In surprise FCC filing, Sprint endorses net neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://gigaom.com/2015/01/16/in-surprise-shift-sprint-endorses-net-neutrality/ <comment><USER2> Best marketing Sprint has ever done.

Granted this position probably helps them against the bigger competitors, that is why competition is good.

Already we are seeing network providers start to jockey for competitive positions just at the hint of change. Imagine the competition when this actually happens.

 _This position stands in stark contrast to what other carriers, including Verizon and AT &T, have espoused. In particular, the carriers have warned that Title II would provide a major disincentive to invest in upgrades to their internet offerings._

They are arguing that our current market setup is encouraging investment in upgrades? Where are they? The current system hasn't spawned investment and new upgrades, but competition will surely do this. Here in Phoenix (Tempe/Scottsdale), the moment Google announced Phoenix would be a possible Fiber market, Cox Gigablast initiative was launched, before that _crickets_.

<comment><USER3> I dunno, the fact that Sprint still offers (real) Unlimited data plans in the US is the best marketing they have ever done in my book.

<comment><USER4> That is true, but that doesn't make up for the sheer glacial speed that Sprint is moving at to improve their network. They have the most spectrum of all of the carriers but do not use it properly. Quarterly announcements of the Spark network upgrades not meeting their own expectations seems to have become common. You may have LTE but it's not very useful if you can barely get 1Mb/s.

T-Mobile on the other hand is having greater success with their CEO and all of the "uncarrier" tactics they are implementing. T-Mobile is now focusing on upgrading the last of their own cell sites to LTE to expand footprint in the rural parts of the country but they still have a ways to go. And that's not to say T-Mobile's existing LTE network isn't great, it's fantastic (if you can actually get it).

AT&T is out of new deployable spectrum so their LTE network is slowing down in congested areas. They are deploying tens of thousands of small cell sites to make their network more dense to help with this problem. So say a tower has 100 people sharing 20mhz (10x10) of LTE bandwidth at the same time. If there are now three small cell sites placed away from that tower, each additional site has 20mhz of spectrum to use. So there would then be ~25 on that main tower, and ~25 on each additional small cell site.

Verizon's original 700mhz LTE network is very congested in a lot of areas, but instead of deploying as many small sites as AT&T, they instead bought that very large chunk of AWS spectrum from cable companies and have it deployed to the majority of their cell sites. In major cities this is a full 40mhz chunk of spectrum (20x20) which theoretically can net you up to 150Mb/s if you have the right device that can use band 4. They also have started re-farming a small portion of their PCS spectrum (10mhz total) in some testing areas (san francisco especially). They will need to densify their network eventually but they sure have done a great job at buying an ample amount of time.

I personally feel Sprint's current slump all comes down to the Clearwire/WiMax decision. Both Sprint and Verizon were in the same situation when it came to deploy their choices of 4G technologies. They both operated CDMA/EVDO 3G networks which with the revision they were using maxed out around 3.1Mb/s. AT&T was in the middle of deploying their HSPA/HSPA+, what they now call "4G" (not to be confused with LTE). Verizon and Sprint did not have the option of this transition period of significantly higher speeds that was not LTE or WiMax. Surprisingly Verizon got this right. They obtained a nationwide chunk of 700mhz block c (band 13) spectrum for their initial LTE network they started deploying in early 2011. This is the same spectrum that has the open access rules attached to it that made them back down on throttling on their LTE network. The sheer speed at which they deployed this LTE spectrum was just ridiculously fast. Right now they have 99% of their entire 3G footprint covered with that layer of LTE while AT&T's national map is still nowhere close to Verizon in terms of overall LTE deployment covering their entire legacy networks.

Meanwhile Sprint went ahead with WiMax and we all know how that unfolded. I hope they can recover as 4 national carriers is always going to be better than 3 competition wise, but I just don't see it happening for potentially years from now.

In terms of network, Verizon got it 100% right the entire time. AT&T struggled in ~2009 with the iPhone and recovered but is feeling the effects of congestion but they are countering with tons of small cell sites. Verizon has congestion on the band 13 LTE deployment, but band 4 is helping with that. T-Mobile's LTE deployments are great, but they are still focusing on expanding into more rural areas. Sprint is working on their Spark network, and where you can get it, it's good, but they just are moving so damn slow I don't know if it will be fast enough in the long run.

<comment><USER5> Maybe you guys can answer this. With mainland Europe using GSM across the board, do they have these frequency allocation problems across providers? It seems to me like it would be in everyone's interest to have a large shared pool of frequency allocations and share the burden of maintaining a network using them. Then you significantly more bandwidth capability per tower.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but won't someone please think of the poor industry executives?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a sort of an accepted insanity that the positions which these large businesses take are considered important.

Certainly information from these businesses on how they believe different legislation will effect them is useful to voters, their representatives and their appointees in performing a legislative calculus.

But what certain companies 'advocate' for? This is hardly useful information for the design of legislation (it's a single bit, and a complicated one). As these large businesses should have no direct say in how they are regulated, I don't see why we the people should care what companies 'endorse'. They don't get a vote.

Whether Google or Sprint or AT&T or Comcast sanctions or opposes net neutrality should mean nothing and should not be worthy of news. The companies that happen agree with the general public do not do so on the ground of ideals or liberty or heroism but on the ground of profit. They are not the stewards of public interest or champions of the public - only the public can do and be this. We can't count on Sprint or Google or any other company to get the legislation we want passed - because if we condone that we also condone their passing of legislation we don't.

<comment><USER8> Why is it insanity? You are implying that the companies are adding no value to the discussion by chiming on the topic. Shouldn't the entities most impacted by the change be listened to when it comes to decide on policy?

You can certainly make a case that you need to adjust for their self-interest, but ignoring them completely is even more questionable than taking their statements at face value.

<comment><USER7> > Certainly information from these businesses on how they believe different > legislation will effect them is useful to voters, their representatives and > their appointees in performing a legislative calculus.

> But what certain companies 'advocate' for? This is hardly useful information > for the design of legislation...

We agree. I'm not saying ignore everything they possibly say. What I am saying is ignore what they merely advocate for and pay attention to why they advocate for it and what information they can give relevant to the design of a healthy and flourishing industry.

When political discussion devolves into a series of corporate for-against it looks more like a sport and cheerleaders than a democracy. Legislation can not be about deciding who wins in the market but about designing markets that eliminate rent seeking, moral hazard, and externalization of costs while promoting fair competition between businesses of all sizes. You can't know how to design such legislature without understanding the conditions of an industry and how changes will effect current players. But you also can not design markets within the confines of regulatory capture or by merely noting which current players will stand to benefit or lose from a given legislative delta.

The word insanity here is meant to convey a lack of grounding in the reality of the situation: advocation doesn't signal whether legislation will make a market healthier or serve customers/citizens/nations. We know what Sprint wants - more money. What we need to know from Sprint is not whether given legislation will or will not lead to their getting more or less money but details that clarify how proposed legislation will or will not "eliminate rent seeking, moral hazard, and externalization of costs while promoting fair competition between businesses of all sizes."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sprint understands that it hurts their competitors more than themselves. NN is unlikely to be strong on the mobile side, and Sprint has little in the way of consumer wireline business. Verizon and AT&T have more substantial wireline businesses.

Similar to Walmart supporting a higher minimum wage. Hurts the other guys more. And a nice bit of PR.

<comment><USER10> Little consumer wireline but substantial wireline overall. NN is an extremely positive thing for Sprints network planning/design, as they are building capacity over intelligence. Source: I stare at Sprints network maps every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Note the repitition in the letter: 'light touch' and 'allow differentiation'. I think this is likely reasonable, but it certainly gives the carriers enough wiggle room to still play shenanigans. Which is likely fine; Sprint's right that there needs to be room for having differing services. But the good news is they clearly signaled that if they have to, they'll differentiate at the network layer instead of giving up at the services layer. (That's what I read into it - time will tell if it's merely a political gambit :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Not mentioned in the article (and perhaps Legere will change his mind) but TMobile is aligned with AT&T and Verizon in opposing Title II reclassification.

Disappointed with that stance, since otherwise, I'm thrilled with TMobile from a customer standpoint.

</comment><comment><USER13> > So long as the FCC continues to allow wireless carriers to manage our > networks and differentiate our products, Sprint will continue to invest in > data networks regardless of whether they are regulated by Title II, Section > 706, or some other light touch regulatory regime.

This is really huge, because it endorses applying Title II to _wireless_ networks, not just wired broadband.

Much of the discourse so far has been around wired broadband, and many of the proposals so far (including the FCC regulations that were shot down last year in court) carved out special exemptions for wireless networks.

<comment><USER14> The FCC regulations that were shot down in court, and the proposed follow up, did _not_ differentiate wireline from wireless, they differentiated fixed from mobile. Those are approximately the same, but the definitions and explanations made clear that broadband delivered wirelessly could be "fixed" (e.g., via microwave transmitter to a fixed location.)

Its important to note, because in addition to opposing net neutrality overall, ISPs have pitched that any regulation in that direction should use a wireline/wireless distinction rather than fixed/mobile distinction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not that surprised, they own a minority share of the market and infrastructure, in their case its too their advantage that they be able to use other's networks uninhibited (roaming, long distance fiber, etc).

</comment><comment><USER16> All this means is that Sprint thinks it is on the losing end of some deals made by competitors.

<comment><USER17> Along with every US customer of 'broadband' paying $50-$75 per month for 5-15mbps fixed non-broadband.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Was a Sprint customer for two years then last year I kept seeing all these great deals pop up due to T-Mobile. I kept calling them asking if they had anything competitive. The only thing they had was this terrible framily plan where I had to work to find people/anyone to join this plan with. Even deadbeats. Stupid & when I started to travel I noticed how bad their network is!

I have since switched to an ATT family plan. 15 Gigs split between 4 users, free WiFi hotspot (had to pay $15 additional a month to Sprint for that) and I pay less then $50 a month. ATT coverage is solid everywhere in this state and up and down the east coast.

<comment><USER17> I second this. Switched from Verizon to AT&T. I can get good speeds on AT&T's 4G LTE network in some of the lowest population spots - in the middle of nowhere - on the east coast. Their network has been impressive so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this a case of wireless vs wired? Most Title II talks are with respect to wired connections due to last mile issues. Wireless doesn't have that particular issue. And right now wireless has plenty of roaring competition so there's certainly less of a need for a regulatory hand.

<comment><USER2> Wireless is already under Title II (also Sprint probably wants in on wired so they are for open competition there), that is why AT&T, Verizon, etc take their winnings from the wired internet market and invest it into competing in wireless because they have to compete as there is competition.

The monopolies on the ground were used as wireless investments/banks, nearly all investment went into the wireless side, not fiber or residential internet.

We have seen 3G, 4G, LTE etc all rapidly rolled out by all wireless providers, yet we are still running late 90's speeds on wired. The reason is the competition. Title II is at least a start because it somewhat works in wireless, better than wired anyways.

<comment><USER20> Wireless is only nominally under Title II. Section 332 of the statute instructs the FCC to forbear on most of the parts of Title II when it comes to wireless.

And Title II is one reason there is competition in wireless, but you've got the effect backwards. Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon are not cable providers, so their wired networks were heavily regulated by full-on Title II. They invested money in wireless because it was much less regulated. But the big thing was that bandwidth demand for mobile exploded, while growing much slower for wired.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Wireless was a blue ocean just like cable/broadband was in the late 90s/early 00s where mobile really hit in the last decade. So of course most of the money and investment would go there, but being under Title II somewhat helped rather than, like in wired, a full on monopoly over areas creating stagnation and less demand. They are still competing it out for your business over wired even though Google Fiber may be in even higher demand.

However, part of the promise of getting $200B in investment/breaks was to finish building out the wired side, which really has not been done and is now harming us competitively with the world. Part of their promise was to spend it on the less demand areas of wired. Had they built out fiber and competed there would be more demand for it. Google Fiber is in high demand and all Google is doing is using broadband late 90s playbook, just give the people faster speeds and whole unrealized economies emerge that our GDP has been missing for a decade during wireless laser focus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I live in SF. Get fast LTE everywhere in the city. A bit slower elsewhere in the Bay Area, but well worth it given the significantly cheaper prices.

</comment><comment><USER22> kick ass Sprint!</comment>


German City Set To Make Linux A Norm For Citizens   - <AUTHOR> http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=109248

<comment><USER2> _" Lubuntu can comfortably run on as little as 256MB of RAM."_

It can although I'd call it jogging rather than running. It can work on a P3 coppermine class laptop very nicely. However, a stock Lubuntu live CD does not come with LibreOffice.

Gnumeric is a nice spreadsheet, but Abiword _normally_ does not have built in facilities for mathematical formulas, or for making drawings. There appears [1] to be no presentation application.

I hope the City are making some training materials available along with advice on installing LibreOffice. LO will jog on a 900MHz p3/256Mb _one application at a time_.

[1] [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Setup#Applications](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Setup#Applications)

Edit: I should say on P4 upwards or a Centrino laptop with 512Mb it will fly, and run LO fine with multiple applications.

<comment><USER3> Quite sincerely, I just tried switching to Ubuntu 13.04 (from Win7) on my gaming machine (4GB Ram, some Nvidia card that I can play BF3 very well), and it doesn't "Run" like Windows either.

Chrome is slow to start, videos don't load properly, ejecting the pendrive fails...

<comment><USER4> Did you get the proprietary drivers for that Nvidia card?

They can't legally be included in the distro itself, you have to go get them, which is a shame.

<comment> quaint- The situation described by GP is so ridiculous that it's unlikely to be true, which is why I wouldn't recommend anyone to waste their time trying to solve the mentioned "problems".

I mean, really, why would _anyone_ switch from Windows to Ubuntu on a _gaming machine_? Just think about it for a sec.

(Videos not loading or USB not working are issues the OEM are supposed to handle. The fact that someone like GP can't tell even the series of their GPU hints strongly toward them using a prebuilt computer - yet expecting to be able to work as their own Linux OEM, which one could argue is more difficult than being a Windows OEM.)

<comment><USER3> (I don't really care about the specific model of the board, because there are dozens to chose from. But I checked my email, its an Evga GTX650 1Gb DDR5. Oh, I avoided ATI because of past problems with Linux.)

Why Linux? Because coding (web stuff) on Windows sucks. Expandrive hasn't been working that well for me, makes explorer sluggish, etc.

Of course I didn't replace Windows - Ubuntu suggests you to install it _along_ Windows (that part works really well these days).

See, the other day someone posted on HN that their Unity experience was bad because they had used a slow computer; I bought that idea and tried on the PC this time. (Then I went to XFCE, as usual. Which also failed on me, as I mentioned about the USB drive problem).

I should have videotaped myself installing and using Ubuntu - its just dozens of tiny UX mistakes that make me mad.

The problem is that _everything_ has to work really well for a "power user" to use a computer happily. I can't believe someone that says the experience/aesthetics of Ubuntu matches that of OSX.

I absolutely don't want anyone to help me solve the problems (they were examples, there were dozens)[1] which you consider imaginary - my algorithm regarding Linux on the Desktop is to come back every 6 months and try it again).

(BTW, VLC works very well, I meant web based videos.)

[1] Small example: When I clicked "Install" on Synaptic, the button state didn't change until several seconds had passed, then the box asking for the root password pops up. By that time, I had already clicked it again several times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are some admirable intentions here, but most of the older people I know that this would theoretically serve best are infinitely better served by a light tablet. I want my grandma checking her e-mail and doing her reading in the most comfortable environment/seat in the house; I suspect this will lead to a lot greater usage/engagement. And portability means it's easier to ask for help.

<comment> muuh-gnu Tablets, like mobiles generally sufferer from planned obsolescence. They are not meant to be used and receive updates for years and years, like people used XP.

I want my grandma to not have to relearn to yet another UI every two years. Canonical has commited to support the LTS releases for half a decade, which, while not coparable to XP, is for older folks still a better bet than anything the mobile world has to offer.

<comment><USER6> As I understand it, XP wasn't meant to do that either; the fact that it lasted so long was more of a series of mistakes on Microsoft's part in getting a replacement out the door. I'm happy to be corrected, though.

<comment><USER7> Even if Vista wasn't delayed, XP would have received security update support for at least 10 years after release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lubuntu is a fantastic choice, I install it on all of my friends' old, crapped up, virus infested Windows XP computers and it has them running like new. The interface requires almost no adjusting to coming from XP, much less so than unity or xfce or even windows 8 for that matter. Throwing away old but functioning hardware should be a crime.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, except that the cost of power to run those machines can be significant. The most obvious difference would be reducing consumption by replacing a CRT monitor with an LCD. That should have minor effect on Ubuntu ... today ... maybe. But I do remember fighting to get a monitor configured a couple of years ago (before I moved to a Mac).

Are modern desktops more efficient than 10 years ago? Hard for me to say although Intel has a paper that says that Energy Star and other measures make a big difference.

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to swap the old desktop for a modern laptop. You'd gain all kinds of energy savings - LCD screen, automatic sleeping, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wait... That's what I am paying my taxes for? That's where my money goes?

I am NOT against Linux being more widely used. And I like the idea that the city uses Linux to save money & more efficient.

But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business

<comment> muuh-gnu > But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business

Why not? The goverment standardizes everything else, from screws to seat belts to yogurts, why not stop the crazy update-planned-obsolescence cycle pushed by commercial entities and agree on a "standard UI" for normal people?

The amount of unnecessary changes in UIs has become unbearably crazy. And since those changes are forced from all sides, there is no way to vote with your wallet.

Whoever wants to constantly relearn the same stuff over and over and over, and today relearn the Ribbon, tomorrow Metro, and so on, is free to do it. But normal, everyday folks should not have to deal with this shit. Computers are supposed to be boring, everyday tools to accomplish everyday tasks, not fashion statements.

If the commercial world is not willing or able to keep computers useful tools, the goverment has to step in and slow down the amount of changes and prevent the giant waste of tediously gathered know-how.

<comment><USER11> Most standards are not set by the government, they're set by professional organizations. See ANSI:

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

Safety standards ARE often set by the government, but more general standards mostly are not.

By the way, the position you're arguing for is literally the opposite of innovation. Imagine if, after Apple unveiled the iPhone, the government had discouraged its adoption because it removed people's hard-won knowledge of using Motorola flip phones. I guess Motorola would have been happy!

<comment> muuh-gnu > the position you're arguing for is literally the opposite of innovation.

So what? I dont see any innovation here. It is haute couture like change for changes sake masqueraded as innovation.

Computers have become too important tools to allow a few key players to enforce a crazy planned obsolescence cycle.

> Imagine if, after Apple unveiled the iPhone

I was not talking about toys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> seems like a great idea, but knowing how older people can cope with change I don't see this going so easily and nicely for them as the article makes it sound?

Anecdote: 2 of my family members over 50 years old had XP running with Office2003. I gave them Lubuntu and it took them literally months to adapt. For an IT guy it's off course all alike, but actually it isn't. Especially not if it already took you years to master Xp/Office in the first place.

Apart from that, while I applaud them wanting to reuse old hardware, it seems most pc hardware lives for 10-15 years max. So I hope theay are prepared for that with appropriate backup systsems so they can recover all the systems that will eventually, sooner than later, shut down.

<comment><USER13> counter anecdotes: my 73 year old grandma switched to Linux mint 9 months ago and loves it. and my 21 year old cousin tried the same and ran back to Windows after days.

<comment><USER14> The issue is, for a person as old as your grandmother, learning even the barebones of how to use a computer can be a novel experience because they have had a very small chunk of their entire life to attempt it. This is following having access to many other modern forms of entertainment for far longer.

Whereas, in the case of the young cousin, they grew up with tech like this and having to relearn something that is basically the same system but with a different coat of paint and more inconveniences is a hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would suggest the Trisquel distro, which is completely free software (it's officially sponsored by the FSF) and IMHO the desktop is more user friendly than Lubuntu. [http://trisquel.info/](http://trisquel.info/)

<comment><USER8> Some of the primary things people use computers for are watching flash videos and listening to mp3s and I would rather people use 99% Free software and 1% proprietary software than the other way around because someone zelously recommended to them a 100% Free Distro, which they found unusable and then switched back to windows. One of my worst experiences when starting out with Linux was installing Debian on a laptop, when I was without ethernet, because it didn't come with the proprietary wifi driver I needed, I don't wish to subject a non-technical person to that.

<comment><USER16> tried this recently on a macbook air without an ethernet port - it's actually not even as simple as downloading the relevant .deb on a flash drive and moving it over, as the default .deb will, sometimes, insist on downloading the actual firmware blob from the manufacturer during the install process! I refuse to pay for a USB ethernet adapter which I will use _once_ , so I'm sticking with virtual machines for now.

I agree, normal humans simply don't put up with this stuff - in the end, even I didn't!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The title is misleading: the city wants to distribute around 2000 linux CDs at events -- that's hardly making it a norm.

</comment><comment><USER18> Incredible initiative! Where can I donate :)

</comment><comment><USER19> 2013: Year of the Linux desktop

</comment><comment><USER20> Another counterexample of the Hun typecast as being regimented and dutifully obsequious, and further reinforcing evidence that Jerry is brilliant and formidable.</comment>


Software is nothing but design - <AUTHOR> http://agilefocus.com/2009/09/14/the-myth-of-undesigned/

<comment><USER2> I disagree.

Software is far from 100% design. I'd give it 60 or 70% design at best and even then only in the relatively small (though growing) web sphere. Personally, in my career spanning largely web app development, I've found that having an up-front design and simply filling in the back end code is the most pain-free way to go. This still doesn't make the design 100% though. Let's be generous and call the design 90%. There still needs to be working code behind the design.

The other way, as he pointed out is what leads to unusable junk that makes the life of everyone involved (the coder, the designer, the user) painful. When the coder takes it upon himself to make a "temporary" design, it more often than not ends up permanent. This is definitely the worst way to go. I've committed this sin before and learned from it (I'm a terrible designer) but this doesn't have to be the way to go.

If, for some reason, I don't have a designer (and stakeholder!) working closely with me (which is now a warning bell in itself), I can flesh out the main requirements of what needs to be done as far as major features go and design a public api to my software. When I finally get a design, I'll have only the minor features and the integration of my major api calls to do. In this case SaaS is a blessing. (As an added bonus it makes it easy to swap out or rewrite your major features as you hit performance bottlenecks.)

<comment><USER3> I think you misunderstood what I meant. That's my, fault, though; the bit about software being pure design wasn't my main point there, so I kept it very short. Plus, people use the word design to mean a zillion things. I'm using the word in its broadest sense.

Even if I'm making something with no user interface at all, creating source code is still purely a design activity. The source code doesn't actually do anything; it's a blueprint. When you create the UI, that's designing the UI. When you create the API, that's (as you say) designing the API. Even when you implement the guts, you're still designing them as you go.

I agree with everything else you say, though, especially about the warning bells!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using the word 'blueprint' is a bit deceptive. Source code is _not_ a blueprint, because it is the end result. A blueprint provides all the information we need to build the house, but we can't live in a blueprint (i.e. a blueprint does not fulfil the same needs as an actual house, even though they describe the same thing). We can 'validate' our (now-built) house against our blueprint using a tape measure and a spirit level.

In software, the only analogous process we have is formal specification and mechanical verification.

Just to be entirely clear, _code_ is not a "specification" because to suggest that it is would be like building a full-scale model of a house as a 'blueprint'. If the blueprint is functionally identical to the thing it is describing (i.e. you can live inside the blueprint just as well as you can inside the house it describes), then it's not a "specification" (or a "blueprint") in any useful sense.

So I don't even really have an opinion on the "software is design" explanation. I don't think of software like that, because I don't generally do "exploratory coding". Rather, I'm just objecting to the (often abused) notion of software having anything analogous to a blueprint.

<comment><USER3> Source code is in fact not the end result.

If it were, we wouldn't care so much about non-functional aspects, like spacing, variable and method naming, and code organization. It's a design document. It's special, though, because it is the only design document that the computer can, after processing, understand.

The end result is not the code. It's what happens on people's screens, and in people's worlds after we tell the computer what to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The point made in this article is associated with Jack Reeves' classic 1992 essay on source code as design.

[http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.h...](http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html)

<comment><USER3> Faantastic. Thanks for that link; I had never read this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a really good point.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Show me the code" -- Linus

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish I could upvote this twice.

"Design" "Architecture" and "Analysis" have somehow entered this strange place where we talk about them as if they're not related to "real code"

Instead, as the article points out, _it's all design_. The only difference is which layer of abstraction we're working at. You can make a nice object model by simply kicking out some header files in C, or by declaring some types in OCAML.

We've had so many metaphors -- the factory, the construction site, the military plan -- that we've lost track of just what it is we're doing. And it doesn't help that these buzzwords have generated their own job roles, books, and cultures.</comment>


Real-Time Recognition of Handwritten Chinese Characters - <AUTHOR> https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/09/12/handwriting.html <comment><USER2> slightly off-topic, but the images in the article illustrate it beautifully: I think many people don't realise (I didn't) what an amazing skill it is to be able to read handwriting (cursive). I took it for granted to be able to read hand-written German, English, Spanish, and totally forgot that it must have taken me some time as a kid to acquire that skill (beyond reading and writing generally).

However, when I studied Chinese for a bit, the (printed) characters are tricky to start with, but reading a fluent writer's handwriting ("unconstrained", as they call it in the article) is nigh impossible.

I think stroke order is hugely important, in that it forms the conventions for fast abbreviated writing. For example, the "mouth" radical, a square, "口", when written quickly basically looks like a lower-case "b", because the left lower stroke comes first, then top and right in one stroke, then the bottom stroke.

More complicated characters basically become a squiggle, and it's really magical, if you think about it, that you can just read it. I mean, look at figures 5, 6, 7 in that article.

For me, a nice illustration of Moravec's paradox of AI [1]: what we think is difficult (chess, differentiation, ...) is easy, and what we think is easy (reading handwriting, putting an egg in the fridge, walking (!) and opening a door [2]) is hard...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo) ("A Compilation of Robots Falling Down at the [2015] DARPA Robotics Challenge")

<comment><USER3> > but reading a fluent writer's handwriting ("unconstrained", as they call it > in the article) is nigh impossible.

It is when you are starting out, but it's not so bad once you get used to it. The best way to learn to read Chinese handwriting is to learn to write Chinese handwriting, and I don't just mean practising writing by hand, but to work through a textbook aimed at teaching cursive Chinese.

This book is a good introduction in English [0], and if you are comfortable with Chinese only, this book is excellent and also far more comprehensive [1].

Once you've gone through those books, you'll be able to read most handwritten stuff without too much struggle.

0: [https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script- Introduction-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Cursive-Script-Introduction- Publications/dp/0887100333)

1: [https://www.amazon.cn/图书/dp/B00C907XM2](https://www.amazon.cn/图书/dp/B00C907XM2)

<comment><USER4> In the examples in the article, do you find the second example for 的 legible (figure 5)? Or either of the characters in figure 7 - without being primed, would you know what characters they were meant to be?

I once worked with a paediatric neurologist whose handwriting was so bad, even he couldn't read it. We had a patient with a referral from him which we couldn't read, took it down the hall to him... he scrunched up his face... and gave up reading it: "Well, I know the patient, and they need...". Absolutely lovely bloke, but I'd hate to get a referral from him without being able to talk to him :)

<comment><USER3> > do you find the second example for 的 legible (figure 5)?

Yes. All of the 的 examples are clearly 的 that I'd get without being primed.

Figure 7 is more tricky but I'd know 五 without being primed, and 王 definitely after being primed _or_ if I was reading handwriting that had more context.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the info. I've been learning now for about a year, and text is definitely my weak spot. I see handwritten chinese and it frequently looks nothing like the nice, crisp computer fonts (which are hard enough just by themselves) - not so much that it's messy, but that I often just simply can't see how you make out the elements. I find it amazing that not only do native chinese speakers recognise thousands of characters, but also wild handwritten variants, _and_ also the same again in simplified/traditional.

I once lightheartedly asked my teacher if exercise books in china had bigger gaps between the lines, as I couldn't see how to fit a vertically-complex hanzi in. She wandered over and scrawled something that neatly fit in the line. "How the hell did you do that... ?" :)

<comment><USER3> > Thanks for the info. I've been learning now for about a year,

A year is probably still too early to be able to read handwriting well. You probably need to have about 2,000 known characters under your belt _and_ also have a good feel for the language such that you are able to fill in gaps based on context - that is be able to complete parts of the sentence based on knowledge of what words/characters are likely to fit.

There are many cursive characters that reduce to something quite similar so having knowledge of what fits in the sentence makes things easier.

As an example, with 王 above, by itself it might not look like anything you can recognise, but if it was written like that on a note starting out like 尊敬的王老师 then from context it narrows down the possibilities significantly.

> She wandered over and scrawled something that neatly fit in the line. "How > the hell did you do that... ?" :)

Practice! It's one thing to know how to write a character, it's another thing to have the fine motor skills required to write it proportionally within a confined space, and you can only develop that skill through practice. If you're interested, one of my side projects [0] is a site that lets you generate custom Chinese worksheets of varying grid sizes and fonts (including some handwriting fonts) and other things, which can be useful for such practice.

0: [https://www.hanzigrids.com/](https://www.hanzigrids.com/)

<comment><USER4> A year is definitely too early - I'm a middling student at it (and weak at text), and would be lucky to get 100 characters by sight. As you say though, it's all about practice, and I need to apply some "bum glue" (to quote Stephen King) and just sit down and do it. A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch!

Thanks for the link - it will help and I've been meaning to look for one (phone apps with your finger aren't quite the same).

<comment><USER3> > A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly > homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch!

'Pretty much every night' is the most important part.

Learning Chinese characters is a grind and you just need to keep chipping away at it.

Pick a nice sustainable number of characters (maybe 6, maybe 3, maybe 10 but something that takes maybe 30 minutes to an hour to do including revision) and then do it every day without fail.

Number of days in a row spent learning is far more important than number of new words learnt per day, so always try to optimise for the former rather than the latter.

At some point, almost every Chinese learner who has spent more than 3 years learning the language has looked back and thought 'why oh why didn't I just learn 3 characters a day'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm very interested in this field! But I didn't stop at 30,000 characters - I'm making a dataset of 75,000 characters from 1500 different fonts. Does anyone want me to publish it?

I use Apple's Chinese handwriting keyboard almost every day, living in Taiwan. Unfortunately it only shows 4 possible choices, and often the character I need is not one of those. So I use my own Pingtype keyboard.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

Enter a character into the bottom text field, click Search, and see the character decomposition above, and the characters & words containing that character below. Then when you're ready, click Insert to add it to the text field at the top for translation.

I have no idea how to do marketing for this tool, and commenting here is the only way I've had ~1300 views in the last 6 months since I published it.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like you should apply for a Job at Apple, or sell your "company" :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Over twenty years ago, I was in a conversation with a developer who was working on Japanese handwriting recognition for the Go PenPoint OS. He told me that stroke order, which is supposed to be consistent in Japanese writing, was a big help. It's interesting that this article says that there was a need to "achieve stroke-order independence". I'm wondering what the issues are here and why stroke order was useful in the 90s but not considered so now. I'm also not sure if the developer I spoke to was concerned with Chinese input as well, or just Japanese, and how that might affect the methods used.

<comment><USER8> With handwriting recognition you differ between online and offline recognition. With online you have the stroke order, which helps a lot for character segmentation. Character segmentation is the unsolved problem for handwriting recognition, at least for Latin scripts. With offline you only have the image of a word. If you depend on online information you can't recognize text from images taken with a camera.

<comment><USER9> Segmentation is not needed for a modern deep learning system, since this is learned by the neural network. It's a solved problem for many handwritting recognition problems.

<comment><USER8> Would love to see a system or a paper which did solve this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey, I understand this! Because I read An Intuitive Explanation of CNN's yesterday! ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15328516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15328516))

Thanks HN!

</comment><comment><USER11> The input is a 48x48 image. For handwriting recognition, many systems use stroke information (online) to augment the purely image based (offline) data. This significantly reduces error rates.

For the smaller ICDAR 2013 Chinese Handwriting Recognition Competition (~8,000 characters), CR(1) accuracy went from 94.77% (offline) to 97.39% (online). Human recognition rates were 95.19% (offline) and 96.13% (online).

<comment><USER12> Yes, but the article mentions there's a lot of stroke order inconsistency (errors), so they don't rely on that

<comment><USER13> Surely you could still use it for hints? (ie. "stroke X followed by stroke Y has a Z% higher chance of being this character rather than that one", much like some phone keyboards use the prior/next words entered to correct words so they make sense in context).

<comment><USER12> Problem is that when these hints push you in the wrong direction

One of the examples there was a Chinese character being drawn as something like a 2. The character looks nothing like a 2

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was going to ask if anyone could pinpoint when apple started publishing, but I found their first post - July 2017. They even have an email inviting students, researchers, and devs to ask questions.

[https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/07/01/Welcome.html](https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/07/01/Welcome.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I applaud 'Handwriting Recognition Team' on the excellent work they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately they don't provide any details about the model or the training. Would be nice to have an example as a baseline for real-time performance on iOS devices.

</comment><comment><USER17> What would be really cool is to have an augmented VR setup where the user is writing in midair and the VR shows light trace of it, while the OCR recognizing the writing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone done any work on English handwriting recognition? I'm very interested in this field.

<comment><USER19> Chinese language student, native English speaker. I haven't found any handwriting recognition commercially available for the English language that compares to what is available for Chinese Traditional / Simplified.

The best English handwriting recognition software I've found is the old Palm Pilot Graffiti writing system. It's not really developed since the late 90's / 00s. Back in the day, it was blazing fast (and pretty accurate after learning the method) compared to shitty small mechanical keyboards of the era.

After diving into Chinese I realized how deficient the English HR landscape was and how badly under-researched the area is. I think the standard QWERTY keyboard is just too efficient for the Euro zone languages to make the research investment worthwhile. My 2 cents / guess.

There are Graffiti like apps available on IOS. What I've found is that with english keyboard auto-correct, my typing is so much faster without Graffiti using the standard Apple IOS English keyboard. Kind of a disappointment...

Another conjecture, I suspect much of the morbidity in English HR research has something to do with Graffiti patent lock up between what ever remains of Palm, Xerox, and some heretofore unheard of company called Communication Intelligence Corporation.

<comment><USER20> On android, [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.handwriting.ime&hl=en) supports a bunch of languages (and emoji).

<comment><USER19> I hated the Android phone I had 5 years ago and haven't looked back, so apparently I'm not up to speed on developments in the Android marketplace.

I stand corrected on everything stated above!

I'll have to borrow a friend's phone to play with this and see how it compares to the old Graffiti.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there an API for this or is this for Scribble/Apple Apps only?

<comment><USER22> I think this is only exposed in iOS with the Chinese keyboards (and Scribble on watchOS), so not programmatically.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and also on Mac OS. (Show Trackpad Handwriting)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A cryptocurrency hedge fund anyone can invest in - <AUTHOR> https://www.emberfund.io/ <comment><USER2> Anyone can invest except non iOS users...

<comment><AUTHOR> 2 weeks and Android will be released!</comment></comment>


Against School - John Taylor Gatto - <AUTHOR> http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm <comment><USER2> If you ever get the chance to read Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto I highly suggest it, it's very eye opening as to the origins and reasons for mandatory schooling.

Also when reading John Taylor Gatto, please ensure you do not conflate schooling with education. You'll not like him very much if you conflate the two. Unless you really are against education, in that case please reply :)

<comment><USER3> I already read The Underground History of American Education. Is it worth reading Weapons of Mass Instruction too?

Not that it greatly matters, of course, since there is absolutely nothing I can do about it as I have already decided not to have kids.

<comment><USER4> "I already read The Underground History of American Education. Is it worth reading Weapons of Mass Instruction too?"

No. Weapons of Mass Instruction is basically just excerpts from Underground History. I think there are a few new things, but mostly what happened is that the publisher for Underground History backed out once they read the book, which left Gatto allowed to self publish it himself but unable to find another publishing deal. So Weapons of Mass instruction was basically just him going out and repackaging Underground History and publishing the best of it.

<comment><USER5> I imagine any publisher would have strong disincentive to publish UHAE. He has few good things to say about the scholastic publishing houses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The fact that home schooled children often end up having a higher quality of education regardless of the educational levels of the parents seems to me a pretty damning indictment of the public school system in general. There is this perception (backed by laws, regulations, and taxes) that there is a specific and elevated set of skills necessary to be a teacher, however all of the evidence seems to indicate this isn't the case.

<comment><USER7> I'm all for the privitization of schools (voucher system). People recoil in horror when I say this. However, it's not nearly as bad as what people make it out to be.

Government should get out of the school/education provisioning business. It hasn't worked, period. What I don't mind the government doing is providing education _funding_ via vouchers.

Do you want a government bureaucrat deciding on how to allocate public education money? Think about it this way, do you want to maximize parent choice, and have them decide on the quality of a school, or do you want a board of education member deciding on the quality of schools?

Do you trust the decisions of a swarm self-interested parents and children or, or the decision of a self-interested government official? I trust the swarm.

<comment><USER8> > Do you want a government bureaucrat deciding on how to allocate public > education money?

We let govt decide where people can spend food-stamps and what they can buy.

Oh wait - we don't - there's not nearly the same level of govt control wrt food.

<comment><USER9> That depends. Do agricultural subsidies count as control?

<comment><USER8> > That depends. Do agricultural subsidies count as control?

Even the most extreme interpretation of govt food control doesn't approach the amount of govt control in primary public education. (I find that folks who talk about various subsidies tend to overstate them if they're opposed and understate them if they support. Note how that lets each side claim that the other is lying. Curious that they never notice that they're both correct about that.)

Or, are you suggesting that all amounts of control are the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> His magnum opus: <http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/> (free read)

</comment><comment><USER11> Those who enjoy reading John Taylor Gatto may also like to read a great little book called "The teenage liberation handbook" by grace Llewellyn. It's that book you read as an adult and wish you'd read as a teenager.

</comment><comment><USER12> I had a hard time reading this and I suspect I'm not the only one. What particularly struck a nerve with me was the absolutely out of left field mention of Columbine as if it somehow amplifies the impact of public schools being bad (paraphrasing: "Schools are 2000-4000 child warehouses, like the now famous Columbine highschool").

The alternative of large schools (and what is being championed here) is home schooling children. Not only does that not scale, it also disproportionately favors the wealthy as families with already limited means are unlikely to be able to commit neither the money nor the time (on top of work everyday) to teach their children.

Even if you fix the scaling issues and the disproportionate income problems, you still have parents that simply don't care. When I was in school it was in vogue (in my locale) to take your kids out of public school and begin to homeschool them. But it turned out that parents' seemed to think that was the magic bullet, and their children were largely left to their own devices to figure out material, a schedule, and to somehow still be able to interact with kids their own age.

Obviously, I am not a big proponent of home schooling. I actually liked going through public school. I will forever wager my small town public school education against any home-schooled person's education any day.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious whether you think home schooling favors the wealthy more than the public school system does? Recall that public school funding is a local affair; the wealthier the local population, the better funded the school.

I'm also not sure what you mean by `scaling issues'? Many districts here in New York State avereage 45-50 students per teacher. We have a large family by the national or local averages, and our five kids have one homeschooling parent all to themselves...

This doesn't mean that homeschooling is affordable for everyone -- especially given that every parent (and non-parent, for that matter) is paying (directly if they own, indirectly if they rent) for the public school system, whether they use it or not.

<comment><USER12> > homeschool vs public school I can't speak with any authority on the relative > value of home school vs public school for children of wealthy families. But > I will point out that simply because a school district is well funded does > not mean the school district will necessarily be better than better than a > slightly less funded district.

>scaling I did speak incompletely. I meant to to explain that school best works at scale (I meant to say "not only does that not scale down"). You have already explained this for me. Each family requires a parent to do the home schooling, where as public schools can provide a teacher for multiple children of multiple families.

>pay for it regardless Fortunately those that own, they realize an associated cost of owning is taxation. The argument could also be made that in return for paying for the public school system, those residents are able to live in a place that has a compulsory education system.

I'd be willing to bet that no one would flock to (let alone stay there for a significant portion of time) an area that did not require taxes that went to a local school system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've always enjoyed Gatto's writing, although I disagree on some points: I'd prefer to move public schooling towards a more liberatory model, than encouraging home-schooling (something which doesn't favor people without the bare minimum of means). I prefer to change institutions than to drop out of them.

If you like Gatto, I'd also recommend reading up on Francisco Ferrer, A.S. Neill, Paulo Freire, and Alfie Kohn.

<comment><USER15> Adjusting the government school model and encouraging home education aren't mutually exclusive. It would seem that any sort of effective change in the way government approaches education is extremely difficult.

We home educate our children, and you are correct. It has been a genuine challenge on many levels. I've observed various families with the minimum of means achieve success home educating, but in general it is folks that have a solid single income and understand that they are making a "sacrifice". There is very little in this life that favors those of bare minimum needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I look forward to reading his online book. There are quite a few interesting books from the 60s on this topic, including Paul Goodman's "Compulsory Miseducation" --- which you can read online at [http://gyanpedia.in/Portals/0/Toys%20from%20Trash/Resources/...](http://gyanpedia.in/Portals/0/Toys%20from%20Trash/Resources/books/goodman.pdf) \--- and A.S. Neill's Summerhill, and Dennison's The Lives of Children. All three offer a formal framework for addressing this topic: how we learn and develop is a psychological matter, not one of grades, nor figuring out how to fill a kid's head with facts. Contemporary work on cognitive and psychological development (unintentionally) corroborates this viewpoint (as far as I can tell, which is part time research, since full time I write code).

</comment><comment><USER17> Loads of Gatto audio at <http://tinyurl.com/2d9rqr>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's my recipe for schooling, you ask?

1\. Teach kid to read 2\. Show him internet 3\. Kick him out of house

<comment><USER18> And how do you plan to keep him from watching porn all day long?

<comment><USER15> I tell mine that I do weekly log analysis of all traffic crossing the router. It isn't true, but the bluff has held for years. Shit, now he'll find this and have the keys to the pleasure garden...

<comment><USER19> How can you possibly know if the bluff has held so far or not, if not by log analysis?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had to read this for a literature and composition class. Definitely an eye opener</comment>


The Moon We Left Behind - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/17/the_moon_we_forgot_97498.html

<comment><USER2> I think 100 years from now, we will look back at this current lack of interest in space exploration as one of the biggest missed opportunities in human history.</comment>


Monitor PasteBin for Your Email or Passwords - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shayanjm/pasteye/ <comment><USER2> Whoa. Nice to see someone else doing what I am already doing.

[https://canary.pw](https://canary.pw)

New version is coming out this week that lets you search via relation.

<comment><USER3> That's an awesome project. Have you open sourced it?

Also, just to draw the distinction: Pasteye is for near-realtime monitor notifications, and it seems like Canarypw is more like an archival search.

<comment><USER2> This project isn't open-sourced but there is an API in the works. I am going to be presenting some of its abilities at BSides Vancouver next month.

[edit]

I should add that a component of it might be open-sourced but I haven't had much time to digest the idea of doing so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> JUST TYPE YOUR PASSWORD INTO THIS BOX, IT'S COOL.

<comment><USER3> Source code is available, and you can use _any_ password.

Inb4 not reading before posting

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> speaking from experience ([https://github.com/bryanbrannigan/pastebin- parser](https://github.com/bryanbrannigan/pastebin-parser)) if you are just grabbing the pastes from the "latest" box you are missing a lot. To grab everything we actually had to create a distributed setup or else pastebin would start banning our IPs.

<comment><USER3> I ran into that issue myself. Pastebin throttling is real. I was playing around with the idea of actually using the socks5 proxies gathered through scraping in order to retain modularity (and eliminate the necessity of multi- IP set ups which could easily get pricey).

It would be tough because I would have to check the health of each proxy prior to use (so that I don't miss out on request windows), but still an interesting concept to consider.

<comment><USER5> cheap VPS boxes from lowendbox.com work well for this purpose. we also had problems just processing the queue on busy days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good work! Just a suggestion: You should probably look to collaborate with this guy: [https://haveibeenpwned.com/](https://haveibeenpwned.com/)

The two of you together can help us (l)users know when we've been pwned...

<comment><USER3> Creator of the project here. Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't want something I have to create an account for. I want to search my email address/name/phone number on my own accord.

<comment><USER3> Then feel free to fork and set up your own instance (hence, why I open sourced it), or use canary.pw to search through archives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Might also be of related interest: [https://twitter.com/dumpmon](https://twitter.com/dumpmon)

<comment><USER9> Hi there! Author of @dumpmon here. If you are interested, the entire project is open-sourced here: [https://github.com/jordan- wright/dumpmon](https://github.com/jordan-wright/dumpmon)

I'm planning a solid revision sometime soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's to prevent a hacker from compromising a computer then checking config scripts for the monitor?

<comment><USER3> This is meant to be deployed as a SaaS (hence, why there are user management features included). There are two possible scenarios here:

#1 - Hacker breaks into your production server and steals your config files

#2 - Hacker breaks into your dev computer and steals your config files

If either of these things happen, I think you have a bigger security issue than any you might find on Pasteye.</comment></comment>


Stop Blaming IE - <AUTHOR> http://www.forgetfoo.com/?blogid=14390

<comment><USER2> This link is blogspam that adds nothing to the actual article.</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't carriers upgrade your Android version?  - <AUTHOR>

Are the carriers not upgrading the Android OS on your phone because it doesn't serve their direct interest. Since they have already sold you the phone? I've had LG Optimus with TMobile for a while and I'm still waiting to get onto Gingerbread (2.3) from Froyo (2.2). I'm thinking about CyanogenMod | or Rooting and installing it manually? Please advice and share your experience. <comment><USER2> The carrier takes the latest version of Android, and they put all of their proprietary code on it. For example, Sprint makes sure their NASCAR, NFL, Sprint Zone, and Sprint TV works on it, as well as disabling tethering without the plan addition. This is in addition to whatever modifications the handset maker needs to make (e.g. HTC Sense UI, Facebook for HTC Sense, HTC Friendstream, HTC Footprints, etc.). Given all that is required to upgrade to the latest version of Android, sometimes it makes more sense to work on a new phone.

</comment><comment><USER3> I personally think this is the biggest issue with the Android market, phones get stuck in time. Once bought, there is no way except for a very technical process to modernize the OS image.

Contrasted with IOS; phones from several generations back are able to upgrade through a fairly simple process to the latest OS. This helps insure that most relevant hardware is within a few versions of the current shipping OS, thus reducing compatibility issues.

I wrote off Samsung devices for this very reason. I bought one of the first pads and to this day there has been no upgrades to the OS on the pad. There is no reason other than forcing users into an upgrade path, that the tab could not receive a honeycomb upgrade bringing the pad up to an OS that was designed with tablets in mind.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just root it, rooting has basically become an unbrickable process. Your phone will feel like a new phone running CM .

Yes carriers would rather have you buy a new phone, but for a lot of consumers it doesn't matter. I mean seriously if it was that big of an issue you probably would of rooted your phone by now. A recent study came out that 50% of iphone users haven't plugged in their iphone after initial purchase, so basically theres a large amount of people out there that just don't care or know. The benefit of Android is that its customizable. On the other hand if people really didn't want to worry about root but wanted upgrades they should only get the Nexus phones.

</comment><comment><USER5> having people buy new phones/contracts actually makes the carrier some money, whereas giving free upgrades doesn't. Note: I use t-mobile, which uses sim cards, which is just easier to deal with when changing phones.

Last year, I tried upgrading my phone, but they said it would cost me $200-$300 to get a decent android upgrade, so I went on craiglist and bought a G2 and a Mytouch 3g slide as my backup/music/video player for a total of $225, they had scuffs on the side, but overall were in fine conditions. I also had a G1 that i used to learn about rooting, so after i got the G2 i rooted that in 20 minutes by downloading the 1-step root app, downloading cyanogenmod 7, and flashing it to cm7.

If you want help buying a phone via craiglist, pm me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Android has no long term roadmap, no standardized hardware spec, and little meaningful vendor support. As others have pointed out, the carriers are on their own (as are the handset manufacturers).

To paraphrase Kissenger, you can't get Android on the phone. Google just releases what they release (or in the case of Honeycomb, doesn't) and it's up to the rest of the world to figure out what to do with it and how to do it.

iOS and WP7 in contrast have a coherent hardware spec and roadmap.</comment>


Show HN: DivANS – Rust simd compression algorithm demo in WASM in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://dropbox.github.io/divans <comment><USER2> Interesting post. Curious, assuming this is used to more efficiently store user uploaded files, does Dropbox blindly apply the compression across all user files or selectively applies them (e.g. if file is already compressed like jpeg then ignore)?

<comment><AUTHOR> To compress files for a system like Dropbox we would recommend a) check if the file can compress with [https://github.com/dropbox/lepton](https://github.com/dropbox/lepton) . Lepton has some new flags that can help it compress a wider range of files, so it's not just limited to pure JPEG files any longer.

b) then compress it with zlib -6 to get an idea of how compressible the data is.

c) if the data compresses by at least a percent with zlib, it's likely to do significantly better with more advanced compression like DivANS. About 1/3 of files in Dropbox fall into that >1% category but aren't compatible with Lepton. For those compressible files, DivANS gets 12.08% savings over zlib with the settings we chose in the blog post. Brotli, in contrast, gets 9.64% savings over zlib on that same data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Glad to see how much progress you guys made!!!

</comment><comment><USER4> Does SIMD in WASM even work in the browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> The crate is built with cargo build --release --features=simd --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown which aliases DefaultCDF16 type to the SIMD types.

However since WASM doesn't support vectorized instructions yet, I believe LLVM translates these to scalar and the result is actually 20% slower on both Firefox and Chrome than without the SIMD enabled.

Compared to the speed of the native binaries in [https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/06/building-better- compr...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/06/building-better-compression- together-with-divans/) the Firefox WASM binary seem to decode DivANS roughly 3x slower than native without multithreading at around 100 Mbit/s. Chrome goes more than 12x slower, running at around 20 Mbit/s. I'm a bit surprised that there is such a big performance gap between the browser and the native binaries.

This may be a reason to look further at the generated wasm and see where the time is being spent.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Spike in App Store Downloads from China? - <AUTHOR> I have two unrelated iOS apps under different vendor IDs and both have seen a surge in downloads from China over the past week. In-app analytics suggest that most or all of these downloads never even open the app.
In Apple's dev forums, it appears that other devs are experiencing a similar spike right now.
Anyone have a clue what might be going on? <comment><USER2> We're seeing the same thing for Tablo, big spike in China downloads but no change in impressions or sessions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I noticed the same thing. I posted a similar question today on HN. No responses tho</comment>


Startup Genome: The world's best cities for startups - <AUTHOR> http://reports.startupcompass.co/StartupEcosystemReportPart1v1.2.pdf

<comment><USER2> Also related:

Map of accelerators around the world: <http://god.dinopost.com/fullscreen.php?layer=1>

Based on the post of Silicon Valley Economics here: [http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/27052637228/silicon-...](http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/27052637228/silicon- valley-economics)</comment>


Bernoulli discovered e by studying a question about compound interest - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)#Compound_interest

<comment><USER3> There is more than one famous Bernoulli. This is the work of Jacob Bernoulli; Daniel Bernoulli, of Bernoulli's principle, is arguably better known.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny how the calculation seems to be done backwards

(For an initial 100% interest) "If the interest is credited twice in the year, the interest rate for each 6 months will be 50%"

And of course this is wrong, because the interest is not 50% but (2^1/2) - <USER2> (that is, 41%) since x * 1.4142(first interest payment) * 1.4142(second interest payment) should be 2*x

<comment><USER5> It isn't wrong, it's just a convention in finance. The Nominal Annual Rate is presented "without adjustment for the full effect of compounding" [1]. In the provided example, a 100% nominal annual rate becomes a 125% effective annual rate, since it is credited twice in the year.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_interest_rate#Nominal_v...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_interest_rate#Nominal_versus_effective_interest_rate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a great book out there called ' Against the Gods ' by Peter Bernstein. [http://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story- Risk/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story- Risk/dp/0471295639) It has the fantastic story of how a lot of mathematical computations are a product of the effort to quantify risk.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of something a professor told me in my first Calculus course that the famous L'Hospital's rule, named after the French mathematician Guillaume de l'Hôpital, was actually discovered and proved by Bernoulli. The saying is that l'Hospital bought the rights to Bernoulli's mathematical discovery in order to publish it in his book _Analyse des Infiniment Petits pour l'Intelligence des Lignes Courbes_ [1]

[1] [http://www.stewartcalculus.com/data/ESSENTIAL%20CALCULUS%20E...](http://www.stewartcalculus.com/data/ESSENTIAL%20CALCULUS%20Early%20Transcendentals/upfiles/projects/ecet_wp_0307_stu.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> So, XKCD. <http://xkcd.com/947/>

<comment><USER9> Well, he is investing at about 0.15% per month =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's my "e bookshelf" <http://imgur.com/YBB33> , which uses the 1/n! definition. It only goes up to 1/3!, but ideally would approach 1/infinity!. e grows as the total area of the clear books on the left. For example, for the bottom shelf, 1/3! is the same as having all possible arrangements of three objects, and choosing one.

<comment><USER11> Another nice property of the 1/n! definition is that you can use it to define exponentiation for things which don't have division (e.g. matrices)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Calculus 101?

I recall that learning that lim(1 - 1/n)^n with n->inf is 1/e, was one of the first things learned in Calculus. I think we even briefly touched this in highschool.

<comment><USER13> > I recall that learning that lim(1 - 1/n)^n with n->inf is 1/e

To clarify this should not be 1/e, but e.

<comment><USER14> It would be e if there had been a + sign in the parens, but with a - it is, in fact, 1/e. (1-1/n) is always less than 1; multiplying a bunch of factors less than 1 can't possibly* give you 2.something.

*without somehow wrapping around infinity [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%80%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%80%A6)

<comment><USER13> My mistake, didn't notice the minus sign...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What can't compound interest teach us....

</comment><comment><USER16> In other breaking news of interest to the digitally connected elite, e follows d and precedes f. It is also generally not used as a grade in American educational institutions.</comment>


Building Hater News - <AUTHOR> http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-news/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate the irony of me posting this "hater" comment, but...

my "most hateful" comment was this:

"Thanks, would love to see your app when it's ready!"

Not sure if it's ready for prime-time.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you should ease up on the sarcasm.

<comment><USER2> No sarcasm there, just an earnest response to a comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7462010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7462010)

<comment><USER4> Think you missed the sarcasm in pluies_public's comment :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't evaluate how serious or useful this is but I really like the idea. Anything that might encourage more constructive discussions is a perfectly valid thing to explore. I love the idea of trying to characterize the contributions of different commenters based on their history, including my own. Not just for things like "hatefulness" or "incoherence", which is what this seems to be detecting, but other things as well, like "helpfulness" or "erudition" or apparent areas of interest.

<comment><USER6> I have a dreadful fear that this will evolve into a system for trolls to keep score. "Dude! My h8r score is TWICE yours!"

<comment><USER6> Funnily enough, this comment how has my second-highest hate-score (the highest is a fairly level-headed comment on drug policy.) Apparently my cunning plan to fake being a nice person on HN is working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This link points to a stupid blank page. I disable noscript and I get a stupid horse video. You suck!

<comment><USER8> scroll down.

<comment><USER9> _Whoosh_

<comment><USER10> That's just textbook Poe's Law at work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It'd be nice to see the score on a post before you post it - it could keep me from doing something I'll regret.

<comment><USER12> Most fleshware should have this preinstalled.

<comment><USER11> Sure if I can read what I wrote objectively. Often not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I got hater scores of around 2.5% on both my accounts. On each one, the most hated comment was the one where I took the most pains to explain that I liked the user's main point and was just trying to clarify/disagree with a small part, i.e., to be sure I was not dodging the central point.

Reading them, they come off as passive-aggressive. I think that's a useful discovery for me. Thanks.

<comment><USER14> Don't be a douche. You just got chastised by a lame algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like the idea -- sure wish I could try it. It hasn't worked since the original submission for me.

I have a feeling I'm a hater.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, you need to work harder on your hating.

      serf's Hater Score:
        2.36%
      Of The Time Spent Hating.

The worst comment:

      I wish that it showed the previous color scheme if I go back. As it stands I have to go back and then refresh with that URL. (firefox)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The main submission was flagkilled so thought this, more technical post would be more on topic.

<comment><USER17> It's too bad it was flagkilled, because it is an interesting project.

<comment><USER18> We unkilled it so discussion can continue: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517267).

<comment><USER19> Very gracious of you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Google cached [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building- hater-news/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Small bug: It seems like the specific comments that you link to also include submissions, which once it encouters that it mismatches all the subsequent 2 character links with the comments they're associated with by an index of 1. I.E.

AA -> links to comment beginning with AA

BB -> links to comment beginning with BB

CC -> links to a link the user submitted

DD -> links to comment beginning with CC

EE -> links to comment beginning with DD

Very cool implementation though.

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Looking into it! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would be awesome if this was fast enough to run on every user. That way, you could make some sort of leaderboard for Haters.

</comment><comment><USER23> Clicking the quoted comment on the bottom of the page takes you to the wrong comment on HN.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes! I love this idea, can you make it go back further and have a leader board?

<comment><USER8> Yes and yes. :) The problem with the first one is I have to make an individual API call for each comment currently. If you go past 50 comments it starts to get slowwww. For example, I tried to pull back all of @pg's comments... Bad idea. It's like 13,000 of them. Check it: [https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json?print=pre...](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json?print=pretty)

<comment><USER25> I think I've seen a few archives of HN comments. Maybe grab some of those and only make API calls for newer comments? Also preserve the comments from the API calls?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My most hating comment is:

      'Ah interesting re self - how did you find out about that?'

Which I didn't think was particularly harsh.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been too lenient on my architectural taste lately as well. Looking forward to good discussion with the other architects at this site.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Which profiling tool do you use to target your optimizations?", but then again I am a 2.97% hater ....

</comment><comment><USER29> Your website sucks. All the content is is smashed in a column with small width so I have to scroll left and right to read each paragraph. This despite there being gigantic 30% of the screen margins on each side. Try to build something even half-worthwhile next time you're at it. I could build a better website easily; you should go back to school.

<comment><USER29> Intentionally hateful comment by the way ;) Just curious to see how much haternews picks up on it. Although the problem I describe with the content column is real, all the insults and drama isn't at all! For reference: [http://imgur.com/St9hAqR](http://imgur.com/St9hAqR)

Edit: My intentionally hateful comment shows up as being somewhat hateful, but not my most hateful comment. So not too bad!

<comment><USER8> Haha. Awesome! :) I'll fix the site and I'll keep improving the model.

<comment><USER29> Screenshot is FF34 if that helps by the way.

And just a fun side experiment idea: I'm curious how the IBM Watson User- Modeling service would stack up out-of-the-box against how you currently do things:

[https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/#/store/cloudOEPaneId=store&servi...](https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/#/store/cloudOEPaneId=store&serviceOfferingGuid=e37fb381-4aa8-4b53-b5ef- ce975d9f646b)

[http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/user- modeling.html)

Could make for an interesting blog post if you have the time!

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I'll check it out, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My most hateful comment was

\- "Yup"

</comment><comment><USER8> A few things:

1\. Thanks for posting my blog post @chippy. :) The actual app ( haternews.co ) kept getting booted off HN...

2\. There have been a lot of interesting comments on the three threads on here. People pointed out some bugs and overall issues which I will be fixing (also, the site should not crash half as much now). This is just a fun side project I have been messing around with so I can get better at using data science in various applications. If you would like to help build it out for fun further let me know! Also, feel free to submit a bug or suggestion for an improvement if you really want to.([https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news/issues](https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news/issues))

3\. I wanted to build the "hater score" for two reasons. First, to see how accurately I could build a model to measure insulting comments in the wild and second (if it's accurate), to see how people would react to seeing how positive or negative they usually are on Hacker news (or other social networks).

4\. I wanted to make sure everyone knows that just because something is your "Worst Comment" doesn't mean it is negative. Most people have very low scores and most of your comments are not identified as insulting. (It would be over 50% if it is actually an insulting comment.) So most people on HN are not actually haters. I just had a more "hater" focused design just for fun. There are in fact actual haters though, if you look hard enough.

5\. Something I found interesting is clicking the "Back In The Day" checkbox. It takes your 50 oldest comments and analyses them, instead of your 50 most recent.

6\. Finally, if you're not sure why some comments are getting ranked higher than others, feel free to look at the training data I used (it's from a kaggle competition from a while back.) and read my blog post. If you don't want to here are additional features I used on top of standard bag-of-words (CountVectorizer):

* badwords_count – A count of bad words used in each comment.

* n_words – A count of words used in each comment.

* allcaps – A count of capital letters in each comment.

* allcaps_ratio – A count of capital letters in each comment / the total words used in each comment.

* bad_ratio – A count of bad words used in each comment / the total words used in each comment.

* exclamation – A count of "!" used in each comment.

* addressing – A count of "@" symbols used in each comment.

* spaces – A count of spaces used in each comment.

If you have suggestions on other features I could collect let me know! I'll also be building a way to get actual training data from HN itself and letting HN users determine if a comment is actually insulting or not so that the predictions constantly improve.

<comment><USER31> Have you ever considered that machine learning isn't fairly dust and that you can't sprinkle algorithms on a criteria that's poorly formulated to begin with and get an objective criteria for evaluation? I mean what is "hate" \- insults? expressions of frustration? Sly insults? Sarcasm?

Also, the "most hateful" comment was me quoting someone else's rather unpleasant comment, whereas I'd prefer my distaste for lousy ideas show through more directly.

<comment><USER8> Great point.

1\. I wish everything was made from *fairy dust. How awesome would that be? :)

2\. "Hate" is definitely hard to quantify. It's in fact quite difficult to map words to their intentions and get it right consistently (especially within a proper context). So difficult that people set up Kaggle competitions on exactly this. I actually got my "magical" training data from a competition that paid out $10k, which I explained in the article but here it is again:

[https://www.kaggle.com/c/detecting-insults-in-social- comment...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/detecting-insults-in-social- commentary/data)

They did a great job building a baseline training data set to evaluate several different models on. Which are all briefly explained or at least shown in code in the article. And what "hate" actually means here is the probability that a comment is considered insulting. The "hater score" is just an average of the most recent (or oldest, depending on your settings) comments' probabilities that they are insulting.

3\. I read and looked at several different attempts to build something similar by various data scientists who were kind enough to share their findings, including a huge contributor to scikit-learn ([https://github.com/amueller](https://github.com/amueller)).

4\. Taking out quoted text would be a great feature to add. I have about 5 or 6 new features I will probably add and see if the model works any better for it, thanks for the suggestion (another person was suggesting the same thing). :)

5\. This was just to see how well "sprinkled algorithms" and magical coding works in the wild world of actual comments. I love learning and improving my knowledge base with actual experience so I figured why not build something and see what happens. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was really, _really_ hoping that you built this in lisp.

<comment><USER33> (he tried to originally, but(

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Please point this at the kernel.org mailing lists. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER35> I hate Hater News for giving me a hater score of only 5.48%!

</comment><comment><USER36> > An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. > Please try again in a few moments.

Your app sucks.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Why does hate have negative connotations? If someone did evil to me, and I can't fight back, what do I have besides hate?

And the app in question doesn't work.

<comment><USER37> Forget it and move on with your life?

<comment><USER15> so, is that to say that hate can't add to a discussion? It can certainly detract, but I wouldn't be so quick to say that there are no benefits.</comment></comment></comment>