Bitcoin Falls 20% on PBOC Rumors, Chinese Exchanges Reinstate Fees - <AUTHOR> http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-falls-20-pboc-rumors-chinese-exchanges-reinstate-fees/ <comment><USER2> The last time I posted a news story about a Bitcoin sell-off, most participants here didn't believe me, because the sell-off wasn't apparent in the ticker they follow.[1] Now I keep a closer eye on that ticker, to see how much lag there is in trading after market-changing news is announced. Bitcoin is still very volatile, and it's not clear who can succeed in timing the market. "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent"[2] is still good investment advice.

[1] [http://bitcointicker.co/](http://bitcointicker.co/)

[2] [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed)

<comment><USER3> The other possible issue there is that Magic the Gathering Online Exchange tends to behave weirdly differently to all other exchanges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've read a pretty lucid (for a change) analysis of this over at /r/bitcoinmarkets

The gist of it was that BTCChina's long game was to kill all competition (by being first, and zero fees), wait for the surge of new users to taper off (market saturation?), and start charging a fee once they've monopolized the market.

The OP further speculated that they must've interpreted the change of regulatory climate as disastrous, expect a major exodus, and have implemented trading fees to get at least some profit off the activity.

<comment><USER5> Interesting... In a correctly working market wouldn't the end result be that competitors prefer to lower their fees too and then offer other guarantees (security, etc.) in order to keep clients and to bring in new clients?

Or is the bitcoin exchange market a "winner takes all" market?

And if they "win" and start charging a fee, wouldn't it immediately open a new opportunity for someone to come up with a platform with lower fees?

(honestly asking... Btw I'm european and I'm on Bitstamp for trading Bitcoins)

<comment><USER6> Just like auction houses - it's a winner takes all. The biggest exchange has the hughest volume and lowest spread.

As for competitors lowering their fees - one can onlly do it as long as it has funding to do so.

Here you can witness a perfect example of a free market economy leading to a suboptimal situation. And an example of usefullness of antitrust laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Bitcoin falls 20% in a day...." In other words, business as usual.

</comment><comment><USER8> I assume you'll see other countries' follow China's lead. There's no reason for a government not to.

I fear this might be dire to the Bitcoin economy. Skirting wealth flight laws WAS Bitcoin's killer feature. All of the other Bitcoin use cases I know of are incremental in nature (ie, 2.5% savings on e-commerce transactions).

The open question is if enough of a hype-market was built to keep the other use cases alive. In the case of e-commerce, I assume a rational merchant only accepted Bitcoin because of 1) viral marketing channel 2) speculative hoarding.

The speculation MIGHT work out if the underlying Bitcoin economy was powered by the transaction volume and value of international wealth movement. Running forward it'll be from e-commerce and store of wealth, and I'm skeptical if that'll be enough.

<comment><USER9> What wealth flight laws do countries with freely tradable currencies have? AFAIK I could move a million dollars from my bank account to a bank account in England with no issues.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps, but I don't think the US has worries about wealth flight. I assume the countries that dominate this "economy" are Argentina, Cyprus, etc.

<comment><USER10> The US does have an expatriation tax[1] that is of concern for many. There was also a dramatic increase to the tax proposed as a result of Eduardo Saverin's expatriation before the Facebook IPO. Even though he hadn't been living or working in the US for some time prior, the US imposes taxes on all moneys a citizen earns, regardless of where they are living, or where that money was earned.

Beyond that, expatriation from the US is at an all-time high[3], and the rumor is that it's related to the adoption of Obama's progressive taxation schema.

[1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax#United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax#United_States)

[2] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex- PATRIOT_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-PATRIOT_Act)

[3] - [http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/11/18/US- Taxpaye...](http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/11/18/US-Taxpayers- Are-Expatriating-Record-Rate)

<comment><USER11> Wait, which "progressive taxation schema" is this? The expiration of the top 1% of the Bush tax cuts?

<comment><USER10> That, the "Buffet Rule", the reduction on charitable donations, the increase on capital gains, and his proposed "Grand Bargain", which lowers rates, but eliminates enough loopholes that it is at least expected to raise the effective tax rate for corporations.

<comment><USER11> Fair enough, but the "Buffet Rule" hasn't happened, and almost certainly won't during his term.

<comment><USER10> As I don't net more than $1 million a year, I hadn't followed it very closely, but I admit that I'm a little surprised. For some reason I thought it had _most certainly_ passed and been enacted.

Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sometimes a precipitous event happens and we can say that event was for certain the cause of something going up or down on price.

Most of the time I think there are just too many variables to so confidently point to one as the cause.

So when I hear on the radio that the Dow went down because of xyz I just chuckle. If we were really so good at pinpointing cause and effect in the markets, the people doing so would shut up and make money.

<comment><USER13> While I generally agree with what you've said here I don't think it applies as much to bitcoin. The DJIA is huge and there are many, many, many factors that can affect it's movement. Bitcoin is tiny in comparison with a very illiquid (is that a word?) market. I think many people had attributed the huge runup in price to activity in China so it is no surprise that bad news in China would have this effect.

Basically I think it is reasonable to assume that this news is the reason for the decline.

<comment><USER14> "Bitcoin is tiny in comparison with a very illiquid (is that a word?) market. "

The idea of Bitcoin being illiquid strikes me as being quite ironic.

<comment><USER15> Liquidity != Volatility. There are many cases when it's hard to turn BTC into $US/Danish Pastries/Gold Bars; this makes it illiquid. Try getting your money out of MT Gox.

<comment><USER14> The irony is that Bitcoin is supposed to be a replacement for cash. Technically, it should be the most liquid thing out there.

<comment><USER13> I got what you're saying and I totally agree. I think the problems with liquidity contribute heavily to the volatility as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The confusing thing to me is why the price of a bitcoin went DOWN on btcChina (compared to other exchanges) MtGox, which has had a long history of problems with bank transfers, actually carries a btc price premium (because fiat currency on MtGox isn't very liquid, you have to pay more fiat to buy a bitcoin there) so this whole situation is just confusing.

I think the most likely reason why BTCChina prices have reached parity with other exchanges is simply that the recent selloff has actually temporarily improved RMB liquidity in BTCChina accounts, since folks are stashing RMBs in their BTCChina accounts as they wait to jump back into the market.

...so despite the new Chinese government rules that should lower RMB liquidity, the markets seem to say that BTCChina RMB liquidity is actually pretty good for the time being.

<comment><USER17> Because the report about the Chinese exchanges being cut off appears to have been complete BS. There never was any problem but the false news caused a panic sell by people who didn't bother to think it through logically.

<comment><USER16> Not complete bs- Some limitations on third party payment services are real, though perhaps only minor inconveniences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can someone confirm or better explain how Mt Gox's relatively longer amount of time to process USD withdrawal requests is causing there to be a premium over other exchanges quoted USD/BTC?

This is how I understand it: people already have dollar denominated accounts with Mt Gox, either by selling BTC on Mt Gox or depositing money there. They want to get these dollars out, but since it takes so long for Mt Gox to process these transactions and complete the requests, people are buying BTC on Mt Gox and transferring them to other exchanges that can process the withdrawals in a quicker fashion. This is in exchange for a discount on the USD/BTC rate they will get, i.e. they will lose the premium offered by Mt Gox so that a dollar denominated withdrawal request will happen more quickly on another exchange. The net result is a higher demand for Mt Gox BTC offers, and the premium results.

<comment><USER19> The answer is simpler than that. The issue has nothing to do with Bitcoins.

This is an issue with USD (as dollar bills in your pocket or in a bank account) and MTGXUSD (as dollar units in a Mt Gox account). MTGXUSD are worth less than USD because of two factors; one is potential regulatory issues, and the other is that you are buying future dollars, which are cheaper than right now dollars.

Because MTGXUSD are cheaper than USD, you need more of them to buy BTC, and thus the price differential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It amuses me when people say: "This isn't actually bad news." and, yet, Bitcoin drops 20-30-40% in just hours. Imagine what _really_ bads news can do to it then! I secretly hope all investors and especially the amateurs who are professional only at panicking to leave the market so that we can focus on Bitcoin as a payment technology and not an investment tool. Let's be honest - most people are greedy. Most of us, too. Let's not mix greed with technology evangelism! Many will lose their hard-earned reputation by making baseless statements that Bitcoin will be tens of thousands soon while secretly hoping that somehow their small message will reach the wide audience and everybody will start buying!

<comment><USER21> To a true believer, nothing is ever bad news.

<comment><USER20> Well, of course, there are pathological cases as well. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> All the people who believed BTC was immune to government intervention are getting hit by a dose of reality.

<comment><USER23> People forget that for as long as we have more than one government in the world, they will be met at the feeding table in equal order, which is to say that we must never forget that the very mechanism by which we consider ourselves customers, consumers, individuals being serviced: so too are governments allowed this right.

And corporations now, as well.

So, if we are to look at this situation honestly the only real conclusion to be made is that this is an act of legitimization on the part of the Chinese law-makers, and we can all just stop pretending that .btc are not here to stay, and be used, and .. compete on the global money markets.

What I really can only say, in the rush of it all, is that I hope we can finally end the hegemony of the Petro-dollar, and all those invested in its persistence .. for it has been a very vile instrument, and the time has come. Crypto-currency has the stage.

<comment><USER24> there's the little detail that the government of the country you live in does get a bit more preference, if only by the fact that they can come to your house with guns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you were determined to make Bitcoin crash, how would you set about it?

<comment><USER26> Buy a huge percentage of existing bitcoins and then sell each bitcoin for cheaper than you bought it for and cheaper than your previous sale. Given the entire currency is worth in the billions, nobody would do this, and there's nothing to gain from doing it.

<comment><USER25> You could also try to spook investors though, and make the confidence evaporate, possibly without having to spend much yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've wondered... if the price of a BTC differs from one currency/exchange to the next, what stops you from buying at the cheap and selling at the expensive one?

<comment><USER28> It's called arbitrage. It's possible with bitcoin, but not easy and by no means quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It was pretty much guaranteed to fall since I just bought some right before that. Next time I plan on buying any, I'll let you know, so you can plan accordingly.

<comment><USER30> That's how my investments tend to go too.

To paraphrase a once great govenator.

The key to success is to buy when I sell, Sell when I buy, work hard and marry a Kennedy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's my understanding that this was all the result of someone who managed to post a fake message on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The problem with all the news out of China about Bitcoin is that it isn't in English so unless you speak the language it is hard to evaluate it's truthiness and instead are forced to rely on second hand sources.

[http://www.btc38.com/btc/btc_market/476.html](http://www.btc38.com/btc/btc_market/476.html)

<comment><USER31> (I speak Chinese.) The "rumor" seems already be verified by newspaper and media.

See the article [1] on the website of Xinhuanet [2].

[1] [http://news.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2013-12/17/c_125874796.htm](http://news.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2013-12/17/c_125874796.htm)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency)</comment></comment>


Tekserve auctions their vintage Mac collection - <AUTHOR> https://new.liveauctioneers.com/search?parameters=%7B%22keyword%22:%22macintosh%20collection%20tekserve%22,%22page%22:1,%22pageSize%22:24,%22status%22:%22online%22%7D <comment><USER2> I can't ID the Macs, because "Apple ][ Forever" people don't dig Macs. I can point out that there is an Apple //e, an Apple //c, a Lisa, and an Apple /// in that lot, none of which are Macs. The NeXT Cube isn't even an Apple.

<comment><USER3> > a Lisa

Could be a Macintosh XL

<comment><USER4> It's a Lisa. The auction page lists some of the computer models including the Lisa:

> Macintosh 128k (TED 25th Anniversary Edition), Macintosh 128k (Signed by > Steve Wozniak), NeXTcube, Apple IIc, Apple IIe, Apple Lisa, Apple III, > Macintosh 128k, Macintosh SE, Macintosh Classic, Macintosh Portable, > Macintosh LC II, Macintosh PowerBook 100, Macintosh PowerBook Duo 230, > Macintosh Quadra 700, Macintosh Color Classic, and others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not just a Mac collection as it has a bunch of Apple II's, but sadly no IIgs. That's the computer I first fell in love with. Most kids my age back then were into Playboys. I was lusting after the back cover of some computer magazine that had the IIgs on it. But then a friend told me how much better the Amigas were than any silly old Apple product and I switched allegiances. Those were the days...

</comment><comment><USER6> I would love some of those cattle and auto auctioneers to run the show.

[https://youtu.be/CITxLRXPk1U?t=6](https://youtu.be/CITxLRXPk1U?t=6)

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't forget the _25%_ (!!) extra fee tacked on to the final price. Definitely not for the bargain hunter.

</comment><comment><USER8> that's pretty impressive but just earlier today i saw this: [http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5732303316.html](http://denver.craigslist.org/sys/5732303316.html)

<comment><USER9> Wow, those all-in-one type macs with the floppy disk slot just brought me back to middle school days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked at Tekserve for 2 years. It's quite interesting to hear the strong emotional responses that many people express about its closing.

</comment><comment><USER11> US$29,000? I think you could probably put that together yourself for quite a bit under that price (including a machine or two signed by Woz...)

<comment><USER12> You'd be surprised then. There are two things going for it, one it has a lot of machines in it, and two they seem to be in pretty decent shape. You could probably spend the next 3 - 10 years going around garage sales, haunting Craig's list and other auction sites, and put something together. But it will take time and the outcome is uncertain.

Remember there will be seasoned collectors bidding on this bunch, they already know all the places where things like this might be found, and they are still bidding.

Bottom line, unless you're a collector it is hard sometimes to see where the value comes from.

That said, you could try it and perhaps make a quick $5 - $10 thousand? I warn you though, you start and it gets weirdly addictive. I tell you this as someone who owned 63 variations of MicroVAX at one time.

<comment><USER13> I narrowly dodged a bullet a few years ago when someone outbid me on a pile of SGI workstation hardware. I was ready to become a hardware hoarder, but someone out there saved me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is just heartbreaking.

<comment><USER15> They had a good run, unlike the Atari ST and Amiga shops that went bust not years after opening.

There was a store here that specialized in Newton hardware which, for a few years, was flying high and could do no wrong. Then the end came and they shuttered the store.

That was heartbreaking. We had a Concorde moment there and we still haven't caught up with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used to have an Apple ][ and it's one of my few regrets that I sold it when I did. Luckily, I've still got the IIGS but it's not quite the same. I never made it to Tekserve before they closed either...maybe that's 2 regrets now.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really want to know what happened to that nickel coke machine. I bought a soda from it every time I went, which was often when I was working @ Yodle on W23rd.

<comment><USER18> It's up for auction:

[https://new.liveauctioneers.com/item/47137408_vmc-33-5and162...](https://new.liveauctioneers.com/item/47137408_vmc-33-5and162-vending- machine-coca-cola)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> i'm sad that they're closing</comment>


Ask YC: do you think yahoo share at 15-20% below friday price is a hot deal? - <AUTHOR>

Do you think yahoo will bounce back (in short and long term) - may be after a deal with google in couple of weeks. <comment><USER2> They were trading below 20 prior to the original MSFT bid. A deal with Google might cause an increase in short term speculation but I doubt the stock is going to get back to 30 with such news. If you think MSFT is still going to pursue them, buy some YHOO, if you think Yahoo is going to continue on its own, they're probably over-valued and worth shorting until the stock gets down to 20 again.

I haven't really looked at the options chain on YHOO but looking that over wukk give you a good indication of what the market expects the price to be over the next few months.</comment>


In Santa Monica, parents are paying $1,000 for a boot camp for kindergarten - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-kinderprep-20160811-snap-story.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> _"When they get into kindergarten," she said, "there is no play. It's like first grade."_

Somebody please help these poor kids. Otherwise they're going to have major issues, down the road.</comment>


Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article_email/google-plans-new-smarter-messaging-app-1450816899-lMyQjAxMTA1OTI5MjUyMDI5Wj <comment><USER2> Why not just include this feature in Hangouts? Is it necessary to create a new platform?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, but will it fully support third party clients?</comment>


Ask HN: US this bad about civil liberties? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Dear Internet,

America has become a very strange place. At the same time our military was "bringing freedom to the Iraqi peoples", our legislature and executive conspired to remove or automate much judicial review of spying. In effect American citizens lost another type of liberty.

We seem to be better at protecting our access to riffles. Most of the liberties created by America's founding fathers (women were not allowed to vote) were designed to thwart the power of a monarchy and the power of the Roman-Catholic church. Many of these founding fathers were members of a fraternity called the Free Masons and read authors like John Locke. My point is they were a fairly homogeneous group of Englishmen.

Since then America has expanded civil rights explicit in the Constitution to include people of all races and genders. But the Industrial age has been a constant force of erosion of our liberties. Our elections are not publicly funded. This means there is a huge advantage to material wealth and the wealthy have steered Congress to benefit themselves.

The bright shinning star of hope for The Land of The Free is our government is not systemically corrupt, at least not in the traditional meaning of corrupt.

I think this is a good discussion by Prof Lessig, "Republic Lost":

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxCo2bE9Gtk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxCo2bE9Gtk)

<comment><USER3> "Rulers who distrust their own people, must govern in a spirit of absolutism ; and suspected subjects will be ever sensible of their bondage."

The Constitutional History Of England Vol II

Erskine May

1863

<comment><USER2> In the first place we have granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs forever that the English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate; and we will that it be thus observed; which is apparent from this that the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English Church, we, of our pure and unconstrained will, did grant, and did by our charter confirm and did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent III, before the quarrel arose between us and our barons: and this we will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by our heirs forever. ++We have also granted to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our heirs forever.++

King John of England, Magna Carta

1215

<comment><AUTHOR> basically rich guys rule?

<comment><USER2> Yes, We forced the cake eaters to admit their power is rooted in gold and not the will of God.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


French Record Labels Suing Sourceforge, Among Others - <AUTHOR> http://ostatic.com/177024-blog/french-record-labels-suing-sourceforge-among-others <comment><USER2> I've always wondered if it really matters much if you get "sued" in some other country like this. Really, what can a foreign court do to you? Block your site to its citizens? I doubt that would go over well in France...</comment>


AI is supercharging the creation of maps around the world - <AUTHOR> https://tech.fb.com/ai-is-supercharging-the-creation-of-maps-around-the-world/ <comment><USER2> OpenStreetMap contributors weren't happy about the quality of tags when the import started: [https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=63456](https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=63456)

Facebook wasn't the only company adding low-quality data: [https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=64430](https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=64430) (Previous discussion on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18723138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18723138) )

This article's quotes of what appear to be OpenStreetMap representatives are generally positive, so maybe that means they fixed all the problems they caused.

<comment><USER3> OpenStreetMap contributors haven't been happy with anything, for the last 15 years.

<comment><USER4> There are many positive developments such as good quality satellite imagery and goverment geographic data being offered to OpenStreetMap contributors for integration. An up-to-date aerial image of a city does wonders to the mapping experience. Mapillary's service complements OSM nicely as well as provides an invaluable on-the-ground data source. There's so many happy things in the community I can't possibly list them all.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, Tranport for London recently built an enormous database of cycling infrastructure to be integrated into OSM. It's an exciting project/collaboration.

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TfL_Cycling_Infrastructu...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TfL_Cycling_Infrastructure_Database)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Projects like these highlight that as ML becomes more and more complex, a gap grows larger and larger which must be filled by manual or semi-manual labor. If it isn't a team of volunteers combing the rendered results for errors, it's users who have succumbed to those errors and leave feedback in the hopes the system improves.

That gets me wondering - is the future of AI really just a semi-autonomous twilight zone where cheap / free labor augments an already faulty system? If not, what possible application is there for an expensive and closed automated system which works 100% requiring no human input, when other options are cheaper and leave clear directions for improvement?

<comment><USER7> Yes and no. There is a huge explosion of 'Ops Plus' startups that take an existing manual process and then build some basic tooling around it (with or without any substantial ML component). There are mild to moderate efficiency gains coming from this, but a lot of their valuation is coming from a bet that in the future they'll be able to fully automate the system and reap efficiency gains.

In practice, almost nobody is even thinking about building a fully automated process for every case. The reason is simple: automating the first 60% of work takes x effort, automating the next 30% takes 10x, and automating the next 9% takes 100x and operating the final 1% is essentially impossible. So if you came to the table with the goal of 100% automation right out the gate you'd spent 10 years developing something with little to show.

I think full automation of some systems is possible, but is actually blocked by generational norms. By and large the systems that "Ops Plus" startups are attempting to automate were designed by people who are not digital natives. They're not illiterate, but things like instant messaging, async communication and and structured data are not natural primitives for them. I'm not saying everyone in the Fortnite generation is a master data modeller, but I think that when they join the workforce they'll set up systems that are much more feasible to automate.

<comment><USER8> I'm interested in learning more about this "Ops Plus" term but it doesn't seem very google friendly... Is this a term of art in some circles?

<comment><USER7> I actually just made it up. Companies that come to mind are Scale.ai (doing data labelling stuff for ML that historically would have been done by outsourcing companies, etc), Flexport (freight forwarding, traditionally done via spreadsheets and emails), Checkr (background checks), Atrium (legal services), Oscar/Clover (health insurance), Cadre (real estate investing). There are tons and tons of them in the recruiting (really sourcing) space too: I'd say Triplebyte is an Ops Plus company, as is Sourceress and a couple more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very cool that they are integrating it with HOT tasking manager and making it easy for anyone to use the editor with the ML-generated proposed objects in several countries. I think the ML has been there for a couple years but currently it's not easy to take advantage of it.

Hopefully they eventually release the ML pipeline itself as well.

Their RapiD editor has some similarities to a research project I was involved with: [https://mapster.csail.mit.edu/maid.html](https://mapster.csail.mit.edu/maid.html)

([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-6nbuuX6NY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-6nbuuX6NY) vs [https://tech.fb.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/07/add_ML_road.g...](https://tech.fb.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/07/add_ML_road.gif.-1.gif))

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess it's nice in those areas with low contribution precentage. But I suspect in many cases and definetly in Estonia there's a national high quality map database that could be used to augment existing maps instead. I'm wondering though, has anyone attempted to do so, quick Google search reveals nothing.

<comment><USER11> It is possible to "import" other data into OSM. However it's very tricky. Licencing/legal issues aside, it can be very technologically challenging to merge another database into OSM.

I suggest posting to the OSM talk@ mailing list, or if there's a local estonian one too

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They say it uses a deep neural network but we don't know this is a convnet or another type of NN. Anyone has more technical infos about it?

<comment><USER13> This is semantic segmentation, so it has to be a convnet. I've never heard of trying to do semantic segmentation any other way, and a prototype of another approach wouldn't go into production at scale.

OP links to [https://ai.facebook.com/blog/mapping-roads-through-deep- lear...](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/mapping-roads-through-deep-learning-and- weakly-supervised-training) which says that it's D-LinkNet specifically: [http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018_workshops/pap...](http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018_workshops/papers/w4/Zhou_D- LinkNet_LinkNet_With_CVPR_2018_paper.pdf) (more or less a Unet).

<comment><USER14> I don't disagree, but I'd be careful with that statement.

A huge amount of landcover segmentation in remote sensing still relies on simple models - either linear regression (thresholds) or classical machine learning like random forests or SVMs. For a lot of cases, these techniques will get you 90% of the way and it's very rare to have ground truth data that is accurate enough that you can measure the difference with any real degree of confidence.

A big problem in the field is the lack of good (public) ground truth. There's so little hand labelled data to work with that without humans in the loop it's extremely difficult to validate the results meaningfully (unless you have an army of staff to do it). With something like roads you could also have heuristics about what a road looks like and where it goes (e.g. it's a continuous thin line), which can help condition things.

I've seen a lot of papers which are applying deep learning for semantic segmentation for satellite mapping, but they evaluate on very limited datasets, they attempt to regress to simpler models without realising it (e.g. trying to predict a linear model), or they leak train and test data and report amazing results because they randomly split data from the same region.

I'm not saying that convnets aren't better than simpler models, but particularly for satellite imaging I'd take them with a pinch of salt and see what the improvement from a baseline method is. If you look at a random sampling of papers from the DeepGlobe competition, almost none of them provide the results from e.g. a cheap linear SVM.

Fun side note - several existing "famous" datasets generalise poorly to the developing world because most of the imagery is from the developed world (and even more specifically the West) and infrastructure looks totally different.

<comment><USER15> How do you give a class to each pixel in an image using a linear classifier in a way that uses the surrounding pixels as context/input? I'm genuinely curious! You are right about the data, it's expensive to make and startups based on satelite imagery tend to keep them as it's their main advantage.

<comment><USER14> In a most cases, you can reshape to a 1xN^2 vector for a NxN region. This was how object detection worked long before convolutional inputs were popular.

Have a look at mnist classification using a linear SVM, for example.

<comment><USER15> Classification makes sense, because you do a linear (or kernel) combination of the input and squash it using sigmoid to get a probability of a class. For segmentation you output a pixel mask so you would have a NxNx3 vector to predict 1 class for 1 pixel and then you would have to do it for all pixels so you'd have to encode the position as well. Alternatively, if you take a unique weight for each position you end up with get single FC layer with NxNx3 inputs and NxN outputs (N^4 parameters). I guess for me it's hard to imagine doing segmentation "back then" and I find it very fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it open source? It is somehow implied, but I can't find the source.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe AI can help with Lyft/Uber. I'm sort of tired of being dropped off in alleyways.

<comment><USER18> The great thing with Lyft/Uber is that I'm in the car and I can say "please take me around front to the main entrance, not here in the alleyway."

<comment><USER19> That works for regular cabs too! /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My first thought is wondering what data FB hopes to acquire from making this tool available.

<comment><USER13> FB is far from the only big tech company which has sponsored OSM as a competitor to Google Maps (Microsoft/Facebook/DigitalGlobe/Telenav/FourSquare/Craigslist have all sponsored OSM to some degree; Apple, of course, went its own way and created Apple Maps).

It's a reaction to Google Maps: a monopoly on high-quality up-to-date global maps with business location is dangerous to everyone else, as a chokepoint on mobile applications. It's less about 'acquiring data' and more about not being extorted by GM. Classic 'commoditize your complement' dynamics: [https://www.gwern.net/Complement](https://www.gwern.net/Complement)

<comment><USER21> Yes, see also "Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap" [https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/5/232/htm](https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/5/232/htm)

Figure 3 demonstrates the scale of corporate OSM edits.</comment></comment></comment>


Ricardo Forth: A Forth in C, JS, WebAssembly and Asmjs - <AUTHOR> https://marianoguerra.github.io/ricardo-forth/ <comment><AUTHOR> Slides from a presentation I gave about WebAssembly at StuttgartJS (August 10th, 2016) are available here: [https://marianoguerra.github.io/ricardo- forth/resources/slid...](https://marianoguerra.github.io/ricardo- forth/resources/slides.html#/webassembly)</comment>


Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-half-baked-how-hunter-gatherer-really-eat/ <comment><USER2> I am convinced that most weight-loss diets that succeed (even if only for a time) work because they limit you to a subset of foodstuffs.

The diets substitute "have willpower to eat less of everything you already eat" (which doesn't work for most people) with "limit yourself to this palette of food that you will get bored of very quickly", which people seem to do better at.

<comment><USER3> I have suspected this for a long time as well; by requiring attention and planning to get the appropriate items from the limited set permitted by the diet the real goal, making an evaluation each time you eat, is achieved.

I suspect people cycle through different palettes/diets until they find one that suits their personal tastes, or until some other stars align in their life and motivation such that their next attempt was going to succeed anyway. People then become cargo cult evangelists for that particular diet. That's without even looking at some of the people who profit from diet fads and promote them with various techniques.

That's all conjectural on my part though, perhaps one day a researcher that models memes with techniques from epidemiology will get an appropriate data set to seriously investigate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All of this highlights the need for more funding towards nutrition science. It's absurdly hard to do this stuff (e.g., controlling what people eat for a year), so it's expensive. But given how expensive things like diabetes are, I think it'd be societally efficient to drop $100M or something on few grand randomized controlled experiments.

This[1] is the closest thing I'm aware of. You'd sorta hope governments would make this kind of thing a priority.

[1] [http://nusi.org/the-science/current-science-in- progress/#.U9...](http://nusi.org/the-science/current-science-in- progress/#.U9hDvIBdX4J)

</comment><comment><USER5> This strawman is the most common way of "debunking" the paleo diet. It's like saying that vegetarians should only ever eat vegetables. The article even sort of acknowledges that:

      Some Paleo dieters emphasize that they never believed in
      one true caveman lifestyle or diet and that—in the fashion
      of Sisson's Blueprint—they use our evolutionary past to
      form guidelines, not scripture. That strategy seems
      reasonably solid at first, but quickly disintegrates.

..and then goes on to attack the same strawman.

No doubt there are people out there that think the paleo diet means that you should live exactly like hunter-gatherers and think they know what that means, but I think for most people on it (I am not one), that is just inspiration that leads you to conclude that maybe meat is less dangerous than popular advice would have you believe, and maybe the better guideline is to avoid food that's been heavily processed. This certainly feels like what Mark Sisson is proposing.

<comment><USER6> The point is that even the guidelines are murky, and that it isn't clear what foods our "evolutionary past" intended us to eat. The best that the evidence seems to suggest is that diets varied widely in early humans.

So basing your diet, even loosely, off a false or unclear understanding of the diets of early hunter gatherers, is probably a worse strategy than following more contemporary research on the health benefits of different dietary strategies.

<comment><USER7> >is probably a worse strategy than following more contemporary research on the health benefits of different dietary strategies.

You've implicitly assumed that the strategy is not also informed by contemporary research, but the particular framework being criticized, that of Mark Sisson, makes extensive reference to contemporary research.

In fact, a reader of _Mark 's Daily Apple_ is probably linked to more peer- reviewed articles than a reader of, say, _Scientific American_. Consider e.g.:

[http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-definitive-guide-to- resis...](http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-definitive-guide-to-resistant- starch/#axzz38uSWlbfX)

<comment><USER6> I'm not attacking Sisson's framework. I haven't read much of his stuff, but the Primal Blueprint does seem to base a lot of its information off of assumptions about what Paleolithic hunter gatherers are supposed to have eaten.

The article above makes a pretty good case for why building your diet from this foundation may not be the most reliable framework. If Sisson is using the latest scientific research to develop his system, then fine. But this is hardly a "Paleolithic" diet then. Why not just say "Avoid processed foods because they have been shown in numerous studies to have negative effects?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I crossfit, a community that is associated with the paleo diet. No one interprets paleo literally. It's just a buzz word that generally means eat less processed foods, more fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and healthy fats, and limit grains. Some folks do cleanse diets first. I've seen folks loose dozens to hundreds of pounds. For many, this is the first time they've actually paid attention to what they are eating. And this is really the important part. Pay attention to what you eat and avoid processed foods as much as possible. Call it paleo or "clean eating." Who cares.

Aside, I don't think carbs are evil, but they are very energy dense and not particularly satiating, especially refined carbs (i.e. carbs not from produce). I run 60 miles a week, crossfit 3-5x a week, and still have to pay attention to limit calories from refined carbs.

<comment><USER9> Are you including indigestible carbs (fiber) as part of natural whole grain sources, fruits (pectin), oats (soluble fibers) as part of your "not particularly satiating" carbs? I spent 6 months on paleo, 12 months on keto, and 6 months cyclical keto. I have found that complex carbs have helped my training and weight loss far more than restricting carbs in general. It seems that proper carb sources are just as satiating as loading my bowels with red meat (and the outcome is vastly preferred).

<comment><USER8> I don't eat red meat but maybe a few times a year. My protein is mostly from fish, eggs, greek yogurt, fowl, and protein powder/bars sparingly.

I don't find carbs in any form particularly satiating. Unless I have protein and/or fat with a meal, I'm hungry quickly after. So steel cut oats, not satiating on their own. But if I add say crushed walnuts to the oats and have a couple eggs or greek yogurt too, I fine almost till dinner. The more refined the carbs, the worse it is for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These kinds of articles are getting tired. Most people who started paleo years ago have modified their diets to be more of a "natural foods" diet. The only people I know who still adhere to a paleo diet are the ones trying to sell cookbooks, or somehow profit on the name paleo.

Furthermore, if these articles really wanted to help people, they would explain what pieces of the paleo are bogus, and what pieces make sense, because the fact is, if most people cut back on processed grain, refined sugar, and processed seed oils, and doubled down on fresh fruits and vegetables and solid protein, they would in fact become healthier.

</comment><comment><USER11> Robb Wolf is a prominent voice in the paleo diet movement. It's worth noting his comment on this article:

\</comment><comment>--

I'm not sure what it says about the broader scientific community that they seem incapable of actually articulating what has been written by folks in the Paleo/Ancestral health field?

I adress Pro. Warinner's TED talk here: [http://robbwolf.com/2013/04/04/debunking-paleo-diet-wolfs- ey...](http://robbwolf.com/2013/04/04/debunking-paleo-diet-wolfs-eye-view/)

\</comment><comment>

Most debunking of the paleo diet actually attacks a strawman. There ARE some people who say they eat paleo and follow this strawman, but most don't.</comment>


Using LVM's new cache feature - <AUTHOR> http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/using-lvms-new-cache-feature/

<comment><USER2> Interesting stuff. I get a bit skittish around storage caches because of some scars from some pretty spectacular failures, but when they are working as designed they are quite awesome.

Multiple writers with some using ftrunc(2) that is the nightmare scenario for me. Would be interesting to do a walk through of considering each disk blowing up and the recovery from that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent! I was _just_ investigating btrfs[0] and realized that it doesn't offer anything like ZFS's "2nd level storage" (L2ARC) which is doing precisely this: keep what is nowadays referred to as _hot_ data on dedicated (read: solid state) storage; as much as possible.

In the course of this little recherché I hit upon bcache and dm-cache but found (Debian) user-land to be entirely lacking (`modprobe dm-cache` doesn't raise an eyebrow, though).

Having dm-cache support in LVM -- one of those projects that figure centrally in my personal sysadmin lore -- would be just heavenly.

[0] Balanced Tree FS. Similar in outlook and approach to SUN-now-Oracle's ZFS and -- oh, irony of ironies -- also under the Oracle umbrela.

<comment><USER4> Annoying thing about have a filesystem and a separate block layer cache (bcache or dm-cache) is they're duplicating a lot of the same work - filesystem maps from inode:offset to physical offset, cache does the same thing. Both doing their own allocation/reclamation/etc.

I've been turning bcache into a full blown filesystem in my spare time. It's working now - it's fast, and the code is _small_ compared to other filesystems.

Not production ready yet and it'll be awhile before I freeze the on disk format, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to admit that for a moment I thought: awesome, there is a built-in cache feature now for the llvm compilers and it took me almost a paragraph to recognize that the author was not talking about compilers....

</comment><comment><USER6> How well does this work with a database workload? Did anyone test PostgreSQL, or SQLite (in WAL mode) with this?

<comment><USER7> It's a bit surprising that this routine post investigating a new LVM feature turned up on HN and several other high profile sites last night while I was out at a gig.

So I'm afraid I haven't yet had time to do proper testing. The benchmarking in the post is next to useless. I will be looking at how virtual machines behave on top of LVM cache (versus on top of an uncached hard disk), but that will take some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would really like to see random IO benchmarks vs. bcache... Does anyone know of any?</comment>


A Ruby-based lightweight publish-subscribe messaging system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/derekcollison/nats

<comment><USER2> For those who don't know, nats is at the core of cloudfoundry. It's a great tool if you're in an all ruby world. The author wrote messaging software for Tibco before vmware so he knows his stuff.

Having said that, 0mq is probably a better choice these days since it's cross language. Still you can build some fun stuff with nats.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone suggest an exisiting tool to achieve the following--what I want isn't quite a message queue, but has similarities.

-Queue paths that clients can subscribe to for pub/sub.

-Queues that, upon reconnect, replay their history to date.

-Api for listing listeners and their IP's

-Fast

-Scalable

-Heartbeating or presence

-Status-queues (a queue that sends the same message on first connect, and only re-broadcasts when the status changes)

-API that lets you view messages non-destructively

-API that lets you list clients

-Queues that broadcast a message to all

-Round-robin queues

Do I need to roll my own, or have I missed some existing tool?

<comment><USER4> I haven't seen any one product that does all of that, but generally I want to separate heartbeating and status updates from the other queue functionality. ZooKeeper will do a lot of the heartbeating, presence, status changes, list clients, etc. I don't think it's designed to function as a queue though. I think with a combination of Redis and ZooKeeper you could get what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is it different from faye? Faye is also eventmachine ruby code. Faye is 'simple' and NATS is 'lightweight' ?

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, but why force people to type NATS in caps all the time?

<comment><USER7> There you go:

        nats = NATS

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the advantage of this over zeromq? zeromq supports intra-process pub/sub messaging.</comment>


3D Printed Curta Part VIII - <AUTHOR> http://wudev.digitaltorque.com/2016/04/3d-printed-curta-part-viii.html <comment><USER2> For those wondering what this is a part for: the Curta is the ultimate mechanical calculator ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta))

Apparently, someone is trying to 3D print one. I find that ambitious; the tolerances of the parts will have to be tiny, and operating it will exert fairly large forces to the parts.

<comment><USER3> I am the owner of the blog and the creator of that 3D printed Curta. The tolerances are small -- too small for the printer actually, but I am printing them so they will allow hand fitting the parts that require a specific mechanical fit.

The forces aren't too bad unless parts are misaligned which has happened, but the easy solution is to stop turning it when it jams up. When parts are aligned well and lubricated, everything runs very well -- misalignment was my fault for overlooking a few things.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Dumbest AI + Blockchain Project in 100 lines - daniel-l https://github.com/theDumbAssCoin/DUMBASS <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty good so far, but I don't see anything about IoT, drones, and solar power anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER2> Without a whitepaper it's not really credible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Documentation and variable naming are not dumb enough. Remove all documentation and use Hungarian notation incorrectly and I'll invest.

</comment><comment> chupa-chups HODL!

> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodl](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodl)

</comment><comment><USER4> What, no VR? Laaame

</comment><comment><USER5> You convinced me, I'm in :-p

</comment><comment><USER6> how can I invest?</comment>


Twenty Things to do with a Computer (1971) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.stager.org/articles/twentythings.pdf

<comment><USER2> This seems like a far more hands-on and inspiring approach to teaching computer science to elementary, middle, or high school students than the typical intro to CS classes you see now, which might occasionally have some graphical interfaces, but primarily (at least in my limited experience) operate on the command line and do a variety of abstract things. It's a lot harder to fall in love with a sorting algorithm than with a turtle drawing robot or the interesting geometric patterns shown on pages 14-16.

<comment><USER3> ....or worse, build "web apps" with javascript! (Yes I've actually seen a school do this :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cynthia Solomon (the co-author of the memo) maintains a collection of interesting documents and videos from and on the early days of Logo: [http://logothings.wikispaces.com/](http://logothings.wikispaces.com/) (especially: [http://logothings.wikispaces.com/Readings](http://logothings.wikispaces.com/Readings))

<comment><USER5> "The kids became teachers to the math educators attending the conference. The kids were incredible. Rumors spread such as Seymour could teach anybody anything. When it was discovered that I did the teaching, the rumors changed to we bribed the kids with candy."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everyone should read Papert's Mindstorms book, about teaching kids to code. It is one of the best books about learning there is.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, the naivity of predictions.

Play "Space War"? As if games on a computer will ever catch on - we're all too busy making turtles and drawing men with them...

<comment><USER8> Honestly one thing I feel Star Trek got 100% correct (or will be 100% correct) is holodeck, and holodeckaddiction.

I can definitely see people being treated psychologically for hating the real world. Especially with current advances in VR. It already happens with the internet, and that's barely immersive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Logo was the first programming language that I was exposed to as an elementary school aged child. I remember thinking that it was neat to draw something on the screen, but I didn't really understand enough geometry/trigonometry to draw anything interesting... Logo requires more math skills than I had at that age. I had better luck with QBASIC.

I really like the idea of hardware devices to teach programming, and unlike when this paper was written, now there are lots of different (and cheap) devices which are designed for that exact purpose. I wish they had those when I was growing up.

</comment><comment><USER10> well this explains [http://goo.gl/JLPkyi](http://goo.gl/JLPkyi)!

<comment><USER11> Fuck URL shorteners.

[https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/turtle.html](https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/turtle.html)

You're welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _BIRD TURD_

gotta love that one

For the rest: this is actually quite good and way more thorough and interesting than what I ever got in school ('let's make a class' style stuff). Especially the links to real-life physics etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> #1 - Make a Turtle. #2 Program the Turtle to Draw a Man. Origins of logo!

</comment><comment><USER14> So, turtles all the way then ...</comment>


WordPress 4.8.1 still vulnerable to Host Header Attack - <AUTHOR> https://learnwebdevelopment.review/article/wordpress-481-still-vulnerable-to-host-header-attack <comment><USER2> I get where WordPress is coming from by not fixing this issue since it's an Apache thing. But since Apache's default value causes this to happen I think the framework should try to protect its users. The normal user that had their WordPress installed using an application installer on a shared host isn't going to know about this issue.

<comment><USER3> As mentioned in a previous discussion by calibas, PHP.net has this disclaimer:

"Note: Under Apache 2, you must set UseCanonicalName = On and ServerName. Otherwise, this value reflects the hostname supplied by the client, which can be spoofed. It is not safe to rely on this value in security-dependent contexts."

So it seems to be clearly a Word Press issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> AKA CVE-2017-8295. Original report on HN 4 months ago, 70 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14263252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14263252)

</comment><comment><USER5> Django has an ALLOWED_HOSTS setting, which must be provided even in debug and test configurations. I'm surprised Wordpress doesn't have a similar setting; accepting any arbitrary Host can only cause trouble (at least for those uninformed sites which don't already prevent it at the web server level).

</comment><comment><USER6> A less inflamed take on the topic I found illuminating: [https://pagely.com/blog/2017/05/exploitbox-unauthorized- pass...](https://pagely.com/blog/2017/05/exploitbox-unauthorized-password- reset-vulnerability-wordpress/)

<comment><USER7> More informative, but a nightmare to read. Thin gray font on a white background?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why Symfony HttpFoundation has the notion of trusted hosts which is configurable.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is open source so anyone could submit a PR for it though they might get more help if the drop svn and go with Github.</comment>


Deliberate Programming - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-coding/2204cfa35233

<comment><USER2> I'm not a grandmaster by any means, but these are things that I focus on:

1\. Aggressively avoid techniques and abstractions that have produced bugs in the past. The "backwards conditional" is an example of this, in languages like C that will accept _x = 0_ as a conditional, it is safer to do _0 == x_ in an if statement in case you mistype. Mutability trips me up sometimes, so I try to never re-assign a variable. I keep links to the source code of key libraries in my bookmarks bar so I never have the guess how something actually works. Static analysis tools, and bug prediction tools [1] are two steps I haven't taken.

2\. Seek out code written by experts and inspect it [2]. If I'm considering using a new language or library one of the first things I do is to search for large scale OSS projects. For a new language looking at some of the popular 3rd party libraries can be really illuminating. Especially if you're already familiar with the problem space.

3\. two words: learn to fuckin' type.

4\. Get familiar with what the history researchers call the _Primary Sources_. Not just the actual source code but the proposals, the specifications, and the research reports that are written by the people who conceived the tools that you are using.

[1] [http://google-engtools.blogspot.ca/2011/12/bug-prediction- at...](http://google-engtools.blogspot.ca/2011/12/bug-prediction-at- google.html)

[2] (EDIT) According to Paul Allen, in high school Bill Gates actually went dumpster diving for source code: [http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things- you-didnt-know-abou...](http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-you-didnt- know-about-bill-gates-2011-4?op=1)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. In the spirit of the post, I'd love if anyone has any critical feedback on the ideas here :)

<comment><USER3> A great tip I have been using recently is to avoid using cut and paste and IDE completions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Try a new library, or language, or feature of a language as often as possible. Experts become experts by mastering a ton of tiny things._

Personally, I'd rather go deeper in what I'm learning on at the moment and finish something substantial before diving into some other topic. It probably depends on how much of a multi-tasker the person is, but I find it difficult not to concentrate on one topic at a time.

I do understand what you're trying to say, though.</comment>


Quicksort in Scheme and C: First post in a project to be a better programmer - <AUTHOR> http://matthewrathbone.com/Blog/view/post/20091123/quicksort-in-c-and-scheme---operation-algorithm-1.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to make a whole bunch of core algorithms in at least 2 languages per algorithm to help drill the basics into me. You guys think this is a good tactic to make yourself better at something?

<comment><USER2> Try it and see!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your pivot selection is buggy in your C version. Think about what's likely to happen with p = 90, r = 100.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, you're right. I threw it together really quickly, I think I'll just replace the randomized partition with a regular partition call.</comment></comment>


Bike Sharing- the new - jaya-yellowant https://blog.yellowant.com/bike-sharing-the-new-age-of-transportation-102d0bc053ee <comment><AUTHOR> regarding the piles of bikes in the trash: does anyone know how much it would be to ship a container full of those to north America?</comment>


China Cracks Down on Politically Incorrect Maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/12/china-cracks-down-on-politcally-incorrect-maps/421032/ <comment><USER2> Back in the early 90's (in the US) I had a friend who was a college student from China. In the common area of her dorm there was a huge wall-size Rand- McNally map of the world. We were looking it over.

"There's China" I said. "And there's Taiwan."

"You know Taiwan is really not that big." she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Map makers show it larger than it really is in order to exaggerate its importance."

I was a little weirded out by that idea. This girl was pretty intelligent, she seemed to know some math and logical thinking. She was in the process of becoming a CPA.

For better or worse I responded with practical analysis: "How would that even work? You and I could go buy maps right now for navigating ships and airplanes, those would have to be accurate in order to function. We could compare them to this one and if they are noticeably different we could complain and the company that made the map would lose face. Why would Rand- McNally give a shit about the political importance of Taiwan anyway, enough to risk their own credibility?"

"They just do. All map makers do this."

She would not be convinced.

<comment><USER3> Similar experience(s):

I went to the University of Washington, at which an extremely high percentage of the students were Chinese (I want to say between 30% and 40%). Taiwan and the South China Sea are definite hotbutton issues. Once during an international relations lecture of about 200 people, the professor made the mistake of mentioning Taiwan which caused one of the Chinese students to stand up and begin talking very loudly (shouting?) at the professor for what must have been a good three minutes, informing him that Taiwan is not the real China. It was pretty painful to watch considering he was one of the most senior professors within that department, and very well versed on the subject.

Then I also had a Chinese roommate freshman year and there were always oddities like "those people at Tiananmen had it coming." Lots of little things that added up over time.

<comment><USER4> UW has never had that high percentage of Chinese students; from the demographics report:

[http://www.washington.edu/omad/files/2015/02/2015-01-09-UW-S...](http://www.washington.edu/omad/files/2015/02/2015-01-09-UW- State-of-Diversity.pdf)

So they (Asians, other) are at 21.5% in 2014/15\. Note that international has its own separate slice, at 14.7%, that isn't broken down. So...that means all that 21.5% are American, possibly of Chinese descent, which is far away from Chinese nationals.

UW is a commuter school, I think 75% of the students live at home even. So if you were living on campus, your view of the demographics would be a bit skewed. Incidentally, in 2013, UW admitted a class of 6,255, 687 of which were Chinese, roughly 10%, which still isn't shabby:

[http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/10/14/uw- fall-2013-enrol...](http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/10/14/uw- fall-2013-enrollment-largest-freshman-class-ever/)

<comment><USER3> What many of them do, including my former roommate, is to move over here during their sophomore or junior years of high school so they can achieve resident status in the state of Washington and get cheap college tuition. So going by those numbers you found, the true percentage is probably between 25% and 30%.

<comment><USER4> Something else is going on. Either they are on an F-1 visa, paying out-of- state rates, they are illegal (doubtful these days), or...they have green cards (or even have citizenship). You can't pay in-state tuition on a student visa. If they have green cards, they are technically immigrants (though still Chinese nationals, for sure), and are on the hook to pay taxes in the US on worldwide income. (other visas can get you resident status, but none are related to education, perhaps if they are really rich they could get investor visas...but then money would be the least of their problems).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another big thing with china is that they consider all maps and satellite pics to be state secrets that require strict approval before being published. If you ever look on google maps, the satellite pics dont match up up the maps pics. Most are off by at least 100 ft and that is because all the map data china releases has the coordinates randomly changed by a random amount in a random direction and it is different for every city. Baidu maps does not have this problem because they actual had people sit down and manually correct all the maps to match up with the satellite pics but the gps coordinates are still wrong so when you look on your phone you are rarely ever in the correct position on the map

<comment><USER6> The offsets are not random, but algorithmic, using the GCJ-02 datum. Of course, legal access to use the GCJ-02 algorithms requires that you kowtow to the Chinese government:

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

<comment><USER7> > It uses an encryption algorithm[13] which adds apparently random offsets to > both the latitude and longitude, with the alleged goal of improving national > security.

You're both right! It uses reversible randomness apparently. Wonder how hard the algorithm and seed(s) are to figure out

<comment><USER8> > reversible randomness

Yeah, we have a word for that: encryption

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> China takes this issue seriously because it has government censorship of many kinds of publications, and in international law, maps matter. (A map can indicate acquiescence to another country's territorial claim, so dictatorships that have territorial disputes with other countries censor maps.) There have been submissions to Hacker News about this issue before, and I have commented on those submissions from this standpoint of international law.[1][2] See also the Reuters news story "China tightens rules on maps amid territorial disputes"[3] (16 December 2015).

In countries that are not dictatorships, national officials may announce that they refuse to accept certain territorial claims, and simply make sure that officially published maps support the country's view of territorial claims. That can include a country publishing maps that say "boundary representations are not necessarily authoritative" when the country's government has no settled opinion on territorial disputes regarded by other countries. If you have access to maps published by a variety of official and nonofficial publishers, you can compare for yourself how different publishers treat the issue of territorial claims in the South China Sea (the example that is prominent in today's article) or in the border region of Nicaragua and Costa Rica (the earlier example cited below) or in Palestine (the later example cited below). You could also look up Kashmir on a lot of different maps and look for border details on those maps.

[1] 1387 days ago, comments to submission "The First Google Maps War" from the opinion page of the New York Times:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3645784#up_3645845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3645784#up_3645845)

[2] 958 days ago, comments to submission "Google changes Palestinian location from 'Territories' to 'Palestine' from the BBC:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651456#up_5651804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651456#up_5651804)

[3] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-maps- idUSKBN0TZ1AR20...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-maps- idUSKBN0TZ1AR20151216)

<comment><USER10> This so-called international law is often repeated online, with no evidence that random consumer maps have ever been used to resolve a dispute.

If official government maps shows a certain boundary it is evidence that the government at some point in time accepted that as fact (or pretended to accept it as fact).

Consumer maps are probably meaningless unless the government or local officials were using them and they had no official maps to contradict the unofficial consumer maps. I vaguely recall some embarrassment in India where officials were using unsanctioned maps (but I can't find a link).

As far as I can tell consumer maps (not used by officials) have never been used in an international court to prove a boundary. They can be, at worst, propaganda. There is not, as far as I can tell, any UN or other international treaty which mandate that any rabdom map is evidence of boundaries.

In the Shebaa farms dispute, for example, Israel and UN officials cited official Lebanese military maps as evidence [0].

tldr; It is enough for China to police official government maps and the use of maps by officials, without confiscating maps tourists bring in ... unless it's all about propaganda to support spurious claims, which of course it is.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nowhere near this level, but India is pretty sensitive about maps too.

When entering the country the first "forbidden" item listed on the customs form isn't drugs or other illegal things, it's "Maps and literature where Indian external boundaries have been shown incorrectly".

Of course, I doubt they enforce that, especially since anyone with a phone who has opened Google/Bing/Apple Maps while in a different country probably has the "incorrect" boundaries cached on their phone when they enter.

(we have some border disputes with Pakistan and China)

</comment><comment><USER12> Several years ago the Chinese government was confiscating lonely planet travel guides at the border

[http://www.theage.com.au/news/news/hide-the-guide-warns- lone...](http://www.theage.com.au/news/news/hide-the-guide-warns-lonely- planet/2007/11/15/1194766854001.html)

<comment><USER13> Indeed. I studied in China for a year (in 2005) and I remember that amongst the recommendations for travelers, one was to avoid showing your travel guides - or at least the maps - as most would raise eyebrows. I remember covering Taiwan on the map with my hand a few times when asking other college students about recommendations for holiday travels, so they wouldn't pick up on it.

On the other hand, it's not like it was grounds for paranoia either: that was usually a good conversation starter on the train. There's a wide disconnect between what the government says it will enforce, what it actually enforces, and what people actually think.

You could get into some weird conversations, but I generally did not come across much animosity because of these maps. Awkwardness, at worst. If there was any, you'd simply back out and apologize for the map being inaccurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Were there any issues with people having/using openstreetmaps? I believe they're just ignoring the law and provide maps without the offset, but I haven't heard of china blocking access to the project.

<comment><USER15> Oh, they'll block it if it gets any sort of traction. Right now OpenStreetMap is probably not even worth the CPU cycles it takes to add it to the GFW blacklist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reason 5,237 why doing buisnees with China is a bad idea.

<comment><USER17> I think Internet companies could consider a budget to lobby chinese government. Facebook, Google ramp up their efforts to lobby DC after CISPA.

<comment><USER18> Genuine question: how exactly would a foreign "internet company" "lobby the Chinese government?" Google literally had to take their ball and leave China at one point because China wouldn't compromise on a lot of things.

<comment><USER17> First of all, The Google case is a long story. It boils down to Google HQ, especially the three founders, didn't grant much power to local team. I remember there was a news report that one of Google China's partners was trying to lobby a chinese official by gifting gifting the latest iPad, Brin heard that and shutdown that operation completely. While I appreciate the moral high ground and respect FCPA laws, the problem is that other US companies and non-US companies, can and successfully exploited this chinese "culture" and influenced policy makers.

Secondly, for every hostile Chinese policy, there must be someone benefited. Local Chinese internet giants are actively exploiting every possible way to lobby policies for their own good. US capitals can deploy lobby operations via VIE.

Finally, the thing that troubles me is that after all these years, Google is making a coming back to China[1], I mean wtf? seriously? Many hardcore Google fans in China a disguised by this awful act.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/4/9262479/google-china-app- st...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/4/9262479/google-china-app-store- possible-fall-launch)

<comment><USER19> > It boils down to Google HQ, especially the three founders, didn't grant much > power to local team

You sure it was that, and not China trying repeatedly (and successfully) stealing Google's source code? (Source: [http://www.reuters.com/article/china- google-idUSN03258738201...](http://www.reuters.com/article/china-google- idUSN0325873820100303))

And then hacking Google again to commit corporate espionage and steal U.S industrial secrets? (Source: [http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/security- experts-china...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/security-experts- china-hacked-google-steal-u-s-industrial-secrets-article-1.195263)) Or any number of other attacks, backstabbing or a lack of cooperation from China's government?

Google left China because it just wasn't worth it to them to do business there anymore. Especially when your own research into the security breach shows the host country's government is facilitating the attacks on your company. I'd leave too... Then again, I wouldn't have been there in the first place.

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora)

> the attacks were "orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed > his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles > criticising him personally

This is the aftermath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Related reading: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823)

</comment><comment><USER21> As soon as I went to the page, it was hijacked by a huge advertisement. It literally loaded the article, then it disappeared and a huge advertisement showed up.

<comment><USER22> Use an ad blocker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If China "uses historical maps" like the one illustrated, to justify its claim, does that mean they think Hong Kong should still be a British Dependent Territory?

</comment><comment><USER24> Official East German maps showed West Berlin as a blank area bordered right by the map of East Berlin which was in full detail.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have no hope for humanity.</comment>


Inside Ten of the World's Largest Data Centers - <AUTHOR> http://wikibon.org/blog/inside-ten-of-the-worlds-largest-data-centers/

<comment><USER2> For those that have never been in one. Those pics really don't due any justice. Vids would have been better. Datacenters are cold and they are loud. Those qualities just don't come across with pics.

<comment><USER3> Several of our customers thought about building their own largish datacenter in some unused commercial spaces they own. While they often had some idea about requirements of electricity and connectivity, not a single one thought about the incredible noise coming from all this hardware (or HVAC requirements, for that matter).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Error establishing a database connection

Ironic.

<comment><USER5> Dont you love it when HNs brings down a website.</comment></comment>


Bad timing - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/02/bad_timing.php <comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty dubious about some of those 'research' organizations.</comment>


Ask HN: Migration from AWS/GCP to Alicloud - <AUTHOR> Hi All,<p>Anyone has ever done migration of their production system from AWS/GCP to Alicloud? Any experience that you can share regarding the use case and lesson learned after migrating to Alicloud? <comment><USER2> Why do you want to migrate?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi nik,

We would like to migrate becasue alicloud offer data center in the country that AWS / GCP doesn't offer.</comment></comment>


Facebook Game Idea Generator - <AUTHOR> http://whisperstorm.com/apps/fbgameideas/ Get inspiration for your next Facebook Game! All content is distilled from existing Facebook Games. Web app satire :) <comment><USER2> This is actually not a bad start. Someone needs to go all the way and make the "Facebook Game Generator"

</comment><comment><USER3> Pirate Farm actually sounds like it has potential.

<comment><USER4> I'm partial to Ninja Aquarium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if you could use Google Sets to make a name generator generator. I'm still looking for a use for that thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> mistitled. Facebook game _name_ generator.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Sorority Fighter" sounds like a winner.

</comment><comment><USER8> If this reflected what was actually out there, it'd just be, "Mafia Wars + X", where X is a random idea, like "School of Wizards" or "Military Combat" or "Small Pets."

(I've seen all of those.)

</comment><comment><USER9> It should have up/down arrows that you have to click to generate the next one. That way you could quickly determine what ideas are good.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, anyone up for a game of Battle Poker?

<comment><USER11> That must have been the working title for Casino Royale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> These names sort of remind me of scratch lotto game titles.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Robot Warz" already exists, I seem to remember.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Mouse Kingdom" sounds like a great idea!

<comment><USER15> I got "Mouse Aquarium". Genius.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Who Has the Biggest Bears"... awesome.

</comment><comment><USER17> Kingdoms Of Extreme could be fun.

</comment><comment><USER18> i want to knot laugh... but its just hard.</comment>


Bulk SMS Services for Ecommerce Businesses - <AUTHOR> https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/2981268/Which-are-the-best-bulk-SMS-services-for-an-ecommerce-business <comment><USER2> You should also checkout custom chatbots for Ecommerce Business. They are a great opportunity to anyone looking to improve the communication between the customers and the business, which we all want in Ecommerce.

Though, setting up a custom AI chatbot can be so annoying. There are so many tools out there but they all seem to miss a feature that you REALLY need.

Most times they all force you to pay to have that "Powered by…." imprint removed and AI doesn't work.

How about a done-for-you solution? These Chatifai guys set up a simple custom chatbot for just 19$/m in 72 hours after placing your order! [https://chatifai.datawisepro.com](https://chatifai.datawisepro.com)</comment>


Twitter changes access_token flow to be more compliant to OAuth1.0A spec - <AUTHOR> https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/16443

<comment><USER2> Kind of a bummer because this affects all existing ShareKit apps -- the fix was just added: <https://github.com/ShareKit/ShareKit/pull/692></comment>


Fake Documents that Alarm if Opened - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/11/fake_documents.html <comment><USER2> But like my 'email canary': <http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/my-email-canary.html>

<comment> mike-cardwell That's a really nice idea. I think my solution is better though. If an attacker manages to access my email account, all they're going to see are PGP encrypted emails.

[https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...](https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email)

They wont be able to read password reset emails or anything else in there.

I might set up a canary though, as it sounds like a useful way of being made aware of a compromise.

<comment><USER3> It'd be interesting to see how your (and other's) setup have endured actual attacks. As someone non-versed in security, I think your approach sounds great. But how does it fare when someone comes knocking?

I wonder the same thing about my setups. I have a password manager with random passwords for every site/forum that I encounter. It'd be nice to know of the efficacy of this work - has it helped me in any way? I'll never know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a much better (and older) idea: introduce subtle watermarks into the actual content of the document itself. Minor typos, changes of word order, maybe even different facts. Different people in your organization get access to those slightly different versions. Once a document emerges where it's not supposed to be, your knowledge about who might have leaked it increases.

I have heard (not confirmed) that mapmakers introduce small errors into their maps to detect competition copying their maps instead of the terrain.

<comment><USER5> While reading the blog post, I was thinking about steganographically inserting data into printed documents. It might be more difficult in this age of grammar and spell checkers, but sounds fun to play with.

It just occurred to me that stego could be applied at the word level to get around spelling and grammar corrections.

<comment><USER6> There was a tool which was used to trace forum leaks/mirrors, it was made/used by an Eve Online Alliance of all things. (If you can find a 2010/2011 mirror of the "Pandemic Legion" forums there should be a description of it on there).

From what I read it would introduce subtle changes based upon some identifier (either IP address, user account or both).

The variation was generated by using unicode characters which were either invisible or very close substitutions to actual characters. This could be countered by anyone who knew it was there however.

There was also the ability to write a block of the post in multiple different ways. With 5 blocks written 5 ways each you can get 3125 different variations of a post.

There is probably some interesting mathematics relating the level of redundancy to the minimum number of documents that would be required to make an un-tracable version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been doing this for a while with <http://trackmycv.com/> basically you can embed a transparent pixel in an MS word (or any other kind of MS office document) and get notifications whenever it's opened.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is why I would never heavily use a computer without something like Little Snitch (<http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html>) installed.

Highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER9> The phone home mechanism is not necessarily on the client side in MS Word macros. It could be the file server logging access to the fake documents.</comment>


How is Gawker Media getting away with their "SEO Bombs" - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/28jsbh/how_is_gawker_media_getting_away_with_their_seo/

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting read on Reddit - and how Gawker Media is gaming Google hard - to gain massive amounts of traffic.</comment>


Show HN: Polystores an abstraction to interact with cloud storages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/polyaxon/polystores <comment><USER2> Anyone aware of something like this in golang?</comment>


How Google Got Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046512/how-google-finally-got-design <comment><USER2> _> This all changed, of course. Computing power eventually became a secondary draw to user experience. That's partly because broadband exploded, making sheer speed less of a selling point._

So here I am, with my beefy SSD machine, a 50 Mbit/s connection, a JS engine that is orders of magnitude faster than anything we had a few years ago, HTML5 offline storage, HTTP/2, still waiting >5sec for several Google properties to load, waiting >15sec for CEF-based Spotify to load, knowing that with today's tech, these things could fire up within <100ms.

It's no disaster if I have to wait for a few seconds, but especially for secondary tasks (like looking up an address on Maps or playing a song) which I do en passant while focusing on something else, I find that waiting for only a few seconds can already steal my focus. When I fire up a music app (be it non- Google Spotify, Google Play Music or whatever), it would be great if at least the search form was available immediately. Knowing that it won't, that instead my expensive PC will go sluggish for a few moments, I find myself just avoiding these things increasingly often.

And it's sad to know that Google once _was_ pretty obsessed about reducing these little latencies wherever possible. Today, they develop SPDY and QUIC to save a few ms, then throw web frameworks at me that take whole seconds to load.

It's not that I didn't appreciate beautiful interface design. It's nice to have a mobile OS that arguably looks better than iOS. But it also was pretty awesome to have an almost latency-free experience (and good information design, making efficient use of my screen), even with an old netbook and shaky GPRS internet on the train.

<comment><USER3> > But it also was pretty awesome to have an almost latency-free experience > (and good information design, making efficient use of my screen).

It's funny. I think most people would agree that the experience you described isn't diametrically opposed to 'good design,' and in fact have the same goals.

But, it seems like the modern conception of 'good design' has effectively been reduced to pretty things and interface design. Even if designers wouldn't say that if you asked.

<comment><USER2> _> that the experience you described isn't diametrically opposed to 'good design,'_

Yup. The more obsessed we get about "pixel-perfect" interactions, the more insufficient native browser behavior becomes, to the point where e.g. Flipboard just throws it all away and creates a new UI layer using <canvas>. But that's probably not what either of us would call "good design."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think google gets design. Everything google that I've interfaced with has been met with some level of cursing and frustration. The other day I was trying to use google maps and almost had a breakdown out of frustration. It wasn't ALWAYS like this, mind you.

I will agree that their stuff is certainly prettier now, but I've found the usability has tanked across the board. I'd rather have something I can use than something that just looks nice.

<comment><USER5> I don't think _designers_ get design.

In the same way that engineers over-engineer, designers over-design. The difference is when you over-design a user interface the end-user actually notices.

In the same way that developers jump on the next new language and framework, the designer jumps on the next trend. But when you change the interaction pattern the end-user has to re-learn.

Those clever lines of code you love so much in your last project? That's the 50ms animation that really ties together the page - but creates that noticeable (and endlessly anoying) lag where after you click you have to wait to start entering data but you always start to soon and it misses the first letter or the keystroke does something else because the page focus is wrong.

Sometimes design isn't about pretty, it's about not annoying the office worker who uses your product several hours per day.

<comment><USER2> _> Those clever lines of code you love so much in your last project? That's the 50ms animation that really ties together the page - but creates that noticeable (and endlessly anoying) lag where after you click you have to wait to start entering data but you always start to soon and it misses the first letter or the keystroke does something else because the page focus is wrong._

This. Could someone at Google (and every other hip software company) please print this 2000x with a wide-format printer and plaster the walls of the designers' offices with it? Thanks.

<comment><USER6> You mean like this?

[http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy](http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy)

<comment><USER2> There was a more radical version on a long-gone page called ux.html [1]:

 _Every millisecond counts.

Nothing is more valuable than people's time. Google pages load quickly, thanks to slim code and carefully selected image files. The most essential features and text are placed in the easiest-to-find locations. Unnecessary clicks, typing, steps, and other actions are eliminated. Google products ask for information only once and include smart defaults. Tasks are streamlined.

Speed is a boon to users. It is also a competitive advantage that Google doesn't sacrifice without good reason._

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20080719213524/http://www.google....](http://web.archive.org/web/20080719213524/http://www.google.com/corporate/ux.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do I dare to say this somehow shows the _relative_ unimportance of design?

Google is/was quite successful before they _got design_ (let's say success in this context means something like: a large audience).

And even when they decided to get design: it took them a relatively short amount of time to get things "right".

I agree Material Design looks very nice. But I think functional value (just picking a term here) is so much more important, by an order of magnitude.

<comment><USER8> Or perhaps Google "got" design before, but didn't realize it.

Speed, functional value (as you said), simplicity, and such really ought to be considered part of design just as much as a visually appealing set of colors on an interface is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To me Material has always felt like it was designed by an algorithm. There's just no trace of any "soul", playfulness or overall "artistry". I know this isn't true and there's many talented artists and designers working in Google but that's just the way I've perceived everything done with Material so far. It doesn't feel like fun, it feels like something that just had to be done to stay with the times.

Another issue is Material's animations. I literally cringe every time I have to use Google Translate on my phone. I can't imagine how annoying it would be to have full OS on your phone done with Material. Those whole element animations are so distracting and they actually make the app feel slower. I know iOS has also a lot of animation but the difference is where it is being applied. Material design applies it to interactions with elements while iOS applies it to transitions. If I have to wait and see how the element I just interacted with animates, it seems unimportant but if animation is used to mask loading time like for example when transferring between app and homescreen on iOS, then it feels natural. If you want to animate interaction elements, it needs to be really, really fast animation just to let you know that yes, I got your tap/click.

<comment><USER10> Were there studies done to show that material design was "the way"? Or for that matter, was there any research done proving that it would be more useful at all? The designers at my company tout it as "the right way". I'm trying to be accommodating, but I'm starting to suspect that this is just one company's word over another's.

<comment><USER9> Oh I'm sure there's plenty of studies that were used to design Material and that's probably exactly why it feels like it was designed by an algorithm. Like the article says that it's very comprehensive guide/framework to get a cohesive result but that doesn't mean it has the magical "it" what makes design truly remarkable. One reason I think that might be factor is that Google has never been innovator when it comes to user experience. They're more about iteration and testing. The problem is that it leads to local maxima and rarely something unique and something that takes the whole industry forward.

But also keep in mind that designing a framework that works for small screens and big screens is truly a hard task. Microsoft tried and failed with "Metro" and now Google is trying to pull it off. In my opinion Apple has been a bit smarter about this and kept iOS and OSX mainly separate while integrating some elements here and there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Material Design needs to evolve on the desktop side. I like it on mobile and I think to focus on interaction minimizing everything else is great, but on desktop with navigation implemented according to it, Material Design is just a huge waste of space and very unintuitive.

I would like to have an even broader meta framework than Material Design that makes it possible to use different colors and fonts and maybe even different features to distinguish hierarchy. That way you could implement your own version of Material Design, that does not look googly.

<comment><USER12> I second this. Just yesterday We were fighting to find some functionality in vast non-intuitive Google Apps screens with huge wasted space designed for swiping.

Finally a junior developer said, what was wrong with a simple table?

<comment><USER13> you mean like this? - [https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/data- tables.ht...](https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/data-tables.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's clear Google has undertaken a massive task on defining a cohesive image and set of guidelines for the design of their products. In that sense it's probably better to have a flawed plan than no plan at all. However I would not be so fast on calling Material good design.

I might be alone on this but there's something on material design that irks me. I find it objectively pretty: colors, typography, everything with a defining image, related or just a fancy cartoon. That being said, every time I am faced with this kind of UI, my brain disconnects, I feel bored and unproductive, play a bit with the buttons never to touch it again. I do not need smiley faces and happy tones to keep me hooked to something. I just want a productive interface that gets my job done.

It is quite similar to these old children books we used to have with levers and unfolding parts inside the pages to discover more (let's say, the human body and the internal organs, or a lever that makes a bird wiggle). These were fun, sure, but a raw book with no illustrations at all ends up being the most efficient method to transfer information.

One day Google will have to figure out that their userbase are no longer kids amused by a square, a circle and a triangle.

</comment><comment><USER15> Saying that Google gets design is a bit of a stretch. The new Inbox product is a case in point: it just looks so busy and "over-designed" for what essentially should be a list of messages and a few controls to manage them.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, but some of their other products are very well designed IMO. It usually takes a while for them to get to that point though, so Inbox may be headed there soon.

<comment><USER8> Did it really take a while for their other products to get to that point?

I recall Gmail being something so immediately appealing and better than the status quo that people ditched their existing email services and applications overnight to start using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How do you get design?

1 - You respect designers

2 - You let them do their thing

3 - You guide them and is welcoming of (backend) changes that are pro- usability

4 - You avoid "thinking like an engineer" or "users are stupid" mentality

5 - You don't alienate them by A/B testing between 50 shades of blue

<comment><USER18> Seems reasonable. Reminds me of the culture change required when engineers would say we'd like to do agile? Or can we make our own technical decisions with our interference? Or why do we have Business Analyst, Developers and Tester silos, sat in different offices with different managers etc.

Whilst still common those ideas are known anti-patterns. Let us hope UX and solid design is absorbed into the mainstream in time.

<comment><USER17> I agree, there are going to still be some separation because your UX designer is not going to know how to shard a database, or your developer still won't know what kind of palette to apply given a certain circumstance (or use Photoshop), but it's essentially they talk and are not separated into silos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So this is why all of google's pages are suddenly much harder to navigate/use.

</comment><comment><USER20> Material design is great but I am still wondering how google could release the new Chrome bookmark manager which is a usability nightmare. It requires you to click many times to set a bookmark directory instead of just typing some tag. Basic usability testing would have shown this.

<comment><USER21> As a non-designer, the new Chrome bookmark manager feels very "heavy", UI- wise, compared to the previous version. I also believe Material's color scheme will feel as dated as Aero in a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ironically Fast Company doesnt seem to get design with some of the gaudy and irrelevant figures in their article.

</comment><comment> aug-riedinger This must be a sponsored post!

Not only are Google interfaces ugly - I agree this is personal - but they remain unusable.

Indeed, they picked up good ideas from others (mobile interfaces from iOS, flat-ish design from Microsoft), but everything is cheap, in a lesser good quality, and particularly not user-friendly.

I'm thinking of:

\- the new google maps \- the new google drive \- the new inbox \- their google contact app \- google play music \- android interfaces as a whole

Please google, keep on being a data-gatherer, data-distributor instead of an app creator, and outsource this to other people who tackle this issue decently.

</comment><comment><USER23> They are definitely a lot better now than a few years ago. I think the design guidelines are actually better than almost any other OS/app guidelines I've seen so far. The design itself is subjective but I think it's very good.

Material Design is getting a lot of developer traction even outside Android, surely that is a sign of some success?

I find the design language great on mobile but a bit hard to get used to on desktop (still prefer Gmail to Inbox on desktop for instance)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Google's design is still in early stages. It seems like they're taking a bit of a wrong turn in the direction of busy, cluttered UIs - their original approach of simplicity was successful because it didn't get in the way.

Making it look pretty while keeping it simple is challenging. I expect it will take them a long time, and we'll have to grumble through it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Would've been much more impressive had it been released before Metro GUI.

</comment><comment><USER3> So much FastCo Google coverage feels like astroturfing.

<comment><USER26> Is that because it gives them less time for their Apple astroturfing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very much looking forward to reading about this on Daring Fireball.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how much this has to do with Larry Page's meeting with Steve Jobs in 2010-11.

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.ie/2011/10/how-steve-jobs- influ...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.ie/2011/10/how-steve-jobs-influenced- googles.html)

[http://www.androidauthority.com/larry-page-and-steve-jobs- ad...](http://www.androidauthority.com/larry-page-and-steve-jobs-advice-given- lessons-learned-221476/)</comment>