New message from Mt. Gox - <AUTHOR> https://www.mtgox.com#new <comment><USER2> I'm one of those who lost a good amount on MtGox. It wasn't in there because I thought they are a bank, I put it there because I like to speculate from time to time. As such I was prepared to lose most if not all of it anyway. I didn't expect things to go wrong so thoroughly, but still that was the premise of my deposits there.

So from that perspective, I'm not really mad about them losing the money. It's unfortunate, it even really sucks, but shit happens. Sometimes that shit is an apocalyptic event.

What makes me angry though is their utter failure to communicate, to admit what happened. I feel like they're taunting their ex customers, or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all. That's what's really off- putting, and that's what breeds speculation about them being the ones who perpetrated the theft in the first place (which I personally don't believe). Instead what we see here is an absolute non-message from them.

It's like this Seinfeld episode with the shirt at the dry cleaners. We know they shrunk it, they know they shrunk it, so they should just come right out and admit "we shrunk it"!

<comment><USER3> > or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all

They were the market leader, with substantial revenue and lots of cash flow.

Why they didn't prioritize hiring some people and securing their platform is still beyond my understanding. It's up there with the $100+ billion in cash Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers or implement adequate security processes for their most important and sensitive code that supports their entire (massively profitable) business.

I really wonder where people's priorities are. They're not total morons; it must be an interesting reason why these circumstances happen. It's not hard to solve these problems with money - so there has to be a neat (if utterly dysfunctional) story behind it.

Seriously, guys. Spend $20 on a flu shot for your golden goose.

<comment><USER4> > Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers

It's naive to think that the more people you throw at the problem, the less bugs there will be.

See also: The Mythical Man-Month.

<comment><USER3> Catching bugs via parallel support staff not in the primary workflow, or even building automated infrastructure is exactly the kind of parallelism that Brooks diagrams out as within the realm of workable in his team structure diagrams in TMMM.

The intel agencies (both the ones where Apple lives, and all the other ones too) are black box testing this stuff, every single point release, automatically - you can be sure. Why Apple isn't is confusing. They wouldn't even have to be on the team or in the building with the development efforts themselves.

There's something we're missing here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> CONSPIRACY THEORY TIME.

What if Mt. Gox didn't really lose a post-Panamax boatload of Bitcoin (just a small amount)? They're just manufacturing a panic so they can buy Bitcoins at fire-sale prices, declare "We have all the BitCoin we need after all, we fixed our bug, everything's fiiiine" and maybe even turn a cash profit on the upside?

</conspiracy theory, assumes a modicum of competence, etc>

<comment><USER6> If there was any evidence of that they'd go to jail for a long time - even if bitcoin is not directly regulated, I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in...

<comment><USER7> > I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in...

I don't know, but I don't think so. For the law you may be trading in monopoly money at your risk.

<comment><USER8> Intentional misrepresentation of fact for material gain doesn't seem to require currency of any sort.

So Kome I'll make you a deal, I've got a ownership title for the Brooklyn Bridge and I'll trade this title to you for a case of beer... deal? Deal. Sucka. Then it goes to court. Assuming you can convince the court I knew the title was fake, and the case of beer is worth more than the fake title (maybe the title has artistic merit, or maybe the beer was worthless American Lite "beer" of negative worth) then its pretty cut and dried as fraud.

<comment><USER9> What's the fake in this case? They would be convincing people that bitcoins are worth less due to their actions (and it is worth less during this period, as people have lost much faith), buying at the reduced priced, and then covering their losses and supposedly restoring at least some faith in the market, once again raising prices. Where's the fake title? Where's the lie?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of corporate announcements that say "for your convenience" just before saying something incredibly inconvenient.

"For your convenience, all your Bitcoins have been deleted."

<comment><USER11> Here in Argentina the government does this all the time. For example, Today they have announced that Nic.ar, the entity that handles .com.ar domains, will start to charge 200 $AR to register a domain. And the guy that made the announcement said "The users were asking for this from long time" (yes, of course, users are asking to pay for something that is free). Source [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lanacion.com.ar%2F1666972-comenzaran- a-cobrar-por-registrar-dominios-comar&act=url)

<comment><USER12> If it's free, how do you discourage people from registrering a domain just for speculation? Paying for it is a good way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The current message means absolutely nothing:

"Dear MtGox Customers,

In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.

Best regards, MtGox Team"

<comment><USER14> Sounds very passive. "Closely monitoring"? "React accordingly"? As if they were not the ones running the site.

<comment><USER15> Words chosen very carefully in an attempt to keep everyone calm..

<comment><USER16> Words chosen very carefully that potentially hold a subtext. Are they hinting at a security service takedown and gag? MtGox would be a potential target if, say, someone wanted all the data to do a statistical analysis and tie MtGox accounts to SR accounts.

Way out there, but it's anyone's guess right now, and I thought I'd throw this hat in the ring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think they might be manipulating the market. Here's my translation:

"Because people discovered that we lost or stole money, and that would destroy our operations, someone who doesn't want to be responsible for making a decision decided that we could try causing a market crash by dramatically wiping our accounts, lowering the price enough that we could buy our way back to solvency. It didn't entirely work, so we're making this announcement, which is also meant to lower the price, or if that doesn't work, allow us to segue back into operations. We will be monitoring the Bitcoin price and will react accordingly."

</comment><comment><USER18> What are they doing in the page source there? Storing a message in a cookie then refreshing the page to display it?

The second time you visit the page, you'll get your cookie-stored statement.

Almost seems like they want to be able to change their statement without previous visitors seeing the changes.

<comment><USER19> I don't see anything like that. Here's the page source for me:

  <title>MtGox.com</title>

Dear MtGox Customers,

In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.

Best regards,
 MtGox Team

<comment><USER19> Wait, I refreshed the page a few times, and once, I got:

    		<title>MtGox.com</title>

Dear MtGox Customers,

In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.

Best regards,

    	MtGox Team

This is very odd behaviour.

<comment><USER20> Someone already mentioned in a previous thread that this is an anti-dos method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would not like to be in the shoes of mtgox CEO... He lost about 400M USD, some of them probably belonging to shady peoples (drug dealer, mobs, etc.)

<comment><USER22> Well that's what people say, yet I haven't seen lots of executives in large companies where scandals have occurred suddenly getting randomly killed by hitmen in the streets. And Madoff's still alive, too.

<comment><USER23> Well, a gentleman flew all the way from the UK to Japan to have a polite chat with him, so it's not outside of reality for someone to do bad things to him fairly easily.

Beyond that, CEO's of large companies are generally under guard when the crap hits the fan, and Madoff was protected by police.

I wouldn't be surprised if the "CEO" of Mt. Gox soon finds out what a tire iron tastes like.

<comment><USER24> Death threats on HN. That's a first.

<comment><USER25> Oh, please. How sensitive can people get? That was hardly a threat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Best case speculation: they really are being acquired by a more competent exchange, or consortium of competent exchanges, who decided to step in to prevent further harm to Bitcoin's reputation. Hence the hidden message in the html, the acquisition of the "gox.com" domain, and the suspending of all transactions until the official announcement.

<comment><USER27> hidden message in the HTML? Nothing as of right now [http://pastebin.com/yi5j88FG](http://pastebin.com/yi5j88FG)

<comment><USER28> He's probably talking about earlier, when there was an HTML comment about an acquisition

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When has the passive voice ever actually worked to calm a lynch mob?

<comment><USER29> I'm getting a little tired of every (justifiably!) angry group of people being called a "lynch mob" by default on the internet.

You might want to wait for something resembling actual violence before applying such an ugly characterization. A bunch of people saying mean things is not a "lynch mob".

<comment><USER3> There are literally dozens of people on reddit's /r/bitcoin right now casually discussing contract killings, with various shades of joking (from "kinda" to "not at all").

I'm not being hyperbolic.

<comment><USER30> Isn't that the kind of shit bitcoin was made for? Drugs/contract killings in the "deep web"? Would not surprise me at all if some of those guys are serious, especially if they just lost their life savings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And it doesn't seem to have been proofread very well. "In the event of [something that has already happened]..."? I don't consider myself a particularly picky person, but come on, you could at least make the effort at a time like this.

<comment><USER32> Panic doesn't lend itself to careful writing.

<comment><USER31> Well, sure, but it's not like this message was rushed out within minutes of anything in particular. They seemed quite content to have a completely blank site for hours on end before putting this up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand why people put their money/BitCoins in MtGox, if you researched them (previous to this incident) you would find a large number of complaints and shady dealings.

Personally, I put my coins in BTC-e, Virtuex, and CoinBase (and thank god I did). Even though BTC-e and Virtuex seemed fairly sketchy they still allowed me to withdrawal my coins with no issue.

<comment><USER34> Why not set up a secure offline wallet and keep your coins there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> www.gox.com is now redirecting to mtgox.com.

For an organisation which is insolvent they must have invested a fairly significant sum on a 3 letter .com domain. This happened yesterday! What's going on here?

<comment><USER36> Insolvent != no money in the bank

<comment><USER35> Yeah, but shouldn't they try to pay people back before they spend what's likely tens of thousands of dollars on what amounts to superficial marketing? I mean, it's not even much of a re-brand!

<comment><USER37> > Yeah, but shouldn't they try to pay people back before they spend what's > likely tens of thousands of dollars on what amounts to superficial > marketing?

"Should" based on the assumption that they are profit-maximizing entity, or "should" based on the assumption that they are a moral actor? Because, you know, the answers are quite different.

<comment><USER38> I think that "should" is based on "wanting to avoid prosecution for operating while insolvent".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So I have n bitcoins and $x in MtGox; will I get this back? Will there be a haircut? Is MtGox winding down? So many questions...

<comment><USER19> Probably not. But don't give up hope yet.

<comment><USER40> Give up hope. This thing is toast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Are you kidding me?

This message is likely worse than staying silent.

<comment><USER42> Silent would be worse. At least we know that the site is deliberately disabled by its owners, as opposed to a host of other hypotheticals we'd be discussing otherwise.

<comment><USER41> No. Because this shows that they aren't using some sort of professional crisis management team and are trying to handle it in house. That's ridiculous. They keep showing themselves incapable of handling such a high profile company.

<comment><USER43> Do they have to hire a team if someone with deeper pockets just came in and said "Shut it down, we're buying you out"?

You may be right that they are incompetent and it shows, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the answer is to right now immediately hire a new team and let them handle it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is this a joke? What's worse than a non-response? Lies. That's what.

</comment><comment><USER45> That's it??

<comment><USER22> Yeah, kinda disappointing. That's a company which does not care a bit about their users...

<comment><USER46> > That's a company which does not care a bit about their users...

Yes, but they cared about their user's bits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I guess this could be taken to mean "the leak was a fake and unanticipated, we closed the markets to prevent even more panic selling"

Maybe there is a faint glimmer of hope for gox... (I personally doubt it)

</comment><comment><USER48> [http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-statement-claims-made- conscio...](http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-statement-claims-made-conscious- decision-halt-transactions/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Sometimes it seems like Mt.Gox is a corporation in EVE Online. Like in EVE, they're trading in virtual goods and there's zero regulation. Similarly, scams are part of the game.

<comment><USER50> Playing EVE Online taught me to spot scams, pyramids and ponzi schemes in an instant. When I first read about bitcoin I couldnt stop laughing, "people really pay for pretend money counting on price going up so they can sell and earn $? AHAHAHA" was all I could hear in my head.

Turns out I was too smart for my own good. Almost every ponzi scheme can be exploited _if_ you get on board early enough.

At the current stage of bitcoin only suckers are left holding the bag. Of course no one will see it, because "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)" (its a book, read it).

<comment><USER51> > Turns out I was too smart for my own good. Almost every ponzi scheme can be > exploited ...

You're misusing the term "Ponzi scheme". A speculative system that relies on volatility and wishful thinking isn't necessarily a Ponzi scheme (might be but not necessarily).

A classic Ponzi scheme has layers or levels that are treated differently. Ordinary speculation about a volatile entity doesn't have this property.

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

Quote: "Typically, extraordinary returns are promised on the original investment[5] and vague verbal constructions such as "hedge futures trading", "high-yield investment programs", or "offshore investment" might be used. The promoter sells shares to investors by taking advantage of a lack of investor knowledge or competence, or using claims of a proprietary investment strategy which must be kept secret to ensure a competitive edge."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Seems like they concluded that panic selling is over and they can't benefit from this anymore? Too bad many of their customers already sold at much lower prices.

</comment><comment><USER53> If Bitcoin were a government currency, all Bitcoin users would have to pay for MtGox losses and every MtGox users would get their money back.

That's the price of anarchism.

</comment><comment><USER54> So at this point, what exchange should someone who has, say, a ton of LTC, go to convert their holdings to Dogecoin?

<comment><USER50> Cognitive dissonance is strong with you my child (or irony, in which case I failed at detecting it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Their way of protecting the site and the users is doing precisely the opposite

</comment><comment><USER56> Well putting together that statement clearly took a lot of work...

</comment><comment><USER57> > _recent news reports_

Of which recent news reports are they talking about?

<comment><USER47> I'm guessing that gox lost ~$400m and is insolvent?

Perhaps the leak was fake, so gox shut down to prevent people panic selling

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is insane. No <!doctype> declaration? Come on!

</comment><comment><USER59> They are just trolling everyone now...</comment>


Substance called 'Soylent' intended to replace food - <AUTHOR> http://video.foxnews.com/v/2585496430001/substance-called-soylent-intended-to-replace-food/?playlist_id=930909749001

<comment><USER2> WAT? Is someone trolling Fox news, or does that guy just have a crazy sense of humor?</comment>


Virtual queue - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_queue <comment><USER2> The article is quite opinionated towards this system, while I think the main beneficiary of this, is the call center. And not because they actually operate more efficiently, but because the can fake more efficiency. When I pick up the phone, to call a company, it is usually because they already did something wrong, and I need help with that immediately. In all other cases I wouldn't contact them or would have send an e-mail. The article claims that "the best bet for improving both customer satisfaction and contact center operations" is some queue management stuff and so on, but I think the "best bet" would be getting someone on the phone asap. And asap is not after 20 minutes of waiting time (whether on the phone, or off the phone).

<comment><USER3> > asap is not after 20 minutes of waiting time (whether on the phone, or off > the phone).

Sure, but if the prevailing queue conditions mean I'm forced to wait 20 minutes regardless, I'd much rather do that without a phone to my ear. I'd even prefer a 40 minute virtual queue to a 20 minute physical queue, so it seems appropriate for there to be _some_ discounting of virtual queue times when compared to physical ones.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Being in a queue means you have to constantly keep an ear out for being transferred to an actual human being. Which can be quite hard when the hold music is regularly interrupted with voice announcements. Yes I realise my call is important to you, but if you didn't tell me that every 10 seconds I could stop listening so hard and (maybe?) enjoy the music.

As an aside, their comparison of voluntary queuing with and without virtual queues is suspect as they seem to inform the customer about the length of the queue only when they also have the callback system. These are two separate things and should be measured separately.

<comment><USER5> The stats piece is close to nonsense as well, if you measure ASA from your phone system's call duration when you have a virtual queue you are lying to yourself at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When we took our kid to get a picture with Santa this year they used a virtual Queue. It allowed them to backup a queue of customers up to 8 hours! Customers registered at the top of the line and then were sent away. They texted 30 mins before and then 5 mins before. It was quite effective. When we finally arrived we were in front of Santa in 5 mins.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another nice system is for you to 'queue jump' when you call back after a certain time. E.g. if you call before 10am at a busy time, you have the option to call back after 12pm and you will be guaranteed a direct connection to an operator.

<comment><USER8> Nice for the caller, yes.

<comment><USER9> I got started working in an IT call center: I can guarantee you, it's nice for everyone!

First: we were ABSOLUTELY required to keep the calls flowing. Did not matter how many we got: if a call went above 5 minutes in queue...which did happen with our volume to tech ratio...we all were berated: I'd go as far as saying verbally abused at times (think: directors literally stomping their feet on the floor and screaming at you.)

Second: no one likes to wait on the phone. It's annoying. They want their problem fixed. If they have to wait on the phone they'll just be more angry by the time they speak to a tech.

Third: you're still handling the same number of calls, most likely. Sometimes even less! We'd have people call and abandon constantly, so that'd drive up our numbers and make us look really bad (they didn't want users abandoning.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The wikipedia article is about incoming call queueing which I find good even from end-user (caller) perspective.

What I found more interesting is that at least some telemarketing call centers actually use outgoing call queues. The reason for this is:

1) They anticipate some percentage of unreachable numbers; 2) To maximize efficiency- operators don't spend time waiting on somebody picking up the phone, they are only engaged when there is someone on the line.

<comment><USER11> Yes- if you ever picked up the phone and there is 3-5 second delay before you hear someone, that is the queue/robodialer realizing someone picked up and sending you to the telemarketer

<comment><AUTHOR> So the fake virus scammers who call from 'Microsoft' are also using the same system then ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's like lazy-loading people's attention.

</comment><comment><USER13> I tried to use this feature while on hold ... once.

They returned my call using a poorly tuned predictive dialer, I listened to 20-30 seconds of silence before the call dropped.

There was no second attempt.

<comment><USER14> I use this all the time. Never had an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> We used this callback system when I worked at a call center selling products from TV infomercials, although it wasn't anywhere near as advanced as the example in this article. The dialing was automated but we had to manually initiate each call, and make sure we were speaking to the right person.

I don't even know how many times I've said the phrase "We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls". Hopefully never again.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone provide this as a third party service? It'd be pretty cool to be able to drop a number I know I am going to need to call, and wait over to someone else who will do a ringback for me.

<comment><USER17> I've used FastCustomer in the past successfully. It's a mobile app that calls customer service numbers and connects you after waiting in a queue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are systems in at least the UK that will queue for you on a callcenter. You call them first, they queue for you and when the call picks up you get the call joined by them calling back to you. Never used it though.</comment>


Signs That You're a Good Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.yacoset.com/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-good-programmer <comment><USER2> 1) This is just HN clickbait.

2) The symptoms are largely hipster BS. ThinkGeek, Referal links to specific books, really?

3) A destructive pursuit of perfection is the sign of _incompetence_ and is frequently career ending when combined with this symptom: "Contempt for delivery dates". The mere fact this was put to paper is proof the OP is completely worthless. If a developer can't produce an acceptable, working product on a reasonable deadline _they get fired_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Eager to fix what isn't broken should be more like getting better at your job over a period of time. Sitting around and rewriting apps that work perfectly to make cleaner/optimized code is not usually a good use of time. But taking lessons learned from one project to do better on the next is expected.

No matter who writes an app, the next person in charge of it thinks it was written terribley and wants to rewrite it. This is a vicious circle and I have seen lots of development teams never achieve anything that really helps the business or users because of this. Be careful of ever being eager to fix what truly isn't broken.

</comment><comment><USER4> signs that you're good at writing clickbait on HN

</comment><comment><USER5> This list is kinda terrible. I know horrible engineers that can't get a single line in production code who match every one of these traits

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting discussion from a previous post (about 3 years ago): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607823)

</comment><comment><USER7> A dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9167008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9167008).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the opposite of a duplicate, actually.

<comment><USER7> Sorry! Major Boolean fail. Un-de-duped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of these have a good amount of overlap with: "Signs That You're a Sociopath"

</comment><comment><USER9> I think probably these are signs of a good programmer. But i wouldn't worry too much about how you compare to these things. To be a good programmer, program.</comment>


That Was One Ugly Email - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/that-was-one-ugly-email/

<comment><USER2> Looks like backblaze threw their marketing team under the bus because they went above and beyond the call of duty and tried to fill the gap where others were oversubscribed.

<comment><USER3> As a member of the Backblaze marketing team, that post was mostly us poking fun at ourselves. The team was spread pretty thin and had a lot of balls in the air, so that newsletter came out a bit goofy and with some typos. That won't be happening again :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: ShopMyApp Photoshop extractor - <AUTHOR>

ShopMyApp is a prototyping solution intended for designers that allows a Photoshop file to be exported as an interactive device prototype.
Example JSON: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fjexrhdy4uctge4/applewatch_health.json?dl=0 Example texturemap: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2x7uxi219cpi3me/applewatch_health.png?dl=0
Part of the solution is a Photoshop plugin that exports a PSD as a texturemap and JSON-formatted metada about dimensions and texture coordinates. This is pretty cool from general perspective and might have other uses also.
The exporter is free to use so feel free to try it at http://shopmyapp.com. Also the question we had in mind was if you see any potential in this kind of thing. Like if we'd develop it to certain direction, could it be something to pay for? <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, messed up copy&paste, but read it twice, makes more sense :)</comment>


Joe Rogan's Interview with Commander David Fravor (Tic-Tac UAP) - <AUTHOR> http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/9472 <comment><AUTHOR> Here are some things to read and watch if you haven't seen any of this before:

Anderson Cooper on CNN: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ZJQ4I7_3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ZJQ4I7_3M)

Michio Kaku: [https://facebook.com/michiokaku/](https://facebook.com/michiokaku/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWEhY5NzaBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWEhY5NzaBQ)

New York Times: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo- sightings...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings- navy-pilots.html) [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/science/tom-delonge- ufo-r...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/science/tom-delonge-ufo- research.html) [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo- sightings...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings- navy-pilots.html) [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret- pentagon-u...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo- program.html) [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon- prog...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo- harry-reid.html)

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

The Hill: [https://thehill.com/homenews/house/460334-top-homeland- secur...](https://thehill.com/homenews/house/460334-top-homeland-security- republican-accuses-navy-of-withholding-ufo-info)

Politico: [https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/navy- withholding-u...](https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/navy-withholding- ufo-sightings-1698396) [https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/23/us-navy- guidelines...](https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/23/us-navy-guidelines- reporting-ufos-1375290)

The Washington Post: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national- security/2019/09/18/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national- security/2019/09/18/those-ufo-videos-are-real-navy-says-please-stop-saying- ufo/)</comment>


Better than boycotting GoDaddy (google bomb Namecheap) - <AUTHOR>

GoDaddy has been a supporter of SOPA which has caused many to boycott them.
Here is an even better way to hit them in the bottom line...
Add this somewhere in your webpage (you can just stick it somewhere in the footer)
<a href="http://www.namecheap.com">Domain Registration</a>
GoDaddy is #1 in google for "Domain Registration", but if enough people link to this (it doesn't take much) they will be nocked out of the coveted top spot. This will be a huge dent in their revenue stream.
This is referred to as a "google bomb" and it works by the fact that search ranking is based upon the the weight of the links pointed to a page. The name of the link helps them correlate the search terms that match with the link.
Namecheap was chosen as they have a high ranking (so they have a good chance at popping to the top) and has been vocal in being anti-SOPA. You can use the coupon code "SOPASucks" to get a discount there too.
I just added it to two of my sites -  editthis.info and cueflash.com (both with a page rank of 5). That will hit them in the SEOs. <comment><AUTHOR> Post here any urls that you add this link to.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why namecheap, specifically?</comment>


Securing Single Page Apps and REST Services - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesward.com/2013/05/13/securing-single-page-apps-and-rest-services

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not the author, I'm just curious what people think of this approach. Does it sound reasonable?

<comment><USER2> This appears to be another mechanism to mitigate CSRF vulnerabilities, tailored to a single page app. It is quite similar to, for example, putting a security token into a form that is validated on post. The difference is that it is put into a header. This is probably less secure, in fact, because the token comes straight from the cookie. CSRF tokens are typically generated server side and can thus be made cryptographically strong.

It's funny because the author initially advocates against using cookies because they are susceptible to CSRF attacks, and then immediately suggests using cookies as part of this new scheme (albeit in a different way).

This is a good example of why you shouldn't design your own security system unless you are an expert in security and/or cryptography.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the scheme is still generating the token server-side, no?

"The server validates the login information and creates an authentication token for the user"</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists invented a dryer that can dry clothes in half the time without heat - sahin-boydas https://finance.yahoo.com/news/scientists-invented-dryer-dry-clothes-170600085.html <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder why we don't use vacuum freeze-drying of clothes.

</comment><comment> tonic-music Want.</comment>


Run-DMC explains Network Partitions in CouchDB - <AUTHOR> https://cloudant.com/blog/run-dmc-explains-network-partitions/

<comment><USER2> Author here. I had a blast writing this. Thanks to everyone who helped me out with it. I'm constantly amazed by the compassion of the tech community.

If you spot anything you want fixed, or if you just want to check out the source code, raise an issue here: [https://github.com/garbados/jepsen- couchdb](https://github.com/garbados/jepsen-couchdb)

Thanks, gang :D

<comment><USER3> Wow, I thought the Run-DMC thing was going to be a gimmick, but this analysis has some depth. Thanks for the follow-along instructions. However, your writing needed more song lyric callouts.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Re: callouts, duly noted for the next analysis.</comment></comment></comment>


Wealth-Care Reform - <AUTHOR> http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=wealth_care_reform

<comment><USER2> > Fixing our health-care system will make us more economically secure. It > won't make us much healthier.

It will if that means we can now _afford_ treatment...

<comment><AUTHOR> _In a 2002 paper for the journal Health Affairs, Michael McGinnis, Pamela Williams-Russo, and James Knickman conclude that the breakdown goes something like this: "genetic predispositions, about 30 percent; social circumstances, 15 percent; environmental exposures, 5 percent; behavioral patterns, 40 percent; and shortfalls in medical care, 10 percent."_

To a certain degree, yes. But it's not a status-quo game. The money for health insurance that is currently not being paid must come from somewhere. The interesting question is whether we're prioritizing the discussion around the actual effective use of those dollars (assuming we're going to spend this money come hell or high water) to pay for people getting healthy? Or to create a new type of health financing system?</comment></comment>


Everybody wants to be like Safari or why Apple's browser marketshare is inflated - <AUTHOR> http://blog.html5test.com/post/33951003573/everybody-wants-to-be-like-safari

<comment><USER2> Relevant: History of the browser user-agent string

<http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/></comment>


MongoDB Days - <AUTHOR> http://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/mongodb-days/ <comment><USER2> Shrug. Oracle suffers from problems that you don't get on your z/OS running IMS on top of VSAM files (which by the way is hierarchical, not relational - which is what your big ole bank will be using).

Talking about the relational model and "sound mathematical underpinnings" is fine, but I've seen dozens.. hundreds?.. of production relational databases and they've all been monsters. Most have been partially or significantly denormalized for good/bad reasons. All have their own warts, usually significant.

If people end up normalizing their MongoDB as the author suggests - Well I'd expect that. It's pretty rare to get your DB model right first time. Any thought that you can is probably tinged with madness. If you can have a good stab at it and iterate you're ahead.

Plus if you've ever worked with a TPS (or TM/2PC) you'll know they're a nightmare. Any volume systems I've worked on dispensed with them and use a reconcile/compensate mechanism.

MongoDB has gone down a replica/sharded model that focuses on Map/Reduce. How successful this is, well that's a different argument - but comparing it to an old-school big-iron mentality is a waste of time.

<comment><USER3> I think the main revelation in databases was the division of the world into OLTP and OLAP.

So you keep your normalised schema for production and have a methodologically denormalised schema for reporting.

Mind you, computer science courses generally don't teach OLAP -- stuff like dimensional modelling. My university didn't when I was there, though they've rolled it into a larger "Data Mining" course alongside MapReduce and friends.

<comment><USER2> Agree. & this makes sense from an architectural perspective, since the demands of each domain are different.

I was arguing from practical terms and my own experience. Even in established, DB-heavy, "we have hundreds of DBAs" organisations, you can't have a porcelain schema. It evolves over time, breaks, get optimised and de-optimised.

The Oracle shops I've worked in don't have one schema, they'll have dozens. Usually because they can't shoehorn emerging requirements into the databases they have. Or because of project timelines. Or they need to be performance tuned in some special way, which in the case of Oracle could be considered a dark art.

These orgs may have just one big data warehouse, but that becomes a dumping ground. It's possible to do your dimensional modelling (I worked on star schemas in the past, but that's about it) -- but it's a big ball of mud to try and weave together.

Even then your OLAP is under-stress because it's got a lot of ground to cover. Usually they start out as marketing engines, but get co-opted into all sorts of things. The most common and troublesome is regulatory reporting. Once your data warehouse gets used for something like regulatory reporting you're a bit stuck as nobody wants to touch it.

Then, because point to point integrations between the databases is brittle and cost-prohibitive -- they break the golden rule and take data _out_ of the OLAP and put it back into the OLTP. I won't name names, but this is commonplace.

SalesForce is one of the biggest Oracle DB users (I read biggest at one stage, but can't find the reference). Even then the SalesForce data model is so denormalised you could call it one big table[1].

I use MongoDB day-to-day and it's fit for purpose for what I do. That said, I'm not a rabid fan and an alternative/hybrid approach is always on the horizon. What I don't buy is the "the DB world has already solved all these problems", particularly when things like "relational integrity" and "two phase commit" get thrown in the mix - truth is there is plenty to be solved.

[1] [http://www.dbms2.com/2011/09/15/database-architecture- salesf...](http://www.dbms2.com/2011/09/15/database-architecture-salesforce- com-force-com-and-database/)

<comment><USER3> Does using a document store solve any of these problems, though?

<comment><USER2> In some limited ways. I don't think the technology and lines of approach are fully mature yet.

I don't know any MongoDB users that I think would be better off on Oracle - especially for the reasons cited in the article.

My own view is the critical pieces will converge. If I could have PostgreSQL with a greatly simplified replication/parallelisation solution I'd be a happy man.

Equally if MongoDB could do a COUNT query in even _double_ the time of psql. Or compress their keys. Or have fine-grained locking... (All of which I'm sure they will get to, just when).

Maybe that's MongoDB 5, PostgreSQL 14, Rethink 3 - I've got no idea and I'm sure I'll look at them all. However, I'm not the guy rocking up to a MongoDB conference and coming away with the conclusion "Oracle had that in 1988".

<comment><USER4> Once you start adding all those features in, the performance you gained by not doing them evaporates. That is the lesson of MySQL.

My argument is not that MongoDB users would be better off on Oracle. It's that Oracle users would not necessarily be better off on MongoDB, since Oracle actually does many things that the makers of MongoDB claim it can't. If MongoDB had been made by MS, everyone would call that "FUD"...

<comment><USER2> So we stop trying? The contribution of MySQL to the world of databases is significant.

If your intent is to rebut FUD, then statements like _" But just remember that these kids think they're solving problems that IBM (et al) solved quite literally before they were born in some cases"_ don't contribute. You're just meeting rhetoric with rhetoric.

<comment><USER5> If by "trying" you mean, random coding expeditions performed by people in too much of a hurry to find out what their forebears discovered, then yes, you stop trying. You stop trying and start reading, start researching, start thinking. There are vast reserves of knowledge just sitting there in the source code, waiting to be read. Looking at the CAP theorem and deciding to make a distributed database to exploit different tradeoffs is very sensible, but hubristically ignoring everything that came before because it's older than a decade is not.

<comment><USER2> You'll have to be more specific if you want to have a real discussion. Calling MongoDB a random coding expedition doesn't give me anything to go on, except perhaps just to flame back. Same goes with "ignoring everything". It's an absolutist statement that is patently false.

If there is something specific that MongoDB is blatantly or arrogantly ignoring from Oracle (i.e. the original article) -- technical, business model, whatever -- Then call it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm most interested in the features that commercial DBs like Oracle have that free/open-source DBs like Postgres, MySQL, & NoSQL DBs don't. Are things like "a materialized view (1996!), a continuous query, the result cache" available in any free DBs nowadays?

There's more of this sort of criticism in the following old thread, "SQL Databases Don't Scale":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690656)

where a few commenters say (somewhat unpleasant) things like:

\- _I find that this type of FUD comes about from people that aren 't good at designing and implementing large databases, or can't afford the technology that can pull it off, so they slam the technology rather than accept that they, themselves, are the ones lacking. Most of them tend to come from the typical LAMP/SlashDot crowd that only have experience with the minor technologies._

\- _For me, thousands of transactions per second and 10s of terabytes of data on a single database is normal. It 's unremarkable, it's everyday, it's what we do, we have done it for years. And I know of installations handling 10x that. It's only people who's only "experience" is websites that whinge about how RDBMS can't handle their tiny datasets._

\- _Mr. Wiggins article would be better titled something like "ACID databases have scalability problems, especially cheap ones startups use"_

How true are these criticisms nowadays? Is open-source still far behind, or is it (as I think) more than good-enough for 98% of use-cases?

edit: Thanks for the responses, sounds like I'll be trying out Postgres for my upcoming personal project.

<comment><USER6> > Are things like "a materialized view (1996!), a continuous query, the result > cache" available in any free DBs nowadays?

Getting there... [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/rules- materialized...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/rules- materializedviews.html)

(The rest of his examples are complicated Oracleisms and you'd probably get pretty far with MVs.)

<comment><USER7> 9.3 matviews are a step forward, yet you could probably roll your own matviews with triggers.

<comment><USER8> The nice thing with materialized views in DB2 for instance (don't know about oracle) is that they are automatically picked by the optimizer to replace a join. So your logical query is - as it should be - completely exasperated from the physical storage underneath. The DBA just puts in a materialized view and the application will speed up magically :)

<comment><USER9> I think you mean "completely abstracted from the physical storage underneath" :) Although, I'm sure queries exasperate the storage all the time.

Regardless, I had no idea DB2 was so smart. I guess you get what you pay for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last year I wrote a tool for a bank to suck in MongoDB data from 5 big nodes on physical hardware, into an Oracle database running on a virtual machine. The idea was to make it easier for others to write their reporting queries against an SQL database that they understand. It turns out with the right tweaks the Oracle database also performed a lot better, on a lot less hardware. It was one of the things that really improved my impression of the Oracle database product.

The article also reminds me of how a father and son went to a Microsoft presentation in 2000, where Microsoft showed their solution to the tricky problem of integrating multile backend servers. Their solution was to have front end tiers close to the client, and the client getting thinner. The son was very impressed. The father said 'that's what IBM did before the 70s!'

</comment><comment><USER11> One of the comments in the original article said that developers use MongoDB because they're too lazy to use RDBMS. I don't see anything wrong with that - laziness is a virtue among developers!

Seriously though, we are using MongoDB with great success at StartHQ ([https://starthq.com](https://starthq.com)) having done a lot of work with relational databases before. It's a great fit for startups where the schema is constantly evolving & the amount of data stored can be quite small.

Also, by talking to the DB directly, without an ORM, we can keep things really simple. I dread to think of what the same code would look like if we were to use a relational database, either with or without an ORM.

</comment><comment><USER12> Data locality is not about seek times on disk, it's about network transfer times between different nodes! Linear horizontal scalability often needs sharding of data, and with a document store like MongoDB, you can easily shard a complex denormalized document.

Now, if I have this complex document normalized into several tables, how am I going to easily shard several tables, all such that I can execute successful joins that only need to execute on one leaf node? What if I start reusing a small piece of data in one of these normalized tables? I might be forced to go between network nodes to get this data.

Normalization is like premature optimization. I can take any program and modify it such that every piece executes optimally fast, but I am likely to compromise on clarity or to add complexity while doing such a refactoring. In the end, it probably got me no real-world performance boost that mattered. 80/20% rule and all.

Same thing with normalization: automatically making all my data fully normalized from the start is a like a bad premature optimization habit that we are forced into with relational databases out of A) sheer habit and school teachings, B) lack of easy support for nested structured data.

<comment><USER13> You can do all of that with a SQL DB. In fact, Postgres works as an amazing key-value store if you want it to. They've even got some damned good performance in hstore compared to many use cases of Mongo. I use MongoDB and SQL DBs every day.

<comment><USER12> Mongo is much more than a key-value store. Document sub-components and subarrays can be indexed and aggregated against. I don't see how you can do that with hstore.

Yes, I can totally see how Postgres and hstore can run circles around key- value storage.

And by "all that", I would love to know how to use the open-source versions of Postgres or MySQL to have transparently-sharded tables with joins _AND_ have that be in a replicated environment where I can do real-time failover.

<comment><USER5> I think the partitioning and replication stories with Postgres will have to get a lot less manual before there can be automatic sharding. It doesn't sound beyond the pale to me, but I wouldn't expect it in the next five years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "We don't work the way we do because tables are a limitation of the technology, we use the relational model because it has sound mathematical underpinnings, and the technology reflects that†. Where's the rigour in MongoDB's model?"

It seems all anti-NoSQL rants are the same whining and refusal to understand. "Sound mathematical base"? Really? So, if I can't describe something mathematically (I can, by the way) it's not worth it? A computer program is a mathematical description, there you have it.

The relational model breaks for very common use cases nowadays. Yes, maybe you think it's fun to do a query across how many tables to get the information you want, but if your website has a non-trivial traffic then the solution is usually to add more cache.

That's (one of the reasons) why PostgreSQL has hstore. Beyond the fanboy insistence that you can do everything with relational DBs, Postgres have accepted the reality that you need a more flexible data structure.

Edit: yes, please continue showing your contempt while I have to code around the limitation of relational databases.

</comment><comment><USER3> A better title might be:

"MongoDB solves problems MySQL didn't solve at the time."

</comment><comment><USER15> Relational databases are a kernel of mathematical relational beauty buried under a million tons of ugly hacks you have to do to keep them performant.

</comment><comment><USER16> He has a DBA mindsight in a FullStack world. There are many projects now that only require one or two FullStack engineers. Not one dba, one QA, two developers, one deployment/operations, one requirements analyst, etc. In this new FullStack world MongoDB is a great fit: changes are easy (no alter table add new_thing varchar(200); It's interface is JavaScript, the same language we use in other places; It's super easy to get started with (definitely not the case with Oracle); Oh and if we need to scale later, it _might_ scale better too.

<comment><USER17> Yes, in our brave new FullStack™ world we've gone from having three or four people who are each insanely good at something to having one person who is not insanely good at anything.

Progress!

<comment><USER18> yes id still til take "dave" our database guru at BT - whose first boss was Edsger Dijkstra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not so sure about the criticism of applications being exposed as web services.

If you have a system setup where different parts run on different services you don't want to have to co-ordinate and resync all the applications when their underlying data structures change.

Web services solve this by having a agreed contract of communicating between systems, service A knows of a better way of accessing its own data that service B knows of accessing system A's data.

<comment><USER4> What if you need to do something that touches both A and B?

<comment><USER19> Then you would go through both A and B's web services?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps better-put: MongoDB solves problems OP doesn't understand because he sees them in terms of purely relational SQL databases.

<comment><USER21> Genuine question: What are these use cases that MongoDB solves better? I'm a fan of several other non-relational databases, but I haven't really encountered any use-cases for MongoDB that make it seem like a good fit.

<comment><USER22> MongoDB has a nice page which explains the core MongoDB use cases: [http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/use- cases/](http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/use-cases/) and also here: [https://www.mongodb.com/solutions](https://www.mongodb.com/solutions)</comment></comment></comment>


India outsourcing back to USA - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/as-indian-companies-grow-in-the-us-outsourcing-comes-home/2011/05/17/AFZbrp7G_story.html

<comment><USER2> The title and premise of the article seem totally flawed.

The reason why Aegis has opted to hire locals within US is for their native American accent. The cost of vocal training of an average Indian employee is quite high. Given the attrition rate and gap in quality of delivered service, it makes sense for these companies to find out ways to sustain and meet standards. That's why cheap hire of people who "lack high school diplomas" makes sense in the US.

This does not in anyway suggest that India is now 'outsourcing' back to United States. That is likely to happen only after huge and reverse tilting between the two economies [Assuming China does not exist!]. IMO, this move on part of the company indicates only their incapacity to serve from India. In other words the article is just an ego-massage fluff piece.

[Language fixes]

<comment><USER3> What you're describing are the exact same mechanisms that led US companies to outsource to India, but working in reverse.

<comment><USER2> No. Cost of hiring in America was the only reason why outsourcing took shape. India was the largest population which had advantage of basic English education; and thus it was in a good position to serve such an emerging market at low cost.

Only now people have realized that English is different from Hinglish, Chinglish, Finglish, Singlish and cost-wise it is okay (economical and easier) to hire "barely educated" within the States than to train someone in Asia who would jerk the consumer experience quite often. I think both situations are completely different.

<comment><USER4> Typically -glish refers to a mash-up of English and another language, _not_ English that sounds accented to Americans.

For example, Taglish is Tagalog with English mixed in (or vice versa) and you'd be hard-pressed to find any call center in the Philippines that relies on Taglish.

<comment><USER5> I would argue that the English spoken by as a vernacular in India contains enough idiosyncrasies to be classified as a -glish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After the dot com bust, they only interesting consulting job I could get as a 5 month gig for an Indian company writing a Java Sharepoint clone. They did not pay very well, but the work was satisfying. I have also had two remote gigs from China and a few from Europe. Earth seems flat (in the Thomas Freidman sense) to me! Btw, I live in the mountains of Central Arizona.

<comment><USER7> Sharepoint clone in Java in 5 months? I am intrigued. Want to share any details?

<comment><USER6> Sure. All files stored on disk. Meta data stored in memory using prevalence. I used JSP and custom tag libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> More accurately - Indian outsourcing companies have become global outsourcing companies, providing services from wherever is cheapest/most efficient.

<comment><USER9> On some projects, we work with an Indian outsourcing company (not necessarily an off-shoring company) to get temporary programmers to assist with a project. There have been a few cases where we went to India to find workers, and the Indian company came back to the city and found us a local contractor when local outsourcing companies could not. In talking with these people, they got more work from partnering with Indian companies than they did with local companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Capuana, a manager for Aegis in New York, motivates this U.S. office with > dress-down days_

Can anyone explain to me why a call centre worker needs to be dressed 'up' most days?

<comment><USER9> When I worked tech support, I asked this same question of my management. The answer was professionalism. The same reason why most interviewing experts or interviewing articles will tell you to put on a tie for a phone interview: the way you dress influences the way you comport yourself. Doing professional tech support requires a professional behavior that a t-shirt and jeans won't bring about. This might be different if you're doing tech support for a valley start-up.

<comment><USER11> I'd be interested in studies on this because I've heard the same thing over and over again, but I don't believe it.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe it either. I've never seen any evidence that forcing people to wear a tie has a long-term effect on their behaviour.

<comment><USER12> Wearing a tie used to get in my way when I had to crawl under desks to get at PCs.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like IBM.

<comment><USER11> Dude, my day job is at IBM. LOL. I am glad the days of having to wear ties there are over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article is 15 months old. This particular trend seems to have lasted for a very short period of time.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Near-sourcing" aka hiring? It's silly that we have to resort to jargon.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes, this is true.I know a lot of companies that are hiring more in the US and opening offices. This trend is going to continue. USA has some exceptional people and skillsets, and so do Indians. It will be a win win situation.

<comment><USER16> This is what the term "negative externalities" was invented to cover. It is a win-win situation for those who successfully outsource - getting good work at lower cost. It is a win-win situation for those who get decent work. However, it is not a win-win situation for those who cannot get a job or who take a big pay cut or worse conditions because so much of the work in their sector has been outsourced. Perhaps you could say it is a win-win-lose situation.

<comment><USER17> Like you describe, out-sourcing generally provides a net-benefit to _society_ by providing cheaper goods here and jobs in India. But it does not necessary produce a _net_ -benefit to the US, since the trade off is cheaper goods but fewer American jobs.

As a global citizen, I'm not concerned about the latter.

<comment><USER18> Problem is, other countries aren't necessarily as open as we are to outsourcing and foreign labour. For instance, Western universities have many Asian professors, especially in Math, Science, and Engineering. But South Korean universities very rarely employ foreign professors, at least not full professors.

This goes for many jobs in South Korea -- they simply don't want foreigners to do it, because foreigners aren't Korean. The exception is teaching English Conversation, because the Korean teachers very obviously can't do it well enough themselves. The government is trying to limit South Korea's reliance on foreign ESL teachers though.

This goes for outsourcing too -- the UK government is happy to consider having foreign companies build nuclear power plants or railway lines in the UK, but the South Korean government would rather have everything in South Korea done by South Korean companies, even setting up a company to do it if necessary.

When Westerners open their labour markets to foreigners and foreign companies, what can they do if the foreigners do not reciprocate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think with the advent of the internet, the disparity in the world economy is being normalised. In India, just 6-7 years back, $200/month was a good salary where one could lead a a happy life. Nowayadays, $1000/mo is fairly manageable (still very low compared to world standards). Inflation is up, living standards is improving, costs have risen and so are the income expectations. So, this might not be surprising.

Just my thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how much profit there is to create loops? Company outsources to India which outsources to the US which outsources back to India which outsources back to the US, etc. I guess they make it work by finding cheap labor in the US (compared to training Indians).

</comment><comment><USER21> How is a company hiring in a different country 'outsourcing'? It would be outsourcing if Aegis is giving work to another company in US.

</comment><comment><USER22> > _hustle_ the phones

Buzzword bingo.

</comment><comment><USER23> The Article is from 2011 what a joke!

</comment><comment><USER24> H1-B visa abuse must be stopped.

<comment><USER25> Agreed, no abuse should be tolerated.

However, it's impossible to get h1b visas for call center workers.

<comment><USER24> You sure? You can get H-1B for people with no work lined up! Those damn desi firms.

<comment><USER25> You must report abuse then. Be a vigilant citizen.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Wi-fi refugees' shelter in West Virginia mountains - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14887428

<comment><USER2> The wikipedia article has a bit more detail for those interested: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity)

<comment><USER3> _Seven studies were found which did report an association, while 24 could not find any association with electromagnetic fields. However, of the seven positive studies, two could not be replicated even by the original authors, three had serious methodological shortcomings, and the final two presented contradictory results. Since then, several more double-blind experiments have been published, each of which has suggested that people who report electromagnetic hypersensitivity are unable to detect the presence of electromagnetic fields and are as likely to report ill health following a sham exposure, as they are following exposure to genuine electromagnetic fields._ [1]

This is the sort of thing that should have been mentioned in the article. Either through shoddy research or intentional omission the author included none of this and left it with two short paragraphs of dissent. The article gives the impression little work has been done on this issue.

Another example of shoddy science reporting in the media. _sigh_

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity#Scientific_evidence_and_etiology)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was interested in the study mentioned, as I'd never before heard of positive evidence for such a phenomenon. This [0] appears to be the paper referred to. The results seem pretty bizarre and hardly support the rosy view presented in the article. In particular, the symptoms are different for nearly every trial and symptoms were reported for half of the sham trials.

This is also 20 trials with a single subject, so it's probably too early to talk about broad applicability. It would also be good to see some replications in a more respected journal.

[0] <http://www.avaate.org/IMG/pdf/EHS-_A_Novel_Diagnosis.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER5> Very good. I applaud their decision to live well apart from me. Now if I could only convince the woman at Vons who is convinced that a DJ from Portland is controlling people in Los Angeles using the US Bank Tower to do the same.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I put my trial version download behind a contact form  - <AUTHOR>

Hi there, I am about to release a software product (won't give the name since website is not ready yet) and I need your insight.
1. The software is targeted to specific people, mostly architects and civil engineers. It's a windows app, nothing web based. 2. It will be a commercial app, with a single type of license (to keep it simple in the beginning). 3. I will be giving a trial version (I am thinking to make it valid for 10 days). 4. In the website, I am planning to put the trial download behind a contact form, so that I can contact people who downloaded the trial later on.
However, I am not sure to go with this plan, putting a contact form might alienate my potential customers. What are your thoughts and experiences on the subject? <comment><USER2> You really should simply try it out (A/B testing) and see what happens...your own data will help you decide.

1) Initially don't require the contact form for some time 2) Then, require contact form for some time 3) Finally, try having an optional contact form -- they can still download the trial even without filling out the form.

One of the reasons to try this out instead of relying out info from others is that the behavior may be specific to the kind of software you are selling and specific to the target niche and so generic advice won't be suitable.

</comment><comment><USER3> My personal opinion is that this is a bad idea - unless I have to use a specific software package, asking for my contact info before I try your software is enough to make me close your website and go on to the next one.

Beginning the download is the first thing a user does after deciding "this looks cool, I'm going to try it out" - do you really want that first impression to be a negative one? dreamux seems to have nailed it - make it easy for them to download, and even easier to contact you to purchase when they are ready.

</comment><comment><USER4> I usually vote no on such ideas from the standpoint that if they don't like the trial, the won't want to be contacted either. However, if you want to reduce the pain for customers to reach out to you or purchase a license -- make it easy to do _from_ the trial software (a prominent upgrade/purchase/contact button with as few click-throughs as possible)</comment>


Show HN: The Gives – Watch videos with friends - <AUTHOR> https://the.gives/ <comment><AUTHOR> The platform lets you search for YouTube videos, once clicking on a video, the app creates a room, whoever joins this room will watch that video in sync with you, while both parties are video chatting.

[https://imgur.com/qrtyVzc](https://imgur.com/qrtyVzc)

[https://imgur.com/E8VxkOl](https://imgur.com/E8VxkOl)

</comment><comment><USER2> Alternative desktop app: [https://syncplay.pl/](https://syncplay.pl/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've exceeded YouTube's quota. I've placed a fixture with preloaded results of John Oliver clips instead. Sorry about that. I'll try working with YouTube on getting this sorted out.

<comment><USER3> Would you be comfortable posting the source, so that others could host their own copy with their own API keys?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will add an option to paste a YouTube's video URL, so you can search on YouTube and then navigate back to The Gives and watch it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shoutout to Jitsi, which allows you to add a YouTube video to a group video call which auto plays for everyone.

<comment><USER5> Alas, this feature only works for users on the browser app, and not in the mobile apps.

<comment><USER6> Yes. I'd love if the mobile version would kill the users video feeds and keep audio even just to have the synced YouTube video. Or text chat only for mobile? Any kind of graceful reduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rave.io is an alternative that really impressed me. With features like watching videos with friends on Gdrive

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand the name of the site? "The Gives"? That's just ungrammatical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but I liked the domain, it reminded me of 60's rock bands I like.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but those rock band names are at least grammatical. They're of the form "The {Noun}s", not "The {conjugation of verb}".

<comment><USER9> Give is certainly a noun. As in, "the mechanism has some _give_."

> the quality or state of being resilient; springiness.

Whether it makes sense to pluralize it.. well, no. But hey.

<comment><USER8> And if the name was "The Give" I wouldn't have quite as much of a problem with it, though that's still not a great name, especially in this context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's dead jim.

<comment><AUTHOR> :(</comment></comment>


"There's been no global warming [For 16 Years]"--evicted from UN climate summit - <AUTHOR> http://www.climatedepot.com/a/18726/Fmr-Thatcher-advisor-Lord-Monckton-evicted-from-UN-climate-summit-after-challenging-global-warming--Escorted-from-the-hall-and-security-officers-stripped-him-of-his-UN-credentials

<comment><USER2> I can't do it any better than Potholer54. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW- aHvjOgM></comment>


Ive's Legacy, the Post-Ive Apple - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/jony-ive-leaves-apple-ives-legacy-the-post-ive-apple/ <comment><USER2> Maybe Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was getting titans like Jony Ive and Steve Forstall, who could each run their own successful design and/or tech companies, to put aside ego and work together under one roof.

<comment><USER3> Yup.

"My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people."

<comment><USER4> The Beatles exploded into rancour, hate, and bitterness, so they're maybe not the ideal role model.

Bands are hard. People in bands are passionate, often drunk and/or on drugs, almost guaranteed to be egotistical, and fiercely competitive - _not at all_ team players by default, more like literal 10X music rock stars. (It doesn't help if they are.)

There's almost never a supervising manager to keep it all together. (Producers are temporary, and band managers are more like salespeople and hired negotiators than corporate managers.)

It's interesting to wonder what would happen if you took difficult but talented musicians and somehow managed them into smooth cooperation. Maybe Jobs did indeed do the software and design talent equivalent - but even he would have struggled with getting to happen in the music business.

<comment><USER5> Genuine bands are hard. So are genuine partnerships in every field, including founding companies.

Top-down, command-and-control organizations that churn out product are different. Not all achieve the same success, but nearly every industry has figured out how to industrialize "creativity."

In music, pop has had industrialization for sixty to seventy years. Instead of The Beatles, think of all the "bands" that were actually vocalists fronting for The Wrecking Crew or The Funk Brothers.

Think of producers and arrangers like Quincy Jones or Trevor Horn or Prince. They produced many acts, including their own, but they were essentially scaling themselves.

Bands of equals are hard. But industrializing music is an understood business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I liked iOS' "skeuomorphic" design and despise the flatness that Mr Ive introduced, i think 5 years back. The first iPhone was mind blowing because it seemed to make apps pop out of the screen and invited you to tap on them. Flatness is two steps back and made iOS Androidish, not a great design inspiration.

Also the ridiculous obsession with thinness of macs and iPhones probably at the cost of making them do something useful, if that is Mr Ive's doing, he has clearly outlived his usefulness.

Those iMacs though were pretty. Never used one but Ben is right about them being Ive's best work. Wish him a happy and most well deserved retirement.

<comment><USER7> I also really loved the skeuomorphic design that came with my iPhone 4s.

Buttons looked like buttons, leather and denim accents made the phone feel like a luxury device even though it was just digital fabrication.

Even the notes application looked like a sketch pad with a special "handwriting" font. I was sad when it went but now I'm in full nostalgia mode.

I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.

<comment><USER8> > I wonder why they decided to kill it. There must have been a good reason.

Because it is tacky and it didn't age well

I'd say the initial use of it was maybe in discoverability, but I suppose when smartphones became more popular that lost its main function.

I think it gets distracting sometimes and it is needlessly design heavy (think how much images you need to do that).

<comment><USER9> My parents still handle easier the UI where they see the "buttons" for the navigation. They are just confused when some of the text is clickable and some is not.

For those who don't know them, the "buttons" like "Cancel" "Next" here:

[https://www.dummies.com/wp- content/uploads/293595.image1.jpg](https://www.dummies.com/wp- content/uploads/293595.image1.jpg)

Young users don't have such problems, but original iOS was easy to use for the older generations too. Steve Jobs cared about the easy discoverability. That is something that started as early as with Apple Lisa: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW- atKrg0T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4) also recently on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20247545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20247545)

It was a big step back for my parents when iOS removed the buttons present in the older design and replaced them with the plain text.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure how that looks like in a modern iOS version

I'd say this is a good example of (light) skeumorphism (which is mostly good and non-intrusive), I was mostly talking about stuff like the notes app [https://www.dummies.com/consumer- electronics/tablets/ipad/ho...](https://www.dummies.com/consumer- electronics/tablets/ipad/how-to-use-ipads-notes-app/)

<comment><USER9> > I'm not sure how that looks like in a modern iOS version

[https://www.authsmtp.com/images/setup/iOS11-smtp-server- setu...](https://www.authsmtp.com/images/setup/iOS11-smtp-server-setup-iphone- ipad-step-6.png)

They never know that they are supposed to click on these to proceed. With the button look it was obvious to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >In their separate interviews with the FT this week, Mr Cook and Sir Jonathan insisted that no single person at Apple decides which innovations graduate from its R&D labs and which are sent back to the drawing board. "The company runs very much horizontally," said Mr Cook. "The reason it's probably not so clear about who [sets product strategy] is that the most important decisions, there are several people involved in it, by the nature of how we operate."

This would certainly explain Apple's apparent lack of direction in recent years. Between this, their recent refocusing on "services", and the clusterfuck of ports, dongles, and redesigns on new products, I am fearful for the future of Apple hardware.

<comment><USER11> I'm ready for a post-Apple world. Fine attention to detail in the user experience of their products, but at the expense of a pernicious ecosystem that traps you in and works with nothing else. It feels weird to say it, but I much more prefer Microsoft and their recent culture change. They're putting xbox gamepass on non-Microsoft devices, their own PC games on Steam, open sourcing their software, building world class android apps. I don't care how many Jony Ive's you've got, it's the openness and willingness to work with others that I want.

<comment><USER12> Apple has their own walled garden ecosystem because they can afford to. It really isn't much different from Microsoft in the 90s and early 00s, when they were at the peak of their market lock-in with Windows. Then the rest of the world changed, and it took them a really long time to adapt. Since they've been forced to open up their software and their ecosystem, the consumer has benefited immensely. Had everyone still been working on Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows with generic PC hardware and the mobile revolution had not occurred, Microsoft would have never left their old ways because they didn't need to.

Whether the same thing will at some point happen to Apple we do not know (although I'll wager we're nearing Apple's peak), but it will likely take a monumental change in the way that the technology world works for such a transformation to happen.

<comment><USER13> Microsoft always wanted 3rd party apps on windows and never really tried to monopolize distribution or creation. They wanted the platform to be valuable to customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone else miss 'early' Ben Thompson?

Ben of Then would easily spend an hour meticulously crafting around the topic whilst carefully rationing his listeners' attention. Once listeners are thoroughly primed, Thompson would then proceed with a sudden, massive contextual leap shifting the laid groundwork (vertically) into potential energy, lifting us along.

Ben of today, writes mechanistically, with two main pillars: 1)catering to his technocratic subscriber-base 2)asserting himself as an expert historian of the industry.

Technocrats demand affirmation of their worldview (that is what they do), so static narratives provide an important anchor. The preeminent historian supports this rigidity as his main competitive advantage (over lesser historians) is his cultivated cache of (niche) interlinks.

In our (violently) changing world we need thermonuclear Ben not the historian Ben.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope Apple goes back to Frog Design, I think those designs had much more character.

Also, if you make a design slimmer and slimmer, you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting.

I also don't like the sharpness of the aluminum at the edges. The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho.

<comment><USER16> > you're bound to end up with something flat and uninteresting

That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting that since long before Steve died, too.

Hence the iPad, literally just a screen. Or last year's iPad Pro, where they took the bezel away and there's even less screen, same for the MacBooks. The iMac must be the poster child: literally just a screen.

The less device you see, and the more content (ergo screen), the better.

> The plastic designs were much more friendly, imho

But plastic also chips and breaks. Of all the plastic MacBooks I had, none of them finished life without a few chips of plastic missing. The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well.

I agree that the sharp edges aren't fantastic but, strictly speaking, you're supposed to keep your wrists raised above the keyboard to avoid developing RSI so the edges shouldn't come into it anyway.

I miss the PowerBook G4 design. That was aluminium but had round edges. That design but with modern thinness, that would be nice to have back.

<comment><USER15> > That's the ideal: a computer that gets out of the way. They've been wanting > that since long before Steve died, too.

Yeah, but what's Ive's role here? Isn't the miniaturization more due to electrical engineering efforts (placement/routing/PCB design), than to visual design efforts (making it look thinner than it actually is)?

> But plastic also chips and breaks.

Yes, and I think it gives a device more identity and character :)

> The plastic also didn't vent the computers' heat very well.

True! But Apple is known for their obsession of "form over function", so this is a curious aspect that goes against their principle.

> the edges shouldn't come into it anyway

Yes, that's a good point. But you can't always prevent that e.g. when traveling, or lying down, which is what laptops are made for.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my view because I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I liked Apple in the days of the Apple ][, but I absolutely despise their walled garden, and their assimilation of the supply chain. Design is absolutely secondary to all that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "even Ive's exit was beautifully designed."

</comment><comment><USER18> The best Ive's product is the Magic Mouse... How could you put the charging port UNDER the mouse?

<comment><USER19> Because they didn't want you to plug in the lightning cable and just use it as a wired mouse ... because that defeats the purpose of it.

I mean, I plug mine in once in a blue moon ... and always when I leave the office for the night ... and it's fully charged for many weeks thereafter.

You might have more of a point if the battery only lasted a few hours ...</comment></comment>


Reformatting Bad HTML - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2011/02/18/reformatting-bad-html/ <comment><USER2> I think a better (or more moddern) approach would be to use an HTML5 parser (like html5lib), as it has a standar way to parse INVALID documents too, and then recreate the HTML with the DOM.

BTW: Paul Irish has this ticket asking for help/someone to update lazyweb to use an HTML5 parser: [https://github.com/paulirish/lazyweb- requests/issues#issue/2...](https://github.com/paulirish/lazyweb- requests/issues#issue/20)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.cloudspace.com/...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2011/02/18/reformatting- bad-html/&charset=\(detect+automatically\)&doctype=Inline&group=0)

<comment><USER4> the W3 validator is a joke. it rejects many constructions which are widely used and at worst harmless. it overwhelms you with so many BS messages that you can't see where the real problems are.

overall, the bookmarklet version of this doesn't impress me. i deal with web pages wholesale rather than retail, so libtidy and the command-line tidy floats my boat.

<comment><USER3> totally. i thought it was a 60% obnoxious 40% funny thing to post. i took a risk!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My preferred method is "html2haml < filename.html | haml". Doesn't care about document validity - just cleans up attributes and tag nesting/indentation. Generally speaking, I don't want the document corrected, just reformatted. Works for any XML, too, not just HTML.

</comment><comment><USER6> this even works for .html.erb files

<comment><USER7> > this even works for .html.erb files

And ".erb" stands for ...?

<comment><USER8> [http://www.ruby- doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/erb/rdoc/classes/ERB.h...](http://www.ruby- doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/erb/rdoc/classes/ERB.html)</comment></comment></comment>


France lobbies G8 for Internet control and censorship - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/20/france-lobbies-g8-fo.html

<comment><USER2> France had an unfortunate history of self censorship from the media and active control of the public media from the president(de Gaulle that controlled the only TV channel, Mitterand ordering illegal wiretapping of journalists)

The actual french President is a control freak. Sarkozy has strong relationship with most of the private media owners and is using it.

He has since the start of his mandate tried to control the internet eg.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/13/france...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/13/france- three-strikes)

He is (ab)using a common view in France that speech should be controlled and freedom of speech isn't absolute. For instance, it is illegal to make xenophobic or racists comments. La quandrature du net is doing a good job of exposing the latest of his attacks and, hopefully public pressure can shame him out of his willingness to control everything.

He likes the French motto of "Liberty, equality fraternity". If enough people see him trying to replace the first one by censorship, he might be less aggressively trying.

Fortunately, his approval rate is record low, part of this is likely due to his abuse of power and willingness to control everything. Unfortunately, the best opposant is currently accused of sexual abuse.

Then, another member of the G8 is Italy, with Berlusconi as the president....

Interesting countries, all in all.

<comment><USER3> Freedom of speech isn't a law of nature, and it wasn't handed down from God or whomever. In the United States it is provided by the Constitution. In Canada we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and hate speech is forbidden, for example, members of the Westboro Baptist Church are banned from Canada.

<comment><USER4> Actually, the US constitution does not provide any rights, it _does_ assume that Freedom of Speech and other rights are inherently ours and it only limits the powers of the federal government.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that a distinction without a difference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a French I don't vote anymore. The truth is that Freedom is incompatible with having full time elected people at all scales of the society, since they need to justify their work by taking all kinds of unsollicited stances and intempestive measures.

Left or Right ? Both of them will spend the most of their time fulfulling their purpose : to make new laws. Generally on a wide range of topics they don't understand (not only the Internet).

Unfortunately, the blank vote isn't recognized in France: abstention is the best option. So far, no political party suggests that we drastically reduce the number and power of representatives.

<comment><USER7> I think your stance should be commended. However, while they do say "We want full time parliamentary elected representatives, free to set their own agenda, free to control the country's budget, free to debate all public issues...", what are your thoughts on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Alternative> ?

<comment><USER6> In the age of the web, we have the power to make democracy more direct. I also believe we don't need so much statemen whose daily job is to make new laws. A strong and centralized state is mandatory during war, and that's it.

In aviation, a lot of crashes could have been avoided if the captain released the commands instead of desperatly hook on them, because the plane is programmed to get back on its feets alone.

It think it would be the same for our governments, people would be really surprised to see that the world wouldn't collapse if you removed the bulk of our elected and non-elected statemen. We give them too much credits. The industrial revolution happened in spite of them rather than thanks to them, that's why every western european country encountered about the same progress overall with different political systems. Unless a certain amount of freedom was missing, progress grew naturally. Thats what happening right now with the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah, the G8 and G20, only getting things done that benefit everyone at the top. These meetings are meetings for collusion, none of the leaders represent the actual values of voters.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra "(and not just Russia)" Interesting angle, considering that article doesn't mention Russia anywhere else nor links to anything which does.

<comment><USER9> Russia is the evil country by default.

<comment><USER10> I thought it was China.

<comment><USER11> But China isn't part of the G8.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Italy + France trying to get some of glory back they once had. Wanting to have the success Germany has had these past years. Problem is that Germans like quality and working while the French, Italians, Spanish, Portugese and Greek do not. The latter countries protest against unemployment (???), higher pensions ages and higher taxes. They waste time instead of working for their countries to get better. Then get in a few corrupt presidents who like to be popular instead of running/saving their countries (give me Merkel any day over those imbeciles in FR/IT/ES). France needs to do something to get it's former glory back, so yeah, why not try to get 'control' over the internet?

Disclaimer: I live in NL/FR/ES, not in Germany. I spent a lot of time in all 4, although my main country is NL; the Spanish and French are just lazy. Nothing else to say about it; they really do not want to work, just maintain their level of comfort. Come on; protesting unemployment? They want cushy jobs from the government in government run facilities so they cannot get fired. What crazy attitude is that? /endrant

Edit: downvoters; reply and tell what's wrong with this; I live(d) in all these countries; I know the people and I know the mindset. Most inhabitants agree with these sentiments. Maybe you (hopefully you live in one?) don't, but you can have the decency to reply he?

<comment><USER13> Your contribution sounds like repeating common stereotypes. Now we all know stereotypes often have a grain of truth to them, but nonetheless it's useless to use them as argumentats.

At any rate, protesting unemployment can be understood in various ways. Suppose the protester's postulates were: less taxation on small business, simplier laws to ease running small businesses, wide-ranging education on running own business, a bit of import/export protection -- now that'd make some sense, right?

The thing about unemployment is that you can't _just_ stand up and work on something and then sell it -- aside of labor (what you have), you need capital (both liquid assets and infrastructure) and enought knowledge to pull bargaining with (parts, materials) vendors and customers as well as to navigate the legal framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is not a shred of content in this article. The beginning restates the title and introduces a quotation that restates it several more times.

</comment><comment><USER15> Patricians want to control the plebs. Yawn. Wake me up when humans are not power hungry.</comment>


AI will speak its own language soon. OpenAI showed the way - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mikecorp/language-for-ai-74e349e64a74 <comment><AUTHOR> The whole AI industry is switching from learning to growing AI from seeds. A grounded language is another seed for AI.</comment>