The Quotes That Motivate Me - <AUTHOR> Attitude determines outcome.  - Jim McGraw, COO of Marion Laboratories
Be the first, be the best, or be different. - Jacyln Easton
Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur
Elegance is for tailors.  Don't always believe in the numbers.  There is always room for human judgment. - Albert Einstein
Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves. - Albert Camus
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don't know which half. - John Wanamaker
I do not love the money.  What I love is the making of it. - Philip Armour
I guess we can make them, although we never have. - Benjamin Franklin Goodrich
I never gamble. - J. P. Morgan
A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination.  He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. - Charles Schwab
If I could get $25,000, I would spend $24,000 on advertising, the remainder in making Coca-Cola.  Then we would all be rich. - John Pemberton
If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln
The best way to really enter minds that hate complexity and confusion is to oversimplify your message.  The lesson here is not to try to tell your entire story.  Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the mind.  That sudden hunch, that creative leap of the mind that "sees" in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence.  If there's any trick to finding that simple set of words, it's one of being ruthless about how you edit the story you want to tell.  Anything that others could claim just as well as you can, eliminate.  Anything that requires a complex analysis to prove, forget.  Anything that doesn't fit with your customers' perceptions, avoid. - Jack Trout
If you're going to lose money, lose it.  But don't let 'em nose you out. - Gustavus Swift
If you love an idea, that is good.  If you have ideas as to how to work it out, that is better. - Henry Ford
It's a barrier to entry because you're shooting at a moving target. - Bill George, CEO, Medtronics
Name the greatest inventors.  Accident. - Mark Twain
Nothing, not all the armies of the world, can stop an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
Perceived truth is more powerful than truth itself. - Michel Fortin
Purchasers are made, not born. - Henry Ford
Success depends on how you react to unexpected opportunities. - Ross Perot
The ancestor to every action is a thought. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The march of improvement in any given field is always marked by periods of inactivity and then by sudden bursts of energy which revolutionize existing methods sometimes in a day. - George Eastman
There was never a great character who did not sometimes smash the routine regulations and make new ones for himself. - Andrew Carnegie
Think a lot.  Say little.  Write nothing. - J. P. Morgan
If first an idea is not absurd, it has no hope for survival. - Albert Einstein
To lead people, walk behind them. - Sun Tzu
We study the methods of improving our business as we would a science.  We imitate no one. - A. Montgomery Ward
We took what was a luxury and made it into a necessity.  Our only advantage was lack of precedent. - Henry Ford
We want character to go with our goods.  And 16 ounces is a Swift pound. - Louis Swift
What others could not or would not do we would attempt, and this was a rule of business which was strictly adhered to. - Andrew Carnegie
What we believe is based upon our perceptions.  What we perceive depends upon what we look for.  What we look for depends on what we think.  What we think depends on what we perceive.  What we perceive determines what we take to be true.  What we take to be true is our reality. - Gary Zukav
You can't get wet from the word "water". - Alan Watts
You can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it. - Albert Einstein
I wonder if she was thinking about hacking:
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.  The world will not have it.  It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions.  It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.  You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.  You have to keep directly open to and aware of the urges that motivate you.  Keep the channel open. - Martha Graham <comment><USER2> First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

MK Gandhi

<comment><USER3> ..."Then you win" because the Japanese made an offer for Indian independence and the Brits had to match it or lose all of Asia.

...or something like that.

<comment><USER4> They could have easily gone back on their offer like they had done after the last war when India committed 1000s of soldiers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "To lead an orchestra, one must first turn his back to the crowd."

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if she was thinking about hacking:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep directly open to and aware of the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. - Martha Graham

Absolutely not

</comment><comment><USER7> "Honour thy error as a hidden intention" - Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies

</comment><comment><USER6> In basketball you have to shoot 50pct. If you make an extra 10 shots per hundred, you are an All-Star. In baseball you have to get a hit 30 pct of the time. If you get an extra 10 hits per hundred at bats, you are on the cover of every magazine, lead off every SportsCenter and make the Hall of Fame.

In Business, the odds are a little different. You don't have to break the Mendoza line (hitting .200). In fact, it doesn't matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once.

</comment><comment><USER8> The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas. - Linus Pauling

The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate. - Thomas J. Watson Sr., founder of IBM

Name the greatest inventors. Accident. - Mark Twain

</comment><comment><USER9> If you never change your mind, why have one? -- Edward de Bono

</comment><comment><USER10> "The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours." -Ayn Rand

<comment><USER11> That sounds like a quote from The Secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The prisoner falls in love with his chains." - Edsger Dijkstra

</comment><comment><USER6> these are really good

<comment> big-j I dunno. I think taking advice from successful business people is hit-or-miss. Sometimes they're successful because they're good, and other times because they were at the right place at the right time and just got lucky.</comment></comment>


For sale - Social decision making app - <AUTHOR> http://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/66

<comment><USER2> Interesting project - just seems like it fell short on follow through.</comment>


Facebook Tech Talk: Mark Zuckerberg on Memcached - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=631826881803 <comment><USER2> Zuck doesn't seem very fresh on what he's talking about.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't matter. His primary goal in giving the talk himself was probably not so much to teach people about memcached, but more to signal his values, one of which is that Facebook is a company where technical contributions are highly regarded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone else find the upward inflection in his speech to be annoying?

</comment><comment><USER5> I love memcached so much, it's totally saving my butt right now. This was a pretty interesting talk, but I don't think Zuck should have been the one giving it. He needs to give his talent more room to showcase their talent.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is he giving this talk? I don't believe he fully knows what he is talking about. Seems like he is just following a presentation someone else prepared for him.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are these numbers right? <http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/8227/picture9sh1.png>

That equates to like 24 gigs of RAM per server!?

[Update: I thought 8GB was big (& 16GB was huge) - just from my limited experience - <http://www.slicehost.com/>]

<comment><USER8> RAM is disproportionately expensive on leased/managed servers; afaik it's just the pricing model that hosting companies established in the past (when RAM accounted for more of the total hardware cost compared to now), and the industry has stuck with it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Most recommended books for designers - <AUTHOR> http://s.il.ly/books/

<comment><USER2> I borrowed the Robin Williams book from the library and read the first part of it. As a non-designer, I found it to be highly accessible, and it also ringed true. I guess I lost my motivation before I finished the book. But I would finish it if I needed to do design.</comment>


InfernoJS Boilerplate – early stages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/garetmckinley/inferno-boilerplate <comment><USER2> Afaik Inferno can replace React directly. Why would someone not use an existing, mature boilerplate instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> Replacing react directly with inferno-compat is incredibly slow compared to inferno native. This has been confirmed with the creator (@trueadm on twitter) directly.</comment></comment>


Engineer: Egyptians built pyramids by piling rubble and attaching bricks later - <AUTHOR> http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/how-were-pyramids-built-british-3010204 <comment><USER2> Not passing the sniff test for me. Three flaws at first glance…

At the end he describes lowering blocks into place by incrementally removing bladders. This does not work. As soon as you are fully submerged and displacing with bladders you are unstable. As your depth increases, pressure increases, and your displacement goes down making you sink even faster. The good news is if you get neutrally buoyant you could poke the blocks down into place and they wouldn't weight much so you could move them around then remove the bladders.

Also not covered was how the water gets to the top. Each lock load of blocks and bladders requires at minimum the same mass of water to be lowered (to fill the lower lock chamber). In practice it will be at least several times this in order to keep the blocks from jamming in the chamber. So each ton of block effortlessly floated to the top will take several to many tons of water laboriously hauled to the top. Hauling water is probably lower friction than stone, compared to the volume multiplier, I can't say who wins.

The inner lower lock door is also a problem. It has to contain water at something like 10 atmospheres and be loose enough to move. Plus, if shaped like the video, it needs to weigh 150lbs/in^2 to keep from being blown out when raised. That makes it about 120 feet tall if made from limestone.

<comment><USER3> What if the channel was vertical an placed at the center of the pyramid?

         /| |\
        / | | \
       /  | |  \
      /===/ \   \

blocks surface at the center of the floor while it's being built.

The entering tunnel is gently sloped but doesn't have to reach the top of the pyramid.

I guess it would be easier to build since the the walls of the channels are kept in place by the weight of the whole structure.

I don't know about the bladders though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting idea, and maybe one worth investigating further. I've always liked the internal ramp theory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4O5LOCI68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4O5LOCI68)

In the end, lets all at least agree that it was human innovation and not alien technology that built the pyramids.

<comment><USER5> 1\. People, in general, are smarter than the ancients and civilization has progressed since then.

2\. We don't know how they built the pyramids.

Either aliens built the pyramids, or we're dumber than the ancients.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, Poe's law? I'll bite.

When it comes to engineering, domain knowledge is often far more important than any kind of inherent "smartness," and ancient Egyptians had thousands of years of block-stacking domain knowledge that we don't. While modern society has billions of tricks up our sleeve that would completely befuddle ancient Egyptians, I'm sure they had a handful of tricks that would catch us by surprise. Knowledge isn't strictly ordered.

Also, just because we aren't sure precisely which strategy they used doesn't mean that we didn't think of it, it just means that we can't find evidence to overwhelmingly support a single one of our hypotheses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not convinced that the Egyptians could build watertight channels at this scale, especially those shown climbing up the slope of the pyramid which would have to be watertight at the top too, and under great pressure. Also one or two packages could easily get stuck in the "pipe" jamming the whole thing. Finally, the video likely downplays the number of floaters necessary to lift a block of stone.

<comment><USER8> Density of limestone is about 2.5, so the volume of floats would be about 2.5 times the blocks.

<comment><USER9> I'm tired but isn't that just 1.5 times?

Tied together, a 1m³ block of limestone and a volume of 1.5m³ of floats displace 2.5m³ of water. Assuming the mass of the floats themselves isn't much then already that would lift 2.5 tons off from the bottom of the water pool.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I got it wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the sake of the argument, let's accept _" The structural engineer reckons that would be impossible as the ramps would have had to have been at least a quarter of a mile long"_ and _" "If that happened, there would still be signs that the ramps had been there, and there aren't any."_

This idea replaces that quarter mile ramp by a waterway with a difference in water level of 150+ meter and thus with 150+ meter high watertight walls that can withstand the pressure. Where are the signs that that waterway was there?

Also, how do you get the water up in that lock? Ships can move up through locks, but water only flows down.

<comment><USER11> There's a second video that addresses this that's linked elsewhere in the comments. Basically he outlines some evidence for a high pressure natural spring underneath the pyramid, and that some of the branches off the main burial chambers that have never been adequately explained were used to fascilitate water movement. For the last few levels, he proposes a regular old bucket line. Over all, not implausible. In some ways, more so than the standard heave-ho theory.

<comment><USER10> A natural spring in the desert that fountains water up 100+ meters, and they decide to put a huge pyramid-shaped stop on it, presumably to get rid of the luscious oasis that must have been there? And that fountain somehow, in thousands of years, didn't find a new way out through the limestone, which is water soluble?

I think it is more likely to claim there was an oil well there.

Edit: it wasn't a desert at the time they built the pyramids, but blocking a natural spring never was a good idea over there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why not test this theory with a smaller pyramid replica. I think that a lot of people would volunteer to spend a couple of weeks of their summer working on a project like this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good theorie, but now i wonder how they got the water up. There must be evidence of pump or large amounts of buckets :D

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering too. This video explains in more detail how they used pressure to move the water up

[http://youtu.be/C1y8N0ePuF8?t=15m20s](http://youtu.be/C1y8N0ePuF8?t=15m20s)

<comment><USER14> Archeologists would be able to find evidence of these water piping from springs underneath the pyramid.

<comment><USER13> I agree, they say that they should have found evidence of ramps... well they should have found evidence of this water structure if it was used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't the water ramp have immense pressure at the bottom?

<comment><USER16> Not that much, 150m of water means about 15 atm of pressure.

Did the Egyptian know about water weels at that time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My favorite theory is that the blocks where cast in place.

The part where they float the blocks up the side seems dubious to me.

<comment><USER18> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQk_yBHre4) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting idea.

Romans used water for mining too.

Why do effort when nature does it for you?

Two problems people raise:

Water pressure from 150m+ water column is too much. In the video they talk about dividing the hight slope channel into sections This way leaks will be also smaller.

Putting water inside. This probably is the weaker point of all.

But overall it makes sense. It will be great for a kickstarter to try to replicate it at a small scale.

</comment><comment><USER20> OK. How about if they also built a large water tower on top of the pyramid? The seasonal rains would be trapped in the basin(s) and used to refill channels and replace water lost due to leakage?

</comment><comment><USER21> Questionable source imo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the video first. It is a fascinating theory

Other sources: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526467/Were-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526467/Were- pyramids-built-INSIDE-OUT-New-theory-suggests-ancient-Egyptians-built- monuments-like-modern-builder-constructs-stone-wall.html)

<comment><USER22> Well, the Mail's a cheap tabloid too...

I'm no Egyptologist, but I think I'm right in saying that this guy is arguing against something (the whole long-ramp thing) that's been at least thought unlikely, if not wholly disproven, for some decades now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> i love this - even if it turns out to be not fully correct in the end. one thing i was wondering was if any evidence had been found about about the balloon floatation devices, and, along similar lines, if they modeled the idea that small barges atop the blocks might have worked instead of balloons.

<comment><USER23> fwiw : someone else posted this more detailed youtube video ..which has a good discussion of the rationale of the floats -- wood vs animal skin and papyrus.

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1y8N0ePuF8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This entire website looks like a cheap tabloid.

<comment><USER25> That would be because the mirror is a cheap tabloid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What if a pre-human civilization made them and the egyptians just found them?

<comment><USER27> What, like some really smart Gomphotheres in the Pliocene maybe?</comment></comment>


Indigenous Colombians fear losing their hallucinogenic brews - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/06/15/indigenous-colombians-fear-losing-their-hallucinogenic-brews <comment><USER2> A disappointing development. I drank this brew in a ceremony elsewhere from indigenous grounds and it had a profound effect on me. It is a psychotherapeutic treasure beyond all reckoning. One's perceived identity does not have to be "hippie" or anything else in order to find it helpful and edifying. Hopefully this tradition has a future that can include all who need it while be respectful of the culture that developed it.

</comment><comment><USER3> And LSD and so many other safe (relative to e.g. alcohol) psychotropics are still illegal, all because of some moral panic decades ago.</comment>


Ragic – Editable forms with relational data - <AUTHOR> http://www.ragic.com <comment><USER2> I would really like to see a good tool in the "beyond Google Sheets"-space.

I tried Ragic just now for 10-15 minutes and it is far from simple, like their landing page claims. It is nothing at all like a database and it also is nothing at all like a spreadsheet (and not in a good way).

Edit: Looking at previous discussions about it here on HN, the criticism in this 5 year old comment all still holds true: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960207)

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean by "beyond Google Sheets" space, but there have been some cool spreadsheet tools emerging recently.

[http://www.alphasheets.com/](http://www.alphasheets.com/) is still mostly in stealth (as far as I can tell) but they let you mix and match SQL, Python, R, and Excel formulae in a spreadsheet.

Airtable seems pretty polished ([https://airtable.com/](https://airtable.com/)).

Both of these are _definitely_ spreadsheets, though. Not sure if you're looking for something more specialized for a certain vertical or problem domain.

<comment><USER4> Founder of Airtable here--Airtable is actually a relational database with foreign key relationships (the technicalities of which are abstracted away from the user). It's designed specifically to be somewhere between the accessibility of a spreadsheet and the customizability/structure of a Filemaker/Access/Force.com, all with a _much_ more modern UX and collaboration experience. Airtable.com/product or Airtable.com/templates offers some more context!

<comment><USER5> Thank you for Airtable, I'm a big fan, especially of the Zapier integration. Lately there has been a lot of discussion on Hacker News about projects like Opps Daily [1] and Nugget [2], where people write in about some pain point they have in their daily job that might be solved by custom-built software. I get the impression that Airtable + Zapier could solve a lot of those use cases.

\-- [1] [http://oppsdaily.com/](http://oppsdaily.com/) [2] [https://nugget.one/daily](https://nugget.one/daily)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the kind words! We love Zapier and use it extensively ourselves : ). Here's some example workflows Zapier wrote about: [https://zapier.com/blog/airtable- automations/](https://zapier.com/blog/airtable-automations/) [https://zapier.com/blog/how-zapier-uses- airtable/](https://zapier.com/blog/how-zapier-uses-airtable/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "Over 90% of enterprise IT projects are delivered late."

Due to piss poor project managers and lack of business requirements and/or realistic deadlines.

<comment><USER7> Lateness is a mostly meaningless metric. On the one hand, it's vague, and on the other hand, it has little inherent value. Doubly meaningless.

For example, let's say a team is given 4 projects. They provide rough effort estimates and schedule those projects on the calendar, with normal buffer for support issues, changes, etc. Then a new ultra-high-priority, life-of-the- company-at-stake project comes down from the CEO, and everything else gets pushed back by months.

So, are those original 4 projects technically late? By many studies' definitions, they would be categorized late.

Furthermore, does it matter if they are late? If you're late on 80% of your projects but deliver on time for 100% of your critical projects, is that so bad?

Not having the demo ready for the tradeshow is a real problem. Not having the compliance changes in by the deadline is a real problem. Not having the integration upgrade done before your partner turns off the old version is a real problem. And so on. Missing some date that was arbitrarily chosen, probably months or years ago, eh, that doesn't necessarily bother me.

I'm not arguing that it's good to be late. It's obviously better for projects to be delivered when expected to let businesses make projections, plan, etc. I'm just saying the real world is messy and full of tradeoffs. If you're constantly reacting to fires and unexpectedly missing deadlines, that's a sign that better project management is needed. However, if you're working with business stakeholders to reprioritize efforts and adapt to changing realities, that can be good in my opinion – even though externally it can appear that projects are "late".

Edit: To be clear, I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with parent's comment on the source of lateness. I'm commenting on using stats like these as evidence that something is broken in software development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This particular application has name called database application builder (DAB). I think that's probably how DabbleDB got its name. Also checkout out Caspio ([http://caspio.com](http://caspio.com)) and ZenBase ([http://getzenbase.com](http://getzenbase.com)). They are similar products in this space.

<comment><USER9> Huh. No, for the record, we'd never heard that acronym when we chose the name for Dabble DB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We have been running Flexlists.com[0] for many years as a 'background sideproject'. Not to make money; it was to scratch an itch and I still use it a lot. We launch somewhere before DabbleDB I think and some others and they all folded so we never took it further. Ours is trivially simple to use which I do not find the case with others. The interface is somewhat dated and the source code has only been updated for security in the recent 5 years. I am going to continue with it soon as I do believe there is something and Flexlists has enough users and fans. Good to see people are still working in this space.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> DabbleDB anyone? One of those products that really should have been more successful.

</comment><comment><USER12> A bit off topic: their landing page is really very well done. My only picking is their name: Ragic!.. Simpler software doesn't have to _sound_ unprofessional.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this basically the same as MS Access?

</comment><comment><USER14> Your pricing page is not mobile-friendly.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this like dabbledb?

<comment><USER16> Exactly what I was going to compare this to. And I hope it is—DabbleDB was excellent. This looks like it has more interoperation features (Excel synchronization) but maybe doesn't have the auto-guessed column-types + relations that DabbleDB had.

<comment><USER4> Fwiw Airtable has often been compared with DabbleDB :).

[https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/51568968982347366...](https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/515689689823473664)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seems to serve the same purpose as, e.g., Access. What is different about this?

<comment><USER18> 1) Your data is in the cloud, you do have do worry about controlling it yourself.

2) There is no perpetual license to worry about, only pay as long as you need your data.

3) Access allowed business people to muddle through creating database that IT hated to have to maintain... this is obviously different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's always nice to see tools tackling the everyday challenges of allowing the non-programmer to solve his problems instead of hot air duds like LightTable and Eve that try to create some revolutionary paradigm that is unfamiliar to both programmers and non-programmers.

</comment><comment><USER20> Many updates, new features and a redesign? Seems very nice.

</comment><comment><USER21> How is this better than Filemaker Pro?

</comment><comment><USER22> HTTP only sign up page? really? in 2017?

<comment><USER23> Top sign-up link is https, but you're correct that it's possible to load it as http and the sign-up in the body of the page links to the http version.

They need to redirect any http to https for the sign-up page; they already do this for the login page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> More like tRagic based on the comments here.</comment>


Best Slacktices - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@danielhengeveld/best-slacktices-e0cdfc050dd2 <comment><USER2> Slack is going to have to do a better job of educating new users as they grow. Assuming that these large, traditional enterprises will know how to use the tool without some sort of guardrails or deeper education will be problematic and likely hurt long term adoption.

<comment><USER3> As options, integrations, and bots in Slack get more and more customizable, in many cases it will end up being the responsibility of individual organizations to provide some sort of training for their users. SOPs and conventions will be unique to each organization.

It kinda gets to be a situation like we have with some of the huge CRM and asset management systems, where the official documentation and training is really more focused on setup and administration, and the specific implementation is really up to the org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've posted this before, but I'll post it again.

My overwhelming experience has been that the people who hate Slack are people who don't know how to use it:

1\. Learn how to mute channels.

2\. Learn how to use the /channel action to bypass mutes (but only use when absolutely necessary)

3\. Create channels for different topics, and for different groups of people. Create a "#random" channel where people can post silly crap without cluttering the main channels, for example.

4\. Create channels for important announcements (with rules to keep these channels clear of random conversation).

5\. Learn how to set up different device-specific notification settings for the different channels you are in.

6\. Allow people to join and/or mute the channels that make sense for them.

7\. Use threaded conversations instead of cluttering the main feed.

8\. Use the @username method to direct notifications at people, if you aren't directly messaging them, but want to loop them into a conversation.

These simple mechanisms, once spread throughout your organization and used by everyone, will make Slack your friend. You will only get notifications for the things you want to see and/or things that are very important.

<comment><AUTHOR> I very nearly added an extra point "manage your notifications" with a simpler subset of what you posted here but decided it didn't fit in the in the tone and spirit of my post

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > 1\. Only use private messages when you absolutely have to

Disagree. Private messages are the analog of walking over to someone and just talking to them, and one-on-one discussion has valid purposes (e.g. discussing user stories or parts of the design before writing a spec).

> 2\. NEVER EVER do this: @ username can i ask you a question? Just ask the > question.

YES YES YES. This is a huge problem, esp. with colleagues from cultures where this bullshit is considered polite.

> 5\. Don't stare at your chat client all day, it's easy to fool yourself into > thinking replying to chats is the same as being productive.

I have to work on this. I have three monitors, one of which is reserved for Slack (and Outlook). Maybe I should cut that out for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Disagree. Private messages are the analog of walking over to someone and > just talking to them, and one-on-one discussion has valid purposes (e.g. > discussing user stories or parts of the design before writing a spec)

Perhaps you disagree, or perhaps this is when your organization absolutely has to? ;) One-on-one discussion has valid purposes, even if the purpose is to reduce noise, but it's important not to err on the side of private messages because institutional knowledge just disappears, or never gets cemented in the first pace</comment></comment>


'Shooting,' 'Bomb,' 'Trump': Advertisers Blacklist News Stories Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/advertisers-blacklist-hard-news-including-trump-fearing-backlash-11565879086?mod=rsswn <comment> toper-centage This is the main reason why I always advocate for using ad blockers. It's not just about annoying adds, not even just about trackers. Ad-supported content is always, to some extent, ad-controlled content. Advertisers have successfully taken control of YouTube by demonising anything that could be controversial.

<comment><USER2> I spent years browsing the web before it had any advertising on it at all. I remember the first ads, they were called "banners" and everyone raged out about how awful they were.

But we had no idea just how truly awful they could become, and that in fact the entire infrastructure of the internet would bend so that tracking and advertising became omniscient and pervasive. What a nightmare.

For a few years there though it kind of looked like the web was going to remain free and open forever. Back when we were all so young.

<comment><USER3> Hit the monkey to win!

<comment><USER4> Congratulations! You've been chosen to win a free iPod!

<comment><USER5> Everyone fell for those at least once

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's really interesting how the advertising industry has been controlling journalism/media (and therefore the majority of society) for at least the past decade.

<comment><USER7> How about since the dawn of mass media? It was always either ad supported, investor supported, or both. Print, Radio, TV, have always been in bed with, and at the behest of advertisers. Corporations sell with good feelings, not reality. At first, the web seemed to dis-intermediate brands from products, marketing from reality. In a couple decades we've gone from honest online reviews to SEO spam and reputation management; publishing raw ideas to Facebook's endorphin optimizer, maximizing revenue per session and usage at all costs.

Adjacency is the core precept of advertising sponsored media. The advertiser gets some of the juice of the media brand, and the media brand's decisions about what ads to allow materializes an aspect of their brand. Digital advertising at scale takes away the relationship between publishers and advertisers, and instead rely on brokers who define what is an 'ad safe environment'. Having worked in programmatic ads on the buy and sell side, I can say with confidence the system sucks for all. Publishers are constantly having to police which ads appear on their pages, advertisers wind up spending money on Eastern European spam domains without their knowledge. I think life even sucks for the ad exchanges, which have to try to balance the interests of all parties with profit.

A new model is certainly needed. Its shape has yet to be determined, but I can't imagine we'll be doing header bidding in 10 years.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes I feel like independent journalism is inherently contradictory: journalists need to get paid somehow. Even without ads, someone needs to pay their salaries, and that means someone has control over them.

If subscription-based, you write what your subscribers are willing to pay for. If ad-funded, you write what your advertisers think is good for their ads. When paid by the government, there's the risk that the government may decide what you can write.

I fear truly independent journalism can only be amateur journalism, but you don't get deep investigative journalism that way.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is GraphQL suitable for communication between microservices? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to implement an app following the principles of domain driven design using microservices. In this situation, I plan to have each bounded context in my domain to be a microservice. I think this is a good size for each microservice for now and leaves the option to break them down into smaller services if needed in the future.
In terms of talking to the client(s), I plan to have a GraphQL API gateway sitting in front of these microservices.
I am also planning to have synchronous communication between the microservices as they are easier to reason about and test and if needed, some of them could be turned into async endpoints in the future.
Regarding communication between microservices, there are currently a few different flavors, for example: - REST - GRPC - Thrift
I've experience with GRPC and REST and personally prefer GRPC. Using protobufs in GRPC makes renaming fields and adding new fields much more easier and reduces the risk of breaking clients.
After looking into GraphQL, I wonder if GraphQL might be useful for implementing communication between microservices. For example, it is also possible to use GraphQL over GRPC by using a JSON codec and having the GRPC be equivalent to the /graphql endpoint. In this case, you'd get the benefits of grpc middlewares, tracing, retrys and backoffs.
If using GraphQL on GRPC, I think the only benefit of GraphQL over protobuf GRPC is the ability to select only the fields we need and select nested/graph data when reading from a microservice.
Have any of you considered or implemented using GraphQL for communication between microservices? How did it go? Would you recommend it? <comment><USER2> I don't have experience with GraphQL or other graphing APIs but I do have experience with micro services written in Scala using a RabbitMQ backend and running in Docker containers on DC/OS (mesos).

We were experimenting with some other tools back on that projects and were looking at migration paths. If you're starting from zero, I'd recommend looking at Kafka. It's a true pub/sub model and you can use it easily to communicate with various services.

RabbitMQ is good for things that are unreliable and you don't care about data loss. We did care a lot about data loss and had to deal witreliable transfers (like SMS/text messages) there are better solutions like ZeroMQ. Avoid RMQ if you can is what I'm saying.

I'd personally recommend a backend like Kafka and writing your services in a language you like and are comfortable with. Write strong, solid test cases. With good unit tests and integration tests, language choices become less of an issue.

Also take a look at event-source for persistence. You can use regular old relational databases if you have an event sourcing micro service you rely on to persist information.</comment>


MapCrunch - Random street view - <AUTHOR> http://www.mapcrunch.com/?hn

<comment><AUTHOR> I got this idea from "Globe Genie" by Joe McMichael. I thought it could be improved upon so decided to rustle up my own version.

Any suggestions for features / improvements would be appreciated!</comment>


A Massive Impact Crater Has Been Detected Beneath Greenland's Ice Sheet - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/a-massive-impact-crater-has-been-detected-beneath-green-1830437095 <comment><USER2> Here's a link to the study for those who do not want to go to Gizmodo. [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173)

<comment><USER3> Also, an ongoing discussion of yesterday's article in Science: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458138)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Some of the minerals they analyzed exhibited the telltale characteristics of a catastrophic impact, such as shocked quartz grains and other impact-related grains, such as glass.

Forgive me for my poor terminology here as this isn't my area.

Considering they found the signs of the impact, and other impacts like the Chicxulub Crater have left similar debris / signs in soil samples.

Are we at the point now where we can take soil samples in an area and without finding a creator see that there was a large impact somewhere (near or far) around a specific time based on the soil date?

</comment><comment><USER5> pelagic_sky's link to the study is useful, I'm not sure why their comment is dead: [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173)

<comment><USER6> Shadowbanned with only 9 karma and only constructive comments so far, ouch. I vouched for their posts, but damn that's a harsh welcome to HN. @dang, maybe some spam-bot detector is a little too sensitive?

<comment><USER7> New accounts with short posts containing outside links are probably a red flag to spam heuristics.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS - <AUTHOR> https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calculator/ <comment><USER2> Given my experience with AWS, I doubt this is reliable in any way... Every bill I've ever seen(and paid personally for that matter) felt a bit like someone played darts blindfolded. One that really struck me (around 3 years ago when I decided to move over to gcp) was two consecutive months: my usage was 99.2% identical. First month my bill was around 151.01 euros. Second month it was 235.32. Everything was absolutely identical, API's usage, storage, traffic, everything. I compiled a report sent it over to their support and I got a convoluted response which could roughly be summarized with ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER3> I am not sure why this is the highest-voted comment. The OP has shared a tool which performs a calculation for a pricing estimation. This comment does not address the metrics, or the accuracy, of the calculator. It makes a complaint about AWS pricing, but does not attempt to evaluate or comment on the post, or even provide evidence for the unrelated claim about AWS.

<comment><USER4> HN comment sorting is weird. It's not based solely on upvotes, as far as I can guess. Probably a mixture of upvotes/downvotes/flags much like the homepage is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> AWS is deprecating their trusty pricing calculator in favor of one that makes you describe what you're building first, and this makes me sad.

This one only works internally to one region at a time, but it compares various costs in different storage mechanisms on an apples-to-apples basis as best I can.

<comment><USER5> > _AWS is deprecating their trusty pricing calculator..._

Is AWS deprecating the simple-calculator [0]? Frustratingly, it has been neglected and has never supported many aws services.

> _...in favor of one that makes you describe what you 're building first, and > this makes me sad._

[https://calculator.aws](https://calculator.aws) is pretty good, to be honest.

Or, are you referring to the TCO calculator [1]?

\---

[0] [https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html](https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)

[1] [https://awstcocalculator.com/](https://awstcocalculator.com/)

<comment><USER6> [https://calculator.aws](https://calculator.aws) is good but it takes extra clicks. Having something lighter (if all you care about is storage) is pretty nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1TB in GCP Cloud Storage's Archive storage class is just $1.20 per month. [https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=8404213d-ef...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=8404213d-ef9e-4b1a-b5ce-541631c1345c)

Retrieval is within seconds, not hours like in Glacier.

<comment> rob-olmos Impressive to me but $50 to retrieve 1TB vs cheaper tiers on AWS for slower. I don't know what GCP's retrieval throughput is though.

<comment><USER8> There's also B2, with 5$/TB for storage & 10$/TB for retrieval [0].

\---

[0] [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage- pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the design, but is anyone choosing storage based on price? I can see comparing cloud-to-cloud, but within a single cloud the type of data (blob, block, database, etc...) and the frequency of r/w prescribe the storage you should be using regardless of price.

I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move from EFS to EBS or such because its 8% of the price. I chose EFS for a reason in the first place.

Not meaning offense, I'm just unsure of usefulness. Appreciate all the content you provide though! Didn't realize who you were :)

<comment><USER10> >I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move from EFS to EBS or such. I chose EFS for a reason in the first place.

How about when your team has terabytes of data stored in EFS that is only used sporadically and now you want to move it off? (maybe you started with EFS because it makes the most sense for your application but now you have a lot of older data that you still want to keep but don't necessarily need it to be accessed by the application anymore). Something like this helps justify how much you could save by starting that migration project.

I do see your point though. IME, calculators like this are used more for management who are trying to estimate their budget for planning purposes (as in, I have a team that tells me they will need 5 TB of S3 storage, how much is that going to cost me?), not necessarily by devs making architecture decisions.

<comment><USER11> If you have the latitude of moving from file storage to block storage you should already be doing it. I'd say you chose the wrong use case from the start, which also backs up his point.

<comment><USER10> The point is that you may not be able to use block storage at the start, but as time goes on your needs may change, giving you more latitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's clearly missing storing data uuencoded in Route53 TXT records.

<comment><USER13> Or you can get 75GB free by using Lambda....

[https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the- cloud...](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/how-to- get-75-gigs-of-free-storage-in-aws-with-xssfox/)

(Yes this is a joke)

<comment><USER14> It's because of thoughts like this that the number of tags per item is limited.

Initially they were going to allow unlimited tags until someone pointed out that you could use tags on your items as a poor mans key/value store for free.

<comment><USER15> I'm reminded of people who use S3 as an eventually-consistent database. Encode your rows in CSV and use them as names of empty objects. Query using paginated LIST requests for a prefix of the columns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The price for Glacier Deep Archive is wrong.

I entered {50GB, US-East-<either>} and got a price of $1.05/mo. I think the actual price is $0.0495/mo (just under a nickel).

(Less worrying, I don't see Glacier [normal] at all.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You found two bugs. Awesome! Fixing.

I also never use normal Glacier at all (which is how this got missed in testing), but the pricing's all there on the backend. It's a frontend thing...

<comment><AUTHOR> ...aaaand it's an AWS renaming thing in their pricing API. Lovely!

AWS is so bad at naming things that it apparently now breaks other things too.

<comment><USER17> Everything is relative: compared to Azure virtual machine family naming, AWS is not so bad!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So my cost is $69. But it doesn't say per what!

I assume it's per month, but it really should say.

<comment><USER19> It's back up in the top right:

"Your monthly payment will be:"

<comment><USER18> Not on the page I get: [https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple- storage-calcu...](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage- calculator/?storage=3&units=20&region=uswest2&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs)

<comment><USER19> bit odd but only visible after selecting options for both:

"Where is your data currently?"

"Which tier are you using?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Glacier hasn't really seemed like it's worth it for me and looking over this calculator it's almost as expensive as Standard mode? Why would I use it over Standard, let alone Intelligent Tiering - Infrequent Access.

<comment><USER10> This calculator is either giving completely wrong outputs for the Glacier pricing, or it's secretly throwing in some of the other costs like data transfer/API request costs.

For example, for 50 GB it's showing a cost per month of $1.15 for Standard, which is correct (Standard is priced at ~$0.023/GB). For Deep Glacier, it's giving pricing of $1.05 (which is wildly incorrect, as the price for Deep Glacier is ~$0.00099/GB, meaning the monthly cost _should_ say $0.05, or less than 5% of the Standard cost).

<comment><USER21> Yeah, we're investigating what's going on with this. Seems there's a bug in the public price list we're trying to work out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The fact that a 3rd party feels the need to publish a calculator suggests it is not 'simple'

</comment><comment><USER6> The mindblown platypus when you enter a high petabyte value is cute. I like it :)

</comment><comment><USER23> This doesn't seem quite right at least for Glacier Deep Archive. I put 12TB in Ohio in Deep Archive and it is saying it should cost $250. It should cost ~$12. Maybe just some math typos in the calculator?

</comment><comment><USER24> Did you consider to replace the AWS' names and technical terms by generic terms and their explanations, so it's easier to understand for people not familiar with AWS' storage offers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but that feels a bit out of scope for this calculator. Including all of the trade-offs between different storage services and when to use each results in basically rewriting the AWS marketing pages.

That's a different project of mine. :-)

<comment><USER5> Related: _AWS in plain english_ (re-write of just the product names), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> S3 transition costs rely on knowing the number of objects being stored and are independent of storage size. If you're moving between S3 tiers, this tool provides no input for the number of objects being transitioned. These costs can be non-trivial. Predicted savings involving S3 transitions also need to consider minimum storage duration. Consequently, this feels like a misleading tool. It would probably benefit from showing proof of working.

</comment><comment><USER26> What... "Standard - Infrequent Access" & "One Zone - Infrequent Access" is cheaper than Glacier Deep Archive??

5TB in ap-southeast-1 is what I plugged in.

<comment><USER5> Either the webpage is incorrect or uses a non-obvious formula to calculate inclusive costs (Data Retrieval, Data scanned, API charges along with Data storage)?

Re: Storage: Deep Archive's ~$0.001 per GiB whilst IA buckets are ~$0.01; a 10x difference.

API charges for data retrieval from Deep Archive is 100x (?) (~$0.1004 per thousand reqs) expensive than IA buckets ($0.001).

Data retrieval for Deep Archive is 2x ($0.02 per GiB) the cost of IA ($0.01).

[https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is nice, but is it the price per month? Per year?

<comment><USER28> It's monthly, but yes they should add this information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is neat.

[https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage- calcu...](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage- calculator/?storage=1000&units=10&region=useast1&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs) is a way to show "how much more expensive is X than S3"?

</comment><comment><USER30> This is cool, but the EFS infrequent access pricing for Australia looks wrong. Shouldn't 100GB cost $2.72 (not $1.20)?

</comment><comment><USER31> With the cloud, I have learn about computers and I have to learn about AWS/GCP/Azure's version of computers. The cognitive overload just barely equals not having to maintain my own boxes.

Pick you poison, maintain your own boxes or maintain your own YAML files and spend a lot of time trying to figure out billing.

</comment><comment><USER32> Newbie question: which Amazon storage services can be used to add storage to a VPS ? Storage that would be used like a secondary disk. My VPS provider is asking way too much to my taste ($50 a year for 40Gb disk I think) when comparing with Amazon.

Is it possible at all to mount some amazon storage like I would for a block device ?

<comment><USER10> If you can move your VPS over to Amazon, EBS (Elastic Block Store) is what you are looking for, but it's likely not much cheaper than you're currently paying (EBS is priced at $0.10/month per gb, so $4/mo for 40gb of general purpose).

You _can_ mount S3 buckets as a hard disk on a VPS, but that isn't the main use case for S3.

<comment><USER11> $4/mo, not $40/mo

<comment><USER10> Lol yep, thanks. Fixed. I think I was an order of magnitude off because the parent comment was stating his costs in years. D'oh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> `QuinnyPig - I love the extra mind blown platypus touch when you enter 40000 PB

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqdpkiv0ikevsm4/IMG_1937.jpg?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqdpkiv0ikevsm4/IMG_1937.jpg?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER34> The mindblown graphic that comes up when you enter a rather large data size is delightful :)

</comment><comment><USER35> This list doesn't showcase FSx[0] as an option.

\---

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/](https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Would be nice to see other cloud providers for comparison

<comment><AUTHOR> Generally I find that whenever I'm doing storage calculations it's for existing workloads inside of a given cloud provider. "We're moving the whole thing to GCP because it's going to be X% cheaper" sounds compelling, but... I just don't see it happening at anything other than small scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Excellent design :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It didn't fall flatypus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 0 for dynamodb ?

</comment><comment><USER39> is this just an ad?</comment>


1950s U.S. Nuclear Target List Offers Chilling Insight (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nuclear-target-list-offers-chilling-insight.html <comment><USER2> The article mentions Alex Wellerstein, who I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone interested in nuclear weapons. He runs the Restricted Data blog,[1] which is _excellent_ and well worth the hours of reading you can spend there. He's probably most famous for NUKEMAP.[2]

1: [http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/)

2: [http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/](http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)

Two of his more recent pieces, are particularly worthwhile:

Brief history of the nuclear triad: [http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/07/15/brief-history- nucl...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/07/15/brief-history-nuclear- triad/)

The President and the bomb: [http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the- president-and-...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president- and-the-bomb/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The US continues, today, to be the only first-strike nuclear nation threatening to (as an explicit policy) destroy civilian population centers in a host of competitor countries as a coercive tactic and if and when it serves US national interest.

The further continuation of this longstanding policy, which is in effect today, is a matter of debate - though there has not yet been a strong enough coalition of opinion to withdraw this doctrine.

There were several nuclear strike target lists leaked from the past several administrations and they all say the same thing: capitols and population centers of compeditors, strike first in scenarios where not striking could put the US at a serious competitive disadvantage, use the threat of a strike and the deterrent of weapons of mass destruction as a coercive measure in the toolbox of statecraft.

<comment><USER4> > The US continues, today, to be the only first-strike nuclear nation > threatening to (as an explicit policy) destroy civilian population centers > in a host of competitor countries as a coercive tactic and if and when it > serves US national interest.

Doesn't the Geneva convention disallow terrorism? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention#Colle...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention#Collective_punishments)

Does this mean that if anyone actually carried out an order like this they could be prosecuted for war crimes?

Is it illegal to make or disseminate plans for war crimes if one hasn't carried them out yet?

<comment><USER5> International law does not apply to the US. When the Hague found the United States guilty of attacking and violating Nicaragua's sovereignty, the US simply refused to comply with the ruling and the issue was subsequently dropped.[1]

 _> Is it illegal to make or disseminate plans for war crimes if one hasn't carried them out yet?_

Apparently not.[2]

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_in_Gu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_in_Guerrilla_Warfare)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >It lists many targets for "systematic destruction" in major cities, including 179 in Moscow, 145 in Leningrad and 91 in East Berlin.

I wonder how many members of the Berlin Brigade[0] were aware that East Berlin was a major nuke target.

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

<comment><USER7> back then the lower power nukes were also perceived and intended as tactical/battlefield weapons and being present at some tactical distance from the nuclear explosion was considered normal, and infantry/tanks were supposed to move in soon after the explosion. I'd guess Berlin Brigade would even had trained for such scenario.

That were the days :

[http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests- were-a-...](http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a- tourist-draw-in-1950s-las-vegas/375802/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fictional book in the _Dr. Strangelove_ film called "World Targets in Megadeaths" was no joke, it seems!

</comment><comment><USER9> Good thing MAD worked.</comment>


Show HN: Archivy – Self-hosted knowledge base embedded into your filesystem - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy <comment><USER2> Worth noting that this is written by a 15 year old.

This looks interesting, nice integration with Elasticsearch as well. However, I see and have tried tools like this several times in the past (tiddlywiki, org-brain, etc.) and haven't been able to stay on it, always reverting to paper, or, more recently, reMarkable tablet notebooks. Is it just me or it requires quite a bit of motivation and dedication to stick to it?

<comment><USER3> It's funny because I used to be more obsessive about storing my knowledge when I was younger. I kept track of tidbits of information using various systems (emacs wiki mode or OneNote), but as with you, I always reverted to paper, not so I could "look up" information again, but as a way of sketching out ideas. I might refer to the notes a few weeks later, but beyond that, likely not.

Now that I'm in my 40s, I don't care as much about recording information I encounter (other than for work). If it's worth knowing, I can look it up again. If not, ignorance is bliss.

<comment><USER4> Same here, 40 and not very information junky anymore. But it probably has to do with the fact that anything is nowadays searchable online and also that there is so much information (even here on HN) that if you save it even selectively it is a sea of information. I use the "one tab" plugin and rather than closing the tab I save it to the one tab archive. Most of the time I never look at it again

<comment><USER5> I noticed this was the case when I used tools that made it hard to search through my archives. But once I switched to tools with better full-text search, I actually find myself using my archive all the time. It turns out just knowing that I have it and that its easy to search lets me rely on it a lot more when doing research on things I've read about before.

<comment><USER4> It could be and you're probably right, I just personally lost interest in preserving too much information. Of course once in a while I come across a piece of info that I do save but whatever I slap into some text files is enough to me, most of the time I don't need to look it up anyway or I forget it even exists. And regularly I purge it and that feels good. Maybe I've reached my limits... But I do understand the need if one's line of work requires to or there's a need to for research, these tools can be very useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A much more complete version of this is tiddlywiki:

[https://tiddlywiki.com/](https://tiddlywiki.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw this, and it seemed interesting but I had a few problems with it:

A) doesn't embrace the same idea of building your own digital garden that holds nt only your notes but also automatically syncs with different services like hn, pocket etc to save your digital presence locally.

B) Flexibility of search. Archivy uses elastic search with a neat nlp pipeline to process data and allow it to be searched with accuracy. This is all configured in elastic-search.json and the user can configure it to his needs as he pleases.

C) Ease of use and minimal interface. Archivy has a simple direct UI and its goal is NOT to become a note taking app nor does it pretend to.

You can directly search at the top and then you have a tree view of your data organised in folders.

<comment><USER5> I'd be curious to hear more, your goals seem to be very similar to mine with ArchiveBox. I'd love to chat with you and learn more about your project/approach to archiving!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to! Where can we chat?

<comment><USER7> Not parent but here's his Github:

[https://github.com/pirate/](https://github.com/pirate/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I accomplish this with Emacs + Org-roam. And it's a 'forever' file system, all text. [https://www.orgroam.com/](https://www.orgroam.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice idea, it would be interesting if you could integrate the wayback machine so it archives the webpage you add. That way even if the original page gets deleted, a snapshot will be permanently archived.

<comment><USER10> a) it does better

> If you add bookmarks, their webpages contents' will be saved to ensure that > you will always have access to it

b) It's not inline with the idea of archiving things you care about. If you don't control it you can't rely on it. You definitely can't rely on wayback machine to always exist. Someone's got to keep paying for those servers and it's not a huge profit center, and there have been questions regarding its survival before because of lack of money.

<comment><USER9> > a) it does better

that's not very interesting because when I find an interesting read I rarely bookmark it. For me bookmarks are links that I visit often.

> b)

that is a fair point, however I think the wayback way is still not too shabby an idea. It ensures there's a copy snapshotted just in case, and yes it might not last forever but it's done a fantastic job so far so not trusting it now just because it'll not survive sounds a minor risk imho.

<comment><USER11> it's not "browser" bookmark. It's "add a bookmark" into the app

see [https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy/blob/master/main/templates...](https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy/blob/master/main/templates/bookmarks/new.html)

it's just a form where you paste the URL of the site you're interested.

<comment><USER10> so? I don't understand why this is a meaningful statement.

Lots of us use Pinboard.in or similar "bookmark" services. They aren't "Browser bookmarks" they're just forms in some separate app too. We find them more useful than browser bookmarks. The pasting can easily be worked around with a simple bookmarklet.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

<comment><USER11> clashmeifyoucan was saying "For me bookmarks are links that I visit often" which I interpreted as "browser bookmark".

When I read the description of Archivy, I had the same impression (it somehow captures the action of bookmarking).

So I looked at the code to see how it was done, and in fact, as you said, it's more like a local pinboard/similar "bookmark" services.

No real point to make, just clarify what 'bookmark' it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool! I really like the (upcoming) idea of watching your own online profiles on HN and such for upvotes and saving those pages. It's essentially what I already use those upvotes for in my head, but not what they are in reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'm really excited about that idea of building a digital garden based on the stuff you enjoy online AND your notes.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if there's a reasonable way to extend this to structured quantified self data... Fitbit steps, calorie logs, chat logs, etc.

That stuff won't fit the "markdown with a header" format too well, unfortunately. Would probably need to add a SQLite or DuckDB [0] storage engine.

[0] [https://duckdb.org/](https://duckdb.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty cool.

Instead of elastic search you could also use SQLite5 with its full text search support.

<comment><USER5> That + ripgrep is how we're planning to do full-text search in ArchiveBox.io, seems much more appealing than running a full ElasticSearch cluster.

<comment><USER15> A grisly death is more appealing than running a full Elasticsearch cluster :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was absolutely coding exactly the same pet project. This one is so much better than mine!

Kudos. Very good job.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love to see the web-page archiving. Curious about how you see your tool versus Obsidian. Have you checked out Obsidian? Similarly uses markdown and front matter on the local filesystem.

<comment><USER10> can't speak for the author but:

* obsidian is a proprietary piece of software so you can't rely on it for long term archival. There's zero guarantee the company that makes it will exist next year and keep updating it to work with new operating systems.

* obsidian doesn't download page contents

* obsidian doesn't handle bookmarks in any notable way.

While they both use markdown, and can store notes the similarity pretty much ends there.

<comment><USER18> It _does_ use flat files for storage, so there's not much lockin there.

<comment><USER19> And the flat files are IIRC markdown, so it works just fine for long term archival.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple I discarded as junk sells for $200k; mystery woman stands to get half - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28221648/100-000-check-awaits-mystery-apple-i-donor <comment><USER2> A similar thing happened to my uncle Paul (Terrell)... after he moved to Portland, he had an Apple I (part of the original run of 50 he famously bought) and many other ancient 8-bit computers, like Exidy Sorcerers, in a garage my cousin was using. One day my cousin got frustrated by the "junk" and hauled a bunch of it away to the dump.

I believe my uncle still has one more bare motherboard squirreled away somewhere -- it used to hang on his wall in a plexiglass case as art.

<comment><USER3> by a weird coincidence, i was just watching a video where steve jobs talks about that early sale of the 50 computers. it is interesting in its own right.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKlc4m5D50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKlc4m5D50)

<comment><USER2> Have not seen that before, thanks! 1980 was only a few years after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can't really blame the woman, something so old doesn't shout "Hey I'm worth hundreds of thousands!" to most people. But I am glad people at the depot recognized its value and didn't actually recycle it.

<comment><USER5> You can blame her. I can't count the reports of such cases, where they throw away valuable things, just because they're not all chrome and shiny.

<comment><USER6> What? 99% of electronics from the 80s and 90s are utterly worthless. As far as the odds go, she was entirely correct to throw the thing out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> had to reread this title like 10 times. kept reading it as "Apple [that] I discarded...." and kept trying to find that angle in the article.

finally cracked the mystery, felt epicly stupid.

<comment><USER8> Same, intentional clickbait title. A decent editor would not have allowed that through. "Discarded Apple I sells for $200k; mystery woman stands to get half". Not difficult.

<comment><USER9> That's stretching the idea of clickbait quite a bit. "Mystery woman gets rid of old computer, you won't believe how much it sold for!" is the one baiting clicks. Current title is just an unfortunate arrangement of words.

<comment><USER10> > That's stretching the idea of clickbait quite a bit.

He was probably just using that term mistakenly, what a troll.

<comment><USER7> Wait, what? Who are you calling a troll?

<comment><USER11> Woosh!

It's a joke about misusing terminology.

<comment><USER7> So far over my head I didn't even feel the breeze from its passing.

<comment><USER9> I missed it too... so far over my head I frowned and muttered something about chemtrails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hope they find her, a $100K isn't anything to sneeze at.

I did go to a garage sale in the Bay Area where an older couple there had the manuals for an Altair 8800 which they kept because they thought they might have some historical value to someone but threw out the hardware because it wasn't really useful to anyone. But over the years it is very hard to know what will and what won't become collectible in the future.

Back before Jobs turned Apple around you would be lucky to get $500 for an old Apple I, after all who wants the first computer of a failed computer company? :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> These boards were $666 in 1976, about $4K in today's money. Plus you had supply a TV, power supply, keyboard, and punch tape reader. That was twice my income in those days.

<comment><USER14> Going by CPI it's actually about $2,800 in today's money. Still a significant amount of cash though.

[http://data.bls.gov/cgi- bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=666.00&year1=19...](http://data.bls.gov/cgi- bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=666.00&year1=1976&year2=2015)

<comment><USER15> I'm not fantastic at math, but I think that makes it about an 11.3% annual rate of return after inflation. That's not outrageous, but I'd take that investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How cool. Makes me wonder what might be worth more in today's disposable age.

Maybe ten years from now, old cellphones that had removable batteries will be in high demand, because a sun flare blew out all the modern ones. _shrug_

</comment><comment><USER17> Didn't one of the boards sell for almost $1M recently? Did the market for them drop massively or did some fool over pay by $800k for an Apple I?

<comment><USER18> [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837776/vintage- apple-1...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837776/vintage- apple-1-sells-for-a-record-905k.html)

$905,000, and presumably there's a premium for being in working condition. I think there's also a small market of people who have the money and care to spend it on this, so prices can fluctuate quite a bit.

<comment><USER19> Considering the time for the sales transaction taking place (2 days?), I'm sure if they took it to an auction house it would fetch a much higher price. There's only 50 ever made and it's from a household name that even the fashion houses respect.

On the other side of the story, this story is totally genius marketing (if intended). I've been hearing this firm's name all day including their policy of sharing proceeds with people who donate.

<comment><USER18> You may be right, but if you look at the history of sales recently, the prices are all over the place. This one's still pretty low in comparison, but if it isn't working, that could explain the difference. Or perhaps some of these came with accessories, like a cassette player.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#Collectors.27_item](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#Collectors.27_item)

5/13: $668K 6/13: $390K 11/13: $330K 10/14: $905K 12/14: $365K

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had some very old machines around, even if I am not even 30 yo, I love almost any kind of old machine I was able to collect.

I had a small collection since a couple of years ago composed by Sun Ultra-60, Next Workstation (working, but original HD was gone), Next Cube (never worked), Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Apple Macintosh (not working) and some others machines people were not interested anymore and I was able to collect for free. It was a quite good collection and funny to deal with in the spare time, but then, one day, my father decided to discard all of them because they were _old and mostly broken_. I was so disappointed it took me a while to realize it.

</comment><comment><USER21> And that's why I like to eyeball the piles of junk on the side of the road waiting for collection by the council.

So far the best I've managed is a Commodore 64!

</comment><comment><USER22> I read that as Apple "I" (as in me) discarded...

</comment><comment><USER23> If they really can't find her, they should peruse the obits for her husband.

Edit: 3 downvotes and a bizarre reply to my comment about sexism. From the article, "He feels badly because the woman said her husband had died a couple of months earlier". How is my comment sexist? And how would you find the woman?

<comment><USER24> I curious about the 50/50 split? It looks like a relatively new company.(couldn't find a review on Yelp, and 50 plus like on Facebook). I went to Clean Bay Area, under 'How much money can I make?'; The answer was scarce, and I would need to email them for details.

Call me cynical, but while I feel this is a true story, I wonder if this is the first time they actually ponied up any money on donated equipment? That is without a firm agreement to buy before the drop-off, or pick-up?

This one Apple computer and their earnest attempt to find the woman and give her $100,000 sounds fishy? It sounds like it could be a PR move?

I could be wrong, and they always make good on their promise to split proceedes with customers 50/50?

I will probally never know--unless the company comes on here(HN), and describes the details, and discusses the 50/50 split? It would all be good marketing for an honest recycling company? Especially, a new one?

My main point, is I have dealt with antiques, collectables, etc.--for 20 years. I have never found a completely honest wholesale/picker/auction house/reseller/buyer? You have to keep a keen eye on All of them. If you want to donate to a supposedly good cause--just drop off the stuff. Just keep in mind even companies like Goodwill are loaded with huge internal theft problems. My local San Rafael Goodwill has fired at least three managers, that I know for internal theft. None of the managers were charged? Why? Maybe, because the nonprofit didn't want the bad publicity? They sure go after, customers caught stealing--with a vengeance? By the way--I see people buying too many products from Goodwill close to, or exceeding retail prices?

One manager was literally cherry picking the valuable donations and selling them out the back door. He was quite the happy entrepreneur--for awhile? Another was caught taking expensive jewelry out of the company safe, and yes Goodwill rehired her for some reason! I am not picking on Goodwill. I am actually hesitant to say anything because they have a lot of lawyers. Someone wrote a book on Goodwill, and no one bother to read it.

Just expect to get ripped off if you are not selling your stuff yourself. Hell, even the wealthy need to beware--I believe Christie's was found guilty of price fixing a few years ago? Oh yea, go through your stuff before tossing? I've seen a lot of people throwing away 1st edition books. I can go into most people homes and find something of value--they thought was junk.

<comment><USER25> Some people have empathy and integrity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Url changed from [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/mystery-woman- dumps-2...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/mystery-woman- dumps-200k-apple-1-computer-at-recycling-depot/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Turns out that website crashed all my tabs in Chrome. Never seen that one before.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow with that kind of payout I am surprised there aren't counterfeit chinese clones by now.

</comment><comment><USER29> This isn't exactly a mystery. They know where the woman lives.

<comment><USER30> On what do you base that assertion?

<comment><USER31> [http://cleanbayarea.com/portfolio/e-waste- recycling/](http://cleanbayarea.com/portfolio/e-waste-recycling/)

"Our electronic waste pick-up service is free for all residents of Northern California, CA."

OP is likely assuming they operate like my local dump/recycling center where they record my drivers license info every time I visit and drop something off (electronic or otherwise). Believe it or not they used to physically write down the data, now they swipe. Locally they don't tag what I drop off individually with my ID but they do have my ID on file as a visitor on a certain date.

I have no idea why they collect the data as opposed to mere verification. I suspect its something along the lines of a large difference between resident rates (free) vs business rates (if you have to ask, you can't afford it)

<comment><USER30> The article explicitly says he did not collect her information. Is the argument being made that he is lying about that detail of the story? To what end?

<comment><USER31> huh that's interesting, I missed that and in my mental model of op's theory, op obviously also missed it, for the model to make any sense.

I talked to a coworker and in his village they also gather visitor data, and for environmental reasons the recycle center will never turn hazmat away, ever, but the data is forwarded to the city who will lean very heavily on business owners who try to use free resident hazmat instead of paying for commercial hazmat disposal. With lead free solder and RoHS I wonder if some day we'll reclassify electronics (at least modern lead free electronics) as plain old garbage instead of hazmat.

There are, probably, many political ways to organize hazmat collection and its funding, some of which aren't going to make sense to outsiders.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can a SaaS do to detect fraudulent signups? - <AUTHOR>

Our SaaS product has been hit with a couple signups that resulted in charge-backs recently and they would of been difficult to detect without a lot of manual investigation. Apart from building your own in-house rules for each transaction are there any smart ways to catch potential fraudulent signups? <comment><USER2> Have you heard of Sift Science?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not until now. Checking it out.</comment></comment>


Paypal Patent Application: Expedited Virtual Currency Transaction System - <AUTHOR> http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20180060860.PGNR.&OS=dn/20180060860&RS=DN/20180060860 <comment><USER3> Bitcoin transactions support multiple inputs and multiple outputs (transactions involving multiple input and multiple output "accounts").

For example, Satoshi Nakamoto would need to use multiple accounts as inputs for any single transaction greater than 50 BTC. Those accounts were created prior to the development of the Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet spec (BIP32) [0]. From reading only the abstract cross-posted here, it sounds like the linked patent filling from 2016 is describing something very similar to the "Per-office balances: m/iH" use case described in BIP32 [1]; which is indeed prior art from 2012 [0].

With Bitcoin HD Wallets, there is no distinction between a private key and an account. With an HD Wallet, there is a private parent key and there are private child keys which are derived from the private parent key. Each private child key is a distinct "account". Multiple Bitcoin wallet softwares support the 2012 BIP32 HD Wallet spec.

[0] [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki)

[1] [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki#Peroffice_balances_misubHsub)

<comment><USER4> You can file paperwork to tell the examiner that you think you have found prior art. Their searches are typically scoped to existing patents.

<comment><USER3> That would require one to read the patent, which could be used as evidence of willful infringement.

If someone else could read it and file a prior art brief/notification - <USER2> appropriate - that'd be helpful.

<comment><USER4> I think you're getting into a bit of bush lawyering here.

Saying "oh but your honour, I know _of_ it but I didn't actually _read_ it" won't carry much water if it ever came to trial. If nothing else it would evidence an intent to ... willfully infringe.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, and clearly neither are you. Neither of us is giving legal advice.

<comment><USER3> re: "Supreme Court Update: New Standard for Willful Patent Infringement and Enhanced Damages Under 35 U.S.C. §284" (2016 "Halo") [https://www.omm.com/resources/alerts-and- publications/alerts...](https://www.omm.com/resources/alerts-and- publications/alerts/supreme-court-update-new-standard-for-willful-patent- infringement-and-enhanced-damages/)

> Though the Court's unanimous opinion gives district courts wider latitude to > apply enhanced damages under the abuse-of-discretion standard, a concurrence > by Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Kennedy and Alito, suggests at least > two judicial limitations to that discretion: (1) mere knowledge of the > patent is insufficient to support enhanced damages; and (2) "enhanced > damages may not serve to compensate patentees for infringement-related costs > or litigation expenses."

There should be no IP reason to stop using Bitcoin HD Wallets for handling multiple Bitcoin accounts due to the linked patent filing because Bitcoin HD Wallets existed four (4) years prior to what seems to be described in the patent abstract copied to this thread.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the same link was at the top of my google search too. My conclusions were that (1) it's not cut-and-dried and (2) I am not a patent lawyer and I don't think it's wise to pretend I am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Urgh. PayPal is the definition of stagnant. As a merchant, the experience hasn't changed over a decade. I have over a dozen workarounds for their bad interfaces for refunds, invoices, chargebacks, tax reporting, etc, user experiences.

I'm not clear on why they move so slow.

To be fair, across that broad range, nobody else is doing better than them. It just seems like given their position, I'd see more innovation. For example, what's their response to Stripe? They seem to be on their laurels.

<comment> rising-sky

      > For example, what's their response to Stripe?

Acquired Braintree [https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/09/26/paypal- braint...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/09/26/paypal-braintree- acquisition/2874891/)

<comment><USER5> Sure, but compare Braintree related HN posts to Stripe related HN posts. Something is missing.

Edit: Guess my feel that HN posts might be correlated to innovation is off? As far as I can tell, Stripe is kicking Braintree's ass. PayPal has good market share as a whole, because it is a second form of payment. Ignore that and look at basic CC payments only, and Stripe is clearly beating Braintree in market share. Basically...what did PayPal net from this acquisition?

<comment><USER6> HN posts are no measure of profitability or market share. Loud does not equal better.

<comment><USER5> So, how do the two do compare in market share? That is, specifically vs the Braintree product. Is this accurate? [https://www.datanyze.com/market- share/payment-processing/bra...](https://www.datanyze.com/market- share/payment-processing/braintree-vs-stripe/)

Edit: Get the charge volume point, but 15% of top sites versus less than 1% seems to indicate something. Also, websites added/dropped going negative for Braintree. That can't be a good thing.

<comment><USER6> You'd want to measure based on charge volume, not sites using each service.

My understanding is Braintree is cheaper when you get big enough.

Edit: it doesn't cost you anything to accept Stripe on your site. Would you figure Optimizely revenue from all of its free plan users they just purged? You would not.

<comment><USER7> Why charge volume? Seems like since the fees are the same, number of integrations would be a better indicator of ease of use.

<comment><USER6> Ease of use doesn't mean profit. Volume and margins do. That's _all that matters_. Reddit is easy to use and makes zero profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Copy-and-pasted the abstract: "Expedited virtual currency transactions are provided by identifying a first user primary wallet associated with a virtual currency and including a first user primary wallet private key. First user secondary wallets are created that each include a respective first user secondary wallet private key, and a respective virtual currency transaction is performed using the first user primary wallet private key to transfer predefined amounts of the virtual currency from the first user primary wallet to each of the first user secondary wallets such that first user secondary wallets are provided with different predefined amounts of the virtual currency. Subsequently, an instruction is received to transfer a payment amount to a second user, and the second user is allocated a subset of the first user secondary wallet private keys included in respective first user secondary wallets that are associated with predefined amounts of the virtual currency that equal the payment amount."

It sounds like a way of PayPal holding in escrow. This doesn't solve transaction speed except for example repeat transactions (known amount long beforehand). You need a new wallet per every transaction, also?

<comment><USER9> It sounds like they say 'create 100 accounts with 1 coin in it', then when you want to send, say, 23 coins, you give the recipient the _private keys_ to 23 of those accounts.

Which 1) only works if you trust the sender or 2) immediately transfer the funds out in which case you're still rate limited by the root chain.

<comment><USER10> > or 2) immediately transfer the funds out in which case you're still rate > limited by the root chain.

That's in there.

> 12\. The method of claim 11, further comprising: performing, by the first > user device, a respective virtual currency transaction using each of the > plurality of decrypted third user secondary wallet private keys to transfer > the association of predefined amounts of the virtual currency associated > with respective third user secondary wallets to the first user primary > wallet.

So I'm not sure how this is supposed to "expedite" anything.

<comment><USER9> It isn't completely irredeemable in a different context. Such as if the network supported expedited operations for things. Imagine if Ethereum had a built-in or special smart contract that was a wallet contract. It has an owner that is just some address (another contract or desktop wallet). If Ethereum expedited changing ownership (where ownership changes are signed messages of the current owner so there is no trust involved), then the idea works.

Edit: wait, no, that shouldn't be much faster, if at all. Still need to get it in a block and, IIRC, Ethereum is account based so this is basically how transfers already work, just using arithmetic...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, so is the patent literally for just transferring wallets with currency in them?

<comment><USER10> Boiled down, it appears so.

I only read the claims, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My god, that is one of the most unclear abstracts I've ever read.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sad the US doesn't do anything against patents or at least software patents. I don't think patents do any good in respect to the development of mankind.

<comment><USER14> Most modern pharmaceuticals would not exist without patents.

<comment><USER15> Why do you say that? Just because most modern pharmaceuticals were created with patents, doesn't mean that they wouldn't exist without patents.

<comment><USER14> Because trade secrets are virtually impossible in non-biologic drugs, the entire funding ecosystem around pharmaceuticals is driven by patents.

<comment><USER15> 5 minutes of googling suggests that Penicillin was not patented and the mass production was later patented by the USDA (not some private pharma company). The entire modern funding ecosystem being patent based just means it's the most profitable business model, not that it's the only way to produce pharmaceuticals.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production)

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US2442141](https://patents.google.com/patent/US2442141)

<comment><USER14> Of course it's not the only way to produce pharmaceuticals, as pharmaceuticals are thousands of years old. But without patents the number of new drugs pharmaceuticals over the last 50 years would be probably 1-5% of it actually was.

<comment><USER16> Maybe we would have less but better pharmaceuticals, because it would be easier to improve the existing ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why should this be patentable?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is from 2016 and original authors are no longer at PayPal..

<comment><USER4> Patents typically take several years to be examined.

Source: mine took 4 years, including various rounds of asking for re- examination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The title here is clickbaity and misleading.

Patents are hard to read, and very easy to believe (especially for lay people) that they claim far more than they actually do. What you need to do is ignore everything but the claims. I am by no means an expert (I'm still somewhat confused as how relevant dependent claims are, for example), but the starting point is still easy.

Reading the first claim, the nexus of the claim is that it's a virtual currency system were you send money from wallet A to wallet B by routing it through distinct subwallets. There also seems to be an element that the subwallets are effectively fixed-size wallets (e.g., each subwallet represents a different coin as physical currency would have), but I would not bank a legal case on that. The other independent claims are effectively repetitions of this idea.

So, at best, this could be construed as a patent on tumblers, and definitely nothing wider-reaching than that. Even the claim that it would cover tumblers is somewhat stretching it, I think.

</comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone done the math on how much losing ~100% of their Ebay business will cost them?

<comment><USER21> Ebay was (and is until mid 2020) 13% of Paypal volume [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/paypal-just-how-bad-is- the...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/paypal-just-how-bad-is-the-ebay- breakup-2018-02-01)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> (2016)

</comment><comment><USER23> what's the point of this when there's clearly prior art[1] by almost a decade? to patent-troll and stifle competition? i doubt it would work for them; it'll only take 1 bitcoin millionaire/billionaire philanthropist (see pineapple fund) to shut them town.

[1] [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

<comment><USER24> To appease shareholders.

<comment><USER20> I'm surprised it took this long for an innovative digital payments company to think about innovating digital payments.</comment></comment></comment>


The Continued Existence of the Emacs IPython Notebook - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jupyter.org/2017/02/23/the-continued-existence-of-the-emacs-ipython-notebook/ <comment><USER2> The emacs ipython notebook is indeed a very impressive piece of software. Kudos to John for maintaining this after the original creator stopped enhancing it.</comment>


Ask NH: How do you become a Data Scientist? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, I'd be interested in the topics one must learn/ master in order to become a Data Scientist.
Also, it would be great if you could include any learning resources you would recommend (books, tutorials, websites, classes, etc).
Thanks, <comment><USER2> Introduce yourself to statistics.</comment>


"The Secret History of Mac Gaming" Now Available - <AUTHOR> https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/ <comment><USER2> I think all these Gaming on the Mac or developed on the Mac, all happen when Steve Jobs wasn't in Apple.

I wonder if Steve Jobs was ever a gamer. He worked in Atari, that should means something? It seems right after Steve Jobs came back the one thing he decide not to focus on is gaming. And ever since then Apple hasn't been in gaming community at all.

Apple now, is possibly the largest Gaming platform by revenue, most of those App Store revenue, my bet is that 80%+ are from gaming. But this wasn't because Apple thought Gaming was important, there simply had the Software infrastructure and best hardware in place. I wish they could do the same for Mac, but then again, I dont see Apple cares about gaming at all.

<comment><USER3> The reason why Apple's iOS App Store is so successful, is it's the only store accessible/allowed. On Mac Apple is also competing with Steam, which probably taxes quite a lot App Store game sales.</comment></comment>


USER GENERATED SERVER DESTRUCTION - <AUTHOR> http://www.ugsd.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> The server is an exhibition an [Node15]([http://node15.vvvv.org/](http://node15.vvvv.org/))</comment>


The Bicycle Problem That Nearly Broke Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-bicycle-problem-that-nearly-broke-mathematics/ <comment><USER2> See also:

[http://www.nature.com/news/the-bicycle-problem-that- nearly-b...](http://www.nature.com/news/the-bicycle-problem-that-nearly-broke- mathematics-1.20281)</comment>


A Tale of Two Exploits - <AUTHOR> http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-tale-of-two-exploits.html

<comment><USER2> This is a quintessential example of why it's a very bad thing for the NSA to hoard zero-days. It's easy to forget that the black hats are looking for zero days too, and the fact that you've found an undisclosed vulnerability doesn't mean that that you're the the only one to have found this vulnerability, or even that you're the first one.

In the example from the article, it's likely that the black hats found the zero day first, and were in the process of updating their attack toolkits when the Project Zero team came across the issue and notified Adobe. If it had been the NSA that found this issue, no one would have been notified, and the black hats would have had days or weeks to refine their attacks before a patch was issued.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not familiar with the term bug collision, and I don't quite grok it from context. Is this another way of saying independent discovery?

<comment><USER4> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm no security researcher, but the proof of concept looks like there just exists this API where you get to set a memory address and call from a limited pool of functions. Based on that observation, this hardly seems like an exploit--it looks like "as designed". What made Adobe/Macromedia/whoever originally decide that this interface was "secure"? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> Well, the ability to call a set of functions (really, to overwrite a vtable pointer with a constrained set of values - which is a table of function pointers your C++ compiler emits to handle virtual function calls) is the underlying vulnerability. The article describes a proof of concept exploit - an approach of turning this into a concrete security problem (arbitrary command execution/calling libc).</comment></comment>