When are Lyft and Uber going to add a "refund" button within their app? - <AUTHOR> This morning - once again - I got charged 5usd for cancelling a ride even though I had good reasons to do so. This happens too many times because of Lyft/Uber's fault, not mine:
- I cancel a ride because the driver goes in the opposite direction - The app keeps showing 2/4 mins and it's been 10+min I have been waiting - Drivers calling me to ask to cancel the ride - ...
If I want to get a refund, I need to spend too much time: DM + email -> https://twitter.com/julienbarbier42/status/959105112223264768 + wait for the refund to show on my bank account. (note: when I do ask for refund I always get it, the customer support is nice with me, all the time).
When it comes to paying Lyft/Uber, this is automatically done, they don't have to send me a DM and email to ask me to pay them for the service I used. Why would we have to spend so much time to get reimbursed for a service that we did NOT use?
Please Lyft/Uber, add a button "refund" WITHIN the app. You technically can EASILY do it. It should be as easy to get reimbursed than to be charged. Of course, you can review complains / claims, but I should not have to spend that much more time asking for reimbursement, especially when I right, I am a customer for a long time, I already have a good track record, and all claims I made in the past were confirmed by your team.
Why is this not already done? <comment><USER2> It would leave too much room for fraudulent or abusive behavior. Would exponentially increase the time their claims/customer service team has to spend digging through refunds to sort the real ones from the bs.

As a bad customer: I don't like the drivers name - refund. I thought the driver was too slow - refund. I just want to see what I can get away with - refund.

Believe it or not, most people will exploit systems to the fullest extent.

<comment><USER3> Completely false. Steam's offered a 2-week refund window ever since their criminal no-refund policy [1] was called to a judge's attention in Australia and the end result is a very low refund rate - just 6% for Rust [2].

Google Play for years now have had a 2-hour window where you can reverse purchases too just by going back to the store page and pressing the cancel button. I think the vast majority of developers aren't even aware of it.

It's very easy to detect consumer abuse of such a policy at the store-level. But I don't think consumers in general are trying to fuck companies. Darkpatterns.org exists to point out how willfully the opposite is true, Uber are just being thieves and they will be held accountable for it and a refund button will appear but not until they've stolen millions more.

[1] [http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/video- gam...](http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/video-games- website-steam-fined-3-million-for-refusing-refunds-20161223-gthdux.html)

[2] [https://www.pcgamesn.com/rust/rust-refund-stats-sales- number...](https://www.pcgamesn.com/rust/rust-refund-stats-sales-numbers)

<comment><USER2> Steam and Google play are much different services and user bases.

I'd also like to see comparative transaction amounts before you claim "completely false".

<comment><USER3> About half of Uber's users come _directly_ from the Play Store: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubercab](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubercab)

Do you have any examples of companies suffering unfairly from refunds because consumer protection laws have made them mandatory for a long list of reasons in many countries for decades already.

<comment><USER2> User downloads != transactions. A user can download the app once and conduct hundreds of transactions.

Refunds still exist, and are honestly easy to request. My point is that there is most likely a very strong product/business decision as to why there isn't a "get my money back now" button in the app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Drivers calling me to ask to cancel the ride

Tell them to cancel it if they want it cancelled!

<comment><USER5> There is an option for "the driver asked me to cancel" in the "why I'm cancelling" drop down (or something to that effect).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uber actually already does this on occasion. Request a refund from My Trips > Trip > I would like a refund. Depending on your reasoning, and the details of the trip, it may issue a refund automatically.

For a cancellation fee, I've definitely gotten an automatically issued refund in the past.

Disclosure: I work at Uber.

<comment><USER7> Huh, I did not know about this. I just tried with a recently cancelled trip and it did issue an automatic refund. Only nit: the option that gave me the refund is called "Problem with cancellation fee", not "I would like a refund".

TIL, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is my biggest complaint with these apps as well, its a terrible experience and I'm surprised they haven't hashed it out yet. Generally I call the driver and tell them I won't cancel and sometimes it works. If it doesn't then I open up the other app and hope it doesn't happen again.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good middle-ground:

After matching with driver:

Wait 4 minutes.

if distance from driver >= initial distance from driver:

Pop up modal asks if you would like a refund, to be matched with a different driver, or to wait.

<comment><USER10> Alternatively, if you've already waited double the estimated time, do the same popup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have requested a refund because a driver asked me to cancel from the app. I'm on iOS but if you go Your Trips -> Find it -> I would like a refund. I was refunded in a very short amount of time from what I remember. edit: This is from the Uber app, not sure about Lyft.

<comment><USER12> I've done this on the Android app a few times and have always been denied by a human. Now I just issue a chargeback with the credit card and don't even bother to contact Uber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If uber charges you $5 and makes you spend an hour to reverse it, no one reverses it. Those $5 add up.

</comment><comment><USER14> This isn't just a $5 issue. My friend had a driver start a ride without her in the car, and then kept it going as they drove multiple hours to the tune of $650. The whole time we were trying to stop it but there was no option. Months of tweeting and emailing and calling later, they weren't budging. It wasn't until I started a Reddit thread asking why Lyft allows drivers to scam riders that they finally relented and refunded the money. Customer service!

<comment><USER15> Months of tweeting? Next time just call your credit card issuer and have them do a chargeback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The cancel->refund pattern falls under the umbrella of a dispute. Drivers don't want to drive 10 mins toward a rider and then see them cancel on a whim with no consequence. In a case like that, the rider made a commitment that they would pay some money, which would ultimately offset the cost of the driver driving to the pick up spot, so the driver would want things to be made right if the rider decided to cancel.

Determining who is right in each case requires human intervention. Human intervention costs money. In some cities, it costs A LOT of money. Someone has to pay for it. One solution would be to hide that cost in the price of all rides, but no company is going to do that if it means having higher prices than competitors across the board.

If it was more common that a driver is at fault in a cancellation than a rider, the default behavior of the app would logically be to refund. The fact that it is not tells you something about the incentives for all the parties involved and where the potentials for abuse lie.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ola (similar to Uber/Lyft in India) have refund button and it works pretty well. One time I booked a ride and the driver cancelled it after 20 minutes because of traffic, but I got charged for that. The Ola app had refund option and I choose the reason "The driver cancelled the ride" and I got the money back (to Ola wallet).

</comment><comment><USER12> They intentionally charge you the $5 because they are assholes who like to commit fraud. Dispute it with the credit card company. Don't even bother with Uber. Go straight to your credit card website and put a dispute on it as soon as it comes out of pending. I have not seen the fee with Lyft myself, but Uber's charging of fees is absolutely ridiculous. They claim to charge a fee after you've been waiting for a few minutes if you cancel, despite the fact that the only reason you've been waiting long enough to trigger the fee is because they are a bunch of fuckwads who can't provide decent service within a reasonable amount of time. The fee is fraud and you should treat it as such. As far as I can tell, the credit card companies do not even contact Uber anymore, they immediately refund you the money because they know it's fraud. Oh, and write your representatives, if you think that will make a difference-- it won't.

</comment><comment><USER17> This thread has 36 points and 26 comments in 40 minutes, but it's halfway down the second page somehow. Shouldn't this be on the front page? Is this being demoted by the mods for some reason?

EDIT: The thread was flagged apparently. For what?

<comment><USER18> Because Hacker News isn't Uber or Lyft customer service. Nothing good could come of this post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They do, go to trips, report a problem, request a refund or something.</comment>


Haiti earthquake victim Startup charity drive - <AUTHOR> http://haitibizrelief.blogspot.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my effort at creating a way for startups and small companies to help Haiti, and also get exposure.

As I went to submit this, I also noticed this post : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051914> from another HN called dariusmonsef who seems to have plenty of experience and knowledge in this field.

As a result, I'm updating the site to send all donations collected directly to <http://hodr.org/>.</comment>


Multicore OCaml: Feb 2020 update - <AUTHOR> https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-feb-2020-update/5227 <comment><USER2> I'll say it again every time OCaml is mentioned here: there are programmers who are eagerly awaiting for it to become more friendly to the modern hardware realities and then they'll use it a lot. Like myself.

(I am mainly waiting for multicore but SIMD/AVX would be nice as well. Transparent parallelization of code without the programmer doing anything about it except supplying a compilation flag would be a game-changer but eh, we can dream right? After all, pure functions can be detected part of the time so I don't see why not.)

I get the vibe that the current community that's driving it forward is small, dedicated and overworked. Sad to hear that but rest assured that the community will grow once OCaml has multicore support. People will want to contribute once they can suddenly replace their Python or Go codebases with OCaml.

(I'd probably also ask to throw away the C strings and only leave the UTF-8 ones in but I am aware that the OCaml developers are very committed to backwards compatibility so likely not going to happen.)

Great work and progress! Keep it up! <3

<comment> Ono-Sendai You may be interested in our functional programming language Winter. It does auto-parallelisation (WIP) and auto-vectorisation: [http://forwardscattering.org/post/22](http://forwardscattering.org/post/22)

It's not open sourced yet but will be soonish.

<comment><USER2> Really cute. :) Liked the article.

That being said, I'm not looking to get back to C++.

Your work is interesting though. I'd like to see things like these upstreamed in Rust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Algebraic effects are going to put OCaml on a next level in terms of expressivity, abstraction and decoupling capabilities of separate tasks. It would be like going from a type system like C, with only concrete types, to parametric polymorphism and/or generics.

Multicore is a very nice addition, but the fact that it is going to be coupled with an effect system is a game changer for the language as a whole.

<comment><USER4> I, for one, would gladly trade threaded GC and unchecked effects for checked exceptions... Unless there is a way to implement some kind of poor man checked exceptions with unchecked effects?

<comment><USER5> Please see [1]. Around 28:45 the talk moves to effect types. At around 29:25 the proposed mechanism (with throw) is literally described as "checked exceptions".

AFAIK, this is all part of the roadmap.

[1] [https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/effective- programming/](https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/effective-programming/)

<comment><USER4> Yes thank you, exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good to get an update on multicore. On the other side of the pond, parallel MLton [0] is making solid progress. And Poly/ML [1] has had pthreads for a while.

[0] [https://github.com/MPLLang/mpl](https://github.com/MPLLang/mpl)

[1] [https://www.polyml.org/documentation/Reference/Threads.html](https://www.polyml.org/documentation/Reference/Threads.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Languages like Haskell and Go already have multicore GCs. How does OCaml's multicore GC compare? Is the work taking a long time because it is doing something brand new in the design space, or is it simply hard to integrate it with a mature language that was designed to be single core?

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I don't speak for OCaml or OCaml Labs but I am a contributor to multicore.

It is indeed that it is hard to retrofit parallelism on to an existing language while trying to retain backwards compatibility _and_ performance.

Backwards compatibility is tricky because there's lots of C code using the C API.

Performance is hard because OCaml users are used to well performing code, with low and predictable pause times from the GC (<10ms).

The community is small and it seems like there wasn't appetite for maintaining two distinct runtimes with very different performance characteristics.

The current implementation for multicore GC ([https://github.com/ocaml- multicore/ocaml-multicore](https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml- multicore)) is reasonably close to upstream in performance on single threaded code and yet will scale up to multiple threads. It requires a change to the C API though.

There's a modified multicore GC ([https://github.com/ctk21/ocaml- multicore/tree/stw_minor_gc](https://github.com/ctk21/ocaml- multicore/tree/stw_minor_gc)) that doesn't require the C API change and we're currently writing up a paper that contrasts the two wit a fairly substantial amount of benchmarking ([https://github.com/ocamllabs/sandmark](https://github.com/ocamllabs/sandmark)).

Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER8> > Performance is hard because OCaml users are used to well performing code, > with low and predictable pause times from the GC (<10ms).

I would expect that low pause times are easy enough (or relatively easy considering the difficult domain of GC optimization), but keeping the allocations cheap is (one of) the key constraints, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's very easy to make pause times low if you're willing to make allocation expensive - it's all trade-offs.

In multicore's case it's about keeping low pause times while also keeping allocation cheap _and_ maintaining throughput.

<comment><USER9> Why would _allocation_ become more expensive in parallel? Surely you're allocating in thread-local space? It's like two machine instructions. Where does the extra overhead come from?

<comment><USER8> If you want conventional shared memory parallelism, then your allocations can't assume thread-locality.

<comment><USER9> > If you want conventional shared memory parallelism, then your allocations > can't assume thread-locality.

I don't really understand why not. Can you expand on it? Doesn't the JVM for example do thread-local allocations in a conventional shared-memory parallel environment?

<comment><USER8> I was mistaken; wasn't thinking clearly as I responded. JVM can get away with this because it's generational/moving; bump allocator works in the young generation and then objects are subsequently moved. Generational/moving is tricky, especially with C APIs (if the GC moves an object that C has a pointer to, the C code dereferencing the pointer will find potentially garbage data) and I believe they make it difficult to get good STW times, but at this point I'm pretty well out of my depth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could somebody, who's familiar with both worlds, please compare OCaml's Multicore, Algebraic effects, Reagents with Scala's Monix or ZIO?

I'm familiar with the latter, but would love to learn more about OCaml.

</comment><comment><USER11> I created an account just to ask, what is the fetish and obsession with OCaml and functional stuff on here? Does anyone actually write it (besides Erlang)?

OCaml specifically is such an obscure language you'd have a hard time explaining it to most people who are software engineers.

Who cares?

<comment><USER12> Facebook uses Ocaml in the form of Reason, they're a pretty big deal. I think they also use Haskell?

Lots of financial companies, including some serious heavy-hitters like Bloomberg, use functional languages like Haskell and Ocaml. I suppose the blockchain folks are pretty enamoured with it too.

Plenty of big companies like Twitter use Scala, which is plenty functional.

Even on the front-end side: JavaScript was directly inspired by Scheme; TypeScript was hugely inspired by languages like Ocaml and Haskell; React and Redux's inspirations fall directly out of the functional programming community.

Rust, out of Mozilla, is also a descendent of the functional programming world; its compiler was originally written in Ocaml.

Just the other day there was a conversation on here about type-system enforced optionals. Almost every "modern" language has grown these in the past decade, often including monadic combinators to help minimize boilerplate. All of this comes from what ML and Haskell were doing as many as 30 years ago.

Speaking of monadic combinators: these are also frequently used in modern languages with async libraries to avoid what the JS community termed "callback hell".

TBH if you've developed software in the past ten years, it's unlikely you haven't been hugely affected by what the FP community has been doing, and it's not impossible that watching what they're doing now give you a glimpse of where mainstream programming will be a decade or more down the line.

<comment><USER13> > "TBH if you've developed software in the past ten years, it's unlikely you > haven't been hugely affected by what the FP community has been doing."

Apart from HN / reddit bubble, not many people know about FP, and not to imply that's their fault. FP is still weird, difficult for mere mortals, and ivory tower elitism is holding some of its useful ideas back.

<comment><USER10> people are doing FP, or using ideas originating in FP without even knowing it:

* Java/C# generics

* sealed interfaces and record classes

* pattern matching

* first-class functions with closures

* even type system itself (eg Python is gaining a type system)

* ...

The world of programming languages is converging, no matter how slowly, towards ML

[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/talks/mlw13.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/talks/mlw13.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Half of those things aren't even specific to FP. And I bet most people don't even use pattern matching outside HN / reddit bubble, not to say it isn't cool.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nasty Facebook Bug - <AUTHOR> https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/1380414162214730/

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, seems like Facebook is having some issues with synchronization.. Seems like developers are not keeping up anymore with the fast paced change of the company. Also I was looking for my recent activity on the Facebook Android app. I gave up after an hour of searching.. Something really basic and straightforward as "my recent activity" should at least be available on a smartphone in a very intuitive way.. Just hope Facebook will get this issue fixed soon..</comment>


Chinese Company Says It Will Soon Cross $100/kWh Battery Threshold - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/12/04/chinese-company-says-it-will-soon-cross-100-battery-threshold-slay-the-internal-combustion-engine/#28caabd17402 <comment><USER2> Just to put this in perspective, for $169 you can get a 1200Wh deep cycle battery on amazon: [https://www.amazon.com/Universal-UB121000-45978-100AH- Cycle-...](https://www.amazon.com/Universal-UB121000-45978-100AH-Cycle- Battery/dp/B00S1RT58C/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1544043381&sr=8-3&keywords=Deep+cycle+100ah)

however, you will only get 300 cycles before the battery performance degrades to unacceptable levels.

If you wanted to use this deep cycle battery for 5 years (300X5, 1500 cycles), you would only be able to discharge 20%, meaning you would need 5 of them.

So given that you can buy a $169/1200Wh battery right now, and get 300 cycles Or you can consider it a $845 (5 X $169) / 1200Wh given the above explanation regarding cycles.

So for $900 you can get a 100 AH 12v lithium battery, which gives you near 1200Wh, $900/1200Wh to give further understanding about the title of the article. The lithium battery should give you the same amount of cycles as the 5 deep cycles. However they are relatively new in this size and unverified, they will probably perform at this level.

<comment><USER3> The 5 lead acid deep cycle's will weight approx 320 lbs, the 100 Ah Lithium Ion is 29lb...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> is the technology getting better or is the cost of production getting lower?

<comment><USER5> I believe Tesla has been talking about reducing the amount of cobalt in their batteries which would be a technology way of reducing cost. As well as simply making larger more automated factories reduces the production costs.

Battery companies are going from all angles to reduce their prices.

<comment><USER6> Right, the clear indication here is on commodity futures for the raw materials which batteries will require for the next 100 years.

If you want to own the future of transport, owning cobalt and lithium mines is where to be.

So, who specifically is doing this? Thats where i would invest.

\---

Also, what will the overall environmental impact of the full lifecycle be for a generation of EVs in 15 years.

If tesla is producing 10k cars a week, and they will require 2 batteries in their lifetime, thats about 300K batteries per year - where they will last N years... then what becomes of them?

<comment><USER7> If you're a retail investor, it's probably very likely that the big guys have already priced this in, and all you're making might be a bet that shifts on new information.

The big guys also get new information much faster than the rest, and even have people employed who's job is to get information via non-traditional means that are not available to average investors.

For example:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/08/19/129298095/with...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/08/19/129298095/with- satellite-images-wall-street-analysts-spy-on-wal-mart)

Using satellite images of parking lots to predict super market earnings, or using satellite images to estimate corn and wheat production.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Raspberry Pi Rain Man in the Making - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2017/10/13/a-raspberry-pi-rain-man-in-the-making/ <comment><USER2> OpenCV + Rasperry Pi (especially newer models) are a powerful combo, I was able to get lane tracking going on a Pi2 & OpenCV a couple years ago.

[http://coreyrowell.com/raspberry-pi/autonomous- car/2016/01/0...](http://coreyrowell.com/raspberry-pi/autonomous- car/2016/01/09/autonomous-car-project.html)</comment>


Block Google and Facebook to Improve Firefox Privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2014/10/block-google-facebook-improve-firefox-privacy/

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have ideas on improving the blocking?</comment>


The Coming War on General Computation (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md <comment><USER2> When the war on drugs will inevitably be over in US, within a decade or so (the trend towards it is growing), by then there will already be two new wars started to "replace" the war on drug for anyone who benefitted from it (such as the police, private prisons [1], etc): the War on Pirates, and the War on Child Porn. If not both, they'll just use whichever works best. The real agenda behind it will be the same either way.

Then you can start expecting SWAT teams raiding people's homes for downloading songs illegitimately (and yes, you'll even see more dogs and even innocent people shot in the process - just like in that "parody" video where the SWAT team shoots the kid who was downloading songs in the head at the end, which I can't find right now).

Some of these are not felonies yet, but they're working hard [2] to "fix" that "problem". Current and future surveillance technologies, used by either NSA, FBI, DHS, or even the police will make that ever easier and more "tempting" to do.

[1] [http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby- illegal/](http://www.republicreport.org/2012/marijuana-lobby-illegal/)

[2] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/unauthorized- stream...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/unauthorized-streaming- felony_n_3720479.html)

<comment><USER3> I also think we can expect that things which are today 100% legal, like free software on hardware under the user's control, will be targeted too. In this area I expect anti-gun-like retoric: "with so many important aspects of society happening online, we cannot allow potential criminals and terrorists access to tools that can do so much damage". (~)

The future was supposed to be amazing. What happened?

(~) I finally see the pro gun rights people's point of view. I'm disappointed in myself that it took a "me-relevant" analogy for me to understand.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps we as a community need to dig our well before we're thirsty and start putting tech-literate, sane-minded, ethical politicians in the seat of power before the new batch of liars and crazies get there. After all, the media is the driving force behind it and we're able to harness online media channels that're rapidly becoming more relevant than the traditional broadcast media platforms of yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Links to the actual upstream posts by Doctorow:

[http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on- general-p...](http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general- purp.html)

[http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)

[http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> We live in a world where anyone with $25 can purchase a rasberry Pi and hook it up to a television/monitor. General purpose computing is more accessible than ever before. And if people want a locked down device why shouldn't they have a device that actually meets their needs?Unless the need for programs dried up and ran away, we will always need(and have) general purpose computation.

I'm sure a lot of people here constantly fix the computers for their friends and family. Tablets and smartphones help decrease the amount of help they need. isn't that a good thing? Or is Doctrow scared of becoming irrelevant when hackers are no longer needed as techno-priests?

<comment><USER7> I disagree.

You cannot simply buy the RPi at a normal retailer, unlike (smart)phones, laptops, (smart)TVs etc. etc. This does not mean the RPi isn't a fantastic little machine or that it doesn't offer new possibilities. However, there is a _world_ of difference between a developer board (that doesn't have a case, operating system, built-in storage etc.) and a ready-made consumer article.

General purpose computers become rarer with an increase in phones and tablets, all of them locked down. This is the making of a niché, and I think it is dishonest to simply assume people are worried about losing their status. Is the reduction in sales of general purpose computers the end of the world? Perhaps not. Should it prompt closer scrutiny and some concern? I think it should.

<comment><USER8> _General purpose computers become rarer with an increase in phones and tablets, all of them locked down._

But the reason this happens is that most people, even when the computer they owned really was a general-purpose computer, didn't _use_ it as one. Anyone reading or commenting on HN is an outlier; we actually _need_ a general- purpose computer, because we need to be able to do things with it that its designers and builders never thought of. But most people don't. Most people want a small and pretty much stable selection of apps, and if those apps are there, they don't care whether or not the device they're running on could also run an infinite number of other apps.

<comment><USER7> This works until one of that "stable selection of apps" tells the user that the version of their OS is not supported anymore, and that they would have to update. If the device is locked, your update paths are limited. Just because not everyone _uses_ all functionality doesn't mean I have to condone removing that functionality entirely. And it does not mean that it might not burn a user at some point in the future.

As an anecdote: we have an iPhone 3G in our household, a phone that became progressively worse with certain updates after the release of both the 3GS and 4, to the point that it is nearly unusable for surfing now. This leaves me with exactly two options: stop using it as it was meant to be used, or buy a new phone. And for the other camp: in order to get an inofficial version of Android that is newer than Gingerbread on my phone, I would have to reformat its internal storage, which I _can_ only do since it is unlocked by now. However, even that is not entirely without risk, and it is not supported.

<comment><USER8> _This works until one of that "stable selection of apps" tells the user that the version of their OS is not supported anymore, and that they would have to update._

Oh, I entirely agree; I've been bitten by this myself (and on desktops/laptops, not on mobile devices), and it's one of the main reasons I don't have an iDevice and don't use many apps on my Android tablet.

I'm just saying that you and I are outliers; most users appear not to care that their device is locked down and they will sooner or later be forced to upgrade. (Many of them are used to upgrading every time their phone carrier comes out with a shiny new toy anyway.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And in the 2 years since this was published, this has turned out to be completely spot-on...OH WAIT. it hasn't at all.

Modern political discourse: Everything is a war on something.

This kind of language radicalizes people from the outset, and prevents a discussion from actually happening.

How about instead of calling it the "War on General Purpose Computing," "the War on Christmas," the "War on Women," the "War on Guns", heck, even the "War on Drugs," and the "War on Terror" \- we take a step back, take a breather, and talk reasonably and calmly about the actual issues here?

Because that wouldn't grab headlines.

<comment><USER10> I think it all boils down to the "War Over Control" where some people want to control other people.

Personally I think if Islamists/gun grabbers/drug dealers/child pornographers want to destroy our way of life then they need to do it themselves -- I'm not going to do it for them by enacting draconian, broad-sweeping, and baseless laws that delegate power to people with questionable motives (all in the name of "safety").

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember when the iPad first came out and I (along with many others) were concerned that it was a device for consumption and not creation: the first step in the "war" on general-purpose computation. However, with the continual improvements in web browsers and JavaScript runtimes (as well as things like Emscriptrn) I'm far less concerned. Nowadays even a locked down phone can run any JavaScript, which may provide the user with an IDE or a secure messaging system. I still think there's a war but I think it's more at the network level rather than device level.

<comment><USER3> I think your optimistic view misses something important: nomatter how well browsers can execute JS, it's not truly general purpose computing as long as the stuff beneath the browser - from OS to hardware - is out of your control.

It's great that the in-browser ecosystem is expanding and improving, but IMO we will still lose The War if we cannot tell our chips to do whatever we want. I hope we won't settle for the browser when we can and should have it all.

<comment><USER12> > it's not truly general purpose computing as long as the stuff beneath the > browser - from OS to hardware - is out of your control.

By that standard the state of general-purpose computing has been steadily improving as the most popular computing platform has moved from Windows--which is closed-source--to Android, which is open-source.

<comment><USER3> I'm not so sure. There seems to be an unwillingness to consider phones general purpose (which isn't that strange, since not long ago they were indeed special purpose). Just look at the acceptance of vendor lockdowns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Previously discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448754)

<comment><USER14> and here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436139)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I think there are certainly reasons to be concerned with the phenomena Doctorow is describing, I find his reasoning unpersuasive.As a general observation, he is making an argument that certain trends are bad because they could lead to possible bad outcomes in the future. This style of reasoning seems to me to be common in political arguments. The reality is is that there are trade offs from policy choice in the present, which are hard enough to quantify. Then there are going to be future trade offs, which become harder and harder to predict the further out they are, and the more complex the problem domain is.

The core of his argument is that special andpurpose computers open the potential for surveillance. This seems myopic in the sense that the only effective controls on government surveillance are political. General purpose computers or not, the government has no shortage of means to spy.

So far, the adoption of special purpose computers is being driven by market forces. They simply work better for most tasks than general purpose computers. There is a huge benefit to the human population from these devices, just as there is a huge benefit from having a rather leaky worldwide network easily accessible to "civilians."

So society has to struggle already with how to manage control of information. The availability of general purpose computers seems largely peripheral to this dilemma.

As far as the availability of general purpose computers to technical people, the harm he posits is almost entirely hypothetical. Not only are they still being produced in large numbers, there are fantastic numbers of existing computers that will continue to function for years to come.

A far more likely impediment to accessibility to powerful, modern general purpose computers will be that market forces will shift so that they are no longer commodity items, and the cost to access the latest and greatest will rise. This is a problem of market structure, and legislative attempts to address this type of pricing problem have proven to be futile.

If we were seeing calls by industry or politicians to legally limit the use of open source operating systems, then I think a call of alarm would ring louder (at least to me).

</comment><comment><USER16> General purpose computers will be available for a long time. But they will have the significance of a home computer in the 1980s.

<comment><USER17> I don't know and neither do you.

<comment><USER18> Er yes, that applies to absolutely everything. He's expressing an opinion.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough, let me rephrase it: he is parroting a common cliché, one that is based more on the desires and trends of the contemporary computer industry than a deep reflection on the future of humanity.

<comment><USER18> I suspect a typo in the second sentence. I think it's hard to argue with the first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> sadly people will always be ready to sell snake oil that promises the impossble.

great example i saw floating around here the other day: [http://privatecore.com/](http://privatecore.com/)

<comment><USER20> Care to explain to the rest of us who don't see it why your link is an example of "snake oil"? I'm familiar with the metaphor, but I don't see the deception yet.

<comment><USER21> I believe it is the "data in use" portion, glancing from the page.

Why? Because all forms of powerful server-based crypto rely on software-based crypto. The problem with this is they need the private key of yours on the server side, somewhere, from the whole thing to work. This means the server operator can recover the key from a running operating system, easily (through system utilities) or forcefully (reading it out of memory with specialized programs), or just writing code to fool you into enter the passphrase and storing.

If you have heard of host-proof systems, they indicate (I would say correctly) the only way for crytography on network service like the one offered here is the data is encrypted on the client and sent to the server, never ever will the passphrase see server receiving the data. Therefore, not even the service provider can crack it without the same effort as some adversary from outside the system.

That being said, I could have read too much into.

<comment><USER22> Homomorphic encryption allows one to carry out operations on encrypted data without having to decrypt it; I could encrypt my data, send it to a big number-crunching server, they do the operations without decrypting anything, and send it back to me to decrypt and see the results at my leisure.

It's got some way to go, but it's certainly possible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Poutsch is Twitter meeting SurveyMonkey  - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2013/02/25/to-poutsch-your-opinion-matters/

<comment><USER2> I use it on my website to poll my users and it's quite usefule

</comment><comment><USER3> I look forward to the mobile app

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice guys !</comment>


Show HN: Moon – a tiny UI library inspired by Vue - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KingPixil/moon <comment><USER2> This is one of two completely unrelated Js projects called moon, both of which have been posted to Show HN in the last three hours

At time of writing, they are next to each other.

I got really confused for a few minutes trying to figure out what they had to do with each other

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, this one has been around since early 2015. Not sure when the other one was released. Sorry about the confusion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has nothing to do with the code, but out of curiosity, why are all of your projects on free domains? They tend to not have a very good reputation with many corporate filters (like .tk, ga, cf, ml, etc are all nearly completely packed full of spam and malware)

I can visit the github pages fine, but the domain TLDs are killed off for malware here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm a student trying to save money wherever I can, but I really need to start migrating all of my work to more reliable domain names.

<comment><USER3> IMO you can use a js.org subdomain (check the cname mappings for using github pages) or something like kingpixil.github.io/moon, which would look (personally) more professional than a .tk-equivalent

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I'll try and setup a js.org subdomain, or start looking for some nice domain names.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cambridge ousts Harvard as world's best university - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/08/cambridge-worlds-best-university-harvard

<comment><USER2> I am not sure that this is worth arguing about, but would question the ranking of MIT.</comment>


Sublime Text plugin review: GitGutter - <AUTHOR> https://dbader.org/blog/sublime-text-gitgutter-review <comment><USER2> Thanks, I didn't know about this.</comment>


What VC Needs to Learn from Uber and WeWork - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90408850/what-venture-capital-investors-need-to-learn-from-the-mistakes-of-wework-and-uber <comment><AUTHOR> So the pendulum is swinging back the other way.

It used to be standard practice to replace the founder CEO with someone more mature / experience. Then they saw Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and it rebuilt confidence - actually your founder has the strongest vision.

Now with Uber and WeWork, well...not always.

I think the lesson here isn't "replace your visionary when company gets to a certain point". I think it should "look at the fucking business fundamentals of _today_ ".

Those companies above were profitable or (amazon) not profitable due to investment, but the investment made sense.

Uber never made sense to me - the story was once they achieved "scale", they would be able to raise prices. No, I'm sorry. People will just revert to whatever transit they were using before. But hey I've been thrilled with 7 years of subsidized rides (think I started using them in 2012 or so).

WeWork I'm not so familiar with but given the immense backlash with IPO, clearly their board and lead investors shit the bed and believed the hype / potential vs what is real now.</comment>


The Rise of the Online Vacation Agency - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/10/the-rise-of-the-online-vacation-agency/

<comment><USER2> I'd love to see something for longer trips that can be modified on the fly. I've done three 1-month long trips in my life where I went from city to city. They required a lot of planning and research, but often while traveling you'd learn of new options and have to quickly plan to incorporate those experiences into your current itinerary. Being able to quickly adjust your itinerary of a multi-hop vacation while en route would be nice.

Related to this would be a nearest neighbor point of interest discovery tool. Often its easy to find what is interesting to do in a particular location, but its much more difficult to explore options that are a day trip to an overnight trip away from that anchor point. My experience has been that the day trips or overnight trips with a return to the origin point at the most memorable.

Some examples:

\-- Vacationing in Praia do Forte in Bahia, but taking a day trip to Mangue Seco.

\-- Passing through São Luis do Maranhão and taking a three day trip to Barreirinhas, and from Barreirinhas, taking a day trip to Lençois Maranheses.

\-- Day trip to Interloken from Zürich (I wish we had done an overnight trip, but we didn't plan on that and missed out)

\-- Day trip from Amsterdam to a spa by the beach (unlike the other three, this one was not worth it and I wish I had known that before)

At the end of the day a great vacation often resembles a bunch of nodes in a graph, with edges being formed on the basis of financial cost, time cost and value of that destination/activity/hotel/restaurant to me. Find me the best route between node A and node B in the graph that maximizes happiness (According to my criteria) while minimizing cost and travel time.

Another reason it's valuable for this to be centralized is that it avoids the issue of being sent to some boring activity or place because you don't know that the local person may be recommending a venue on the basis that its his brother or cousins business. This happens surprisingly often.

</comment><comment><USER3> Author here. This is a somewhat of a follow on to another article, "Innovation in the Cruise industry... Where is it?" that you might also find interesting: [http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/09/innovation-in-the- cruise...](http://blog.kangacruise.com/2012/09/innovation-in-the-cruise- industry-where-is-it/)

Happy to get a little more into the specifics if anyone's interested. It took us a long time to get out of the "better ui, kill the travel agent" mindset that's prevalent among travel startups. The greater complexity of vacation sales really seems to throw most of the precedent set by online travel agencies (Expedia) and meta-searches (Kayak) out the window.

<comment><USER4> Colin - this is awesome and I just recently began working on an idea based on many of the same observations you've made. Just shot you an email to the contact@ address!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I haven't used a travel agent in about 10 years, and I vacation 2-3 times a year. Not sure how they can justify that vacations are not booked online. In fact, no one asks me when I am booking a flight or hotel online whether it is for business or vacation...

I guess if you are looking into pre-packaged resorts, where its a charter plane, resort, and even airport transfers included (Transat Vacations, Sunwing Vacations, etc) then maybe that's true that people still us agents for those... I still see agents advertising those in malls.

But I bet that segment of the market is declining year over year for the past 10 years. So yes, its a low percentage of a shrinking market.

As for cruises, the market is still overwhelmingly older and retired people[1]. Another market it will be hard to disrupt with technology.

Not to be all pessimistic, but there's a reason things are the way they are I guess.

[1] <http://www.cruisemarketwatch.com/market/>

<comment><USER6> The market that I still see isn't pre-packaged, but custom packaged. When you have 7 people flying from 3 different air ports, need reservations various restaurant for three evenings and tickets to particular sporting event. Companies that can fix all that and more with one super efficient point of contact still offer value that many people are willing to pay extra for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've booked family cruise vacations each of the last 5 years. Each year I've done all the research online including deciding on point of departure, cruise line and the specific ship on sites such as expedia, vacations to go, and the individual cruise line websites. Despite this online research, I still book with a travel agent because they seem able to match or beat online prices, book multiple rooms near each other, and sometimes obtain larger room credits. If it were possible to accomplish all of the above without an agent at a lower cost I would do so.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love this idea and fully agree with it. My friends are currently planning a vacation for a large group of us, which involves flights, hotels, and events, as well as coming up with options for a range of budgets, interests, and family needs like child care. Online vacation agencies would be a huge help and well worth paying IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER9> Two thoughts

1\. I worked for a cruise booking company (a deplorable company and industry, just FYI, but that is a story for another day). I wrote their systems for integrating with Sabre and then the UI. The industry just plain sucks. The scams, the "discounts", the different prices. Not to mention that getting the data is a nightmare (it might have changed, I've been out of that for some time now). I honestly felt terrible about what I did nearly everyday. There was always "another tweak" to get more money out of the customer, some additional fee or service charge. It was unbelievable.

I don't know kangacruise and I wish them luck. I hope they can wade through the crap industry and make a nice experience that gets the user a fair price.

2\. In the past 5 years I've taken at least 3 vacations a year plus at least 10-15 business trips. Conservatively, say 35 trips, many of them international. Not once did I consult a travel agent. I considered it once for a more involved trip, but when I saw that they weren't really bringing much to the table, I left and did it all myself. It wasn't hard. Perhaps having to loop in three different sites is annoying, but unless there was an overly compelling reason to use a travel agent, I wouldn't even consider it.

At this point in time, I feel travel agents are mostly for older folks or someone with more money than sense. I don't know if you can actually create a market (yes, I feel you would have to create it...it wouldn't form naturally) which is always an uphill battle.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are you sure people don't book a vacation online? It seems the weakest part of the argument. I booked my last vacation almost completely online, albeit from different vendors. The flight was booked online, then the hotel (also online), and finally my car, online. The only time I've used a travel agent is when I travel to places that aren't online, such as Kenya, where I needed a local agent to find a driver and map out a route.

<comment><USER11> They cited numbers, and I tend to believe them. Particularly for certain segments (like cruises). We booked a cruise in 2011 and it most definitely required an agent. There are just to many options and to much to weed through, the agents (who are free for me to use even) are just too easy for such a vacation.

I'm not even sure this is something that _needs_ to be disrupted. My experience with actual people for booking these things has been fantastic. It's low stakes and relatively easy...I'm not sure online is better.

<comment><USER12> If you look at the linked report it says that online segments are growing in all of air, rail, car rentals and hotels--"vacations" are just not growing as a segment online. I think what tstegart might be saying is that it's not obvious which aspects of "vacation" are left, when all of those pieces can be booked individually.

I agree with regard to whether or not this needs to be disrupted--I do some work for a local travel agency and the level of service they provide is remarkable (it would be very difficult for me to save money by booking the same trips myself online, without even accounting for the time it would take me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To me planning holidays is hell. How do you come up with places to travel to? So I think this makes sense, naturally I think about it every time I have to plan a new vacation.

</comment><comment><USER14> You guys might want to check out cruisewise.com, they have been doing something very similar</comment>


A relatively secure way to check if your passwords are in some online database - <AUTHOR> https://invidio.us/watch?v=hhUb5iknVJs <comment><AUTHOR> The change of title is, again, deliberate. This is intended to explain exactly what the video is about, rather than the original, which was a little "click- baity".</comment>


Uber Talent List - <AUTHOR> https://candidate-experience.uber.com/ <comment><USER2> What am I looking at?

<comment><USER3> I am currently getting a 404, but my guess would be something similar to Airbnb's "talent list" [1] after they, like Uber, announced layoffs [2]?

1\. [https://www.airbnb.com/d/talent](https://www.airbnb.com/d/talent)

2\. [https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2020/05/11/coro...](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2020/05/11/coronavirus- effects-lead-uber-laying-off-3-700-via-zoom/3113512001/)</comment></comment>


Kind of like Lyft, but for your packages - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/barnacle-ships-your-packages-through-regular-people-to-1541702233

<comment><USER2> Great, I need to move some drugs

<comment><USER3> Seems like a great crossover opportunity for Lyft/Uber drivers who have downtime.</comment></comment>


Exhibiting The Hobbit: A tale of memories and microcomputers - <AUTHOR> https://www.kinephanos.ca/2014/the-hobbit/ <comment><USER2> If you're wondering why _The Hobbit_ was an interesting game, see [https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the- hobbit/](https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/)

<comment><USER3> That was a terrific read, thank you. Interesting to see that Megler is now Dr. Megler at AWS.</comment></comment>


"Journalist of the Year" and how Fake News is real - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-messed-with-the-wrong-small-town-d92f3e0e01a7 <comment><AUTHOR> As a rural American, I can assure you that many people feel mis-characterized as the authors of this piece feel.

Intellectual dishonesty of this type is one of the root causes of the current American political climate.</comment>


"Progether" community popped up on Reddit, "program together" - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/progether

<comment><USER2> For anyone interested in getting into the general swing of things with this subreddit, I encourage you to read the original post which spawned the subreddit in the first place:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/10h6o4/wou...](http://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/10h6o4/would_anyone_else_like_to_learn_programming_as_a/)

</comment><comment> indivisible-irl huzzah!</comment>


Run JRuby on Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/12/13/run_jruby_on_heroku_right_now/

<comment><USER2> While you've been able to do it with a custom buildpack for some time, it is nice to see this as supported functionality in the default Ruby pack. I am excited!</comment>


China putting minority Muslims in 'concentration camps,' U.S. says - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-concentrationcamps/china-putting-minority-muslims-in-concentration-camps-u-s-says-idUSKCN1S925K <comment><USER2> China isn't invading any Western countries and so we will take no action that could threaten our wallets. We've spoken to the Council of Wallets and they've said relations with China are excellent.

</comment><comment><USER3> So exactly what the US is doing with large numbers of latino's?

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand the whataboutism happening in response to this article. Countries do bad thing sometimes, the US most certainly does. But can we not just be happy that there's some visibility being created about bad acts/actors regardless of who's reporting on it?

These camps have been going on for too long and are still under-reported. Most of the people I've talked to about it still have no idea this is going on at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is concentration camps in quotes, since this fits the literal definition of a concentration camp?

</comment><comment><USER6> Some Muslim groups do similar stuff to minorities as well. It's all evil.

<comment><USER7> where is there a concentration camp of nonmuslims in the muslim world? and why even bring that up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> US has probably killed more Muslims than any other country in the last few decades (and is still occupying Muslim countries) and is trying to act like the paragon?

>defended his use of a term normally associated with Nazi Germany as appropriate, under the circumstances

US also had concentration camps at the same time.

There is something else going on here. It has nothing to do with trying to protect a minority group.

<comment><USER9> Probably the something else is the same thing that's happening with Huawei, that happened with Super Micro, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are they putting them in "concentration camps" because they are muslim or because they are separatists? The headline seems to imply something ( like ww2 nazi germany scenario ) that is not true. Wouldn't it be more correct to say they are putting uyghurs ( or uyghur separatists ) in "concentration camps" rather than muslims? That's bad too, why escalate it to muslims? Because the largest muslim ethnic group in china ( the Hui ) are not being put in "concentration camps".

I don't condone putting anyone in "concentrations camps" or "reeducation camps", but reuters, like many of their british counterparts, are playing a dangerous clickbait game at best or a dangerous propaganda game at worst. The worrying part is that they know better and yet this still did this.

I wonder if reuters ever had a headline "Britain mass murdering muslims" when britain helped invade libya, iraq, etc. Or did they choose a more benign, neutral, or even pro-british headlines instead?

</comment><comment><USER9> The U.S. says lots of things, especially about its rivals or targets. Meanwhile, literal, verified concentration camps exist on the US-Mexico border.</comment>


Introduction to Writing Genetic Algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://udara.io/writing-a-genetic-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> GA is cool

Population size 1024 took only 52 generations to get from random gibberish to "Helln, woqld!"

Then over 6000 generations to arrive to "Hello, world!", which seems not very efficient.

As every member of population is evaluated for fitness every generation, we performed 6M evaluations.

If same task was bruteforced (all combinations of 13 length from alphabet of 89 letters 89^13 variants) it would take much more than 6M.</comment>


Y Combinator opens registration for its free Startup School online course - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/06/y-combinator-opens-registration-for-its-free-startup-school-online-course/ <comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13801376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13801376)</comment>


The Slow Decline Of Adobe Flash Player - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3049920/tech-forecast/the-agonizingly-slow-decline-of-adobe-flash-player

<comment><USER2> Flash being a resource hog is down to bad coding of the flash applications rather than the runtime itself (the runtime isn't a masterpiece of efficiency or anything but it isnt intrinsically a resource hog).

All the crappy programmers making punch the monkey flash ads will just make punch the monkey html ads and you wont realise what it is consuming your battery.

Also, "Thoughts on Flash" is full of easily verifiable lies.

<comment><USER3> The runtime is pretty awesome as well. I remember the work of people like Joa Ebert exploiting the platform and the language to the max, really cool stuff. The world is barely coming closer to what Flash was capable to do... 8 years ago.

IMO Apple killed Flash not because of the "battery, security, etc..." "issues", but because they didn't want their devices to depend so heavily on another company. It was business, and strangely, Adobe didn't even put on a fight. And they just spread FUD and all the developers that didn't know better went with it, but I agree with you, shitty flash developers will now just be shitty HTML developers and everything will be the same in another 5-6 years or so.

<comment><USER4> There is probably business strategy in that, but I remember flash on my mac to be terrible (100% cpu, draining battery like crazy). While the same version on windows was running perfectly.

<comment><USER2> Apple wouldn't give access for some hardware apis to Adobeso stuff that was being done on the graphics hardware in windows had to be done 100% software on Mac. Then Jobs complained that Flash was slow.

<comment><USER3> And its pretty much the same thing now.

Try WebGL on any Mac (Safari is the worst performer of them all btw). You will see a bit of lag, frame drops, CPUs at 100%, a lot heat and your battery will die in two hours max.

Open the same site on a Chrome/Windows machine (with comparable specs of course) and you don't see any of that trouble.

Why? Because Apple wants everything done "The Apple Way®©™" and other people just don't care so they just create a substandard implementation and call it a day. And it's only going to get worse now that they want to push Metal everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I don't understand is why Adobe hasn't made HTML5 a supported compilation target for the existing Flash tools. Yes, tons of work. But a great way to stay relevant in the web app development space.

</comment><comment><USER6> I do some Flex (Which is build on Flash) contracting, the money is crazy and there are some Flex/Flash applications out there that I don't see getting replaced by JS anytime soon.

<comment><USER7> You are one of the brave few and I salute you! When flash fell out of favor I joined all the other devs who jumped ship. I really enjoyed application development with Flex/actionscript. It was a much saner ecosystem than client side javascript IMO.

I think it's a pity Adobe hasn't open sourced flash, I'm sure there are some rockstar developers out there who could help fix the bugs and boost the performance/efficiency of the runtime.

<comment><USER4> you have haxe ([http://haxe.org/](http://haxe.org/)), open source and even better.

<comment><USER2> The flash language (Actionscript) was entirely open source from compiler up. The OP is talking about the Flash runtime.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


US Geological Survey Put 60,000 Maps on Sale for $1/each - <AUTHOR> http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/usgs/zInvReductionSearchStart/(isQuery=yes&layout=7_1_95_58&uiarea=0&carea=%24ROOT)/.do

<comment><USER2> looks like starts with a $5 handling fee - and standard shipping is 7-21 day delivery.

Standard shipping cost estimations for $1 sale products:

1-25 maps -> $5.00

26-50 maps -> $7.50

51 + maps -> $10.00</comment>


Ask HN: Which is the cheapest TLD for 10 years? - <AUTHOR> Which is the cheapest TLD, to purchase for 5/10 years period. Personal use only. Namecheap is giving some TLDs at $27 for 5 years. Need to know if I can get some domain for ~10 years for a lower price. <comment><USER2> Out of interest, is it the absolute amount of coin, or your desire to drive a bargain? because $27 is $5 per year, which I estimate you will afford by digging around the sofa for loose change.

You don't _need_ to know this. You _want_ to know this. You will spend more money in opportunity cost finding out.

<comment><USER3> In the USA perhaps.

OP is from India, where median wage is ~$2 a day.

Saving $5 would equate to 2.5 days effort per domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm from Namecheap. .PW is $78.80 for 10 years. .UK is $56.90 for 10 years. [https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?...](https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?domain=test- testerson.pw)

</comment><comment><USER5> Namecheap and others have sales on tlds from time to time. There are sites that will aggregate the prices and tlds [https://tld-list.com/](https://tld- list.com/) is one. I know the last domains I bought were only a couple of dollars for 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER6> Keep an eye on Porkbun - I got a .party for 10 years for about $8 back along - a bargain!

</comment><comment><USER7> .ovh is 1.2€ (first year) + 3.6€/year (renewal price), so about $42/decade.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I'm curious how that TLD was conceived. Surely it's for the host, right?

<comment><USER9> If I remember right it started out as a gag before the new gTLDs were a thing, and they then decided it'd be good marketing to make it real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://internetbs.net](https://internetbs.net) currently has .feedback domains for $1.49/year ($14.90 for 10 years)

</comment><comment><USER11> .trade domains are super cheap. I think i paid $8 for 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER12> dot.tk has a melange of different free domains.

Hard to beat free.

<comment><USER13> If it's still available in 10 years is the other question though.

<comment><USER14> It's a country tld, those tend to stay around.

<comment><USER15> It's the TLD of the archipelago of Tokelau. They have a population of 1.400, their energy company provides 24-hour electricity "on special occasions", and they outsourced the TLD to a company I'd be ashamed to call a professional registrar. So country is a little guarantee.

<comment><USER7> Eh, seems to be basically an autonomous region of New Zealand, much like Gibraltar is of the UK. I'd bet it's pretty stable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I paid ~100$ for a .eu for 10 years recently, so I don't consider that the cheapest option.

</comment><comment><USER16> I paid my .tk ~60€ for 9 years. Renewed until 2024.

</comment><comment><USER17> xyz usually has some good deals.

</comment><comment><USER18> get an onion address its FREE (and no renewals), and great for personal use. I put a comment with more details but it was blocked so I'm trying to avoid keywords here. I'm running a gitlab and a sftp server on an old laptop at home (no server fees) which I can access anywhere in the world without dealing with static ip's or changing router settings.</comment>


Ask HN: Flynn.io/Hyper.sh/Nanobox.io vs. Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> What benefits/drawbacks might one of these "pre-packaged" container orchestration tools like Flynn.io, Hyper.sh, or Nanobox.io have verses just rolling your own with something like Kubernetes?
Edit: I didn't make it as clear as I should have initially that I actually work with Nanobox.io. I'm legitimately trying to gain an understanding of why developers might find something like Nanobox (or a similar tool) appealing over something like Kubernetes.
Apologies for any misdirection initially. <comment><USER2> You should be more upfront about your links to companies you talk about. This community is pretty fine with self promotion, but it really needs to be honest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for calling that out. I do work with Nanobox, but am legitimately trying to gain an understanding of how our platform (and things like it) might appeal to people who are more familiar with things like Kubernetes than I am.

I could have done a better job of making that clear in the description, and I apologize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Disclaimer: the OP appears to work for one of the companies/tools listed, Nanobox.io.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do work with Nanobox, and I apologize for not making that more clear initially, but am legitimately trying to gain an understanding of how our platform (and things like it) might appeal to people who are more familiar with things like Kubernetes than I am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am attending Google Cloud NEXT[1] right now, and there are a lot of breakout sessions on kubernetes and Container Engine. Google Cloud and Container Engine (GKE) makes creating a kube cluster super painless. It honestly just works and only takes a few minutes to spin up a kube cluster. GKE also has baked in awesomeness that is not available in the open source version such as automatic master and node version upgrades and automatic repair.

I'd recommend just using GKE instead of trying to run kubernetes on your own or using a lesser platform such as Flynn or Hyper. Google Cloud also has their own container registry which is nice since it is tightly integrated with GKE.

[1] - [https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/](https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/)

<comment><USER5> Hey, I'm with Hyper. Also at Google Next.

GKE is obviously backed by a company that isn't going away anytime soon.

Other than that, I'd be curious to understand your use of the word "lesser" in this context. Have you tried Hyper?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Typically the pre-packaged tools don't give you enough control. They are an abstraction with no lower level to fall back on when you want to do something outside of whatever use case they are trying to solve. Kubernetes is sort of the opposite case. Personally, I think Docker Swarm is the best option at this point. The API is simple in comparison to Kubernetes and works well. One thing that I've found that Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are missing that some pre- packaged options have is a load balancer / reverse proxy, but Traefik has grown into a very nice solution. I think pre-packaged solutions to can still add a lot of value by doing things like autoscaling, simplifying blue-green deployments, etc, but I personally find some of the limitations frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER7> I didn't really have Flynn and Hyper.sh down as really being comparable. I'm not sure how Nanobox fits into the picture.

I've been pretty impressed with Hyper.sh's ease of use and pricing. I didn't find Flynn a good match for my use case.

I've also found GCE to be pretty good to work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is your use case that made Hyper.sh a better choice for you over Flynn.io?

Also, if you had to categorize some of these technologies how would you do that, and what are some of the other ones that are similar to those mentioned here that aren't listed?

<comment><USER7> In my mind Flynn has more of an application focus - something comparable to Heroku with git deploys etc.

I wanted to run a regular (every 10mins) task. I created a container that had the hyper cli installed that spawned a task container that exited on completion. This worked really well for what I was doing. They're thinking of adding this as a hyper sh feature: [https://trello.com/c/JfyGyBKS/45-serverless- cron](https://trello.com/c/JfyGyBKS/45-serverless-cron)

I didn't consider using Flynn. Just didn't really have Flynn down as being for this kind of thing. Of course another difference is that Hyper.sh is a service; Flynn is a project that I need to self host.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Primarily, the orchestration tools will do a lot of the work for you, but they'll also make a lot of the decisions on how things will work. "Rolling your own" gives more control at the cost of more complexity.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hello, I'm working with Hyper. There are valid comments here about how much control you might want over your container stack. If you need total control, you should run your own k8s cluster or have someone else run it for you, like GKE.

Most of our users choose us because they don't want that level of control and maintenance.

I'm aware of Flynn but not sure how it works and I'm hearing of Nanobox for the first time.

I imagine however that they will be experiencing the same thing as us, lots of people running event driven workloads.

<comment><USER6> I've used both Nanobox and Hyper and they seem to be set up for two different use cases with some overlap. Nanobox seems to be focused on the deployment of your custom application while Hyper is focused on letting you deploy whatever container to the cloud quickly and easily.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the clarification. I'll check out Nanobox.</comment></comment></comment>


Rant: Facebook Sucks` - <AUTHOR> http://chrisportela.com/post/88338180133/rant-facebook-sucks "we all believe 'we'll stay in touch' but the horrible irony is how we still believe that lie" <comment><USER2> Of course it sucks. It's an advertising platform, nothing more. It's designed to erode your privacy and turn you and your life into dollars for Zuckerberg, so he can afford things like buying all the mansions around his in order to preserve his privacy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "we all believe 'we'll stay in touch' but the horrible irony is how we still believe that lie..."</comment>


Fake girlfriend, revisited - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35585087 <comment><USER2> I have a somewhat analogous experience that proves to me this could plausibly work.

A few years ago I was single and met a guy at 'da club' who was visiting just for the weekend from .au. We hit it off and hung out while he was in SF until he flew home (to his husband, they were in an open relationship.. I know complicated). Note: This initial physical chemistry is the part that a "service" may never be able to replicate, and might be a necessary pre- condition for many.

But... for the next 6 months or so while I was stressed out, single, and building a startup, I got relief by texting him all the time. I called him my fake boyfriend at the time, even to my friends! I got a lot of the same support/companionship I needed purely virtually that I'd normally get from a real relationship. And because he was married it could never get too 'real,' but the role he played for me was real.

Many people go through hard times alone, and all the business/friend/family/therapist networks in the world can't replicate the role of a romantic partner. If the personality is real and is compatible, and the conversations have memory, then I think a synthetic partner is a beautiful thing for people who need it most.

<comment><USER3> Huh, that's funny. I've had the same kind of relationship with a woman for the last 2 years, though we dated for a relatively (for me) long time after my divorce. She has kept in touch after I moved. Only recently, I think she is finally ready to "move on" so I've backed off 100%.

It's true. Having someone who cares about you with whom you can relieve personal stress is meaningful. She definitely did that for me, and I hope I did that for her.

On the other hand, I wonder if it has always been like this or there is something unique to our current societal configuration causing the need for these synthetic partnerships.

<comment><USER3> Aaand... She just texted me. It continues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OA quote: _" "lower league English football" wasn't available"_

Possibly explains the recurring need for a fake one.

Serious contribution: bots faking it with other bots generating large numbers of apparently real social profiles. Not just gf/bf whatever but other forms of relationship (fake boss asking for more work this weekend as a cover for...).

Ideal chaff for the surveillance society.

<comment><USER5> It wouldn't be too hard for the surveillance society to distinguish the real profiles and bots(Edit: or people pretending to be different people).

The US Government has built up such far reaching surveillance tools, of which we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, that this chaff that you are talking about wouldn't be chaff at all.

<comment><USER6> These aren't bots. These are people, pretending to be other people.

<comment><USER5> Either way, it would be very hard to generate significant chaff that the surveillance guys would go after.

<comment><USER6> Maybe. But the thing is that they're going after everything. Add some hot key words. Back in the day, we used sigs for our Usenet posts that were loaded with hot keywords.

Anyway, this would cost real money, for sure. But the labor supply for fake friends is huge, especially if you don't care about proficiency in English.

Edit: For example, one could generate numerous fake Russian acquaintances of Edward Snowden, and have each buy a few fake friends. Maybe the fake friends would be impressed ;)

<comment><USER7> When someone suggests rolling their own crypto a bunch of people pop up to point out the considerable risks.

We need the same for these "wheat / chaff" steganographic noise generation schemes. Steganography is probably secure, but people tend to vastly underestimate the amount of cover material needed.

Considerable money and time has been devoted to "finding the real signal".

The Usenet keyword triggers were trivially easy to filter. Mostly because people just put a list, in all caps, at the end of their post.

We know these are trivially easy to filter because putting a list like [ECHELON CIA NSA GCHQ IRA BOMB inurl:groups.google.com] returns loads. Here's one example, with the handy words "anti echelon block" [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/uk.media/KqhWP1rLF9U/G...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/uk.media/KqhWP1rLF9U/GK05lbwYuUcJ)

<comment><USER8> Doesn't that mean that the real bad guy would just put that list in his messages?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the boyfriend/girlfriend ratio is 60/40, they could almost just connect these people together.

<comment><USER10> I used to work in the phone industry. If you're allowing users to message each other you need human moderators, otherwise you'll get death threats and bizarre fantasies carefully worded to get around any automated filter. If you're going to pay a human to read every message you might as well pay them to write them, it takes a similar amount of time and usually means better service.

<comment> guard-of-terra "Moderated dating" is an interesting idea by itself.

Where both sides have to conform to a very strict etiquette (platform rules), until they both decide to move their relationship to next level anyway. I can see how it can appeal to some people.

<comment><USER11> Seems a bit counterproductive to me!

Why would you choose to not have information about the other party, when you are trying to evaluate them?

<comment> guard-of-terra Because you don't want to disclose your information.

<comment><USER11> So you are saying that I would want to use a "moderated dating" platform if I needed a very strict etiquette in order to conceal that I was a dick?

<s>Sounds like an attractive place to me!</s>

<comment><USER12> All dating sites are moderated, to some degree. At least the mainstream ones. I can't think of one where you start by posting your home phone and address and full name.

You start by sending messages, establish a relationship. Then you elevate it to messaging/calling via other platforms or real world meetings at your own pace.

It's not for concealing that you're a dick (well, it could be), it's more for protecting you from who knows how many people with who knows what intentions. It's not a guarantee, but it's a filter that works fairly well.

<comment><USER11> How could this protect anyone from anything worse than the occasional verbal abuse? Real bad people with real bad intentions will most certainly not be frustrated by some automatic word filter or a ban on dick pics. They will probably be the /last/ ones to do anything obviously fishy. You just can't be a sneaky bastard luring in innocent victims and an obvious prick at the same time. Unless you are doing some amazingly charismatic virtuoso double bluffing, I suppose. Or you're just looking for a willing victim looking for a perp. I think the whole idea is beyond stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _" He mainly needed a fake girlfriend to get his parents off his back after > he was divorced."_

Good grief. Have some mercy, parents.

<comment><USER14> I know lots of my Indian friends got married ( sometimes sight unseen) to get their parents off their backs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dunno why people are surprised that (straight) women are interested in boyfriends as well. Plus or minus a percentage or two, there are as many single women as single men, and they face many similar family/societal pressures to be involved with someone (if not more due to the eventual biological timebomb). Partners are not commodities, and it's way better for women to be single than to have the wrong partner.

<comment><USER16> I think I'll get downvoted for this, esp. on HN, but I think the main surprise people have with this kind of thing (+ what you're missing out with the comparison to men frankly) is the significant biological difference between men and women - it's far, far easier for a woman to find a male partner than vice-versa. Generally, women choose.

In history 40% of all men have reproduced, while 80% of all women have. It's just biology.

So it's surprising they couldn't find this in real life. Additionally, women tend to have better support networks than men.

Of course, this doesn't mean it's easy to find a _decent_ guy, and yes, partners are not commodities, so maybe that is the real issue while still wanting some companionship.

And it's not just way better for _women_ to be single than to have the wrong partner, it's way better for a person to be single than to have the wrong partner.

<comment><USER17> _Generally, women choose._

Until you spend 6 solid months in the gym. Just saying.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, what is it you're saying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU 1\. Hire fake girlfriends

2\. Get them to solve captchas or do mechanical turk stuff

3\. ???

4\. Profit

<comment><USER19> Humans as robots as a service arbitrage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Made an account just to post this. I used to follow a columnist called Jann Burner.

That's what he wrote on the subject:

``` And now, a closer look at what is to be in store for us. Computers will become totally voice activated mimetic devices cued to their owner so no one else will be able to activate them. The good ones will not even be deceived by a recording of their owner's voice. They will "seem" to become attached and will be able to pick up subtle clues that will be undetectable by technicians. Somehow (no one will be quite sure how) they will be able to tell the real from the Memorex. They will be able to read "stress" levels in their owner's voice and eye like an attentive pet. "What's wrong John? Have an especially difficult day?" Wireless wearables will become the style. No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor. The hardware will be comprised of two parts: a small pager like device which will attach to the belt and a headband with a small fiber optic cable which will twist gracefully around the face and project the full computer image directly onto the retina of the eye. The ultimate "head's up display".

Websites will have come a long way. People will go from designing personal web pages and Facebook entries to personal virtual reality sites. Places you will be able to hang out in. Places friends will be able to visit, the ultimate private club or salon. Some will be free floating and move like the frequency of a cell phone, never to be in the same place twice. Others will be so solid they will be constructed over generations and handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. Like cybernetic jewelry. Creations in cyberspace will be an investment.

Eventually people will begin to put their memories of their lives on their sites. At first they will be like a grand photo-album, but then things will get more complicated. People will begin to journal their memories (cleaned up and detuned or exaggerated). This will be called their Book Of Life and when you fall in love or become very close with someone you will share your "Book of Life". You will go to their past (as they remember it or as they want it to be remembered) which is not to say that that is how it really was, but then, that is another story. In the end, who cares? The motto of the day will be,"Intention is Everything".

Some people will constantly hang out in their own Memory Palaces. Some will call this Cyber-Porn. Masturbatory! With some people, taking a walk through their Book of Life will be like a walk through a very cultured and cluttered museum. With others it will be a walk in a park. With still others, you might not want to walk through their Book alone, without a guide and without protection. And especially not at night, even Cyber-Night. It might resemble a cross between Times Square, New Year's Eve 1999, and a car crash in progress with everything happening at once and yet with all the separate incidents frozen in time, to be savored later, like the left-overs from a frozen dinner. From a Jeffery Dhamer buffet.

Some people will actually hire others to design their sites, so it will be dramatic or pretty or impressively chic. Beware of anyone who has someone else design their Book of Life.

Some people will get so caught up they will actually begin to live in their book and they will get stuck somewhere between their restructured memory of a past and their fantasy imagining of a future. Their real life simply will become a maintenance site for their bio-computer, a place to sleep, fuel the body, take a dump and sweat, so that the mind might remain healthy, so as to allow them to really live and move through their silicon/crystal version of consciousness, through their Book of Life…their Memory Palace. Their perfect place to be where no wind blows. The center of the cyclone. This will be more addictive than any drug. ``` See more at: [http://www.unexplained- mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352](http://www.unexplained- mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352)

He also has more on it: [http://www.unexplained- mysteries.com/column.php?id=186379](http://www.unexplained- mysteries.com/column.php?id=186379)

<comment><USER21> You would likely enjoy Neal Stephenson's novels if you haven't already discovered him.

<comment><USER22> Specifically, The Diamond Age:

[http://smile.amazon.com/The-Diamond-Age-Illustrated- Spectra/...](http://smile.amazon.com/The-Diamond-Age-Illustrated- Spectra/dp/0553380966)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This has been a thing in Japan for over a decade.[1]

[1] [http://time.com/3998563/virtual-love- japan/](http://time.com/3998563/virtual-love-japan/)

</comment><comment><USER24> >You can choose from six _broad_ personalities

That pun made me chuckle.

</comment><comment><USER25> Many people are willing to pay to increase their social proof or status.. There's probably an untapped market for selling e-points.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like it can be done by AI bot if it will pass the Turing test ;)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how does this business scale. $15 a month is not much for paying salary.

<comment><USER28> A single person can obviously maintain multiple profiles. Sending some text messages to a fake partner isn't exactly a full time job.

<comment><USER29> Those are usually a "full time job" for those people, they probably handle 1000's of profiles a month.

<comment><USER28> Yes, I meant a _single_ $15/ mo profile doesn't need a full time job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Similar to Girlfriend PlusPlus, except without human operators.

</comment><comment><USER31> This has been going on in MMORPG's for years, at least there it's a bit more up-front and transparent. And people can do other things to pass the time while they wait for the fake girlfriend to login. :)

</comment><comment><USER32> Dopamine is he culprit

</comment><comment><USER33> The whole thing reminds me of the r/sadcringe subreddit.

</comment><comment><USER34> There should be a free trial but limited to girls in the Niagara Falls area.

<comment><USER35> I don't get it

<comment><USER36> Canadian girlfriend: [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GirlfriendInCanad...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GirlfriendInCanada)</comment></comment></comment>