Show HN: Fitloop.co – A full-body fitness workout made easy for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://fitloop.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

Fitloop.co is a site I've been working on for a few years to help me learn the routine from Reddit's bodyweightfitness subreddit. The routine is freely available here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommended_routine)

I got into bodyweight fitness since I liked the idea of exercising wherever you are, no gym membership required. Bodyweight fitness is quite amazing, especially if you're a traveler or want to save time (and money) going to the gym.

As a beginner I wanted more than the wiki offered, a tool which would break down the routine in easy steps, show the youtube videos right there, and help me log and track exercises. So I made it.

\- Shridhar</comment>


What is the gambler's equivalent of Amdahl's Law? - <AUTHOR> http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/10/what-is-the-gamblers-equivalent-of-amdahls-law/

<comment><AUTHOR> I try and answer the question "What is the gambler's equivalent of Amdahl's Law?" with "The Kelly Betting System."

</comment><comment><USER2> Unfortunately, but realistically, this is a much more complicated formula than Amdahl's law.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the extra complexity (and it is there) is the biggest strain on the analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For financial markets, _Portfolio Management Formulas_ by Ralph Vince develops a similar strategy. It too is based on the Kelly Criterion. But it assumes you already have a profitable strategy as opposed to saying "do this system".

I'm not in any way related to the above authors, nor their books.

<comment><USER4> Portfolio Management Formulas is _not_ based on the Kelly Criterion (i.e. maximizing the expected value of the logs of the returns). The latter is not applicable to trading (Academic promotion of such notwithstanding. Kelly himself in his 1956 paper only shows it as applied to gambling. Are we to believe he was unaware of a potential trading application, or that brevity precluded that?) It is specifically because the Kelly Criterion is applicable to gambling and not trading that prompted Portfolio Management Formulas and what followed. -Ralph Vince

<comment><AUTHOR> The Kelly Criterion is controversial (proponents of utility theory hate it) but has been used in financial situations (see: "The Kelly Criterion and the Stock Market" Louis M Rotando, Edward O Thorp, The American Mathematical Monthly (1992) vol. 99 (10) pp. 922-931). Now no system can make money unless the underlying game is favorable to the player (which is why "system" has a bad name). Also the Kelly System can be used with portfolios- it is appropriate when you are investing in anti-correlated instruments (like stocks and bonds at the same time).

<comment><USER4> I beg to differ. It is appropriate only in certain, special circumstances. It is misapplied and misunderstood, and though I respect the work of those you cite, but it does NOT yield the growth optimal fraction in trading unless two specific criteria occur (aside from a positive expectation). Peculiarly, it has not been illuminated for what it is and when it is applicable -- an absence of critical thinking on the part of its proponents have promulgated an enormous degree of disinformation out there. Regularly, I would get called in by hedge funds and witness this firsthand. Sorry I cannot be more specific about this at this time -- I will be in the coming months, suffice to say for the time being that one must be extremely careful if they think that the Kelly Criterion is giving them the optimal fractin to risk in trading. More often than not, it is giving them something different and very dangerous.

<comment><AUTHOR> First, I really appreciate your politeness in the discussion. One huge mis-use I can think of in using a Kelly type system would be to use past frequencies directly as your probabilities. At best this would give you the CAPM and at worst it would give you a disastrous "momentum trade" strategy. The Kelly System is a little sneaky in that it assumes you have good estimates of the probabilities of future events. So when the system fails it can turn around and say that you had bad estimates or un-modeled dependencies.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 experience on iPad Vs Nexus One - <AUTHOR>

iPad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4
Nexus One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUw7RyBrZA
Flash on Nexus One: http://vimeo.com/9596010 <comment><USER2> The Flash on Nexus One video is pretty impressive.

If this is the true user experience when it gets released to consumers, that would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> great comparison. You should have put this together in a blog entry or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr? I'm not really a video guy.

<comment><USER5> TL;DR: HTML5's canvassed animations are very slow (on the given mobile devices), Flash on Android is adequately speedy.</comment></comment>


48 Hours that reinvented democracy for the world   - <AUTHOR>

48 Hours that reinvented democracy for the world
Riga, Latvia, 20/11/1985 — It took a team of 8 young people from 5 different countries just 48 hours to completely transform the meaning of democracy.
At a programming start-up event known as Garage48.org where teams are formed to deliver finished products within 48 hours, the team managed to create a service that they call Groupocracy.org.
Radical as it may be, they brought to life a product which enables citizens of any country to not only vote on any parliamentary decision, but to also collaborate and successfully draft and revise documents.
Using an interactive voting system they provide an easy to understand overview on the popularity of issues, documents and even segments and clauses within the documents.  They also gathered data on every political decision in Latvia from 2009 and can show exactly how each member of parliament votes, coupled with a high number of very interesting statistics.
What is even more fascinating is that the first country of choice – Latvia is already well on the way to making such services legally binding. Should the law pass, any online petition with 10,000 or more votes will have to be discussed in the parliament.
The team consists of Dmitri Dimitrijev, Armands Leimanis, Eriks Remess, Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, Konstantinos Anagnostopoulos, Kirils Solovjovs, Vitalijs Gaicuks and Andrejs Jurcenoks. With their plan to introduce wiki-like collaboration and to maybe even start a political party, this project is the one to watch in the coming year.
Contact:
Dmitri Dimitrijev
Groupocracy.org
+3725138135
firstname.lastname@example.com
 www.groupocracy.org
### <comment><USER2> Software that democratizes democracy?

Sure, why not.

Power to the People!</comment>


Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/amazon-drone/ <comment><USER2> Whenever I see one of these articles, I can't believe how narrow the author's view of the world is that they can't imagine these drones actually working.

Imagine if they put a small warehouse in a big city, filled with their most commonly sold items in that city. (For now we'll pretend the warehouse/dronepad is on the roof of their Seattle headquarters, right in the center of Seattle)

I can SEE Amazon's buildings from my apartment right now. It's probably a mile or two as the crow (or drone) flies. That seems well within the range of what Bezos talked about for Prime Air. I also have a rooftop deck on my building that only residents can access. It's pretty big and would be a perfect place for a drone landing pad.

There are probably a hundred similar apartment buildings all within a 10 mile radius of Amazon. They would all be able to easily handle drone deliveries from this small, centralized, micro-warehouse.

Can commercial drones handle straight line flying with building sized object avoidance over a space of a couple miles? I think so.

Will they "in a few years" just like Bezos said? Absolutely.

Just because it won't work in rural south dakota or the suburbs of Detroit Michigan, doesn't mean that it won't work somewhere.

Like the author said, Amazon trialed fresh for FIVE years before taking it out of Seattle. What's to say they won't do the same thing with Prime Air?

(Just in case anyone is wondering, I don't work for Amazon)

<comment><USER3> Small warehouses in big cities still cost a lot of money. Land is expensive in big cities, and even small warehouses are pretty large.

Warehouses -- even small ones -- also need to be able to take goods IN. They need truck-accessible streets, loading docks, and they need staff who store, and then pick/pack/ship your goods. Small warehouses that handle high-turnover goods need even more staff, since they need to constantly replenish themselves (since they're small, and can't just take a hundred thousand units in once a month, and since we're stipulating that the goods are high-turnover and leave the warehouse quickly).

It's expensive. Amazon has wonderful warehousing and distribution, which only goes to show that they aren't actually naïve about how expensive it is. Which goes to show that the drone delivery thing was a publicity stunt.

Too small a warehouse, and you don't deliver the customer satisfaction that is presumably the point of a drone delivery, because a trivial number of goods actually get delivered to customers. (Especially since we're talking very small goods in the first place).

<comment><USER4> > Small warehouses in big cities still cost a lot of money. Land is expensive > in big cities, and even small warehouses are pretty large.

They don't have to be downtown.

Regardless, you're thinking about this the wrong way. As a service that must serve everyone and deliver everything instead of as an opportunistic service, which is a smarter way to approach the problem from a business perspective.

Amazon already has warehouses, fulfillment centers, in several major metro areas.

Let me state that again, because it's hugely important. Amazon already has warehouses in some cities. They have to have their FCs somewhere, and the places where they are, like Seattle, already have a comparative advantage when it comes to fulfillment of commonly stocked items.

This changes the problem dramatically. It transforms it from: buy high priced land in major cities, build FCs there, set up drone operations; to: set up drone operations in a few cities where you already have large, well stocked warehouses, and then pilot the program opportunistically in those cities. Then expand the program to other cities depending on how successful and profitable the pilot program turns out to be.

This is business 101, you leverage what you've already got to mitigate risk and reduce development and acquisition costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article strikes me as a bit naive and overly cynical at the same time. I research, build and fly "drones". There is no question the technology now "hobby grade" will make the jump to industrial within maybe 2 years. What is really lacking to them is areospace efficiency, and computer science. All the most popular software and hardware to date was mostly written or built by tinkerers and RC aficionados, not computer science and areospace industry leading professionals.

You can get an article circulated by badmouthing the hottest tech news, but in this case, it's just a bad misleading article with little basis in truth.

Also the government just opened 6 commercial testing zones, and the FAA just laxed some of the regulations regarding commercial UAV experimentation and flight. Note that these moves happened at lightening speed for the government. Just weeks ago it was illegal for a company to fly with out FAA clearance and a pilots license. This is going to happen. I believe Amazon or Google are the most well positioned to make it happen.

Not only is Amazon talking about introducing drones, it's also entertaining the idea of making UPS or FedEx strictly Business2Business enterprise, as Amazon would be handling the final leg of delivery ultimately to the customers door. I haven't heard anyone mention anything about this. Personally, as bicyclist living in NYC, I can't wait until those disgusting aggressively driven diesel delivery trucks are moved to the strap yard, replaced by the distant buzz of a battery operated drone army.

Also to correct the inaccuracy presented in the article. The drones will be the final leg of the package journey, not the mid term. They will fly maybe 10 miles max, with a top speed of maybe 60 mph max within a city, not, 120 miles from city to city. It will start in one city like Amazon Fresh, and then 2 or 3 more years after that. Not every city all at once like the article insinuates then points out would be impossible. One city with in 5 years still makes Amazons plan a success and it makes this article completely wrong.

<comment><USER6>
      I research, build and fly "drones".

Great, maybe you can bring some information to the discussion.

For the type of drone you are best informed about, what is the maximum round trip flying range, assuming you adjusted the weight of batteries to maximise flying range and there was no wind and no worries about radio range or line of sight?

What about if you were carrying a 1 lbs / 0.5 kg payload in the outbound direction?

What would the round trip time and average flight speed be?

What would the retail cost of such a drone be, if I wanted to order a kit today?

<comment><USER7> I'll add a few questions:

\- Can you ensure safe failure modes for your in-flight drones?

\- Who assumes liability when your drones crash?

\- What is the blade tip speed during operation? What precautions do you take when flying in populated areas?

<comment><USER8> I'm not the original asker but these seem to have obvious first-draft answers:

\- Add rotors. The demo video showed an 8-rotor drone, I can imagine that building it as a pair of parallel quad rotors from the power supply point of view would give you quite a bit of control even at a 50% loss. A single-engine loss is obviously fairly small beans. I'm emphatically not an expert so this is armchair engineering.

\- I don't know why anyone would ask this question. The answer is trivially obvious (the operator of the drone, whichever legal entity that ends up being modulo whatever insurance they certainly have). Obviously "it could crash" is hardly novel in other delivery services and yet they seem to survive the liability question without issue.

\- Probably quite dangerous. I imagine you want to fly quite high for cruising for obstacle-avoidance and noise anyway so 90% of your distance this isn't a problem. I think the answer here is "don't hit people" just like with existing forms of transportation (or more realistically "be as careful about not hitting people as your liability insurance continues to reward you for").

<comment><USER9> >Add rotors. The demo video showed an 8-rotor drone, I can imagine that building it as a pair of parallel quad rotors from the power supply point of view would give you quite a bit of control even at a 50% loss. A single-engine loss is obviously fairly small beans. I'm emphatically not an expert so this is armchair engineering.

Well, the thing about a multirotor is that a motor failure is going to drastically throw off the stability of the aircraft. The controller would have to be able to recognize the failure, kill the faulty rotor hub, and compensate on the remaining motors in _very_ short order to keep the airframe from getting so far off balance that it tumbles out of the sky.

Though, honestly, I'd think the controller or battery failing is a more likely mode of failure than one of the brushless motors suddenly dying.

<comment><USER10> The controller is already responding to changes in balance at an extremely high rate. How do you think these things fly in the first place?

Like an earlier poster acknowledged, the current hobby grade gear is not really engineered with industrial use in mind, but that's a fairly simple engineering problem which has already been solved by the groups who _are_ using drones commercially (i.e. the military)

I have no doubt what so ever that Amazon, Google etc have the engineering chops to bring the software and hardware being used in drones up to an industrial grade.

Don't assume that because the first thing that you thought of upon hearing "delivery drones" is infeasible that the whole idea is unworkable. It just needs an engineer with a little more imagination

Edit: a couple of obvious solutions to your battery/controller failure mode would be a) use redundant controllers. They're small enough that you could easily have two or more running in tandem and checking eachothers integrity, and b) if you lose main battery you can autorotate down and land somewhere reasonably safe. If you use EDFs/shrouded blades they aren't a safety issue, and building a map of safe landing zones for a city is not a huge ask for somebody like Google.

Now for somebody else willing to use their imagination: what do you do about cheeky individuals interfering with your drone during delivery?

<comment><USER9> >The controller is already responding to changes in balance at an extremely high rate. How do you think these things fly in the first place?

You really don't see how there's a huge difference between balancing thrust between relatively equal power sources and losing so much thrust that the aircraft is inherently unstable?

Because that's kind of a huge issue - multirotors fundamentally rely on having power at each corner for aerodynamic stability. Even brief loss of power to one is going to put you into a tumbling state _with no way to compensate_ for it.

>that's a fairly simple engineering problem which has already been solved by the groups who are using drones commercially (i.e. the military)

What multirotor UAS systems does the military have in service for reliable flight over moderate distances?

I'd also take issue with the suggestion that controlling an aircraft which has become unstable over an axis that you no longer have control over is "a simple engineering problem."

>They're small enough that you could easily have two or more running in tandem and checking eachothers integrity

I was referring to the speed controllers that convert the battery power to AC for the brushless motors. I'd expect commercial grade ESCs to be overbuilt, but they put out a good bit of heat that has to be engineered around. They're also one of the more common modes of failure for the brushless motor systems used in mutlirotors.

>It just needs an engineer with a little more imagination

This is the equivalent to saying "we're going to magic away any problems with this idea."

EDIT:

I missed this.

> If you use EDFs

Seriously? Do you even realize how terrible a suggestion that is? EDFs are even worse in terms of energy efficiency and they'd compound stability issues since they have relatively poor throttle response.

But I suppose we can imagine those problems away too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nonsense? Hardly. One thing people tend to struggle with when new technology comes around is that it has a different set of tradeoffs and advantages/disadvantages than the current dominant technology. But that doesn't make it inferior or impractical, just different.

Consider horses vs. automobiles, for example. Horses conveniently can be bred, so owning a horse can potentially give you more value than just having a means of transport or labor. Horses can also be trained for a variety of tasks, they can get better at their job over time. Horses are also excellent at traveling along uneven ground. They can travel along city streets or country roads and dirt paths or through forests and open fields or even through mountain passes. In comparison, cars, especially early cars like the model T, are inferior to horses in a great many ways. But it turns out that the few key advantages of automobiles are more than sufficient to make up for the down sides, which is why automobiles won out.

Similarly, if you imagine that drones must be a 100% drop in replacement for FedEx/UPS you'll rapidly come to the idea that the whole endeavor must be nonsense. But if instead drones only provide a complementary service then they can still be a feasible addition to delivery options. Even if drones only delivered high priced orders (say, more than $1k) to businesses with special drone landing spots it would still likely be a profitable and successful venture. Being able to have something delivered the same day in mere hours is a game changer in a lot of ways.

Imagine how much that would put Amazon even more into the existing business space of, say, home depot, as a simple example. If a home builder could order a replacement circular saw to be delivered to the work site in an hour without having to send someone out to a store that's a big deal. And there are countless examples of where the value of having some durable good delivered as soon as possible is immense, and would more than justify exorbitant drone delivery fees.

<comment><USER11> Great post.

Your Home Depot reference made me think of the 24x7 propane dispensers that are in front of many Home Depots. Enter your credit card, put your old tank in the cage, take a fresh tank and you've got propane. It costs more, but adds convenience.

Amazon could easily partner with smaller-box retailers like CVS, Walgreen's, supermarkets or convenience stores to make store branches drone delivery points. If I need a Macbook Air or a circular saw now, I pay $25 and a 5 minute drive/walk to the drugstore for pickup vs. driving to the mall or waiting two days.

<comment><USER4> Amazon already has something similar for non-drone deliveries called Amazon Locker, which is actually pretty useful. But you make a good point. Drone deliveries are just one way to cut down on delivery latency. The continued existence of brick and mortar stores is a good example of the value of low latency delivery, often at a high premium. If you can spend the money that would have been spent on storefront rent, attendant wages, and distributed inventory instead on drone systems then maybe in some cases it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Correct me if I'm wrong, but they didn't propose doing same-day delivery for all items that they sell. They proposed doing it for their most commonly sold items. So instead of needing huge warehouse holding all of their items in urban centers, they can keep those farther out and only put smaller warehouses holding a smaller selection of their most commonly sold items in the urban centers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Trucks deliver bulk from distribution hubs to small 'drone stations' and the last mile (almost literally) would be by drone. Maybe even from a mobile drone station, i.e. big truck with drone manager and driver who stay in the truck unless there is a problem.

<comment><USER14> Human augmentation rather than replacement is key (at least in the early stages). Imagine a delivery truck with a set of drones on top. As the human drives (for now) and delivers, the human also racks up packages that the drones can deliver. In between deliveries the drones charge from the truck and when the truck heads back to base the drones who don't need maintenance tasks fly to the next incoming truck.

UPS in my neighborhood has done something similar in Christmases past--they have trucks bringing in bulk and bicycle delivery doing house by house. I didn't notice it this year; I don't know if it was a failed experiment or if I just missed seeing them.

War is Boring has an interesting post about using unmanned aircraft as a weapon-truck wing-man instead of an independent operator: [https://medium.com/war-is-boring/64b87d155545](https://medium.com/war-is- boring/64b87d155545)

<comment><USER15> I think a variation of your idea is a winner. The top of the delivery truck can have lots of instrumentation to determine whether the final approach is safe, and help guide the landing. The human does the last 50 feet of delivery.

A computer can know exactly where the trucks are and when they will be in the vicinity. The delivery time can be fairly accurately estimated on the spot.

In an urban environment, bikes could do the last mile, with the robots delivered to pre-designated drop off points. A predetermined location would be easy on the computer.

But I think your idea works better in a suburban zone. The trucks exist and are constantly driving around. It is a question of how to re-prioritize the work on the fly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some people underestimate the value of serving "I need X _now_ , take my money already!" Small warehouses stocking high-value-density high-urgency items (memory cards, camera batteries, etc) delivered _fast_ at high price would, direct profit aside, generate stark raging goodwill and intense consumer loyalty.

<comment><USER17> Isn't it still cheaper and easier to dispatch a bike messenger from that small warehouse instead of a drone?

<comment><USER15> The practical answer is probably to blend the technologies. In an urban environment, the bikes do the last mile. Very small drop off points with tiny specialized helipads would accept a stream of fast deliveries from the more distant real warehouses. Since the routes would be established, the computer technology demands would be modest.

Get the package to the drop off point in 30-60 minutes by quad-copter. Get the package from there by bike in 30-60 minutes. There would be uncertainty based on the availability of human messengers, but routes and delivery times can be estimated/calculated by computer. "Estimated delivery in 79 minutes. Click yes?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That sixty minutes thing will surely be remembered as the best value for money in PR for 100 years.

<comment><USER19> That's _exactly_ it. And more: it stole the headlines in the exact weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. How clever is that?

What's even more impressive: they hand-picked a story that is so good that even months after the pseudo-hoax went public, you still have hundreds (thousands?) of really smart folks on HN and other forums discussing the feasibility of the idea, the economics, or if an hex-copter wouldn't be better than a quad...

And just think about the wave of CS students applying for a job at Amazon, "because I want to work on cool projects". Certainly more cost effective than driverless cars.

Amazon Prime Air is already a success. They don't need to fly anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As much as I don't want to hear drones buzzing around (would be horrible IMO) what if Walmart starts to shut stores because the cost of doing business is too high and they can't compete with Amazon? What if say the minimum wage rises to $15, cost of gas rises astronomically, too many lawsuits, unions, whatever. Robots don't sue. Remember all the businesses that were destroyed because of Walmart's lower prices. If Amazon can deliver lower prices by drone, grandmas everywhere might demand drone delivery for cheaper hearing aid batteries. If Amazon can take out Walmart, maybe drone delivery is not that far off. I hope it doesn't happen but like I heard one analyst say (regarding drones) on Bloomberg radio: "It's not if, but when."

</comment><comment><USER21> Author pointed out three problems with drones:

1\. Battery life is insufficient. This one is true, batteries are not there yet.

2\. Warehouses are far from target areas. This one is true as well, in order to make drones work warehouses/dispatch centers should be fairly close by. One solution would be to utilize hyperloop kind of system to quickly deliver drones to where they need to go.

3\. Problem with delivering. This one is super simple. Make drone subscription costs high and deliver to customer a drop off pad. Make a clause in prime air agreement that you must find enough open space on private land for drop off pad to serve as drone beacon and unload zone. Drop off pad can have RFID/other location beacons that would let drone know exactly where it is.

TL:DR author is right, while this can be built right now - it is simply not economical, and likely will not become economical in near future due to point #2 above.

</comment><comment><USER22> "everything that can be invented has been invented.", Charles H. Duell US Patent Office Commissioner 1899

Based on history, it's always unwise to say that something futuristic can't be done.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is just like the Segway rollout hype all over again. Segways turned out to be real (self balancing and all, except they turned out to have two wheels instead of one wheel) but are very niche. I'd bet drone delivery will also exist eventually, but it will also be very niche.

</comment><comment><USER24> Of course it will happen. The fed needs the technology for its ongoing insurrection suppression preparation (DEA, ATF, NSA, etc.) and would have to come out of the closet to develop and deploy a network of sufficient size to be effective at its task. Amazon is the perfect front.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'll bet in a short time, we'll see usage of drones inside the warehouses to sort out packages and load them onto trucks for long hauls more efficiently (and with less labor cost) than what's currently being done by humans.

</comment><comment><USER26> What if instead of building warehouses, you offer to outfit most local stores with helipads / charging stations and POS data interchange so that orders from amazon can be fulfilled via local stores that then load and launch drones?

</comment><comment><USER27> Even if it is nonsense you can't buy this kind of press. It is a success either way.</comment>


Ask YC - comprehensive image gallery software - <AUTHOR>

This is probably the wrong place to ask but I've been looking around for great image gallery software before I resort to building my own or hiring a fellow hacker with more time on their hands.
I want to expand my site with a place to put all the images from my reviews and so on. I love what weblogs inc has done with their recent image gallery revamp: http://www.autoblog.com/photos/detroit-2008-desktop-wallpaper-gallery/586793/
Particularly I'm looking for something that can auto-watermark - probably imagemagick-based. For clarification this would be hosted on my server and fully integrated within my setup.
would love any feedback <comment><USER2> Have you considered the Drupal framework? For an example, check out <http://www.flippr.net/> for a Flickr clone that was built in a weekend.

To a great extent, Drupal can be seen as a point-and-click website development kit. Assembling pieces like like the image, watermark, lightbox and other modules like postcard and image notes can provide the pieces you're looking for. Being modular in design, this installation of Drupal could start its life as a simple image gallery but later grow to become a full website with features like an OpenID provider, BitTorrent tracker, Digg-like voting, etc.

There's also excellent Menalto Gallery2 integration, but Gallery2 may or may not be what you're looking for.</comment>


Choosing between a PhD and industry for new computer science graduates - <AUTHOR> https://www.shreya-shankar.com/new-grad-advice/ <comment><USER2> The existential angst at crossroads that never goes away. Good luck.</comment>


Paul Graham Responds To Critics, Says YC is Planning Event For Female Founders - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/30/paul-graham-responds-to-critics/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a EXCELLENT move by Y Combinator. This should settle the issue. This gives the females more ammunition to compete in the real world. Thank you Paul Graham.</comment>


Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace <comment><USER2> Props for a great readme as well. I wish more open source included at least a screenshot so you can see what it actually is.

<comment><USER3> I oftentimes don't know if asking for screenshots is appropriate as I have no idea what's the software is about; so, whenever there are screenshots, I get a sense of relief.

<comment><USER4> I believe asking and could even warrant openning an issue with said repo!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also remember 'mars.com', that I guess I found on some bbs, which was basically just the terrain renderer you could roam about in a very basic heightmap that was coloured to resemble mars. I think I saw that before comanche, and it was _fast_ on fairly mediocre pc back then.

I don't know if it is just me and the appeal to the stuff I grew up with, but I find the style of the visual artefacts a lot more appealing than in many more modern rendering techniques. Perhaps it is just the simplicity of it.

<comment><USER6> After seeing 'mars.com' I decided to write write a game using that terrain algorithm. I never finished the game, but here is a video of one of my tests: [https://www.facebook.com/magoghm/videos/10153819968108735/Uz...](https://www.facebook.com/magoghm/videos/10153819968108735/UzpfSTY3NzQ3ODczNDpWSzoxMDE1MzgxOTk2ODEwODczNQ/)

<comment><USER7> I get "The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed." \- likely you've not made the content "public"

<comment><USER6> I don't know why you get that message. The content is set to 'public'. I just tested it on another computer, without login into Facebook, and it worked fine.

<comment><USER8> I can confirm it works here. Very low resolution, but watchable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great article.

I wonder at the speed of this on a modern machine vs an assembly version running in dos on a 1992 machine. A benchmark of interpreted code on a modern OS + machine vs bare metal native code written in the 1992 style on an old machine would be interesting.

I remember when Comanche came out... the 1990s were like the Heyday of flight sim games and Comanche was mind-blowing at the time as a teen. They were my favorite by far type of game. At some point it feels like they really died out. There were a lot of games that had a happy medium of fun vs realistic/complex back then.

At some point the # of flight sim type games plummeted and the ones that stuck around bifurcated into hyper-realistic to the point they are a time suck (cause you could be using an actual real flight sim for real flight training) or they are hopelessly unrealistic and no fun compared to the old stuff.

Not sure but I might disagree with the author about Comanche being 3 years ahead of it's time. It might have been closer to 5 years ahead of it's time. You didn't get stuff that really blew it away till hardware acceleration became prevalent, but by that time 3D FPS games were demolishing the flight sim market.

<comment><USER10> In those days games came with hefty manuals. I particularly remember learning the rudiments of flying a helicopter from Gunship's manual.

You can see for yourself on this PDF, starting on page 38:

[http://www.simwarrior.com/gunship/utilities/GSManUK.pdf](http://www.simwarrior.com/gunship/utilities/GSManUK.pdf)

Edit: this is Comanche's manual:

[http://www.starehry.eu/download/simulation/docs/Comanche- Man...](http://www.starehry.eu/download/simulation/docs/Comanche-Manual.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Didn't they just? Microprose and Digital Integration in particular were the masters back then for this stuff - I remember the Project Stealth Fighter (C64, ZX Spectrum in around 1987) and then the Tornado (PC) manuals with particular fondness, covering laser guided toss bombing and all sorts of stuff.

I'm amazed to discover that Tornado has gone open source and is still being modded by people: [http://www.moodurian.com/](http://www.moodurian.com/)

[https://archive.org/details/Project_Stealth_Fighter_1987_Mic...](https://archive.org/details/Project_Stealth_Fighter_1987_Microprose_Software/page/n5) for another blast from the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A bit of self-promo, but for those interested I also am using a variation of this algorithm powered by compute shaders. See [https://twitter.com/voxelquest](https://twitter.com/voxelquest). If you scroll down a bit, you can even see versions using the maps from Comanche shown in this demo. :)

(Also, thank you @s-macke, your github page taught me the fundamentals of the algorithm - previously I had only seen Ken Silverman's post on wave surfing, which was not nearly as clear).

<comment><USER13> Aha, I've been following your main account but didn't know this one existed. Definitely impressive!

<comment><USER12> Haha, yep, because this account retweets gavanw and not the other way around. But the links are cleverly "hidden" in my profile. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here is my simple port of VoxelSpace (74 sloc). Written in Python 3, no additional libraries required.

[https://github.com/true-grue/terrain](https://github.com/true-grue/terrain)

Looks like Python+Tkinter is a good demoscene platform where you have performance of graphics close to 286/EGA :)

<comment> s-macke The 20 lines mentioned in the headline refer to the render algorithm itself, not including all the code for map loading, input handling, line drawing and html/css. Basically the lines 51 to 71 in your code.

<comment><USER14> Sure, my code is only a demonstration that you can fit everything in <100 lines. I remember that there were some sceptics in older HN discussions on this topic... :)

Again, thank you very much for all your education reverse engineering works!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There were also tricks to extend this simple rendering algorithm to allow limited rotations around the other two axes, to look up / down slightly (just move everything up / down; also implemented in the demo here) and to "lean" when steering left / right (just move everything up / down proportional to the distance from the center of the screen; not implemented in the demo here, but visible in the 1992 NovaLogic Comanche example GIF).

There were Turbo Pascal versions of this on websites in the 90s I think, but it seems they were lost.

<comment> s-macke Indeed, look up / down is very simple implemented. Just alter the horizon line position. This works for the human eye for small deviations such as ±20°, but will lead to perspective distortions for higher angles.

<comment><USER15> Same with leaning. Add one more line of code and tweak the draw call:

        var ylean = (input.leftright*(i/screenwidth-0.5) + 0.5) * screendata.canvas.height / 4;
        DrawVerticalLine(i, heightonscreen+ylean, hiddeny[i]+ylean, map.color[mapoffset]);

It adds a lot to the "feeling" IMO :)

<comment> s-macke Cool, that works!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> @s-macke very cool article, it brings me back. :) Thanks for the write up.

Regarding speeding it up & drawing front-to-back, didn't some games do a back- to-front with some kind of bounds on how far down they draw? That way you get speed up without needing the y-buffer memory. I remember that in some games you could sometimes see cracks in the terrain, and I'm guessing from my faded memory that it was bounding the vertical draw. Not entirely sure if I'm remembering seeing cracks in sprite-drawn terrain though.

I was also wondering about the "Rotation" animated gif example, some extra mountains show up on the right side in the 360 spin for a couple of frames while the camera is passing the far end of the river, just before the pyramid comes into view. Is that just a bug, or is it something about the algorithm that's tricky to fix?

<comment><USER15> Even drawing front-to-back you don't need the y-buffer, if you switch the loops: for x ... for y ...

Another trick I now remember was to interpolate the color values on such a y-segment, to reduce the pixelated look.

<comment> s-macke Indeed, switching the loops is valid and might or might not give you an additional speedup. I had hoped, that someone figures this out :-). However I think in order to understand the basic algorithm the way in the readme is the better one.

<comment><USER17> Do you know of referenceable pseudocode (or real code) for that somewhere? I've tried modifying your code to switch the loops, but it always comes out garbled; clearly I'm messing up somewhere in the refactoring process, but I don't have enough experience with this algorithm to figure out where!

<comment> s-macke A render routine with exchanged for loops looks like this.

[https://www.pastiebin.com/5e10d48ac6595](https://www.pastiebin.com/5e10d48ac6595)

Just exchange the Render() method in my VoxelSpace.html file with the pastie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This was a very pleasant read and brought back fond memories of the days of Novalogic Commanche and the followup Commanche 3D, which was one of my favoured network games back in the day - many a Friday afternoon spent blasting co-workers out of the sky ..

Voxels are a pretty neat graphics technology. For the fans of such style, Voxatron (from Lexaloffle, the PICO8 crew) is a pretty great environment for experimenting with the subject - its a fun game, but also a neat design/experimentation environment as well... [https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php](https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php)

<comment><USER19> Also brought to mind Vista and VistaPro scenery generation / terrain rendering programs. Used to play with them a lot to produce pictures. Terragen is the only program I know of in that space these days.

<comment><USER20> I had VistaPro with the Mars maps on my Amiga 2000 and 1200 back in the early 90s; I should dig those machines out someday (no idea if the floppies still work, tho - I have tons of Fred Fish stuff, too)...

<comment><USER18> Do it. Mars awaits! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is _really_ nice. Captures that Comanche feel I had playing the original game many, many years ago on my first VGA card. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Same. I find it amazing about how much can be achieved with so little. Even more so now that games require computing power that rivals the supercomputers humans had when these games were released.

Another World (Out Of This World) featured a couple of days ago hightlights this also, imho.

And fun, I had plenty while playing these games. Increasing computing power improves immersion and realism, which certainly improves the entertainment; but the fun? Not obvious to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Brings back memories of playing Novalogic Comanche with a Logitech WingMan Extreme. It was an amazing experience at the time. That game was really far ahead of its time.

I really like the animations that illustrate how the algorithms render the final result.

<comment><USER23> Used a Logitech Wingman 3D... Win10 doesn't even recognize it as a device.

Low priority to find a current flight stick.

<comment><USER24> Is that a gameport or USB device? Looks like there are a bunch of adapters out there which will allow legacy gameport sticks/pads to represent themselves as modern xinput controllers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Really cool project! If you like artsy and short code snippets [https://twitter.com/hashtag/tweetcart](https://twitter.com/hashtag/tweetcart) is also a great source of awe.

<comment><USER26> Also dwitter.net

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is the kind of 3d engines I was making as a teen. The way it works is that you iterate over x screen-space, get a "ray"/"slice", then you iterate over z camera-space (goes inward) using that ray. From there, you have what it takes to sample a heightmap. Draw a vertical line. There is plenty of room for optimizations and it's very good for learning to code.

<comment><USER20> It seems like this code would be fairly easy to add to a simple 2.5D raycaster (either a cube variant like the old Wolfenstein, or something more advanced like Doom/Doom 2) to give some variation (or more "natural" stuff) for indoor/"outdoor" scenes.

It really isn't much different from floor/ceiling rendering code.

Something else I was thinking was if you flipped it upside down (and kept the current view), you could render "caves"; heck, it probably wouldn't take much effort to mod the current code to achieve this.

Somewhere I have code to a voxel rendering engine someone made in QBasic; they posted a demo of it on youtube, but never posted the code - I got in contact with them, and they sent me a copy of the code. The interesting thing they did, though, was add voxel rendering of "buildings" \- you could easily go inside spaces and outside, all voxel rendered, and it was fast (for QB code).

Note - I know about Ken Silverman's voxel and other 3D engines he did in QB (and posted his old code), prior to Duke Nukem 3D - but this wasn't that code; it was completely original...

Anyhow - this is a great little "3D" engine; I'm glad it was posted!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This was nice, here is a code[1] for Python Fractal Mountain Landscape in 20 lines i.e. if you ignore the Mayavi import.

P.S. This code is not mine, the author has made an effort after seeing the documentary on fractals.

[1][https://github.com/dafarry/python-fractal- landscape](https://github.com/dafarry/python-fractal-landscape)

</comment><comment><USER29> I was just wondering what other metrics are there for code other than 'lines of code'

Cus I could write some stuff in one line of code. But that one line would be horrendously unmaintainable.

What metrics are there for maintainability (the most important aspect of code imo)

If there was a hard measure you could put on granularity for example.. Instead of saying hey I wrote this in 10 lines, you'd say hey I wrote this with 90 fleeborps of granularity! its super-maintainable!

ps. Not meant as a sly criticism of this. I have not even looked at the code. Just the 'lines of code' in the title sparked that thought. This thing is awesome! Just a few days ago I was chcking out Commanche Maximum overkill videos.. in 1992 that was mindblowing!

</comment><comment><USER30> Fantastic description of how voxel rendering works with a really great illustration, I had no idea it was that "simple". I remember the Comanche game mentioned in the README, it was amzaing graphically for the time!

</comment><comment><USER31> The way the slices render in the image examples reminded me of TerraGen and setting my computer to render a simple animation overnight while I slept, and hoping it didn't crash.

<comment><USER32> Terragen is still going strong but it's been about 15 years since I played with it.

I remember it taking about an hour per 800x600 frame, and then we got a new computer and it only took 3-4 minutes per frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I find the 2D color maps beautiful for some reason, despite their simplicity.

Was these hand drawn by an artist or generated in some way? Any info about it exists?

<comment> s-macke Ever since I played Comanche, I've been asking myself the same thing. I guess they had some real elevation maps and pictures as a base and then made manual changes to add periodicity and color. A half-manual and half-algorithmic approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This repo helped me when I was implementing my own 2.5D voxel engine. I definitely recommend tearing through it for anyone interested.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ingenious! The terrain looks realistic for such a simple technique, specially w/ well chosen colours (check the C13 and C16 maps on the live demo).

</comment><comment><USER36> How many more lines do you need if you want to capture the natural "roughness", but you also want to guarantee some plateaus, such a for building on in a simulation game?

Or, to put that another way: what does the code in Sim City 2000's terrain generator look like? Because it's _almost_ just doing this, but then it has that one extra thing...

<comment><USER37> Sim City is 2000 is isometric, it doesn't have perspective. You just need to overlay 2d bitmaps of the prerendered tiles and assets on top, drawn back to front, bottom to top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I recently implemented the painters algorithm in a modern-ish way: using atomic ops in a compute shader. That's one of the rendering techniques for the terrain in [https://github.com/kvark/vange-rs](https://github.com/kvark/vange- rs)

</comment><comment><USER39> If you use Brave you have to enable device recognition attempts or you won't see anything. [https://i.imgur.com/QYIBFVO.png](https://i.imgur.com/QYIBFVO.png)

</comment><comment><USER40> Very cool. I've ported it and played around a bit now. Anybody got any pointers on how I might add arbitrary flat sprites like trees to the mix?

</comment><comment><USER41> Love the readme, maybe that is the star of the show

</comment><comment><USER42> It seems that stuff randomly appears/disappears between the horizon and some line that substitutes for the real horizon.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is there a practical way to achieve better draw distance? The horizon seems superficially low.

<comment><USER44> Draw distance can be as high as you want, you just need a big enough map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Very cool. Reminds me of reading the now-defunct Game Developer magazine years ago.

<comment><USER46> I'll have to check out some of the old issues, I thought it was more of an industry magazine and not covering algorithms or coding.

Archive.org has most (all?) issues in a collection: [https://archive.org/details/game_developer_magazine](https://archive.org/details/game_developer_magazine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I still remember the Comanche feelings :D It was glorious

</comment><comment><USER48> Keyboard controls not working for anyone else?

<comment><USER49> I was confused by this too. Clicking and dragging with the mouse (or at least touchpad) works for navigation. The HTML canvas element key events aren't working (maybe they worked . in older browsers). There is an open PR that hooks window events instead (I made similar edits locally that make it work). [https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace/pull/13](https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace/pull/13). The distance rendering works once you move and force a redraw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> All these " _X_ in less than _Y_ lines of code" efforts strike me as fundamentally misguided because they seem to confuse succinct notation (short code) with efficient computation. To whit: there's absolutely nothing preventing anybody whipping together a _de facto_ DSL wherein one can call a single render_terrain( ) function and get the task done with a single token, particularly in today's environment of dime-a-dozen new programming languages.

<comment><USER51> I think any piece of code falls on a spectrum, somewhere between "software engineering" (efficient, well documented, etc) and "art" (interesting to look at in some way, someone had fun making it, etc).

The two ends of the spectrum serve completely different purposes but I think both deserve to be appreciated! Just for different reasons. This post (IMO) veers pretty close to the "art" side of the spectrum, so it doesn't make much sense to talk about its efficiency.

<comment><USER50> It's probably not so much a spectrum as it is a pair of orthogonal axes.</comment></comment></comment>


Adrian Lamo has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/adrian-lamo-hacker-dies/ <comment><USER2> Sorry, this story isn't very interesting, but it really stuck with me nonetheless, and I wanted to share.

Adrian had a passing romance with a friend of mine, and thus ended up traveling through the city I grew up in. This was long before Chelsea Manning, etc.

I was a super shy, rather awkward teenage girl. I suppose the teenage part has changed.. but I digress. I loved the idea of mischief, but at the same time, I was a habitual rule-follower. I get nervous walking through the retail store detectors placed at entrances.. even though I've never stolen anything in my life. I remember listening to social engineering phone pranks -- the sort where people would talk their way into being put on the store-wide intercom at Walmart. At the time, I think I really wanted to be so confident that I could do such a thing, versus the reality, which was mild anxiety over something so simple as placing a legit pizza order over the phone.

I knew who Adrian was in a peripheral sense. I was a community leader and eventual employee on AOL in years prior, and I had an interest in how to break things as an inverse of being curious how they're built.

I had a car, while my friend did not, and Adrian had traveled via transit, so I spent the day with them hopping around town. At one point, we were downtown grabbing food in one of the larger complexes -- Adrian breaks off for a second and asks a retail store employee a bunch of questions about working there, saying he was just hired at the cafe. We then ended up going into what was clearly an employee-only area -- GUYS WE AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE WHAT IF WE GET IN TROUBLE OH GOD -- we duck into a fire escape, hike up to the upper level where he picks the lock to the door with roof access, and there we are, highest point in the city. After a few minutes of me suggesting that MAYBE we go back down since this was cool BUT REALLY WE SHOULD GO, Adrian told me I'd miss the sunset if I kept worrying.

It was dumb. I'm sure I could've been arrested. But watching the sunset with the two of them from the top of that building remains one of my favorite memories. It was the first time I'd taken a step out of my shell, I suppose. Adrian was a troubled guy, and I don't forgive what he did to Manning, but I appreciated him for that moment in time.

<comment><USER3> This is a good description of the kind of hacker Adrian was. He wasn't a write finely crafted shell code to exploit a buffer overflow in an application or deep knowledge of the esoterica of how CPUs function Spectre Meltdown kind of hacker. He'd just try the knob on a door he wasn't supposed to go through and surprise it was open.

<comment><USER4> well, to be fair, he didn't plenty of that too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At a user's suggestion, we changed the URL from [https://www.facebook.com/groups/majordomo/permalink/10156204...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/majordomo/permalink/10156204603994522/) to avoid the painful contrast between an internet forum controversy and a father's grief over the death of his son.

I've turned off flags on this story because if we don't, the story will be reposted until we do. In return, here's a request: if you comment here, try to bring your heart with you a bit more than you usually would.

If we don't do that, a sort of tragedy of the commons kicks in where we each add a piece that's defensible in itself, but the picture of us that the pieces add up to is ugly.

</comment><comment><USER6> I know that there has been controversy dealing with Adrian Lamo for a long, long time, however; my sister was married to him for a short time and I know he had many mental health issues and demons that he's been dealing with his entire life. I know she loved him very much at one point and time and she is sad today because she knows how hard his life was dealing with his issues. I feel terrible for his parents, family, and friends. This is not the time to talk badly about him.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this insight, and blessings to your sister.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is somewhat a shock to me, and I'm curious to know what happened.

Adrian and I became friends when we were both about 12. We met at 2600 meetings in the embarcadero in SF. We soon were buddies, going "trashing" downtown finding all kinds of crazy things corporate SF left out for trash: working DAT backup drives, 17" view sonics (prized at the time), blueprints for a bank (!), entire trash bags full of credit card receipts with nothing redacted, etc.

He was always a mysterious one, and beat to his own drum. I admired his spirit, and our paths crossed many times including when we both volunteered at the same queer youth center in SF.

Years later he stayed with me in grad school in Cambridge looking not the healthiest. I tried to provide food and shelter, not able to figure out why a guy so talented refused to do anything conventional that would make him good money. But he didn't care about such things.

He had his own sense of right and wrong, and was principaled within his own philosophy — but I never fully understood what philosophy that was. When I recently was chatting with him, I asked why did was doing something currently to which he said "why do I ever do anything?"

I'll deeply miss Adrian.. he was a kind and unique spirit. Some may disagree with me on that only because they only know him through Manning, but that was a small sliver of his life (and one I happen to agree with him on, with additional perspectives I can't share publicly).

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing your connection with Adrian. It was nice hearing some positive memories about him. I know he did what he did with Manning with much consternation but out of a moral necessity. It really did weigh on him.

I met Adrian in about 98 in SF and shared many of the same kinds of adventures with him. He shared a lot of his physical and electronic intrusions with me and he never did any harm or anything malicious. It was all simple exploration in the best hacker ethos. He'd usually inform the 'victim' taking nothing for his services except a Coke while he told them his story.

I'm also curious what happened, morbidly. I haven't heard from him at all in a few years. An unfortunate addition to the list of young, talented but troubled hackers I've known who've left us too soon. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those who do not recognize his name as I did not:

> Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile > computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and > Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest.[7]

> In 2010, Lamo indirectly reported U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning to the Army's > Criminal Investigation Command,[8] claiming that Manning had leaked hundreds > of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks.

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

<comment><USER10> I first heard of him from the initial version of his Wikipedia entry, and I wondered if he had written it himself ([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Lamo&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Lamo&oldid=237418))

Wikipedia was different in those days. A few hours after it was posted, Larry Sanger himself added a comment to the end saying "Um, can we clean up the above puff job, please?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminder: Lamo is a public figure but also a real person with real relationships with people who will read this thread. You are all commenting on a Facebook thread written by Lamo's dad about the death of his son.

<comment><USER12> > You are all commenting on a Facebook thread written by Lamo's dad about the > death of his son.

I think I understand why you wrote that, but I don't agree. Posts here should be thoughtful and respectful, certainly. But it is not Facebook. I am not an expert about this person who has died, but it appears his story has a public interest dimension. HN is an appropriate place for such discussion. Furthermore, I think you need to remember that this is a global community, containing many people far away from events in the USA. In the event of any death, the vast majority of HN readers are not members of the in-crowd who had some personal connection to that person. This site has a large global readership; it isn't and cannot be a "community" in the local sense that you and dang seem to be portraying it as. (Also, friendly reminder, dang is the moderator but AFAIK you aren't).

<comment><USER13> I think the context for dang's comment is that the HN link originally went to a Facebook thread. I _hope_ nobody from HN showed up on that thread to trash Lamo in comments that were effectively directed right to his grieving father, but...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Definitely check out the documentary Hackers Wanted [1], which follows Adrian. I found it interesting how he was able to break into some of the "high-profile computer networks".

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2292707/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2292707/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Adrian and I met back in '97\. He always struck me as ahead of his time, and was someone who opened my eyes to what "information security" actually was: The man's natural ability to find his way into places he shouldn't be - physical or electronic, was simply uncanny and I have never before spoken with or known of anyone like him.

</comment><comment><USER16> Rest In Peace: you lived your life the way you believed it mattered ~ and you had to wade through difficulties with an illnesses. I admire your ability and your talent . Rest easy .

</comment><comment><USER17> The directors cut of his documentary voiced by Kevin Spacey, and featuring Woz and Kevin Rose is available on public Bittorrent sites:

[https://thepiratebay.org/search/Hackers%20Wanted](https://thepiratebay.org/search/Hackers%20Wanted)

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hackers_Wanted](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hackers_Wanted)

</comment><comment><USER18> There's merit to discussing whether his actions were beneficial or not. But for the love of god, if you've got a problem with him as a person, pocket it unless you know discussion of the specific problem you had with him _will with certainty_ serve the public good. You've got every right to say what you want, but think it through.

I didn't know him, but I've known plenty of others with questionable reputations who've died as a result of mental duress. Before you comment, I'll ask as a bystander for you to think about whether everyone benefits from knowing what you wish to share. Otherwise, you'll just out yourself as an asshole.

Rest in peace, Adrian. Regardless of what you did, beneficial or otherwise, no one deserves the mind-shackles you had to live with.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sad. He did the right thing reporting Manning and I'd do the same thing if I was him.

<comment><USER20> You would tell nazi patrol which cellar jews are hiding in? You are a good patriotic boy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> here's a documentary featuring Adrian prominently. This is the best you'll see Adrian, because some time after this film he went on (or off?) his meds, betrayed Chelsea Manning and various other things shitty humans do.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYN6JuQGGX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYN6JuQGGX0)

Hackers Wanted.

<comment><USER22> Taking medicine and not taking medicine are both things shitty humans do, as is refusing to join a criminal conspiracy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have read almost all his answers on quora. And from all that, one thing is there which i know for sure, that he was a good man. Rip.

</comment><comment><USER24> I hope that he found peace, somehow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Inexplicably this post just disappeared off the very top of HN... Edit: appearing now as flagged.

<comment><USER5> Users explicably flagged it.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't showing up as flagged when it disappeared.

It is now, though.

<comment><USER5> Flags affect story ranking before the [flagged] tag appears. The tag appears when the effect of the flags exceeds a certain threshold.

Since "flagged" isn't a binary state that's the only easy way to do it, but it does mean that a story's rank is sometimes affected by user flags without that being visually displayed yet. Usually it shows up after a while.

<comment><USER3> Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> lama of winamp?

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow. I remember, long before he became famous (I think he went by _ill_ at the time), discovering his Inside-AOL site that delved into the workings of AOL. It was really fascinating to me to find out how so much of it worked (that was the first place I heard of Rainman). I've always loved reading about how complex systems work, and that site was like crack to me.

I know that most people here will probably remember him mostly for what happened between him and Chelsea Manning (and, quite frankly, I automatically like anyone who makes an enemy of Julian Assange), but I want to remember him for his early work more than anything.

<comment><USER27> He was Magus on aol [https://mattmazur.com/2010/06/26/adrian-lamo-aol-files- profi...](https://mattmazur.com/2010/06/26/adrian-lamo-aol-files-profile/)

<comment><USER28> That page isn't loading for me, but he was not the Magus behind the famous Fate X AOL prog. I actually talked to that Magus and several of his friends a few years ago [1]. I'd heard Lamo claimed to be Magus, and maybe he went by that handle in some cases, but he was not the author of Fate X.

[1] [http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate- zero-...](http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-zero- encryption/)

<comment><USER27> He also went by Line Trace. AMP link: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/mattmazur.com/2010/06/26/adrian...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mattmazur.com/2010/06/26/adrian- lamo-aol-files-profile/amp/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So, I'm gonna lay it out here as I am having a bad day and don't feel like censoring myself. I'd known Adrian since 1998. He came to 2600 meetings in SF and was a fixture there. In that time, he generally didn't make any friends. While he was gay, he was also stalking a lady at the meetings, and being super creepy about it. Eventually, he left SF and was homeless. He got in trouble for hacking the NYT and making himself some Lexis Nexis accounts. He then reported Chelsea Manning to the authorities when she reached out to him, connected because of their shared LGBTQ background.

Lamo screwed Manning big time, but when he did, none of us who knew him were surprised. He was never a happy person, and never friendly to anyone I knew. I think his folks threw him out of the house in his teens.

Kind of a tragic figure, but also not really someone you could ever trust or even invite to parties. When anyone dies, it's sad. But with Adrian, he had already basically removed himself from the groups who knew him long ago. He was just seemingly not comfortable being in society and making friends.

<comment><USER30> Come on, man. His body's not even cold and it was well-known that he was experiencing mental health issues, potentially his entire life, including discovering he suffered from Asperger's after an involuntary hold (that he described himself). Your venting isn't actually far from that diagnosis making sense. Is this really the time and place for this?

<comment><USER29> Actually, I feel my comment is about as even handed as I could muster. Aspergers or not, he hurt a lot of people.

<comment><USER18> Serious question: what's the public benefit afforded by your comment?

<comment><USER31> What's the public benefit of hanging around on hacker news and chatting about things in general? Why would this be any different?

<comment><USER18> Hackernews discussion is intended to be productively informative. Knowingly putting someone down on a public forum does not make anyone better for it except maybe to educate the person making the mistake and others performing in an equal manner. Considering what Adrian was dealing with, any others like him might not even benefit from reading such things; this delivery method is more likely to fail than to succeed.

It's fine to constructively criticize. But it's inherently impossible to do that with someone who's died because _they 're dead._ And with disorders which risk social impairment, public shaming isn't the solution either; it just drives people who don't understand how to address their challenges further and further into a hole.

I figure your question was intended as both maieutic and rhetorical, but please take into account what I'm sharing with you here.

People are expected in some capacity to grow on hackernews. This comment contributed no growth value to anyone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Underpants Project - <AUTHOR> http://lab.cubiq.org/underpants/ <comment><USER2> I'm the (co)author of the project. Please note that it's just a one-day proof of concept, imagine what a well motivated corporation could do.

It's nothing new (someone correctly pointed the EFF project) but I wanted to make a real world demo out of it.

The demo doesn't store each bits of info separately, it simply creates an hash out of them. If I stored the data separately I could for example identify small user agent updates or screen resolution changes or newly installed plugins and so on.

Also, many of the info can be gathered without JS and actually browsing with NoJS puts you in a very restricted niche making you even more trackable ;)

The demo is far from perfect but I believe that even a 90% reliability is alarming. Anyway I'll put all the source code on Github for you to review. I hope to be able to add the NoScript code as well soon.

<comment><USER3> Surely an IP comparison achieves everything this does, and is probably more than 90% reliable?

<comment><USER4> Just IP comparison only works if the user's IP is constant, which rules out many phones, tablets, and laptops that frequent coffee shops and restaurant wifi. It also doesn't allow you to tell when IP $a and IP $b are really the same person at home and work. Further, IP comparison doesn't let you distinguish between multiple users coming from the same home or office network, or from a proxy.

Commercial implementations of this sort of tracking include the user's IP in their dataset, but track a number of other datapoints so they can tell if e.g. everything but a user's IP matches an entry in their database, it's probably the same person connecting from a different location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can view source to see what they're using to generate the fingerprint: screenSize, devicePixelRatio, timezone, mimeTypes, plugins, httpAcceptHeaders, fonts. It's interesting that these are enough to generate a moderately unique fingerprint. I'm sure my fonts list is unique, so that's probably enough to ID me right there. However, not every computer I use has the same fonts installed, nor the same screen dimensions. This won't track me as I go from my desktop to mobile device.

<comment><USER6> I think the font question was answered by <http://panopticlick.eff.org/>

<comment><USER7> Yes, I tried Panopticlick on a number of different computers and it was always the fonts that gave them the most bits of entropy. I wonder if installing a couple of new fonts and deleting a few others (which I do from time to time) would make them believe I'm a different person...

But really, browsers should stop allowing scripts to access the full list of available fonts. What use does a website have for that data, anyway? Any site that doesn't want to use one of the standard fonts should be using webfonts nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Simply resizing my browser window before pasting the second url seems to thwart this (But I don't have flash installed). Without flash, it falls firmly into the "kinda-works sometimes if everything goes perfect" camp.

So its another demonstration of flash being ridiculously insecure. These guys did it better, even defeating tor to reveal the origin IP. [http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/0610-advisories/Practical_...](http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/0610-advisories/Practical_Onion_Hacking.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Interesting, I had Chrome Flash Block enabled but it did not seem to thwart this.

<comment><USER10> Enabling click-to-play in Chrome (and not one of those extensions that hide or remove from the DOM the element once it's loaded) just makes the fingerprint to have less bits, since it can't get the list of the installed fonts on your computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is this significantly different from <http://panopticlick.eff.org/> ?

<comment><USER12> No difference, except they didn't just warn of a possible attack, they implemented it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hit a collision when I moved from one browser to another on my iPad. I'm guessing the number of permutations on mobile devices is quite small.

</comment><comment><USER14> With NoScript, it does not provide a tracking ID. Which shows yet another reason to browse with NoScript.

<comment><USER15>
       *The following is your unique fingerprint on the web:*

            *loading...*

I'll bet my fingerprint isn't unique.

<comment><USER16> <https://panopticlick.eff.org/>

You'd be surprised.

<comment><USER15> Not really.

 _Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 11.9 bits of identifying information._

<comment><USER17> That's a very low value. With JS off or blocked, my browsers convey between 16 and 21 bits (the latter meaning unicity in their dataset).

The amount of information conveyed by the HTTP_ACCEPT headers is especially preoccupying. There is nothing in there, apart from maybe the language, that should leak any info, on a modern browser. And certainly not 10 or 16 bits of info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems like the biggest information leak is installed fonts. If I install one extra font above the default for my OS, I am leaking a good deal of information: <https://panopticlick.eff.org/>

Would it not make sense for my OS to sandbox which fonts can be accessed by my browser? If a webpage wants to use a special font-family, I could be prompted to allow/block access to my greater font library.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have any idea how well this works with corporate enviroments where the typical workstation is a clone of all the others behind the same (NAT'es) address?

</comment><comment><USER20> I really question the name of this. Underpants Project? I just don't get it. It doesn't really fit with the point you're trying to make, IMO.

<comment><USER21> 1st step create tracking software.

2nd step

3rd step profit

<comment><USER22> "The Underpant Gnomes"[1] were honestly the very first thing that came to my mind when I read the name.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_%28South_Park%29>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You could accomplish the same thing using local storage in an iframe with postmessage and it'd be a lot more robust with fairly significant browser support. (IE8+)

I built a demo a year ago that let you store personal data and exposed a postmessage API for storing and sharing permissions and personal data with sites as kind of the beginnings of a poor man's client-side only Oauth.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think it doesn't work.

After typing "meow" and hitting enter. The copy paster url had this to say about me "It seems you didn't save the word. Go to lab.cubiq.org/underpants first."

The unique fingerprint is also different. "93615388f7f54cd79d2f806ac3795c182217aa9b" somehow became "f37ec3fdd05c27c13cbb7fcdef95cc004297f62d" after copy-pasting.

Other than that technical glitch for me (Linux, Chrome latest unstable version), I still think this is actually a pretty good idea. But will websites use it now that the ones we actually want to worry about are injected into every website via Tweet and Like and + and whatever buttons.

Google in particular is _everywhere_ with their gAnalytics tracking code.

edit: now that I think about it, I may have misunderstood the point. Was it a proof of concept of providing cross-site tracking without tying to a personal identity?

If not, insecurities in cross-site whatever hardly matter when I am logged into every little tidbit that is loaded via iframe and appears on almost every website. Even porn sites have like buttons these days.

<comment><USER25> I entered meow too. It also forget my word and fingerprint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You have to remember that it's not just about the physical tracking, it's also about time. If the page takes seconds to run it's not feasible on billions of requests because the tracking software sits in between the page getting paid and the target destination. If your tracking script takes seconds (this technique only works after the page is loaded), or provides a white screen jump period, it isn't something that will be desired. Unless of course all other options are removed.

Getting all pages on the web to remove the old image based cookie tracking in support of JS etc... also will never happen unless extreme circumstances occur. Most of the people running ad sites have no idea what you are talking about anyway in realms outside of Cookie and Tracking.

</comment><comment><USER27> > This technique can be used to find out some of the softwares installed on > your system. For example I can say that you probably don't have Adobe > Creative Suite installed.

Sorry, I have CS3 installed and fully licensed. But still a nice demo.

<comment><USER28> Presumably they're looking at installed fonts to see if you have Adobe CS, so what did you do with the fonts that would fox this?

I'm guessing you're on Mac OSX? Can you have fonts available that aren't apparent to the browser somehow?

<comment><USER27> If cubiq is right it doesn't check for my old version. It's pretty much a vanilla install on OSX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does anybody know of a browser plug-in that attempts to defeat fingerprinting?

<comment><USER5> This fingerprinting can be defeated by NoScript. Or by turning off JavaScript. A sensible idea would be to make an extension that purges the unique elements from the set they're tracking (i.e. fonts, plugins, mimeTypes, screen size and pixel ratio, etc.) and provide a white-list for sites you want to have that information.

<comment><USER30> torbutton kills some of it -- they lock your window size to a multiple of some fairly large number of pixels. not sure what else they do....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fingerprinting can be _very_ useful to you as a user, as well. Imagine that you switch between devices and work locations all the time and you use a core suite of web applications. Fingerprinting could be used, with your permission, to uniquely identify you across all your devices, locations, and browsers for the suite of services that you depend upon. Not having to ever enter a password again while remaining secure sounds pretty nice to me.

It is not the technology, but the evil application of said technology that is evil.

</comment><comment><USER32> I must have a plugin or something that breaks this.

When I went I saved the word "what" against the fingerprint of 0e24f67890fb99dfd6fa147adc5634224e6cf509

Then, I opened a new tab, copied and pasted the url to ghosttouch and was given this fingerprint: 0373164e6053f6d4d1e0cea156be83e5a45e13d4

So, out of curiosity I copied and pasted the url in the same tab where I had "saved" my word:

0373164e6053f6d4d1e0cea156be83e5a45e13d4

It generated the same code.

So then I went back and re-saved my word, went to the ghosttouch site again and this time it loaded my word.

Something wonky in there but I'm not sure what.

</comment><comment><USER33> Today I learned that surfing with different firefox profiles out of privacy concerns is only useful if you disable Flash. Or any other plugin, for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER34> In 2008 I worked at a major credit card company and they were building the exact same thing, only with more like 75 attributes. Of course it was all through a 3rd party so they wouldn't have any PII, but it was their design. They'd to this to build super-cookies and then track prospects across multiple products. It was awful.

</comment><comment><USER35> What is the worst thing somebody can do with a fingerprint? Show you ads they think you will like?

<comment><USER36> It depends on what they are looking for. For example, a company could gather information about your browsing habits using advertising. If a company like Google distributes ads across a wide variety of sites, they can use your fingerprint to gather lots of information about your browsing habits.

This is scary not because it enables them to provide more relevant ads, but because it enables them to sell personal information to organizations like corporations and the government. Imagine your boss being able to buy a package that tells him what type of porn you like, how often you view porn, your most visited subreddits, etc.

And often from this information, these companies (based on aggregate data) can make more sweeping generalizations (that are often incorrect, but also often right on the mark) like income bracket, ethnicity, drug use habits, sexual orientation, etc. These approximations can also be bought.

Imagine that your 'package' has some information in it deducing that you regularly use cocaine. Even if this is not true and the person observing this information knows it might not be true, the fact that it has been stated might be enough to lose you some important opportunity.

I don't know how common it is for someone to buy this information, but I know that the information is already out there and the potential for things like this is very large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can anyone explain what use-case this technique enables that is not served by cookie tracking?

Or is the point that disabling cookies is not sufficient to avoid being tracked? Everyone has cookies enabled (or many sites don't work), so if that's all it is, nbd..

<comment><USER38> Cookies don't cross site boundaries - e.g., cnn.com can't read a cookie set by foxnews.com.

Just to emphasize that this is meant to demonstrate privacy risks, __not __to be taken as a feature suggestion...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Source site said Fingerprint: cb71811ba44d8d86755b03be8a83938d2946169b And I chose the word: Charismatic

Libellu.la said Fingerprint: e0349008d04cc0c73e5cc9a9ea15a246feebf3b1 Word: Chortle

So... no?

Ipad2, jailbroken with AdBlocket running, no idea if that was a factor or not.

</comment><comment><USER40> Here you have the same thing, but IT WORKS AMONG BROWSERS: <http://fingerprint.pet-portal.eu>

</comment><comment><USER41> Have to enable js/flash (I browse with NoScript), but it's interesting that it works through FF's Private Browsing (FF 11.0).

</comment><comment><USER42> I can see that even in chrome "incognito mode"

<comment><USER43> I would like to remind you that when you open incognito, it specifically says:

"Going incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software. Be wary of: \- Websites that collect or share information about you"

Incognito only prevents information from being stored on _your_ computer, not anyone else's.

<comment><USER44> But more interesting is that the fingerprint in the normal window and the incognito window ends up being the same.

\- Enter word in normal browser window \- In an incognito window, go to the URL and retrieve your word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Should we ban all analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics)?

Or should we regulate how analytics software handles data instead?

<comment><USER46> Easier: don't use your real identity online if you don't want to be tracked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, but is this really more reliable than a simple IP comparison? Probably not.

</comment><comment><USER47> It failed to track me even though I opened the link in a new tab beside the first one.

</comment><comment><USER48> Failed spectacularly for me.

</comment><comment><USER49> Doesnt work on the iPad...

No flash FTW!

<comment><USER50> It worked for me on the ipad...

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> sorry, it doesn't work. I saw different finger prints when accessed the link from a different machine and different ip address

</comment><comment><USER52> _"Your word has been saved! Now point your browser to any of the following addresses (copy-n-paste) and watch the magic."_

Followed by, _"It seems you didn't save the word."_ on the two connecting websites.

Safari 5.1.5, OS X 10.6.8, no add-ons installed. I do, however, have Flash configured to not allow any websites access to local storage unless I specifically say so.

</comment><comment><USER53> I know this isn't Slashdot, but I have karma to burn and can't resist:

Step 1: Collect underpants

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!!!</comment>


The downfall of Sparrow.app [video on site] - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/mac.php

<comment><USER2> Are you referring to the fact that the video isn't working anymore?</comment>


Percolating Nones in Scala - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=267933 <comment><USER2> For those used to Haskell-like languages, Option is the "Maybe" monad and the "for" comprehension is the equivalent of Haskell's "do" syntax.</comment>


Ask HN: Bought a domain on SEDO and the seller canceled after I sent payment - <AUTHOR>

Short story:
I purchased a domain on SEDO. Sent the payment ($1,000), didn't hear back anything. Asked what was happening last night in the SEDO transfer center, and received an email saying that the transaction has been canceled and I'll be getting a refund.
I'm looking at the whois of the domain, and it definitely appears to be owned by the same person who listed it.
What legal rights do I have here? Anyone faced a similar issue? Is it worth pursuing legal action? <comment><USER2> > Is it worth pursuing legal action?

Not unless you don't get the refund. If it was $10,000 or $100,000 I might answer differently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh. Bummer. Was really stoked about the domain too.</comment></comment>


Wordpress to fight "legally deficient and objectionable" Prenda subpoena - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/wordpress-to-fight-legally-deficient-and-objectionable-prenda-subpoena/ <comment><USER2> I love Automattic for this!

Go and bash this troll out of business.

However, it makes me shiver in fear thinking how many hosts didn't tell public about or notices like these and gave away private info!

</comment><comment><USER3> Who/what can be subpoenaed based on an IP address?

Suppose that Automattic did comply and did release the IP address logs. In order to identify individuals, wouldn't the ISPs also have to comply?

<comment><USER4> This is a porn copyright troll. They spend their days issuing subpoenas to ISPs for subscriber information. One thing they could do is to use those logs to look for critics to sue. The courts basically only have their word for it that they've detected some IP infringing upon their porn--it takes no special genius to create a form claiming that 10.0.0.1 was detected infringing upon whatever and create a computer printout saying that if nobody looks at exactly how that form came about. And their word isn't worth all that much right now, with all the crazy shell games and the stunts they've pulled in court.

Oh, and Florida they use a different, special legal process that amounts to the same thing. Their MO is to get subscriber info and then threaten people hoping to be paid to go away. As you can see from their actions, they scurry away from actual court rooms as quickly as possible.

I called it a few comments ago that they would have some lame excuse to no show. I just wonder how long they can keep that up? I see bench warrants or the threat thereof in their future.</comment></comment>


Change.org Petition: Grant Persecuted White South Africans Asylum in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/european-commission-allow-all-white-south-africans-the-right-to-return-to-europe

<comment><USER2> what is this nonsense?</comment>


Visas for Foreign Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_12/b4171027577226.htm

<comment><USER2> Here's the thing: immigration is something that is waaaay out of your control as a founder. It doesn't matter how clever you are, if some snooty clerk decides that they don't like you, you're done for, your dream is going to die.

I personally think that start-ups are already hard enough without having to contend with gratuitous bureaucratic roadblocks. You would be better off founding your company in your own country (assuming that we are talking about people from modern Western or Asian countries). Putting your dream at the mercy of bureaucrats is a recipe for disaster.

This is a little bit of a cry from the heart. The dramas I had, as an Australian wanting to work in France were just unbelievable - clerks that flatout refused to apply the rules, disintrested bosses, ridiculous catch-27 style rules in the first place, it was almost impossible to get a work visa, even as an engineer with more than 10 years experience. I even had to spend 6 months shuttling backwards and forward between London and Paris every week for 6 months whilst fighting the bureaucracy. And, as if the rest wasn't bad enough, the only way that I eventually got my paperwork approved was to get the personal support of the mayor of Paris. As an interesting aside, once I got passed the roadblock clerk, and passed up to the next stage where they deal with 'special' cases, the clerk couldn't understand why my application hadn't been approved straight-away.

Anyway, start-ups don't need distractions of that size.

</comment><comment><USER3> Should there be options for smart guys like this to come to America? Absolutely, but let's be realistic; these guys have a few options. They could immigrate to Canada - unlike America, Canada welcomes people with open arms. Forget that rubbish about "all the expertise is in Silicon Valley". There is no shortage of smart, experienced people in other countries. Heck, in Vancouver they would just be a short hop away from the valley if they really must be (although why you'd want to leave Vancouver beats me... think San Francisco, except much nicer).

And of course, they could always do this in Holland. Seriously, why not? It's not like a business never became successful in Holland.

Personally as someone who is dealing with US immigration bureaucracy, I am opposed to the founder visa because on the very long list of things that need to be fixed with immigration in America and that would also benefit the US economy, this one is item #217. We don't need yet another special interest carveout. No. The system needs to work in the best interests of the nation and to treat people with fairness and dignity. Aiming for anything less is just not even trying.

<comment><USER4> As a Canadian citizen, part of me wants the "founders visa" to fail because it passing would remove a small advantage we have in a sea of disadvantages. RIM, for example, was not founded by someone born in Canada. I'm not exactly sure what makes it easier to immigrate here, it just seems easier if you have certain education.

In a similar thread, Microsoft opened a development office in Vancouver (well, outside of it) more/less because it was easier to bring offshore talent here than to Redmond. Given that it's only a 2 hour drive away, it seemed like a good example of more liberal immigration laws helping out. Although, the net effect of this seems to be that the Canadian office is really just a holding pattern for top talent who can't get an H1-B yet.

<comment><USER5> _I'm not exactly sure what makes it easier to immigrate here, it just seems easier if you have certain education._

It's actually not easier, in 80% of the cases it takes 64 months for the visa to process.

[http://www.canadavisa.com/federal-business-immigration- entre...](http://www.canadavisa.com/federal-business-immigration-entrepreneur- processing-times.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a simple, genuine question. Why do smart people from countries with the highest quality of life in the world want to immigrate to the US?

<comment><USER7> Here's another genuine way of asking the same question.

Why do people continue to believe that European social democracies have the highest quality of life, when people vote with their feet in the other direction?

<comment><USER8> An average speaks nothing about the standard deviation. The minimum quality of life in the US is far lower than many European countries, but young, educated, intelligent, and motivated people are rarely at the bottom.

PS: Consider the AIDS rate in Washington DC at ~3%. "Our rates are higher than West Africa" [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/03/14/AR2009031402176.html) However, other areas of the country are way below that, even as other groups are much worse. "Black men, with an infection rate of nearly 7 percent, carry the weight of the disease, according to the report, which also underscores that the District's HIV and AIDS population is aging. Almost 1 in 10 residents between the ages of 40 and 49 has the virus."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> what would happen if anyone were allowed to live and work anywhere?

<comment><USER10> Africa would be mostly empty, for a start.

<comment><USER11> If africa became empty, i would move to it. I hate noise.

But then someone who also hates noise would follow...

<comment><USER12> As long as you're both quiet you'll be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Last year 8% of U.S. residents founded companies"

Really? That simply can't be right. Were there 24 million companies founded last year? I have to say that if I count all the people I know that have _ever_ founded a company, let alone last year, it's nowhere near 8%.

<comment><USER5> That seems way off. SBA says it's closer to 600,000.

</comment></comment><comment> tomh- If all innovative Dutch people starting cool companies leave Holland, how can we create our own silicon valley here? Is that really the only solution if you don't want to make crud applications for businesses, to just pack and move to the US?

<comment><USER14> > how can we create our own silicon valley here?

You do it with laws that make it easy to start a company and that make it cost-effective to invest money in a local startup. Tax reductions are one way. Simple processes are another. Labor laws that distinguish between startups and established companies are yet another.

Here in Brazil we have labor laws that more or less make it prohibitively expensive you from legally starting a tech company, bureaucracy that's absolutely maddening, and an equally insane tax code.

<comment><USER15> Couldn't agree more, +1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hope this comes in time for these guys to stay!

<comment><USER16> I doubt it. It takes forever for bills to become law, and immigration bills usually get stuck in some committee black hole or the other.

<comment><USER17> Shouldn't they be able to get B1 visas with the company they founded? It's most probably registered in the US. But then again, the US immigration system is seriously broken.

<comment><USER18> It says they're on a tourist visa (B2) - a B1 really wouldn't gain anything - they'd still have to leave every 3 months, and be questioned more closely each time they come back.

<comment><USER19> Technically, they may be inadmissible in the future now that they "did business" (talking to investors, etc.) on a tourist visa.

<comment><USER18> You'd run into the same issue if you actually did work on a business visa. I.e. something other than meetings, talking to investors, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Etherdoek, an Ethereum version of Reddit r/place - <AUTHOR> https://etherdoek.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, creator of Etherdoek here. I had this idea for a while and the corona lockdown was a good excuse to work on it. I've also written an article about tokens and art and when I think it makes sense to put things on the blockchain: [https://www.etherdoek.com/tokens_and_art](https://www.etherdoek.com/tokens_and_art).

In short, Etherdoek is a 1,000 by 1,000 pixel canvas. Pixels are sold through a smart contract. The buyer sets the pixel color (hex value, 3 bytes) and gets an ERC-721 token which corresponds to her pixel. Pixel tokens can be traded like any other ERC-721 token. Through the same smart contract any owner of a pixel token can change the color of the corresponding pixel.

The canvas will exist as long as Ethereum. Ethereum contains the full state of the image and changes are saved forever as events. It's censorship resistant and does not depend on any data being stored outside of the blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER2> This already exists:

Site: [https://thousandetherhomepage.com/](https://thousandetherhomepage.com/)

HN thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393446)

Not sure if that also,supported re-trading/coloring of the pixel. That could be a nice touch or very against the idea of the others which meant to be "forever". Not needing a special browser is nice.

I might miss it but it seems this page assigns me a single pixel, or one pixel at a time where I can control x,y? The power of the others lies in being able to buy multiple pixels in a controlled fashion and having an easy way to add your logo (jpeg/png/...).

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference with Thousand Ether Homepage is that they store images off chain. Etherdoek stores pixel information (hex values) on the Ethereum blockchain itself, including as events all pixel changes. All the blue question marks on Thousand Ether Homepage are lost images.

I've added a few Python scripts for easier interaction but totally agree that for now putting images on Etherdoek is a pain.</comment></comment>