origin of the prohibition of male American Marines from carrying umbrellas. I always wondered why the accessory was permitted for female Marines, but not for males.

That said, the trench coat (All-Weather Coat, Pewter Gray) is very water repellant. And Marines in utilities can wear the Gore-tex or poncho.

</comment><comment><USER32> "The British also regarded umbrellas as too French"

I guess it was a very bad thing at the time :D

<comment><USER33> Still is. Brexit, don't ya know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think there is more than insularity/xenophobia going on here. When faced with an unpleasant situation, there is some benefit in taking pride in one's ability to cope. It can easily be taken too far, however, leading to an aversion to doing something about it, and antipathy towards those who do. It is as if getting soaked by rain became part of Britain's tribal identity.

Umbrellas are pretty effective against rain, and I think it is amusing that they were invented to protect against the sun by providing shade.

</comment><comment><USER35> It says that umbrellas were seen as effeminate, and identifies him in the article as the first man to use one--was he the first umbrella user in England, or just the first male one?

</comment><comment><USER36> There's still a traditional prejudice among some Englishmen against non- clergymen using umbrellas in the country (as opposed to in town).

</comment><comment><USER37> The popular kind is still a boring, awkward black gamp. To counter the effeminate charge I assume.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder whether anybody called umbrella users umbr-holes…

</comment><comment><USER39> What are the English 1750s umbrellas of today?

<comment><USER40> Google Glass. Even without the camera controversy, wearing anything on your head is hard to pull off. Bluetooth headsets approached acceptance at one point but have gone back to serious fashion faux pas.

Or to take the other angle of it, anything remotely "feminine" is still violently opposed for the modern man at least in the U.S. Although the way I read it, umbrellas were rejected as "feminine" but weren't really allowed for women either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> i wonder what they'll say about the first city enclosed in a climate- controlled glass dome

</comment><comment><USER42> I _still_ internally laugh at men who use umbrellas.

<comment><USER43> Why?

<comment><USER44> Because anoraks are the height of sartorial elegance.</comment></comment></comment>


Kindista: A social network for local sharing implemented in Common Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kindista/kindista <comment><USER2> Interesting. It doesn't use any framework like for web. Running on a raw Hunchentoot. Uses Parenscript to generate JS.</comment>


I built a CNC, what can I make to pay myself back? - <AUTHOR> I figured that if I built a machine that can make stuff, I can make stuff to sell to others to pay myself back, and save up for a nicer machine.
I just don't know where to look / who to ask about "what can I make you?"
Thoughts? <comment><USER3> Ah, exciting! We're wiring up our home-built CNC this week!

Keep a notepad to hand and every time you see something novel that you like that you could make on your machine, make a note of it your first thoughts about what you specifically like about it and how you'd like to make a version that is your own.

Make things for yourself that you want without much thought towards profit. Document and photo these things, and share them with people around you - <USER2> time someone will either want one, have their own tangent they'd like to investigate, or know someone who's in the same sphere.

A wee thing I'm doing at the moment with my laser-cutting, having hit a bit of a creative block earlier this year, is I've set myself a wee project to force myself to do an iteration every day or so. Doesn't need to take long - I'm budgeting half an hour or so to design then cut and treat at the end of each day, and I'm already staring at a couple of pieces now that I'm really happy with and wouldnt've bothered coming up with otherwise.

.

Also, short answer - signage :) A good 2.5D domain to practice in and make things that 'everyone wants'. particularly good in terms of finishing too, as there are sanding painting and varnishing challenges to be met too (where wood or MDF, etc, is concerned).

Good luck and, most of all - have fun!

</comment><comment><USER4> How many axis, what's the volume, what rigidity/accuracy, which materials are you comfortable with?

<comment><AUTHOR> 3-axis, 12" x, 7" y, 5" z. Accurate to 0.001. Plastics, metals.

<comment><USER4> With the 'accurate to 0.001"', how was that measured?

Asking because a lot of people new to CNC (as you question seems to indicate) build their machine and don't know they have to spend a fair amount of time fine tuning to get the accuracy to where they want it to be.

Not sure if that's the case for you, but pointing it out, just in case. :)

With the 'metals' thought, be careful there. Soft metals (eg most aluminiums) are a lot easier to mill than the harder ones (eg cold rolled steel). It might be better to stick to soft metals for a while unless you're sure. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've worked with steel on it and it does well. Fair point on the accuracy issue. Any thoughts on something I can make that's in demand?

<comment><USER4> As a thought, talk to the people involved with bio-med prototyping. If you can work in stainless steel, that build volume would likely be of interest to them. (assuming your actual accuracy is workable, but talk to a few places to find their requirements first)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ebola: The tolling bell - <AUTHOR> http://stanfordlawyer.law.stanford.edu/2014/10/ebola-the-tolling-bell/ <comment><USER2> Stopping Ebola now could be one of the single most important decisions the world makes this century. Just imagine what would happen if Ebola emerged in lets say _India_. It doesn't sound so far fetched now that we have seen a case in America.

Exponential growth tends to catch people off-guard. Just like Moore's Law lead to a rapid emergence of the home computer, a deadly disease could reshape the world overnight.

<comment><USER3> The viral factor of ebola is 1.7, but it is also is the place in the world where there is the least amount of medical staff.

In addition it would be a lot easier to ban plane travel out of Africa than it would be to end the ebola outbreak. Both options would prevent ebola getting into India.

In addition I am not that terrified of India - the kind of people who live about the airline are the kind of people who have access to medical resources. I don't want to live in India, but it is not entirely a third-world country, certainly not for the middle-class and above.

Now if it got into the slums of Calcutta we might a bigger problem.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, with all do respect, you do not know the current plight of Indian and South Asian population.

Many of them work in the Persian Gulf in labor camps. ANd I do not mean a couple thousand. In Qatar, there is 10 million plus population, the population is overwhelmingly male, and the Qataris are less one million of that population. Male South Asian laborers are the largest demographic group in the whole country. This is an increasingly common pattern in the region.

There is little or no medical care, and despite first class medical care for expats, it would be way too late for the unprepared MoH units, which receive basically minimal training from the CDC to react in time. This area, specifically Qatar, has become a major transportation for hub internationa flights, hence the real underlying panic for MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).

If South Asia (India, Pakistan, Nepal, etc.) were hit in any real way, the world would be fucked ... probably in the course of weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." - John Donne, Meditation XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

It's important that we realize that theses people being affected by viral spread of Ebola are people just like you, me, our families and friends.

<comment><USER6> Well what about all the wildlife and rainforests that have been devastated by human population growth in Africa? The continent would be better off without so many people. After all, they're not doing anything to advance humanity technologically. They are just wrecking ecosystems and wasting resources.

<comment><USER7> Have we double booked the Ebola thread with the support group for "Arseholes Anonymous"?

Anyone from Europe or America who likes to sit in sneering judgment over the wide variety of cultures in Africa either has no education in their own history or hasn't the strength of character to face up to it.

<comment><USER8> I'm unsure what's more terrifying going forward, Ebola or the fact that at least three users on this Hacker News story--as opposed to a mainstream newspaper's website comment section where bigotry and ignorant patriotism is the order of the day--have seen no issue in declaring their views unanomymously. Much like death tolls go, how many more wanted to have made similar comments but still had a minimum sense to restrain themselves?

<comment><USER9> Lemmesee. Catch Ebola... or have to read three interweb comments seriously lacking in sensitivity? Tough choice.

Good luck, Ebola-Chan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Donation pages for Médecins Sans Frontières:

[http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation](http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation)

[https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/](https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/)

Better to cough up cash now...

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the author is overestimating how prepared the US healthcare system is to handle a real threat if one arises:

\- The U.S. has been advertising that we're the ones with the cure for ebola, so where is anyone with money going to go as soon as they get exposed? And while most of the victims are among the urban poor, there will be more wealthy people who become infected as the epidemic increases in scale.

\- Even if we have better technology, the cost of treating each victim here is exponentially higher. The cost for each patient could easily be close to a million dollars if you count 2+ weeks in the ER, licensed biohazard disposal and decontamination, network tracing, quarantining exposed contacts, etc.

\- Nearly 50M Americans don't have health insurance. If going into the ER risked you getting kept there while waiting for test results, possibly losing your job, and getting getting stuck with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars even if you don't have ebola, it's hard to imagine that many of those people aren't going to just wait a few extra days.

\- In the US healthcare workers are generally paid well enough that they can just leave their jobs, maybe not comfortably, but with enough money to at least feed themselves and get by. It's hard to imagine that we won't have large numbers of healthcare workers just taking off if this ever gets serious. Especially since US healthcare workers aren't trained to deal with ebola, and largely aren't interested -- notice how most of the people going to west Africa to volunteer in this crisis are missionaries, not doctors.

\- We have all sorts of religious fundamentalists in the US who think it's god's will that the US be destroyed for condoning homosexuality or whatever who would be more than happy to help the process along, and more than enough people abroad who would gladly sacrifice their own lives to disrupt our foreign/domestic policy.

</comment><comment><USER11> "The current Ebola epidemic may well become the worst human disaster in this century. And we are not doing enough about it."

Ok, I think anyone here generally understands how dangerous Ebola is and could become if it continues to spread.

That being said, already this century:

Smoking has killed roughly 60 million people

HIV / AIDS has killed 20 to 25 million

Malaria has killed eight million

Diarrhoea has killed perhaps 15 million

We're a long ways yet from Ebola competing as a worst human disaster candidate. To put it in stark perspective, it could kill a million people before it's contained (100+ fold more than it likely currently has), and it still wouldn't get near the health disasters I listed. I don't really understand why people persist with inflating Ebola's stature (or downplaying the other health disasters, however you want to look at it). The only conclusions I've come to, are that Ebola has been sensationalized for years by Hollywood and the media (on-going), and its mortality rate and rapid nature are obvious fear points. I still don't see how the fear adds up when compared to millions of children dying from diarrhoea, except that these are things most people think they can't get / won't die from.

<comment><USER12> At what age did people who died from smoking, first get infected? How many years did they live with the infection? Did they have the difficult but still viable option to quit smoking and survive a few more years or even have a full life?

How many people contracted HIV by hugging someone? Or being in the same environment for a prolonged period of time? How many contracted it because of unprotected sex, or perhaps sharing needles? Again, how long did they live with the disease?

How many people did _not_ die from Diarrhoea and Malaria? Do we have medicines for these diseases?

It takes two weeks to die from Ebola from the moment you are infected. You don't have any choice in the matter. It has extremely low survival rates. We have no cure. It infects anyone and everyone. Being infected with Ebola is closer to being the victim of a random shooting than any of the diseases you mentioned.

And finally, in numbers alone, from the original article: "WHO and Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) both estimate that the number of people infected is doubling roughly every 20 days. This means that in 20 days 6,000 infections would become 12,000 and in 100 days, 6,000 infections would become about 200,000. In 200 days – early April 2015—there would be 6 million infections and in 400 days—roughly Halloween 2015—we would see over 6 billion people infected, nearly as many as the world's total population."

He does go on to say: "Unsustainable trends will stop; that rate of new infections will slow down.[3] We will not see the world's whole population infected with, and more than half of us dead of, Ebola before the end of 2015. It is possible that outbreak may end up largely confined to the three current epidemic countries in West Africa. Other parts of the developing world provide some hopeful signs."

So, there is hope. And it may not be as bad as the whole world being infected, but the possibility is much larger than 60, 25, 6 or 15 million. That too in one year, and not in 14.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fact that this article has been flagged (is no longer in the front page despite being way up there minutes a go) and the lack of upvotes (compared to other less important articles) makes me fear for the future of humanity. Because despite being made of fairly smart people not even the HN crowd still realizes the gravity of the situation.

</comment><comment><USER14> This could become the new trend, as populations concentrate more and more in cities, creating slums, the conditions to catalyze outbreaks increase exponentially. I agree with the author that the cause of the recent epidemic has to do with the geographic location of the initial cases.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am sad that Ebola has become an epidemic, but worried that it might be used as a weapon by a fundamentalist. Our cavalier attitude in treating that man from Liberia who developed Ebola in the US Presents a difficult problem to prevent. That was an accidental event. What precautions can we take against intentional events?

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anybody know how the (immune) survivors are engaged in the health care system of the affected countries? The treatment itself doesn't seem so advanced, it's main challenge being not getting infected. Being immune would be a huge advantage.

<comment><USER16> Seems there are quite serious plans to even tap their blood: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410437)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read somewhere about a black market for ebola survivor blood. At first I misread the title and thought it meant a black market for ebola-infected blood (or ebola-infected cadavers). Now that is a truly scary possibility - terrorists intentionally infecting themselves with ebola, then going into airports and other high density areas, infecting surfaces and as many people as they can before succumbing (or maybe even blowing themselves up with a suicide bomb - who knows). I think that's one possibility that's been overlooked and underscores why we really need to be funding greater vaccine/cure research (in addition to the obvious reason of potentially saving millions of lives in Africa).

<comment><USER18> Terrorists could have done that years ago with AIDS or Hepatitis C but they never have - it's not obviously an effective propaganda tool and religious terrorists are likely to have hangups about dying in an unclean fashion.

<comment><USER19> > it's not obviously an effective propaganda tool

It's actually a terrible propaganda tool, the "goal" so far as there is one is to strike terror into your opponents (and gain supporters) while not doing something so heinous that you call down the wrath of your target since terrorism is usually the far weaker side opposing the stronger side.

I think for example IS/ISIL/ISIS are just about to cross that line if they haven't already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While the situation is serious - it will be contained eventually in my view.

As cynical as it sounds I think there are many positive effects being overlooked here. People need a good wake-up every now and again.

We suddenly realized that there is zero global coordination. There is just no global immediate response mechanism in place to deal with this type of stuff. In the Hollywood movies you see the American tanks roll in as a show of force to contain an area...but where are the American tanks in Nigeria?

Sure eventually UN & US mechanisms kicked in (which is great) but I still feel it was subpar. Not in the sense of the people under-performed (they're great) but rather that the structures in place under-performed / don't exist.

Personally I think there should be a global response team. i.e. one group that has the ability to declare an emergency (Ebola) and then specific governments can buy in or not (and delegate power & funding). Based on that buy-in the team either has power or it does not. In this case, with EU and US buy-in such a team would have vast of power over many nations - and many other nations will follow a US/UN/EU alliance blindly (imagine finding yourself on the wrong side of that). With THAT kind of response you can counter an epidemic.

Thats a bit of a pipe dream sure, but it illustrates what I mean by saying we lack a global immediate response team. Now I'm not suggesting the above should be implemented - its more of a thought experiment...the fact remains that the current model is not capable of deal with Ebola let alone other stuff (that shall remain unnamed in the interest of keeping things on track)

<comment><USER21> I often think that people just can not conceive of the scales of disasters that are possible and can befall anybody, including the US. You look at the frankly incredible measures that may be necessary to prevent an outbreak, and it's easy to imagine the _costs_ , the screaming from the affecting (and, given the topic, possibly the _literal_ screaming on the evening news of perfectly innocent people against their will being confined in their own houses unto literal death), the economic costs of shutting things down and quarantining people, etc., politically and economically all very expensive, and in the face of an imagination unable to truly, fundamentally _believe_ these things are possible, the will to take the necessary actions can not be found, because the _benefits_ are literally inconceivable.

And there are oh-so-many things that are so much more _fun_ to spend time on for those in authority, and the odds that their fundamental preparations will be found wanting so low during their tenure, that the appeal of shifting all resources and money away from basic prep is tempting to the point of irresistibility.

Unfortunately, the disasters that can occur are not bounded by our imagination.

(And I do mean _fun_ for those in authority. Contemplating emergencies is not fun. Exerting primate dominance over others in the so very many varied ways that humans are capable of is so much more _fun_.)

<comment><USER22> People need an emotional connection to a disaster or emergency before they begin to contemplate the effects and either take action or donate time/money/resources to help. Asking for money to help prevent a _future_ disaster is a lot harder connection to make with donors.

A recent NPR Planet Money podcast highlighted the difficulty in raising money to fight Ebola:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/09/22/349962559/why- rais...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/09/22/349962559/why-raising- money-to-fight-ebola-is-hard)

 _" Donors like being part of a recovery story. In Haiti, buildings and lives were destroyed. The pitch was, let's help them rebuild. In the case of Ebola, it's been harder to make a pitch."_</comment></comment></comment>


It's called vomit fraud. And it could make your Uber trip really expensive - <AUTHOR> https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-vomit-fraud-20180724-story.html <comment><USER2> This is yet another example of what happens as a result of the "race to bottom" for wages and compensation for Uber/Lyft drivers.

These drivers are looking for any way that they can to make their work barely profitable, because just letting the algorithm "Manna[1]" them around a city ends up being barely break even after all costs are added in.

So that's why you get the calls asking where you're going so they can get long trips (especially around airports), the "oh not I got into an accident, can you cancel the trip?" calls, etc... Not to mention the drivers who are stuck with high interest loans on cars from Uber.

It's marginal labor inputs for a marginalized workforce - and an increasingly immigrant one, which is great generally but correlates to the easily exploitable. So while I don't condone this kind of behavior, I can see why they would feel pushed into doing it - especially if it's relatively retribution free.

[1][http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

<comment><USER3> Uber is the worst, especially if you are an Uber Eats driver. They just recently increased the drive radius while lowering pay. The app doesn't encourage customers to tip, either, whereas a tip is default in other apps like GrubHub(then again, DoorDash steals tips so they can pay less in fees).

Unfortunately, not enough people use Lyft so those who don't like Uber are still forced to "multi-app" with Uber rather than relying on it as a sole source of income.

It's companies like Uber that make the US unemployment rate bullshit; people can be independent contractors, get treated like trash by "unicorns" like Uber, get paid shit, and be considered employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can make a living working multiple gig economy jobs, but it's hardly sustainable.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand tipping. Service offered for $x. Contract accepted. Contract completed. Service delivered. Funds transferred.

<comment><USER5> It's a way for employers to shift, by way of ingrained culture, some of the labour costs onto the customer.

<comment><USER4> I had a tiler round on Monday. He quoted £200, I paid £200. Job done.

The entire cost of his Labour was borne by me, yet I didn't tip him.

Is it a tax evasion scheme, and thus a tax subsidy for certain professions?

<comment><USER5> I don't quite understand what you mean by this.

If it wasn't clear, what I meant is: employer under pays employee with the expectation that customer will pick up the slack via tipping.

<comment><USER4> Pay $20 for something and no tip Pay $15 for something and $5 tip

It's identical, expect I suspect the $5 tip isn't taxed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm sure some incidents of this kind of fraud have happened, but I'm skeptical it happens often, simply because of driver incentives (ie, why make a quick hundred bucks if it's at the risk of never making any additional Uber income ever again).

Also, I'm totally skeptical of the guy complaining of _two_ vomit frauds committed against him in one evening. Far more likely is that he blacked out and then threw up twice in different vehicles, or he's simply too embarrassed to admit it.

<comment><USER7> _Far more likely is..._

Yes. The statistics bear this out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the flip side, $150 is an insufficient cleaning fee. Driver loses all revenue for the rest of the day and the cost of professional detailing often exceeds that amount. It should be a minimum of $300.

It once took me 4 hours to clean my car after an incident that involved my sliding door mechanism. Cleaning quote for that exceeded $300.

And that smell... ugh!!!

Edit: vomit incident.

<comment><USER9> Did someone throw up on your sliding door mechanism?

<comment><USER10> Probably blood.

<comment><USER9> Maybe. The "ugh the smell" made me believe vomit.

<comment><USER10> Completely missed that. Oops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd assume that the drivers keep a bunch of photos of actual vomit on their phones, and then just use them when they decide to commit a bit of vomit fraud?

If that's the case, then Uber should at least save the submitted photos and implement some minor automated procedures to raise the bar from _effectively zero_ to just a few millimeters above. Check the EXIF data and compare it to the ride data, and compare the photos to old ones. When a vomit charge is disputed, Uber employees could compare the submitted photos to old ones in case a driver took a bunch of different photos from different angles. Or if they want to put more effort into things, control the camera directly from the Uber driver app and _only allow photos taken from the app_ to be submitted.

It wouldn't solve the problem, but Uber could at least put a minor speed bump in front of would-be fraudsters.

<comment><USER11> Okay but [https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+vomit&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=fake+vomit&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER10> I guess you could whip up a batch of fake vomit. But then you have to actually clean up the fake vomit, thereby incurring the very costs (both money and time) the fee was meant to compensate you for. If you use the gimmicky plastic variety, I'd think it'd be pretty obvious in photos. Especially if you only buy one fake vomit piece.

But I was thinking more in terms of catching at least some of the fraud attempts and making it a bit riskier as a deterrence, rather than a foolproof detection method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How could their systems allow a charge for a trip with a cancellation, and also a fee for vomit on that trip?

"I see that it was an uncomfortable experience, because the driver started the trip without you in the car, which should not happen."

also, that plainly does not make sense.

</comment><comment><USER13> After a particularly terrible uber experience in Miami (driver swerved terribly the whole time, didn't understand english enough to recognize that we were asking him to pull over because I was nauseated), I thought this would be about drivers intentionally making passengers motion sick so they could extort cash from them (ie: pay up or I'll report you). But this makes a lot more sense. I don't see a fair solution other than requiring video footage, which unfortunately would just be another expense for legitimate drivers.

<comment><USER14> I had an Uber driver tell me years ago he would sometimes shake people up extra hard when it was his last ride of the day at 2-3am Fri/Sat and the passengers looked like they were ready to pop. He claimed to know a guy who would be able to clean up for only $50, and Uber would pay him an extra $200 for the inconvenience. It was a nice occasional $150 boost.

Still, doesn't seem scalable. Also not super pleasant to have that done to your car unless you're renting it. Every time I would tell other Uber drivers this story, they would just laugh and not believe it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get following message when I open the link.

"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism"

</comment><comment><USER16> The easy thing to do for the driver (for legitimate cases), is to take a picture/video of the passenger while still on the car right after the incident.

For the passengers, just take a picture of the interior after you get off an uber vehicle.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes, but wouldn't you then dispute the charge with your credit card company?

<comment><USER18>
       Despite several email exchanges, Uber never agreed to
       reimburse her the extra money. But she disputed the
       charge with her credit card company and got back her
       $98. Uber then canceled her account.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Typically companies store CC info hashed with a per account salt, so you can sign up for another account with the same credit card

<comment><USER19> Uber will ban you by name, so you can't just use a new card.

<comment><USER20> Surely names aren't a unique identifier? "John Smith" et al. Would they keep around other information and use that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if this is a thing at all with Lyft.

If its a problem with both services, it's dishonest to target Uber specifically.

EDIT: A quick Google search indicates it's likely a problem in both Lyft and Uber.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yet another reason to use taxis:

[https://lee-phillips.org/lyfthuh/](https://lee-phillips.org/lyfthuh/)

<comment><USER23> That post reminds me of late-night TV commercials for bizarre gadgets, which try to sell you on their nonsense by showing videos of ordinary people completely failing to accomplish easy household tasks.

<comment><USER21> It's easy to laugh at them, but generally those products are actually being sold to people with disabilities.

<comment><USER23> Interesting. You'd think they would show people with disabilities in the ads... unless they were going for the mental sort.

<comment><USER21> My guess is that if they showed people with disabilities using them, able- bodied people would be less likely to buy them. They might admit some product might actually be kind of handy, but seeing it used by the disabled in an ad would implicitly send the message that it's for disabled people and not buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European > countries.

<comment><USER4> "Unfortunately we take your life and sell it to criminal gangs for 2.6 cents and Europe insists you have to explicitly allow you to happen"

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if you can push your case with Uber by threatening to sue for defamation of character.

Also, I wonder if a request for metadata of the photos would help resolve this in your favor.</comment>