Show HN: I made a site to catalogue 10,000 CC0-licensed stock photos - <AUTHOR> http://finda.photo/#v2 <comment><USER2> [Full disclosure, I work on a service called Azure Search]

Very nice site! Since your site is so much based around search, I thought I would pass on a few suggestions based on what I saw. If you happen to be using a search based engine for your content such as ElasticSearch, SOLR or maybe Azure Search :-), there are a few simple things you could add to make the experience a little smoother. Suggestions in the search box are nice to allow people to quickly see results as they type. You could even add thumbnails of the images in the type ahead such as you see using the Twitter Typeahead library ([http://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/](http://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/)). I also noticed that your search does not handle spelling mistakes or phonetic search (matching words that sound similar). Finally, through the use of Stemming, search engines can often help you find additional relevant content. For example, if the person is looking for mice, but your content has the word mouse in it, this will bring back a match. Since you don't have a lot of content, this can really help people find relevant content.

Hope that helps.

<comment><USER3> > using the Twitter Typeahead library

Unfortunately, it's no longer maintained [0], plenty of unfixed issues. You could try a recent fork [1] :

[0] [https://github.com/twitter/typeahead.js/issues/1424](https://github.com/twitter/typeahead.js/issues/1424)

[1] [https://github.com/corejavascript/typeahead.js](https://github.com/corejavascript/typeahead.js).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like to think I am very conscious of copyright. I might not always adhere to it in my person life (who can claim they do these days?!) but professionally, everything is done strictly legitimately. With that in mind... Am I the only person who is slightly uncomfortable with the phrasing around PD and CC0? With other copyright licenses there is _somebody_ there is saying _they_ own something.

I'm particularly uncomfortable with Flickr's "no _known_ copyright restrictions". What if people infer PD from that and upload it somewhere else under CC0? Then it gets sucked into this finda.photo? Yuck.

As for finda.photo, why are you truncating the source down to just a domain name?! Many of the sources include proper uploader details so why aren't you copying those over and displaying them?

I know you're not required to, but attribution isn't a bad thing if you can give it. I for one would be much happier using a photo if I knew exactly where it came from.

<comment><USER5> One of the challenges I have with attribution generally--and, to be clear, I try to be very careful with attribution on any CC, etc. photos that I use--is that the attribution is usually detached from the photo. (It may be stored in the metadata--or not.) So, even though I make a point of cutting & pasting the flickr links when I'm putting together a presentation, it's very easy for the attribution text and the photo to become separated on subsequent use.

There are potential ways that you could fix this from a technology perspective, e.g. have a process to create a new JPEG with the credit below the original photo. But anything like this is going to be a bit clunky and potentially ugly graphically.

<comment><USER6> There are fields within the JPEG file itself for this information, called IPTC fields. I know they can be read with photo-specific software like Photo Mechanic or Photoshop, but they seem incredibly under-used by the Internet in general. They're perfect for a use case like persistent attribution, but few image software services seem to know about or expose them.

<comment><USER7> I agree these are under-used but they face the same issues as the other methods like putting the data in text near the image on a web page or presentation slide. These fields, same as all Exif metadata, can be overwritten or removed by anyone with access to the file. The data can be faked by someone intending to deceive, or it could disappear when posted to big sites like Facebook or Twitter who routinely remove Exif data by default (presumably to protect the majority who don't understand how GPS tagging works on mobile phone photos, etc).

Once the photo metadata is gone, it is too easy for others to claim it is an 'orphan work' and avoid liability under copyright law. At the opposite end of the spectrum, people like me who release most images as CC0 are annoyed that that license tag was stripped from the metadata, preventing others from freely reusing them. I use and rely on Exif tags a lot but they are fragile and you cannot rely on them staying embedded with your images once they hit the web.

<comment><USER6> The data _can_ be faked or deleted within IPTC fields, of course.

What IPTC fields have over the typical ways of handling attribution is that they are not left behind when the image file is copied--so they should be more resistant to _accidental_ removal of attribution metadata.

On most websites, the attribution is a line of text that is displayed next to the image. Anyone copying the image, who wishes to preserve attribution, must also separately copy the attribution text. Then they need a way to store that text, and keep it associated with the image. Not easy, actually!

> Once the photo metadata is gone, it is too easy for others to claim it is an > 'orphan work' and avoid liability under copyright law.

You cannot avoid liability this way. Under the law, it is the responsibility of the person using an image to know that they have the right to use it. Just claiming "I thought it was orphaned" does not work if you are being sued by the actual image rightsholder.

> I use and rely on Exif tags a lot but they are fragile and you cannot rely > on them staying embedded with your images once they hit the web.

Yes, this is my point! They're fragile because web services don't preserve them--but theoretically they could.

The cynical side of me thinks that a lot of web services don't _want_ to know all the rights data for the media they carry. Ignoring rights gets them more traffic and engagement, and under the relevant law (the DMCA), they are allowed to. All they have to do is remove infringing images when the rights holder requests it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always use [https://pexels.com](https://pexels.com). They also have only CC0 images.

<comment><USER9> Strange, I was curious what kind of images are there, did a search for "Taiwan", and the result is literally 8 pictures with "Shutterstock" watermark and that's all. Is that supposed to be CC0? Even if it was yes, would that be useful at all to have watermarked images like that?

<comment><USER10> Just tried the same thing. It looks like the Shutterstock watermarked photos were an advert sponsored by Shutterstock themselves. No actual CC0 photos for the site itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why not just use flickr? A search for images with "No known copyright restrictions" returned 663,502 results. [https://www.flickr.com/search/?license=7%2C9%2C10&text=&adva...](https://www.flickr.com/search/?license=7%2C9%2C10&text=&advanced=1&view_all=1)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if "No known copyright restrictions" means what you think it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the domain, the design is usable, and the database is great. This has it all.

</comment><comment> m-i-l Looks good. Feedback from a designer I showed this to: it would be useful to search based on aspect ratio (landscape vs portrait at minimum).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's actually already possible. There's a list of all the attributes you can search by here: [http://finda.photo/search/tips](http://finda.photo/search/tips)

For example, [http://finda.photo/search/?q=--aspectratio+%3C+1](http://finda.photo/search/?q=--aspectratio+%3C+1) would give you portrait images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very nice! What are you using to search the photos by colour and feature?

<comment><USER15> Probably performed dominant colour analysis on each (like color-thief), sort by similar ranked colours using a closeness transformation like LAB? No idea for the feature though.

<comment><USER16> Is there an algorithm for what you just described? I'm currently researching for color classification and it seems quite a complicated issue.

<comment><USER17> Hi, If you want you can contact me. I created a powerful algorithm to detect dominant colors in an image using K-means clustering and lab color space.

Examples: [https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/479040852028051456](https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/479040852028051456) [https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/472517258418606080](https://twitter.com/kamy22/status/472517258418606080)

Have a good day!

<comment><USER18> What about feature? If I want a dog, how do you determine which images contain a dog?

<comment><USER17> You have to do a lot of research to solve these type of problems. I think that neural networks and machine learning are the best way... but it's a complex problem.

Here you can find awesome publications ([http://rodrigob.github.io/are_we_there_yet/build/classificat...](http://rodrigob.github.io/are_we_there_yet/build/classification_datasets_results.html#4d4e495354)). It's something like a bible of neural networks :P

<comment><USER18> Considering that companies like Google are so good at this, why build your own photo site? Why not upload all the CC0 images to a public Google Photos library?

<comment><USER17> I like your question. Ok, you can use 500px, Flickr, Google and other sites... But... In my personal opinion, a developer should be curious. I'm a dev and, for this reason, I like to give myself a challenge. It's a good way to learn a lot, to discover new solutions, to meet new people, to improve my skills, to create something new. So... you can use Google Photos library or you can consider to create something different (because definitely your solution will be different from the others). It's a choice ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Adding Alana to the list of CC0-only stock photos.

[1] [http://alana.io/](http://alana.io/)

[2] [http://alana.io/about-us/](http://alana.io/about-us/)

<comment><USER20> Adding to the list: Pixels

[3] [https://www.pexels.com](https://www.pexels.com)

[4] [https://www.pexels.com/photo-license/](https://www.pexels.com/photo- license/)

They currently have over 5000 photos (~600 new images are added every month)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> When of the about pages says that the photos are on a GitHub repo, which sounds really cool, until you follow the link and the repo hasn't been shared yet. Hopefully it's just a matter of time before it is shared.

[http://finda.photo/search/tips#contributing](http://finda.photo/search/tips#contributing)

</comment><comment><USER22> Hi - for some reason the search bar keeps changing my search terms eg Australia --> Australium

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry — that'll be the search trying to get a singular term from a plural.

I've tagged the images with singular terms to make them easier to search, so it will change terms like "bridges" to "bridge", or "men" to "man", unless I override each term. If anyone can suggest a better way, I'd be very grateful.

I'll add "Australia" as an override, for now. Thanks for pointing it out.

<comment><USER23> Have you looked into using stemming?

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

Most major languages should have a library available to handle this for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems that you do have a valid SSL certificate but [https://finda.photo/search?q=test](https://finda.photo/search?q=test) is not working properly.

</comment><comment><USER25> Check also [http://pixabay.com/](http://pixabay.com/) for Public Domain pictures, I've found many awesome gems there

</comment><comment><USER26> Firstly it is slow... Secondly I have typed "wolf" and I got: 3 foxes, 1 lion, 2 monkeys, 1 snow house and 2 wolfs that do not look like wolfs !?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the slowness. I suspect it was struggling under the traffic. It seems to be running pretty quickly now, though.

Most of the images are automatically tagged, and can sometimes be incorrectly labelled. I'm aiming to work through and manually check them all. In the meantime, I might add the ability to flag incorrect keywords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> [http://finda.photo/image/14847](http://finda.photo/image/14847) \- Tags are weird. This is not a dog, mouse, canine or feline. It's not sitting. It has 'eyes' but I think that might be irrelevant. Although I would agree that ferrets (not an included tag) are cute, I'm not sure I'd describe them as domestic. Otherwise, great!

<comment><USER27> I stand corrected: "The ferret (Mustela putorius furo) is the domesticated form of the European polecat" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret)

<comment><USER28> Ferrets are relatively common domestic pets in the UK. Perhaps because the sport of ferreting was historically more prevalent here?

<comment><USER27> Yes, I had to check as after posting the initial message I remembered seeing a child walking a ferret on a lead in Penryn. I've never seen one wandering the streets of Oxford though...

They don't appear to make it into the top 10 pets of 2014: [http://www.pfma.org.uk/pet-population-2014](http://www.pfma.org.uk/pet- population-2014)

Perhaps a ferret adoption drive is necessary! [http://ferretshelters.org/](http://ferretshelters.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> An idea: You could use this pretrained machine learning library to classify your images/improve search even more: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/3yt4o5/dee...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/3yt4o5/deep_learning_in_a_single_file_for_smart_devices/)

</comment><comment><USER30> what is the diff betweeen this and pixabay or pexels.com? which there was one meta-search engine to cover them all :)

<comment><USER31> Even if there is no "diff", this is an extra backup. Any of those sites can go down I guess, then where are all those pictures?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I really like both the selection and the color chooser! Did you do any manual selection of the photos?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

The selection is mostly based on the source sites I chose, like Unsplash, which all have only good-quality photos. The aim was to show all of the images from those sites.

The actual download and analysis of the images is done on my local machine, and each image has its own JSON file. These are then used to populate/modify the database, so I can track any changes to each image's data (if I add/remove keywords, for example) using Git.

<comment><USER33> Have you thought about automating keyword discovery or do you plan to stick with a manually-auditable dataset?

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.2306.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.2306.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Might be a good place for an infinite scroll when going through pages of image results - one lest click they have to do.

</comment><comment><USER35> Just a really great job on this. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just curiosity, where the owner possibly find all these photos to fill up the database?

</comment><comment><USER37> I ran into a Laravel error on the homepage due to the server running out of memory.

</comment><comment><USER38> nice one!

</comment><comment><USER39> My first search on "new york" returned nothing...

</comment><comment><USER40> If you're still a little concerned with licensing and copyrights, I would recommend taking a look at www.graphicstock.com - you just play a flat monthly or yearly fee and you can download as much as you want.

Disclaimer: I work for the company behind GraphicStock. Oh, and we're hiring!</comment>


How do you define intelligence? - <AUTHOR> http://news.usc.edu/92940/how-do-we-define-intelligence/ <comment><AUTHOR> J. P. Guilford (Guilford's Structure of Intellect) - <USER2>

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Guilford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Guilford)

</comment><comment><USER3> Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including one's capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving.

</comment><comment><USER4> Turing test</comment>


Ask HN: Do you celebrate employee anniversary dates at your startup? - <AUTHOR>

I work at Twilio, and we have a bunch of employees who are going to reach their first year with the company soon so I've been contemplating some special way to commemorate their anniversaries with the company.  Does anyone celebrate this at their startup?  What do you do, and what does it mean to you? <comment><USER2> We celebrate their anniversaries with the company at the closest company meeting to that date. There are increasingly cool company shwag presented with the acknowledgment, starting with sweaters and progressing through nice jackets, skateboards, framed photos etc. It feels great to see people still really happy with their job after 4 years and having to earn the nice shwag makes it mean more.</comment>


A Maven plugin that creates merge requests for dependency updates - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/helpermethod/dependency-update-maven-plugin <comment><USER2> Good

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here: The plugin is in currently at a pretty early stage but already used productively. It was developed because I wanted something like DependaBot which works for self-hosted GitLab instances.</comment></comment>


A physical, open source time puncher for freelancers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/02/08/raphs-puncher-freelance-time-tracking-device/ Raphael Abrams shows us his Freelance "Puncher" time tracking device. After trying many different methods for keeping track of his hours, Raph created this little puncher to easily clock in and out of his freelance work.<p>Check out the code and schematics here: https://github.com/raphaelabrams/freelance-puncher <comment><USER2> Back in the days when my employer did a lot of billable work for clients, I used music to track my time. I'd decide which client's project I wanted to work on, pop in a CD, and when the CD ended I'd write down the total time, take a little break to stretch or get a drink or visit the bathroom, and then pick the next thing I wanted to work on and the next CD I wanted to listen to.

This gave me convenient time tracking and reminded me to get up and take breaks.

<comment><USER3> This is a great idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This gives me a simpler idea -- use a USB drive and run a script that detects it, writes timestamp to it as it is plugged in -- say intermittently every 10 minutes. The log can either be written to the USB drive or to a local file.

<comment><USER5> I had the same idea when I opened the article but then I thought about wearing out the USB port, maybe that's a goofy concern.

<comment><USER6> Officially, the required lifetime for a USB type A connector is a disturbingly-low 1500 insertion cycles. I expect present-day connectors to greatly outlast this in practice, of course.

<comment><USER5> The Wikipedia article I found, probably the same one you found, only specifies male connector cycles "The lifetime of a USB-A male connector is approximately 1,500 connect/disconnect cycles." I was more concerned about the receptacle, which I can't seem to find info on. I wouldn't care to lose a thumb drive so much, but a port would be horrible.

<comment><USER6> Regretfully, "connector" is used generically in the USB standard to refer to both the plug and receptacle. Type-A "standard durability" connectors, plug and receptacle, are specced for 1,500 cycles minimum. 5,000 for "high durability". The only type specced for more is the Micro connector, at 10,000 cycles.

See section "18.104.22.168 Durability or Insertion/Extraction Cycles (EIA 364-09)" of the USB 3.0 standard. I'm sure it's in 2.0, too, but the section number may be different.

<http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was just jonesing for just such a device. I'm in the same bind and would love to play with a similar design but with a dial to log different jobs.

Excellent job.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a feeling this could cause some trouble in places like airports.

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of the pomodoro technique whereby a real physical kitchen timer is recommended to keep track of time broken down in 25minute intervals.

<comment><USER9> It also reminded me of various devices related to recording/illustrating the passage of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My brain is not a stopwatch <http://drupal4hu.com/node/319>

<comment><USER11> I used to do per project fees exclusively but I found that with certain jobs, mainly ones that involve a lot of drawn out unpredictable grind (like repairing broken circuit boards), hourly is much better for me. Different situations call for different solutions. I still charge per project for jobs that don't lend themselves to being measured with clocks. Oh, and just FYI: not all freelancers are programmers! In fact, some people do work that doesn't involve computers at all. True story.

<comment><USER10> And my post was not exactly geared to programmers either. Aside from the half sentence which says "when I am actually typing the solution into an editor" there is nothing programmer specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A stop watch?</comment>


Ask HN: Which is the best place to get your SSL certificate? - <AUTHOR> I want to install SSL on all my sites, but I am wondering where should I buy the certificate?
Some people suggest Let's Encrypt, but anothers say as it is free it does not work very well.
What do you suggest? <comment><USER2> Lets encrypt will work find, but they are offering SSL for 90 days only. That means you need to reissue your certificate for each 90 days of interval. This will become more hectic. And if you forgot to reissue your website will no longer be encrypted.

It will be better to get SSL Certificate from trusted SSL Certificate Authorities.

Here's the comparison of Domain Validated SSL Certificate of Trusted Certificate Authority - [https://aboutssl.org/comparison-of-domain-validated- dv-ssl-c...](https://aboutssl.org/comparison-of-domain-validated-dv-ssl- certificates).

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's Encrypt SSL certificate is not recommended for business level websites, as it is limited for domain validation only.

It's depends on you. If you have a small website just go with domain validated SSL Certificate which start under $5.

If you have an eCommerce based website, then go with Organization Validation (available under $30) or EV SSL Certificate (available at $99).

I would recommend CheapSSLSecurity ([https://cheapsslsecurity.com/](https://cheapsslsecurity.com/)) where you can get your choice SSL Certificate at lowest price with instant technical support.

</comment><comment><USER4> I recommend to buy your SSL Certificate from [https://comodosslstore.com/](https://comodosslstore.com/) that offer all types of SSL including DV, OV and EV SSL at cheap price.

Here you can get

\- 30 days money back \- 24x7 support \- EV SSL @ $99/yr \- Unlimited reissue \- Price match guarantee

Whereas you can get free certificates for a limited time such as 30 days or 90 days and you have to keep focus on its renewal all time. So, a Comodo SSL Certificate is the best option to secure your website at cheap price with the highest level of encryption.

</comment><comment><USER5> _anothers say as it is free it does not work very well_

There is _literally_ no difference between a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate and the basic paid product from any other signing authority.

</comment><comment><USER6> I suggest you to buy from [https://www.cheapsslshop.com/](https://www.cheapsslshop.com/) Cheapest price and best customer support.</comment>


The Joy of Cosmic Mediocrity - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/79/catalysts/the-joy-of-cosmic-mediocrity <comment><USER2> I have a very boring solution to Fermi's paradox: interstellar travel is simply very hard. Beyond the reach of any civilization, no matter how technologically advanced. Or maybe, just within the reach, so that advanced civilizations will occasionally travel to neighboring stars, but this results in a very small minority of all the stars in the galaxy being populated, and we are not close to any of these.

Oh, as for intergalactic travel, I'm close to 100% certain it is way beyond the capability of any civilization. It's very hard to imagine intelligent beings with an attention span of millions of years.

<comment><USER3> And not just hard, but without any clear payoff.

We're evolutionarily fine-tuned to live on Earth. We love a blue sky, room temperature, certain levels of gases in the atmosphere, and so on. It takes very little work to live here, relatively speaking.

Living long-term in outer space and other planets means either forgoing most of the things that make people happy, or else attempting to recreate them in incredibly _incredibly_ expensive ways that ultimately aren't as good.

It's cool to dream about living under glass domes on other planets... but the reality is that after the novelty wears off after a couple of weeks, I think you'd realize you'd just rather go back to Earth. It's way nicer.

"What about if we ruin Earth?" plenty of people counter. Well _don 't_. It's a _helluva_ lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic things here like taking care of the environment, than to building interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets.

<comment><USER4> > _And not just hard, but without any clear payoff._

The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out. Not putting all your eggs in one basket. If you can't see how that's an inherently good idea, I'm not really sure I'll be able to convince you.

Your post is thinking on timescales of millennia, at the longest. We know the sun will burn out in a few billion years. We know another 'ice age' is coming in a few thousand years - the entirety of human civilization cropped up in the 10,000 years since the last major ice sheet retreated. We know earth will have some kind of natural disaster, whether it's tectonics or bombardment, and we may not be powerful enough to manage it when it happens. This knowledge alone is enough to justify the cost of trying to get off this planet.

> _It 's a helluva lot easier to apply our intelligence to normal prosaic > things here like taking care of the environment, than to building > interstellar spaceships that can colonize other planets._

"We should fix all the problems here on earth." Every time the idea of building in space comes up. As if we're capable of fixing all our problems on earth linearly and in order before moving on to space, and as if there are only enough resources for fixing the things you think are important. This is the classic, "this solution won't fix the problems we're currently not fixing, so we shouldn't do _anything_ until those problems get fixed."

<comment><USER5> > The clear payoff is: as far as we've seen, life only exists on one place in > the universe, so it makes sense to spread it out.

Sure, if the short term concerns don't do us in first. You're talking about an extremely long tail concern in terms of likelihood of human destruction compared to the threats that will come with developing the technology we need for material independence from earth. If history is any guide, colonization does not lead to spontaneous harmony or collectivized thinking.

I think the idea is "why are we playing with technology we aren't responsible enough to use yet when the benefits aren't clear". Take the story recently about SpaceX launching satellites that are so reflective they obscure the sky: for a company with supposedly with noble intent, they clearly have their own interests which they will advance above our own. In the BEST case, they admit their own blasé ignorance as to the collectivized effects of their actions, and it's not like they make any secret about serving militaries.

If there is a model for "space" research in the public interest, the US and comparable nations have barely invested a tiny drop in the bucket of military investments. I have no faith we're going to start any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article deals with The Principle of Mediocrity as applied to extra terrestrial life in an optimistic way, essentially saying we've been here before, many times, convinced of our special place and we've always been corrected by some new perspective.

So, while not actually countering current challenges - eg. The Fermi Paradox - head on, the reminder was reassuring for those of us sceptical about life elsewhere, but longing to be proved wrong.

<comment><USER7> The Principle of Mediocrity has also been applied to hilariously wrong results.

If you go back to the early scientific age, you will find a widespread belief that the other planets in our solar system were inhabited! After all, why should the Earth be special? It was only after this was shown to be nonsense that SETI moved out to planets around other stars.

What all this does, of course, is ignore anthropic selection. If life is extremely rare, then Earth will be special just by the fact we are here to be making observations. In the end, a PoM argument for intelligent life being common is just circular reasoning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMHO,

Science is prodigy but not magic, so when we try to explain things that are way too complex or out-of-scale (whether big or small) relatively to us, the solution space is so incredibly vast that we might as well be guessing — science lets us rule out 1% of the 'whys' and we're almost none the wiser.

Consider this:

\- galaxies may generally follow cycles, patterns, notably depending on the activity of their supermassive blackhole (or quasar, etc); life may be peaking during a "sweet spot" in the cycle, and plummeting at other times. What may be critical is thus not only age but 'state' of the galaxy, and we might find ourselves in the beginning of such a cycle (we sure accumulate enough particularities in the topology of our local spacetime, being both rich yet calm enough, to warrant the assumption that we're currently 'privileged' on average).

\- We have no way to detect life in other galaxies. They could be swarmed by spaceships and interstellar spatian empires and we just wouldn't be able to determine that. Thus basing the Fermi "paradox" on such a small sample (on the order of 10⁻¹²) seems much too weak data. We simply don't know. We actually can't properly observe ours yet, especially behind the core, generally in the alignment of the disc. We are just now discovering that said disc is distorted and there are remnants of jets above/below us[1]. There are hundreds of galaxies in our local Andromeda-Triangulum region, huge gravity streams, and we've only begun to grasp that in the last few decades... It's still very, very early in our observations of the cosmos.

I think it's good to ponder such questions and raise apparent "paradoxes", go science! — but to draw any conclusions based on weak data and conjecture of a perceived (read: biased) mean is, IMHO, rather foolish, way too premature at best. Not hubris but wishful thinking, belief, opinion. So let it be that, humbly, defusing the anxiety.

In the grander scheme of things, we're not much better off than the Ancient Greeks when faced with this question. Give it another thousand years, and then I'd expect a whole other level of questioning. Not 10 or 20 or even 100, if we are to tackle that kind of scale — we need infrastructure for this, in space, way beyond the solar system (think telescopes, probes, not even manned missions).

The ultimate problem with time is not evolution (of us, of science, of tech), it's information travel: e.g. if we were to use the thickness of the Milky Way to set up telescopes, at ~1,000 LY, it would take half that time to transmit pictures to a central aggregator. 5 centuries for your next picture, I don't know if we'll be able to commit to such transgenerational projects without huge changes in our biology (lifespan, mindset, whatever but huge, enough to make us a different species).

Until we're able to do such things, grow such infrastructure, gather such meaningful data, we're just too small to even _look at_ the cosmos. Let alone draw conclusions. We really just have to keep going at it, and it's gonna take a long, long time.

[1] Contrary to the very regular spiral illustration we're acquainted to, we are now realizing the Milky Way could actually look more like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A)

<comment><USER9> Search Of 100,000 Nearby Galaxies For Waste Heat Signatures Of Large Civilizations Finds Nothing:

[https://phys.org/news/2015-04-advanced-civilizations- earth-o...](https://phys.org/news/2015-04-advanced-civilizations-earth- obvious-galaxies.html)

<comment><USER8> Thank you for furthering my point.

The base assumption of this study is:

> _"if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring > civilization, the energy produced by that civilization 's technologies would > be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths"_

Requiring galaxy-spanning civilizations who love to advertise themselves from afar is a bit of a narrow path to victory.

100 K galaxies is about one millionth of our observable universe (which is possibly itself just a tiny fraction of the whole).

So while this _could_ have found something, provided all assumptions held true, that it found nothing is hardly representative nor conclusive of anything. It wouldn't have detected a billion thriving Kardashiev-2 civilizations and 'below', and that's ruling out _a lot_ of life (actually, 100% of what we know to exist). It also assumes that Kardashiev is a valid representation of a civilization's advancement — in all likelihood, that measure is quite far from the whole picture.

Again, I commend the effort and welcome more, ever more, but let's not jump to conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Our mediocre world could have been a bit more interesting if we simply had a habitable moon with other beings, alien fauna, and even exotic diseases.

<comment><USER11> We did, until the dinosaurs nuked it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a stupid question. Any world we discover that doesn't harbor intelligent life we would in all surity dismiss as a world that never will. See Mars, for instance.

OTOH, any world that _was_ inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an extent that we would never have known they were there.

Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Face it humanity, you're not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think, but, frankly the figurative apes throwing stones at each other after a (galactic version of) World War III.

<comment><USER13> I'm afraid that this comment is not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think it is. But for people who come by and want to know why this dark matter suggestion is fundamentally ill-informed and wrong:

Dark matter isn't merely "not bright" matter, it is matter which does not interact with electromagnetic radiation. It is generally expected that the vast majority is non-baryonic, for a variety of reasons.

The observed density of all matter in the universe is about 30% of the universe's critical density, but Big Bang nucleosynthesis results readable in the cosmic microwave background show much less helium and lithium than you would expect if it were baryonic — it is safe to say that baryonic matter is only 5% of the critical density. Moreover, small dense objects (black holes) would produce gravitational micro-lensing effects which aren't present, while more diffuse objects would affect the absorption spectra of light.

And finally, the observed distribution of dark matter in the universe just ... sorta makes it a rather poor candidate for war debris.

<comment><USER12> Why can't the remenants from an alien war not be baryonic?

The observed distribution is very odd, actually. In some galaxies there is nearly none, in others quite a lot, yet it tends to be hang quite close to matter even though the forces between them are quite weak.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to handle "barely worth it" project requests? - <AUTHOR>

I've been consulting for a while now. During this time I've taken on every kind of project: From small bugfixes that took a couple of hours to launching new projects that took multiple months to finish.
Now I'm at a point where I think I can make enough money by only working on the latter: Projects that I can implement from scratch, and that take at least a couple of weeks to implement.
But at the same time I get a lot of requests for smaller projects that take just a couple of days from start to finish.
While I like working on these smaller projects as well, I feel that they may harm my productivity in the long run: Always juggling multiple projects (at least one big project and a couple of small ones) means that in my mind I'm constantly occupied and there's always something that should be (and can be) done quickly, as opposed to bigger projects where there aren't any immediate deadlines and I can plan my work better, and also take a few days off every now and then without feeling guilty about it.
I've been thinking lately if I should perhaps ditch these smaller projects completely, and only take on large projects.
But at the same time I think I would feel bad not accepting these smaller projects for various reasons:
- It's always nice to get to know more people, I might profit from such a relationship later on - A small project might turn into a big one - A few small projects still equal a nice profit - It might hurt my "image" if I have to reject too many requests
So I've thought about perhaps adding additional requirements for small projects, e.g.:
- Minimum budget size for any kind of project that I take on - Selling my work in "packages", where I tell the customer that I can help them, but they will have to buy at least N hours of my time
Perhaps somebody else has been at this point before and could share their experience? <comment><USER2> We've done a lot of work on our house over the last few years, and I've observed how different contractors deal with scheduling issues:

1\. Some won't return a call at all.

2\. Some will call you back to say that they're in the middle of a project, and are too busy to take your business.

3\. Some will happily schedule you in for a date in the distant future (like, three months from now).

I'm unlikely to bother calling the first two again for work, but the third makes me think, "Man, this guy is so busy that he's booked until _March_? He must be good."

</comment><comment><USER3> Every project has a price at which you know it is worthwhile. Sometimes it feels funny to estimate high...even 3-4x your normal rate. But trust yourself. Understand the additional costs in your time or energy. Likewise, some projects or clients are worth working below your normal rate.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have a fantastic problem on your hands. The demand is exceeding the supply.

I would suggest raising your prices for all new clients. You might also consider bringing on subcontractors to handle the smaller jobs for you.</comment>


An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf <comment><USER2> Nada Amin, who gave the keynote at Strange Loop in 2014 "Programming Should Eat Itself" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrKj4hYic5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrKj4hYic5A)

has worked through the implementation [https://github.com/namin/inc](https://github.com/namin/inc)

and provided the corresponding workshop documentation in her github account. [https://github.com/namin/inc/blob/master/docs/tutorial.pdf](https://github.com/namin/inc/blob/master/docs/tutorial.pdf)

She's also been involved in contributing to the next generation Scala compiler (Dotty).

</comment><comment><USER3> Here are some related papers you might be interested in (If you haven't seen them already):

[http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1589](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/1589)

[http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano- jfp.pdf](http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf)

[http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/commercial- nanopass.pdf](http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/commercial-nanopass.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> What I'd like to see is "An Approach to Incremental Compiler Construction", i.e., a compiler that outputs code which evaluates its input incrementally wrt. previous inputs.

<comment><USER5> Or how about a live programming environment that incrementally recomputes a new programming execution based on incremental changes to the program's code. Anyways, I've been working on this problem for a few years now...the first step is incremental compilation.

<comment> vive-la-liberte You're probably aware of Smalltalk already but in case you're not, I think it might be of interest to you. There's an open source implementation of Smalltalk called Pharo. They have a few screencasts and recordings of presentations at their website. [http://pharo.org/documentation](http://pharo.org/documentation)

Edit: Checked your profile. Going to say that yes, you almost certainly know about Smalltalk -- far more than do I.

<comment><USER5> I would argue this a lot with people like Gilad Bracha :), but ya. Incremental compilation is pretty trivial in Smalltalk though given the lack of a static type system.

<comment><USER6> ...and no explicit native macro system either (lot can be laid atop it of course...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A bit old and it is in Pascal, but still, Let's Build a Compiler by Jack Crenshaw is also fun to read:

[http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/](http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/)

</comment><comment><USER8> A friend and I used this paper as part of an independent study in compilers, it was a lot of fun and I think strikes the right balance of concepts core to compiler construction. I highly recommend it.</comment>


UK's Daily Mail in early talks over bid for Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/uks-daily-mail-early-talks-103313614.html <comment><USER2> Current discussion on another thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11470728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11470728)

</comment><comment><USER3> Having worked for both organisations (dmgt - associated media base, and yahoo europe), I can't imagine a more screwed up bastard child of a company as the progeny of that merger.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, imagine ending up with Paul Dacre as the new boss...</comment>


Tesla looses head of production at critical time, sources say - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/06/26/tesla-loses-head-of-production/ <comment><USER2> Why is now a critical time?

It seems they have a bunch of production lines already running, with approximately the right capacity to fulfil orders.

New products are still a little way off, and cost reductions are the main thing I'd expect a head of production to be working on right now, but they're very incremental and not very exciting.

</comment><comment><USER3> loses?</comment>


Go Get Yer Shiny New Yahoo Profile…And Make Some Connections - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/16/go-get-yer-shiny-new-yahoo-profileand-make-some-connections/

<comment><USER2> Finally Yahoo! starts to realize that their brand is the best thing they have going for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like this. It's more open that Facebook's, and more powerful than Friendfeed, since it also show email activity (à la xobni)

And for once, they don't brand it as yet another social network or any other buzzword</comment>


Snowden: Apple's defense of digital rights highlights Google's absence - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/679319304828018689 <comment><USER2> [http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/12/blackberry- ceo-...](http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/12/blackberry-ceo-says- apple-has-gone-to-dark-place-with-pro-privacy-stance/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I bet apple is more vocal on Tax reform too.</comment>


UNCRUNCHED: Arrington's new blog. - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/

<comment><USER2> I had a strong hunch back in February and I'm glad I blogged it for once because it might well be coming true(!): [http://peterc.org/blog/2011/381-michael-arringtons-dreams- of...](http://peterc.org/blog/2011/381-michael-arringtons-dreams-of-a-blog- for-true-startups.html)</comment>


A Quebecer spoke out against the Saudis then learned he had spyware on his phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/omar-abdulaziz-spyware-saudi-arabia-nso-citizen-lab-quebec-1.4845179?cmp=rss <comment><USER2> When you look at the URL in the SMS message, you'd have to be a complete moron to click on it....</comment>


IPhone takes 72% of Japanese smartphone market - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/23/apple_iphone_takes_72_of_japanese_smartphone_market.html

<comment><USER2> That's 72% of the approximately 4~5% that smartphones represent of the Japanese phone market.

[http://whatjapanthinks.com/2009/05/30/smartphones-not- impres...](http://whatjapanthinks.com/2009/05/30/smartphones-not-impressing- many-in-japan/)

As others have pointed out, virtually all "dumb" phones in Japan support email and network. The clamshell form's keypad is comparable, if not superior, to mobile querty keyboards for typing Japanese language text. A sizable number (perhaps even a majority) of "dumb" phones also support streaming television, a contact-less payment chip, GPS, music playback, an app store.

I find the 4~5% (mostly foreign designed) smartphone percentage a lot more interesting to think about.

<comment><USER3> Also interesting are the implications for Softbank (the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in Japan). They'll definitely keep taking market share away from NTT Docomo as they continue to offer innovative devices and compelling pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This would be a good test for a "pundit tracker". Before the iPhone was available in Japan a popular theme was that Japan already has great stuff and the iPhone might get a boost from the halo effect, but that it wouldn't be special. 72% seems pretty special.

e.g.

wrong: [http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/15/iphone-apple-japan-tech- wir...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/15/iphone-apple-japan-tech-wireless- cx_ew_0115appljap.html)

wrong: [http://www.tuaw.com/2007/12/19/docomo-to-carry-iphone-in- jap...](http://www.tuaw.com/2007/12/19/docomo-to-carry-iphone-in-japan/)

right: [http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2008/06/japan_pho...](http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2008/06/japan_phones)

<comment><USER5> Don't get too excited. iPhone is not very popular in Japan. You rarely see one there.

<comment><USER6> As someone who lives in Tokyo, I beg to differ at this point in time. Last year, there were not many people holding iPhones on trains. Now, it's quite widespread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This makes no sense to me at all. Almost no one uses iPhone in Japan in my experience. Just about everyone is using the standard long-rectangular clamshell form factor.

This article has to be wrong.

Update: Aha, probably comes down to "smartphone" semantics. Meh.

</comment><comment><USER7> I haven't been to Japan for about seven years, but I get the impression that their "dumb" phones are almost as fully-featured as our smartphones. If there were only ~2 million smartphones sold there last year this would seem to imply that they're not heavily into the whole smartphone thing. Can anyone comment?

</comment><comment><USER8> This headline is misleading.

They currently have 72% of sales not the market. There are a lot of "legacy" smart phone devices in Japan.

That said, capturing 72% of new sales is huge.

<comment><USER9> That's what the market is. The market for cellphone _applications_ may include the entire installed base of phones, but by definition the "smartphone market" means people buying and selling smartphones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> To put things in perspective, iPhones were 4.9% of all new phones for 2009 ([http://asiajin.com/blog/2010/04/23/iphone-2009-takes-4-9-sha...](http://asiajin.com/blog/2010/04/23/iphone-2009-takes-4-9-share- in-japan/))

</comment><comment><USER11> At least for once, we are exporting to a country like Japan other than just our food. Even tho I dislike the totalitarian regime of Apple, I am happy to see U.S. Technology in another country.

<comment><USER12> well, we are exporting technology, the actual phone itself comes from china - where all apple products are manufactured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A related and interesting question which I was just discussing with my friend the other day.. It seems japan is and has for a long been years ahead with their mobile phones and other technology. Why is it then that they haven't dominated foreign markets too? Why does it take so long for their tech to reach the rest of the world? Anyone know?</comment>


Amazon and Microsoft workers: No more special rental deals for you in Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2016/sorry-amazon-microsoft-workers-no-special-rental-deals-seattle/ <comment><USER2> _If_ you buy the argument that "tech worker" is a proxy for "white male"[0] then this amounts to the city _requiring_ housing discrimination by landlords: Combined, Seattle ordinances require that landlords offer benefits to certain minorities and now require that equivalent benefits _not_ be offered to certain non[-visible]-minorities. This does absolutely nothing to actually solve the housing crisis, which is the _only_ way non-tech-workers won't be priced out to the detriment of us all.

[0] I'm not sure I do, since of the top 10 of my coworkers according to the frequency of our interaction, only one is a non-Hispanic white male, and you have to go to my lead's lead's lead's lead to find the first of only two white males in my management chain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would a landlord even want to offer this deal? Are they getting a kickback from the companies involved or something?

<comment><USER4> Better tenants. And there is competition for high-income tenants, particularly areas like Capitol Hill which are gentrified. Most people don't want to pay $2,100 a month for a 1bd, but the ones who do are worth getting in the door and generally work for tech companies.

Example - I didn't have to pay a security deposit for my last place due to working at Microsoft. It didn't really impact my decision to live there, but it might have if there was competition in their price range.</comment></comment>


A few Git tricks for your arsenal - <AUTHOR> http://illicittech.blogspot.com/2008/06/git-tricks-ive-been-using-lot.html <comment><USER2> `git rebase --interactive' is a tremendously cool tool. The rest of these are pretty basic and should be familiar to most git users.</comment>


The general tone is purple - <AUTHOR> https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/alison-light/the-general-tone-is-purple <comment><USER2> My favorite part of reading LRB articles I come across on here is guessing what the article will be about from the title. I never guess correctly but I'm always hooked by the time I've read far enough to understand the title.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://archive.is/qnvl1](https://archive.is/qnvl1)

</comment><comment> ur-whale [http://archive.is/qnvl1](http://archive.is/qnvl1)

</comment><comment><USER4> What a terrible website. Do not click.

<comment><USER5> A cookie banner without any opt-out covered by a newsletter prompt. I can't see the article and I can't be bothered to try.

<comment><USER6> My browser plugins avoided all that crap for me, but I was still frustrated by the tiny map images. The high resolution maps are beautiful: [https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/download- maps](https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/download-maps) and there's an interactive version that overlays Google Maps so you can see what happened to those "Vicious, semi-criminal" areas: [https://booth.lse.ac.uk/map/14/-0.0736/51.5023/100/0](https://booth.lse.ac.uk/map/14/-0.0736/51.5023/100/0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't remember I have ever visited LRB site and I got pay-walled: "You have reached your free article limit".

<comment><USER8> Same. Maybe the limit is zero -_-</comment></comment>


Why Rent Control Doesn't Work - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/ <comment><USER3> Supply side markets work when they defeat the power of hoarding. Pick any market, and if sitting on the item makes you money in the long term, rather than putting it to use then you have a monopoly problem of some sort.

For a market to work, it must always be the case that using the item to cause some socially useful economic flow to happen is more profitable than sitting on it, or trading your hoard with other hoarders. Ideally you go bust quickly if you sit on it, much as you would with perishable goods.

When you apply that view to housing services you find that the power to exclude is the hoard that needs defeating. Keeping an apartment empty and outside the housing services supply market should be cripplingly expensive.

Ask yourself this. What's the market force that drives rent prices down and is it equivalent in force to that which drives rent prices up? People need housing to live, but housing only needs people if there is a chance of a profit.

<comment><USER4> I would much prefer a land value tax and relaxation of regulations preventing new construction (in London you can't build in certain areas/over a certain height because of Protected Views [1], which seems utterly bizarre, as if maintaining views is more important than sufficient housing)

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

<comment><USER5> Protected view is an oversimplification. As in, whilst the law names, and officially only ensures protected views, the actual effects of that law go a little further than that and I bet plenty in the law making profession are aware of this, but feel that the law as is is sufficient.

Specifically: The protected view law reduces crowding. Without it, the # of folks living per square kilometer in London would be higher than it is right now, and that would mean London needs to expand all sorts of services (medical, public transport, heck, even the # of butchers and the like), needs to deal with more concentrated pollution, and in general just needs to 'run better' just to keep up the same standard.

And that is not a stupid goal.

Yes, it clashes with affordable rent. I have no solutions, just pointing out that the idea 'hey, affordable rent is way more important than protected views, so, duh, get rid of that law!' is probably a bit shortsighted.

<comment><USER6> It is a stupid way to achieve the goal because if you're legitimately trying to mitigate other specific things you could tax for those things. E.g. for one example you mentioned allow new development, but set trash disposal fees at some absurd amount.

It also assumes a zero-sum economy. Once you have more population density you have more of a tax base to pay for all those things, and some fixed costs go down as density goes up.

The claim that public transit of all things is going to get worse with higher density is, frankly, ridiculous. If it really persists as a problem you can use the extra money from the new tax base to bring in urban planners from Tokyo.

> I have no solutions[...]

I have one to address NIMBY-ism everywhere: We say sure, you can have "protected views" or whatever, but then you need to pay market value for those things.

We'll see how long that lasts when people need to pay out of pocket for the opportunity cost of not constructing a skyscraper just to occasionally enjoy the view, as opposed to incumbents getting to vote for "free" and getting the direct benefit of their property values rising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, economists said similar things before the Great Depression. But market couldn't fix it, so government had to basically redistribute tax money "from rich to poor". Yes, there were mega-projects like Hoover dam, but the main idea was to give poor some money to buy the goods.

I don't have opinion on rent control in question, but I can see it as yet another form of redistributing money "from rich to poor". Every single revolution happened because of income disparity, so I can see it as a form of loosening that tension a bit. Whether it works -- I don't know.

<comment><USER8> "I can see it as yet another form of redistributing money "from rich to poor"

Except that rent control is not usually means tested.

If you've lived in a rent-controlled apartment in SF for 10 years, and worked as a software engineer all that time, you might choose to stay put even if you buy an apartment. You can pay rent at slightly above prices from 10 years ago, and receive market rent on your new place.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but the same thing happens to landlords. If they can afford the buy in, then they keep their properties and charge as high a rent as possible. Usually you find landlords slowly expand their holdings over time, and if your city can't support enough private buyers, then it becomes predominantly landlord owned and there are no affordable places anywhere.

So the question becomes, if not rent control, then what do we do to keep our cities livable to a range of people?

<comment><USER8> "then it becomes predominantly landlord owned and there are no affordable places anywhere"

I'm not sure I follow. Why would a large proportion of properties being owned by landlords reduce affordability?

"So the question becomes, if not rent control, then what do we do to keep our cities livable to a range of people?"

Allow people and companies to build apartment buildings, either on green field sites, or by knocking down houses. Stop allowing existing property owners (NIMBYs) to veto new building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The idea of renting a property as a long-term solution to remaining on a specific plot of land fundamentally makes no sense.

A five or ten year fixed lease, if you can negotiate one, might.

It's completely unsurprising that on a year-by-year lease the rent might rise and you may want to move out. That's what a 1 year lease _is_.

All of the emotional pandering surrounding that is simply unnecessary. If you want to live somewhere for an extended period you either need a long lease or to buy a place.

That's not a politically popular viewpoint for reasons I can't quite understand.

<comment><USER11> That's not a popular opinion because it's functionally the same as saying only the people who can afford to buy a home or enter a long-term lease should have access to affordable, stable housing. Since politics is about who gets what, and since most people don't have much in terms of savings or leverage, it's in the interest of most people to oppose your viewpoint because it's against their interests.

It's only emotional pandering if you don't think politics should be a useful instrument to people without money.

<comment><USER10> Yes, only people who can afford to enter into a long term lease have access to stable housing.

There is no "should" here. It's definitional. That's literally what a long lease is, as opposed to a short lease.

> It's only emotional pandering if you don't think politics should be a useful > instrument to people without money.

It's emotional pandering because it's devoid of actual logic.

You've injected the 'people without money' bit here as if it's relevant when actually this is a matter that affects everyone.

<comment><USER12> >The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

One should realize that politics can be used to cement long terms societal stability, and not just make one rich as fast as possible.

<comment><USER10> Sure.

It can't make a short term lease a long term lease though.

You can, of course, eliminate or curtail short term leases.

Whether such a thing is preferable is up for question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Rent control is government setting the price on a good. I've always thought that price is metadata about a good or a service. Changing the price doesn't change that reality - it just hides it.

If the rent is too high why not just give people money and let them spend it on rent? That's probably idiotic but it makes more sense to me then telling the people renting out units that they have to charge a certain amount. At least in this case you still have a price signal - though if you toss money like it's nothing at a problem you tend to get inflation especially if you give people money and tell them they _have_ to spend it on a single good.

A better fix is to increase the supply of housing and to the extent it's possible lower the fixed costs for building. If there's more of it the price will go down. I understand the argument that says "If we let them build more they'll only build for rich people" Sure. My answer to that is let them build more. It will take time but eventually the supply of units for non rich people will increase and when it does the price will go down.

That's all easy to say but I doubt any of that will happen.

<comment><USER14> >If the rent is too high why not just give people money and let them spend it on rent?

This doesn't work because the money will go straight to landlords. Rent prices simply increase across the board. There's even an argument that indirect improvements, like building parks and improving infrastructure, generally does not benefit renters since it drives rental prices up. Landlords reap the majority of the benefit.

Building more would definitely help, but that is directly against the interest of existing landlords. They will fight it hard since it will generally erode their views and decrease their property value.

We really need a solution that incentivizes higher density where there is high demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Note that Oregon's new rent control law is at 7% + inflation per year which seems like a very mild restriction and unlikely to cause bad long-term effects?

I would guess this only guards against sudden, extreme increases; eventually, someone on fixed income will have to move somewhere cheaper, but at least they know what's coming and have some time to figure it out.

It seems unlikely these studies say very much about mild rent control.

<comment><USER16> It would definitively have better outcomes but I don't think it would be politically acceptable. 7% means doubling rent every 10 years. Building more housing within those 10 years to prevent excessive increases in rent is certainly possible but will it actually happen? The type of government that uses rent control doesn't actually want to take it's medicine (more housing). They just want a quick win even if it causes problems over the long term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is an interesting conversation. As others have said, this article does indicate rent control works for the renters. What are the arguments about who it doesn't work for? I've heard landlords angry about this kind of thing in Oregon but never heard them complain about the values of their properties skyrocketing. It's human nature to only see the downside. But, is the solution to make these rent controls temporary? Is the big problem, as the article suggests, that the laws don't adapt to the dynamic nature inherent to cities?

Could blockchain solve this?

Joking!

<comment><USER18> _this article does indicate rent control works for the renters_

Current renters. Future renters get locked out.

 _What are the arguments about who it doesn 't work for?_

By discouraging development, it creates an environment where the only people who can afford housing are the rent control lottery winners, and the very wealthy who can outbid everyone else for the few remaining units. In other words, San Francisco.

<comment><USER19> It also discourages downsizing. If you're old and retired, and want to move into a house that's a bit smaller now that your kids have moved out, maybe you can't afford to because it would mean paying _more_ in rent than you do currently. This can exacerbate (or cause) shortages.

<comment><USER17> I would argue this is actually a separate thing. Rent control does one thing. Zoning laws like they have in SF that prevent building more dense structures prevent people from selling in one area and then finding a new property that is much smaller in the same area. The combination of rent control and NIMBY zoning laws makes downsizing challenging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a good discussion of rent control, even though the title is unfortunately click-baitey.

The great thing about this episode is that it actually does something that most popular discussions of rent control don't do: it acknowledges that it _does_ work, for the rent controlled people. It also acknowledges that the harms of rent control are smaller, and spread across a large number of people (which is why rent control policies are popular).

<comment><USER21> It does work for those renting. Whether those are who it needs to work for gets greatly distorted as time goes by. The cost is also not widely distributed, but can fall heavily on the property owner.

<comment><USER22> One anecdotal example of this - my sister, lives in SF, near market in a rent controlled apartment paying ~$2200 for a single bedroom. She is a director at a tech company making high 300k - 400k a year depending on bonus etc - <USER2> obviously doesn't need rent control to have a roof over her head. Recently her job moved to South Bay (Palo Alto) but she refuses to move cause she can't let go of the "great deal" in the city. Way I see it - everyone is hurting - she, cause of he horrible commute, but can't let go of the "great deal", someone who probably really deserves that apartment/rent, the landlord, the environment.

I know just one anecdotal example and I am sure there are many other examples on the other side where rent control helps. But to me, it looks like rent control really distorts the market way too much to be an effective solution to the housing crisis.

<comment><USER23> She leaves, and some _also wealthy person_ gets to pay way more for it. The _also wealthy landlord_ gets to get way too much for it. I'm happier to watch the owners of capital hurt for it.

Decommodify housing. Full stop, no rents. Housing by need.

<comment><USER24> Who gets to determine the need?

I've lived, though as a child, in a place where housing was distributed "by need" \-- the USSR, though even then in the 80s things were liberalizing some. It was, in retrospect, a horrible combination of corruption, underinvestment in housing, and what would in the modern West be considered terrible living conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I used to be against rent control, but when I found that in CA there is a constitutional amendment that prohibits the government from increasing the taxable valuation of property by more than 2% per year I became strongly pro it.

If you want to increase rent costs by more than 2% you're acknowledging that your property value has increased by more than 2% and you should pay taxes on that. But the tax valuation can't increase by more than 2% so you shouldn't be able to increase your rent by more either.

So I'd favour something strong than rent control (that only applies to continuous residents), I'd say that no rent, lease, or similar arrangement can increase at a rate of more than 2% (or whatever the limit on increases property taxes is) year on year, irrespective of occupancy, or changes in tenants.

</comment><comment><USER26> * SF: has rent control, prices go up.

* Cambridge: removes rent control, prices go up.

How do you show the causal relationship? Seems like there's constrained housing supply everywhere.

<comment><USER16> Why look at the price rather than the population/housing capacity growth? If you have housing for 500000 residents and 600000 looking for housing or living in the city then prices will go up simply because demand outstrips supply as you said. The demand probably grows every single year.

Rent goes up because people can afford it, so this is actually not a problem that needs to be solved. What needs to be solved is the fact that 100000 people cannot find a place in the city at all. No matter how low or high the price of rent is, you will always have a shortage of 100000 units if you're not increasing the supply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I lost respect for freakonomics and their analysis a while ago. What I used to find pointed and creative I now see as willfully ignoring elemebts of reality to come to some conclusion that is notable mostly for it's faux-contrarian 'creativity.' they, along with Malcolm Gladwell, some take a complex issue...use complexity to dismiss existing reductivist solutions...and then substitute their own equally reductivist conclusion.

Add in that suddenly after Koch industries became a sponsor of their radio show/podcast they did a total softball interview of one of the Koch brothers with no disclaimer that they were a sponsor

<comment><USER28> I enjoyed the Charles Koch interview, sure it wasn't hard-hitting journalism - it was about him and personal philosophy. I hadn't heard about the sponsorship but it turns out that's because it's not true: [https://twitter.com/freakonomics/status/938505933508038658?l...](https://twitter.com/freakonomics/status/938505933508038658?lang=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you consider an economy as a dynamic, rather than static system, then there can be a place for a form of rent control that functions like a dashpot. People have trouble dealing with high-speed changes in their situation, especially many such changes, so wild swings of rent etc turn into stressful high-speed chop.

When you think of a city's economy as a static system you can tell yourself that you can predict the result of fixing a single variable (e.g. rent in this case). Of course over time it has results you might not have anticipated, and results that are hard to fix due to hysteresis (e.g. rents go up slowly, so buildings are not maintained, and suddenly you get to the point of a lot of derelict buildings and no tax base proportional to your maintenance needs).

</comment><comment><USER30> "And the most recent paper has shown that crime has gone down — particularly, street crime has gone down right after the elimination of rent control in Cambridge."

Is that because the removal of rent control caused a net loss of the poor in Cambridge? Certainly not all of those who'd have a hard time affording Cambridge were committing crimes.

</comment><comment><USER31> As a resident of NYC I'm all for getting rid of rent control (stabilization) _but_ I have to say that it leaves a sour taste in my mouth to just hand over a windfall to landlords that bought buildings while rent control was in place and accordingly paid a lower price.

Maybe some kind of rent control buyout program would make more sense.

<comment><USER32> What happened to all the landlords who owned a building when rent controlled was first introduced? Most got stuck with a huge future loss.

Seems weird to subsidize one side but not the other.

<comment><USER31> They are long dead. How does it make any sense to give a windfall to a group of owners far removed in time and ownership to "balance" that?

<comment><USER32> That's not my argument ;) My argument is that is why you don't give landlords a one time cash payment when you end rent control. You are making someones property worth MORE, paying them is giving them a double win.

<comment><USER31> Ah I see. I meant that landlords would have to buyout of rent control with a one time payment not get paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> TL;DR version: Rent control keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction.

Correct?

<comment><USER34> In addition, it encourages inefficient use of existing housing.

<comment><USER33> Like me not finding incentive for renting out my existing apartment when I'm out of town?

<comment><USER34> Not really a problem. A more significant thing is not finding incentive to move to a 2-room apartment after kids have grown up, because regulated price of your 6-room apartment is same as the 2-room would be.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bones Found 76 Years Ago Could Actually Be Amelia Earhart's - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/amelia-earhart-skeleton_us_581883dde4b064e1b4b49b74 <comment><USER2> The backstory to the bones is pretty interesting. Take a look at [https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Bones...](https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Bones_Chronology.html) if you're curious. One of the surprises to me when I first read it is that the British administrator on Nikumaroro flat states that he thinks the remains could be those of Amelia Earhart.

Ultimately they decided that no, these bones were those of some other unfortunate person predating Earhart's disappearance. It's worth reconsidering their conclusion because we know some things now that they didn't know then.

Here's a link to a scan (or maybe it's a photograph) of one of the Tarawa telegrams: [https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Taraw...](https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Tarawa_Archives/1940Bones_File/02bones.pdf). Take note of the two serial numbers from the Sextant box, those turn out to be important.

Scans of some more telegrams from the Tarawa archive can be found here: [https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Taraw...](https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Tarawa_Archives/1940Bones_File/1940Bones_File.html).

The sextant box with two different serial numbers seems weird. That's addressed here: [https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bullet...](https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/52_NumbersGame/52_NumbersGame.html). The TLDR is that there's a very good chance that this was the box for a sextant that was surplussed by the U.S. Navy some time after 1919. Also it turns out that Fred Noonan (Earhart's navigator) liked to carry a naval sextant as a backup to his regular aeronautical instrument.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been seeing breathless "could be!" announcements from TIGHAR in the news every year for what feels like my entire adult life. So color me skeptical.</comment>


MIT Takes Multicore in a Different Direction - <AUTHOR> https://www.top500.org/news/mit-takes-multicore-in-a-different-direction/ <comment><USER2> More info from 12/2015 -- a little older than the paper mentioned in the article.

Poster here: [http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/poster.p...](http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/poster.pdf)

Paper here: [http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/2015.swa...](http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/2015.swarm_.micro_.pdf)

Slides: [http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/2015.swa...](http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/2015.swarm_.slides.micro_.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> FTA: "As far as we can tell, there is no actual hardware yet, so any claims of ease of programming and performance advantages are based on simulations and perhaps the enthusiasm of the researchers."

Take it for what it's worth.

<comment><USER4> I've been assuming that these kind of architecture thought experiment could be compiled into VMs that can then play compiled code against them, while counting simulated wall time - so that one could make relatively true claims with regard to architectures?

I'm not versed in the topic, but if that's true, then why wouldn't those numbers be worthy?

<comment><USER5> From their MICRO'15 paper (section 5): "We use an in-house microarchitectural, event-driven, sequential simulator based on Pin".

This is fairly standard for computer architecture research in academia: the results are based on a cycle-accurate model that simulates what the machine would do when running particular code. The field has a standard set of benchmarks (e.g. SPEC CPU2006 for serial code, and a bunch of different ones for parallel code) that are run on these simulators and are well-understood. The same is true for architecture teams in industry: they start with simulators and (a lot of) benchmarks before any silicon ever exists.

The reason for all of that is that actually fabbing a chip is prohibitively expensive and insanely work-intensive. A real chip has probably millions of lines of Verilog RTL, and a lot of custom layout to get anything reasonably performant (then > $1M for a mask set, multiple weeks or months to get the chips back from the fab, etc). In contrast, a good simulation model, worthy of publishable results, of an SoC with out-of-order cores, a cache hierarchy, and DRAM, is somewhere between 10K and 100K LoC of C++; the model for a new proposed feature is maybe a few KLoC of code on top of that. Once the simulator exists, a grad student can try out new features fairly easily. It's also much more analyzable and instrumentable: a chip is mostly a black box, modulo whatever debugging features you build in, while a simulator can easily dump a "pipe trace" of the pipeline state every cycle. The field has invented lots of different tools and ways of visualizing data to get a sense of what goes on inside the machine and what bottlenecks exist.

So basically, it's a software model, and the software model is much more informative, and easier to tweak and iterate on, than silicon while being "good enough" for trustworthy results.

<comment><USER6> I don't completely agree that fabbing a chip is "prohibitively expensive and insanely work-intensive." While it's not cheap, lots of university projects fab chips using multi project wafer services. For example, the Rocket core from Berkeley has been taped out 11 times: [https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-1...](https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-17.html) and can boot Linux.

But, I agree with your point that a simulator is a much easier step that gets most of the data.

<comment><USER7> Even companies worth billions that have their own fab simulate the chip first before fabbing it to test it and benchmark it.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. For a primary source, see this talk from 32C3 where an AMD CPU designer explained their process in detail: [https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_wor...](https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_work)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here'a a more in-depth article: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/sanchez/papers/2016.swarm.toppic...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/sanchez/papers/2016.swarm.toppicks.pdf)

and the actual paper introducing Swarm: [http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/2015.swa...](http://livinglab.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/2015.swarm_.micro_.pdf)

<comment><USER10> And the MIT news source: [https://news.mit.edu/2016/parallel-programming- easy-0620](https://news.mit.edu/2016/parallel-programming-easy-0620)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So... it's hardware transactional memory with explicit priorities on the transactions so the hardware can retry and/or complete the highest priority task first if there's a collision?

<comment><USER12> [http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-02-26](http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-02-26)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "... parallel execution of rather small tasks"

Feels like another hardware direction that will require a lot compiler work to truly take advantage of. Anyone else getting Itanic vibes?

<comment><USER14> A lot of compiler people thought Itanic was dumb because it put things into hardware that the compiler could handle efficiently without hardware help. SWARM doesn't appear to make that mistake at all. It's unclear to me if Swarm can be take advantage of without explicit compiler directives, but that's a different issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if this could be handled more easily by making memory smarter. The timestamps they talk about are really just lamport clocks I think. If ram used that on writes for atomic updates, then you could throw a fault (similar to a numerical overflow). Then compilers/code could just give devs a way to directly handle this. An OS could be designed to use this to reschedule threads, etc.

Seems like this would be a more incremental option than requiring a full new architecture to be designed.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can this circuitry be implemented in FGPA?</comment>


Does anyone have "sweat equity" templates or examples? thnks - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Unlikely because sweat equity is so problematic (from unclear at best to illegal at worst) for a legitimate business of the sort that uses contracts.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! What scheme you consider better at this stage?

<comment><USER2> It depends on what sort of business you are trying to form. A group of people can form anything from a traditional partnership (hire an attorney) to a Delaware C-corp (there are substantial risks in not hiring an attorney) to anything in between and lots of other things that are not based on US practice.

Which is appropriate really depends on what type of business is really under consideration. If the plan is to build a company attractive to Sand Hill Road VC's [0], then a C-corp that owns all the intellectual property and has vesting schedules and pays everyone a legal salary is appropriate and that's the basis for much of the 'standard startup advice' that circulates around Hacker News.

But people call lots of other things 'startups' and many of those are small businesses and other forms of business organization are often appropriate.

Besides legal complexities, the problem with a contract for sweat equity is that it is premised on adversarial interests rather than mutually aligned interests and incentivizes meeting the letter of the contract rather than building the business together.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road)</comment></comment></comment>


StubHub granted U.S. patents for seat mapping - <AUTHOR> http://www.ticketnews.com/news/StubHub-granted-US-patents-for-seat-mapping101126374

<comment><USER3> I don't know why it takes so long to grant a patent when all they do is slide it under the rubber stamp machine.

<comment><USER4> Some articles I've read suggest that it's intentional on the part of the applicant. The idea is to extend the useful life of the patent by delaying the application's completion as much as possible.

<comment><USER5> Definitely worked well for some people:

"By April 1988, when Gould's use patent was approved, optically pumped amplifier patents covered 80% of the lasers made in the United States. The market for lasers had ballooned to more than $500 million per year. Suddenly, Gould was a multimillionaire."

[http://electronicdesign.com/article/components/gordon- gould-...](http://electronicdesign.com/article/components/gordon-gould-the- long-battle-for-the-laser-patent1/2.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. Where I live, since at least 2005, I can choose the seats in a movie theatre when buying a ticket (even online now). Seems like a lot of prior art.

<comment><USER7> The patent in question (which I believe is 8,024,234) only covers a method for people _selling tickets_ to compare prices for tickets across a venue in the form of a venue map. It does not describe an interface for purchasing them.

(Don't construe this as a defence of it though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is this substantially new? This type of article makes the US patent system laughable.

<comment><USER9> The patent thing may look laughable from the outside but inside the US it's pretty much required by how everything in business has been set up - <USER2> squeeze everything out of anyone using so-called 'legal' methods.

The legal system in the US is basically a self-feeding machine that produces crap you have to pay for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems any unique process can be patented.</comment>


Must-Have Apps for Successful High School Students - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/08/27/apps-for-high-school-students/

<comment><USER2> Absolutely none of these are essential, some barely even useful, and good luck taking your phone with a graphing calculator app into an exam.

</comment><comment><USER3> WolframAlpha should be on that list, possibly as a replacement for some of the items now there.

</comment><comment><USER4> A graphing calculator may be expensive, but not as expensive as an iPhone...</comment>


Ask HN: Change C-corp name, or file for a DBA? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
We incorporated our startup using a fairly generic (/boring) name, mostly due to my lack of creativity. After a year in operation, we found a catchy alternative. From what I understand, we can either change the name, or file for a DBA. Any advice as to which course to pick?
Filing for a DBA seems to be easier/cheaper, and we also signed a few NDAs under our previous name. But we also don't want to be stuck with the bad name forever..
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You can do either, but in general I hate changing the corporation name after you already have contracts in place etc. It isn't a huge issue, but to do it properly you need to update all agreements with a notice of the change and make sure all parties are updated. Then you also have bank accounts to deal with, credit accounts if any exist etc.

A lot of times a DBA is easier and even more appropriate, especially if what you are doing is brand specific. And at the bank you can just add the DBA as an additional name on the corporate bank account and deposit checks that are written to the DBA etc. Plus with the DBA you are not required to change any current agreements etc.

There are reasons to do both honestly, the earlier you are the more I personally would lean towards changing the corporate name, the further along you are I'd look more towards a DBA unless you have really good reasons to change the original corporate name.

Just as a point, most brands are not corporate names, e.g. look at Proctor and Gamble etc, they have 100's of brands under their corporate umbrella and most are not their own corporation or even a DBA, just a protected brand name. Even Google is no longer Google per se, they are Alphabet with Google as a core brand.

</comment><comment><USER3> Talk to a lawyer. S/he will do a name search for the new name (which is important) and advise you on how to use it.</comment>


IE9 Overtakes Chrome and Firefox on Windows 7 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2129802/microsofts-internet-explorer-finally-overtakes-chrome-firefox-windows

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is a more informative and graphical view of what has happened: [http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/11/30/ie9-le...](http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2011/11/30/ie9-leading- modern-browser-on-windows-7-worldwide.aspx)</comment>


Time management tool in alpha. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://priortz.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I am a founder at a startup with more on my to-do list than I can possibly get through. I applied lessons from Randy Pausch and Stephen Covey to create this prioritization tool.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER2> 5 second look at your home view before I go to bed (without signing up, sorry)

1- make a better call to action, you currently just have a text link. A pretty shiny button will go pretty far to increase your sign up conversion rate.

2- throw an "about us" or something to allow users to learn anything about your site and/or you.

Good luck.</comment>


Microsoft lays off journalists to replace them with AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/30/21275524/microsoft-news-msn-layoffs-artificial-intelligence-ai-replacements <comment><USER2> I just see a bunch of portal editors seeing fired. A guy picking through blurbs to post on a channel is not a journalist. Basically MS starts doing what everybody else has been doing all along: curation by algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe Microsoft hires Tay[1] as one of their new AI journalists.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_\(bot\))

</comment><comment><USER4> I bet that This will come under the "what could possibly go wrong." In a few years time.</comment>