NASA has completed the $8.7B James Webb space telescope - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/07/nasa-has-completed-the-8-7-billion-james-webb-space-telescope/ <comment><USER2> Diameter 6.5 m, collection area 25 m2

For comparison, the two biggest telescopes launched into space are:

Herschel: 3.5m, collection area 9.6 m2

Hubble: 2.4 m, collection area 4.5 m2</comment>


HP to develop ARM-based low power servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/01/hp-servers-idUSN1E7A01KX20111101

<comment><USER2> Dupe of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183311></comment>


Bitmovin Raises $10.3M Series A - <AUTHOR> https://bitmovin.com/bitmovin-raises-10-3m-series/ <comment><USER2> Thx for posting :-)

If you have any question, feel free to ask!</comment>


Cheat at Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock - <AUTHOR> https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/195083/cheat-at-rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock <comment><USER2>
        &/"ki"?

It's incredible how seven little characters can pack so much power, but this level of cuteness also demands some explanation as to why it's correct (given the input domain).

The first thing we might observe is that every input has two possible outputs, and the output domain is the same as the input domain. That means that if we select our outputs carefully, we may be able to find a property of the input that differentiates them.

        q){x!x in/:\:k}distinct raze k:string`Rock`Spock`Paper`Lizard`Scissors
        R| 10000b
        o| 11001b
        c| 11001b
        k| 11000b
        S| 01001b
        p| 01100b
        P| 00100b
        a| 00110b
        e| 00100b
        r| 00111b
        L| 00010b
        i| 00011b
        z| 00010b
        d| 00010b
        s| 00001b

We can see several options: "k" gets us Paper, "i" gets us Rock, "a" gets us Scissors, "p" gets us "Lizard". There are a few red herrings though: "S" doesn't get us any single output (Scissors and Spock don't have a shared winning response). The pairs I can see that differentiate all states are "ki", "ka", "ip". Let us use "ki":

        Roc<k>    | Spock   <Paper>
        Spoc<k>   |<Paper>   Lizard
        Paper     | Lizard   Scissors
        L<i>zard  | Scissors<Rock>
        Sc<i>ssors|<Rock>    Spock

The only remaining item we can choose (Lizard or Scissors), and if we choose the latter then our game can play traditional Rock-Paper-Scissors as well!

        `Paper`Rock`Scissors@&/"ki"?

Of course if you're not using q, you could use a different mapping function. Many of the responses looked at the lengths or a critical bit of a hash (like md5), all with the aims of producing this kind of compression function, and this isn't uncommon in high performance systems, but if you're going to depend on such a function, you should explain carefully how you came up with these magic characters so if someone wants to extend the game in the future they know how to reconstruct your function.

</comment><comment><USER3> If nothing else, that was a very satisfying read because it shows the incredible diversity of programming languages available today.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am still wondering how the two Perl ones work with two missing words in the code.

<comment><USER5> Since each hand beats two other hands, you only need three possible outputs to beat any opposing hand.

<comment><USER6> The conclusion does not follow...

(the missing condition is that every hand is beatable)

<comment><USER7> There are 5 possible hands

Each hand beats 2 distinct hands

With 3 distinct hands you can cover up to 6 distinct hands which is a superset of all possible hands

3 * 2 > 5

<comment><USER6> And yet...

      A --> D | E
      B --> D | E
      C --> D | E
      D --> C | E
      E --> D | C

QED

<comment><USER7> Um, this isn't a general math problem; We're not solving for all possible sets. We're solving this problem in particular:

      A --> B | C
      B --> C | D
      C --> D | E
      D --> E | A
      E --> A | B

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently you don't actually need to print "Rock or Spock" although it sounded like that's a requirement.</comment>


Senator Demands IP Treaty Details - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/senator-demands-details/ <comment><USER2> I'm rather baffled by this line, from the end of the article:

> The agreement does not require congressional approval.

How can that possibly be true?

EDIT: Some detail. The U.S. Constitution says that treaties made "under the Authority of the United States" are "the supreme Law of the Land" (Article VI). But it also says (Article II) that the president "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; ...."

That last bit about the Senate would seem to contradict the above statement. Or perhaps ACTA does not require Senate confirmation, but then it isn't the supreme law of the land.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of the Constitution, the paragraph just after that which you've cited from Article VI is interesting:

"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, _anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding._ "

My interpretation, which seems to be supported by [1]: no treaty may expand the powers of government beyond those enumerated by the Constitution. If it is shown to (which seems likely given al the secrecy), it becomes unenforceable and we learn who to recall from office.

[1] [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&...](http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=354&page=1) (I found paragraph 2 of the opinion particularly salient to the topic), found from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Six_of_the_United_State...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Six_of_the_United_States_Constitution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well it's about fucking time. I posted a link to wikipedia in mid-December showing that treaty negotiations are set to conclude in January, and I tripped the spam filter. I said it there and I'll say it again, we've got to do something.

It doesn't matter if you're not interested in politics. Politics is interested in you. If you don't want to get f*d in the ass do something about it. I called and mailed all the congressman for my state. If I knew how I'd set up a site with free VOIP + contact info so people could call and complain.

I think Skype has a HUGE interest in making sure this treaty isn't signed. I emailed them asking for VOIP to help. Any other HN'ers have ideas/have done anything?

</comment><comment><USER5> If that treaty gets ratified in anything close to it's current form I'm pretty sure I would not be alone in saying that I would immediately start looking for a new country to move to...

<comment><USER6> The list of ACTA countries is growing (from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Counterfeiting_Trade_Agree...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement)):

United States, the European Commission, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Canada, the European Union, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore and United Arab Emirates.

It isn't going to be easy to escape.

EDIT: spelling

<comment><USER5> More and more I feel that starting a new country is a really good idea.

<comment><USER7> On what land? The days of just finding unclaimed land and calling it yours are over. The world isn't as big as it used to be.

<comment><USER8> These guys have a plan: seasteading.org

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Kirk said last month that the international community would walk away from the negotiating table if the public could see the working drafts."

And this is supposed to be _reassuring?_</comment>


Why Bankers Would Rather Work for $0.00 Than $500K - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=355&bpid=23401 <comment><USER2> Because zero is obviously a temporary value, whereas 500K could potentially be forced into a standard income.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ariely conducted a number of social experiments with unexpected results, as covered in a summary of his book that was posted a little while ago on HN:

<http://bookoutlines.pbwiki.com/Predictably-Irrational>

The "Cost of Social Norms" section is the one relevant to his points in the article.

</comment><comment><USER4> From how eager they are to return the TARP money, it looks like they are more willing to work for $10 million a year plus stock than $500,000.

Yeah, not quite what the article was about, but it's ridiculous what some people expect for adding so little value.

<comment><USER5> It is not obvious to me that banking executives add "little value" as a general proposition. (Sure, a lot of them look like idiots today. I suspect this state of affairs will not persist to the end of time.)

Most of us here work on the Internet, right? Our businesses are essentially one big lever to apply intellectual capital, right? And every change is multiplicatively effective, right? 1% more signups is a 1% increase to the bottom line. 1% higher average ticket price is a 1% increase to the bottom line. 1% more traffic is a 1% increase to the bottom line. Each of these compounds.

Banking is like that, except it is one big multiplicative engine for capital capital instead of intellectual capital. Sitting at the top of the $100-billion-in-assets-under-management capital multiplication engine is an executive or ten. What is the 1% difference in outcomes between candidate A and candidate B worth to the firm? Well, if its multiplicative... oh, dear. (I know crony capitalism has caused a bit of the salary inflation -- but don't assume there is no fire just because you see a lot of smoke.)

Relative income parity, the historical norm for the vast majority of people for the last several thousand years, is an accident because historically everyone was operating under the same constraint: you can only labor for 24 hours a day. Some of us no longer operate under that constraint, because our particular combination of talents, skills, and markets do not measure productivity in hours. Our skills are super-scalar.

And, in a world with any skills that are super-scalar, income equality is doomed.

We saw hints of it in the last two bubbles, which might get dismissed because they were covered up by frothy madness. But I make something approaching the mean national income _while sleeping_ just because I sell programs and selling programs scales really freaking well. Far, far better than selling programming expertise, which is a fairly well-paid field of endeavor to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dan Ariely talked about this recently on C-SPAN's Book TV, and I (being a nerd) watched the entire thing.

 _"[...] if we pay them nothing, people work. If we pay them a little bit of money, people get demotivated. It switches us from a social domain to a market domain."_

 _"I actually think the right salary for these bankers should have been zero."_

[http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/media/player.php?pid=2...](http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/media/player.php?pid=284793-1&width=365&height=340&start=1975&);

</comment><comment><USER7> how about no pay restrictions but put every banking executive's salary on whitehouse.gov. now shame and pride figure equally.

<comment><USER8> This will not work. As shown by CEO pay, publicizing this data led to people feeling like they were in competition for higher and higher wages.

CEO wages increased _massively_ as a result.</comment></comment>


Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen by 2048 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/salt-water-fish-extinction-seen-by-2048/ <comment><USER3> I want to drop a book recommendation in here for everyone else that feels panicked and mad that no one around them is panicking enough.

Climate - A New Story by Charles Eisenstein

The author suggests that we might have the causation backwards. It's not that everything is dying because the climate is getting worse -- it's that the climate's getting worse because we're killing everything.

Healthy ecology actually regulates the climate around it -- and nature actually can be very quick to bounce back when a niche is available to it.

But we keep overfishing, and slash and burning for plantations and cattle grazing, paving over limestone and wetland -- we really are physically very destructive to healthy ecology, but we could be much better hosts to life on earth, and in protecting fisheries and planting forests, we may be able to reverse the extinction by taking a very heavy hand in creating spaces where the ocean and the forests are cared for and not just exploited. It is our rush to extract wealth from the natural world that has put the climate into a havoc -- the CO2 is just icing on the cake.

<comment><USER4> this makes sense as part of the problem. the more carbon actively stored in the form of living creatures the less there is in the sky cooking us

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given the evidence, every nation of the world should have a massive federally funded project on the scale of the Apollo program to put the brakes on global warming and biodiversity loss.

It blows my mind that we haven't dropped all luxuries and transitioned into the analog of a war economy to address what is literally, without hyperbole, the worst catastrophe humanity has ever seen and will likely ever see, by any definition.

<comment><USER6> People don't believe it will happen, or assume engineering and science will save the day. If people really understood the significance of what's happening, funding for this stuff would be #1, 2, and 3 in terms of priorities, far ahead of universal health care or free college. But again, nobody believes it will happen, or assume that engineers and scientists will save the day.

Fun fact: taxing consumption (the thing that destroys the environment) at the same rate as a typical EU country would raise almost a trillion dollars annually that the US could direct towards funding research and development into climate change solutions.

<comment><USER7> The key issue is we don't really have a "world government" to force all countries to do this.

With our current system of every nation having its own government, whichever nation does most to stop climate change will disadvantage itself relative to other nations.

<comment><USER8> The nice thing though is that we can all have as many children as we want, because apparently massively increasing the planet's population in future won't contribute to global warming/ecological collapse, whereas forcing me to switch my 3 litre BMW for a hybrid and to stop eating burgers will magically solve everything /s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The way I see it, there really isn't any room for debate here anymore. We could all go back and forth about how actions to help ecosystem collapse are going to blunt our current economy, but ultimately, that won't help; our current collective lifestyle needs to take it on the chin. And we should all be afraid. Not the paralysing, indecisive type, but the kind that makes you enact lifestyle changes when you get some bad news at the doctor.

</comment><comment><USER10> Global climate change is the main focus of most people in retards to the environment these days but that's only one small facet of how we are killing the ecosystem. Unless and until people somehow wake up and acknowledge the fact that the earth is vastly overpopulated and start figuring out how we are going to address that issue none of the band-aids we propose is going to be ultimately effective. The faith that most people have that the ecosystem can sustainably support countless billions despite all of the evidence is incredibly myopic, very disturbing and borders on religious.

</comment><comment><USER11> I feel depressed if I read something like this. It is possible that there would be no human live in only 100 years or so! We would need a revolution right now.

Do you have any hope that the humanity is able to turn it around?

</comment><comment><USER12> [2006]

Also, checking out the abstract of the paper ([https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5800/787.long](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5800/787.long) , paywalled, but it must be on scihub if someone has a moment) doesn't mention extinction of anything. Presumably, predicting the apocalypse would merit a line there, right?

Climate change is real and awful, but hysteric doom-mongering reporting about it does far more harm than good. Compare the D.A.R.E. model of communicating about drugs to people.

<comment><USER13> Alarmist claims like this do tend to fuel climate change denial.

<comment><USER14> It's pretty much why the green movement lost me. When I was growing up - <USER2> were supposed to have no snow by 2015, and all the wales were supposed to dead.

I see the value in clean water, clean air, biodiversity, and living in harmony with nature. However scaremongering and wild predictions (the latest one I heard seems to be that we have 12 years?), is an easy way to drive me away from the movement as a whole. Even though I agree that emissions should be cut, fuck the crazies I ain't dealing with their shit.</comment></comment></comment>


Design Float: A digg/reddit for design articles - <AUTHOR> http://www.designfloat.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm constantly amazed by how incremental people are in creating webapps. The long tail is an interesting concept but why is the digg/reddit concept for a specific niche being so thoroughly flogged to death? Is each site really grabbing big enough traffic numbers to make it a worthwhile pursuit?

How can we break ourselves of the herd and copy+features methods of problem solving?

<comment><USER3> I don't think this was supposed to be a feat of engineering. They're trying to create a site for a specific niche, seemingly targetting 25 to 45 year old design professionals. This is a bit like asking why are there so many vBulletin forums out there.

<comment><USER2> and I think either one is a valid question. what I meant was I wish there was at least some differentiation between stuff not just simple rehashing for different audiences, oh well.

<comment><USER3> I think there is new stuff; like you, I don't know why this one was submitted since it's just a pligg script.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didnt submit it as a startup, more as a resource for learning about design

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's not really a startup as much as a 'user' -- they use <http://www.pligg.com> to power the site.</comment>


FunnyorDie Hangs In There: Good Content Still The Key - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/22/funnyordie-hangs-in-there-good-content-still-the-key/ <comment><USER2> That's cool... I didn't know Sequoia funded Will Ferrell. That must have been an entertaining pitch meeting.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Like the name says, you're either funny, or you die.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle direct ad sales? - <AUTHOR>

I recently discovered that, on some properties, the money that can be made from direct advertising relationships far exceeds that of AdSense. So, do you have experience with this, and any advice?<p>Specific questions: please answer one, all, or just offer advice. Thanks so much.<p>* How do you craft your agreements? Is there a specific contract you like to use, or do you just keep it informal?<p>* What level of reporting do you offer to your advertisers?<p>* How do you handle raising rates on advertisers?<p>* How do you bill? Do you just manually send invoices, or is there a tool that you use?<p>* Any other good-to-know's?<p>[UPDATE] One more question: any good marketplaces for finding advertisers? <comment><USER2> There are companies like appsavvy.com who do it for fb games.

I always use agreements. Main things to cover are payment terms and collecting 1/2 of the payment upfront if they are a new advertiser.

Ideally on request is what I send advertisers, otherwise a dashboard is always fun if you have the time to make one.

Raising rates is more about creating competition and value for the advertising available. At the end of the day most advertisers just do the math on the ROI. If they want to stay you can raise rates. More important imo is about retention and having advertisers over the long haul.

Freshbooks.com and other invoices. I just use a google doc template I have and email that to them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Set up recurring billing, don't chase checks every month. Send invoices if it makes you and/or the client happy, but collect the payment automatically. I use Authorize.net for billing and Blinksale for invoicing.

This will save major headaches and improve long-term advertiser retention. (And if your advertisers aren't long-term, I suspect you'll have a tough time continually generating the new accounts necessary to make this worthwhile.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Still in private beta (which does not help) but isocket.com would provide ease in billing, reporting, and adjusting rates. Worth signing up for notifications as a future solution :)

Have never used this <http://www.openx.org/> \- but removes the rate adjustment problem since you are dealing with a marketplace. Might be worth investigating as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh, you just reminded me to ask about marketplaces. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> try trafficspaces.com

oiopublisher.com

buysellads.com

<comment><USER6> Check out www.isocket.com.

isocket is commission-free and has everything you need to run direct ad sales.

TechCrunch was our first beta tester, and they are using us to manage their direct ad sales.

I'm the Founder, John. We're bringing in new beta testers now.

Shoot me a note, would be happy to tell you more. john (at) isocket dot com</comment></comment>


Browsers, URLs, Facebook and expectations - <AUTHOR> http://www.acidlabs.org/2010/02/24/browsers-urls-facebook-and-expectations/

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Most people using the web aren't especially technically capable. They don't understand the difference between the search box and address box on the browser they're using (one of the smartest people I know constantly frustrates me by using the search box to go to sites and declares it "easier" as I vent). They don't know what a URL is nor how it works. Nor do they even understand what a browser is. Let alone that the web isn't the Internet. ..."_

Something I easily forget.</comment>


Ask HN: Is the Ballmer Peak real? - <AUTHOR> Yes, it's from a comic. But I've heard varying stories regarding the ostensibly-imaginary method. Companies like Jet allow alcohol at the desk. Is there any truth to it? Dependent on the person? <comment><USER2> Well, think of it this way: people would benefit from it if there were a solid chance that the positive benefits outweighed the side effects of alcohol consumption, reliably. People might even be slightly buzzed all the time if such were the case. But of the people (afaik) who drink when working, do they try to convert others to do the same, for an easy upgrade or enhancement of work ability? I find, not so much. So, I think it may just be a catchy meme foremost than a trend to keep up with, probably helps that regular drinking is not out of the ordinary in SV or NY, etc..

</comment><comment><USER3> For some kinds of work, say sales, a little alcohol can help with anxiety.

It has a way of catching up with you, however, and you can easily wind up drinking too much.

If you want to suppress anxiety you may be better off getting a prescription for a short-acting benzodiazepine such as Xanax -- the primary effect of alcohol and benzodiazepines is basically the same. BZs are much safer than the older tranquilizers, but still have danger of addiction and overdose, particularly if you combine with alcohol, opiates, etc. Xanax is cheaper than alcohol, however, and less toxic.

</comment><comment><USER4> There have been quite a few studies showing that alcohol helps with creativity, presumably because we don't shoot down novel ideas so quickly.

But most development is not creative. I worked from a co-working space that had free beers available on Friday afternoons, I tried having a beer and working and it was a total waste of time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Original comic - literally relevant xkcd: [https://www.xkcd.com/323/](https://www.xkcd.com/323/)</comment>


Rate our iPhone app (iRewardChart) - <AUTHOR> http://www.irewardchart.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Who: Parents of kids between 3-13

Why: To motivate the kids to be good and earn rewards

How: Kids earn stars for the tasks assigned and later star balance converted to actual rewards.

Versions: Free: <http://itunes.com/apps/iRewardChartLite> Paid: <http://itunes.com/apps/iRewardChart>

Comments, suggestions?

<comment><USER2> I know its an iPhone app, but the "here's an iPhone with some icons standing up with reflective surfaces everywhere" immediately pegs the site as a iPhone fad cash-cow wannabe.

I'm not saying that's what it really is - but if you follow these trends/fads, people _immediately_ pay less attention to your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I agree with you a bit - the reflective thing is little way too much done!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Image 1 of your screenshots should replace the two iphones showing a splash screen (they serve no purpose + I don't want to see your splash page - if you use them just for links, just make a get it now button). I had to click the screenshots to find out what the app does. If this wasn't on HN I would have simply left the site and moved on.

Also, I hate links that open up iTunes. If you're going to do so, let me know first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with you on the 2 splash screen. I am not defending, but all the 'Available on appStore' badge all over the web always takes you to the iTunes. Its an expected behavior, but I know it can be irritating for some!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not really about the app (It looks neat however) but on the site, the "Take a tour" section should display the screen shots in a gallery, lightbox or some such. It's rather hard to view them all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Guess it IS a lightbox. If you click on any of those thumbnails, it opens a lightbox slideshow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like it</comment>


Real world location virtually recreated to scale in minutes [video] - <AUTHOR> https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/08/volumetric-mirror-world-mapping-6d_ai.html <comment><USER2> Related question that I've had for a while. I have 25 years worth of family pictures, many of them taken at my childhood home. The house is no longer in the family, and I desperately want a photorealistic 3D model.

I don't have a walkthrough video, let alone different videos; and I believe reconstruction techniques like these work on such sparse inputs.

What's my best approach here? I have partial floorplans, I made a reasonable SketchUp model (I counted bricks in the pictures to get accurate measurements) but I'm nowhere near my goal, which would be having a complete, photorealistic 3D model I can drop load in Unreal or Unity and make a VR walkthrough (I can only imagine how that would blow my mum's mind!)

I've thought of outsourcing this, e.g. find a talented game environment artist or architectural modeller and pay them to do this, but I fear the result will be "off". I dream of the perfect algorithm that will do this.

Any ideas?

<comment><USER3> I think there aren't any algorithm that can do that and won't be for any time soon.

I spent several weeks last year recreating my backyard in VR, aiming at 1:1 mapping, using photogrammetry for capture and a standalone mobile headset that allow walking around untethered (Lenovo Mirage Solo). Even with photogrammetry it wasn't as accurate as required for the objects to be placed exactly at the correct position and be able to confidently walk around without fear of hitting a tree that is 20 cm more to the side in VR than in reality. It took many back and forth to get the alignment right. By the time I was done the tomatoes had grown so much the VR environment was already wrong.

Outsourcing reconstruction of lost/old places is a great idea. I found that even just stereo-panoramas of old apartments seen in VR (so without positional tracking) is triggering memories in a way that simple photos can't.

<comment><USER4> It's definitely possible, if the photos are suitable. There was a burst of interest over a decade ago specifically around reconstructing a 3D model of Notre Dame from public tourist photos, so that might be something to look into. Here's an example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rG0t1hS1ms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rG0t1hS1ms)

<comment><USER5> I am wondering what has happened (or is currently happening) to this project: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur1Z72_LyTM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur1Z72_LyTM)

<comment><USER2> OMG, that's incredible. I wanted to do something similar for my project - whenever you stepped in a location where a picture was taken, the picture would fade in, superimposed to the VR scene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember a ycombinator "ba, tched" startup doing about the same. [https://sendreality.com/](https://sendreality.com/)

The time to sniff the place was a bit more but the quality looked better. Let's not get fooled by speed : without a good 3D copy of the place you are... screwed. Because our eyes can't stand gross mistakes.

<comment><USER7> That's us. [https://sendreality.com/318-main- st-a3d/](https://sendreality.com/318-main-st-a3d/)

The biggest challenge about 3D mapping like this isn't about the tech itself, but about actually making it useful for end users. These demos are cool, but the important thing is that you need to build out the part of the software that makes it useful/valuable for consumer/business applications. Otherwise, you should be working on the tech in a research lab vs. a venture-funded business.

This is a trap that even we've admittedly fallen into at times.

<comment><USER8> That's a great point, and an interesting example link for two reasons:

1) Real estate seems like a large market for this technology.

2) The specific space in the link looks like it would photograph well, but the 3D version reminds me that it has low ceilings and a lot of areas with limited natural lighting. i.e. it does a worse job than photographs for the purpose — selling the unit — because you can find the unflattering perspectives.

(Side: the red dot is very confusing as regards browser pointer-lock, and the whole thing seemed very awkward to navigate with a trackpad until I discovered that WASD worked.)

<comment><USER7> The incentives of realtors are not aligned with those of the buyer, which manifests in the cognitive dissonance you've just experienced.

On a different note — if possible, I'd love to chat about your experience with the UI. Do you have an email I can reach out to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There have been lots of programs to do that. This one isn't that good. Here's an open source one.[1] And another one.[2]

Doing a room is the same photogrammetry problem, but inside-out. Autodesk had that 10 years ago. The current product for that is ReCap.[3] You can work from drone imagery if necessary.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0PDCp0QF1o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0PDCp0QF1o)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D0EhSi- vvc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D0EhSi-vvc)

[3] [https://www.autodesk.com/products/recap/overview](https://www.autodesk.com/products/recap/overview)

<comment><USER10> > Here's an open source one.[1] And another one.[2]

I think both of these links refer to Meshroom/AliceVision. Very nice input, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It makes for a cool demo but all the applications that could benefit from this need much higher quality textures and better dimensional accuracy. Also there are certain cases where this fails, reflective or partially transparent surfaces, lack of texture, etc.

<comment><USER12> Object detection can 'normalise' the shape of your couch from a noisy input, and the upscaling algorithms we've seen recently can clean up the textures. It's only an aggressive short-term R&D effort away from being terrifying.

<comment><USER13> I can already see deep learning applied to normal maps of the various (+coloured) surfaces at home.

You could then deep-filter the inputs and get a higher-resolution version of the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would be pretty handy for indoor mapping. Imagine a crowd-sourced 3d OSM for malls, public buildings, office-plans ect.

That would be massively useful.

<comment><USER15> Serious question. What are some examples you're thinking about of "massively useful" applications of this?

I think it's a really cute tech demo, but I'm struggling to find obvious uses that'd make the world a better place or generate huge piles of cash.

<comment><USER14> Fair point, for me 'massively' would be an significant amount of time / confusion saved.

Whenever I want to go catch a bus at an overseas metro station, try find a shop in a unfamiliar mall, or even try find where a clients desk is in an unfamiliar building, that would be fantastic.

The a potential to generate a snapshot of a space indoors would be super handy. Maybe even for places without an address you could look at a timestamped point cloud like that and see which building to go to.

Democratizing capturing 3d space in a simple/user-friendly and cheap way would open up really interesting doors.

<comment><USER15> Streetview type imagery/navigation solves that problem though, right? There's no need for the depth map/3d reconstruction going on here? Just a "walk through" with a 360degree camera (or multiple overlapping cameras) capturing 2D lets you find the shop or the desk.

<comment><USER14> Potentially, but I am sure you find use from zooming around in 3d before going into streetview and taking a closer look, as being able to look on from up is a useful perspective. At least I can find streetview disorienting at times.

Maybe it just comes down to personal preference. But having a finer scale of 3d, another level in google maps for example, seems like a logical next step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I expect Apple is working on this type of technology for their next iPhone. What better use case for a back facing depth camera (yes, I understand this demo was performed with a standard camera, but it would likely be better with a depth camera). The implications for their maps, home furnishing, AR, Android differentiator... all very interesting, and Apple will likely do it right. Want a high resolution capture of a vase in your living room? Just walk closer. Claim a space and mark it private? Sure. An option to turn an elaborate house into a basic ceiling/walls/floors for others, maybe.

</comment><comment> awinter-py the baseline photogrammetry software is already 'mostly good' if you're scanning something featureful & matte like a wall of graffiti

where it chokes is specular reflections, curves, 'wobbly bits' (leaves on trees), lots of duplicate features (leaves on trees), and things in parallel planes (leaves on trees in front of a brick wall)

these are all solvable with better scene models, object models and feature stats

looking forward to the next gen of structure from motion tech

</comment><comment><USER17> This has been possible for a good while, the most common algorithm is Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM). No stereo cameras are needed, but there are also implementations that make use of depth sensors.

What interests me is for an open implementation of Street View: drones plus crowdsourcing and we'd be free of requiring Google services for street visualization. We already have open street maps, we could have open street view too.

<comment><USER18> For a course project, I implemented DTAM - which does dense mapping and tracking, without needing any stereo vision, in real time (on a mid-range GPU). It's really amazing.

<comment><USER17> Hadn't heard of DTAM yet, but found a video and am very impressed! What GPU did you use? Do you think it'd be feasible on mobile GPUs?

<comment><USER19> That sounds interesting.

Any links to further explain what DTAM is/how it works?

<comment><USER20> DTAM: Dense tracking and mapping in real-time

> _DTAM is a system for real-time camera tracking and reconstruction which > relies not on feature extraction but dense, every pixel methods. As a single > hand-held RGB camera flies over a static scene, we estimate detailed > textured depth maps at selected keyframes to produce a surface patchwork > with millions of vertices. We use the hundreds of images available in a > video stream to improve the quality of a simple photometric data term, and > minimise a global spatially regularised energy functional in a novel non- > convex optimisation framework. Interleaved, we track the camera 's 6DOF > motion precisely by frame-rate whole image alignment against the entire > dense model. Our algorithms are highly parallelisable throughout and DTAM > achieves real-time performance using current commodity GPU hardware. We > demonstrate that a dense model permits superior tracking performance under > rapid motion compared to a state of the art method using features; and also > show the additional usefulness of the dense model for real-time scene > interaction in a physics-enhanced augmented reality application._

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6126513](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6126513)

<comment><USER19> Awesome, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember seeing some of this type of stuff with the Xbox Kinect. It's cool that the form factor has moved to mobile (slowly swinging the Kinect around the room was not ideal). I'm not following this space but from the video it still looks like capturing good 3D models is a long way away. Being in a VR world that looks like that would be terrifying.

<comment><USER6> Yes I do agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here is Jack Black demoing similar NSA technology in 1998 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY)

</comment><comment><USER23> The possibilities for those with disabilities is remarkable. You wouldn't have to map everything to be useful, just common routes.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is cool. I have a related question. Can I make 3d models of my 5yr old kid and 3-d print robots that walk/talk like thme? Does current day technology even suffice for this? Or do I need to create 3d models now and then wait for a few years for technology to catch up?

<comment><USER25> You could do it, but it would take forever. Here are some starting points for the different technologies involved:

Here's how to make the walking robot: [https://asimo.honda.com/](https://asimo.honda.com/) [http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~fer/cmsc828/classes/cse390-05-0...](http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~fer/cmsc828/classes/cse390-05-02.pdf)

Here's how to make it look like them: [https://www.creativebloq.com/features/deepfake- examples](https://www.creativebloq.com/features/deepfake-examples) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9qs6JudXJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9qs6JudXJg)

Here's how to make it talk like them: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time- Voice-Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning)

<comment><USER24> Thnaks. yes, based on the list you posted, it will take forever. Guess I have to wait for someone to put a package together.

The deepfakes can only do a 2-d model, not a 3-d model yet.

Btw, why are people down voting this?</comment></comment></comment>


Turn off tracking protection to resolve "video is currently unavailable" error - <AUTHOR> https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?popup=true&aId=kA00L000000Hfaq&categories=CBS_Entertainment%3AAll_Access&template=template_cbsvod&referer=cbs.com/vod&data=&cfs=SFS_FT <comment><USER2> I've found it amusing that a few news sites disable their atrocious autoplaying videos (and often, the preview window that follows you when you scroll an article) when they detect ad blocking or tracking protection.

They're purposely giving me a better experience for blocking, rather than an inferior one.

But I guess the metrics must show or are being interpreted to show that most users prefer the obnoxiousness.

<comment><USER3> > most users prefer the obnoxiousness

Most people aren't looking to read the news- they're bored and looking for entertainment. So they LOVE all this crap that autoplays, especially when it queues up more clickbaity crap that sounds more interesting than today's headlines.

<comment><USER4> > people aren't looking to X- they're bored

Wow the way you put this brings so much into focus. All of these apps and websites with awful ux where you can't find anything because you're drowning in a sea of content and shit is constantly flashing in your face... _that is the point_. People actually _want_ that, for no other reason than its entertainment and it distracts them from their boredom. They're not actually looking for news, or videos, or pictures, or to learn or anything, they're looking for _entertainment_. And it's not the content that is entraining them -- the content is just an excuse -- it's _the app itself_ that's entertaining them.

News, social media, video sites, photo sites, they're not content platforms at all, they're just a new type of game. That also explains why I can't comprehend the behavior of these sites, because I'm coming to the site to do something completely different from what it was designed to do.

<comment><USER5> I think calling it entertainment is very flattering. I would call it distraction, or maybe even conditioned response.

<comment><USER6> I think the word you are looking for is "diversion".

<comment><USER5> No. I wrote the word I meant. There are numerous synonyms for distraction, and deliminating between them does not add anything to the discussion at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I could imagine a few reasons for this:

• CBS is being malicious, and it's intentionally refusing to play the video if they detect tracking protection. (It sounds like a lot of people on the thread are assuming it's this one, and it very well may be.)

• CBS is being lazy, and didn't bother to test with tracking protection and work through any technical issues (like implementing graceful fallbacks).

• CBS is being cautious, and knows they haven't tested tracking protection as much, so they're leaving "disable tracking protection" in as a troubleshooting step, since it certainly does reduce the number of variables.

• Firefox is being unreasonable, and makes it enough of a pain to implement a website that works with tracking protection that CBS doesn't want to play ball. As a simple example, if Firefox's tracking protection blocked all cookies, plenty of honest parts of the internet would break (so it works differently, apparently with a domain block list). It sounds like others have had trouble with blocked domains that are sometimes used for tracking and sometimes for legitimate non-tracking purposes (like force.com, apparently), but I don't have a good sense of how common that really is.

Anyone have enough experience with these things to know how likely/reasonable the different explanations are? (Or if there are other reasons that I missed.)

<comment><USER8> Firefox tracking protection doesn't block all cookies - just third party trackers on the disconnect.me basic list [1].

While all scenarios you listed are theoretically possible, basic due diligence suggests that there are pretty significant differences in their likelihoods of occurence. It is disingenuous to treat these as equally likely just to appear fair.

1\. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking- protection](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection)

<comment><USER9> > It is disingenuous to treat these as equally likely just to appear fair.

Then it's a good thing that the comment explicitly wasn't doing that, openly unsure of the likelihoods.

<comment><USER8> Understanding how Firefox tracking protection works is one google button press away.

If you tell me that the OP had the time, patience, and technical skill to list all those possibilities but could not do a basic check on how Firefox tracking protection works, and instead talks about how with Firefox tracking protection "plenty of honest parts of the internet would break", and how blocked domains are used "sometimes for legitimate non-tracking purposes", forgive me for not buying the "openly unsure" claim.

<comment><USER7> As mentioned in my comment, I'm aware that tracking protection uses a domain block list. (I edited it about a minute after posting to make that more clear.) I did do some research, I just didn't link to it because the comment was getting too long.

I don't think a basic technical understanding is good enough to know how it plays out in practice. Computers are complicated, humans are complicated, organizations are complicated, and I've seen many cases where people jump to unfair conclusions because they oversimplified a situation. I think that hearing from people with experience (e.g. people who have worked at a company like CBS or people who worked on Firefox's tracking protection feature or something similar) is much more likely to lead to an accurate understanding of the situation than trying to work off of assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Click the hamburger (3 vertical lines) in the top right corner of the screen_

I found it humorous that they simply call it 'the hamburger', and that they confused vertical with horizontal.

<comment><USER11> Could be 3 very wide and short-in-height lines stacked vertically?

<comment><USER12> That's not vertical lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This means that anti-tracking measures are working.

This is good news.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. People need to understand that blocking ads will harm the industry and doom the economy. I'd go as far as banning ad-block users completely from my website.

<comment><USER15> Great, then I can easily see that I do not wish to access your website!

Ads should be blocked relentlessly until companies realize what reasonable, secure and tasteful ads look like, instead of the intrusive malware-ridden pile that interrupt our lives at the current time.

Tracking, on the other hand, will never have a place in this world.

<comment><USER16> I mean, if you stop using their website wouldn't it be a good thing for bandwidth heavy sites like YouTube? It's kind of like a restaurant showing you the door and then saying "I didn't want to eat here anyways."

<comment><USER2> I would be happy to accept denied access to most sites before loading their content.

It'd be cool if browsers could send some sort of do not track header, that sites could then use to refuse to serve you any content.

Assuming that they actually do want none of those users to consume their content in that way.

<comment><USER17> DNT headers are a thing. They were proposed by Mozilla originally, and its use was suppose to be opt in (and of course so is any compliance by the site in question).

Then IE10 turned it on by default, making it pretty much completely useless as a signal for site owners.

<comment><USER18> Changing the default value of DNT to "on", so that you needed to opt in if you wanted tracking, didn't make the header "useless" for site owners. But it did make it awfully inconvenient, because it underlined an awfully inconvenient truth: if a site makes money off tracking users, then the best interest of the site is at odds with the best interest of the users. Of course, many sites still wanted tracking, so they resorted to the scummy tactic of just ignoring the header.

In other words: if most users do not want to get tracked, this should have been a signal to _stop fucking tracking_. The fact that it didn't doesn't reflect well on sites, to put it mildly.

I totally agree with josteink: this is good news because it means that anti- tracking measures are starting to hurt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a losing gesture. It used to be that installing an ad blocker was the weird tech thing to do, and it was their fault that the site broke. Now tracking protection is the browser default, and it's the sites that are weird.

It's a small distinction, but an important one. When stuff doesn't work, the default reaction is to blame whatever the weird tech thing is. In this case, CBS is moving from a position of being able to say, "well, you messed with your browser, and you broke it" to, "we're doing something odd, and it requires an instruction manual to make it work."

It's the same reason, for better or worse, that people were worried about secure boot for systems like Linux. When you hand someone something, and it doesn't work, and your response is, "well, you just have to mess with some config settings"... well, sometimes that works. There will be _some_ people who do it. But now you're in "Linux territory". It's doable, but you have a prerequisite now to slightly educate people on tech literacy before you can ask them to do the thing you want. And none of your other competitors have that prerequisite.

</comment><comment><USER20> Another site I won't miss I guess

<comment><USER21> Another user CBS won't miss, I guess

<comment><USER22> Another dying legacy network that few people will remeber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If anyone is interested in CBS All Access, you can also buy it for the same price via Amazon Digital as an "Add-On Channel."

In essence you get CBS All Access's content but via the Amazon Digital Web- Site/Apps, it is a massive improvement in reliability and performance. CBS's actual streaming player and web-site is a hot mess.

</comment><comment><USER24> They are at least giving people correct instructions to change this, unlike a bunch of sites that just tell people to turn off ad-blockers.

<comment><USER25> I'm glad they're desperate enough to allow the word "Tracking" to be used in the instructions. This is why I think all "Ad Blockers" should rebrand as "Tracking Blockers". It would force a more honest terminology to be used. "Turn off your tracking blocker" is a much scarier request to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is "have you tried turning it off and on again" not a conspiracy.

These extremely generic troubleshooting instructions have nothing to do with anything CBS all-access is or isn't doing.

Further down the page they tell you to clear your cache and history!

<comment> apk-d I don't know, this sounds extremely specific to me. I mean, you'd think they'd know exactly whether or not their website works on Firefox, especially in these enlightened auto-update times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If this is all that's necessary to disable autoplaying video, I'm all in.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well this is a brilliant way of shifting people to PopcornTime.

What exactly are they tracking that Firefox is interfering with?

<comment><USER21> Yes indeed. There era of entitlement is upon us - "unless CBS gives away all their free content without tracking and monetizing me, I'll illegally pirate their content - because in 2018 I'm entitled to CBS content without frills"

<comment><USER29> The problem is that there's no alternative to "free plus ads or tracking" for most services. If I could pay a reasonable fee for all the content and services I need, I'd do it. I can do it some places, but other things just aren't available.

<comment><USER30> That's not the case with CBS. You can absolutely pay for CBS All Access.

<comment><USER31> Do they turn off the ads if you pay? Many sites don't offer a no-ad option at any price.

<comment><USER32> Even if they don't display the ads, I'd expect them to keep tracking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone have an alternate source? Force.com itself is a tracking domain that I block.

<comment><USER34> I believe subdomains on force.com are used for support portals by companies using Salesforce for customer contact. I've seen it used by Western Digital and a bunch of software or SaaS companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really hope this isn't malice on CBS's part. Either way it's a arms race and it's interesting to see the introduction of a social component.

</comment><comment><USER25> Do they also require EME be enabled?

</comment><comment><USER36> This kind of advice puts lay people at risk (if they see it).

Proliferation of such poor advice — which may just be copied and pasted by other sites as-is — could make lay people vulnerable to tracking outside of CBS properties too, since they may forget to turn it back on (or may not be even understand the need to have it on in the first place).

</comment><comment><USER37> I have yet to see an adblocker, that removes embedded text that came with the page, like the old days of Google. Maybe that could be a direction.

<comment><USER38> Could you elaborate, I'm not sure what you are describing.

<comment><USER37> I.e. when a website just sticks pure text in <p> in a page, no images, maybe just an <a> for further info. Not HTML5 taking up 2/3s of the page, flashing and jumping about etc.

<comment><USER39> I am using Firefox with AdBlockPlus (older version that supports the -->), and one extra add-on called "Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus" [1]. This extra add-on doesn't block, but merely hides bits and pieces of the page. It mostly use it to cut-out/hide all "Related/Suggested" columns and tables, so when one article loads, I only see that on the page and nothing else.

[1]: [https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper](https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper)

<comment><USER40> Incidentally, uBlock origin has this feature built in. uBlock is also better respected than ABP these days I believe, though of course you're free to use whatever addon you prefer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is this legal?

<comment><USER42> Their site, their rules. Just like you can't read some forums unless you registered.

<comment><USER43> I'm assuming that this is paid access, right? Does the signup process mention this "hidden fee"?

<comment><USER44> There are two levels. One has ads. One doesn't. Presumably they're doing this to force their ad-viewing users to actually watch the ads.

<comment><USER42> Even though, paid printed newspapers have ads so I am not sure we should expect a paid subscription to be ad-free. But again I wouldn't like those ads to track me across other medias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> youtube-dl

<comment><USER27> mps-youtube for even more win.

[https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps- youtube/mps-youtube)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm not sure "demands" fits here, but it is funny to see. Similarly, they "demand" you disable ad blocking or enable popups [0]. So, clearly, this company suffers from idiocy more than malice.

0 - [https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?aId...](https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?aId=kA00L0000004xn6)

<comment><USER47> We've updated the headline to "requires", which is a bit more idiomatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm thinking maybe you can r

</comment><comment><USER49> I think the poor quality and restrictive distribution of news media these days is largely a matter of efficiency. I've taken an interest in tools to make honest reporting more efficient, so that more of it can be done per dollar, and I wonder what others on HN think would be useful.</comment>


Belyayev's Fox Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Belyayev_(zoologist)#Belyayev%27s_fox_experiment <comment><USER2> A 2017 study showed that hypersocial dogs have structural changes in genes responsible for Williams-Beuren syndrome in humans. It speculates that this is what might have allowed domestication.

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700398](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700398)

[https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/williams- syndrome](https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/williams-syndrome)

</comment><comment><USER3> There has been some doubt about the validity of this experiment [1]:

"A widespread misconception maintains that the Farm-Fox Experiment started with wild foxes and recapitulated the entire process of domestication. Belyaev himself accurately described the founders as fur-farm foxes, but by referring to the unselected population as 'wild controls', contributed to this misconception. In reality, the experiment started with a fox population from eastern Canada that had been captive and purpose-bred since the late 1800s, something Belyaev and his colleagues may have been initially unaware of."

[1] [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.10.011](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.10.011)

<comment><USER4> The purpose of the experiment wasn't to show "wild foxes can be domesticated in just 30 years of selective breeding", though that is the most famous and perhaps the most important takeaway from it.

The hypothesis under test was something like "expression of tameness is genetically linked to expression of physical characteristics, such as spotted fur and floppy ears". It's quite valid in that context: Belyayev started with a population with a low (perhaps non-zero) level of domestication, ended with a moderately domesticated population, and observed the physical differences.

<comment><USER3> It is doubtful, though, that the spotted fur, floppy ears, and other physical characteristics (domestication syndrome) are a result of the experiment [1]:

"The history of the Farm-Fox population undermines the commonly repeated narrative that a suite of domestication syndrome traits emerged solely as a result of selecting on tameness. There is no temporal link between most of the syndrome traits, which first appeared in Prince Edward Island (PEI) fur farms, and the later behavioral selection in Russia."

On the spotted fur [1]:

"The farm-fox breeders of PEI intentionally selected for white spotting and other unusual coat patterns (Figure 3). They noticed that crossing two white- marked foxes occasionally resulted in animals that held their heads askew, a phenomenon Belyaev would later describe in his population, suggesting shared genetic etiology. White spotting was more common in Belyaev's selected than unselected populations, but has not been associated with less fearful behavior in individuals (Figure 2D)."

On the floppy ears [1]:

"The farm foxes of PEI occasionally had floppy ears, even as adults (Figure 3C). In the Farm-Fox Experiment, 'delayed ear raising' was noted (ears floppy past 3 weeks of age, but not necessarily into adulthood). While slightly more common in the selected population, the trait is extremely rare, and no association between delayed ear raising and less fearful behavior in individuals has been described (Figure 2D)."

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.10.011](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.10.011)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The woman who took over the experiment after Belyayev died wrote a book about if a few years back: [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2116251372](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2116251372)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a horribly edited Wikipedia article yet it is such a delight to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new- bes...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mans-new-best-friend- a-forgotten-russian-experiment-in-fox-domestication/) has much of the same content, and might be easier to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A handful of websites claim to offer pups from this specific colony as pets, which sounds wonderful. Though it's hard to validate they weren't just taken from a fur farm (thus not actually tame).

</comment><comment><USER8> I was expecting much more content about the implications of these results on humans

are we domesticated our-self? how does society (morals, e.g.) acts as Belyayev selection?

<comment><USER9> Relating it to humans gets far more awkward than you might guess. Ponder any implications of what Wikipedia dares to say about the matter:

 _The changes manifested by the tame foxes over the generations, moreover, were not only behavioral but also physiological, just as Belyayev had expected. The first physiological change detected in the tame foxes was a lower adrenaline level. Belyayev and his team "theorized that adrenaline might share a biochemical pathway with melanin, which controls pigment production in fur", a hypothesis that has since been confirmed by research.[2] As they became tamer, more and more of the foxes began showing "signs of the domestication phenotype"; Trut later recalled that in the early 1980s "we observed a kind of explosion-like change of the external appearance."[5] After eight to ten generations, the tame foxes began to develop particolored coats, a trait found more in domesticated animals than in wild ones_

 _Belyayev 's experimental animals and their descendants have been said to "form an unparalleled resource for studying the process and genetics of domestication".[1] Brian Hare, a biological anthropologist, wanted to study "the unusual ability of dogs to understand human gestures". Hare "wanted to know if dogs' powerful rapport with humans was a quality that the original domesticators of the dog had selected for, or whether it had just come along with the tameness, as implied by Belyaev's hypothesis". He discovered "that the fox kits from Belyaev's domesticated stock did just as well as puppies in picking up cues from people about hidden food, even though they had almost no previous experience with humans."[1] In a 2005 paper for Current Biology, Hare suggested that selection for tameness "may have been sufficient to produce the unusual ability of dogs to use human communicative gestures" and that the inability of wild wolves to pick up human cues is caused by their fear of humans. While Belyayev and his team "didn't select for a smarter fox but for a nice fox", Hare said, "they ended up getting a smart fox." Belyayev's research, Hare further argues, has implications for the origins of human social behavior: "Are we domesticated in the sense of dogs? No. But I am comfortable saying that the first thing that has to happen to get a human from an apelike ancestor is a substantial increase in tolerance toward one another. There had to be a change in our social system."[5]_

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Short documentary from a few years ago:

[https://youtu.be/4dwjS_eI-lQ](https://youtu.be/4dwjS_eI-lQ)

</comment><comment><USER11> The experiment is not designed well. I would guess that the tameness comes from the non stimulating environment more than the process of selection. It is known that mother imprints a lot of hormonal/stress activities to children while pregnant. Just like starving pregnant mothers have an effect on generations that come through hormonal gene activation similar thing happens to animals in wilderness. Is there a line of foxes bread for generations in captivity with purely random selection?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe Belyayev had a control group, yes.

<comment><USER11> Still, the nature of the control group might have a smaller taming effect needing longer time to turn into tame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've discussed this a few times on HN, but old discussions are a bit hard to search for. Here are a couple: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10517631) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12493059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12493059)

</comment><comment><USER13> An interesting aspect of this experiment often overlooked: the same process influences us.

The way that we behave in a corporate setting seems closely related to domestication. It would be worth examining the traits associated with animal domestication and compare them to human behavior in a variety of contexts.

It's not really a _happy_ thought that we're domesticated, but power structures exist, and it's in most of our genetics to serve. It's often possible to trace certain types of ambition to a young age, for example. It would be neat to see a more rigorous exploration of whether it's true that humans are domesticated, and if so, how much, and what it means in a precise way.

<comment><USER14> Human reproduction is based on choices made by individual men and women. "Corporate setting" or not, no central authority is selecting us for mating based on some characteristic.

With domesticated animals, often a stud is selected and can have hundreds of offspring. For example, all border collies are related to a single dog (Old Hemp). There's no comparison to humans.

<comment><USER15> Imagine the strong selective pressure as humans moved to larger social groups and agrarian societies. These were ruled by strongmen interested above all else in most cases in collecting the highest taxes from a compliant population. Anyone too fierce, fearful or combative would be ostracized at best, killed at worst.

Even today, prisons and mental institutions are filled with non-conformist, anti-social people who in many cases are not allowed to reproduce.

<comment><USER16> OTOH, "undomesticated" males tend to be good as generating more offspring with diverse partners than "domesticated" ones with 2.5 children.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me figure out suitable work for my young stay-at-home wife? - a-saleh

My wife has just finished her master studies in molecular biology, and we are expecting our first child in few months.
While for now I have a decen't salary, and she is quite looking forward to be a stay-at-home mom for a few years, we can't help bu wonder about her future employment/income posibilities.
It seems that in her area of expertise, there are no other career paths than PHD -> PostDoc, and from what she has seen of the academia, it doesn't look compatible with raising a child.
She is a decent language learner and reasonably skilled artisan/painter.
What would you advise us? <comment><AUTHOR> Write a book on molecular biology? Start learning programming after the baby is old enough moving into scientific computing? or software designed for the molecular biology field? Take the time out of the academia rat race and work on one of the great problems? Again might result in a book or a position. Art book of molecular biology references? Start a blog on reviews of papers for biology? Start a blog on reviews for biology books? Develop a small startup for open science for easy, accountable peer review?

<comment><USER2> Congratulations on the baby.

I like this approach. If you could help her with the "computing problems", maybe she could 1) write a book, 2) while she learns more about scientific computing and come with ideas about mixing molecular biology with sc. comp.

<comment> a-saleh This was my first suggestion as well, unfortunately, her encounter with statistics in their undergrad course was so terrible, that she doesn't want to touch anything that would require it with a ten foot pole. What is pity, we even have a systems-biology research group in the town we live in.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is online courses that go through the maths with you. Which are usually better teachers than most undergraduate courses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If she is interested in getting into academics, she may consider doing remote teaching. For example, many of the professors who teach at University of Maryland University College ([http://umuc.edu](http://umuc.edu)) are from across the country and only teach part time while either holding a full-time job or being retired. The majority of the classes offered are all done entirely online so there is no travel commitments by the professor to go to a classroom every day or week. I am sure that there are other similar opportunities at other colleges. Just a thought.

Congrats on the baby!

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on the baby , I would say look for positions that allow remote work . Additionally , developing skills that could help her work as a freelancer (web dev, big data etc) with applications in biotech of-course

</comment><comment><USER5> She could do something similar to what my wife did who also has a Life sciences PhD - see here [http://www.priceusa.com.au](http://www.priceusa.com.au)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can she (and you) find a way to do research/development at home in her field? Or possibly figuring out how to combine her area of expertise with computing, specifically simulations.</comment>


Rapper wants to be a "venture capitalist like Ben Horowitz" in crazy music video - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/embed/QYjG7E5O-Pk

<comment><USER2> Already submitted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7932778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7932778)</comment>


Ask HN : What do you think about my idea? - <AUTHOR>

i am preparing to launch a website about for criticism in technology such as people can submit article to criticise x company for y issue .. they domain name will be www.techcriticism.com .. give me your opinion about my idea ? <comment><USER2> Is it a subjective critique or a know bug? The name doesn't really communicate which one. If it's a subjective critique I don't see the value — but if it's a "known issue" that might have some value, but only if there's some sort of form of support.

<comment><AUTHOR> it is subjective critique ..the articles on the site would be such as criticise x company for data breach for example ... criticise for better service only .. dirty articles wont be accepted ..something like this :)

<comment><USER3> There is a "dead" answer in this thread that you might be interested in too. (You can activate showdead in your profile.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it safe to assume this would be like a Consumerist but with a tech only focus?</comment>


Ask HN: Is Google responsible for returning 'fair' results or 'good' ones? - <AUTHOR>

By now most regular readers of this site have heard about how Google has bombed Rap Genius from orbit after they sought to game the system[1]. Beyond this specific case, do you think that Google should be prioritising the punishment of those who seek to inflate their search results over whether or not the results are of high quality? After all, Google is much more than simply a search provider, it's an institution for almost everybody who uses the internet.
In their public begging for forgiveness[2], RG submits that they want "to create an amazing experience for users and hope they prefer us to all other lyrics sites," which they appear to have done. Certainly I prefer RG to other sites for lyrics; the UX is generally just better and the additional functionality of the annotations would appear, in my eyes, to only increase the value. I've gotten malware from other lyrics sites in the past, and I've had to deal with other sneaky tactics from other sites (like embedding a link in the lyrics when I copy them). I submit that RG is almost categorically a better result for if I Google something like "whoa lyrics earl sweatshirt" than another site.
Does Google have a responsibility to the users the best possible results even if they tried to mercilessly self-promote? Or does such blatant gaming of the system deserve such a crippling blow?
[1]http://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-penalized-rap-genius-for-link-schemes-180777
[2]http://news.rapgenius.com/Rap-genius-founders-open-letter-to-google-about-rap-genius-seo-lyrics <comment><USER2> They clearly have a responsibility to return the most relevant links and in this case they've gone pretty far but in my opinion they also have a duty to do things like this as negative as it may seem.

What Rap Genius did is why SEO companies exist. I've never been able to tolerate them for the reason that, for a price, you can "game" the system and rank higher even if your content is no better. In the long run, this type of behaviour is dishonest and damaging. By making a great example out of Rap Genius I think they've put it out there very clearly that you will be punished if found doing this like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't believe so, no.

I think it's in their best interest, but I don't think they should be held accountable in any manner.

This whole RG thing is about protecting their results, though. They're returning, probably temporarily, poor results in one specific type of search, but it will likely have a net benefit result overall.</comment>


Friends Without Benefits - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/09/social-media-internet-porn-teenage-girls

<comment><USER2> Except, I don't believe a minute of this. I have sisters and cousins.

This is blowing things far out of proportion. It's like watching Mean Girls and then assuming all of high school is like that for every single student.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. This article is very sensationalist and is only a cross section of dumb people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a former middle school teacher who taught in two very different schools: it depends a lot on the parents and location. One school I was at was nothing like this, the other just like this.

</comment><comment><USER5> One of the best articles on this topic I've seen...pity it sank like a stone as it's pretty much a summary of what's wrong with existing social media.

<comment><USER6> Probably flagged by the thought police.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While reading this article, keep just one thing in mind: think back to every "teenagers these days" article you saw back in your teens, and how closely it actually reflected your own experience as a teenager.

<comment><USER8> Do you think the average hacker's experience as a teenager is representative of their contemporaries'?

<comment><USER9> I certainly expect them to have knowledge of what it was like for their peers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pursuing career in academic philosophy? - <AUTHOR> How hard is it to get into academic philosophy and do it for a living? Any professional philosophers here on HN? <comment><USER2> Immensely difficult. I wouldn't recommend it. I personally witnessed extremely intelligent PhD students struggle to get any job beyond an adjunct position.

Source: BA in philosophy.</comment>


Ask YC: To The Young, How Supportive Are Your Parents? - <AUTHOR>

For the younger crowded on Hacker News, how supportive are your parents to a startup? It seems most stress the importance of some work experience first. Any experiences? What problems have some of you guys faced? <comment><USER2> I'm not young, (turned 35 today), but I have a number of war stories about regarding parents and their being supportive.

For the first 14 years of my life, we lived as missionaries in Central America. And, on top of that, we moved around tons. I moved 20 times before I was 21. So, I didn't really have tons of chances to develop lasting friendships aside from my parents, brothers and sisters like most teenagers. The first couple of times that I went against the parental flow, it was really rough.

So, there was an immense resistance when I wanted to get our of the family business (being preachers) and follow my own dream of being a software engineer. The first time my Dad found out that I had been on a BBS, I got grounded for a week. They talked me out of majoring in CS back in 93, because they were convinced that computers were a fad. Doh! And, they talked me into being a nurse so I could have a steady job. And, that's what I've been doing for money for 15 years.

I've been trying to escape nursing for 15 years. I've tried a bunch of different ideas: painting, sculpture, architecture, furniture design, Animation, Visual Effects... Non of which my family approved of or supported. Finally, I decided to go back and pursue my first love--programming and engineering. I've been chipping away at my schooling online for the past 5 years, and I'm done this semester. Meanwhile, my parents were trying to talk me out of it the entire time.

So, I'm now embarking on my first startup idea, a suite of online tools to make contract nurses lives easier. And, finally, after 15 years, they're a little excited about what I'm doing. Honestly, they only started coming around to the idea of my starting an online business since Startup School.

They finally understood that there might be something to these computer things after all.

<comment><USER3> Happy birthday!

<comment><USER2> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am 17 years old myself and am still living at home, at least for a few more months till I move to London.

My parents have been supportive since day 1 I picked up a programming book together with a business book; determined to create an e-commerce site for a local retailer. To be honest I see myself more as a business oriented person then as a hacker, but I thoroughly enjoy writing code nonetheless.

While in high school (I am now in my last 3 days) I had to travel a lot for various business projects and all throughout my family has supported me and never stopped me to pursue my dreams and goals. Since September '07 though, my IB diploma has been my primary focus and I've had to put off my goals and ideas up until this Friday. I fully agree that work experience adds tremendous value to your chances of success because theory never quite cuts it in reality. For anyone reading this, my age or younger I can not stress enough to go out and get an internship at a company in the field you want to later be in. Get experience by listening to those older then you but never shy away from giving your input. The most important lessons I learned from real-life experience are:

1\. Only surround yourself with people who want you to be successful. Find those people that have integrity and character and don't bother with the rest.

2\. Never underestimate the power of networking, and make it one of your top priorities for your business.

I am about to launch my first full blown company and will go to India for 2 months to work with a development team. It's an exciting time and my parents are very supportive of me and have faith in me. Which provides you with a great basis to start from because you'll run into enough people who won't.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's been sort of a weird situation not just between myself and my parents, but between myself and my entire extended family. I come from a very conservative (in the life style sense, not the political one) family. No one, including Aunts, Uncles, Parents, Grandparents and cousins, has lived in a big city let alone start their own company.

Luckily, a few years ago, I was able to land an internship in Chicago for a few summers, which I think made my family realize I wanted something slightly more adventurous than middle class Ohio/Michigan. After graduating, I was able to obtain a full-time job in Washington DC, launch a successful micro business (less than 3k revenue in FY07) and launch a successful small business (revenue of around 85k in FY07).

For my parents and family, they've accepted that I'll be taking a very different path than the "family norm" and even though they don't understand exactly what I'm doing, they're happy because I'm happy. However, if I had decided to quit my "good" job, move to Boston and launch a startup with no experience running a previous business or living in a big city, I think they would have been extremely hesitant in their support.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm Mark Bao, 16, owner of Avecora and coder and all that, and my parents are highly against, extremely unsupportive of coding/business/entrepreneurship. I'm guessing that it's a result of my lack of focus towards (high) school.

My reasons for doing this kind of thing early:

1) The people. Like eisokant said, networking is extremely important and I take it seriously.

2) The experience. I'm not getting a huge amount of business experience from this, but it's still valuable to learn about.

3) Make some money to re-invest into future things.

All are hard to do and are important problems. Unfortunately, I've been unable to network around here due to location (Boston = sucky networking compared to the Bay Area) and time. And, of course, my parents are anti-supportive of it, so it's tough to find time to work and code amidst their demands and school.

<comment><USER7> I think it's an age/cultural thing. Same story here, but with my grandmother. She is a professor at Moscow State U, and is very saddened that I'm not going the respectful and institutionalized route of academia. To her, entrepreneurship is something for selfish people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No longer being young myself, I can't speak from direct experience here-- but I can say that I was called in to help in the dismantling of a disastrous start-up founded by a young'un, and largely parent-funded. In this particular case, at least, there was an outrageously unrealistic business plan, and the parents were acting as blind angels-- performing none of the reality checks that normal funding sources would apply. I think the business would have been much more successful if the founder had gotten more constructive criticism along the way, and less cash to burn.

So, where it is great if parents are supportive, I think there are many forms this support can come in, and some can be counter-productive.

</comment><comment><USER9> Work experience is CRITICAL! How can you start a business when you don't know how one works? Why make mistakes when 6 months in a company will already point out most of the mistakes? How do you expect to make your employees happy when you do not know how it feels to be an employee? How can you manage properly if you have never had a terrible manager?

Get a job, save the money, then quit the job and start your business. This is a sensible and clever solution, and trying to start a business by depending on your parents and bootstrapping and hunting for capital is frankly...stupid.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure if I qualify as young (25), but coming from a different generation, they don't quite understand wanting to turn down a 100k job to bootstrap something with a very small chance of success.

I can understand this, after all my dad was a civil engineer and worked at the same company for 30 years. They also think of starting a startup in the terms of starting a company in the past. For example, opening a store. I've pointed out that it's much different now for technology and web companies.

Either way, they're always pretty excited even if they don't quite get it.

<comment><USER11> > they don't quite understand wanting to turn down a 100k job to bootstrap > something with a very small chance of success.

Your _average_ income will exceed US$100,000. You have a small chance of becoming a billionaire and a larger chance of getting nothing. You can repeat this process five or 10 times before you succeed - or take a US$100,000 job.

The contention is that parents see your _likely_ income being below your true potential.

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori First, I'm 23 (as of today) and my parents were the ones who first got me started on computers at about age 6. Neither of them are big geeks, but my dad is a draftsman and has used computers at his work since CAD became popular in the early 90s.

He also tried to start his own business when I was a kid. Unfortunately it flopped, taking a huge chunk of money with it. It took years for my parents to recover from that, and they didn't have much money to begin with. My dad has never attempted another business, but I think he regrets that.

That must be where I got the entrepreneurial bug from. When I suggested that I want to start my own business, my dad was supportive but wary, and my mum was wary but supportive, if you get what I'm saying. I can't fault either of them, because they've always supported me in everything I've done.

Money is always a sticky point with them, so I had to convince them that I had some idea what I was doing and that there was relatively little risk. Now is the time I can do risky stuff like this. The worst that could happen, I argued, is that I lose a few months of my life and living expenses for that time.

It turned out that's what did happen, and now I'm in a sticky position of trying to find a summer job in May, when no one wants to hire me for just 4 months (now 3.5). I'm returning to school in September to finish my undergrad. I don't consider my first startup attempt a failure, because I've learnt a lot.

The whole time, my parents have been supportive of the idea, but very concerned about money. I know I impressed them with how long I could survive on the money I had -- I definitely learnt how to live ridiculously cheap.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ok forks! This is how I convinced my parents. I told them since I don't have a mortgage, wife, kids, and other financial burdens, this is the perfect time for me to go off to work on my own projects. Even if I fail, I at least know I tried and have experience for the next gig. Life is short, and it's too easy to fall into the daily grind of working in the office. Hence, if I don't try, it will be harder for me to follow my dreams when I'm older. This is the Valley for heaven's sake! Where expression, art, and science can become a reality. Voila! They were sold!

</comment><comment><USER13> My parents support me as much as they can, despite limited knowledge and understanding.

While I'm sure they'd love to see my startup succeed, they are sensible people and are always highlighting the advantages of more stable, 9-5 type of employment. We definitely don't see eye to eye on many things in that regard, however they are always interested in what's going on, what we've got planned, and are always there to celebrate the little successes. When it comes down to it, that's all that matters.

That, and maybe some seed investment :]

</comment><comment><USER14> Work experience can be extremely valuable in starting up. I would even recommend going through the startup process as an employee if possible to learn some good and bad practices.

Personally my parents think I am crazy for attempting it. My father who ran his own business for 25+ years strongly encouraged me not to do the same. However, like him, I have the desire and he recognizes this.

Parents want the best for you, but don't necessarily know what is best for you.

</comment><comment><USER15> When have parents ever been supportive of risky behaviour in their children?

I say this in defense of my non-supportive mother and somewhat-supportive father.

<comment><USER16> When they've got 3 others who are more stable! :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, my mom has been trying to make me start a company since I was 16 and told her I wanted that someday...

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm 22, just finished school, and my parents completely lack opinion in regard to anything I want to do. They're supportive whenever I need their help in any way, but as long as I was finishing college, they haven't really been interested in what exactly I'm doing professionally.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very supportive, but I finished college first and then transitioned from intern to full time at work. My last day of work is in two days and then I'm bootstrapping a business.

If I dropped out of college to start a business, I'm pretty sure my parents would kill me.

</comment><comment><USER19> my parent's are in their 70s. I don't think they have much faith in my ability to pull this off, and they certainly don't understand the internet or even computers. They support me as much as they can.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm 24 and my parents seem to be supportive but I think a large part of that is that we came to the US in the late 80s so they may have the entire "risk" mindset.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you version control your event stream schema? - <AUTHOR> Anyone here built or used a data pipeline that validates event structures or pipes data to multiple destinations?<p>- Did you use JSON, Thrift, Protobuf, Avro or something else to define the schema for the events in the stream?<p>- Did you version the schema?<p>- Did you version each event or object in the schema?<p>- What type of versioning did you use? (E.g. semantic, incremental counters, git hashes, another type of hash, etc.)<p>- Any other cool things you'd like to share? <comment><USER2> I'm in the same boat - looking to consolidate a few smaller data pipelines that have organically grown over the years into a single pipeline and taking the opportunity to try and get the org to rethink how we emit events in various parts of the stack. As teams operate fairly independently, we need something that enables a flexible data structure whilst still enabling the ability to join data on common well-defined fields.

The current path we are going down is looking at using a 'nested' JSON structure that enables sub-processes in the various systems to inherit values from the parent. Something similar to:

{ "type": "schemaX", "version": 1, "payload": { "k1": "v1", "type": "schemaY", "version": 3, "payload": { "kk1": "v1" } } }

The structure itself will be documented using JSONSchema and hopefully we will be able to verify the validity of events as they are processed, though this might be too expensive to do in high volume scenarios.

The goal is to then build a low latency router that takes in routing policies to forward subsets of events to further data pipelines. The policies themselves will be defined using some kind of DSL (possibly using JSONPath?).

As a whole, this seems to be a fairly common problem[0] that other companies are trying to solve, but a lot of the low level details are not spoken about. One thing that does seem to be a common component to a service like this is Apache Flink.[1]

[0] Netflix Keystone - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPB8w-YXX1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPB8w-YXX1s) [1] [https://flink.apache.org/](https://flink.apache.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! So it seems you may end up using an incremental counter as a version – or was that a placeholder example?

What are the main use cases for the data pipelines you're forwarding your data into? Are the events fairly rich or fairly simple? Do you plan on doing any type validation as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We're using Avro + Kafka's Registry. We try to append to our messages to keep backwards compatibility.

That being said, there are things we intentionally do to ensure we can support this. e.g, Allow for nullable properties.

We pass in the message type, version, and additional headers. It's fairly common to create an envelope around the actual message. I would also suggest consider doing this for a few reasons. Skipping the obvious benefits, there's one powerful benefit in adding meta data to messages without having to alter the actual event. e.g, security tokens, time to live, and more.

I'm sure this might be also fairly commonly known, but I would highly recommend adding information like request correlation information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing.

> We try to append to our messages to keep backwards compatibility.

Do you additionally do versioning, or do you solve it by only allowing backwards compatible changes such as appending to the message?

<comment><USER3> We do - that's how Kafka Registry knows what schema to apply for the Avro message. If you like, you can ping me at my username + gmail and I can answer any other questions about what you're doing.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Olive Oil startup? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software developer. I work in Europe, but just found out that I will be inheriting some olive land in my home country.
I was wandering if there is an international market for extra virgin olive oil, with provable "cruelty-free" production process and zero pesticides.
Would you buy a regular subscription to deliveries when you can just buy olive oil from your local market?
I'm thinking of dropping my 9 to 5 job, to build the web platform, but i'm not sure if there is a market for this? How would one proceed ? <comment><USER2> There is a market. However, just last week here in China I had someone approach me who had shipped a large quantity in to China and was looking for someone with the appropriate import license (they hadn't thought that far ahead). Cross-border everything is pretty painful. Easier at postal scale, hassle at container scale. China will pay top dollar for organic. However, proving that may be hard if your home country is not in Europe and is perceived as having pliable/unreliable regulators.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking postal-scale, with a "soylent-like" subscription/delivery model

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I usually buy extra virgin from the grocery store. I look for the CAAE mark. I personally can't see myself buying a subscription for a one grocery item from a single vendor.

You might have more luck with another product that's not a commodity, like lemon flavoured oil or something. Is that a thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are flavored olive oils, like spicy for pizza and stuff like that. I have no idea about the market for it, I will look into it, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't quit your job until you've proven that your business idea can work (for example by building a MVP on the weekends and becoming at least Ramen profitable).

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely agree with you, problem is that this is not a SaaS, for an MVP I have actually to produce, store, package, label and ship a product.

This requires a number of man-hours and some expenses.

<comment><USER4> Sure, you could start by reselling artisanal olive oil over the internet. That way you don't have to start producing yourself. Shipping and handling and so on you'd have to do though.</comment></comment></comment>


Why a mono repo will speed up your development - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/why-a-mono-repo-will-speed-up-your-development-1109542d409e <comment><USER2> From Monorepo to Submodules everywhere and back to monorepo. We've gone full circle. (Again)

<comment><USER3> "We"?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to design and prototype a flexible 3D shape - <AUTHOR>

I would like to create a 3D shape out of a flexible material.  For example, imagine creating a form fitting plastic covering for your vehicle or lawnmower.  What tools or process could I use to design the shape and how could I go about prototyping the design? <comment><USER2> You're not giving enough context to give very good advice. Here's some basic ideas.

To design the shape, you can use a computer 3D CAD program, such as Inventor, SolidWorks, etc. Alternatively, you can just use foam, wax, wood, or some other easy to shape material and manually carve a buck (a buck is something that is the same shape as the final product you want, but only used to create a mold). If it's small you may be able to use a rapid prototyping machine (commonly called 3D printers) to create the buck, if you designed it on a computer.

To prototype, you can try creating a model out of a different material that's easy to shape, then using that buck to make a mold (perhaps out of silicone). After you have created a mold, you can then use mold release, and mix and pour in silicone to create your prototype of the shape you actually want.</comment>


Rubik's Cube Inspired Puzzles Demonstrate Math's "Simple Groups" - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=simple-groups-at-play

<comment><USER2> A little off subject, but this reminded my of one of my original advisors, Rich Lundgren, whose love of group theory was contagious. Also a great bridge player. I fondly remember playing for 4 hours while discussing the life of Galois in the back of his VW bus on the way to a math convention.

Here he is now:

<http://math.ucdenver.edu/~rlundgre/>

Thanks for the memories.</comment>