NASA's Balance Mass Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933607

<comment><USER2> >Balance mass should perform some type of scientific or technological function

So that's 661 lbs. I wonder how far we are from a solar powered 3D printer. Can we build a self-replicating robot of any kind that would work on Mars? What practical raw materials could a machine tap, if any? Imagine this platform being used to test off-planet manufacturing. Even on a small scale it would be pretty impressive.

Didn't the Mars society have a proposal for a low cost Mars mission with automated missions flown before-hand performing some kind of fuel extraction from Mars (hydrogen?) So that when humans landed, they'd tap these reservoirs of fuel instead of paying all this money to fly fuel with them. Even a small scale test of that would be a game-changer.

If that's too lofty, get 50 colleges to make mini robots/sensor/whatever with a 6lbs limit, kind of like we do with CubeSats today. That leaves NASA ~350lbs for a lander to safely drop these things. Having just one single winner seems a little short-sighted. I'd rather see lots of people given the chance to drop something on Mars than just one group.

<comment><USER3> No you can't create self replicating anything in that space. The big issue is the chip fabrication.

You might be able to test making rocket fuel, but the practical point of that is probably not great (we already know it will work) as you couldn't store a useful amount, and at the moment there is nothing in the pipeline that would use it.

Also only 150kg is dumped during entry. The other 150kg have a much rougher task to survive descent. (As the doc says "material surviving atmospheric reentry would impact the Mars surface approximately 10 minutes after separation at nearly 9,000 mph (4,000 m/s)."

The 150kg that is dumped during the entry phase is still going to have a real rough time of it mind, but it is an easier task.

Small cube-style sensor dispersal would be unlikely to survive, could pose substantial risk of main craft damage, and would be unlikely to have enough radio power. Also these things have to be _dense_ there is not a lot of volume to work with.

It is a challenge, because it is actually fairly challenging.

<comment><USER4> Even if its not fully self replicating being able to create the bulk of the structural mass and maybe even basic batteries would save a huge amount of fuel costs. Then you only need to bring control systems, motors, and radioisotope generators to mars rather then a bunch of multi ton robots.

<comment><USER3> Can't be done in that space or that mass. The hard part isn't the 3D printing (and that isn't easy, as anyone can tell you 3D printing in a controlled temperature environment with precision manufactured feed stock is still a bit touchy, using on site crafted feed in an environment that shifts 100 degrees Celsius day to night is going to be very challenging) it is the materials extraction and processing. You basically have to mine, refine, and mold Martian soil into whatever end product you have, and you have no fossil fuels to get things up to temp.

To do so at all would be a massive undertaking, to do so at any kind of scale in 300 kg (assuming that magically you ended up recalculating the trajectory or something to get all 300kg in one group on the surface) is, I'm pretty sure, beyond our technology at present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> Payloads replacing Balance mass should perform some type of scientific or technological function adding to our knowledge base while closely matching the volume and weight characteristics of the original Balance mass._

Um, the one being replaced was solid tungsten, which is almost twice as dense as lead. How is anything going to come close to matching that?

<comment><USER6> > Because of the high density of tungsten, it is unlikely that payload > concepts may be proposed that identically match the characteristics of the > MSL BMDs. To maximize the potential for innovative concepts while still > achieving the desired spacecraft EDL performance, NASA is requesting that > proposed concepts target 90% of the original MSL BMD mass while matching the > volumetric dimensions used for MSL.

Still, I agree with you. It's a very difficult target.

<comment><USER5> Where is that quote from?

It seems to me that the only way to hit the 90% target would be to include 270kg of dead-weight tungsten, and fit all the science into a 30kg budget.

<comment><USER7> The relevant constraint isn't mass, but volume. Essentially you're limited you to a cube 12 cm on a side (plus 1 cm³ for every 19.25 g of payload mass).

<comment><USER5> What are you basing that claim on? The quotes elsewhere in this thread seem to contradict what you're saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My first thought for something actually doable would be a group of compressed gas cannisters with highly reflective balloons attached to them. Very simple mechanics, all you need is a strong valve on a timer, so it can be made to survive the impact with the ground.

Once they're inflated, they would rise to relatively high up, so they can be carried off by winds. Because of the high reflectivity, we would be able to track them from orbiting imaging satellites and probably even from earth, teaching us more about wind speeds and flows on Mars.

One thing I'm not sure about is if this could meet the weight/space requirements.

</comment><comment><USER9> ExoLance project is supposed to use that dead mass to shoot darts under the Mars surface to look for signs of life:

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/exolance](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/exolance)

<comment><USER7> Is that actually their plan? I haven't found anything about balancing mass on their site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 300kgs of gold. To encourage someone to come looking for it.

<comment><USER11> The most expensive element you can currently send to Mars is platinum [1], which would equate to a value of roughly €10 million. All other things you could send either decay quickly (plutonium) or otherwise devalue over time (micro sd cards) or fluctuate too heavily to depend upon (microSD cards filled with Bitcoin private keys, LSD).

I wonder what would happen if a space agency went to Mars and dropped a minted coin valued €50 billion (or something) by the US Treasury/European Central Bank/National Bank of China and see who could retrieve it the quickest. That should be an interesting competition.

[1]: [http://what-if.xkcd.com/108/](http://what-if.xkcd.com/108/)

(Edited because for wrong terminology)

<comment><USER12> > The most expensive rare earth element you can currently send to Mars is > platinum (...)

> All other things you could send either decay quickly (platinum) (...)

I don't understand. Did you mean platinum in both places? In that case, I got confused by the "other". Or did you mean something other than platinum in one of the cases? Or am I just failing to comprehend? :)

<comment><USER13> Based on the xkcd link I'm sure he meant plutonium decays quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shape it into a kinetic projectile. With the orbital velocity it should make a crater exposing underground materials.

</comment><comment><USER15> A solid lump of duct tape. Guaranteed to be useful in future.

</comment><comment><USER16> 300kg of fireworks would make one heck of a display

<comment><USER17> Need atmosphere to combust though

<comment><USER18> No, most fireworks carry their own oxidizer. Otherwise even in Earth's atmosphere their power would be quite limited by airflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> is there any logic to bringing some fissile material to mars for use as a future fuel source? My gut instinct says no, but its among the only things I can think of that would be heavy enough. Uranium and Plutonium are pretty heavy.

The only other things I could think of would be common catalyst materials like platinum. Something that could be collected and used later by some future mission. Lead might be useful, as a battery component, but forming it would be problematic.

If it remains tungsten, and the impact is going to be at very very high speeds, do any of the other mars rovers have instruments capable of detecting the seismic waves produced? Could that provide us any details of the makeup of the crust? A 150kg tungsten mass would likely make quite a crater traveling at 9000MPH.

</comment><comment><USER20> Better still: figure out a way to land without needing 300kg of dead weight.

</comment><comment><USER21> Bottle-sized greenhouses.

<comment><USER22> A lot of care is put into making sure we don't track Earth microbes to Mars in the first place to make sure if we do find life we'll be pretty sure it's not just a hitchhiker flown in from Earth in the last 40 years of space exploration.

<comment><USER23> That's historically been true, but won't always be the case. NASA has talked about putting humans on Mars within a couple of decades. It may be sensible to try putting other living things on Mars in advance of humanity...

<comment><USER24> This! Having supplies/environment primed and ready when humans arrive could make the difference between a thriving colony and a miserable death.

<comment><USER22> The first colonies won't get any help from microbes on the surface of Mars, it's too cold and dry for much of anything useful from Earth to survive much less thrive. And the timescales for anything that could a) thrive and b) have a measurable impact on the lives of colonist are way longer than (I hope) any mission will land since it'd take decades/centuries for there to be a useful impact. Eventually yeah introducing life to Mars will be a useful prospect but we're talking about kickstarting a whole planet's ecosystem not something to do haphazardly or that will show large impacts in a single lifetime.

<comment><USER24> All we'd need is a bubble-greenhouse to be growing some wheat or something - don't have to terraform the entire place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why isn't this just given to amsat.org for a nice RF transponder? Could be the location is non-optimal for solar / antennas, but ...

<comment><USER26> These aren't going into orbit, these will be ejected during entry and landing. They will end up on the surface of Mars and they won't have the benefit of parachutes or rockets (unless you bring your own) slowing them down before they hit the ground. That's a very demanding proposition to expect any sort of system to survive, which is why it hasn't been done before and why this is being set up as an open challenge now. Maybe someone will come up with an intriguing possibility here that nobody else thought of, rest assured there are no widely obvious, easy answers to the problem as yet.

<comment><USER25> google for the amsat suitsat program, its remarkably similar other than re- entering earth instead of mars and being obsolete space suits rather than counterweights.

I'm well aware there are subtle technical differences but the mission profile isn't all that different. It would be an interesting place to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Railgun.

Use the momentum just before it goes into orbit to blast it into deep space with a message.

It could outpace Voyager easily.

<comment><USER28> Wouldn't the subsequent recoil push the MSL wayyyy off course?

<comment><USER22> Well, they /could/ factor the recoil into their insertion burn calculations. That's just a matter of the repeatability of the railgun's acceleration.

Of course the better way to outpace Voyager at this point is probably an ion engine, Voyager is sailing along at 17 km/s and the highest number I could find for a current railgun is 2.4-3 km/s (and these way waaay more than 300kg), that leaves the orbiter with >14km/s of the velocity required to beat Voyager. Each mission will come in at different orbital velocities but I found that Odyssey had a velocity of "5.907 kilometers per second" [1] before it's orbital insertion burn. Missions are more inclined to come in at or around their final orbital velocity (getting there faster requires more fuel for braking into orbit and more weight dedicated to that fuel requiring more fuel [repeat until your entire launch weight is fuel with a postage stamp as your probe]).

[1] [http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/mission/timeline/mtmoi/moid...](http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/mission/timeline/mtmoi/moidescription/)</comment></comment></comment>


Tech in Cuba, before the thaw - <AUTHOR> http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/13117/tech-cuba-reforms/

<comment><USER2> Heh, this quote brought back memories:

> They use a hack to break the countdown timer just before it expires, > creating an open-air LAN party.

I lived in Cuba from 2000-1, and back then the only way online was to buy cards granting a limited amount of dial-up access. I figured out that their accounting system restarted each day, and that if you stayed on over midnight, only the time in the second day was counted against you. So I was online every night from 8 to 12:01, losing only a minute of time. I also figured out the card didn't truly expired until the day after you used it up, so on your last day, you could be on and off as much as you wanted.

My honest guess is that these "hacks" are not only known by the workers but quite possibly created by them, so that they can get around the restrictions themselves. There's a tremendous amount of theft from workplaces in Cuba. How bored does an internet cafe worker have to get before they figure out a way to get online as much as they want. And if others figure it out, who cares?

</comment><comment><USER3> I visited 4 years ago as a tourist from México, our mid-level hotel had a PC however we didn't bother to try going online. If you get the chance, do visit soon. It's a special experience, when coming from a very different modern world. Seeing a place for yourself that you have heard so much about gives a healthy perspective. Plus they can use the CUCs, pronounced cuuk ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_convertible_peso](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_convertible_peso)).

</comment><comment><USER4> Nova Linux 4

[http://www.nova.cu/](http://www.nova.cu/)

Seems to be based on a Gnome Shell UI from a recent Ubuntu and would suggest _reasonably_ recent hardware because Gnome Shell based UIs need acceleration (lvmpipe is dreadfully slow).

I'm guessing that is what the official cyber cafes are using.

Side note: In UK, cyber-cafes and Internet centres are found mainly in less affluent areas.

</comment><comment><USER5> At least visit. It will be an eye opening experience.</comment>


MIT Startup Bootcamp Video - Robin Chase (Zipcar / GoLoco) - <AUTHOR> http://venturefizz.com/blog/startup-bootcamp-video-robin-chase-zipcar-goloco

<comment><USER2> You can see all of the talks from 2009 on our YouTube channel: <http://youtube.com/startupbootcamp></comment>


Security in Plan 9 (2002) - vezzy-fnord http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a PDF version of this? "Â" keeps showing up everywhere and I'm pretty sure it's a text encoding error

<comment><AUTHOR> Nevermind, found it: [http://plan9.bell- labs.com/sys/doc/auth.pdf](http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.pdf)</comment></comment>


Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/subject-write-emails-faster-smart-compose-gmail <comment><USER2> This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]).

I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ([http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop- dark-s...](http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-side- autocorrect/))

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references)

<comment><USER3> This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.

<comment><USER4> I feel like we are becoming less homogeneous. When I was a kid everyone watched cable television after dinner and everyone watched all of the same shows. Thursday night was Friends. Friday night was Full House and Family Matters, etc. Now I find everyone I know watches all kinds of shows, many of which I've never even heard of. Not to mention YouTube which is whole new layers upon layers of content. In an odd way, I actually kind of miss the "bonding" cable television used to give the populace (but not really).

I just chose shows as an example. But I feel the same happens with reading, music, technology, politics, etc.

<comment><USER5> Personally I think you're both right. We are becoming less homogeneous as a society, but the people within those subgroups interact much less than they used to, at least in person.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I think this is an accurate observation. There seems to be more variation on the fringe and more homogeneity closer to the center (or over large areas).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think a native English speaker would benefit much from this feature. But as someone for whom English is a second language, I am sure that I would have appreciated this when I was less fluent in English.

I am now trying to learn French, and I find myself searching to the most trivial sentences in linguee.fr. Learning grammar and vocabulary is one thing; knowing the idiomatic way to express one's message is an entirely different beast. Things that might seem obvious to a native speaker, e.g. the difference between "I'm fine" and "I'm good," are completely unapproachable for a non- native speaker for the first few years of using the language. Now that I am fluent in English, I would find this feature annoying. But I wish I had access to something like this 10 years ago.

<comment><USER7> Here is something funny. Google's Japanese Input on Android does English dictionary lookup when you're in romaji mode. And, here is the kicker: you have to use _exact spelling_ , or no dice.

<comment><USER8> The exact spelling for Japanese is a lot more reasonable, though. In English there are lots of spellings for the same pronunciation. In Japanese there is only one spelling for each pronunciation. If you get it wrong, then you are writing a different word and there is very little you can do in the general case.

Of course the problem with romaji is our habit of spelling things wrong :-) To highlight the irony, "romaji" in Japanese is ローマ字 (literally roman (Roma) characters (Ji)). The ロ is "ro", the マ is "ma" and the 字 is "ji". But there is one character left! ー extends the "o" sound for the "ro" for one extra "beat" (Japanese is a rhythmical language). I don't even know the correct transliteration for this other than "rōmaji". For Wāpuro rōmaji I think I would enter "roumaji", but I think this is not actually correct romanisation.

Even to this day I mispronounce that word because of stupid romaji :-)

<comment><USER7> My comment is about _English_ lookup when the keyboard is flipped into romaji mode, and the user isn't composing kana.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this?

How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing?

Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable.

PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fastmail? ([https://www.fastmail.com](https://www.fastmail.com))

<comment><USER10> At this point the only reason I haven't ditched Gmail is because that's the email address I've used everywhere. Changing email addresses is even more problematic than changing physical addresses these days.

The reason people are so upset is that it has a negative effect on the world even if people have the option to turn it off (and don't), and it has virtually no real benefit. It's the latest in the trend of tech companies trying to solve problems that don't exist, and creating new ones in the process.

At best, you'll never know if the person on the other end of the line outsourced their response to Google. At worst, people's mental capacity for expression and nuance will start to atrophy because they couldn't be bothered to manually relate to another human being.

<comment><USER11> I've recommended it elsewhere in similar threads, but a nice middle ground between self-hosted email (lots of work), and a straight-up Gmail/Yahoo/Fastmail/Hotmail/Etc account is to buy your own domain and set up your MX records in accordance with Fastmail's (or whoever's) instructions.

I've ported my email address / domain across several hosting providers now. I don't have to retrain anyone.

Obviously this doesn't help you now, but maybe you can start training people on to your new email@example.com email address to avoid this problem in the hypothetical future when Fastmail becomes dystopian and gross.

<comment><USER12> The best time to start using your own domain for email was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good lord that's scary. Rapidly ushering in the future where none of our words are our own.

Anyone ever read Roald Dahl's short story _The Great Automatic Grammatizator_ ? 10/10 strongly recommend, about an engineer who develops a computer-like machine able to compose fiction.

Googling "the great automatic grammatizator pdf" gives a .doc version as the top result, for me anyway.

<comment><USER14> Oh no, more autocomplete!

I don't see it as much scarier than tab-completion while programming or on a phone. As long as you're watching over it and fixing mistakes, it's just a convenience.

<comment><USER13> If it wrote the entire email for you, and you watched it to see there were no mistakes, I suppose that would just be a convenience too. But at some point you cross a line and your voice is lost. That line draws closer, inch by inch.

<comment><USER14> At that point it shades into ghostwriting, which can be done well or badly. If done well, it should be imitating how you'd write it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> People are saying this is 'basically the same as autocorrect or predictive text'. It's not. Autocorrect doesn't make any creative decisions for you, whereas this does.

That is to say: we think at the level of words, not letter-by-letter. When I make a typo, autocorrect corrects what my hands do to match what my brain is thinking. My brain still has primacy. This thing sits at the level of words and even sentences: if it's autocorrect, it's working to correct what my brain is thinking. Which is creepy and sad.

It's a little bit more like predictive text I admit. But because predictive text only suggests one word at a time, there's little semantic meaning to a suggestion and it's rare that I have my thoughts distracted or changed because of it. It's still largely a convenience tool. Suggesting a full sentence is shaping the direction of your thought, which is very different.

I'm still horrified that Google has put this out.

</comment><comment><USER16> These types of tools worry me, because I put a lot of value in organic spontaneous conversation.

Does anyone remember the old days of Google search maybe 10-15 years ago? You would put in a search query, and often you would find something interesting in a serendipitous manner.

These days the machine tries to figure out what you like, and what makes them the most money / is most popular and keeps feeding you that and nothing else.

You get trapped in a filter bubble, and nothing ever seems to change in your searches. The same sites, the same quality of content (often low), the same authors.

What ever happened to running into the blog of someone who is totally unknown, but put a lot of effort into researching and creating an amazing and informational blog post? Quality well above average, maybe it was their only post. One topic they spent years researching and distilling for the world to see.

This is what you will lose in your conversations, just like it has been lost in search.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is awful. We need _less_ mediation and commodification of our personal interactions, not more. What is the use of this? At best this is a solution searching for a problem, at worst it's an attempt to standardize our communication in a way which makes semantic meaning easier to analyse.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. Rather than something customers asked for, this feels like something driven by the culture at Google: "AI all the things" and "build new things" to get promoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Side note:

How is this blog design by Google considered "good"? Between the dropdown from the top when you scroll and the stickied footer, about a 1/3 of the page is easily readable (shoved into about 500px).

I'm not a designer. But this stuff is bad. How is this greenlit at Google?

<comment><USER19> You're right the related articles stickied at the bottom is super-distracting, it draws the eye, and has to be dealt with before you can continue reading. It's an interruption plain an simple - not as bad as a layered modal - but it still introduces an element of _work_ to the reading experience.

The really frustrating thing is it's for _related articles_ and it's shown first thing on the page. How about giving me a god damn minute to read the article I clicked on before prompting me to read something else. Related articles are fine. But how about putting them at the bottom of the page? I guess this is an interface a team of geniuses creates when they optimize for engagement instead of content.

This is definitely an anti-pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lol. This is exactly like the plot of the book Avogadro Corp. where a Google- like company creates an email-composing system which then leads directly to the singularity as the program pursues it's own agenda.

</comment><comment><USER21> Okay, I guess I've got the contrarian take this time around. As a CEO/founder, I spend an astonishing amount of time writing emails that are mostly the same. Things like the following:

Dear [name],

[pleasantry].

I'm writing to check in on [$$non-automatable follow-up action$$]. [Have you been able to take care of this yet? Let me know if I can be of assistance.]

[best regards / thanks]

[signature]

...

For me, things like Gmail's one/two-sentence responses on mobile are _honestly_ a godsend. Things like Smart Compose are similarly incredibly valuable. I'm not trying to be the world's best orator, I'm just trying to bang off the dozens of emails I need to get taken care of each day as quickly as possible.

<comment> et-al Seems like you want a mail merge feature, which does exist for emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this kill EasyMail (YC W18) ??

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650)

<comment><USER23> Interesting that the comments on that link for this technology are much more positive than the comments here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Aha, by training a machine learning algorithm on everybody else's emails, you can now write what everybody else wrote.

It's a new generation of Clippy! I'VE GOT THIS, THANKS!

</comment><comment><USER25> "I apologize for such an algorithmically-generated letter letter - I didn't have time to write a non-algorithmically-generated one."

― Mark Twain's Gmail

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand the sentiment of the comments here (I'm no google fan!). Isn't that just the natural evolution of word prediction like on a smartphone?

<comment><USER2> Yes. But let's extend that evolution -- if an AI can pretty much write a solid email, don't we basically become like a safety driver in a self-driving car? Not alluring.

<comment><USER27> Let the AI handle the form, let the human handle the content. If this leads to better or more efficient communication, all the better.

In the car analogy, as long as people get where they want to be, what is the issue?

<comment><USER2> But here we're letting AI handle the content.

The issue is agency -- like the God of the margins, our agency being relegated to margins at the very least raises some questions for me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Smart reply/compose might be the most dystopian thing I've seen come out of Google, which is saying something. Beyond the obvious reduction in conversational authenticity, it threatens to homogenize our voices themselves.

I would imagine that after you've been saying "close enough" for a while, the smart replies start to warp the way you phrase things mentally, instead of the other way around.

<comment><USER10> This comment already seems quaint after having seen the Duplex demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm the PM for this and the author of the article. Happy to answer any questions, with the exception that I can't comment on future roadmap.

<comment><USER29> Hi, thanks for offering to answer questions. Did you consider the language homogenisation question and if so, how did you answer it?

<comment><USER28> It's a great question and one of my early concerns as well.

For most people email is a utility. The diversity of language in the middle chunk of the distribution isn't very high today and the biggest complaint most people have about email is how much time it takes. Most of our users aren't writing poetry, they are doing every day business transactions and we can help them be much more productive. Think how many times you've written "hope to hear from you soon", or some equivalent.

For the tails of the distribution Smart Compose is not helpful. We address this primarily with a triggering model, we aim to only show suggestions when we're quite confident that you're in the 'just getting things done' mode.

And if you're the type of person who always has a lot of personality in your emails, the feature probably isn't a great fit for you. Today it's opt-in, and there will always be a setting even if we turn it on by default.

<comment><USER29> Okay interesting. Did you get stats on how diverse the majority of users' language is?

I think there's also a second aspect. If I understand correctly, you're referring to the homogenisation of a single user's language (where 'Hope to hear from you soon' loses variation). I think the second aspect is homogenisation of language across many people. Did you look at tailoring the suggestions? In England there must be 30 ways to say goodbye, and this slang arguably is part of regional identity (although I don't know how much made it across to email).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I go out of my way to _avoid_ banal phrases in my emails.

<comment><USER31> Banal pleasantries cost nothing (less than nothing with this new feature), and at worst are ignored and at best make the receiver feel better about you and the important text that follows.

<comment><USER32> They can have a cost if they dilute the core intent or message of the email: the reader has a higher cognitive overhead before understanding how to reply or what action to take. I spend a lot effort stripping out fluff and filler fron my mails, as a courtesy to the recipient!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder where the training data comes from? Is it from my account only, my organization account, or...?

If I type "Sure, the password is" will it auto suggest some passwords from other people's previously sent emails?

<comment><USER34> If you use Gmail (or message people on Gmail), your messages have been part of Google's bulk training data since Inbox rolled out with Smart Replies in 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wasn't this being done by a YC combinator funded company, doing it as a gmail plugin, within the last few years? did they get bought out? or are they now competing against google?

</comment><comment><USER36> I wrote a tool that helps you do this anywhere by using Google's autocomplete API: [https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete](https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete)

It also supports DuckDuckGo, so for the privacy conscious it should work fine.

Unlike the complaint that Google's product shrinks the lexicon, Anycomplete actually expands your lexicon by allowing you to type words/phrases you have an idea of but don't know how to spell.

</comment><comment><USER37> I could write emails faster if, when composing an email, the "New Message" box did not cover up the email that I am reading and wanting to respond to. There used to be a function to tear off the "New Message" box, but I guess that was too confusing for people? Now I have to open another browser window if I want to look at an email and compose one at the same time.

I'd love to know if there is a good work around or trick to have the compose window open up in a separate window.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is just extended auto-complete with the unintended reminder of how predictable/cliche your writing is.

</comment><comment><USER39> Only if your recipient is a bot too. Having said that could work very well for 'business emails, where essentially we're writing in the same tone than personal email'

PS: I'm loving the idea and let's hope it can get tailored to ones individual needs

</comment><comment><USER40> This reminds me of waitbutwhy's article on neuralink[0]. Language is an inefficient means of communication. It require niceties and good grammar just to get a simple point across, especially with unfamiliar people. The question is, do we really want to optimize communication?

It feels disingenuous to optimize only your end of the conversation, but it could also be really helpful. Hopefully we find a more openly efficient means of communication soon.

[0]: [https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)

</comment><comment> Paul-ish Maybe this will cause us to think less about we write, or maybe it will allow us to quickly write the things that don't require much thought so we can think more about the things that are important.

<comment><USER23> So far I have found it helpful for the latter. It has not got in the way when I'm trying to communicate something that requires nuance or careful expression, but it has kicked in with suggestions when it sees I am heading towards some banal pleasantry that is expected at certain points in many emails - the sort of thing I don't want to have to think too much about.

It also seems to pick things that I would say - not sure if this is learned from my own mail, but if so then it is actually reinforcing my individuality in some way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> In the new equilibrium of people sending lots of automated emails, how would the receiver of an email distinguish between a canned response and a real response? I suspect the incentive to properly signal your email as real can reduce adoption of "Smart Compose" for non-trivial communication. So that leaves us with use cases like scheduling meetings, quick updates or alerts - most of which are already automated in some extent through notification and logging.

</comment><comment><USER42> Since many commenters seem to be concerned about the possibility of this homogenizing written communication. What if this system implemented something similar to an epsilon-greedy strategy where say 5% of the time it actually recommended a phrase outside of ordinary writing patterns, but was still grammatically correct and semantically the same?

I think if something like that was implemented this could be a cool way to introduce people to new and different writing patterns.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why do I want this?

At this point we might as well do away with the pre-structured responses and just send single a single emoji as a response. It'd get the same message across.

</comment><comment><USER44> I was happy to open the comments and see everyone writing approximately what I was thinking.

Almost made me feel there would be no point writing something similar myself.

</comment><comment><USER45> I quite like this incremental approach towards AI, of providing a suggesting assistant rather than trying to solve the full problem at once.

</comment><comment><USER46> Is this some kind of belated April Fool's joke?

</comment><comment><USER47> The title reminds me how Google effectively crippled fast writing of emails a couple of years back, when they fouled up the Compose textbox with fancy JS/HTML hackery. Can't write & paste an email to the Compose box, can't invoke an "edit-text-in-external-editor" browser function on it. There's smart in simplicity.

</comment><comment> Digit-Al Those of you complaining about this have obviously never had to deal with the unintelligible gibberish that can sometimes be spewed out by desperate customer support staff on tight deadlines. If this can even begin to help them write sentences that are readable and understandable then I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is very neat technologically. I can't imagine it is easy to do predictive text and have it be meaningful. I suspect that that will be the case here. It will be useful for a narrow subset, mostly rote business things. Otherwise, it will just be an annoyance.

</comment><comment><USER49> I love tech, but it's kind of scary, I think we are heading towards a dystopian future.

</comment><comment><USER50> > Over the next few weeks, Smart Compose will appear in the new Gmail for > consumers, and will be made available for G Suite customers in the workplace > in the coming months.

Weird to roll out to free consumers first. What's the reasoning behind this?

<comment><USER51> Almost everything rolls out to free consumers first. The consumer version is like a regular stable release channel, G Suite is like an enhanced product built on top of the latest LTS.

<comment><USER50> Thanks for the clarification!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think Google creating reincarnation of MSFT's clippy - solution looking for problem.

These "intelligent" hints of what someone think I likely want to express - quickly becoming a distracting nuisance.

Hopefully it'll be optional feature.

</comment><comment><USER53> In their defense, I do like the quick answer buttons sometimes. There's lots of cases where "Okay, thanks!" or "Got it, will do" is all I need and if it offers that, great, one click and done.

</comment><comment><USER54> "It looks like you're writing an email! Would you like help?"

</comment><comment><USER55> The "smart" autofilling of details like address and subject matter are interesting and possibly useful, but I am disgusted by the idea of letting google talk for me.

</comment><comment><USER56> Could anyone direct me to research material of how to implement a system like this for a single language, or a collection of documents?

</comment><comment><USER57> Is this not going to be a part of Inbox?

</comment><comment><USER58> What's the difference between this and auto complete? I think there is a bit of overreacting here.

</comment><comment><USER59> Yet another reason to avoid Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER60> An so it begins... To anyone who has read Daemon by Daniel Suarez this sounds very creepy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh god this is even worse [https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant- impersonating-a-hum...](https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant- impersonating-a-human-is-scary-as-1825861987)

</comment><comment><USER61> Now where did they get all that training data...

</comment><comment><USER62> Feels like auto-complete from any IDE - love it.

</comment><comment><USER63> I want this for code, not email ...

<comment><USER64> I'm actually not opposed to this feature in gmail. For code, it already exists, and it's terrible. "Hey, don't you want to catch this error?" Then people catch an error without actually doing anything about the error condition, causing another error to occur later, harder to diagnose.

In code, this sort of thing makes it easy to write programs that are skimmed, not read, with lots of tiny cracks for bugs to hide in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> What's the point of humans

<comment><USER65> From "Echopraxia"

>"You think this matters"... [Valerie the transhuman]

>"You think so, too," Moore [baseline human] began. "Or-"

>"-you wouldn't have reacted," he and Valerie finished in sync.

>He tried again: "Were they under formal con...," they chorused. He trailed off, an acknowledgement of futility. The [transhuman] even matched his ellipsis without missing a beat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Clippy 2.0.

</comment><comment><USER67> I feel like I could type these robotic responses as fast if not faster than it takes Google to "help" me.

<comment><USER68> it's not for you. it's for grandma

<comment><USER69> I don't think so, I think this is for professional users. Grandma is not gonna realize that the slightly greyed out text is not already there, and also that tab actually writes out the text for her.</comment></comment></comment>


The lifesaver app for delinquent boyfriends, the disorganized, and forgetful - <AUTHOR> http://twotoasters.com/ideas/2013/introducing-the-h-bloom-gifts-app-for-iphone/

<comment><USER2> or "The lifesaver app for all people who have a hard time spending their money fast enough."</comment>


RIM reports Q4 miss; Balsillie resigns as director, CTO out - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/03/29/rim-reports-q4-miss-balsillie-resigns-as-director-cto-out/ <comment><USER2> RIMM made some major mistakes but was too arrogant as the market leader to take the competition seriously.

1) They Osborne'd their product line by prematurely showing off new products that weren't ready.

2) They tried to meet the iPad head-on in the consumer market by calling their device a Playbook but their strength is in enterprise. Thus the marketing message came out confused and having a pompous "Amateur hour is over" campaign sealed their own fate.

3) Repeated, worldwide BBM network failures that went on for extended periods of time, alienating its most loyal customers when RIMM needed them the most. This was their core competency and they neglected it. Having alternatives on competing phones like iMessage, WhatsApp etc didn't help.

<comment><USER3> Talking about terrible marketing: they're running an aggressive television campaign in India right now showing a bunch of singing business men in suits chiming "We are the blackberry boys...." <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LducWACdt88>

This is one of the most obnoxious, male-centric ads I've ever seen and would never float in the west. Sure it's India... but it's sad that a western company thinks it's cool to run something that doesn't fly back home in S. Asia.

<comment><USER4> Oh please. I often see female centric ads on western tv and I dont get offended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Witness failure: many people even 2 years ago said the co-CEO's need to either clean up shop or walk out... now that RIM's market is entirely ceded to Android/iOS... NOW they start shaking things up?

Chances are, RIM will never be great again - they lost their edge, then sat on their hands for years living off yesterday's big hits. Question is, do they have anything that a acquiring company might find worth purchasing?

<comment><USER6> "The company also said that it will dial back efforts in multiple consumer markets and refocus its efforts on the enterprise market." -- I think this a smart move because they make business-oriented devices, not entertainment devices, but it might be too late.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's ever too late in a tech market as long as your company still has enough funds to launch and market one more product. After all, if you'd looked at pre-iEverything Apple a few years ago and claimed they would be the most valuable company in the world today, most people would have laughed.

That said, RIM clearly has an uphill struggle ahead of it. They need a smash hit, which means they need people with vision at the top. They have limited funds for repeated attempts, so unlike the Microsofts and Googles of this world they can't afford to keep throwing stuff at the wall until they find something that sticks. They've had a string of PR and management disasters in recent years, which matters far more to a business-based market than to consumers. And with the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all now heavily invested in mobile technology and competing for most of the biggest market segments, it's going to be tough to find a niche that is small enough to make a defensible foothold and yet big enough to expand out into a serious player again.

My guess is that they need a new kind of device, some novel form factor or combination of features that creates or brings credibility to a whole new market the way Apple has done more than once. There _are_ pain points with a lot of the current generation mobile devices, and in particular those devices that rely mostly or entirely on a touchscreen are always going to be primarily consumption devices, which means mobile content creation is an area with potential. RIM actually has a very good track record of, for example, combining real keys (albeit mini ones) with great displays (before the turkey that was the Torch, the half-height displays at the top of high-end Blackberry phones were pushing the resolution frontier long before Retina came along).

Another possibility, and one that is not mutually exclusive with the above, is that RIM could aim for a clean, professional, businesslike UI. Not everyone wants Facebook integration and iFart apps. Personally I don't even want those on my personal phone, and I certainly have no interest in having them in my business devices. On the other hand, I would love to have some mobile gear that started with basically nothing preinstalled except for an OS and comms tools, that had tools available to interoperate with whatever grown-up systems I want to in an easy and secure way, and that had an "app store" with professional software that did useful things. If the same organisation supplying that mobile gear also happens to provide useful back office products and native and/or web-based interfaces that let me talk to them from my desktop/laptop/other large-scale devices, so much the better. Again, RIM probably have more talent in-house in this sort of area than a lot of companies, if they can figure out how to harness it.

Oh, and if RIMM shares are at $500 in five years because they've cornered the "in-house cloud" market, someone please let me know so I can tell them where to send the cheque. ;-)

<comment><USER8> _> I don't think it's ever too late in a tech market as long as your company still has enough funds to launch and market one more product._

This is something we see over and over again in this industry. Yet, people still don't believe it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was a coop student working at RIM in 2007 when the iPhone came out. Their complacency and ignorance ensured I found work elsewhere post-graduation.

</comment><comment><USER10> RIM's greatest issue has been LEGACY.

RIM's focus on the enterprise ensures that a large number of their staff has to build hacks to ensure their software's backwards compatibility. Forget the entire "Flash as being dated" debacle and think more to the tune of Microsoft's Exchange servers and address databases from the 80s which RIM has to be compatible with.

Naturally, companies must decide whether they want to ditch this side of the business. RIM tried to dip its toes in both. To be fair, they were trapped into supporting legacy services. Legacy isn't something that can spinned off. For RIM, they would have had to cut out a huge portion of their business to try to innovate.

By comparison, Newer players in the mobile phone space (Apple, Google etc.) didn't/don't have to deal with legacy. That's why they have such a small presence in older large enterprise. Microsoft's mobile side had similar issues to deal with but I think that their newer platform has eliminated their legacy components so there is hope.

As a Canadian, I'm very sad to see RIM die off. U Waterloo will also suffer tremendously. With SRED going away, I wonder what the Canadian tech scene will look like overall. I think I'll consolidate my thoughts on this and write a blog post or something.

<comment><USER11> This may not be a great place to make this request, but can someone write up a detailed blog post on how the new SR&ED changes are going to affect us? I would love some more perspective on this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> RIM will become another case study MBA students read about when discussing the Innovator's Dilemma.

</comment><comment><USER13> It looks like the new RIM CEO has opened his first envelope.

</comment><comment><USER14> For RIM to come back, just having a new OS (BB 10) and shiny hardware is not going to be enough.

As an aside, Nokia, a company with similar brand recognition - albeit in a different market segment - is trying to claw back into the game is using Windows Phone 7 and Lumia 800, 900 series of phones. If I see this correctly, Nokia isn't betting on just the new hardware and Microsoft's OS (and financial muscle); they are also implicitly optimistic about Windows Marketplace and other content (XBox?) gradually becoming seamlessly available across it's product range. Content and services are the key; a decent piece of hardware and a decent OS should be agiven.

The reason I brought up this is that for RIM to make a comeback, they need to be able to offer something more than Apple is offering at the moment; that's the only way to entice users away from a platform they've invested in. In my opinion, the only company that can provide RIM with an edge in content and services is Amazon.

I wonder if RIM and Amazon can cut some sort of a deal. Amazon already makes a tablet that is fairly successful; the prospect of mobile phones with the Silk browser running on them, seems quite interesting.

<comment><USER15> Have you used the Silk browser? It performs like a pig. Turning off "Silk" is the only way to use it. Even then, it is substandard, in my opinion. If I have my Kindle Fire in my hands and need to look something up online I will usually put it down and reach for my iPhone on the nightstand. It is better than nothing on a device I use primarily for reading books, but I would steer clear of any phone running it.

<comment><USER14> I should have clarified; yes indeed, Silk does perform like a pig _currently_ , but I like the idea behind it, and I believe that Amazon has the engineering chops to pull it off.

Immediate access to the mobile phone market along with a huge amount of data that can go Amazon's way if they fix Silk, might make a partnership seem mutually beneficial. (Also, since the mobile phone market is still carrier dependent, Amazon will have a harder time penetrating that market segment on its own)

<comment><USER16> Silk has the same ideas behind it which Opera has been pushing with Opera Mini/Mobile and Opera Turbo for years. There is no reason why Amazon cannot enjoy the same kind of tremendous marketshare as Opera does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Serious question: What viable options do they have besides being acquired?

<comment><USER18> The time for small course corrections has long since passed.

The main option for them is to become smaller, and to do one thing well. Their perceived strengths are mobile messaging (BBM) and "security". If they became a software only company then they would be at the mercy of their (fickle) partners to get it deployed. When they are playing the hardware game then there is ferocious competition and you have to do a full software stack (proprietary or adapting Android/WinMo).

In their position I would do exactly one hardware device that is a best of breed, adapt Android for it and have a layer of BBM/security on top. I'd try to get the BBM/security licensed by as many manufacturers as possible and use the own hardware as a showcase. Eventually the hope would be to get out of the hardware business - it exists purely to ensure there is at least one way to market.

There is so much to be done on the communication side with lots of half assed solutions. On the security side consider running an IT department or being a consumer and a device is stolen. Now list what sensitive information was on the device.

<comment><USER19> This. Android is posing a serious problem for businesses as people demand to BYO with phones that are a huge melting pot of unknown versions, vulnerabilities, levels of support for exchange, etc. They need to provide their stack as a virtualized system that can work on any Android handset and then have their own analogue of Google "experience" devices where they do the whole thing. They can make some serious hay out of guaranteeing updates, security and support which the Android vendors largely are either ignoring or failing at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey guys, remember: They make tools, not toys.

Too bad everyone else is busy buying phones that can do both.

<comment><USER21> "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

I find it incredible that RIM or their customers did do all of these things. In fact, a lot of the major phone companies did this, even Nokia and Microsoft.

<comment><USER22> This is the most important topic in this discussion and maybe the most topic for any startup or company in general. How do prevent your business from becoming obsolete? Is that even possible in the long run for IT firms? How about staying hungry or at least not becoming arrogant like RIM?

<comment><USER23> It doesn't matter. Everything dies.

You get hugely successful, defining a new product. You build a very effective business to capitalize on your product. The state you were operating in when you designed/built your product is _by necessity_ baked into your business. Life, for a time, becomes Very Good.

But the world state changes. This is inevitable. You don't care — there's enough money in what you do so that changing your business just isn't _rational_. So you keep on keeping on, and your culture continues to grow in the direction allowed — fighting to keep the status quo, even as the rest of the world is moving on.

And then at some point, once the world state you built into your company (that has been profitable for you since day one) and the current world state diverge to the point that you can't even _understand_ the change required, and you are going to be staring down obsolescence. There's nothing you can do. Your entire company is predicated on fitting a context that no longer exists. You can't understand what's happened, because to understand what has happened your company would have to be a very different company.

And you die.

<comment><USER24> > It doesn't matter. Everything dies.

"Why do all companies die, wheras almost all cities survive? You can drop an atom bomb on a city and it will survive".

[http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_o...](http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations.html)

<comment><USER25> Excellent TED talk. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Im am not sorry about the loss to BB. They totally dropped the ball on the whole company and there brand!

</comment><comment><USER27> In an attempt to alleviate the craptuclar collection of software, RIM gave out free Playbooks to Android Developers.

Having now played with one I don't think it's that bad of a device, and I certainly trust it more than an iPad or Android tablet.

However RIM is missing key software that they should have provided.

1) The PDF reader works, but it's functionality is as bad as the Adobe Reader on Android.

2) The browser experience has thus far been not so bad. Things work for me on the Playbook that crash on Android browsers. A desktop mode for the browser (like Dolphins, but without the crashing) is necessary.

3) A remote desktop client?

4) A VNC client?

5) Busybox!

6) Putty!

7) Python and/or Ruby

<comment><USER28> Saying the PDF reader on Playbook works is like saying a bucket of cold water works for having a shower.

I actually enjoy reading on a Playbook more than an iPad or a Kindle. But the PDF reader is abysmal software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Their crown jewels are its BBM framework. They should simply make a paid BBM app for iphone, android,winmo,etc. I think they will find a substantial userbase of people who would love to pay a monthly subscription to be able to.use BBM on a non-blackberry device.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if they'll spin out QNX.

</comment><comment><USER31> _RIM said it shipped 11.1 million BlackBerry smartphones and more than 500,000 PlayBook tablets last quarter._

I absolutely refuse to believe those numbers. I've seen noone with a Blackberry tablet and I'm surrounded by geeks at home and at work.

Spotting Android-tablets is hard enough (I have one and besides that I know one other guy IRL which does as well), but Playbooks are practically non- existent.

<comment><USER32> Shipped does not always equal sold. They could be devices sitting on a palette in the back of some warehouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Imagine a device with Android as the OS and RIMs amazing, bullet proof, indestructible, long life batteried hardware.

</comment><comment><USER34> Well blackbberry you were a tech company who refuse to innovate really I only see on of two possibilities become a android OEM or fail and get Google, Apple, or some other company to buy your name and patents. It's sad because they had plenty of time, but scoffed at ever lose the smartphone wars with such a significant lead.

<comment><USER35> I don't see how becoming an Android OEM can't be a win-win situation. Blackberry keep their brand and don't have an OS to maintain (maybe just a handful of Blackberry Android applications instead).

<comment><USER13> I'm sure embracing Android would be a win for RIM, but would it be too little, too late?</comment></comment></comment>


After Nearly 100 Hours in Line, San Francisco's First iPhone 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.taskrabbit.com/blog/taskrabbit-news/after-nearly-100-hours-in-line-san-franciscos-first-iphone-5/

<comment><USER2> And, a few hours later, I queued up at the same Apple store and walked out of the store 20 minutes later with my iPhone 5. I suppose you can never know in advance, but this time they still had hundreds in stock at noon.

<comment><USER3> The scarcity of iPhones at launch is a fabrication. The primal human instinct to be lured by scarcity even trumps rational minds.

<comment><USER2> It's not always a fabrication, it's just difficult to predict. It was quite difficult to get an iPhone 4S for many days after its release.

<comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, why is there an emphasis on getting the iPhone so soon after release (unless you are a developer who needs it for testing)? You'll have your phone for 2 years -- why it is worth spending 2 whole work-weeks in line to get the phone 5 days earlier?

<comment><USER5> Wrong, if you are the average Apple fanboy (and oh, don't get me started, there are plenty of those, I sit for lunch every day with two of them) you'll have the phone until the next one comes out. Why? Don't ask me, I guess it's the success of Apple's selling its brand as a 'lifestyle'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, that is some epic PR right there. Nice job. I really like a creative campaign like that.

I was sort of wondering why one of the live flight tracking services didn't jump on the Shuttle fly by in the Bay Area today to provide live tracking of its location.

</comment><comment><USER7> Saw the line outside the Apple store here in Pasadena this morning and thought "Task Rabbit".

Now the REAL question, how much did this guy make for his 90 hours of standing in line???

<comment><USER8> I was going to say, "it's in the article" then I went back and realized it's not in the post (I think it was in previous posts about it).

Kinda surprised since they could have done a lot of PR with, "THIS GUY MADE 1500!"

<comment><USER9> I thought so too, but it turns out he only made about 16.70 an hour. All things considered it was decent enough for a one time thing, but thats really not that much money.

<comment><USER4> Many people have lots of trouble finding even $10 jobs these days! Plus, those are the people who are most likely to sign up to be TaskRabbits. Furthermore, he can read, sleep, play videogames, etc. while getting paid.

I'd say he got a great deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I genuinely don't get it. Can someone please explain why the hell anyone would queue up like this?

Food, water, medicine, supplies - yes.

Shiny telephone - no.

<comment><USER11> They consider it fun, something to do, a chance to hang around for a little bit with some people that are interested in some of the same things they're interested in.

<comment><USER12> This. When the iPhone 4 came out, I hung out in the queue for two hours even though I wasn't planning to purchase a phone (I was keeping a friend company who was in it for the long haul). It was a lot of fun and we met some cool people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't this PR work underline the darker side of TaskRabbit, or at least clearly demonstrate that TakRabbit is leveraging income disparity to profit? That is, some people either want or need money enough that they are willing pull a 90 hour shift so someone else with spare money can get an expensive phone arbitrarily early.

<comment><USER14> So what's wrong with this? People are not being forced to do anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really well done promotion and PR! You can see that TaskRabbit PR even hired TaskRabbits to create further good visuals: "TaskRabbits gave pastries to San Francisco's iPhone 5 fans." This sort of focus on visuals is the mark of a true professional.

And also, all photos were posted online and are available for reporters to use for future stories. (The only thing that could make this better is if higher- rez versions were available online, for reporters to download and use in future stories.) Great job, guys!!

</comment><comment><USER16> In an alternate universe, I spent five minutes pre-ordering my iPhone and had it by 9:30 a.m. I feel like such a chump. I should have hired a TaskRabbit to do that for me.

</comment><comment><USER17> This was a great PR stunt by task rabbit!</comment>


Computer Moves - <AUTHOR> http://reallifemag.com/computer-moves/ <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure I read that even human computer hybrids are falling to pure computers in chess these days, but this author claims otherwise, and now I don't know what to think.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. I'd like to know this as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Deep Blue did not use brute force search. Like all successful chess engines, it used heuristics to estimate the value of board positions, and focused its search on the positions that looked most promising. A truly "indiscriminate" search would waste so much time on losing positions that even I could beat it.

<comment><USER5> Yes. The challenge now is to come up with a game for which heuristics don't work :)

<comment><USER6> Considering heuristics is the only tool humans have, such a game is inherently unplayable.

<comment><USER7> Heuristics are also what make games fun and learnable. "I am thinking of a number between 1 and 10e256" has no learnable heuristics, for example.

<comment><USER8> 17?

<comment><USER7> Darn it! You got me :-)

What's most interesting to me is that if the _human_ is picking the random number, there _are_ heuristics you could use to guess it. A birthday, for example. A favorite number perhaps. But perfect play is easy and requires brute force search.

<comment><USER9> One of my favorite numbers is 355/113 but it's still hard to guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a simple strategy which has allowed me to win every game of Nomic [1] which I have ever played.

My strategy is to propose rule changes which allow every player with a nonzero score to be declared a winner.

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

</comment><comment><USER10> I mean, in the end, it is just humans beating other humans at chess because it takes other humans to write the algorithms. See what I have done here?</comment>


AWS Start-Up Challenge 2010 Finalists - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/aws-start-up-challenge-2010-finalists-1.html

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or do these businesses sound kind of boring? I read their pitches, and after the first sentence my eyes began to glaze over - I couldn't really tell what some of their businesses were all about. Loggly and zoombu (not a fan of the name) seem to be exceptions, since I knew exactly what they would do for me if I signed up.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely:

>> Compass Labs has a team of talented, accomplished individuals with strong expertise in Web and social media technologies, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, and - not surprisingly - complex algorithms. Compass Labs is propelling a paradigm shift in people's online experiences. To support our groundbreaking efforts, we have created an equally innovative organizational structure: flat, non-hierarchical, and designed for optimal collaboration.

So what? No one gives a crap how awesome you and your company are. What's your business?</comment></comment>


Google Said to Be in Talks to Acquire Travel Software Maker ITA  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aJXdCOdgJmw4 Bloomberg is reporting that Google is in talks to buy ITA Software, in Kendall Sq. Cambridge.  The company makes travel management software and is one of the largest Lisp shops out there.<p>If GOOG buys them, will they force a rewrite in Python?  I'm under the impression that ITA funds a lot of development/creation of tools for Common Lisp, so what impact might that have on the Lisp ecosystem? <comment><USER3> Nothing would happen to Lisp. A few people would keep using it and a lot of people would keep arguing about it. Maybe Mahmud's right and there would be a new diversity of real-world applications; that would be nice.

A more pressing question is what would happen to QPX, ITA's flight search system. Google's policy of making acquired companies rewrite their software according to Google's standards would, if applied, mean rewriting QPX in C++, Java, or Python. Given how often QPX has been cited as a system that leverages the power of Common Lisp to do complex things, that would be an interesting thing to follow. I bet Google wouldn't do that, though. For an acquisition of this size (the article says $1B), the rules are probably different. (Did they rewrite Youtube?) I must say it would be neat to see Google break their no- Lisp policy.

(As a side note, it's true that if you don't care that much about continuing to evolve a complex Lisp system, it's often possible to rewrite it in a less powerful language; you just end up with a larger and less changeable codebase.)

<comment><USER4> Orkut.com is in .NET. Isn't it?

<comment><USER5> It was ported from .NET early on, as soon as it became too successful to scale. They kept the .aspx URLs so links wouldn't be broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A hundred Lisp startups would bloom. ITA is the blackhole of Lisp programmers; a good chunk of them work there.

<comment><USER7> It might be bad for Common Lisp; I can see a number of them switching to Clojure. In his talk last year (NOTE, seems to be gone: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8>) Dan Weinreb gave Common Lisp only about another 10 years and guessed that Clojure is the future of Lisp.

Which is my guess as well: Common Lisp is stuck in standardization amber prior to it dealing with too many things that are critical today (concurrency and network programming being the two biggest ones), Scheme is in a mess due to the mess with R6RS and moves slowly. At least it moves, unlike CL, but it's so slow there isn't even yet a standard for multidimensional arrays; at this point I expect it to continue in its niches of education and language research for a long time.

<comment><USER8> The main thing that attracts me to Clojure is the abundance of java libraries and standard APIs and corresponding documentation available.

To do anything useful with common lisp I had to spend a lot of time researching which CL supported which APIs, and stuff like GUIs and SQL weren't standardised (or maybe they were, but finding implementations of the standards was difficult).

Contrast this to my experience with Clojure, where I had a REPL running in a text widget within an hour of starting to play. Sure, most of the code isn't very Lisp-y ATM but then it's mostly direct library calls. As I learn more I expect I will start using macros for things like GUI building (or perhaps someone has already created a more natural clojure library for GUIs and I will use that)

Being able to get started and productive immediately is a big win for Clojure (and other JVM based languages). Even if you don't know much Java, there are abundant tutorials and examples on pretty much any API that are relatively simple to translate from Java to Clojure.

<comment><USER7> Yes, both of the other Lisp communities have done an _awful_ job of the basic blocking and tackling that's needed in the foundation to do most of the interesting and useful work today. A big group like ITA's can get around that with no problem, but it's too much of a pain for most individuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch> is a very nice way of searching for flights if you have specific/unusual requirements (eg, you want to do mileage runs, or you want a weird routing to get a free stop over in an odd location to visit family or friends). It's worth spending the time learning their query syntax - shouldn't be an issue for any HN readers.

</comment><comment><USER7> It occurs to me that if Google is smart they'll take a hands off approach with QPX. It's a service ITA runs for its customers and it's got to have some pretty stiff service level guarantees. For a bunch of their customers, if it's not up _their_ customers can't book flights (well, they could _book_ them, but they couldn't find out which flights to book).

Google's infrastructure is just not up to this level. Customers with multi- year contracts like Alitalia will be none too pleased if QPX's infrastructure and code is mindlessly "Googlized" (well, Alitalia might be a bad example given Google's problems with Italy, maybe they'll say "Nice airline you have here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it." :-).

I can seem them doing the above, spinning off or ending QRES (a problem of bad timing as I've noted elsewhere), and then doing interesting things with various parts of QPX. At the very least ITA has a whole bunch of interesting data feeds ... then again, I wonder what sort of contractual restrictions there might be on them. Still, Google would be miles ahead by buying ITA and only requiring negotiations instead of starting from scratch, i.e. not even knowing what data feeds are out there until they hire domain experts. And then there's capture and formatting and all that stuff, all already done in C++ by ITA.

They could be buying ITA for its domain expertise plus its pile of crackerjack programmers, the ones working on QRES wouldn't be pleased to be moved from Common Lisp but that could beat the alternatives. Tough luck for the QRES Oracle RAC people at all levels, but perhaps there's a good market for their expertise (Microsoft sure had fun there when they screwed up with Danger/Sidekick). And the QRES front end software is in Java (only the middleware is in Common Lisp).

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm finding myself redirected to <http://preview.bloomberg.com> when I click this link. I had to use the search box there to find the story. Anybody else having issues?

</comment><comment><USER11> More rich Lisp hackers and lots of jobs for people rewriting Lisp to C++ (or Java)?

</comment><comment><USER12> "What happens to Lisp if Google buys ITA Software?"

Over the years, subsystems will get converted one-by-one to C++/Python/Java, and programmers will get converted one-by-one to C++/Python/Java programmers. Google would have a lot of good arguments for playing by the rules - <USER2> would be able to leverage scalable computing and storage at scales ITA could only imagine, and the rest will fall into place

</comment><comment><USER13> Does ITA even use Lisp for its newer projects? None of the current job postings in their engineering department mention Lisp.

<comment><USER7> I suspect they have enough Lisp programmers for their needs at the moment. They're hardly 100% Lisp:

The backend database of QPX is in C++ and loads half of a 32 bit address space with route data, SBCL CL runs in the other half to figure out the "right thing" which is complicated in more than one way (e.g. a good result is not 100 fares doing roughly the same thing all within a few dollars; see the talk linked in the next paragraph).

The backend of QRES is Oracle RAC, the middleware is stateless and almost almost entirely in Clozure CL, although Dan Weinreb mentioned in his talk (NOTE, seems to be gone: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8>) that one team was using something else (Java, I think). The front end is in Java with a zillion web libraries.

They aren't Lisp fanatics ... I'm sure enough of them remember where that attitude got Symbolics.

<comment><USER14> They're still hiring Lisp programmers. I got a "mostly Lisp" job offer from them a couple months ago but turned it down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ITA uses Allegro Common Lisp, developed by Franz, if they wanted to rewrite in something more palatable to Google maybe then <http://github.com/franzinc/cl- python> could be the answer, maybe!!

<comment><USER16> "ITA uses Allegro Common Lisp"

Unlikely, because then they would have to pay a percentage of their revenue to Allegro in perpetuity. (Allegro has an insane revenue model <http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml>)

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's a throwback to a bygone era, pre-open-source. The Smalltalk vendors shot themselves in the foot this way.

How can Franz not realize that they're guaranteeing their own obsolescence by stubbornly sticking to that model? The new generation of Lisp hackers cross them off the list immediately because of it. I don't get it. Perhaps they just make enough money the old way and don't care.

<comment><USER7> I seem to remember recently reading that they're looking for other ways to make money besides selling ACL per se. Looking at their web site they most prominently feature Semantic Web Technologies: <http://www.franz.com/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Women speak less when they're outnumbered - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2012/09/18/women.speak.less.when.theyre.outnumbered

<comment><USER2> Certainly matches my experience.</comment>


A curated list of stuff related to the new React Context API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/diegohaz/awesome-react-context <comment><USER2> Its really great that the team has finally solved this longstanding "hacky" API - for some historical perspective, the context api existed for a long time completely undocumented. Here's Michael Jackson of React Router fame telling the story of how he discovered the old context api (about 10 mins in: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS8utR_Rp2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS8utR_Rp2Q))

One thing I dont really get about the old vs new context API is the ability to "just" use the implicit context without having to import the consumer. Notice all the examples usually are single file so you dont see the seams but you used to be able to pull off your context property just by declaring it:

```

class Button extends React.Component {

      render() {

        return (

          <button style={{background: this.context.color}}>

            {this.props.children}

          </button>

        );

      }

}

Button.contextTypes = {

      color: PropTypes.string

};

```

now you have to import:

```

import ColorContext from '../ColorContext' // this is new

class Button extends React.Component {

      render() {

        return (

          <ColorContext.Consumer>

            {color => (

               <button style={{background: color}}>

                 {this.props.children}

               </button>

            )}

          </ColorContext.Consumer>

        );

      }

}

```

i know the react team probably thought long and hard about this and explicit dependency injection is probably a good thing but boy i miss the "lightweight" feel of the old api :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The old context was indeed easier to use, but I think the new API is more explicit. It's easier to infer from where things are coming. It has great value in maintainability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This list looks great. I watched the Wes Bos intro video, and it was a nice high-level overview. Thanks for putting this together.

Speaking as someone already familiar with Redux, React Context seems to be conceptually similar to how I already use Redux in practice (+/\- expressing the store and connections as components). Can anyone with better familiarity enumerate the important differences this new API comes with?

<comment><USER4> Mark Erikson (dev on React) explains this very well: [http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead- yet/](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead-yet/).

"If you're only using Redux to avoid passing down props, context _could_ replace Redux - but then you probably didn't _need_ Redux in the first place. Context also doesn't give you anything like the Redux DevTools, the ability to trace your state updates, middleware to add centralized application logic, and other powerful capabilities that Redux enables."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see an example for storing current user info.</comment>


COBOL ON COGS - <AUTHOR> http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM <comment><USER2> Laugh all you want. I remember when the terminal connections to mainframes and vaxen were being replaced by websites in the mid-to-late 90s. It was astonishing just how much _worse_ websites could be.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, those old developers would _think_ about what their users were doing - for example, moving between fields would happen in a sensible order, NOT just in the order the HTML was laid out in. Those old apps might look clunky to modern eyes but really, they were _polished_ to a degree that rarely happens these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...for those who missed it last April 1.

</comment><comment><USER5> I do love how INDEX.HTM is all caps.

</comment><comment><USER6> lol - well done!

I've often teased my "green screen" clients that I could rewrite all their software to run in a browser. (It's not really that much of a stretch.)

What would really be impressive on OP's webpage would be F keys and Esc that worked as advertised in the text. It's really not that hard to coopt them from the browser.

<comment><USER7> There are very strong parallels between a web app without Ajax/Comet and a 3270 terminal application.

<comment><USER3> Do you remember when Netscape Navigator used to include a 3270 emulator?

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I'm too young for that.

<comment><USER3> Heh :-)

Well, it did; the similarities between the web sans AJAX (which we just called "the web" back then!) and 3270 were noticed by the early Netscape developers too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Check out the screen burn-in! LOL!

</comment><comment><USER9> ...and here I'd just been wishing for Prolog on a Pogo Stick, and Malbolge on a Minefield.</comment>


Video Recording From Your Mobile Browser - <AUTHOR> http://cameratag.com? Hey guys,
Just a quick note to let you know that we just unveiled support for mobile web video recording / uploading. (iOS 6.0+ and Android 2.2+). You can check it out by pointing your mobile browser to CameraTag.com and clicking on the "click here to record" box.
 For all you webtech geeks- WebRTC soon to come :)
-c <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

Just a quick note to let you know that we just unveiled support for mobile web video recording / uploading. (iOS 6.0+ and Android 2.2+). You can check it out by pointing your mobile browser to CameraTag.com and clicking on the "click here to record" box.

 __For all you webtech geeks- WebRTC soon to come :)</comment>


Ask HN: upd to http - <AUTHOR>

Google usually helps me find these types of questions, but nothing is turning up.  So I thought I'd throw this question out.
I need to get a UDP packet to HTTP (on my shared webhost)  UPD because a small microcontroller (low cost sensor) generates the packet.  To HTTP because my webhost doesn't allow socket connections beside port 80.
I'm using a home server right now to catch the UDP packet and then pass along the data to the webhost over HTTP.   But can't use that long term.. Any web service available for this, or some tips?
Trying to keep things cheap and simple for this side project. <comment><USER2> A shared hosting account might let you run a UDP listening process; a virtual host definitely would.

Really, anyplace you have a shell account can probably serve the same role as your home server.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks you. I didn't think any shared hosts would allow UDP listening, I'll look around for that.

<comment><USER2> I haven't read the fine print to see if it's allowed by their terms of service, but I just tried setting up a simple UDP-to-HTTP relay on Dreamhost:

      % nc -u -l -p 59595 | xargs -I UDP curl http://example.com/path?u=UDP

...and it worked just fine. I would think as long as the traffic is a tiny fraction of what web traffic would be -- and occasional UDP packets fit that bill -- they might either officially allow it or just not mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks. And thanks for the cli paste - I had not heard of 'nc'.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would it be possible to make an ad blocker using machine learning? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The uninteresting answer to nearly any "is it possible" question is "yes" (though there are a fair number of no answers out there too for various questions).

But that really doesn't answer the question that wants to be asked. Instead "How would you design..." is a better one (assume the answer is 'yes').

This then brings into the question of "what do you consider an advertisement" and "what do you believe it would be trained on?" Banner image size? Domain source of data?

Since its rather hard to figure out what is going on behind machine learning, the classifier could be attacked with adversarial approaches ( [https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example- research/](https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example-research/) ).

All in all, I believe the straight forward (not ML) ad blockers do a sufficient job in most cases.

In the advertisement blocking arms race, turning to AI or ML as an approach doesn't really do much besides turn over the battle plans to an... well... idiot. One that you can't understand and can be tricked in ways that we cannot fathom. Trying to debug an issue of "why is this advertisement getting through" in an ML world isn't an easy one to dig into.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.</comment>


Avoiding VDI Gotchas and Hidden Costs - <AUTHOR> http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Avoiding-VDI-Gotchas-and-Hidden-Costs/ba-p/6446 <comment><USER2> Chris Wolf from Gartner has a lot of wisdom here.</comment>


Who killed the music industry? An interactive explainer - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/05/who-killed-the-music-industry-an-interactive-explainer/

<comment><USER2> It's a pity this didn't get more attention on here, as this is a surprisingly detailed article on the subject.

The one tiny aspect I've been thinking about a lot lately involves the anti- Spotify crowd. This piece throws in some speculative numbers about iTunes vs. Pandora vs. Spotify, and explains that if only non-paying Spotify users listen to a given track it takes 600 listens to equal one iTunes purchase, in terms of royalties. (For paying Spotify users, BTW, it's only 60 listens.)

Although some artists, notably Radiohead, are taking Spotify to task over this, I'm curious about why this is considered differently to the old dynamic of broadcast radio vs. LP/tape/CD, where there was no way one broadcast of a song cost the station as much as buying a single, and that broadcast was nearly guaranteed to reach more than 600 listeners. Is it that Spotify users can choose the songs they listen to, and maybe burn themselves out on their favorite tracks, where in radio they'd run a few chosen songs into the ground but if you wanted to hear anything else you had to buy the album?

What's even more noteworthy to me was Pink Floyd putting just about everything they've got on Spotify. They were one of the famous holdouts on iTunes ostensibly because they wanted their works to be experienced as entire albums, and are part of the group attacking Pandora over its seeking of royalty cuts.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: Record labels are dinosaurs, and they have been and will continue to be hurt by the new digital ways of consuming music, until they die, because their cost structure can't be supported in this new age. New ways of dealing with music and helping artists make money will need to be found, which probably won't include the labels.</comment>


College in Sweden is free but students still have a ton of debt.How can that be? - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/85017/college-in-sweden-is-free-but-students-still-have-a-ton-of-debt-how-can-that-be/ <comment><USER2> The article basically explains it... Though it fails to mention that the loans are so subsidised that even if you dont need them you should absolutely take them. Most years you'll pay lower interest than you'll gain by having them in a regular savings account.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because when you're in school, you're not at work?

You'll find that walking in the park, going to the beach, or doing all the other "free" things in life, leave you with financial debt as well.</comment>