Flux Comparison by Example - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/voronianski/flux-comparison

<comment><USER2> Anyone tried doing isomorphic (server/client) flux?

Most implementations rely on the flux stores being singletons which can't work for multiple requests on the server.

The only one that's isomorphic is yahoo's but that one feels terribly verbose.

<comment><USER3> The singletons are only problematic if you need to interact with them asynchronously. `React.renderToString` is synchronous, so there's no reason stores _have_ to be async.

Shameless plug: Fynx[0] is mostly synchronous, for example.

[0]: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/fynx](https://www.npmjs.com/package/fynx)

<comment><USER2> but how would you deal with async data fetches then?

I want to have the same routing and data fetching logic both on the client and on the server, and for that I would need to have stores that are independent for different incoming HTTP requests.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how you're supposed to do it, but that hasn't been a problem for me. I set up two actions: load and init. load starts a request and init sets the data in the store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's great to see more example Flux projects using different implementations, but what we _really_ need is just one larger and more sophisticated app example.

I've been adapting a React-based app to the Flux architecture for the last week or two. I constantly find myself scratching my head, especially regarding asynchronous operations that need to be reflected in the View.

It would be nice for the mock API in these examples to "simulate" a poor network connection in order to see how asynchronous error handling is best handled in each implementation, for instance.

<comment><USER6> That's why we created [https://github.com/jhollingworth/marty-chat- example](https://github.com/jhollingworth/marty-chat-example). It's got proper examples of using HTTP & WebSockets

<comment><USER5> Ha, I actually submitted an issue to this yesterday. It's a good example but misses some really important (i.e. usually-confusing) stuff: error/failure handling and rollbacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a formal spec for a "flux application"? Or what's the common denominator here?

<comment><USER8> Closest is probably [http://facebook.github.io/flux/docs/overview.html](http://facebook.github.io/flux/docs/overview.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> @prottmann alluded to it, but it might be useful to add Marty as well ([http://martyjs.org](http://martyjs.org)) (no affiliation).

It's just behind Reflux on the superficial metrics (stars, contributors, npm downloads) so is likely to be on most short-lists.

I've had a good experience with Marty so far but remain curious about the others. Reflux worries me a bit because of its minor divergences from the Flux design decisions.

<comment><USER6> I've opened a PR for it but it needs to be merged in [https://github.com/voronianski/flux- comparison/pull/5](https://github.com/voronianski/flux-comparison/pull/5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty cool. There have been a ton of flux frameworks floating around lately, glad that there's an app that deals with async data to be able to compare each on their merits.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thank you! Yesterday i thought about something similar -> a comparison of different flux implementations with an example (and not with a todo-app).

I tried some sample apps in the last weeks with reflux, fluxxor and now marty to see the practical differences.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great job! It's nice to be able to compare same application elements written in different frameworks - very illustrative.

Can't wait for the post with conclusion and thoughts on this.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised to discover how useful I found this -- being able to compare roughly 'apples to apples' in an app was very helpful. Thank you for your efforts!

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a conclusion, comparison or a point? I'm interested in the outcome but not trawling through the links and stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> there will be summing up article soon, but that's not the main point

<comment><USER15> I would also like your know thoughts on how they compare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, which one do you prefer and why ?

</comment><comment><USER17> Where do people think up these names: Reflux? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastroesophageal_reflux_disease](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastroesophageal_reflux_disease)

Why don't we have a library called Melanoma or HIV yet? Actually I am sure we do have libraries with these names somewhere on github.

<comment><USER18> Well, there's Mono...

<comment><USER19> A language runtime for _Unix_ systems...</comment></comment></comment>


Chocolate consumption lowers miscarriage risk by 19% - <AUTHOR> https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-0528.2006.01193.x <comment><AUTHOR> I never knew where so many studies on miscarriage and their external factors. And of cause there is always the question of correlation versus causation.</comment>


Is OpenID the future? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.increosolutions.com/2009/03/is-openid-the-future/

<comment><USER2> I can't find any good experience with OpenID. I think it suffers from the syndrome of 'paradox of choices'

It makes me think, if a programmer (someone that has actual technical skill) finds it confusing, what's the chance of common folks? I don't believe OpenID is the future. Instead, OTH, Facebook Connect might be (as their user adoption is growing, and people use Facebook account almost everyday).

I think it's a separate discussions on whether it's good or not in terms of industry-landscape since they're proprietary.</comment>


Ask HN: How to start your own startup when you are on H1b? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I'm on H1b and it expires on october. I have bunch of ideas that I implemented as prototypes to present  friends, and they used and loved some of those.
I want to try my ideas, but looks like I'll have to sacrifice my work visa in US. I'll find a country where my budget is enough for living a year (e.g Tblisi)
Has anybody else with H1b convinced themself to sacrifice work visa / greencard for doing their own things in another country ? <comment><USER2> i was working for a university, so things weren't quite as easy for me, and i ended up leaving the country again, because i didn't feel like working for that place for 6 years to get a green card sponsorship. i did, however, do a lot of research on that regard.

IANAL, so anything i tell you, you should discuss with an immigration lawyer.

first of all you can get a part time H1B to begin with, and work for that company. important note is that i think you can't own more than 20% of the company, since your part time h1b needs to be legally allowed to terminate the work relationship with you(you're an employee). also there is a little loophole here that good lawyers may know.

second, you can found as many companies as you want, you're just not allowed to work for them. theoretically you can work for the second company while your own thing licenses software that the second one creates, ip can also be held by a third party.

thirdly, keep in mind that once you have a work h1b which is not exempt(so unlike mine), you can always switch employers easily. even if you stop working for the employee you get a commonly accepted 1 month grace period(not defined by law, but by whoever processes your h1b transfer application). also even if you lose your h1b you are still exempt from the cap for the rest of your h1b period.

say you lose your h1b on year 3. a company can still get you for another 3 years even after you left the country without having to wait for the cap.

lastly, and this is probably the most important. once you gain traction with your startup you may qualify for an alien with extraordinary abilities visa, o1 or eb1. there's a list somewhere, but basically you have to fit 3 categories of that list.

anyone with more information on this topic feel free to extend/correct anything i have said.

so the things i'd do immediately is found a company or two, and apply for a company tax id. if when you say expire it's year 3 and not year 6, i would immediately apply for a part time h1b. again, double check everything with a lawyer.

good luck.</comment>


OGDL - an incredibly lightweight markup language - <AUTHOR> http://ogdl.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> Is there a Ruby implementation?</comment>


Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/bill-moyers-why-us-internet-access-slow-costly-and-unfair?paging=off

<comment><USER2> Essential reading, this. I don't understand why the tech lobby, which has the most to gain from ubiquitous high-quality broadband, has been so complacent about the poor state of our communications infrastructure...unless it's helplessness in the face of the poor state of our general infrastructure. I was appalled to see that the first consequence of that large snowstorm on the east coast was 500k people losing power.</comment>


Actually, No, This Wasn't Done With A Slide Rule - <AUTHOR> http://borasky-research.net/2011/07/02/actually-no-this-wasnt-done-with-a-slide-rule/#.ThADhHa6e_0.hackernews <comment><USER2> Even if mainframe computers hadn't been available, it would have been done like the Manhattan Project was, by many human computers at electro-mechanical calculators. Slide rules are to imprecise for actual orbital calculations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the Manhattan Project number crunching was mostly done by humans on mechanical calculators. There were some electromechanical machines available to them.

After the war, though, some of the calculations for the "super" - the Hydrogen Bomb - were done on electronic machines. In particular, there was a concern that the Super might ignite the atmosphere and the calculations to check that were a bit much for rooms full of people coordinated by pneumatic tubes.

<comment><USER3> I just looked through the paper by Konopinski, Marvin, and Teller which works through those calculations. <http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf> . I don't see any mention of any use of artificial calculation devices.</comment></comment></comment>


How Cheap Labor Drives China's A.I. Ambitions - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/business/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html <comment><USER2> _"I used to think the machines are geniuses," Ms. Hou, 24, said. "Now I know we're the reason for their genius."_

I recall John Searle's Google Tech Talk, when he said outright that AI was nothing more than the automation and repackaging of the output of human intelligence. Most of the room was clearly against him, just a bit short of booing him. Nowadays, the "smart talk" around AI is exactly what he said.

For those who may not be aware, John Searle is notorious for his "Chinese Room" argument against hard AI.

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

<comment><USER3> That argument is fundamentally flawed.

It correctly points out that the person in the room doesn't know Chinese but it misses the bigger point.

Of course, the person in the room doesn't know Chinese just as the individual neuron in the brain doesn't know Chinese.

The room or the house (i.e. the feedback loop) is the conscious part.

The correct answer is "we don't know". But we do know that we are ourselves the result of emerging complexity built by much simpler structures and that they are built on even simpler structures until in the end some primordial soup.

The mistake is isolating any individual element in the feedback loop and claiming that because that doesn't have some "magic" properties the system as a whole can't.

<comment><USER4> The person in the room will also start to recognize patterns in the input messages and the resulting output messages. It isn't the canonical understanding of Chinese but it is "an" understanding

If Searle was correct we could do an MRI on a blind person and detect when their brain switched into "symbol processing mode" if a conversation with them covered any visual concepts.

<comment><USER5> The Chinese Room argument fails to make its case, but not for that reason - Searle claims that no such instruction book could be written, and so the experiment could not be performed, meaning that the subject would have no possibility of learning from the outputs generated by performing it. If the experiment could be started, whatever the subject would learn from performing the role would be moot, as merely by getting started, without the subject initially knowing anything of the language in which the questions were posed, it would have refuted Searle.

The reason the argument fails to make its case is that Searle does not have an effective response to the 'systems reply': in the paper, his response is a mixture of appeals to intuition, together with the erroneous claim that if the subject memorized the instructions, then the systems reply would not apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't Google captcha leverage free labor to train ai? Every time I get one of their picture puzzles (click on all the pictures with cars, stores, mountains,etc...)I get about 2 wrong every time on purpose. Even government services like business searches in the state of Delaware, I constantly conclude, I'm being forced to train Google's self driving cars, so I figure I'll do the only thing in my power as a protest (unfortunately I can't boycott the government systems).

I purposely leave one or two unclicked and click a false. I have often wondered how my behavior is classified and if at scale it would have any impact. My reasoning may be misguided and I'm sure impact nil, but it serves as a reminder to think about these systems, the things I do and why I do them. I also do similar things with chatbots, and sometimes I'll add "thanks yous" and really try to interact genuinely, as though I don't know I'm talking to a bot. I like to think the chatbot devs are somewhere highfiving putting screenshots of my chat in their slide decks.

<comment><USER7> > I get about 2 wrong every time on purpose.

I do the same, but actually get google to accept bad data as good. The trick is to get the system to trust you (e.g. by supplying one honest answer), then selecting answers that the system is likely to be unsure about. If done correctly, you can get them to accept a lot of bad input this way.

Like you, I am under no illusion that this will have some sort of effect on the correctness of the resulting ML models, but I like to think that I am at least delaying or otherwise decreasing the training rate.

Have google adopted stackoverflow's model of making the result of our unpayed work available to us, I would have answered these challenges honestly.

<comment><USER6> >but actually get google to accept bad data as good.

I should have been clearer, I purposely get them wrong and Google accepts the bad data for me too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately, the reported AI boom, is of the same kind as Japan's "5th generation" computing was.

The when nouveau riches bankrolling the AI party see that no neural algo amount to "money out of thin air" they quickly loose interest, even without finding out what neural algos actually are.

The atmosphere in the industry feels very much like pets.com 2.0.

Here in Shenzhen, I often ask those intrepid samodelkins "how are you supposed to make money with it?" and never hear back a concise answer.

China's real economic strength does not lay with that type of enterprises.

<comment><USER9> They get billions of funds for a selve checkout register.

PS. The waiting lines with a human are bigger than the selve checkout here in Belgium. Some say it would be better to make room for humans again.

<comment><USER10> Generally the self checkout has a minimum of one staff per check out to show customers how the thing works.

<comment><USER9> Per 6 if they are in a cube though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Two dozen young people go through photos and videos, labeling just about everything they see. That's a car. That's a traffic light. That's bread, that's milk, that's chocolate. That's what it looks like when a person walks."

But in the U.S., we do it for free via Captcha. ;-)

<comment> oh-kumudo For Captcha, you are pointing out the one or several pictures that doesn't belong to certain category, so that seems to me the service needs to know the answer beforehand, doesn't it? It could be used for QA purpose though.

<comment><USER12> Don't need ground truth for crowd-sourced annotation just need agreement between n-different users.

1 randomly present captcha to few known-safe/low risk users 2\. Compare answers with answers from higher risk user's Captcha responses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > But the ability to tag that data may be China's true A.I. strength, the only > one that the United States may not be able to match.

Why would the United States need to match it? Presumably some of these companies are doing outsourced work for foreign firms.

<comment><USER9> Africans are actually labelling data for multinationals right now.

Seems like FOMO article

<comment><USER14> Part of the benefit is that Chinese taggers would have Chinese cultural knowledge, which is probably required for problems like the bakery one mentioned in the article (Africans probably don't eat steamed pork buns and wouldn't be able to correctly tag them).

However that would also mean the Chinese "AI" would have reduced effectiveness outside of China where different cultural knowledge is needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see how this is a competitive advantage when any company or institution can outsource these kinds of annotation jobs to low-wage countries.

<comment><USER16> There's a lot of work involved in how the data is annotated and how the labelers are managed. You have to minimize the error of the labels, because they aren't perfect and the tasks can be more difficult than you might realize.

Secondly, using the data is also difficult.

You have to decide what data you need, how you are going to get clean data, and how you are going to use the data. That's the competitive advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm really surprised that nobody has mentioned ImageNet and its use of Mechanical Turk (Amazon crowdsourcing platform) to label 14 million images [0].

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

</comment><comment><USER18> It's not just china. Numerous bay area AI companies employ similar methods.

<comment><USER19> "Tech companies pay poor Kenyans to produce training data for AI" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369384)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something to think about:

> "It was the same work, same movement, day after day," said Yi Zhenzhen, a > 28-year-old Ruijin employee who once worked at an electronic component > company. "Now I have to use my brain a little bit."

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm the founder of an image labelling company, happy to answer any questions you might have.

</comment><comment><USER21> Observation: It's highly inefficient to place everyone in the same physical space when you can just use their cellphones. By the article's reckoning, that's at least $21,000 loss per year on a business doing $2,000 projects.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cheap Labor is driving everything in China, not just XXX-evil-sounding-taking- over-the-world-ambition.. Is it just me or the nytimes is running out of shitty PR about China to write about ..

</comment><comment><USER23> Dont worry Americans us Euros will always prefer flying into California to Shenzhen. We will stick with you until the end of... wait this Xiaomi smart home is 50% cheaper?

</comment><comment><USER24> This is machine learning not AI.

<comment><USER25> Pretty much every popularized AI advancement of the past decade has been machine learning.

EDIT: To be clear, I think you're right that the term AI is being used carelessly here, but that ship has sailed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> tl;dr

\- supervised learning requires labelled data

\- some companies specialise in labelling data for other companies

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm very skeptical if employed humans labeling will generate enough training data. I don't see how this method is superior to what Google is doing with captcha.

Also this is already being done by many American corporations hiring people in countries like Bangladesh.

<comment><USER28> Amazon has a mechanical turking service for labelling data already - no need to actually put people on your payroll for doing this.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you search HN? - <AUTHOR>

Since the old the hackernews search site is gone and has been replaced with http://hn.algolia.com/, I find it to be lesser than its predecessor. Searching HN is one of my most valuable resources. When researching a topic, to find quality reading material, to have insight on a topic from someone qualified etc.. <comment><USER2> I put the following in google "site:news.ycombinator.com KEYWORD"

try this >>>> site:news.ycombinator.com "Ask HN"</comment>


Faux function type signatures in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.regularexpressionless.com/?p=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys-- this is my first blog post, any constructive criticism would be much appreciated! If submitting your own blog posts is frowned upon in this community, please let me know I will delete this straight away.</comment>


Ethiopian Kids Hacked Their Donated Tablets In Just Five Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-their-donated-tablets-in-just-five-months

<comment><USER2> Considering the OLPC (as pictured) is a dedicated i386 hardware without touchscreen, and that OLPCs runs on a customized RedHat, while the article refers to hacking Android (?) and a Motorola Xoom tablet, I wonder what kind of huge mix up this is and what it is supposed to mean.

EDIT: thanks for the helpful explanation in the comment. I read the article _twice_ and still couldn't figure that out. My first idea was the journalist mixed this up. My mistake

<comment><USER3> You could always just read the (admittedly not that great) piece which precisely explained all of that.

In a sentence:

Nicholas Negroponte, who started OLPC, dropped off a bunch of Xooms that run Android in a couple of villages where the kids figured out how to enable the tablet's camera without any instruction or even literacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4724660>

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is the in-text photo that of an Indian girl with a hindi vowel?

<comment><USER6> All poor people look the same.

<comment><USER7> Oh boy, if you had said something like: "maybe the reason they didn't care about using the right picture is because there's this intrinsically wrong belief that poor people look the same".

Since you did not, let me tell you that it's very insulting and I hope it gets deleted soon.

<comment><USER8> You took the parent post in completely the wrong way, it's my opinion that he was pointing out exactly what you wish he had said purposefully in the most offensive way possible to show how flawed the choice of photo was.

<comment><USER7> You're probably right, it just didn't occurred to me. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen this article five or so times now, but what's always missing is what they did that counts as "hacking" the tablet. Was it changing a (hidden) setting in the camera preferences file? Disabling some sort of monitoring software (and if so, how)? Reverse engineering a preexisting binary on the device?

</comment><comment><USER10> I am convinced that when computing comes in force to the third world, it will not be through donated/subsidized laptops, but through phones. I bet that in 100 years, the famous hacker that rose to great power from the slums will have cut his teeth on a mobile device that was purely the result of the free market. This is not a value judgement. Just a prediction.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand... they don't have electricity, yet they have wifi? Where are they getting the apps?

<comment><USER12> They carry apps in buckets on their heads for miles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> See, professor, the Martians are intelligent after all!

Oh wait, those were human beings, and they're being treated like lab rats because they're poor and not European. Seriously does nobody else see the stark white-man's-burden arrogance in all of this?.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch_

Wow, found a blemish on an unusually featureless, smooth object and poked at it. Amazing.

As for 'hacking android', it's kinda scary that OLPC is so bereft of talent that their security can't stand up to illiterate first-graders. I mean, if we're going to go with 'hacking android' and not 're-enabling the camera'.

<comment><USER15> Say what you will, it took me more than four minutes to find the power button on the Xoom.</comment></comment>


Open Source AWS VOD Workflow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trackit/aws-workflow-video-on-demand <comment><AUTHOR> we released a VOD template for AWS, feel free to share:

\- [https://github.com/trackit/aws-workflow-video-on- demand](https://github.com/trackit/aws-workflow-video-on-demand)

TrackIt VOD template pros 1/ API to perform CRUD operations on the content

2/ S3 tagging

3/ Cognito integration

4/ Metadata stored in DynamoDB

5/ Easy configuration

6/ Easy install - one command to deploy the full stack and the s3 triggers

7/ m3u8 support</comment>


The importance of launching early and staying alive - <AUTHOR> http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2008/02/the-importance-of-launching-early-and-staying-alive.html

<comment><USER2> It's important to note that eventhough you should launch early, your product should work well and have a real benefit. too often i see startups launchs with a half-baked idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Don't launch with a crappy product -- launch as soon as what you have is better than what is out there." If I remember correctly, that is advice given by Paul Buchheit.

<comment><USER3> it doesn't matter who gave the advice, if you can't realise it on your own. And you usually do, without needing someone to tell you.

<comment><AUTHOR> hang out with PB for 10 minutes and you'll hear 10 things that make you say "aha". you've got to be humble enough to realize that you don't know everything, and you won't necessarily stumble upon every realization on your own.

<comment><USER3> you missed my point

e.g. Hearing someone talking about fear is entirelly different from living it on your own.

The same goes for many stages in a startup. If you don't experience it, any advice in the world will not matter.

I wouldn't be here if I thought I knew everything, but If you/I expect someone else to tell you how to understand if your product is ready then you lost already.

For example if you want me to be more precise.

In the certain advice everything is obselete and relative.

What is the competition? Have they already launched? How easy will be for them to just replicate you and crush you? When do you know you are better from the competition? What would make sure you will avoid crushing you?

All these questions relative to that advice are so crucial that makes the advice broad enough unless you are already experiencing that pressure and already have the realization of the market you are trying to enter etc.

Thats why advices are meaningless until you experience them.

You need to value the essence of the advice, not always upon who gives it.

You will get many good advices from many people if you don't undervalue them.

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm still a bit confused by your point, but advice has been very helpful for us. generally, the person giving advice tries to formulate their advice in such a way that it applies to more than just one situation. advice seems to be most useful when it applies directly to a situation you're currently dealing with. but maybe i'm missing your point entirely.

<comment><USER3> that was exactly my point, the advice was valuable because it was applicable relative to what you are experiencing.

the advice is not as important by who is said, as much if the person giving it is identifying what to tell you relative to your current experience. Otherwise any other advice will not matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> very true, but it does matter who gives the advice: some people give bad advice that sounds good on the surface, but isn't. you always need to follow your gut, and listen to all advice no matter who gives it, but we always listen especially carefully to people who have dealt with our situation and been successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any arguments for/against the following?

Quote: the "build it and they will come" mentality is a fallacy. You need to build something great and have distribution in order to succeed. And distribution is hard to get.

<comment><USER5> I've tried and it's true.

I built a great social networking website, but there were problems with just about everything (including a programmer that had a nervous breakdown and quit, one that had a heart attack and quit, one that got pregnant and quit, a change in the law that made our business model obsolete, etc. etc) We launched just for the hell of it, but didn't follow through on it. I think there are around 50 users now...

<comment><USER6> Upmodded for unintentional hilariousness. Are you sure a plague of locusts didn't also descend upon your programmers? Note to self: never accept a programming job from mixmax.

<comment><USER5> he he, I'm the devil :-)

but no, none of it had anything to do with me - it was all external and not related to the startup at all. Just seriously bad luck...

<comment><USER7> No offense, but personally I think this is the one sentence a person in charge should never permit him/herself to utter... :)

On the other hand, bad luck happens.

<comment><USER5> None taken.

But I do find that humor goes a long way in management. In the above example it was the only way of dealing with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is about the importance of getting a rediculous number of major publicity hits, not so much launching early.

Those graphs don't even measure if the product was good -- people often don't find out how good something is until _after_ they sign up for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> exactly right. good publicity and a bad product wouldn't help anything. and if you notice the "new users per day" graph, it settles higher after every publicity hit -- which is a good indication that your product is of value, since the more people that know about you, the more that tell other people about you, the more sign-up for your product every day.

and on a side note, it's also much harder to get good publicity for a bad product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good and timely advice. We have been launched for 6 weeks or so, and seeing our growth grow slower than we would have liked. It is good to know other start ups that are doing well, had a pretty slow intial growth for awhile. I guess that means it is time to put a bit more effort into PR and engineering some viral features.</comment>


Pandora redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.pandora.com

<comment><AUTHOR> They really just flattened things up, but I like their design team's general approach. They keep it simple, change very slowly, it makes me feel like I "know" the site when I open it up</comment>


Stop Using noreply - <AUTHOR> http://ryanhoover.me/post/32059440036/stop-using-noreply

<comment><USER2> "I replied and we shared a short conversation where I learned the meaning behind the name Quibb. Fun. :) And she does this for all new users. Bravo, Sandi! As Sandi has demonstrated, the Internet doesn't have to be faceless. We need to stop communicating with robots."

This idea doesn't scale very well. If you're a struggling little company that's trying to hold on to a handful of users (Quibb is currently "invite- only" [1]), it might be feasible. But a company that already has enough users to be successful can't afford to hire all the people it would take to personally interact with every user. Imagine how many people Facebook would need to hire to personally thank every new user for opening a Facebook account (in the hundreds of languages that Facebook users around the world speak).

[1] <http://quibb.com/about>

<comment><USER3> I don't agree. I've personally emailed every single one of our IgnitionDeck customers, about 20% of which reply. It takes maybe 2-3 minutes extra per reply. Initially, I used TextExpander, and later, Intercom.

These are paid customers though, so were I offering a free service I probably wouldn't have done so.

<comment><USER4> Care to share what software Intercom is? Don't seem to find it on typical Mac download sites or in the app store . . .

<comment><USER5> <http://intercom.io> It's great.

<comment><USER3> It really is. I think their pricing structure is a little off, but it's a service I gladly pay for and recommend. I met the guys at LessConf last year, and they're great people, so it's a win-win in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The post talks about sending personal emails. While that may be possible for smaller companies it doesn't really scale. At some point a company will have to use more automated email.

However, I think that you should really consider whether email is an acceptable means of supporting customers/users. If it is, why not have Reply- To: email@example.com?

It has happened on several occasions that I have questions regarding an incoming email, but it's sent from noreply (with no Reply-To) so I can't respond directly. Instead I have to look for an email address or a form on their website, requiring a long detour.

</comment><comment><USER7> On a similar topic from a recent experience...I recently got into a conversation with KLM about delayed luggage. You fill in a web form that emails them with your complaint. They reply to your email address. If you reply to their email, you get an automated email back saying that they didn't receive your response and that all information must be communicated via a web form.

So now you must go into your sent box, copy the email and then go to the link on the klm.com website. You find your reference number, put it in and then paste the text of your email into the text box...and hopefully get a reply. (It's been 3 days.)

It really amazes me that companies are so bad at communication.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love that Sandi does this. However, it doesn't scale. I signed up on the 18th when her blog post about it hit HN. I didn't get a personal email from her but I had the expectation to after reading the post. :/

I'm trying to figure out how to make this type of thing scale beyond your first 100 customers, and I've come up with a few thoughts.

1\. Don't create that expectation of a personal connection. This is the most common thing you see at large companies. I don't think this is a good way to do it.

2\. Hire someone as the face of the company -- the community manager probably, and send a mix of automated and personal mail from them. But make them the face of the company. This is something I'm responsible for now. And it still has limits.

3\. Randomly assign a contact person within the company for every signup. And automate the insertion of their signature in every email. This however has issues with turnover, and the voice of the emails.

So far, I think what works best is automated (but specific) emails from me, the CEO. And then introductions to the rest of the team for problem resolution.

I'd love to hear what others think works best.

<comment><USER9> Even if the reply-to just dumps responses into a customer support queue, that's better than 90% of mass mail is doing.

Separately, I think it's great if you can have all of your employees involved in the support and outreach process, but that's a cultural thing and thus a bit harder than changing a mail header.

<comment><USER10> My startup never uses no-reply and someone reads pretty much every reply.

But note that this is not zero cost. The time your support staff spends deleting out of office replies and spam is time they aren't helping real people.

<comment><USER11> It's trivial to filter out of office messages if you use a decent email program. The false positive rate should be as close to zero as you can get.

Reading every feedback email from every real user teaches you how to create better products. If you make it clear users can provide feedback, there's an opportunity from them.

I ask every single real person who leaves my service why they left, which translates to about 12 emails from me per week. Most of the time, the feedback isn't actionable, but 2-3 of every 50 emails translate to something I can use to make my product better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's definitely not easy to do at scale, if possible at all. I'm still in the early stages with the product, so at this point (and with this particular type of product) the personal, un-scalable approach makes sense. The style of email that I sent to Ryan, and the one that I describe in the post that he links to, is only for people that are arriving through 'warm' connections (e.g. a colleague told them about the site), versus arriving through twitter, search, etc. For completely cold connections, I use a slightly less personal approach. I shared a post about that here last week, and there were some great comments - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527094>. That method still requires some effort from a real person, but doesn't include any actual 'research'.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is useful in some situations but a large amount of transactional email doesn't and shouldn't have replies made to it. As with almost all advice that you find in blog posts, it works in one situation but is presented as an answer to every situation. Instead of arguing in the comments about whether or not this would work for your company for every email, try and suggest places where this would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think noreply is about not wanting people to respond to your messages. It is rather a solution for all the garbage you get back when sending out email to thousands of people. You will get many many mailer deamon mails for people who typed their addresses wrong or whose mailbox is full (yes, there are still webhosts that have a 20 MB limit apparently). Filtering all this stuff takes lots of effort and seems like a bad thing to spent time on when you can just use noreply and include a "Have questions? Email us at email@example.com" line.

<comment><USER15> Bounces should go to the "envelope from address", which is different than the from address in the actual email. The way I've set this up before had the envelope from address be "firstname.lastname@example.com" so that we could identify bad addresses, but any replies from humans go to someone directly.

You can also use the Reply-To header to achieve the same result.

<comment><USER16> Yes, in theory. Unless you run into a not-so-compliant mail daemon…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I vaguely agree; when I see that wordy explanation about "this is sent from a blah blah replies won't be blah blah" I tend to read it uncharitably, even though I know why they do it. My first read of it, somewhat involuntarily, is along the lines of: wow, these people can't even deal with the use-case of someone replying to this email, and are so befuddled by the possibility that the best workaround they could think of was to tack on this wordy disclaimer in the email, begging people not to hit "reply".

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't agree with this. Having worked on the product side of several larger scale email infrastructures, it's impossible to scale this correctly. Yes, we all want to talk less with robots and appreciate getting a reply from a human, but if you're a web company looking to grow your product to be used by millions, you can't get this to work while keeping your co-workers happy (when I discussed something similar with our community support team they looked at me like they wanted to kill me).

There might be a way to scale it by filtering messages and sending certain replies on certain topics, but then again, your support team will ask you where the reply address will redirect to. Who will manage that inbox? Who needs to reply those emails? Do you want to increase the load on your support guys even more?

</comment><comment><USER19> This makes the rounds of the blogs every couple weeks, and yeah... If you use noreply@, you're going to negatively impact user engagement. But in reality, sometimes you just don't have time to talk to users. At least, not all of them.

I have time to provide good service to a limited number of my customers every day. Meaningless feel-good interactions reduce the number of meaningful interactions I can have. I check the no-reply inbox every couple days anyways, and in general the people who send email to that address instead of seeking out the support email on my homepage are the customers I'd rather lose. It's a good filter.

<comment><USER20> I once spent some time chatting with a guy who ran a handful of fire-and- forget IT side-businesses, including wifi/hotspot internet access.

His customer service philosophy was very simple: either you use and like the service, or he refunds the money. It wasn't altruism, it was self-interest. He didn't have time to do customer support, and was very blunt about it. Either customers corrected their own issues, or they were no longer customers. This was one of the ways he was able to have time for his several companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree. It doesn't require anything extra to use an email address that accepts replies. Even if they go into a dark hole and are never read, at least you aren't sending a message that you don't care what the receiver thinks.

When I receive a no reply, I assume that the company doesn't care about my opinion as it relates to their communication, and in that case, I share the sentiment. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The exception, I suppose, would be something like an Amazon email notifying me of related products.

</comment><comment><USER21> It seems to me that well thought out email marketing should take responses into account as part of the funnel. That being said, I haven't seen any good examples besides just forwarding responses to a customer service queue, as rmaccloy mentions.

The point of email marketing is that it scales, and you can do testing. One on one communication is almost the opposite. Companies shouldn't have to choose between one or the other.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this is a bad idea for the user in the long run, perhaps not only for the user. Think about how long does it take you now to recoginze and (not) read noreply@ e-mails? How long will this take when they are actually directed to you? There's enough distractions on the internet already and if more companies start doing this it will probably result in another arms race.

</comment><comment><USER23> My initial response was, "What about companies that send email to hundreds of thousands of recipients? Surely they can't always handle such a flood of direct replies." But if you don't have the resources to handle so many replies, then you probably shouldn't be sending email blasts to that many people in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, yes. If your email is sent such that you welcome replies, you don't use email@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think this message is geared toward startups. But it's not explicit. It's a good point for startups to try to increase the understanding of their customers. But obviously is not relevant for companies with much larger reach.</comment>


San Francisco Hacker News meetup happening this Thursday - <AUTHOR>

Hi Everyone,
I'm organizing a SFHN meetup this Thursday, November 29th. It will be at the Coderwall offices on 480 2nd Street, Suite 302 from 6pm-8pm.
Refreshments will be provided!
-
Please RSVP at http://sfhn.eventbrite.com/ and join our FB group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/gosfhn <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://sfhn.eventbrite.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/groups/gosfhn>

<comment><USER2> I hit waitlist when I RSVP. Can I still drop by?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I just opened up more tickets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll be there with 2 colleagues from Shanghai where we've been organizing a HN meetup every month for the past year and a half (<http://shanghaihn.org/>).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested to find out what your format is and what has been working for you guys. Please find me when you arrive so we can chat. Your site looks great, btw. Happy to have our Shanghai HNers represent!

<comment><USER4> I went to a number of LA HN meetups organized by andrewvc that went really well. You might want to ping him for tips...

Usually we had some socializing/networking time, followed by 1-2 lightning talks and one longer talk, followed by more socializing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking forward to seeing everybody there. How many spots were available?

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see these spreading to SF! I used to go to the ones in Seattle. You might want to consider creating an event on Meetup, it's tended to work better for us for recurring events like these should hopefully become.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I went ahead and made a meetup group for anyone inclined <http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Hacker-News-Meetup/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great. I am in. I just moved to SF and need some community friction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Can't wait to meet you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for organizing. Free is very appreciated. Sounds like format/agenda is still in the works, any possibility of posting a rough idea of what to expect before would be sweet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since this meetup is the first of many to come, I plan on using this as an opportunity to meet, greet, and strengthen the community.

I'll talk with people about formats and perhaps send a survey out afterwards. I'd like something that really helps the community without people ever feeling like something is being sold to them.

The meetup should be pure, constructive, and hopefully everyone can grow a little more because of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm in. Just moved to SF and ready to meet some awesome new folks!

</comment><comment><USER10> Psyched to meet some HNers in SF!

</comment><comment><USER11> Signed up, looking forward! Managed to get a 'pending' ticket that was dropped by a fellow HNer. Thanks, whoever you are.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sweet, just registered.

</comment><comment><USER13> Btw can you change the name of FB group from San Francisco to SF Bay Area..since most people don't live in the city but surrounding areas?

<comment><USER14> For those of us who do live in the city, it's good to know whether an event is actually in San Francisco, which means I can get to it by bike or public transit in the evening, or generically somewhere in the Bay Area, which would probably be fine for someone who lived generically elsewhere in the Bay Area and had a car, but not for me. So the distinction is semantically meaningful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> See you guys there!

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome...more meetups in Bay Area!

</comment><comment><USER16> Great! Being one block away from home/work, there is absolutely no excuse for me not to go.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, got one of the last spots after only 47 minutes. Maybe a larger venue is warranted?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if everyone that RSVPs will show up. If we reach capacity at this event, I'll plan to have the next one at a larger venue.

Either way, I bumped up the number of available tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What goes on at these meetups?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that no matter how small the scene may seem, we all need a good excuse to get out and meet more awesome people.

This event will give us all a good opportunity to talk about projects, expand our network, and hopefully learn something cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can't make this one, but certainly interested in attending the next.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll try to make these monthly or bimonthly depending on demand.

<comment><USER19> Nice. Thanks for organizing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Damn, I'm in class then. Next time.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looking forward to it!</comment>


Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630153.600-is-this-et-mystery-of-strange-radio-bursts-from-space.html?full=true#.VRslaeE0F4k

<comment><USER2> Whoa, that's kinda spooky actually. I'm getting goose pimples. I vote for some kind of slow galatic router ferreting packets around.</comment>


Richard Stallman Inducted Into the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-stallman-inducted-into-the-2013-internet-hall-of-fame <comment><USER2> > Stallman had this to say upon his induction: "Now that we have made the > Internet work, the next task is to stop it from being a platform for massive > surveillance, and make it work in a way that respects human rights, > including privacy."

The man never misses an opportunity to try and get people thinking about the issues that matter.

<comment><USER3> In _your_ opinion they matter.

I'm unconvinced. The majority of people are sharing more about themselves online. Not less.

Outside this niche, people seem pretty uninterested that governments monitor the internet. They pretty much assumed as much.

Stallman is just always swimming against the tide of what people actually want.

<comment><USER4> People should be allowed to share what they want. At the same time, people should be allowed to restrict others from sharing information about them.

These two are not at odds with each other. The whole idea of "look at these people with 15,000 Foursquare checkins complain that the NSA is watching them" is fallacious. People choose to share their location with Foursquare; they don't choose (and currently cannot choose) to share their location with the NSA.

<comment><USER5> Except they are at odds. People are making information publicly available and are then turning around complaining that people are looking at their publicly available information.

People get to choose to share or not to share, but when they scream it out in public they do not get to choose who hears it.

<comment><USER6> This is incorrect. I haven't seen any complaint about FBI agents perusing public web sites, or deputy US Marshals poking around public portions of Facebook to try to track down a fugitive.

The flap over the last few weeks has been about government surveillance of information that was _not_ intended to be public. Private email, private IMs, private Facebook messages, etc. Where Americans do have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it intriguing to consider that in history and philosophy textbooks in 100 years time, Stallman is likely to have a number of very positive (and possibly even large) contributions to humanity, while Obama is likely to be regarded very negatively for his wiretapping and with no notable positive contributions. Meanwhile today, Stallman is regarded as some kind of madman while Obama is an amazing celebrity.

<comment><USER8> People denouncing Stallman's views just because he's not charismatic and conventional has always bothered me. I hope people will start realizing that using free and open software/hardware/web services exclusively isn't something that only free software extremists should be doing.

<comment><USER9> I denounce Stallman's views because they are plain stupid and not based on reality and don't match with human psychology and sociology. Attempts to portray recent privacy debacles as the proof of Stallman being right are even more stupid, because it has nothing to do with software being open-source, free or not. If my service runs Apache, MySQL, the source is on github, but NSA has access to all the data, how does being open-source help?

People won't start using "free and open software/hardware/web services exclusively", because none of that matters for the end users. I do like and use open source for infrastructure, this is where it shines. But as Joe User I prefer highly polished (and paid) apps to "free" software which is powered by advertising. I am sick of this "advertising will pay for everything" world with ever increasing noise and subpar quality. How about paying some real money for some real work?

<comment><USER10> For a man of such strong opinions, you seem to have a poor grasp of Stallman's philosophy. He's against SaaS, and would refuse to use a hosted service. He doesn't object to charging a fee for software. The user must merely be free to use it after the purchase. Yes, people are ready to sacrifice some freedom in return for convenience. That in itself does not prove him wrong. Cellphones _are_ tracking devices. The "cloud" _does_ allow for wholesale surveillance. In light of recent revelations, his warnings seem to be more prescient than ever.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't take a genius to figure out things like cell phones being tracking devices and the cloud facilitating surveillance.

First we all knew it would happen, then we found out it was happening, and now we're saying thank god for Stallman or we'd have never known and lets be sure to listen to him from now on? Stallman's idea of freedom doesn't work unless everyone gets involved. We live in the real world here and we know that isn't happening. He needs to live and let live a little.

<comment><USER7> You've got that part very confused. Nobody is saying "thank god for Stallman or we'd have never known" \- what people are saying is "Stallman was right - these tracking devices and cloud services are harmful to freedom and we should find better solutions". There may not be better solutions though, but the message is still very clear over which is harmful and what a solution might look like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I the only one surprised that it took such a long time for them to do this?

How did Jimmy Wales got there before Stallman, using an ideology that was pretty much ushered by Stallman as Guerrilla Warfare?

I know that Stallman has his fair share of quirks, who doesn't? But I believe in today's world, he is more of a forgotten hero, whose "quriks" get highlighted more than his long list of achievements and just for inspiring people to join the bandwagon of open source coding.

<comment><USER13> Has anyone else even heard of the "internet hall of fame" before now?

<comment><USER14> It reminds me of those "best of the web" and "site of the day" badges people put on their sites in Web 0.95 patch level c.

<comment><USER15> Though horrible and garish, it's good to see the million dollar homepage still honouring his pledge.

[http://milliondollarhomepage.com/](http://milliondollarhomepage.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While wearing my FSF Libre Planet t-shirt, I offer my congratulations to Richard :-)

Congratulations offered, I would also like to point out that his concerns over freedom, control of your own software and data now seems even more relevant with the recent disclosures about the NSA.

</comment><comment><USER17> I had no idea that stallman came up with the term POSIX: [http://stallman.org/articles/posix.html](http://stallman.org/articles/posix.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Many years ago, when I did my first steps in Emacs, I wrote Richard a mail asking, why it has such unusual and sometimes awkward keyboard shortcuts. He replied: "For fast and efficient editing."

I like that guy.

</comment><comment><USER19> I was not even aware this was a thing.

<comment><USER20> It started in 2012, which we all know as the real beginning of the Internet.

<comment><USER21> Oh that makes sense, I was thinking "really, it took until 2013 to get RMS in there?" It seems like the internet hall of fame would almost be specifically created to contain Stallman.

<comment><USER22> Of COURSE if there is to be an Internet Hall of Fame, RMS has to be in it.

But they were between a rock and a hard place last year, given that the FSF was itself founded by RMS. They probably waited a year to avoid immediate whining of "RMS created an award to give to himself".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if his browsing habits have changed since 2007: [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979)

<comment><USER24> I doubt it. He still travels an awful lot, and while people often make fun of his "I browse via email" set-up, it's difficult to think of an alternative off-line cache setup that would handle long latency that well.

I honestly believe if that "read everything offline" system was proposed on some popular productivity blog as a new life hack, hipsters would be all over it.

<comment><USER25> And Knuth doesn't use e-mail at all. And Dijkstra didn't use a computer for a very long time. I think it's safe to assume that this is the class of people that develop habits that would seem strange to most people.

<comment><USER26> I heard from people at the University of Belfast say that CAR Hoar had never used the universities computer system during the time he discovered quicksort. When asked about this he supposedly answered: "I proved it works, so why should I implement it"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Full inductees also include Aaron Swartz and Jimmy Wales

[http://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2013/06/26/internet-h...](http://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2013/06/26/internet- hall-fame-announces-2013-inductees)

</comment><comment><USER28> Well deserved.

</comment><comment><USER29> Someone will not be happy with this one:

"Aaron Swartz (posthumous) Co-authored version of RSS"

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone have a serious reason not to call it "GNU/Linux"? Curious.

<comment><USER31> Both "GNU" and "/" are hard to pronounce.

<comment><USER32> Is it some sort of sarcasm or you're really implying /ɡnuː/ is hard to pronounce?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like RMS(even attended one of his talks, was fun) and he has been surprising prescient about many things.

But he still seems to be falling victim to the "Smarter people are more likely to believe in false conspiracy theories" rule.

In his post against Ubuntu's local searches being sent to Amazon, he claimed as-a-matter-of-fact that Windows sends local searches to an internet server and his friend proved so. This may be true in Windows 8.1 but is certainly not true beforehand. I figure that if someone else said something similar about FOSS in the same casual way, RMS himself would characterize(rightly so) it as FUD tactics.

Still, I do think that we need more people like him rather than everyone else who seem to be aligning themselves with some or the other corporate entity and thus lose their moral compass in the process.

<comment><USER12> Most of his detractors think that technology has outpaced him. He thinks that technology has outpaced us, rather spoilt us.

<comment><USER25> _technology has outpaced him_

It feels sort of weird to see such claims about a guy who was hacking on computer systems that were almost two decades ahead of everything else. (But that probably depends on what one sees as "technology". Shrinking transistor size is definitely technological progress, but I don't think that this alone has ever had a qualitative influence on the impact of computing systems - unlike their ubiquity, which, on the other hand, is not as much a technological advancement as it is a social one.)

<comment><USER34> He was a brilliant technologist. I'm not sure how much programming he does anymore. But the technology outpacing stuff ... Have you looked into the sorts of devices and technologies he currently uses?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as internet hall of fame, is in fact, GNU/internet hall of fame, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus internet hall of fame. Internet hall of fame is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called 'internet hall of fame', and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a internet hall of fame, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Internet hall of fame is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Internet hall of fame is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with internet hall of fame added, or GNU/internet hall of fame. All the so- called 'internet hall of fame' distributions are really distributions of GNU/internet hall of fame.

</comment><comment><USER36> Just now? Geez. This guy should've been inducted in the first year.

</comment><comment><USER37> He belongs to Wall of Shame.

<comment><USER38> Yup, apparently very few capitalists around here. It's easy to shout rah rah rah in response to RMS from the sidelines but if he had his way very few of the posters here would be making a living writing code, perhaps they don't though, that would explain it I guess.

I've not been a HN member for long but the support for Stallman here is one of the most surprising things I've seen about this place.

<comment><USER39> There are Congressmen that are really, really far left and far right. They're widely seen as kooks, but they serve a valuable purpose - they go against the groupthink of everyone else and get them to think about things differently. Sure, they're crazy. Often their ideas are completely at odds with reality. But the more rational parts of their beliefs also get communicated with their kookiness, and it helps everyone.

For example, Dennis Kucinich made a great Congressman. That being said, he would most definitely not make a good President.

Richard Stallman is the same way. Is it a terrible idea to take all of his ideas and mold the programming community in his image? Yes. It would be impractical and completely insane to expect everyone to work for free. But that doesn't mean that we should completely discount everything that he says. There are great ideas in there right alongside the craziness.

<comment><USER40> >It would be impractical and completely insane to expect everyone to work for free.

Do you have any examples of him saying that code should be free of cost. As far as I know he has no problem with people charging for programs, only that the source code should be made available to recipients, along with rights to modify and redistribute (the latter obviously poses problems for business- schemes based upon artificial scarcity).

I also seem to recall him arguing for micropayment schemes to be used to finance developers (and artists), this is something which could perhaps become a reality in the (hopefully not too distant) future, as shown by successful kickstarter type projects like for example openshot:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot- video...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-video-editor- for-windows-mac-and-linux)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New US spy satellite logo features world-devouring octopus - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/new-us-spy-satellite-features-world-devouring-octopus/ <comment><USER2> Link-baity title, but warranted, I'd say.

The story is that the government is launching a spy satellite with a logo on it featuring a "mascot" \-- a giant Kraken-like octopus taking over the planet. Whoever created it could only have been thinking of their bureau's unchecked ability to do what it wanted and not the public's perception of it because the creature, especially its eye, looks menacing, ominous, foreboding, malicious, malevolent, and borderline evil. It implies the agency is insular, unaccountable, and has an aggressive, secret agenda it cares about more than anything else, certainly more than your privacy or the consequences of its actions.

The kicker is a comment that juxtaposes the logo with a warning illustration saying "Know your communist enemy" with a nearly-identical logo, presumably implying an evil enemy from the Cold War, which we have become.

The government octopus looks like the Kraken on the top of the wikipedia page -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken) \-- except the government one is planet-sized and its eyes seem to have more evil intent, to me, at least.

<comment><USER3> It does look menacing and ominous, but it's only supposed to be used against _them_. Whether you agree with it or not, it's the premise widely shared by Americans and those in the intelligence agencies and in the military. It renders your following implication inaccurate: "It implies the agency is insular, unaccountable, and has an aggressive, secret agenda it cares about more than anything else, certainly more than your privacy or the consequences of its actions."

No, what it implies is that those who intend to do evil against America cannot hide anywhere in the world. It's consistent with Roosevelt's Big Stick, which is something Americans have always embraced: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_ideology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_ideology). The idea is that we're free at home, but militarily unchallengable on the world stage.

> The kicker is a comment that juxtaposes the logo with a warning illustration > saying "Know your communist enemy" with a nearly-identical logo, presumably > implying an evil enemy from the Cold War, which we have become.

Could we declare a moratorium on false equivalency for like just a week? Last time I checked, we still have elections and aren't sending political prisoners to siberia. Not to mention that we haven't killed tens of millions of our own people. There is that too.

<comment><USER4> The false equivalencies are probably more of a "there but for the grace of Columbia go we," type of thing. The disease that is Empire never has exactly the same symptoms.

Last time I checked, the elections did not significantly change policy, despite a change in the balance of power between parties. The US has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the world, mostly over Prohibition. And the millions we have killed are mostly in other countries that do not respeck our authoritah.

On top of that, the US has the clanking cojones to demand that banks everywhere in the world comply with its tax regime, and that every single packet of communication on the planet be subject to its spying.

At what point do we look down and notice that we're dressed entirely in black armor, while holding a red lightsaber in one hand, and twirling the well-waxed end of our luxurious handlebar moustache with the other? Not only have we become the bad guys, but _we have become a Hollywood caricature of badguyness_.

Hence the giant octopus. A normal bad guy hides his nefarious deeds behind a banal logo and seal. An over-the-top, booed-by-the-audience bad guy makes his logo into a tentacled beast devouring the entire world.

<comment><USER3> > Last time I checked, the elections did not significantly change policy

What makes you think that people want a change in policy, in some substantive sort of way? There is a reason that third parties in the U.S. are ridiculed: most people don't agree with any of their positions. Few people are far enough to the right that they want to get rid of the Department of Education like the libertarians, or far enough to the left that they want to revive the power of the labor unions, like the greens. People who opposed Iraq turned around and exerted the President to get into Syria.

> The US has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the world, mostly > over Prohibition.

An interesting aspect of the original Prohibition was that it was, at the time, perceived as a triumph of Democracy. It was deeply intertwined with the women's suffrage movement, and succeeded despite the enormous power, money, and influence of the alcohol manufacturers. It succeeded despite the fact that at the time, the federal government derived 1/3 of its revenue from liquor taxes.

The drug war is bad, sure, but it's a sign of a misguided democracy not an authoritarian regime. I grew up in the suburbs in the early 1990's, surrounded by soccer moms shrieking "just say no!" This year was the first time since 1969 that a majority of Americans supported decriminalizing marijuana: [http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/marijuana- legalization...](http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/marijuana-legalization- poll-98687.html). Not ending the drug war, just decriminalizing the most harmless of the drugs. And not "likely voters" but a group including lots of young people who won't vote to effectuate that policy. You can't look at the drug war and call it some sort of failure of democracy, a slide into Stalinist despotism.

> And the millions we have killed are mostly in other countries that do not > respeck our authority.

There is a big difference between killing people in other countries and killing people in our own country.

> to demand that banks everywhere in the world comply with its tax regime

Doesn't seem unreasonable, considering that banks everywhere transact with or through the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That Octopus is probably one of their tamer patches. The National Reconnaissance Office missions have the best patches - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_Launches](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_Launches) and [http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Mission_Pa...](http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Mission_Patches_Their_Source_and_Meaning_002.html) detail them rather well.

<comment><USER6> I found this[1] one to be particularly reassuring.

[1] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NROL49_pa...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NROL49_patch.jpg)

<comment><USER7> It says "Better the devil that you know"

<comment><USER8> Similar motif on NROL-66: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NROL-66_Patch.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NROL-66_Patch.png)

Can't make this shit up

<comment><USER9> This one... I have no idea how this one makes me feel: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/NROL10_US...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/NROL10_USA155_patch.jpg)

Like, seriously, what if they were _all_ like that?

<comment><USER10> I think the way it should make you feel is,

 _Clearly, the patches are silly and I don 't know why I care so much about this_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't seem all that surprising, these kinds of things have been around for years:

[http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/secret-insignias- fro...](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/secret-insignias-from-the- black-ops-world/)

[http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/top-10-most- sinist...](http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/top-10-most-sinister- psyops-mission-patches/)

Patches seem more like a game of one-upmanship.

I do like this patch's story, sounds just like something a bunch of engineers would come up with:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NROL49_pa...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NROL49_patch.jpg)

> This patch for NROL-49 depicts a phoenix rising from the flames with the > flag of the United States in the background. The Latin words "Melior > Diabolus Quem Scies" roughly translates to mean "The Devil You Know," as in > the phrase "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know". > Cryptic. According to NASA, this saying refers to the return of the use of > an old system after attempting to use a new one, which had resulted in > failure.

<comment><USER12> One of the best all time patches:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._617_Squadron_RAF](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._617_Squadron_RAF)

The so-called "Dambusters" motto was "Apres moi les deluge"

<comment><USER13> Which for those of us who don't know French... "After me, the flood"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yes, it's a ballsy logo, but on the other hand...

Wikipedia tells us that NROL-39's payload is actually a Topaz synthetic aperture radar (SAR) node, flying in constellation with two others already in operation, and two more to come.

This is essentially not-at-all-threatening to civil liberties, being a ground- elevation mapping platform (and to a second order, some degree of surface roughness), of not particularly good resolution, at a semi-polar low earth orbit. There are commercial counterparts to this that are presently in operation, like TanDEM-X, and an order of magnitude improvement on that constellation's capabilities would remain insufficient to track anything particularly interesting beyond the construction over time of large static structures, with a relatively long revisit time.

<comment><USER15> It should be noted Topaz was the only outcome of a _failed_ $25 billion dollar project called Future Imagery Architecture:

> the project was killed in what the Times report calls "perhaps the most > spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy > satellite projects."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office#Future_Imagery_Architecture)

They spent more money than the entire GDP of about 90+ countries for a single spy satellite:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\))

A big portion of that money went to Boeing:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/washington/11satellite.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/washington/11satellite.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&#step1)

<comment><USER16> Haha, no wonder that in the actual logo, the globe is turned so that the octopus is feeding on North America. The motto instead should have been "nom, nom, nom".

<comment><USER17> Don't give them ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like it. It's so super-villainy that I can't help but think it's meant tongue-in-cheek. And the logo does look awesome.

<comment><USER19> Definitely tongue-in-cheek after seeing some of the other logos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The military/spy agencies are not concerned about being politically correct. This is sort of a tradition, if you look at missile projects they all have logos like these and are called things like "reapers" etc... If we start seeing this on the White House seal I'll be concerned.

<comment><USER21> It is a little weird to have devils and such strongly worded messages in mission badges, but it's come to be expected.

There is a huge psychological factor in the DoD about making people believe you have the biggest stick and can see everything. Kind of like putting an alarm company sign outside of your door to prevent theives.

[http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/top-10-most- sinist...](http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/top-10-most-sinister- psyops-mission-patches/)

[http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Mission_Pa...](http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Mission_Patches_Their_Source_and_Meaning_003.html)

[http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1)

[http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/2](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> None of the revelations of US spying of the past year have particularly shocked or surprised me, and probably not very many here.

The level of sheer insanity displayed in the latest revelations however, with yesterday's "horde of Orcs" and this sickening slogan "nothing is beyond our reach" is worse than I could have imagined.

US intelligence has not just gone beyond what is acceptable, they've completely gone off the reservation and have lost all perspective. Historically, this doesn't end well.

<comment><USER23> >Historically, this doesn't end well.

Doesn't end well for us the little people. Those who operate in the shadows, those have the power to play these games probably have it a lot better since they undoubtedly operate outside the rules they set for the rest of us (witness the lack of accountability shown by anyone who has ever been involved in any of these shenanigans).

<comment><USER24> You think?

[http://articles.sun- sentinel.com/1991-08-31/news/9102020946_...](http://articles.sun- sentinel.com/1991-08-31/news/9102020946_1_kgb-vladimir-kryuchkov-vadim- bakatin)

In this kind of system, nobody is safe, and nobody wins.

<comment><USER23> It took decades before the tide turned, and it did because of external forces or it would have continued for a lot longer.

There is no reason to think that today's system would end up the same way without some huge counter-balancing force that I'm afraid I do not see in today's world order.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure which is more depressing to consider. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is like the Rapiscan. Really, you are going to name an invasive x-ray- taking-pictures-of-your-junk device Rapi-scan?

It is slapping you in the face and laughing at it just because they can. Someone said "Hey I bet I can do this and get away with it. Here hold mah beer, watch me draw a giant octupus devouring the earth!"

</comment><comment><USER26> the logo reminds me of an image in an old Canadian history text book. it was an american octopus grabbing all of America (north and south) and part of the section that talked about manifest destiny ( [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny)).

So yes, it is frightening, but only since colonial America.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's like the jokes about hitting a women. Once you actually had done it they are no longer even remotely funny.

<comment><USER28> ... or you've done it enough without being shamed from the public you represent, that it's something you feel comfortable joking about. Analogies are awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's the Space Kraken! We must fire SRB's at it!

[http://www.kerbalcomics.com/2012/07/30/episode-12-fighting-s...](http://www.kerbalcomics.com/2012/07/30/episode-12-fighting- spirit/)

</comment><comment><USER30> The current flow of things while I read all of the works of Bruce Sterling realy freak me out a little bit.

This guy looked in the future somehow. I'm pretty sure about it.

Just finishing "The Zenith Angle"

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone else just think this is meant to be a bad ass logo and not something to be psychoanalyzed as some metaphor for the intelligence community?

</comment><comment><USER32> this is one of those cases where a parody would inevitably fail. the reality is its own parody, and perfectly so.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tip for the new NSA/CIA/FBI Director

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

BTW NCIS wont need this as they have Jethro Gibbs just run every thing past him and if he doesn't hit you on the back of the head your golden.

</comment><comment><USER34> The comparison to old anti-communist propaganda in the promoted comment after the article is priceless.

</comment><comment><USER35> HN has been seriously trolled. You would think smart people have a sense of humor. You would be wrong.

<comment><USER36> I'd say after some point it starts being black humour instead of just humour. Even more if the ones doing it are precisely the ones fucking with us. Some people might like it, some won't.

<comment><USER35> The thing is, even if you somehow manage to unilaterally hamsting US intelligence efforts, which is extremely unlikely because the entire West is complicit, you will still be spied on unless you protect yourself with extreme measures which are onerous. Have a laugh, go outside, life is short.

<comment><USER36> You realise you can use that same logic to avoid fighting for anything, right? I don't really care if life is short, I won't cross my arms.

I did have a laugh though but I would very much appreciate not needing to laugh at it at all. What I did say is that it doesn't matter if you think you are smart or not, laughing of certain things have no relation whatsoever with being smart or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There is an Airforce unit in NH tasked with tracking and maintaining government satellites which has this incredibly evil looking logo [http://i.imgur.com/jAzLyvS.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/jAzLyvS.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER38> They should have used Octocat - charming, friendly creature, who keeps your stuff in order :)

This one will do.

[http://octodex.github.com/images/murakamicat.png](http://octodex.github.com/images/murakamicat.png)

</comment><comment><USER39> Funny nobody spotted it's also commonly used to represent the mafia. Small side note : mafia's power mainly relies on people's fear of being heard if they say anything against it... Just sayin...

</comment><comment><USER40> How did that Google engineer put it?

F- these guys.

Seriously.

<comment><USER41> Yeah those arseholes monitoring terrorist cells in Pakistan, those pri... Wait, why are we mad at these people again?

<comment><USER42> Because they used that mission as an excuse to go all Stasi on the rest of us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well at least they're being honest. Getting rid of the logo is just like changing the marketing without changing the bigger problem.

</comment><comment><USER44> in the same way that abu ghraib/gunatanamo torture and mistreatment of detainees served as a recruiting tool for al-qaeda and similar organisations i can see this sort of thing being the equivalent for digital activists.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Nothing is beyond our reach" \- except subtlety, obviously.

</comment><comment><USER46> It seems to have inadvertently collected North America.

</comment><comment><USER47> Sure, and AT&T features a deathstar

<comment><USER33> Its only that big cos they are still using strowger gear - the ewoks are there to provide a source of cheap labour for bank cleaning.

Should have gone with System X guys

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> "NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH" says their tag line.

Let that sink in for a minute.

It's the mindset of crazies.

<comment><USER49> Or the mindset of a spy sattelite. I honestly don't get what the fuss is all about. They wouldn't launch a spy sattellite with the tagline 'We can only see a very small bit of earth after getting a court to agree on it in triplets', would they?

<comment><USER50> The only way one cannot understand "what the fuss is all about" is by ignoring the context under which all of this is happening.

<comment><USER51> Or maybe to understand that it is but one logo in a long tradition of wacky logos.

<comment><USER52> Even with that tradition in mind, you can still understand why it calls the eye.

Filed under "unintentional gallows humor".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I read the comments in this thread and realize for the most part, the US government can do no wrong. Then I realize you mofos are the real problem.

</comment><comment><USER53> Trolling achievement unlocked.

U mad bro?</comment>


Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98sep/copy.htm

<comment><USER2> > Some naive intellectuals want to abandon copyright altogether.

It's more like "Some are abandoning copyright altogether." now.

</comment><comment><USER3> [1998]</comment>


US, Facebook negotiating record multibillion-dollar fine after privacy lapses - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/US-Facebook-negotiating-record-13617614.php <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, why does there need to be a "negotiation" in the first place? Facebook clearly broke its _previous settlement_ with the FTC, and likely some privacy laws, too, both federal and state-level.

Wouldn't accepting any kind of compromise with Facebook mean Facebook won't really learn its lesson, which I assume is the main purpose of this fine?

I very much doubt any large corporation feels that it has learned its lesson when it knows it can settle its way out of any violation for a small percentage of the profit it gained from that violation. Just like with bailouts, the incentive is to keep doing the risky/legal grey area stuff, because it will net them the most profit at the end of the day.

<comment><USER3> > I'm sorry, why does there need to be a "negotiation" in the first place?

Because litigation is long, expensive, and uncertain.

> Facebook clearly broke its previous settlement with the FTC, and likely some > privacy laws, too, both federal and state-level.

If that's all really clearly true, that's a lot of leverage in the goverment's hands, especially if the relevant states join in the negotiation in cooperation with the feds.

> Wouldn't accepting any kind of compromise with Facebook mean Facebook won't > really learn its lesson

A compromise could be "everything we could get in the courts, but without either side bearing the cost of litigation and Facebook gets on to dealing with the fallout today rather than facing uncertainty for years and then dealing with it", if the government's case is strong enough to make Facebook accept that.</comment></comment>


DIY Drones - <AUTHOR> http://diydrones.com/ <comment><USER2> Indeed. DIY Drones is a great community of amateur UAV builders that was founded by Wired's editor-in-chief (Chris Anderson). The company is a canonical example of an open hardware outfit. According to a recent report their 2010 revenues are approaching $1M.

[http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/05/03/two-open-hardware- robo...](http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/05/03/two-open-hardware-robotics- companies-near-1-million-revenue)

</comment><comment><USER3> Chris is a brave man. The good people over at DIYDrones have to skirt the boundaries of legality, as they can only operate under the FAA's "model airplane" definition ( _very_ lightweight, in sight and control of human operator, etc). I wonder where UAV development would be today if we allowed them to run free over private land, as we allow for autonomous ground vehicles.

I, for one, have reluctantly chosen not to develop UAVs specifically due to the legal dangers under current regulation. I sometimes think of my counterparts in other countries, who have reached the same fork in the road and were able to continue in this field. [This is why "brain drain" happens.]

<comment><USER4> well, if you decide to drop the money to get a pilot's license, you can do a whole lot more, as you can now operate it under a different class of aircraft.

<comment><USER5> A pilot's license is $5-10k and maybe 400 total hours of time (50+ flight hours, maybe setup and commute to/from, ground school and study). Most of the good/cheap flight schools are in Florida (since the weather is consistent, land/fuel/etc. is cheap -- one of the main issues with doing VFR training in a place with variable weather is that VFR conditions aren't always met). I think Arizona and Texas are popular too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> my dad is a mod of a rc board, i think the big thing (in the US) is for flying your own drone, it has to have an observer. plus full first person video requires a lot of bandwidth, and the power you're allowed to use negates hardly any range, even if you can use FPV at all... a lot of the devices over the last few years that had FPV turned out to be over the legal limits of power</comment>