They're using Windows RT - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/omg-theyre-using-windows-rt-7000018596/ <comment><USER2> I work at a large consumer electronics retailer as a salesperson in the computer and tablet section.

You would be blown away by how many Surface RT's I've sold, simply by demoing Metro on the touch screen, the Touch Cover, and the fact that you can plug in USB devices and has Office included.

People who's netbooks are dying now, and want to replace it with something for their normal light usage love it. The best bits of both worlds.

The problems arise when someone expects it to be as useful as a $1000 ultra book. That's where the Pro comes in, but I've sold them mostly to business owners who are using it for sales and other on-the-floor purposes

<comment><USER3> I do the opposite thing when someone asks what to buy. I sort them out an older Lenovo T-series with windows 7 x64, security essentials and open office for around 150GBP. Never a single complaint.

Sure it ain't pretty but they work and are cheap and way more functional than an RT device.

Not sure I could live with the inevitable brick wall when someone takes their RT and tries to install some obscure bit of software they've been relying on for years on it (or open university materials for example). That's instant end game for them, resulting in "why did I buy this piece of shit"

<comment><USER4> _Not sure I could live with the inevitable brick wall when someone takes their RT and tries to install some obscure bit of software they 've been relying on for years on it (or open university materials for example)._

Like when someone tries to do the same with their iPad? As long as you don't sell the RT as being able to run everything, I don't think people will expect it to.

<comment><USER5> It would be a lot easier for people to understand that RT can't run arbitrary Windows applications if Microsoft didn't insist on calling it "Windows."

<comment><USER4> I agree that the branding could be better, but IMO the Surface Pro is in the weirder spot out of the two. No-one expects Windows Phone to run desktop apps, and I'd wager that people wouldn't expect Windows Tablet (if they called it that much more sensible name) to, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a Surface Pro and a Surface RT - can run SC2 and VS2012 on the Surface Pro, but despite that I still use my Surface RT far more frequently.

It's an excellent tablet, I love having the keyboard when I need to compose emails or edit spec documents for work when I'm on the go, it has great battery life, the Kindle and Netflix applications are better experiences than their iOS counterparts (on the iPad), and the app selection is actually pretty decent for my use cases.

<comment><USER7> I have a Surface RT as well and I'm super happy with it. I can do serious Office work with it, work on any file, browser, mail, etc. I bring it with me all the time when I go to my customers to take notes.

Last time I was in a conference, I talked with a Microsoft guy who was happy to see I had a Surface RT. He told me I was the first person he saw at a conference with that device (or a Pro). I was pretty surprised.

So where did Microsoft screw up? Marketing?

Maybe they shouldn't say it's a tablet.

<comment><USER8> They should have allowed people to port old-style Win32 apps to ARM. They were IMO betting too much on the shiny new Windows Runtime which is not mature.

If it won't run ported Win32 code there is no compelling reason to get it over an iPad or Android tablet. It's effectively a Windows tablet that doesn't run Windows apps. iPad and Android don't run Windows apps either, but they both have more and better software than the Windows Store and will probably continue to do so for some years to come. OTOH imagine if you could actually use that "Desktop" app to run useful software ported from x86. It might have some of the appeal of the Surface Pro.

(Full disclosure: I worked in the Windows division during Win8 development. I left the company in 2011.)

<comment><USER7> To be honest, there is no application I currently miss on my Windows RT. Except foobar2000 maybe.

But where you are spot-on is for old games: the ARM has got enough punch to run them and it would turn the RT into an old game portable console.

The other thing that isn't very great is Windows Media Player. It's painful to browse files from a NAS for example.

So a couple of rough edges, but overall, really great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article concludes that Windows RT meets students needs perfectly, but it's hardly surprising since the college's workflow is so heavily skewed towards Microsoft applications.

It's equivalent to saying Mac OS X is an excellent development environment for iOS apps.

<comment><USER10> Yeah it's partly a byproduct of some schools being slow to change, which is partly from wanting tight centralized control (like at a business), partly from budget cuts, and partly from just being slow to learn new things and not wanting to have to do more work. Our university still uses Windows XP, just like at some businesses. Our students were still in elementary school when XP was released. And we still use Blackboard since before even XP was released. They don't support Apple or Google stuff at all, even when it's completely free (like Google Apps for Education).

<comment><USER11> Bah, in the big picture I don't think it is any of those things. "Slow to change" was not the reason I used Powerpoint, Word, and OneNote in college. I used them because they were the best I could find at what they did, and I could afford them because they offered attractive pricing to students. As much as Office might irritate people on occasion, let's be honest here- Office is pretty good, and I'm not aware of any honest competitor.

The only other applications I used specifically for college were remote computing clients, Matlab, and a fairly slick PDF annotator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, universities using proprietary formats (Power Point instead of Libre/Open Office) encourage students to buy Microsoft products. Times have not changed as much as we'd like to think.

<comment><USER13> For Windows, the Office software suite is far and away superior to open-source alternatives. If you're using them heavily, the amount of effort/time you'd lose wrangling with Libre is not worth it (I know, I tried.)

<comment><USER14> I don't get why people say that.

I am using Libre Office for about 10 years already without issue, except to open proprietary formats...

<comment><USER15> Have you used ms office? I've used both extensively and ms office is clearly and obviously superior in my opinion. Superior in usability, not in functionality (you can do everything with LO, it just takes more work).

<comment><USER16> I've published an entire dictionary with Libre Office + Python alone. Didn't find anything missing. Please provide specific examples.

[http://medipage.pl/pl/p/Medyczny-slownik- kolokacji.-Polsko-A...](http://medipage.pl/pl/p/Medyczny-slownik- kolokacji.-Polsko-Angielski-%E2%80%A2-Angielsko-Polski/1841)

[https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/deno/S%C5%82ownik+Kolokac...](https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/deno/S%C5%82ownik+Kolokacji+Medycznych+\(sales+promo\).pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My mom bought a Windows Tablet. I had just dismissed it before. However, I started using it. The UI was great - fast, responsive and clean. Sure, the app choice is nothing like in it is iOS. But it had all the most common apps and did everything it was supposed to. Who thought so? _Face palm moment_

In other news, my Windows machines crashes much lesser than my Mountain Lion machine. Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER18> Alternate title: "Attention Silicon Valley: Office and Windows are Not Quite Dead Yet"

<comment><USER19> Or "Most Computer Users Don't Care What's Cool, Just What Works"

<comment><USER20> It only works because that's the schools dated and closed ecosystem

<comment><USER21> I hate to break it to you but MS Office is here to stay. There are no good alternatives to it for the average user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 4.5% tablet marketshare ([http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-and-windows- rt-account...](http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-and-windows-rt- account-45-global-tablet-market-share-q2-2013)) is tiny, but big enough to account for anecdotes like this.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems like a case of that school being already heavily invested in Microsoft programs, and being very hard to use anything else there. This is why institutions and organizations need to open up to alternatives, otherwise they'll always be stuck with using stuff from the same vendor over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER24> Give me the option to run desktop apps on it (just a few, a terminal, recompiled open source stuff, self-compiled stuff for my work), and I'll seriously consider buying one.

<comment><USER25> Surface Pro does it, but at a higher price point for certain.

<comment><USER26> Doesn't Surface Pro even have a fan? For me, it's a PC then.

<comment><USER27> Surface Pro _is_ a PC. An old school tablet PC, same as we've had since since Windows XP Tablet Edition.

<comment><USER28> It's like a PC with a really crappy keyboard, unless you buy one that increases the price to the point where you should've bought a tablet notebook in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Asus has just announced it's abandoning Windows RT.

[http://allthingsd.com/20130730/asus-pulling-back-on- windows-...](http://allthingsd.com/20130730/asus-pulling-back-on-windows-rt- chairman-says/)

Samsung and Acer has said so earlier, too. And Microsoft took almost a billion dollar hit on it (and probably more losses to come). Windows RT is _dead_.

I've noticed many of the "old PC companies" are starting to aggressively support Android, and there's also a rumored massive wave of Chromebooks in the second half of this year, from most of the big PC OEM's.

<comment><USER29> > Windows RT is dead.

I doubt it. I like to remind people that Microsoft historically takes 3 tries to get something right.

<comment><USER28> Three tries later, it's dead.

Zune. Windows Live. PlaysForSure. Spot watches...

<comment><USER30> Zune ideas became Windows Phone. Windows Live was rebranded.

As far as Spot watches... I think I speak for many people here, "what"? Some random minor product line from a decade ago?

<comment><USER31> Well, actually, they had a few kicks at Zune (2, I still love my HD) before launching Windows Phone, which would have been the 3rd kick, which is normally when they get it right. At this point, they're at kick 2 on the Phone, and making progress, but still have a long way to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The author fails to mention tablets with an Atom CPU as an alternative. They cost pratically the same as similar ARM tablets and give you the option of running x86 software.

</comment><comment><USER33> To date RT has been a failure. You can't rewrite history.

</comment><comment><USER34> Forced to use Office and only Office, eh? When there are plenty of free alternatives? What a racket. Perhaps they can be sued.</comment>


A New Reason for Foreigners to Avoid Google and Facebook View - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-07/a-new-reason-for-foreigners-to-avoid-google-and-facebook <comment><USER2> > ... the European Union wasted its time last year as it tried to establish an > acceptable privacy standard for U.S. companies operating in Europe.

To the surprise of nobody. :/</comment>


L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department

<comment><USER2> Getting evidence would be a challenge if policing were done entirely by private firms with no State granting them special authority over ordinary citizens.

For instance, you suspect that I stole something of yours and have it in my house. You hire a private police force to investigate. If they knock on my door and asked me to let them come in and look around, I'll laugh at them and close the door.

If they threaten to use force, the different private police force whose services I subscribe to will use force to stop your private police force.

Some advocates of entirely private law enforcement/justice systems I've discussed this with tell me that this won't be a problem because my neighbors will see that I'm not letting your private police force in, and that will tarnish my reputation. Reputation will be very important in a government free society, they say, and so I will not risk that unless I'm guilty.

I don't buy that...I think it is far more likely that most of my neighbors would be thinking I'm doing exactly what they would do if some jerk accused them of stealing and wanted them to let some private police force come in-- worse, a private police force that has been hired by their accuser and so has a strong incentive to please him. They want him to give them a good review, so more people will hire them.

Some have told me that your private police force could get a search warrant from a private court. That just pushes the problem back one level, for unless there is some State forcing me to recognize the authority of your private court, I will no more recognize your court than I recognize your police force.

Every way I've thought of, or heard anyone propose, to make this actually works ends up in effect recreating a State under a different name.

<comment><USER3> Libertarians recognize the necessity of a state. They simply want it to be as minimalistic and non-invasive as possible.

One baby step that could be taken in the US would be to abolish the IRS and income tax, and use a consumption tax in its place. Imagine life without the annual ritual of Form 1040, and revealing every detail of your financial life. I don't believe every American should have to be an accountant, or turn their private data over to the government.

<comment><USER4> That's a weird reply, since the parent commenter wasn't talking about tax policy. Also: I'm not sure how a gigantic tax increase on the bottom 95% of all earners is a "libertarian" concept.

<comment><USER3> The main part of the reply was disagreeing with the idea that libertarians don't want a "state". The IRS comment was just pointing out one constructive move towards a smaller, better government.

The "tax increase" you mention is not an increase, read up on the Fair Tax. The prebate is designed to eliminate the potentially regressive nature of the tax. The benefits would vastly outweigh the downside.

<comment><USER4> _This_ FairTax?

[http://www.factcheck.org/2007/05/unspinning-the- fairtax/](http://www.factcheck.org/2007/05/unspinning-the-fairtax/)

 _Even if Kotlikoff is correct that a 31.2 percent rate is revenue-neutral, there remains some reason to doubt that the rate actually would be that low. The FairTax proposal assumes a 100 percent tax base on consumption. By way of contrast, most states that have sales taxes have roughly a 50 percent tax base. With the FairTax's 100 percent base, consumers would pay taxes on a great many things that may not intuitively seem like consumption. The list would include:_

 _Purchases of new homes_

 _Rent_

 _Interest on credit cards, mortgages and car loans_

 _Doctor bills_

 _Utilities_

 _Gasoline (30 percent in addition to current taxes, which would not be repealed)_

 _Legal fees_

Wow.

<comment><USER3> So? There would be no federal income tax. Further, there would be no corporate income tax, so in general prices will fall and wages will rise. Money invested or saved would not be taxed, lowering the overall rate. Finally, the prebate makes up the difference for low-income folk.

From the article you linked: "Moreover, even FairTax critics like Gale agree that consumption taxes increase the size of the economy. Many studies show that long-term incomes would rise under a consumption-based tax system. Optimistic accounts show a 10 percent rise in income over time, but even the more cautious studies show gains of 5 percent to 7 percent. Because the FairTax will grow the economy, workers will eventually see increases in their income."

There are difficulties in implementing the Fair Tax (income tax must once again be made unconstitutional) but overall it's an extremely good idea. Imagine the gains just from the recovered productivity of everyone employed at the IRS, the myriad tax accountants, and individuals relieved from dealing with the entire mess. The billions spent on the IRS every year would also be used for something better.

<comment><USER4> Did you read the article? The conclusion is that anyone making between 20,000 and 200,000 would see their share of the federal tax burden rise, and those making over 200,000 would see it fall. The paragraph you're quoting from is in a section that could have been titled "Fuck It, It's A Regressive Tax But It's Still Good".

You wrote: _The "tax increase" you mention is not an increase, read up on the Fair Tax. The prebate is designed to eliminate the potentially regressive nature of the tax._ You were incorrect. You cannot now move the goalposts.

<comment><USER3> 'The paragraph you're quoting from is in a section that could have been titled "Fuck It, It's A Regressive Tax But It's Still Good".'

(Sorry it's been so long since I replied last, I hope you notice this.)

That's exactly right, 'regressive' is not necessarily bad. The top 10% of earners right now pay something around 70% of all income tax: [http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal- inco...](http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax- data). Is that 'fair'? What is the 'correct' number? Food for thought.

At any rate, the reason the Fair Tax's 'regression' isn't bad, is the estimated increase in tax burden for the middle class is around 2-3%. HOWEVER, the estimated wage benefits of the Fair Tax total 5-10%. So, even though the middle class is paying a higher share than now, its net income would go up 2-8%. That's a win, plus the entire IRS and income tax apparatus is gone - another huge win.

Given the political abuses the IRS has facilitated lately, it needs to go. We don't need an American Gestapo.

<comment><USER5> Anyone that talks about how much the top x% of earners pay of federal income tax in isolation -- especially without talking about their share of income, but not only then -- is either ignorant or dishonest. The federal income tax isn't the only federal tax on income, or even the most burdensome for most workers (federal payroll taxes are.)

And it doesn't eliminate the need for a tax collection and enforcement apparatus, as all other existing consumption taxes demonstrate, so saying it eliminates the need for that is inaccurate.

<comment><USER3> It eliminates the need for the IRS. Verification of consumption tax collection is enormously easier, and there would no longer be all the loopholes, or the ~75,000 page(!) tax code. Most importantly, those _paying_ the taxes would no longer be under any tax-related government scrutiny.

Fourth Amendment, anyone? :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elusive Form of Evolution Seen in Spiders - <AUTHOR> http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20141002-in-social-spiders-evidence-that-groups-evolve/

<comment><USER3> TL;DR: Different colonies of these spiders had different ratios of nanny spiders to warrior spiders, based on the specific pressures of the habitat they grew up in.

When these colonies were transplanted to a new habitat with different pressures, and then their ratio of nannies to warriors was forcibly changed to match the new habitat, _the ratio quickly changed back to one that was suited to their old habitat_ , leading to the death of the colony.

This shows that the colony as a whole evolved to have a certain ratio, and is not merely adapting its ratio on-the-fly (pun intended).

<comment><USER4> I'm somewhat frightened by what this could imply about our cultures. :(

<comment><USER5> Nothing? Cultures are complicated things that may or may not be influenced by our genetic makeups. The life and death of culture involves thousands if not tens of thousands of factors, you don't directly inherit your parents' culture, you have to learn it first.

This behaviour in spiders, on the other hand, is highly heritable, so it's definitely linked to a handful of genes, or maybe just one.

<comment><USER4> Right, it could certainly be nothing. Which would be among the better things it implies. It could also be that changing the "makeup" of a society that is heavy in aggressors is not something that can be done.

Unless, of course, I misunderstand what is claimed. (As always for me, very possible.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The spiders present a puzzle to evolutionary biologists. According to ordinary Darwinian natural selection, only the fittest individuals will pass on their genes. But if that's the case, why do tangle-web spiders act in ways that might conflict with an individual's drive to outcompete its neighbors? A spider that defends the nest might put itself at personal risk, jeopardizing its chances of producing offspring. And a spider that rears the young might have to wait to eat until the hunters are sated, so it might go hungry. These are not behaviors that would be expected to enhance an individual's fitness._

Which is the whole point of "The Selfish Gene". It's not about individuals; it's about their genes. Genes win when their bearer helps out other individuals sharing the same genes.

<comment><USER7> No, this article does go against the theories in "The Selfish Gene" (which only predict kin selection). See the whole row between Dawkins and Wilson over multi-level selection: [http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle- of-the...](http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the- professors)

<comment><USER8> To me, the key point of "The Selfish Gene" was that the base unit of evolution is the gene. I don't see anything in this article which disagrees with this notion, and they did quote a biologist who said something similar:

 _Pruitt and Goodnight don't propose a mechanism by which the colonies boomeranged back to their original state. And without such a mechanism, some researchers argue that the results could be due to ordinary selection acting on individuals. "I think they over-interpret [the results] as evidence of group-level selection," said Andy Gardner, a biologist at the University of Oxford. "Natural selection may factor in the needs of the group, to some extent, when it hones the adaptations of individuals. But group fitness is not the whole story."_

I understand Gardner's point to be that even if the selection pressure starts at the group level, it can still go down to the individual, and then down to the gene. In that sense, we're still selecting the gene.

Actually, upon reading the actual article, the authors say basically the same thing in the first paragraph:

 _" In societies in which individual fitness is tightly linked with the performance of the group, the theory of group selection predicts that evolution will favour traits in individuals that aid in maximizing their group's success—which, in turn, are predicted to increase individuals' long- term evolutionary interests. Here we define group selection as selection caused by the differential extinction or proliferation of groups1. This represents a broad definition that is not in any way adversarial to the importance of kinship selection for social evolution."_

Assuming I understand the authors correctly, they mean that the "fitness" of an individual cannot always be considered to be in isolation. In order to determine the fitness of an individual, we may have to consider the combination of the individual, and the group in which they live. I see that as consistent with the notion of a "selfish gene", as I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This experiment seems to prove the exact opposite to what they are saying.

Obviously many/most? animals have evolved group behaviours that benefit their species over other species which in turn benefits themselves.

Often these behaviours are not directly related to propagating their own genes ie protecting someone else's kid or having enough poison in you to scare something that kills you into not eating others like you.

How are these spiders different?

The 'group' that was suited to the environment failed.

This to me proves that groups don't evolve. If it was the group that evolved and not the individual then the group suited to the environment would have survived.

Instead it reverted back to combined individual behaviour.

The individuals had evolved to their environment and had genetic behaviour that allowed them in their natural environment to work as a team for the success of all members as per usual. Put them into another environment and they fail because their personal evolution was not perfected for that environment.

<comment><USER10> A group doesn't "evolve" overnight. That would be environmental pressures influencing it, not evolutionary. That the groups reverted showed heritability in the face of individual needs. If it were strictly individual needs, the colonies shouldn't have reverted; the evolutionary forces that directed warrior/nanny ratio should have reflected the environment instead of the ancestry of the group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm eager to see biologists who write online regularly about evolutionary theory comment about this. I've asked Jerry Coyne of _Why Evolution Is True_ to do so by sending him the link. Thanks for sharing the link here; I like Simons Foundation stories about mathematics, and I wonder whether or not this finding in biology will hold up.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've never understood how biologists could argue non-selfish evolution couldn't be a thing. If you look at groups of organisms as systems, and you pit the systems against each other, surely eventually the system that evolved to be superior would win in the end, regardless of whether that means any subspecies in that group of organisms would evolve to not reproduce?

Is it not just a question of whether evolution could produce specialized one- offs that don't reproduce but do serve a purpose? Wouldn't the significant population of homosexuals be a sign of this? Perhaps a biologist could give some info on why many biologists think this is unlikely?

<comment><USER13> > I've never understood how biologists could argue non-selfish evolution > couldn't be a thing. If you look at groups of organisms as systems, and you > pit the systems against each other, surely eventually the system that > evolved to be superior would win in the end, regardless of whether that > means any subspecies in that group of organisms would evolve to not > reproduce?

Of course, _all other things equal_ , when you pit groups against each other then group selection will occur. But the problem is that a huge body of science, both theoretical (game theory) and observational, argues that things are not equal: At the same time as the groups are competing, there is in-group competition. There has to be, because the groups consist of organisms that are being selected for, unless someone can propose a mechanism that would suppress that.

What this means is that group selection is _unstable_. A group behavior might be selected for, but individuals in the successful group will still be selected for "selfishly" \- normally - breaking the pattern. If selection operates on the gene level - and almost all biologists believe it does - <USER2> it is inherently going to act on a scale much smaller than that of groups, and in an inevitable manner. And that is going to destabilize any group selection.

For these reasons it was thought that altruism couldn't be easily explained through evolution. That's why kin selection, reciprocal alruism, and a few other theories are so revolutionary - they show how useful group behaviors arise from selection at the gene level.

> Is it not just a question of whether evolution could produce specialized > one-offs that don't reproduce but do serve a purpose?

That does occur in the "eusocial" animals, such as ants and bees. But it is generally believed that happens due to how genes are passed on in those insects (different than we are used to among mammals), and they are a large exception. In practically every species we are aware of, group-level selection does not occur. Hence any evidence, as in this article, is very interesting.

<comment><USER14> Well put! Selfless behavior may sometimes evolve, but it is unstable and will eventually be selected against.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They are discussing the results, but I have trouble understanding the methods and mechanisms.

* How did they change a docile group into an aggressive one? If I understand this correctly, they took a group of, say, 1000 spiders with a ratio of, say, 10-to-1 docile and removed about 890 spiders to create a new 1-to-10 ratio with 110 spiders. But doesn't such a change in group size also change the group itself significantly?

* How was everything tracked after they've been transferred to an environment?

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't it well known that natural selection operates on communities? Doesn't seem very controversial to me.

Douglas Adams described it years ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCsHuoVABgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCsHuoVABgI)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm confused by the subhead. Natural selection occurs at the population level.

<comment><USER10> Evolution occurs at the population level, but populations are generally not thought to evolve.</comment></comment>


Steam Down ahead of reported Halloween Sales event date - <AUTHOR> https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/gaming/1196782/Steam-Down-Servers-Halloween-Sales-event-date <comment><USER2> see [1]

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380167](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380167)</comment>


Show HN: Debug bar and profiling tool for PHP with support for popular projects - <AUTHOR> http://phpdebugbar.com

<comment><USER2> This is actually pretty cool. A pity it didn't get the visibility it deserves.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing, I just had an idea to implement something like this, and here it is!

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks nice. I'm going to see if I can fit it into a Laravel 4 project.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is sweet. If it did profiling as well it would be perfect!</comment>


Patio11 at Business of Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved-markets/

<comment><USER2> Going on a tangent here, it's a real tragedy that 90% of Patio11's business comes from women. We'd have a much better educational system if the percentage was closer to 50% than 100%.

<comment><USER3> ?? Excuse me, your comment does not make any sense to me. How is the percentage change in buyer profile will affect educational system?

<comment><USER4> He means "It would be better if elementary education had more men in it." I'm totally agnostic about that, although I would certainly have appreciated not having all those _hilarious_ jokes about child rape when I told people I wanted to be a teacher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the guy that said everything was going just fine in Japan, and the rest of the world should go about their business without getting involved or trying to help, right?

<comment><USER6> Read his post again</comment></comment>


Facebook designers' novel approach to the usual name tag problems - <AUTHOR> http://fontsinuse.com/f8-conference-badges/ <comment><USER2> And here I just thought it was awesome they had angled the text to match the tilt of having the lanyard connected at the corner, providing more space for names.

Then I scrolled down to discover the booklet and all its goodies.

Surprise and delight.

<comment><USER3> The entire conference design is supreme:

<http://designforfun.com/display.php?id=99>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Name isn't on both sides. They missed the most important part :)

<comment><USER5> But sometimes I like to be able to hide my identity when checking out / chatting with the competition ;)

<comment><USER6> Which is exactly the reason I wish conferences would put the name on both sides :-) I actually find it more with financial analysts than competitors. Many deliberately turn their badges around in the hopes of getting some tidbit from someone in a show floor booth who isn't on their guard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Umm.. the nametag for www2010 was very similar. It opened and had the schedule for the conference inside along with other info. (plus the name was on both sides)

This is taking the concept a bit further to be sure, but I don't think this is an innovation of the scale it is being presented to be.

<comment><USER8> I don't think they're trying to present this as an innovation in name tags. It's just a showcase of an elegant novel design.

<comment><USER9> If I'm not mistaken, innovative is a synonym of novel.

<comment><USER10> The New Oxford American Dictionary defines novel as "new or unusual in an interesting way". While it may not be new, it's definitely unusual.

(Also, you're not mistaken, according to the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus. But they _are_ different words.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ben is a stand up guy, and one of the best designers I've ever seen, I'm glad to see him being recognized (more).

</comment><comment><USER12> I know it's kind of beside the point, but Facebook could have done some amazing stuff with hardware-hackable badges considering their budget. Defcon has multi-purpose modular badges, HOPE has RFID and multi-purpose, and even a party by an elitist hacker group has a badge which does multi-player video games.

Surely a badge with wi-fi or bluetooth combined with a custom Facebook app would allow for all kinds of useful communication and location within a conference. Is this just too complicated? (On the booklet thing, most hacker cons have mobile con guides for browsing and offline mobile apps for use)

<comment><USER13> The facebook chips made me think about things like the ability to tap on a phone and give user information, which would be nifty- to a point.

What about a system that would let a user know what seats that their friends are sitting in? That would eliminate the stress that finding a friend in a large conference room is.

<comment><USER14> I think Addieu (<http://addieu.com>) is doing something like your first point: tap your respective phones to exchange contact info and social networks (full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders, and we're iPhone only right now).

As for your second, if you know what your friends look like, you don't need to know exactly where they're sitting, so you don't need RFID. SitBy.Us (<http://sitby.us>) illustrates this perfectly: if they found a biz dev guy and expanded beyond SXSW & Mozilla Summit Conf, they'd be killing it. If Lanyrd is smart, they'll snap up or clone SitBy.Us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Everything about these looks amazing and they look like they do a perfect job of maximizing both visual pleasure and practical purpose.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fun fact: The first use of those RFID tags was for a Stanford CS210 project. (I've had one on my keychain for nearly a year now.)

</comment><comment><USER17> A good design. Like everyone else said name on both side would have complete it. I really like the Moleskine likeness of it.

</comment><comment><USER18> ok, that page crashes the stock android 2.2 browser every single time.

<comment><USER12> My Optimus V's android 2.2 browser opened it successfully</comment></comment>


First unmanned factory takes shape in Dongguan City (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html <comment><USER2> This article is wrong. The output _per employee_ changed to 250%. So by reducing the staff to 10%, the total output is roughly 25% compared to what it was before.

[http://monetarywatch.com/2017/01/chinese-factory- replaces-90...](http://monetarywatch.com/2017/01/chinese-factory- replaces-90-human-workers-robots-sees-250-production- increase/?doing_wp_cron=1486169062.9302580356597900390625)

edit: added original source courtesy of dmoy [http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html](http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html)

<comment><USER3> That doesn't make sense from a business perspective. No one would invest heavily with output expected to drop to 25% existing levels. More likely is that the factory's total output is 250% of what it was before the employee cuts.

<comment><USER4> Tech Republic says:

> According to the People's Daily, production per person has increased from > 8,000 pieces to 21,000 pieces. That's a 162.5% increase.

I'm highly suspicious of the factual accuracy of anyof these news reports.

<comment><USER5> It's scary how quickly all "data" in articles suddenly seems to have gotten unreliable.

I hope this leads to a resurgence in journalistic integrity. I would gladly pay for news I can trust.

<comment><USER6> I'd argue that such hasn't suddenly become unreliable. It was always unreliable, it's now far easier to fact check (and frequently do so in exchange with experts in a given field, as happens so often here). Now you have a million eyeballs on the bogus claims / data, and those eyeballs frequently have fast, easy access to vast research sources.

Today if the President says something bogus, it'll be fact checked in minutes by a thousand people and that fact checking will be syndicated globally nearly instantly on a dozen large media platforms. By comparison, consider the process, access and distribution that existed at the time of FDR (the things you can get away with when it takes a week or a month for distribution to occur).

We have a lot of historical examples from the last two centuries, to show that data accuracy and reporting in terms of commerce, politics, military, journalism etc. were not particularly extraordinary in the past. Agenda, laziness, bad research, bad reporting, misinterpretation, etc. are nothing new.

<comment><USER7> There is that, but also there's been increasing pressure to pump out more faster due to more competition, and people paying less/nothing. I think quality-per-article has probably gone way down in the last decade, but we do have a ton more articles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This should probably have a [2015] in the title and maybe point to at least the English language people's daily source:

[http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html](http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html)

<comment><USER9> Thanks, we've done both. Url changed from [http://www.zmescience.com/other/economics/china-factory- robo...](http://www.zmescience.com/other/economics/china-factory- robots-03022017/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This story is from People's Daily two years ago.[1] The original article is more useful. The factory supposedly had 650 people doing final polishing on mobile phones. That task was automated.

[1] [http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html](http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> In most factories in China, humans work like if they where robots, one job might be to go with a part from one place to another place, witch could literally be replaced by a transport band. Some workers are extremely skilled and fast though, replacing them with robots would probably cost much more then their salary. It can be hard to see the economic sense in deploying robots when the robots does things five times slower, but when the robot works, _you_ can do something else. Even if you can clean the dishes faster then a dishwasher, it does save you time! And once something has been automated, it's much easier to scale.

<comment><USER12> Dishes are a bad analogy. I can wash a load of dishes by hand in 15 minutes. My washer takes 90 minutes. From a time POV, it could be worth it to pay fleshy robots to do the work.

<comment><USER13> How about hygiene standards and temperature? The machine can have a major hedge on that.

<comment><USER12> They can get hotter, but they are also happy to take some crusted on food and bake it on to the plate... making the QC factor a bit lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These should be American robots.

<comment><USER15> They probably will be made by Kuka...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone here questioning what the value is aren't realizing that scaling goes up so so much easier without humans getting tired, getting distracted. It's much easier to coordinate a million robots than a million humans.

</comment><comment><USER17> Too bad the article does not discuss the time it would take to break even on that investment.

<comment><USER18> I feel like this is always missing. Robots don't scale down, which is a real issue.

<comment><USER19> They kind of can - you can lower the duty cycle and batchify things. You can also outsource to them, and/or otherwise share them with other producers/production lines. I personally believe future manufacturing will be significantly more dynamic with respect to assembling/disassembling production line unit operations via electronic contract (re-)negotiation.

At [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/) we are essentially placing miniature (fresh food preparation) factories in retail spaces, and so I've been reading a lot of industry literature recently. I've found very interesting crossovers with former work on a major Bitcoin exchange - eg. multi-asset/service/settlement path capable transaction markup and negotiation systems - [http://ifex-project.org/](http://ifex-project.org/) In the same way factories use JIT (just in time) concepts to optimize inventory and supply- chain logistics, we similarly optimize for delivery of ingredients and packaging, and thus reduce storage bulk overheads and achieve form-factor minimization. Operations research truly is operations generic, and quaintly fascinating coming from a programming background.

<comment><USER18> You can do anything with unlimited funds, the existence of such technologies or the dream of such technologies doesn't really mean anything. The comparison should be against alternatives.

Human labor is still far more scalable than any technology can provide. The reason the tech industry so strongly supports minimum wages and other increases in cost to labor is because it makes their products more competitive against humans.

<comment><USER19> A fair point, though I think it's fair to say that due to the very nature of HN and startups a lot of people here choose think in the 'what is just around the corner' and 'what is coming' domains, shunning obstinate currency (perhaps subconsciously as done/uninteresting/unchallenging).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Defect rate dropped by 80%, I wonder how much of the productivity boost is related to that.

</comment><comment><USER21> Off tangent question - did anyone here fill out the email subscription form that takes up the entire screen when you go this article? I keep getting told they "work" even though I think they're terrible.

<comment><USER22> They work on the average person. Mostly due to them putting no resistance to filling out a form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what they'll do when there's nobody left to buy the products. Maybe they can sell them to the robots themselves?

<comment><USER24> Basic income is the only future, truck drivers will be all out of work by 2020 for example

<comment><USER25> >Basic income is the only future, truck drivers will be all out of work by 2020 for example

This has become the refrain in the comment section for every article dealing with automation I've seen, of late. Some of the articles, I suspect, are being posted by basic income proponents.

Even accepting the premise that a basic income would be needed in the case of near-universal automation, there are plenty of us who are yet to be convinced that we're heading in that direction.

<comment><USER26> I don't think most of the people talking about basic income are the proponents. I'm a strong believer in that you should be paid the market rate for your work, so if you want to make good money, you must make smart choices about your education and career. That makes the whole system more efficient. I do however think that basic income is inevitable, because of the automation on the scale we've never seen before. Inevitable, because the other option is to let the unemployed starve. So not really an option.

<comment><USER27> I'd like to think that letting the unemployed starve is not an option, but it is. People can be extremely cruel when they don't have to take responsibility for the outcomes of government policies.

They lean on "those people should have worked harder/planned better"

It wasn't that long ago that poor people who needed critical medical care were kicked to the curb to die on the street because they couldn't pay.

<comment><USER26> Ok, you're right, it is an option in third-world countries. I don't see it happening in the EU/US/AU/CA or even China (even considering their past human rights violations). But if it does happen on a large enough scale, hungry riots will just take over the means of the food production (mostly robots and other machinery these days).

> _It wasn 't that long ago that poor people who needed critical medical care > were kicked to the curb to die on the street because they couldn't pay._

Healthcare is a separate issue. What you're describing is still happening all over, including the US. I've been looking at the US health insurance premiums, and I have no idea how an average person can afford something like that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenDNS warns about Google DNS - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/02/25/a-closer-look-at-google-public-dns/2/

<comment><USER2> "We don't persist logs for our users without accounts and configured networks, I'm not sure Google makes the same statement."

What FUD. Was this statement from the FAQ[0] not explicit enough? "With Google Public DNS, we collect IP address (only temporarily) and ISP and location information (in permanent logs) for the purpose of making our service faster, better and more secure. Specifically, we use this data to conduct debugging and to analyze abuse phenomena. After 24 hours, we erase any IP information."

Or what about this more detailed explanation[1] on the linked privacy page? [Originally posted, but removed on account of formatting issues]

If you don't know the answer to a question about a competitor's service, the appropriate, ethical thing to say is, "I don't know." When you say, "We do <good thing X>, I don't know if they do," you are by your omission sowing the seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the audience, for your economic reasons.

[0] [http://code.google.com/intl/en-EN/speed/public- dns/faq.html#...](http://code.google.com/intl/en-EN/speed/public- dns/faq.html#privacy)

[1] [http://code.google.com/intl/en-EN/speed/public- dns/privacy.h...](http://code.google.com/intl/en-EN/speed/public- dns/privacy.html)

<comment><USER3> This might be a poorly written article, but it does lead to an interesting question - what does Google expect to get back from offering a DNS service for free?

They couldn't keep group archives up due to the "maintenance overhead", so they are cost-conscious. They are way beyond being "no evil", so this is hardly a charity for a greater good. There must be _the_ reason.

Changing the privacy policy is a very simple thing to do. Today they don't recycle any DNS info, but - _click_ \- and tomorrow they suddenly do. And being in the business of cross-correlating anything and everything, I can't imagine how tempted they are. So the question is this - should they announce a change to the privacy policy, how many sysadmins and laymen will get off their lazy asses and switch away from Google? And how many would notice the change to begin with.

<comment><USER4> While they may erase "IP information", that doesn't mean they've erased the aggregate data. They could easily take a list of the actual domains and figure out how popular they are in various regions based off of the dns queries again them.

<comment><USER5> OpenDNS could do this too. I don't see how this is a disturbing outcome. If Google wanted this information, it wouldn't really need GDNS (and it's probably not even the best way for Google to do it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I switched from OpenDNS to Google for DNS because I was tired of seeing ad pages when I mistyped a domain name in my browser. At least Google isn't hijacking NXDOMAIN results to make money. You can check your own DNS provider for this behavior as well as others with Berkeley's Netalyzr[1] Web service.

[1]: <http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/>

<comment> mike-cardwell Why didn't you just opt out of the ads? Google can subsidise their DNS service with their other profit making products. OpenDNS needs an actual business model, and they offer you a clean DNS feed if you want one.

<comment><USER6> Well, it's mostly because Google just works "out of the box" for what I need, but also because in order for OpenDNS to associate a dynamic IP address to an OpenDNS account, you have to run some proprietary software[1] to notify their service when your IP address changes. It looks like they don't have a Linux client available, and to spend the amount of time trying to get a set up like this to work for me, I could probably just as easily set up DNS caching on my home server.

[1]: <http://www.opendns.com/support/dynamic_ip_downloads/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a poor article. Full of "I don't know", "maybe" and just plain FUD. The fact is between Google and OpenDNS, only one makes money at it. Google provides DNS because it makes the internet more reliable, which helps their business. OpenDNS provides DNS so they can sell you stuff (or ads).

<http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html>

<http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html>

That's more information than anyone should need for Google DNS.

</comment><comment><USER8> Please use the original title where possible - even if "OpenDNS warns about Google DNS" is going to get you more upvotes than "A Closer Look at Google Public DNS".

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a way to use OpenDNS from any location and permanently opt out of their NXDOMAIN hijacking? I know you can configure it from their website but you can only control your own domains so it doesn't work when you access a wifi hub. You also have to run that daemon all the time which seems like a slightly bigger privacy concern.

> We don't persist logs for our users without accounts and configured > networks, I'm not sure Google makes the same statement.

Does that mean that both my DNS requests AND my HTTP requests to whatever webserver is intercepting my requests to test.invalid (<http://guide.a.id.opendns.com/?url=test.invalid>) are not being logged? Does that mean my requests on wifi hubs that are configured with OpenDNS are being logged?

What does it mean to discourage automated DNS lookups? What else do I use it for? dig?

Couldn't one argue that it is a good idea to keep the number of companies that have access to your information low? From that perspective wouldn't it be prudent to use Google for everything?

<comment><USER10> > _NXDOMAIN hijacking_ //

You and waffle_ss both mention this, can you expand on what problem you're facing. I use OpenDNS because of the filtering abilities and because I found on test that they were marginally faster for me than Google.

Next to never do I see their domain redirect page and whenever I have it's always had the domain I've been after at the top of the page - for example, <http://guide.opendns.com/?url=ycambinator.com>. Yes it has a couple of text- ads but for the 2-3s you're on the page I can't see that I really have any problem with this at all ... it's way less intrusive than the ads on most websites now.

So what's the issue? Is it really akin to being robbed at gunpoint?

<comment><USER5> You seem to be taking offense to something that wasn't said. The term "hijacking" is used here in much the same sense as "signal hijacking" or the program Audio Hijack. The relevant part of the "hijack" imagery is forcibly taking over the way a transport. It essentially means they are causing DNS requests to return against-spec responses.

<comment><USER10> Hyperbole blah-blah-blah.

> _they are causing DNS requests to return against-spec responses_ //

That's part of their service. If there was no way to switch it off then I can understand being annoyed but you can just choose to use your ISP's DNS.

It just appeared to me that both comments concerning this were of the form "ZOMG they has borken my internetz"; could be I read the tone wrong.

So anyway, for the service that OpenDNS are offering is it wrong of them to simplify the situation for users making mistakes entering domain names in their browser?

<comment><USER5> I think "wrong" is a good word for it. Users typing things into an address field in a Web browser is not the only use case for DNS, but this breaks DNS for the whole system, which is the wrong solution. Correcting mistakes in the address field is something browsers should take care of. Firefox and Chrome both do — I know Safari doesn't, and I can't remember what IE does. In fact, Chrome has to employ a rather ugly hack to work around this behavior from noncompliant DNS servers.

<comment><USER10> > _not the only use case for DNS_ //

Of course. But I think that's exclusively the use case that OpenDNS target in their consideration of non-resolving domains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell It's so easy to install a local copy of Unbound on your desktop, even on a Windows box. I'm surprised when I see hackers using Google or OpenDNS rather than using their own DNS resolver. Unbound supports DNSSEC too.

<comment><USER11> The two are not incompatible: I run my own DNS resolver (dnsmasq) which I configured to recurse to Google DNS.

The problem is that any domain lookup requires at least two requests: one to the root servers to find out the domain's nameserver, and one to that nameserver to find out its actual records.

Google has so many users that it's very unlikely that it isn't already in cache, but as a single user of my own resolver, I'd have to pay that penalty for each domain every couple of hours or less (there are some ridiculously low TTLs out there).

Frankly, I think it's worth it.

<comment><USER12> I am sure you realize, but by pointing to Google DNS, you are making your CDN edge request performance _worse_ (in general).

CDNs using GeoDNS will assume your location is the google DNS servers[1], and will use the closest edge node. You would likely get better performance with some sites (those using big expensive CDNs) if you pointed to your ISP's recursors (or used unbound to be your own).

[1]: Google's DNS servers are likely anycast multi-homed as well, so it may not be quite as bad as if google only had a couple of centrally located servers. It would still likely skew your closest CDN Edge node a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think both the headline is wrong (I don't see where they explicitly warn people, can someone point it out?) and the interview contains no actual facts. The only statements are "probably" and "I'm not sure"…

<comment><USER14> The warning is at the end of the article:

"I think Google controlling search, the browser, and the network or DNS layer is a dangerous trifecta that the consumer will probably be best served avoiding"

> the interview contains no actual facts

The headline never asserted the article contained facts though? A brief article that contains someone's thoughts is fine by me.

I see nothing disagreeable in the argument that consumers should avoid consolidating all their network activities so those activities route through one advertising corporation.

<comment><USER2> Why do you consider the marketing opinion held by one company of its competitor interesting, let alone worthy to be posted here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A company warns about its competitor without any substantial claims.

</comment><comment><USER16> Was there a reason for linking in at page 2?

First page, for those that didn't realise: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/02/25/a-close...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/02/25/a-closer- look-at-google-public-dns/)

</comment><comment><USER17> In the end it is about trust. Sometimes i just wish ISP would provide better DNS services.

<comment><USER18> This. A thousand times this. The issues I've had with ISP DNS...

ISP A making their very fast service look dog-slow with terrible DNS (and a terrible wireless router, to boot). ISP B sending mangled responses to some popular requests including facebook.com (which is what made fixing it a priority in my household) and so on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is really a nothing article: It (rightly) warns, very generally, about (over) consolidation of services, but beyond that says nothing specific.

<comment><USER2> Google's public DNS is not consolidated with _any_ other Google services. From its privacy page[0]: "We don't correlate or combine your information from the temporary or permanent logs with any other data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network."

Warning about consolidation of services would very much be _wrong_ in this situation.

[0] [http://code.google.com/intl/en-EN/speed/public- dns/privacy.h...](http://code.google.com/intl/en-EN/speed/public- dns/privacy.html)

<comment><USER19> Well, that's kind of why I threw in the "very generally" part.

It's good to know / have some confirmation (?), though, that Google's handling of DNS query data will not change as part of the ongoing Privacy Policy revision and user accounts data consolidation. (I commented / queried on this point a few weeks ago, in another thread.)</comment></comment></comment>


How to Schedule SMS's and Calls on Twilio - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iron.io/2012/10/how-to-schedule-sms-and-calls-on-twilio.html <comment><USER2> If you need schedulability for outgoing calls / SMSes in Twilio send me an email. I have bled all over this topic; you can avoid some of the more painful mistakes by talking to me. Without casting aspersions about people attempting to increase the community's knowledge through blog posts let me say that it goes substantially deeper than an N-line code snippet.

<comment><USER3> Can you give a brief summary of the issues here. I'm not planning on implementing this for anything, but I'm curious why it's more complicated than it appears to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really not that complicated. The example on github works and you can try it out pretty easily to see for yourself. And if you need any help or have any questions, you can get some real-time help in our public chat: <http://get.iron.io/chat>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Twilio should simply add "send_date_time" or "call_date_time" param. I wonder why they have not?

</comment><comment><USER5> never heard of iron worker...i do a similar thing with delayed_job and <https://www.tropo.com/>

<comment><USER6> Now you have! :) IronWorker is like a hosted delayed_job.. meaning you never worry about servers. Another benefit is if you have to scale up your workers, we've got thousands of cores available at any given moment.</comment></comment>


The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/06/bbcs-hi-tech-failure <comment><USER2> Was wondering if anybody here would notice that the "CMS" being described here was a project to handle every single second of radio and TV footage from ingestion through recoding through editing to broadcast, and then beyond that to transcoding everything for whatever devices want to watch or hear it once it's finished.

People here hear "CMS" and think we're talking about text.

Incidentally the parts of this boondoggle which actually exist are being used as components in the BBC. The headline last week was about the decision to terminate that particular project because it had got far, far out of its depth. Also to put the highly-charming person responsible for it on gardening leave indefinitely pending the investigation.

It's a massive cockup, but it has had some useable outcomes, and it is a product class that doesn't exist outside the world of the Beeb, or other national/international broadcasters. There's nothing off the shelf to buy here. In the 90s this sort of thing wouldn't have got cancelled, so I'm seeing this as a sort of progress.

</comment><comment><USER3> Real headline: Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way.

It seems to me that months or years of auditing and hearings and cries for heads to roll are probably wasted. Just like a private company a few mangers should probably get tossed or reassigned and the second version of the same project should get started to address the businesses needs the first one was supposed to.

<comment><USER4> >Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way.

Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake. This is a typical big government project. Software development is hard. Building large, complex, poorly defined software systems is hard.

//EDIT

I should clarify that. I don't think a private enterprise would engage in a project that would have it build an _internal_ system, at that scale ($100 million), having so little impact on it's primary revenue driver, over so many years!

Big enterprises fail with big software, that's a fact. But they wouldn't fail in this specific way. This is a quintessential big government software project failure.

<comment><USER5> There's nothing special about private enterprises that makes them immune to risk. As others have said, many IT projects fail [1]. In the private sector this is just seen as a business risk, but when a public sector project fails then its "wasting taxpayers money".

For some reason the Economist article doesn't mention that the project was originally awarded to Siemens and Deloitte [2], but technical failures and cost overruns by these private companies caused the BBC to bring the project in-house. It could be argued that the BBC lacked the capability to deliver the project on its own, but thats also a mistake found in the private sector.

[1] [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9116470/IT_s_biggest_...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9116470/IT_s_biggest_project_failures_and_what_we_can_learn_from_them)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Media_Initiative#Initia...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Media_Initiative#Initial_impetus_and_relaunch)

<comment><USER6> There's something special about private enterprises making them reconsider their approaches, though - the fact that they lose their own money (which is often combined with having a smaller pool of money to begin with). Few enterprises can spend $150M and fewer will keep spending upon signs of things not working out.

As to private contractors doing a poor job when paid with taxpayer money - makes some sense, as long as said money keeps flowing. In a different setting the flow would stop more quickly.

<comment><USER7> I know of a private newspaper with a circulation of around 30,000 that spent $3M on a failed Print software system.

How does that compare to the BBC's viewer & listenership numbers for $150M for a Audio/Video production system?

<comment><USER8> According to barb.co.uk, BBC 1 (the flagship TV channel) had some 45M viewers over a recent week. We could consider other channels, radio stations and the website, but that's already well over half the UK population. By cost per customer, that's more than an order of magnitude better than your newspaper example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've personally worked at 3 large organizations that have tried to formulate and develop an all-encompassing content management system. One of those organizations is a broadcaster that was also trying to build a digital content management system.

Every single one of those projects has been a total boondoggle. Always over budget. Always changing scope. Always missing every single milestone and deadline.

Now, I know that this is not a statistically significant sample size, but this sort of thing seems to be more common that I initially thought. It's like the worst-case scenario of design-by-committee.

</comment><comment><USER10> The same organization that couldn't be arsed to host some of their historical web properties due to "high costs": [http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling- the-plug-on-the-bbcs-i...](http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on- the-bbcs-internet-history/)

<comment><USER11> It strikes me that the BBC is hilariously bad at archival. They scrapped dozens of Doctor Who episodes in the name of saving space ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes)).

<comment><USER12> The BBC is, today, very good at archiving programming material. All output is kept for at least five years, and the overwhelming majority is kept permanently (exceptions are things like long-running quiz shows, where samples of material are kept post five years, although any disposed material is offered to the BFI and other third parties before being junked).

Doctor Who wasn't scrapped in the name of saving space, it was scrapped because nobody thought it was worth keeping. The shows couldn't be repeated (because at the time, Equity had negotiated limits on repeat rights), and quad tape was very expensive and easily re-used.

More importantly, nobody really thought that Quad was an appropriate archiving format. Programs would be tele-recorded onto 16mm for overseas sale and archive. This is not, in of itself, a crazy idea - try finding a quad tape player today vs a 16mm projector. The problem at the time was there was no mandate for archival, so the engineering department were junking the tapes, and the commercial department (who were selling Doctor Who on to other broadcasters) weren't retaining the 16mm reels.

Even in the 1970s, many people were still not convinced of the value of archiving TV output. It's not totally dissimilar to the early days of the web - it was seen as ephemeral. This was happening at pretty much _every_ broadcaster around the world - Wikipedia has a pretty big list of lost TV programs, most of which were wiped for space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nowhere near as much as the £12Bn the NHS spent on an impossible moving-spec IT system that they also scrapped(1). Oh wait, it's a tenth of the amount.

(1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health)

<comment><USER14> Saying the program was scrapped is a bit off. It makes it sound like nothing has come out of the project at all.

Choose and Book is widely in use, the Spine exists, as well as the N3 network.

Data format and transfer standards are coming into play now. So instead of one system to rule them all, it's working towards interop. Which probably should have been the overall goal to begin with.

People like to think of the NHS as a monolith, but it's really hundreds of tiny fiefdoms.

<comment><USER15> Tiny fiefdoms all on 172.16

They could easily have picked ipv6 and done it the smart way. Oh how things could have been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I vaguely remember reading uplifting, grandiose articles and presentations about domain driven design at the BBC; search for "BBC domain driven design". From this article, I cannot deduce whether this failed CMS is the same system that has been glorified in these presentations or something else; maybe someone can shed some light on this.

<comment><USER17> It probably is. I've experienced the fact that DDD scales up only until the consultants have gone :)

Same as NserviceBus only works until you've paid for the training.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Previous discussion, including info from someone close to the project, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5762116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5762116)

</comment><comment><USER19> Related further reading for trainwreck geeks:

EDS (now HP) infamously botched a 1-year ~50million-turned-4 year-multi- hundred million dollar CRM project for BskyB a decade ago, and eventually lost a years-long lawsuit.

[http://www.linklaters.com/Publications/Publication1403Newsle...](http://www.linklaters.com/Publications/Publication1403Newsletter/20100317/Pages/BSkyBvEDSTimetoReassess.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER20> I had the chance to see some of the work Adobe is planning to do with their CMS (some actual demos from the "Adobe Labs"), and i cant deny the resemblance to BBCs case. I am wondering whether Adobe was involved...

</comment><comment><USER21> A side matter, but handing the BBC's governance over to Ofcom? They haven't held the Independent Television programme contractors to their remits since 2001 under the threat of any sanction - or, for that matter, put their contracts up to tender (not that it worked or ever will work if we want a One Nation Tory-style public broadcasting system again - and not that I remain suspicious of their inconsistent singling out of Thames Television) since 1993.

The BBC Trust, at the very least, has an image to mantain.

<comment><USER22> I did a quick check to see how Wikipedia defined a "One Nation Tory" \- after all they have been pretty thin on the ground this last 30 years (especially here in Scotland!).

I'm somewhat amused to see that "One nation conservatism" appears to now be the policy of the Labour Party:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- nation_conservatism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-nation_conservatism)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Note that the content in this CMS is hours and hours of raw video footage rather than the usual snippets of text.

<comment><USER24> Duely noted, but I don't think it ought to make a difference in the price tag unless the CMS was doing conversion and distribution.

<comment><USER25> IIRC, their CMS was supposed to be the Holy Grail of video management. Centralized and decentralized storage, processing farms, search-by-image, advanced tagging, etc. Sounded quite impressive but from what I understand, there are now commercial solutions that have some of those feature sets. The way they explain it, when they started no one had these features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd say "well this is what happens when government runs something technical" but I also watched similar stuff happen at MSN when I was there. Not to say that the Beeb is like MSN, but I do know that there were a lot of dim bulbs to go around...

</comment><comment><USER27> As a big fan of the Economist, I'm surprised they didn't catch the typo in the name of the project they're reporting on. "Digitial Media Initiative (DMI)" Especially since a rudimentary spell-checker would have caught it.

<comment><USER28> I guess Economist's CMS is not as sophisticated, as one at BBC

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> From what I understand (and I work in the public media sphere), this was a monster CMS project. A way to integrate audio, video, web content, reporters notes, etc. Is it any wonder a project like that failed?

</comment><comment><USER30> The only reason failed content management system isn't an oxymoron is that content management system is three words.

</comment><comment><USER31> In the US I think noone even blinks an eye at $150 million anymore

<comment><USER32> It's funny you mention that. My first thought was, "wow, that's a lot of money." But then I thought, "but how much is it really?" I actually have no idea how much it should cost for them to do what they were trying to do though I suspect it is probably a fraction of that $150MM.

<comment><USER33> For a more concrete perspective, if you assume that a good developer costs about $150,000/year, then this is one hundred years of development time for a team of 10 good developers, which is quite a lot.

I don't know just what this thing was supposed to do, so I don't know what the scope is.

<comment><USER34> no one working for the BBC in the UK would make that sort of money as a developer

<comment><USER35> I don't know about that. I've seen a few tech jobs around the £70-80k mark at the BBC, which is about $120k. Throw in the additional benefits and it's probably not far off.

<comment><USER36> Hah, I wish. I was a senior engineer there and earned less than half that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> $150 million roughly equals to 1000 developer years.

</comment><comment><USER38> When I was at BBC Online ~10 years back they wasted a couple of million on a content management system through a "leading" consultancy that never made it to production.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.

<comment><USER9> That's spec work.

<comment><USER40> Yes, that seems quite obvious, which is why it puzzles me that you took the time to post it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Article doesn't actually tell us what it is, beyond a traditional CMS.

<comment><USER42> More important, _what is in it_. A large difficulty with content management systems are the data types; pairing down or normalizing metadata while trying to map old to new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> They were trying to build netflix?

</comment><comment><USER44> Sounds like a typical hospital EMR/EPIC/Cerner/Meditech deployment!

</comment><comment><USER45> Now they didn't. They "transfered" $152 million of public money into private hands.

It's a success. Plus, they get to do it again.</comment>


Show HN: Shiori – Simple self hosted bookmarks manager - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RadhiFadlillah/shiori <comment><USER2> Hoping you don't mind a little shameless plug here, I'd like to talk about likedb: [https://github.com/kozmos/likedb](https://github.com/kozmos/likedb)

It's a bookmarking database that keeps a copy of all your bookmarks in your computer, but automatically syncs to your other devices. Similar to what Chrome and Safari do between your desktop and mobile devices.

Although it's built particularly for Kozmos (getkozmos.com), you can build a service that syncs with that.

P.S If you'd like to build an import manager, you can use Kozmos' parsing library; [https://github.com/kozmos/bookmark-backup- parser](https://github.com/kozmos/bookmark-backup-parser)

<comment><USER3> Is it really necessary to hijack others "Show HN"? These types of posts should be banned.

<comment><USER4> I think the opposite - until an hour ago I wasn't aware this category of software even existed. As soon as I learned of it, first thing I wanted to know is what else is out there that solves the same problem and how they compare.

Some projects help you with this by featuring a quick rundown of similar software on their website/repository readme along with links to the repositories. I always appreciate that.

<comment><USER3> Then create a separate Show HN for it? There's no reason to mention your competing product in someones thread, other than to advertise for it.

<comment><USER5> But then they are two unrelated posts with two separate discussions. The whole point is that they are related and in the same discussion. It's more simple this way.

<comment><USER3> I mean if they are unrelated, shouldn't they have separate discussions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Where possible, by default shiori will download a static copy of the webpage in simple text and HTML format, which later can be used as offline archive for that page.

This is the killer feature I've always been missing from so many bookmark managers.

Atm I use Shaarli but I want to preserve my bookmarks as they are now for the future.

I will definitely look into improving the archiving feature through pull requests.

What it seems to be missing is an addon or bookmarklet to quickly bookmark pages from the active browser tab and now way to import large collections into the database.

I'll test it out to see if the database can handle my bookmark collection (which should be approaching about 7000 links by now)

</comment><comment><USER7> Also have a look at Crestify[0]. It doesn't store local copies of the bookmarks, but instead archives them to Archive.org and Archive.today. It is open source and PRs are welcome.

[0] [https://github.com/crestify/crestify](https://github.com/crestify/crestify)

</comment><comment><USER8> Slightly OT, but I'm looking for a bookmark manager to actually manage my current bookmarks. I'm using Firefox and I'm currently up to about 1000 bookmarks, organized in a couple of directories. But I'd like to have UI that can tag them, automatically sort by domain and more. The Firefox Bookmark Manager is not good enough when you have a lot of bookmarks.

Is there any tool out there? I don't want to export the bookmarks from Firefox but something that I can use from Firefox or import into Firefox again after organizing.

<comment><USER9> Full disclosure to start with, I work for the company building this.

We launched the latest version of Gurn ([https://gurn.io](https://gurn.io)) a few months back, it does bookmarks a little differently though. You assign keywords to your URLs, can collect multiple URLs under a single keyword, and sort them into lists. You can then invite others to collaborate on those lists.

You can then navigate to them directly through the browser bar. We currently support chrome and firefox with IE, Edge, and Safari all being worked on at the moment.

It's aimed mostly at teams but works really well individuals as well. I'm building the thing so take this with a pinch of salt, but I couldn't live without it now.

<comment><USER10> Your https fails for me, just fyi. (error pops up saying the connection is not private)

<comment><USER9> We've fixed this now, thanks for letting us know!

<comment><USER11> [https://www.gurn.io/](https://www.gurn.io/) works but [https://gurn.io/](https://gurn.io/) still gives me an error.

> gurn.io uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid > for www.gurn.io Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does someone know how it compares to Wallabag[0] ?

[0] [https://wallabag.org/en](https://wallabag.org/en)

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone should make some sort of web service for collecting and organizing links.

<comment><USER14> I'm a big fan of Pinboard, personally. It's super cheap and the creator is committed to never selling off my data (obviously there's an element of trust there, but then again, all web services involve an element of trust). Oh, and the $25/year plan offers link archival too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A little plug: I have integrated bookmarking with my open source personal knowledge base [https://knowfox.com](https://knowfox.com) so I can annotate and refer to bookmarks. Bookmarked pages are run through [https://mercury.postlight.com/web-parser/](https://mercury.postlight.com/web- parser/) to save the gist with the bookmark.

</comment><comment><USER16> >> Intended as a simple clone of Pocket

Finally, been waiting for so long for this. You have to pay premium to search with the tags....seriously

<comment><USER17> There is also [https://wallabag.org](https://wallabag.org) which is selfhostable and somewhat popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use Instapaper for not just "read later" feature but as bookmarking too to later refer it. It has single level folders for organizing. Searched can be done on page title or cached copy of page.

As your solution is self hosted, it is good. Wish I knew Go tools to use it.

<comment><USER10> > Wish I knew Go tools to use it.

What do you mean?

<comment><USER18> I meant I don't have any experience with Go setup, tools and stuff since it is made with Go.

<comment><USER10> Well with Go, you don't need them if all you want is to run the project. Go produces binaries, so you just download the binary from somewhere - No Go needed. In this case, iirc he was releasing binaries on the GitHub page.

You only need Go if you're wanting to develop on the project, or if the developer never released binaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks promising. However, I really need a way to browse my bookmarks vs. searching them. Maybe that'll be added in a later update?

<comment><USER20> I have used sitebar in the past, will probably start using it again.

[http://sitebar.org/](http://sitebar.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems like a more powerful replacement for the nextcloud bookmarks app which I use. But a bookmarklet would really ease the workflow.

</comment><comment><USER22> This looks great, building and running it seems straightforward. Helm chart or K8s deployment.yaml template would be handy too :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks very cool.

Any plans for a browser integration/plugin? I save a lot of bookmarks, sometimes even multiple at once (with tree style tab).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I have plan to create add on for Chrome and Firefox. The rest API for saving bookmarks is already there, so I think it should be easy enough to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just love the clean look of this. Looks like a labour of love for a personal tool. Nice feature, downloading the full HTML.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much.

To clarify, it won't download the full HTML, only the content part of the webpage. It works by using go-readability[0], which strips unnecessary elements from a webpage.

[0] [https://github.com/RadhiFadlillah/go- readability/](https://github.com/RadhiFadlillah/go-readability/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be nice if it were able to import (or sync some bookmarks with some tag etc.) with pocket.</comment>


Announcing K3OS: A Kubernetes Operating System - <AUTHOR> https://rancher.com/blog/2019/announcing-k3os-kubernetes-operating-system <comment><USER2> Sounds quite interesting. What's the best way to roll it out on bare metal? Is it possible to install/boot over PXE?

<comment><USER3> We will update the docs over the next days, but in short yes. It's designed primarily so that people can build there own images.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Sqardius or where photo sharing is more than just fun, please review - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
Sqardius is a new photo-sharing service where pictures are only shared in 1Km Radius, so that people can only view pictures around them, we think it could be a great service when used for community meetups, concerts, sport events .etc.
Please let us know what you think about it and if you have any feedback, we are here, we accept any kind of feedbacks: critics, suggestions, remarks,...
Here is the link http://www.sqardius.net And here is the blog for feedbacks: http://blog.sqardius.com
Thanks, Sqardius <comment><USER2> How will you execute better than the original Color did?

"Color -- the cross-platform app which allows users to share recently snapped photos with others in their vicinity"? Apart from the 1KM radius vs 150m, I don't see a fundamental difference with the idea.

But what you can do is execute better. Color failed not because of the idea, but because they

      a: Had horrible UI, with mismatched icons and unclear UX
      b: An incredible buggy app, frequently crashing phones
      c: Most importantly, an empty world when starting out

So, what's the takeaway? I really like the idea and think it has potential, but what you have to do is:

a: vastly improve your design. It's a good start, but it's not the most attractive

b: Make sure that there are always enough photos, whether you start with a limit city in mind, or do some code shenanigans

c: Start you marketing now. _It's only viral if there are enough people to make it so_. Especially so with an app like yours that is contingent on there being enough people around you with the app

I'm really excited to see where this goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply,

We have just launched our beta version today, so we are starving for feedbacks like yours. One of the reasons we have launched as soon as we could is to deal with the empty base problem, and I want to let you know that this is only the basic features.

Thanks again, replies like yours give us a giant push to continue what we've started.</comment></comment>


6 Mistakes Growth Candidates Make in the Interview Process - <AUTHOR> https://www.coelevate.com/essays/6-mistakes-growth-interview <comment><USER2> [https://www.coelevate.com/growth-team/](https://www.coelevate.com/growth- team/)

-Done is better than perfect attitude

-Agressive and competitive mentality

-Voracious learners

-Resilient to failure and always looking to improve

-Opinions and ideas on how to do things better

-Bias towards action

-Impact driven

Sounds like a good set of value except:

Agressive and competitive mentality

Nothing wrong with being competitive but a lot companies work off a person with the strongest personality wins. And it seems like the rudest person makes it to the top.(Not saying that's your company.)</comment>