This Year in Robigalia - <AUTHOR> https://robigalia.org/blog/2016/12/27/this-year-in-robigalia.html <comment><USER2> A visit to the wikipedia entry on the Roman festival of Robigalia [0] is worthwhile if one wishes to discover the disturbingly elaborate suitability of the name.

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

<comment><USER3> Why did you think it was elaborately suitable? Just curious.

<comment><USER2> From what I can tell, Robigalia appears to be what he calls the "user space" component of an operating system based on the sel4 kernel, written in Rust. Sel4 is a "the world's first operating-system kernel with an end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement".

Robigalia was a festival of propitation for the god Robigus, or Robigo (the gender of the god is ambiguous), a personification-type deity of crop disease. A thematic colour was of the festival is red, and Robigo was also the name at the time for what we call "wheat rust"[0], a potentially devistating crop disease.

So we have both the prevention of disease (Sel4) and the thematic presence of Rust.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I can't take the credit for the (IMO) brilliant name. For over two weeks in ~September 2015 I was wracking my brain for a decent name and one of my fellow students came up with it. Lots of great name-based tie-ins.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Not To Quit: Man Revived After 96 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://m.npr.org/news/front/139670971?singlePage=true <comment><USER2> I know that this article is mostly about the medical tech related to this case but I still get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing this happened in my hometown; that it was a crew of volunteer firemen and others that kept the vital CPR going for 96 minutes.

I hope the new technology makes it into the hands of EMTs quickly so that more lives can be saved.

</comment><comment><USER3> Capnography is actually required for all intubated patients in many areas (and intubation is a standard step in the management of pre-hospital cardiac arrest patients). This is because (properly interpreted) capnography is one of the most definite ways to verify that the ET tube is headed for the lungs, not the stomach.

Given the increasing prevalence of capnography use in the field, I expect the next few years will see several studies into how it could be used to improve patient outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER4> My favorite paragraph:

The nurse "called the emergency room doctor, who told him that I was dead and that they should walk away," says Snitzer. "And he hung up and he said to the rest of the people in the room, 'Is anyone else here uncomfortable with walking away from this?' And they all said yes. And it was at that point that he called Dr. White."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My first thought is how many people were abandoned because of a reliance on the incomplete picture that the old tech bundle provided.

<comment><USER5> I like to believe this would be less than 1%. Medicine is science, and I hope while designing modern CPR guidelines they did tests to see if pursuing CPR even while all signs suggest death, for long periods of time, would revive more people.

Then they probably had to make a key decision between keeping an emergency team busy for 90 minutes for every case where death was probable, just in case there's that less-than-1% chance of revival, or dismissing the team and freeing the resources for patients who have a higher probability of survival, and increasing the probability of survival of those due to faster response times.

<comment><USER6> Given those numbers, you'd have a statistical expectation of one life saved for every 150 hours spent. Say $100/hr for salaries+bennies for two parametics, 15K per life saved. I think it's worth it.

<comment><USER7> But what's the expectation of lives lost due to late emergency crews?

<comment><USER8> I wonder how overburned most areas are? I had a friend who was an EMT and said they really liked being called (didn't get the impression they were that busy) because it was far better to be safe than sorry and people were often too hesitant about calling for emergency services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That is a fantastic use of technology.

This is interesting: "Now, during good CPR, this is probably going to be around 25 — if you keep this up in that 25 range, then there's circulation still going on. ... That's where you're going to get a positive outcome,".

So essentially, if CPR is working, you don't need to die even if your heart and lungs aren't working on their own. CPR is doing their work well enough, for the moment anyway. If they keep at it all the way to the hospital, you may survive.

Of course, if you'd seen Lindsey brought back in Abyss, you'd already know this is possible :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> There is an important thing missing: In order to prove that someone is dead, you _must_ do electroencephalography. This will detect the brain electric charges. Normally, since the patient isn't dead, there will be brain pulses, which will prove he is alive.

<comment><USER11> There are differences among the laws and norms of local and national jurisdictions, and among pre-hospital and hospital providers.

Depending on local laws, US emergency services field providers usually don't officially declare legal death, though there are protocols for either not commencing or for ceasing resuscitation efforts.

These don't involve electroencephalography.

Factors input in this decision and these protocols vary, but can include evidence of insufficient structures for maintaining life (eg: decapitation), absence of vitals, rigor, lividity (blood pooling), absent electrocardiogram, rescuer exhaustion, and (for cases involving cardiac) failure of defibrillation and advanced cardiac life support where applicable. These factors are usually used in combinations; you need more than one of these, and no vitals.

Contraventions can include hypothermia, which may have been a factor in the cited case, and cold-water drowning.

Many of these cases can and do involve a consultation with the patient's physician, or with the emergency physician

Emergency transport of patients that are presumed dead is not without risks to members of the community and to the EMS crew; these can include vehicular collisions with emergency vehicles, as well as simply not the crew unavailable for another call. Funding also applies, as survival to discharge is (in various studies) not expected in cases where pre-hospital advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) has been administered, and has failed. (If ACLS didn't work in the field, it's equally unlikely to work after a five or fifteen or half-hour transport to an emergency facility.)

I'm not aware of any US emergency services field providers that are using electroencephalography for this nor any field equipment for this, nor even any discussions of its applicability in the field.

On the other hand, capnography has been a subject of various discussions for some years now among emergency physicians and hospitals and field providers, including its use for assessing correct placement of breathing tubes, and waveforms for differentiating various respiratory dysfunctions.

<comment><USER12> I've had paramedics tell me they'll go beyond what the protocols say to try to resuscitate people because they won't the extra paperwork involved in dealing with a death.

A paramedic I know failed to revive an elderly woman who'd collapsed at home. The rescue attempts were watched by the woman's (panicked) daughter, who was a nurse. The daughter later threatened to sue, saying he was negligent for not performing a procedure that she thought was necessary. Paramedic was called before some lawyers, at which point they found out he'd actually done a lot more than protocol had required in those circumstances, and the case was dropped.

Nice way to say thanks for trying to save your mom.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what they meant by "more paperwork," but in most locations, working an arrest will result in a whole lot more paperwork than simply calling it in the field. All interventions (intubation, IV access, medications, defibrillation attempts, etc) have to be documented (who did it, when they did it, etc).

That's a whole lot more paperwork than "Confirmed asystole in 3 leads, see attached strip"

<comment><USER12> I don't know. They might have just been hamming it up for the benefit of the story. Those guys all have a seemingly weird attitude towards death, often appearing somewhat blasé about it. They can't take things too personally when someone dies while they're working on them.

Me? I build websites. If something blows up it can always be fixed. New hardware can be bought. Back ups restored. Apart from some downtime, everything is as good as new.

Them? Turn up on a job not necessarily knowing what to expect. Some times they'll find a situation they can literally do nothing about and, oooops, someone's dead.

Someone dying in front of me is an incredibly bad day at the office i'll never forget. Watching people die as an emergency responder is kinda part of the job description.

<comment><USER3> I actually do both. I'm a freelance developer, as well as a Firefighter/EMT (currently working on my paramedic certification).

The worlds aren't as far apart as you might think... While the stakes (and the pace) are obviously different, I think I enjoy both of them because of the challenge they present. My favorite part of the development process is troubleshooting (either new code or old... doesn't really matter). EMS is really all about troubleshooting. _Something_ is causing whatever this patient's issue is, I just need to figure out what it is and mitigate it to the best of my ability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does this mean that the "Flatline" (See <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flatline> ) will have to be relegated to TV and movie history?

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems that his heart _was beating_ , although irregularly to a degree that they couldn't detect a pulse. Is the article saying that estimating the CO2 output via this new method is a more modern / sensitive way of detecting a pulse?

<comment><USER15> No, it detects the release of CO_2 from the blood to the pulmonary alveoli.

Presence of CO_2 in the alveoli signs the presence of a blood flow, regardless of the nature of the pump (heart vs CPR).

If the blood flows, the organs (including the brain, which is the most sensitive to oxygen deprivation) are properly fed and viable (assuming CPR started soon enough).

<comment><USER16> Well, the heart still has to be in more-or-less the right "shape", right? If the valves are messed up, blood won't circulate through the lungs and back to the organs properly. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heart_diagram_blood_flow_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heart_diagram_blood_flow_en.svg)

<comment><USER15> Indeed, the valves must be in working order, and there must be enough blood in the vessels to close the circuit and prime the pump. I don't know if it was confirmed, but while I was a student, there were strong suspicions that blood in the whole thorax (pulmonary circulation), not only in the heart, contributed to the assisted flow.

Another fun fact: CPR is more efficient if you use a plunger to perform the chest compressions, because you can push and pull it, thus not only pumping blood out of the heart (through the arteries), but also actively sucking it back in (from the veins).

As a consequence, at the end of a cycle, there is more blood in the chest to be pumped out on the next one.

See <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21251705> for the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Non-mobile version here: [http://www.npr.org/2011/08/22/139670971/when-not-to- quit-man...](http://www.npr.org/2011/08/22/139670971/when-not-to-quit-man- revived-after-96-minutes)

</comment><comment><USER18> Every time I get my VO2 max taken I feel like I'm dying anyway, so this is only a fitting use of the technology.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't know if anyone else noticed this but when I see '==' I think comparison not assignment.

<comment><USER20> It really should be logical implication '⇒', shouldn't it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This. I'm usually pretty pedantic about this sort of thing, but don't submit very often, and wasn't aware of the 80 char limit. Forced to pare a more descriptive headline and get back to work, I made a mistake.

It looks as though it's been replaced with the actual headline now anyway, though I don't think that highlights the most interesting part of the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Imagine all the people that could have been saved if only the doctors knew what action to take. I imagine people stuck in a coma, listening to everything going on around them saying: "keep doing what you were doing, it is working", and instead watching them decide to give up.

</comment><comment><USER22> ugh. This is exactly what drives up the cost of medicine. People hear crap like this, and then come in demanding that 'everything be done' for their 95 yo grandmother in a coma in the ICU. Sadly technology can keep this type of person 'alive' for a very long time. Expensive, wasteful, selfish.

Medicine needs to send truthful messages about what can and can't be done.

<comment><USER23> Says someone who is almost certainly not 95 yet.

Expensive? Probably. "Wasteful"? "Selfish"? Not your call, thankfully.

<comment><USER22> You misunderstand, it isn't selfish to want it for yourself, but it is selfish to keep someone else alive in a vegetative state. It is so easy to choose 'life' as the correct and right thing when in fact 'death' is the natural and moral thing. Society needs to think about their end of life plans. If your plan is to be fed through IVs, have a foley, breath through a machine, have a butt tube, and foley catheter in for the last 10 years of your life be my guest. Just please don't use any of my tax dollars for that! The sad thing is most people don't chose this for themselves, instead they have a stroke or suffer another handicap and while they are unable to make decisions (probably unable forever) the family chants 'do everything you can'! Medicine can do a lot, but mostly at the end of life it just prolongs misery.

I routinely ask patients their 'code status' and articles like this give them false hope and false belief. Instead of: "do you want us to do cpr if your heart stops and/or intubate" ... I should be saying, "do you want your last dying moment to have someone beating on your chest breaking all your ribs while another person shoves a tube down your throat as you get pumped full of drugs."

You will never forget the first time you push on ribs and feel the crunch, watching the half-dead eyes look up at you as they live their last moments, and wondering if they are feeling their veins burn with drugs being pumped in.

Never mind that the article makes it sound like resuscitation efforts are grand. They aren't at all. The statistics are dismal.

Oh ACLS drugs? Yea, they don't really work to well... even as far back as 1998.. there are newer studies showing that ACLS training is helpful, but the actual drugs make little to no difference. [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196064498...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196064498700319)

Less than 18% (!) requiring resuscitation survive to discharge. <http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0810245> [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957203...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957203002156)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cheapest way to host and serve large-ish files? - <AUTHOR> What options exist for serving large files on the web without getting killed on bandwidth costs?
For example, let's say I want to host a 5GB file that contains an educational ML data set on S3. Assuming 1000 people download it in a month, that would cost me $450/mo in just outbound bandwidth fees. That's almost $0.50 per download.
Obviously there must be ways to serve files cheaper than physically mailing an SD card to someone. What have you done to serve large files cheaply? Is the only option to maintain a server (either colo or virtual) that has better bandwidth pricing? <comment><USER2> To add to the other comments about using bittorrent, Academic Torrents [0] is trying to solve this problem. I don't think they're that popular yet, but they aim to address some of the issues with bittorrent already highlighted in the other posts.

[0] [http://academictorrents.com/](http://academictorrents.com/)

<comment><USER3> I think averaging 2TB of data served a day is popular!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, there's Backblaze B2, it would only cost $0.10 per download: [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud- storage.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html)

Alternatively, there's bittorrent, which was pretty much designed for this.

But considered you can find decently priced dedicated servers with unmetered gigabit ports, seems like installing Linux + nginx and enabling automatic security updates might still be the best option.

</comment><comment><USER5> Amazon has _Public Data Sets on AWS_. I don't know the current status, but it used to be free for eligible projects [1].

BitTorrent would be the natural thing to do, but it has it's own set of issues. Jeff Atwood summarized them nicely in [2]. This was written in 2009, LegalTorrents doesn't exist anymore and you don't need a tracker anymore, but the rest of the points are still valid. His summary is:

> It's ironic that BitTorrent, which is justly famous for equalizing the > highly asymmetric nature of most people's internet connections, is itself so > asymmetric when it comes to sharing: trivially easy to consume, but awkward > and confusing to share. That's too bad, because BitTorrent is such a > powerful tool for sharing. Hopefully this post demystifies the process a > bit!

[1] [http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- ne...](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=1232302)

[2] [https://blog.codinghorror.com/sharing-files-with- bittorrent/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/sharing-files-with-bittorrent/)

EDIT: Thinking about it, there is no shortage of free public data sets. I believe many of them are provided by individuals and organizations which wouldn't be able or willing to pay the bandwidth cost out of their own pockets. Maybe you could research the solutions they are using. A starting point could be the [3].

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165497)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have used Internet Archive in the past for this kind of hosting. They charge nothing and provide a great (though sometimes confusing) service.

But I'm all for paying my own bills as long as they are reasonable. It seems crazy that IA can afford to host huge files for free for anyone but S3 charges so much for so little. I was hoping there was a middle ground. I guess the middle ground is just running my own dedicated server. Thanks for the reply!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1 TB storage on Google Drive is $10 (100GB is $2). No bandwidth pricing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Static business home IP address from your ISP and your own server.</comment>


How Clash of Clans earns $500,000 a day with in-app purchases - <AUTHOR> http://gyrovague.com/2013/06/05/time-is-money-how-clash-of-clans-earns-500000-a-day-with-in-app-purchases/ <comment><USER2> I really hope this game model suffers the same kind of crash that felled the arcade business in the 80s. At some point I think people are going to collectively realize that they're being manipulated and burn out en masse.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983)

The overwhelming dominance of this kind of app in the app store has killed a lot of my enthusiasm for mobile, unfortunately. There are a lot of very interesting things you could do with a pocket computer that's always online and equipped with a bunch of sensors but nobody cares because if you're not playing these kinds of slimy games with the rest of the top 20 you might as well not exist in the store.

<comment><USER3> What really annoys me is when a game that might potentially interest me chooses to go the pay2win way.

For instance, tribes:ascend. I wanted to get into it but forums were full of people saying each time they released a paid upgrade the balance went FUBAR.

What annoys me the most is there's no way to do it "the old way" and pay a bigger sum of money _once_ and get the full game without having to upgrade for every single new weapon. That's where you realize that the microtransaction model is a scam, because if you want to buy all the upgrades at once it would cost you several hundreds of dollars.

I wish they'd go back to the older model of freeware demo + one time buy full game. I remember buying Doom that way.

<comment><USER4> I'm creating a strategy game right now and I'm facing this dilemma. I'd like to get $20 from each customer during game lifetime, but it seems that it would be easier to make it free to play and then charge for something in the game. And it's hard to charge for anything that would not make you advance in the game, otherwise it's cosmetics and you're not charging for the game, but almost the same as asking for a donation.

Most people would like to play for free. This model enables you to attract more users, which means a larger pool of potential customers. For example, would you pay $20 for my game (see link at the end), or would you rather play for free and then pay $1-$2 a month for some stuff that advances your gameplay?

BTW, in case you're interested the game should be out in a month. See gos.bigosaur.com/cards.html for more info.

<comment><USER5> Some thoughts about the economics (and ethics) of games:

      * if a game isn't fun (to me), I shouldn't have to pay for it
      * if a game is fun, I should pay for it
      * generally, "better" games deserve more money (non-linear)
      * ... but I'm skeptical that $500 is ever the right price (e.g. for every LoL champ)
      * "time spent playing" is a half-assed proxy for "better"...
      * ... but not if you rig your game mechanics around this proxy metric
      * pay-to-win games are "bad" (personal subjective perspective)
      * if I don't have to pay for a game, I probably won't (sorry!)
      * if I'm paying per-month for the game, I feel artificial pressure to play it...
      * ... and if I stop playing, I'll cancel
      * ... so I can't casually pick it up 3 months later
      * ... and I think maybe most people have a limited monthly-subscription budget
      * games that have free options have better word-of-mouth marketing

And a few observations derived from these:

      * gotta have a demo
      * the demo needs to demonstrate the actual gameplay
      * getting demo-length right is really hard
      * if you have the infrastructure to charge $2/month, you've got options

With all that in mind, here's what I would do (hopefully will do, one day):

      * lots of gameplay should be free
      * where it makes sense, put roadblocks that players will hit after a while
      * .... and then some more after some more while
      * charge say $5 to get past each roadblock
      * have say 5 total roadblocks
      * to assuage cheapskates (5-years-ago me!), give alternatives to paying real money
      * maybe crazy grinding?
      * even better would be if you could find a way to give players credit-towards-roadblocks if they are helpful to the game community, or to game development

Be up-front about all of this: "Early parts of the game are free! To feed my family I'll be charging progressively for access to the later parts of the game, but I'll never charge a given player more than $25" (or some other promise you are willing to keep)

\</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>---

By the way, $20 is a lot for an indie game, especially up-front. The humblebundle this week includes ELEVEN games, including several great ones, and the "average price" (unlocks all 11 games) is around $6. So no, I will not pay $20 for your game, are you crazy? Instead I'll go buy the humblebundle for $10, give half of that to charity so I feel like a social justice crusader, throw away 54% of the games in the bundle, and STILL have dozens of hours of gameplay, and $10 in my pocket for the next humblebundle.

Yes, I'm a cheapskate. But this is the reality of the market at work. I'm not saying your game isn't "worth" $20. I bet your game is more fun than a movie- plus-snacks, and people pay $20 for that, right? But your game will be compared to games selling for $10 or less.

Man, I just realized I sound like I'm trying to talk you out of a career in game-dev, and that's not what I want (as a gamer).

\</comment><comment>---

One more thought:

You said "(not necessarily more powerful, but rather more diverse)". Yeah, listen, when you play my Rock Paper Scissors online game, you get Rock for free, and pay for Paper and Scissors. They're not necessarily more powerful, just more diverse.

<comment><USER6> Pay gated content has been tried in the MMO space to varying degrees of success. The main problem with it is that the gates split your community, effectively reducing the userbase of your game. As a non-pay example, take WoW (I did Vanilla->WotLK) where Blizzard continuously reduced barriers to entry for content so that a larger portion of the playerbase could experience it. I honestly haven't seen a gated solution where everybody is happy but I haven't surveyed every game out there and gating works well for single player games.

The other issue is that studios generally feel a need to put a carrot on the other side of the gate. At the moment, I'm tracking Warframe and the current update has (essentially) pay gated zones with a reagent drop that drives both additional character progression and player housing. Neither is necessary to complete any of the other content in the game–the game has a mechanics problem where weapon damage scaling is excessive, the relative ease of content clearing is one–and the playerbase is whining about P2W.

My inclination would be something like:

        * Subscription based
        * Sub payment produces in-game tradeable item, time added on use
        * Subscription use suspends X days after not logging in
        * Payment auto-renewal only triggers when 2 days left
        * You start off with X weeks of playtime

This covers revenue, pay to win, real money trading, free players and (IMO) is both transparent and fair to players. It's basically a F2Pish variant of EVE's PLEX system. The challenge then becomes maintaining engagement and having the economy under control meaning that currency remains useful and inflation remains reasonable.

I haven't actually seen it done, probably because it's not a reliable recurring revenue stream like traditional subscriptions and isn't that strong of an impulse buy. I have seen somewhat similar ideas in a game with limited moves per day but from memory (been a while, blanking on the name) they also used the time item as a catalyst for weapon upgrades which for me veered too far into P2W so I dropped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "... I can't really complain about the hours of entertainment I've gotten in exchange."

"Yet I still can't help but cringe as I run into all the ways the game is intentionally crippled to get you to pay up, and the way its Pavlovian triggers to come back for more operate on fear."

So, sir, you like war games. You observe that this game makes you cringe, and is designed entirely to make you pay up through the experience of fear. Despite this you are willing to pay $4.99 "largely as a token of appreciation to the game's makers".

Game companies that make games that don't intend to extort money out of you are laying people off left and right, and here you are "appreciating" developers that make you cringe. This makes me feel mad and sad.

If you are willing to pay $4.99 for a game that makes you cringe, might you be willing to pay $5.99 or even $39.99 for a game designed to make you experience joy?

The classic Master of Orion I&II are available for $5.99 from GoG. If you demand a modern experience, the latest XCOM is a bargain at $39.99 on Steam. The original XCOM is $4.99, also on Steam.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I paid the $4.99 quite early on, when I was still at the "joy" stage and before I realized the full extent of manipulation going. But I don't regret it: CoC _is_ a good game, and I enjoyed playing it earlier on. I've now just reached the stage where it's pretty much impossible to keep playing without paying.

And for what it's worth, I paid for Master of Orion back in the day when it was still shiny and new, and was quite happy to fork out $15 for the full version of Minecraft, the most "joyful" game I've seen in a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So it's the very definition of "pay2win".

What I don't understand is how they get people to keep playing once they realize they don't need skill to win, but rather a valid credit card number.

Certainly it must feel like using cheatcodes? The victories must feel empty and you'd get bored pretty quickly, at least I think I would.

<comment><USER8> It's called addiction. They get people addicted to the power that gems confer them. People don't care that they need no skills. They just want that high that the gems give them.

<comment><USER9> i very much agree, i played an old web-game back in college called OGame that came out before the "pay to win" model, but the basic premise was the same, the more you login the better you do. and what's best was you had to protect your stuff ( planets/fleets ) 24/7 from people from all different time zones.. it very much became an addiction...

<comment><USER10> I played a web game for a while that was free to play but had a subscription model that gave you features that made management of a large number of assets (villages) easier to do than in the free version.

I played for free for a long time until I ended up with so many resources to manage that I couldn't do it well anymore. I had to pony up the $6/mn to get the advanced features.

The problem with these small transactions is people don't see how much it's costing them. If they priced the game at $20 no one would buy it, but they'll be willing to spend $100 if it's spread out of 100 $1 purchases.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like Tribal Wars. Fun game, but after the first couple villages requires quite the increasing time commitment.

<comment><USER10> Hit the nail on the head. That's what it was. Fun but I ended up giving up my account to another player to manage and haven't looked back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        Clash of Clans on iOS is doing well..
        supercell is making 1 mil a day off of microtransactions?

former_zyngite:

        So much more than 1m a day from what I understand. Yes.
        Clash of Clans is doing well. That's the understatement
        of the year.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fpbv1/i_was_one_of_th...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fpbv1/i_was_one_of_the_520_people_laid_off_by_zynga/cacjaab?context=1)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think League of Legends or maybe Team Fortress 2 are about as good as it gets in terms of over-delivering value and not overselling their micro- transactions. Not everyone is going to be so successful with the same approach though.

<comment><USER14> LoL is horrible compared to Dota2 in this regard. You cant play every hero and with added points you get addex abilities. Dota2 micro-transactions only pay for cosmetic items that you can (mostly) also get via trading with other players or as a drop after each finished game.

<comment><USER15> On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot for needing to grab more money than Valve. Valve has deep pockets and is willing to take a small profit if it means they survive in the long run. Also, Valve's brand is strong-enough that they have players beating a path to their door no matter _what_ they publish. Riot has none of these options. Every player they earn on the strength and reputation of the game alone. They have no cash to fall back onto if LoL doesn't make money for them.

If LoL doesn't make money for Riot, the developers don't get to eat. So yeah, I'm not surprised they went with a F2P model with a little bit of pay-to-win in there, and their variation on it (rotating characters and you pay to _keep_ the ones you liked) is a novel and fair approach to it.

<comment><USER16> Riot is now part of Tencent, which has a market cap of about $90B.

[http://allthingsd.com/20110204/chinas-tencent-buys-riot- game...](http://allthingsd.com/20110204/chinas-tencent-buys-riot-games- for-400-million/)

<http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=0700.HK>

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure what you mean for us to infer from this. Riot is owned by Tencent, but that doesn't mean Tencent is willing to take a temporary loss on Riot like Valve is willing to do with Dota 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been playing Clash of Clans for a few weeks now. I have to say, it's a pretty fun game. Most games that follow a similar layout and design are no where near as polished. The developer behind this game did a really good job making it fun to play.

While I agree that the general formula laid out in the blog post, there are a lot of more subtle game mechanics that I feel help to balance the game (though I am no where near the top-tier of the gameplay yet). I can see at the high levels where the money generation vs cost of things would become a problem, but at least where I'm at, it's fun to play. If I get to the point where I hit a wall where Gems are required to really make progress, I'll just quit.

<comment><USER19> The way this article is written leads me to believe the writer has not played the game for long enough to make a fair assessment on the gems currency.

I have been playing this game for roughly over a month, and put $10 into gems in the beginning. My roommate started a little over a month before me, and refuses to put money into the game.

The amount of time to invest into buildings/resources/farming scales up with how progressed your town is, and gems are present to alleviate this strain. The implication that gems are necessary to win are unfound.

The game follows a simple town building principle, use currencies (gold / elixir) to build/upgrade buildings, however you can only upgrade them to the limit your town hall level will allow. The way to gain currency is attack other towns (to steal their resources), or use gems. Even if you use gems to upgrade your things, you are simply progressing further in the game, at the risk of opening yourself up to more powerful enemies. When you attack weaker enemies, there are diminishing returns (look up the loot multiplier). So while gems allow you to progress, you must also adapt and attack higher level towns. These higher level towns can be achieved without any monetary investment in the game. Gems just allow you to reach that stage sooner.

I bought gems in the beginning, because the game uses a builder mechanic to limit how many buildings you can build/upgrade at one time. When you start out, you have 2 for free. You can have a maximum of 5, however these are bought with gems and the cost increases each time you buy one. With $10, I soon had 4 builders. With this, I was able to progress much faster than my roommate. I am catching up to his level quickly, almost at where he was in two months time with one month invested.

Additionally, gems can be attained for free by clearing brush, however it will be a nominal amount versus buying them outright. But to say gems are required to win this game is not true, but it does save you time versus waiting around a week for a building upgrade to finish. The main thing most people need to realize is this game isn't about spending money, but investing more time into it. The game is a continual uphill grind where the true currency is how much time you devote to it, but I'm still having fun with it for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was at your stage not too long ago, and trust me, you simply haven't played long enough. Come back and revisit this when you're at Town Hall 8+ and building anything of interest requires 2M+ gold or elixir.

<comment><USER20> Have to agree here. I managed to avoid gem purchases up to this point, but now trying to gather up 2M gold or elixir means I have to carefully pick other castles with more than 200K elixir to attack to make it worth my time and dedicate more than a solid hour to play at one time, otherwise I'll get attacked and lose too much of my stockpile in exchange for a paltry 12-15 hours immunity, during which I'll only generate 216-270K of resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is one quote that explains everything:

>> Jorge Yao, the game's undisputed champion, figures he has spent north of $2500 in real money

>> on buying gems, and according to back-of-the-envelope calculations, the cost of fully fitting out your virtual

>> village is on the order of $5000 when you include walls. It's little wonder the top clans leaderboard is full of

>> players like ">< Royal ><" from Kuwaiti clan "Q8 FORCE" and clan UAE's "khalifa" (presumably from Bahrain's

>> ruling House of Khalifa).

So just make game interesting for this Kuwaiti guys and you are bathing in gold.

<comment><USER22> Zynga had (and I assume still have) a 'platinum purchase program' that let players deposit money for in-app purchases via direct bank transfer. It was kept rather hush-hush, but it was definitely targeted at those spending thousands of dollars. It also offered things like referral schemes. A sort of 'high rollers club' for social games. I wouldn't be surprised if Supercell (who make Clash of Clans) had a similar thing going.

Link: [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-dealer-for- farmvil...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-dealer-for-farmville- addicts-evil-corporations-in-action-2010-9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This makes me feel sick inside. These kind of apps are the wood rot of the modern gaming industry. As soon as I see a "beat your opponent by buying more of our shit" I delete the app.

Good fucking riddance.

</comment><comment><USER24> I luckily grew up in the time of BBS text games (TradeWars, Legend of the Red Dragon) and never got into the MMORPGs...but from my reading of articles about UO, WoW, and the like, I thought the average casual player could not stomach PvP? And yet in the OP, it sounds like a key mechanic in the game is to prey on players who don't log in as frequently. So while that's fun for the hardcore players, I would've thought that would drive off a large part of the target audience (i.e. casual gamers with iPhones).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the beauty of the setup: since things are cheap on the lower levels, raids aren't really a problem, you can earn enough anyway. It's only when you reach the higher levels that they start to become a major pain.

<comment><USER24> And so by then, the habit is strong enough to get the casual player to start forking over money? I wonder what the balance there is...I would've guessed that users who were used to playing consistently without paying would have a strong psychological reaction toward having to pay...but I guess if you warm the water in the cooking pot slowly enough....

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, the psychology is clever: you're not being asked to pay to complete _one specific thing_ , you're given the option of using gems for a huge range of things. So it's not "I need to pay $6.98 to upgrade my Wizard Tower" (which would make most people balk), but "if I let them charge my iTunes account a bit, I get this pack of 1400 gems, which lets me skip some tedious grinding and get all sorts of cool stuff quickly".

Also, a lot of people get a single Builder early on for 500 gems ($4.99), and when you've done that once, the barrier to doing it again is lowered.

<comment><USER25> Yep, that first builder is hard to avoid.

"I'll never pay for anything in this game. What, 50% increase in output? Well, I can reward the devs a bit I suppose..."

And thus begins the gemming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This model is Unethical Freemium which has been around for a while now, Clash of Clans is not unique or doing anything new.

IMHO, you should not support games that use this model. It's often called "Pay to Win".

I will only play games that use the Guild Wars 2 or Path of Exile model; all paid items are cosmetic/fun/convenience only and don't really assist in one player being more powerful than another player.

Pay to Win model games are never going to be fun long term because the game will be won/dominated by the people willing to sink the most money into it, rather than the player who invests the most time/thought/skill/etc.

<comment><USER27> > the game will be won/dominated by the people willing to sink the most money > into it, rather than the player who invests the most time/thought/skill/etc.

What is wrong with that? Some people have more money to invest than time, and others the opposite. Find a game that suits you.

<comment><USER26> Because it's not really a game then, it's a store where you buy a thing that says "Winner" on it.

<comment><USER27> If the developers put themselves in a non-game category of the app store, it would be alright?

Whether something is a game or not isn't defined by how much money you need to spend to play it (or to win it).

Plenty of games and hobbies require purchases to play, and plenty give better chances of winning if you spend more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Where did the 500K per day number come from? The Forbes article put their revenue at 2.4m per day between CoC and HayDay.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/17/is- thi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/17/is-this-the- fastest-growing-game-company-ever/)

<comment><USER29> This was the author's source for the 500k number (linked in the article text):

[http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2013/01/10/supercell- generat...](http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2013/01/10/supercell- generating-1m-a-day/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > * If you've ever played Starcraft, Age of Empires or pretty much any other > real-time strategy game, you'll know the drill, and the buildings and units > come off as almost painfully derivative.*

That's a strange claim. In fact, I would claim that, if you've ever played Starcraft, Age of Empires, or pretty much any other real-time strategy game, you would be aware that they have very little in common with Clash of Clans.

</comment><comment><USER31> _And how much more awesome would Clash of Clans be if the effort of squeezing every last cent out had been put into improving the game itself instead?_

Depends. If they were aiming to earn $182 million a year, then it's clearly pretty awesome. If they were aiming to build a great game, then perhaps not as much.

</comment><comment><USER32> I read somewhere, a while ago that games like Clash of Clans are really just payment apps disguised as entertainment.

On a somewhat related note, I tried playing Clash of Clans for a month and once the time to complete a building took too unbearingly long, i just became disinterested in the game and opened it less often.

Feels like there some variation of the law of diminishing returns, or at least a system suggested by the post that weeds out the patient and stimulates instant gratification.

Glad I didn't get addicted :)

</comment><comment><USER33> This is gross, not net, right? If they're spending 500,000 a day on advertising / paid installs then it's not as impressive.

They have the volume, but are they making a profit?

</comment><comment><USER34> Can I buy HN karma points like this? PG could clean out :)

I feel like I am addicted to increasing my karma points sometimes. I submit so many things and so few of them get up there on the main page. The one thing that made it to the main page got me addicted to trying, but sadly the ones subsequent to them haven't had the same effect.

And imagine - instead of flame wars, we could deploy little hacker-warrior- bots!

</comment><comment><USER35> It's a shame, though totally understandable, that we won't see these sorts of games without pay to win mechanisms on mobile. They seem perfectly suited for mobile, but even if you charged monthly I doubt you'd make this sort of money.

</comment><comment><USER36> In fairness, the "gems" system isn't unique to this game. I've seen it in quite a few others, especially in the Tower Defense genre.

Where it gets particularly annoying is in games with difficulty curves I can only assume were designed to _require_ more resources than the player is allotted naturally, thus forcing him to buy gems and trade them for upgrades. It's not literal payment-gating of advancement, but it is de facto payment- gating of advancement.

</comment><comment> a-stjohn I missed the reference about the earnings? Was there one? Are they generating 500k a day or was this projected / estimated somehow?

</comment><comment><USER37> Plague Inc. is a great example of a pay model I think works wonderfully.

If you want cheats or you want to skip content, you can pay. If you want advanced expansion packs, you can pay. But you don't have to.

The concept of a "free" game has been completely destroyed by garbage like this.</comment>


Ask HN: What Virtual Machine solution do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I am a Mac user and wanted to have Windows 7 as a Virtual Machine. I know about only two possible solutions/software that I can install on Mac
1. VirtualBox
2. VMWare Fusion (not free)
I am not sure which one to install. My needs are:
1. It should be free
2. It should be available for Macs <comment><USER2> virtualbox works great for me. I don't think it will handle any 3d graphics, but for testing websites on windows and doing image editing it works great. Simple to setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not care about 3D graphics. I want to use it for simple stuff like testing for IE on Windows etc.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Monetizing Streaming Movie Search - <AUTHOR> How would you monetize streaming movie information?
If you had code that created a database of every movie ever made, it's IMDB rating and whether or not it was streamable on the big services, could you make money with it?
There already exists caniwatchit and flixfindr, but I was thinking an API service might be valuable for 3rd party apps to access.
If you had this code, how would you monetize it? <comment><USER2> Adsense? Knowing what movies the user likes, you could probably relate that to products that people are selling.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a search service, so it's best to took at existing / similar services for inspiration like Google and Yelp.

So that means allocating placements to be used either for adsense / auction- style ad placements.</comment>


It's still unclear whether having Flash is better than not having Flash. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2011/03/18/flash-xoom/ <comment><USER2> Click to Flash is the ideal middle ground for mobile devices. Only play the Flash when the user explicitly requests. 90% of the time, the user won't notice the Flash missing, the other 10% it is available on request. That solves the battery issues and the annoying advertisement issues.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Click to Flash is the optimal solution. On the PC side it still loads Flash objects, they just aren't displayed. It also skews feedback. If developers think that flash is being represented in mobile devices when its not that only causes them to divert resources from creating mobile HTML versions of sites.

<comment><USER4> There could be a ClickToFlash version not loading Flash objects at all until requested couldn't there? Of course it would probably be for all <embed> and <object>, but...

<comment><USER5> That's the core functionality of NoScript: don't allow anything more complicated than HTML+CSS until authorized by the user. It blocks objects but by default leaves behind a rectangle you can click to download and run the object.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, this seems pretty simple: if it is shown that Adobe can create a version of Flash that alleviates problems with poor battery life and terrible performance, obviously it will be "better to have Flash". So long as those problems persist, Flash seems like a lot more of a liability than an asset.

<comment><USER7> I'd add 'security' in there, too. The situation is already looking worthy of concern on Android and other open mobile OSs. Do we need one more attack vector? Particularly a platform with a history like Flash?

<comment><USER8> CSS3 is also worthy of concern. It's true that the security concern is different, and it's true that the security concerns are in general cumulative, but it's not like you can decisively say "things that add to the attack surface are bad".

<comment><USER9> I think it's pretty safe to say that Adobe code bases have more or less earned themselves a special line item in the security concerns list at this point.

<comment><USER8> You could --- and I'm not just saying this to be argumentative --- say the same thing about parts of Webkit.

I want to be clear that I agree that Flash adds more than a banana-equivalent dose of insecurity. I just worry about the notion that the rest of the system is much better.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue the same could be said for the functionality of Flash. Yes, watching video via Flash can start the fans flying, particularly on OS X before Apple allowed them access to the hardware. But, it's not like displaying highly encoded H.264 and allowing people to manipulate the resulting output is easy. The last comparison I saw showed only IE9 convincingly beating Flash in this task, and the big outliers were some of the browsers like Safari on Windows which was abysmal, whereas Flash was solidly good across platforms and browsers. And I'm guessing that performance in other areas is a clearer win for Flash.

I have ideological reasons for not liking Flash, but clearly my brand of ideology isn't as good at mass-mind control and reality-re-defining as the Apple-ideologues. I'll be glad to see it go, I just wish it was because people thought that core web technologies should be open with multiple interoperable implementations, rather than because of a concerted campaign of misinformation and misdirection about performance.

<comment><USER8> I think you may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment.

<comment><USER10> Your point appeared to be that Flash is insecure, but that the things proposed to replace it e.g. Webkit, CSS3 implementations suffer from similar issues. My point was that, similarly, its performance problems with video are shared by other browsers when implementing the same functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think there are five major points of failure for Flash on tablets.

1\. Flash integration into system battery management.

2\. Software support for hardware acceleration, both for video, 3D, and 2D.

3\. Flash objects' use of network hardware.

4\. Flash memory caching / swaps.

5\. Android allocation of processor usage for Flash VM.

Implementing a Flash VM that doesn't crush your battery requires addressing all these points. This will be especially hard to support the plurality of hardware and OS varieties.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really thought I'd miss Flash for certain sites, but it turns out that if it can't be done with html5 then there's usually "an app for that".

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't stand the middle-ground of things 'sorta working' I would rather have it be either fully functional or non-existant.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think that the big news with Flash 10.2 is that it does have hardware acceleration for video. [http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/flash- player-10-2...](http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/flash- player-10-2-launch.html) The article suggests that 10.2 is not hardware accelerated.

<comment><USER15> It's not enabled in the beta, that's all.

<comment><USER14> I see. I just checked the release notes <http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/895/cpsid_89556.html>

"Please note that this feature has been turned off for this Beta release, but will be available in the final Flash Player 10.2 release."

"Please note that GPU rendering was turned off for this Beta release."

It will be interesting to see how well it performs when they enable the hardware acceleration in the final 10.2 release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is what will determine RIM's fate in a few weeks, if playbook flash is just as bad then they are pretty much done for.

<comment><USER5> You say that as though the PlayBook actually has a chance of catching on in a big way. Even if it did, it wouldn't hinge solely on Flash support.

RIM has never done a great job targeting the consumer market, and their enterprise customer base is still pretty loyal. Even if the PlayBook fails to change that, RIM will not go bankrupt before they have time to try again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reading that article I could almost hear Steve Jobs over my shoulder saying, "I told you so."

</comment><comment><USER18> I think flash is just a stopgap until something faster and native comes from android. Both MSFT and AAPL are not supporting it on their mobile platform. Android only supports it because they don't have any other options.

<comment><USER19> Android already supports Theora, WebM, and H.264 -- what do you feel its native support is lacking?

Manufacturers put Flash on tablets/phones as mindless "differentiation", an extra checkbox to wave in front of consumers. There's no technical reason for Android to support Flash, and (as this article demonstrates) numerous good reasons not to.

<comment><USER20> Forgetting that there is a ton of popular flash content on the web? Outside the developer community, people don't care about how the content they're interested in is delivered, they just want access. It isn't hard to criticize the implementation of flash on mobiles, but there are obviously strong arguments for including it on a platform. It's clearly a LOT more than an 'extra checkbox'.

<comment><USER21> Right. Thanks to flash compatibility on my phone, I can watch/listen to a lot of content that cannot be rendered on an iDevice. That's a meaningful differentiator.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Map of ToshL App Syncs Around the World in Real Time (Open-sourced) - Beat-O http://toshl.com/blog/post/28/map-of-toshl-app-syncs-around-the-world-in-real-time/

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really 'real time' in my book: [https://github.com/toshl/toshl- live/blob/master/index.php#L1...](https://github.com/toshl/toshl- live/blob/master/index.php#L105)

They run an ajax request every 3 seconds, and drop pins sequentially every 1.5 seconds. It's a queue on top of Google Maps - there are tons of these.

The most-useful parts might be the constants in the PHP portions, but I have a feeling they're unnecessary, given that they seem to be in the MaxMind database they're using.

</comment><comment><USER2> This serves no purpose for the user. Just a marketing gimmick.</comment>


The GNU project goes dark, too - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnu.org

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting choice of quote at the bottom of the page. I'm pretty sure it's a reference to the Joy Division song, "Digital".

Never pictured rms as a Joy Divison fan :)

EDIT: It is a JD reference. The header spells DIGITAL in ASCII.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to start in NYC? - <AUTHOR>

Hi hackers,
So I have some chances of moving to NYC all the way down from South America and I would like to know the most recommended places to rent an apartment or studio in NY.
Where's the best place to start a startup in NYC based on tech activities, meetups, etc, safety and prices.
Thanks! <comment><USER3> In Brooklyn you can usually find a studio/1BR between $1000-$1500/mo, depending on neighborhood.

Greenpoint/Williamsburg is probably ideal for a mix of affordability and livelyhood/shit to do in the neighborhood; you'll have to take some time to find a good price for an apartment though.

DUMBO has a pretty big startup hub, but it's pretty expensive, so it's not an ideal place if you're bootstrapping.

Honestly, you can probably move to anywhere in the 5 boroughs thats within an hour of midtown/downtown and it would be the same in terms of tech activity, meetups, etc., and that covers about 80% of NYC.

I would personally recommend a quiet residential neighborhood like Bay Ridge in Brooklyn; it has great food, decent accessibility by train/bus, and affordable rent.

Feel free to hit me up if you're in town!

<comment><USER4> Yeah, if $ is an issue stay away from renting in the city and look for a place in Brooklyn or Queens. You'll save yourself a bankload and depending where you end up, you're an hour train ride max to the city at $2.25 a ride. The trains run basically 24/7 so you shouldn't have issue to get anywhere.

You can probably find roommates (if you feel comfortable) advertising and saves yourself half the rent. Check craiglist and other such websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You may want to check out the NY Tech Meetup. They hold monthly meetups in Manhattan, and their online community is pretty strong.

<http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/>

From there, you should be able to get a pretty good idea of what startups are NYC based.

I also suggest following some NY-based VCs or startups on Twitter to get a feel for what's going on in the city. Charlie O'Donnell (@ceonyc) from FRC sends out a weekly email with things happening in the NYC tech community.

Dogpatch Labs has a NYC office, and they're doing some great things to help young startups get going:

<http://dogpatchlabs.com/>

Living is a whole other ballgame. Manhattan is preferable for ease and access, but also the most expensive option. You should also consider Brooklyn, Queens, or even Hoboken, or Jersey City, NJ for something less expensive depending on your situation. All three of the alternatives have great mass-transit access to the city.

Good luck! I've lived here over 10 years now. It's a crazy but great place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! I will keep this thread in my bookmark to let you know if I ever get there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It depends on how much money you have. If you can afford it, you should live in lower Manhattan. And by this I mean anywhere below 14th street... but even below 23rd street is fine.

This is contrary to other people's advice, but I've found that the subway quickly loses it's novelty appeal. Most jobs/meetups/startup activities are in Lower Manhattan, and taking an hour to get from Queens or deep Brooklyn to work becomes a headache, fast. On the other hand, most people are on a budget so you gotta do what you gotta do. Anywhere convenient is going to be expensive.

I will say that the pricing in Brooklyn is kooky now... Apartments in Williamsburg or Park Slope cost as much as they do in Manhattan. Shares are similar. I am about to move from East Williamsburg to the Lower East Side because I got a better deal in the LES. Of course you get more space in the boroughs but if it's space you seek NYC is not the right place to go...

</comment><comment><USER7> Williamsburg. Super convenient with the L train, great warehouse spaces, lots going on, tons of tech folks, much cheaper than Manhattan.

Complain all you want about the hipsters but there's a reason why they're all there.

Also check out the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club: <http://www.meetup.com/North-Brooklyn-Breakfast-Club/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Make sure you hook up with the <http://www.adoptahacker.com/> program - <USER2> will take you under their wing and introduce you to the NYC tech beat. Best thing I did in NYC! Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey niico, I'm in Buenos Aires too. Drop me a line: cafesolo at gmail dot com.

<comment><USER10> He vieja! Yo también!! Vamo Marado :)</comment></comment>


Plotting an escape from the quagmire of equality in Emacs Lisp (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://technomancy.us/159 <comment><USER2> Quite confused. Two examples:

> It turns out there is very little code that would break if Emacs strings > became immutable

Which means that very little Clojure code would break if they just went ahead and used Emacs strings.

> Common Lisp fans claim that lisp-2s have first-class functions, but the way > they are kept separate from other first-class values in their own namespace > ghetto brings to mind claims of "separate but equal"—at best it is Jim Crow > functional programming.

 _Jim Crow functional programming??_ The virtue signalling is strong in this one. He's wrong on the facts, too.

A Lisp-2 doesn't keep the function inside the ghetto, it keeps everyone else out. Functions can be everywhere, but a non-function can't be the value of a function binding. Function's aren't second class in this system, they're royal class.

<comment><USER3> He means that Emacs Lisp code wouldn't break much if strings were made to be immutable; you don't generally mutate strings. (Buffers, on the other hand, are mutated all the time.) I would suspect that the converse is also true though; Clojure code probably doesn't often rely on strings sharing storage, so making them mutable might not have a huge effect. I've less experience with Clojure than with Elisp, though, so I might well be wrong.

As for the latter, it does occasionally feel like functions aren't truly first-class in a lisp-2 because you have to jump through hoops to pass them along as an argument (funcall, #'foo syntax, etc). In most lisps passing functions as arguments is just as common as "calling" non-function values is in Clojure. Anyway, I suspect that the "Jim Crow" dig was hyperbole, not intentional virtue signalling. :P

<comment><USER4> > does occasionally feel like functions aren't truly first-class in a lisp-2

The definition of 'first class functions' is not a feeling, but three capabilities:

        CL-USER 9 > (let ((sin-fn (function sin)))

                      (list

                        ; 1)  passing functions as arguments to other functions
                        (mapcar sin-fn '(1 2 3 4))

                        ; 2) returning them as the values from other functions
                        ((lambda () sin-fn))

                        ; 3) and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures
                        (let ((v #(1 2 3)))
                          (setf (aref v 1) sin-fn)
                          v)))

        ((0.84147096 0.9092974 0.14112 -0.7568025)       ; 1)
         #<Function SIN 410007BC14>                      ; 2)
         #(1 #<Function SIN 410007BC14> 3))              ; 3)

As you can see, functions are first-class values in Common Lisp.

> In most lisps passing functions as arguments is just as common as "calling" > non-function values is in Clojure

Including Lisp-2s. Passing functions is completely normal and widely used in Common Lisp. The Common Lisp standard has literally zillions of functions where you pass one or more functions in.

Common Lisp also can make CLOS objects callable.

<comment><USER3> You've made my point for me. The very fact that you must write (function sin), or #'sin, or use funcall is a way that it treats functions differently than normal values. Since it requires some amount of extra though and/or typing, this often seen as a bad thing. Compare Scheme, Clojure, or other lisp-1s where if you want to pass the sin function to someone, you just say sin. That whole outer let vanishes in those languages, and the result is much simpler.

And just as we both agree that in Common Lisp passing functions in as arguments is very common, so in Clojure is "calling" a vector on a number to index into it, or "calling" a symbol to use it as an index into a alist or hash table, etc. Not only do you not have to type anything extra, you can treat all values as callable.

<comment><USER4> > The very fact that you must write (function sin), or #'sin, or use funcall > is a way that it treats functions differently than normal values.

Look closer. I have not used FUNCTION in 1), 2) or 3). Common Lisp does not treat functions different from other values. They are first class values.

These are the three operations which define whether functions are first class values:

( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First- class_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_function) ) :

1) passing a function

2) returning a function

3) assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures

None of that requires anything special for functions in Common Lisp.

What you need to do in Common Lisp, is to use FUNCTION to get a function from a lexical name and you need to call such a function via FUNCALL, but that has nothing to do with the requirements for a 'first class datatype', which is defined by the three requirements above (passing, returning, assigning).

<comment><USER3> > What you need to do in Common Lisp, is to use FUNCTION to get a function > from a > lexical name and you need to call such a function via FUNCALL, but > that has nothing > to do with the requirements for a 'first class datatype', > which is defined by the > three requirements above (passing, returning, > assigning).

And I'm saying that in practice, regardless of any technical definitions you'll find in a textbook, this need to treat functions specially is exactly what makes people who learn Common Lisp wonder why people say that functions are first class values. You don't have to look up the value of a variable by writing (variable foo), but you do have to use (function foo).

Clojure goes one step further and lets you treat non-functions as if they were functions, by using them in the function positions of expressions.

<comment><USER4> > regardless of any technical definitions you'll find in a textbook

It's the definition of first-class values. You may have your own, but then you need to tell us what you mean first. Communication by redefining established terms is getting painful...

> why people say that functions are first class values

Because you can pass functions, return functions and store functions. That's what "first-class datatype" means.

> You don't have to look up the value of a variable by writing (variable foo), > but you do have to use (function foo)

Only if you want to get the function from the function namespace. If the function is already referenced in the value namespace, then you don't have to do it.

> Clojure goes one step further and lets you treat non-functions as if they > were functions, by using them in the function positions of expressions.

Which existed long before Clojure in Lisp. For example Lisp Machine Lisp had callable arrays 4 decades ago.

Features like these make it a good write-only language.

<comment><USER3> > Communication by redefining established terms is getting painful...

And here I thought I was telling you that not everybody uses "first-class" (or even "first-class values") in precisely the same way. I agree that the strictest definition only deals with how you use the various types of values you might have in your program, and not with the types of names you can give them. I hope you can also agree that not everyone limits themselves to just the values; they see the differences in how functions get stored in the environment, and recalled from it, and see this as treating the functions differently than the variables.

This does mean that many people are operating with a broader definition of what "first-class" means. It would be perfectly clear to call it "first-class naming", for example, but polysemy is not unique to software engineering; we must allow for it in all fields of endeavour.

My only point all along was merely that when someone hyperbolically calls Common Lisp a "Jim Crow" language, they are not wrong merely because they are talking about names instead of values.

As an aside, I didn't mean to imply that Clojure invented callable arrays, merely that Clojure programs use them frequently; probably just as frequently as they use higher-order functions.

I take no position on whether any language is "write-only" or not; that would be nearly as productive as talking about "virtue signalling". ;)

<comment><USER4> > And here I thought I was telling you that not everybody uses "first-class" > (or even "first-class values") in precisely the same way.

I know of no other definition of 'first-class value', which is an established concept since at least Scheme was invented in the mid 70s, which made functions true first class values. The idea that procedures in some programming languages were not first-class seem to come from C. Stratchey from the mid 60s, where functions in Algol can't be the result of compound expressions, can't be stored in variables and data structures.

> It would be perfectly clear to call it "first-class naming"

If someone would define it and give it some useful semantics, it might be clear.

> I didn't mean to imply that Clojure invented callable arrays, merely that > Clojure programs use them frequently; probably just as frequently as they > use higher-order functions.

This podcast speaks exactly how an error introduced by callable data influenced the developer leave Clojure for Haskell: [https://building.fireside.fm/37](https://building.fireside.fm/37)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The timestamp shows that this was written some years ago (2012). I know Guile Emacs has made some progress in the meantime, but is still not done. I wonder if there have been any other changes that would allow for this to happen.

</comment><comment><USER6> Phil is one of the most interesting people in the Clojure community, and in the software industry in general. Always good to see what he's thinking.

<comment><USER7> So sad to see he is leaving Clojure community. That's a sign of the death of Clojure. A few great developers have moved their focus away from Clojure.

<comment><USER8> The reports of Clojure's death have been greatly exaggerated.

<comment><USER9> Mainly from people who just want the language to fail for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "At the heart of Clojure and ClojureScript's implementation is #equiv that is in turn based off of Henry Baker's egal operator introduced in this paper. Briefly, equality in Clojure is defined by equality of value, which is facilitated by pervasive immutability. Equality in the presence of mutability has no meaning."

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.9...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.23.9999)

</comment><comment><USER11> > Of course, with a compiler that targets Emacs Lisp, you can work around this > by implementing your own immutable types

Clojurescript uses this approach and probably it's ok.</comment>


Apple's Watch is Not What You Thought - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/editors-picks/232803d0357d

<comment><USER2> I don't really believe Apple's going to make a watch, but if they did, I would expect it (for third party apps) to simply be a UIScreen that would launch the app on your iPhone if you tapped it.

I wouldn't expect much interaction beyond that since Apple killed the watch face size iPod Nano. I wonder if that was an experiment to see how people took to interacting with a screen that size, and that it was ultimately a failure.

</comment><comment><USER3> This argument extends nicely to the "flat UI" iOS mockups people have been posting. I keep thinking that they miss the warmth and personality that Apple would undoubtably inject into them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I think a lot of people just post what they think will generate buzz. I tried to really think this through without regard for its newsworthiness.</comment></comment>


Erasing the Taboo of Suicide in your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://tech.li/2011/11/erase-taboo-suicide-workplace/

<comment><USER2> Instead of erasing the taboo of suicide I think it would be more helpful to erase the taboo of depression.</comment>


Why social media gurus should be trampled by elephants - <AUTHOR> http://alexblom.com/blog/2010/08/socialmediagurussuck/

<comment><USER2> You come off a little strong in this post, even though I agree with your basic premise. I also found it ironic that your about page lists this:

 _Marketer extraordinaire and social media addict (this blog has been built to 2,800 subscribers and my Twitter has over 34,000 followers)_

So, is building a social media following valuable or not? I'm confused...

<comment><USER3> I believe the article is trying to point out that building a social media following is only valuable if there is a purpose besides just gaining followers/fans. Interesting read.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry guys, server has not crashed like this before even from HN traffic. Will look into it. Below is a copy paste (w/o the cool pictures):

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Several weeks ago I wrote that social media is not new. I only partially called out the pony, rainbow and unicorn practitioner's though. I've been 'doing the Twitter' for years now and social media gurus there is what teenage girls once were to Myspace. Worse, these gurus claim to be offering professional services.

If I had my say they would all be trampled by elephants. So, without further ado, here are my top 5 reasons your social media guy needs to be trampled by an elephant. Ponies, Rainbows and Unicorns

Ask them what they do. The answer: I engage people, I create relationships, I add a layer of transparency. They may as well talk about ponies, rainbows and unicorns.

Now, my friends, is when we run screaming. I can put glass dividers in an office and add transparency. Engaging people is useless without anchoring it to a brand and a business goal. Ask them specifically what they do and who they target (i.e. I create digital campaigns to demographic x to inform them of product y). Gold star if they can hit 1/2. Sometimes the sun, stars, moon and seas are perfectly aligned somebody can answer this.

Perhaps one of my favourite past-times at conferences is to talk to these guys and constantly tell them that 'engaging people' is not something and ask for something more specific. Watch their heads explode, just like here. I see it as public service.

What's a bottom line?

When talking to the next social media 'guru' you meet, ask them what bottom line impact their campaigns had. Note: bottom line is not engaged people, viral buzz or new followers; bottom line is the amount of sales their campaign generated, customer support queries it solved etc.

Don't let them talk about ponies, rainbows and unicorns here. Maybe they just never did "math" in school so be really basic: You were paid this much by the big nice executive. In turn, you generated him this many dollars so he had this many left over.

Social Media is 'it'

As I've pointed out before, social media is not the everything. It is a component of something bigger. Perhaps it is aligned with your recruitment strategy (run screaming if they had never thought of this). Maybe it is timed with other marketing activities. But when you meet one who honestly believes everything can be solved socially take pity, it is not their fault. Some people are not born as smart as others. You know, the ones who don't move for the elephant.

I can't afford a graphics guy

Yep, I thought the Myspacer's were terrible but I think the gurus have taken the crown. We all put photos on our site but seriously guys, get a professional photo and photoshop it properly. There is no excuse to have white edges on your photos from a poor cut out nor should I feel like you just scanned last night's DUI photos.

Don't worry though, social media gurus, I get that these professional services are expensive and you can't afford them. That's because you don't understand business and can't charge for what you do. I've taken the liberty of doing some research, most Universities offer great marketing programs.

Wait, my Apple runs on Unix? or What's a Unix?

Betting on a social guru with no technology training is like betting on the Mayans. No, they don't have to be coders, engineers or designers but you need to fundamentally understand your field. Would you hire a plumber who didn't know water went downhill?

If your guru lacks any technical knowledge it's time to call the elephants over.

<comment><USER4> Can use my cache also: [http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3a%2f%2falexblom.com%2fblog%2f...](http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3a%2f%2falexblom.com%2fblog%2f2010%2f08%2fsocialmediagurussuck%2f)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool tool. Thanks.

<comment><USER4> Np. I just fixed the link, previous link wasn't all there. Bad copy paste from iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I happen to be one of those "gurus" that provide social media consultancy service to a government agency on the sideline. I totally agree with your points and am surprised there are people who just pretend to be professional social media experts.

On the other hand I do take pride in my work because - as bizarre as it may sound - there are managers out there just don't get "social". As more and more organisations nowadays want to become social and start engaging their users, there are definitely opportunities in this new field - but not by people talking about unicorns of course! Codes and standards will come in time.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to feel the same way, but then I read that the Old Spice Commercials had a couple social media experts on site, assisting in the entire creative process. ([http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_i...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_internet.php))

Most Social Media Experts are probably full of hot air, but at least two of them have contributed to a funnier internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Social Marketing can and does work. But like SEO there are plenty of snake oil guys on the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most social media 'gurus' on twitter are just spammers. They don't really want to follow you and just follow you for the follow-back which they then use to spam your living daylights out.

I was an early 'twitterer' at a time, when we used to follow everyone we met. Because of the spammers, I hardly use twitter anymore.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems your server got trampled by HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Bringing the rig back up now. It's been trampled before but never gone down. This must be a big boost.

<comment><AUTHOR> Back up. Will keep the balancing act going.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I shall :) Never had it be this clunky before either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I almost didn't click because the title made me think it'd just be a rant, but the basic point is good:

> Engaging people is useless without anchoring it to a brand and a business > goal. Ask them specifically what they do and who they target (i.e. I create > digital campaigns to demographic x to inform them of product y). Gold star > if they can hit 1/2.</comment>


Ask HN: Is There an HN for Gardening? - <AUTHOR> With the pandemic in full swing, I'm entering into the world of gardening with some milk crates, landscape fabric, potting soil and green bean seeds. I've never grown/gardened before.<p>What's the best resource for gardening for newbies? Something similar to HN? <comment><USER2> There's always a great subreddit! [https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like Permies - [https://permies.com/](https://permies.com/)

<comment><USER4> First post I look at is this craziness:

[https://permies.com/t/60886/solutions- simple](https://permies.com/t/60886/solutions-simple)

And that's a staff member too.

I was hoping to read about a simple composting solution, but I now know he really doesn't like LED lightbulbs.</comment></comment>


Police in Norway can now force you to unlock your phone without court warrant - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrk.no%2Fnorge%2Fna-kan-politiet-tvinge-deg-til-a-lase-opp-telefonen-din-1.13572392&edit-text=&act=url <comment><USER2> IME an easy defeat for Touch ID, on the iPhone 5S at least, is to lick your fingers. Your phone will fail to unlock, and if you do it five times, your phone disables Touch ID for you.

Another trick is to simply turn off the phone. Touch ID is always initially disabled at boot.

I wish Apple would add a "duress finger" feature though.

<comment><USER3> "I wish Apple would add a "duress finger" feature though." that's a really good idea

<comment><USER4> What is a duress finger feature? A button to wipe the phone on the lock screen?

<comment><USER2> The idea is that the phone would wipe itself/lock you out/whatever when you use a particular finger, rather than unlocking. So if made under duress to unlock the phone with your fingerprint, you use the previously-chosen "duress finger" rather than the normal one.

<comment><USER4> What happens if my friend/wife tries to unlock my phone and uses the wrong code?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the most unexpected aspects of the emerging global surveillance regime is how trivially easy it is to opt out of.

All you have to do is leave your phone at home.

The over reliance on consumer technology and social platforms by _end users_ is unfortunate but expected. Seeing how law enforcement has become so lazy as to piggyback all of their investigatory efforts on top of it is truly stupefying...

<comment><USER6> Is this sarcasm?

Leaving your phone at home is equivalent to having no phone at all.

<comment><USER7> I can call a Uber with my laptop, the UX isn't great but it works.

What else do you need a phone for?

(Is it _a Uber_ or _an Uber_? Curiously, uber.com seems to use both.)

<comment><USER8> an uber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love being a Norwegian but damn, occasionally the government does some really dumb stuff. Like this. This is just like when they introduced the Data Retention Directive and whadda ya know, it's against human rights and now it's put on ice. I hope it'll happen with this directive.

</comment><comment><USER10> Android (stock at least, but likely other flavours too) allows you to have multiple users on a device. Swipe down from the top a couple of times, then press the little blue User icon and set up a different user with a pass code for things you want to remain private. You could happily unlock your phone for the default user without giving up any private data.

It's not a method of securing anything as it's just obscurity, but very few people would know about it or bother to look. It's very useful for having 'work stuff' and 'personal stuff' on one device.

<comment><USER11> If you aren't careful, you could end up getting charged with lying to police. That's a serious charge.

<comment><USER12> Lie to police: Felony. Police lie to you: Doing their job.

Hit police: Felony. Police hit you: Doing their job.

Break into police computer: Felony. Police break into your computer: Doing their job.

I should see what the police pay for computer jobs. Everything extremely illegal becomes legal if I am police.

<comment><USER13> this is Norway, the police have 3 years of training, and don't carry firearms..

Source: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Police_Service](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Police_Service)

So it doesn't compare to the systemic issues you have in the US. Besides what are they going to do if you don't unlock...? Give you a fine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's why all phones should have a decoy feature so that when asked to produce a password, you just give them the decoy pass, and it unlocks a clean profile with no way for them to find anything personal, and or incriminating.

<comment><USER15> I would prefer not to have such oppressive laws in place, for more than one reason.

<comment><USER16> How many times can we effectively cry "The SOPA is coming!" before protest fatigue sets in? When the wolves are attempted into law over and again, something has to give and I'm not sure that corporate-congressional interest will be the first to blink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't use a thumbprint scanner. Set a PIN. They can force you to put your thumb in the screen but they cannot force you to remember a PIN. OK their may be able to put you in prison for not handing over the PIN, but at least that is your decision. On some phones you can set a PIN that destroys everything....

<comment><USER18> The argument that "we're allowed to force you to unlock your phone with your fingerprint, because we could physically force you to do it anyway" makes me think that the governments will eventually not give citizens a pass when they have a PIN number or passphrase either, once they develop the technology to read our thoughts. And the reason is the same: because they could physically force you to reveal it.

That's such a shitty way of thinking about laws. Should men be allowed to beat women just because they are physically stronger, too? No, we've simply decided as a society that just because you can do something with physical force, doesn't mean you should be able to do it, and that it's _illegal_ to do it.

And this is why I think forcing you to unlock your phone with your fingerprint, just because in theory the policemen can hold you down and force your finger on the phone, is also an immoral law and an immoral way of thinking.

<comment><USER19> I don't know about Norwegian law, but in the US the fingerprint compelling doesn't have anything to other do with "we are physically capable of forcing you to do this". Rather, there's existing precedent that allows them to requisition your fingerprint, because historically it was only used for identification. The PIN has no such precedent. (Maybe it even falls underneath 5th amendment?)

Again sorry, dunno what the parallel is in Norway/EU

I couldn't read the article because there were giant Facebook, Twitter, etc logos overlayed on all the text in pure black.

<comment><USER20> > _The PIN has no such precedent. (Maybe it even falls underneath 5th > amendment?)_

Not likely. I don't think the Supreme Court has decided this sort of case yet, but some lower courts have held that a suspect can be compelled to unlock a phone. The logic is that it's equivalent to compelling a suspect to unlock a safe.

<comment><USER21> As I recall, PINs are like safe combinations. You cannot be compelled to reveal those (with a 'foregone conclusion' exception). This is because the code is 'testimony' in the sense that you are testifying you know the combination.

Fingerprints are like keys. They are physical things. You can be compelled to produce a key. Similarly you can be compelled to produce your finger.

Obvious I Am Not A Lawyer notification.

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure that precedent says you can be compelled to unlock a safe with a combination lock. You don't have to reveal the combination but you can be forced to unlock the safe. Protection from self incrimination doesn't include refusal to turn over evidence.

Edit: Maybe I'm misremembering. [http://blogs.denverpost.com/crime/2012/01/05/why- criminals-s...](http://blogs.denverpost.com/crime/2012/01/05/why-criminals- should-always-use-combination-safes/3343/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Use the wrong finger. Try it quickly 5 times and it locks, forcing the passcode. If they hold the correct finger down, twist the tip of the finger and try to roll it.

Even better, train a non obvious finger for your passcode. After the last application of your thumb/index finger fails and forces the passcode, turn to them, shrug your shoulders and say I don't know why it didn't work.

<comment><USER23> I don't know if "obstruction of justice" is a thing in Norway but it wouldn't surprise me if shit like this were prosecutable.

<comment><USER20> Despite the downvotes, your concern is legitimate. Refusal to comply with a legal order is typically a crime of its own.

I'm sure someone will say that they'd just lie about which finger they set up. And sure, you can do that. But if you do it in sworn testimony, it's perjury.

<comment><USER11> In the US, you can get into a ton of trouble lying to the police even if it's not sworn testimony.

<comment><USER24> But it's not lying here. It's intentional hiding of facts. Not saying it won't get anyone in trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Guess we now need support for a "distress print" that locks the phone to pin only. Use your distress finger when in need.

<comment><USER26> Unlock with your middle finger. Three tries with your index and done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is about unlocking electronic equipment (phones) based on biometrics and not pin/passwords. I suppose the logic behind it is that the police are already allowed to do similar things. They can use physical force to restrain for instance. They can search one's possessions.

Or consider fingerprinting. What would happen if one were to refuse getting fingerprinted and made trouble? Are police allowed to use force in that case?

<comment><USER28> The only reason police organizations are making it about biometrics is because they have an easier time getting that then getting laws changed to compel pin/password unlocking.

But make no mistake, this is all about getting unfettered access to everything bit of data they can without a warrant. They saw an easy opening to circumvent existing laws and they jumped for it.

<comment><USER29> Which is terrifying. Its kind of a slippery slope argument, but how far is this from mandating universal backdoors in encryption?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> But they can't force you to use the fingerprint lock in the first place.

Don't secure your phone with biometrics in Norway.

<comment><USER31> Can you have it require both a fingerprint and password? Perhaps, requiring a different password for each finger? That is why you need open-source, so that you can program it by yourself.

Or to do like I, don't have cell phone. You can write notes on paper, even in code if you need to I suppose. Confuse thieves (including police, which count as thieves too in this case) by writing very confusing stuff.

<comment><USER30> I haven't seen one that does both for the homescreen lock.

But you'd always want the biometric verification last, since it provides a powerful clue about who can authenticate all the other layers of security on a mobile device.

<comment><USER31> That is a good point yes. Either that or display the password prompt even if the biometric does not pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Smart criminals would not have everything accessible from a phone they take through customs.

</comment><comment><USER33> I see a lot of people in this thread pulling the trigger of this "being an invasion of privacy".

While this is true, I can't help but to feel that the Hacker News crowd tends of see only one side of this issue.

They are not asking smartphone companies to introduce backdoors in their products. They are just trying to make sure that police has the right resources to be able to solve investigations.

To be honest, this sounds reasonable to some extent. When someone gets questioned by the police, you expect the person to tell the truth. If the police gets a hint that your smartphone might have significant evidence of some sort of crime, isn't it reasonable to comply with the request?

It's not like they are asking to access it remotely from anywhere at anytime.

<comment><USER34> > They are just trying to make sure that police has the right resources to be > able to solve investigations.

Which the police can and have been able to do _with a search warrant_. Courts in various parts of the world have spoken here: the smartphone is unlike other personal effects, in that it may provide access to a historically unprecedented vault of personal information about its owner. The space for police abuse here is vast, and using courts as a check against police power is a common solution.

<comment><USER33> I think it is acceptable to wait for a search warrant to search someone's house, whatever that person was doing there, chances are that there will be traces of it even if the person tried to destroy evidence (blood residues, fingerprints, smells, etc).

But for a smartphone, I think it works a little bit differently. Any evidence that you might have on your smartphone can be quickly destroyed without leaving any traces. Even if a search warrant takes 5 minutes to be issued, by the time it arrives to the police it will be completely pointless, since you were able to press delete on all your photos during those 5 minutes.

<comment><USER35> So, what, if you find out you have a warrant, you'll immediately destroy any evidence you have ? Why not, y'know, destroy it in the first place, before any warrant is issued ?

I don't understand the point you're trying to make.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can Microsoft Flight Simulator's 2020 reboot solve the pilot shortage? - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020-reboot/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> _One example of the level of realism now achievable in the new Flight Simulator will be that weather will mirror what 's happening in the real world by drawing on live weather data feeds._</comment>


W. H. Auden's syllabus will make your college courses look like a piece of cake - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/w-h-auden-syllabus-college-courses-piece-cake-blog-entry-1.1639980

<comment><USER3> A lot of that would presumably have already been read by students taking this class, especially the Shakespearian tragedies and Moby Dick and perhaps Dante's Inferno.

</comment><comment><USER4> As with other commenters, I don't think this is too bad. A quick reader could easily get through the Shakespeare in an afternoon (and surely most people taking this course would probably have read or seen them before anyway...), and some of the rest are quite short.

The hardest book there, I would say, is "The Brothers Karamazov", which is a masterpiece with a little of everything in it, but it is rather dense in the way that Russian novels, and those by Dostoevsky in particular, tend to be. "Moby Dick" is also quite a weighty tome, but it's not a particularly difficult one to get through. I have no idea about the opera libretti or what miseries having to read them might entail.

What a wonderful selection, though, regardless (and lovely to see one of T.S. Eliot's Greek tragedies in there).

</comment><comment><USER5> I work full time+ writing software, also do some volunteering. I've read over 2000 pages of recreational reading so far this month. (admittedly, this month I'm not reading any classics - but I do include a few big classics each year as well). I've also had time for some movies and netflix and football games...

3000 pages in 4 months isn't too bad. Tracking my reading with Goodreads last year, I read just over 19000 pages - about 1600 pages a month.

None of that includes technical manual / comp sci reading, either - <USER2> though I also read plenty.

<comment><USER6> It really depends on the density of the material, and why you're reading it. 700 pages of George RR Martin is not the same thing as 700 pages of Thomas Pynchon. Furthermore, if you just want the plot you can read much more quickly than if you are reading to appreciate the language/references/themes, as I would expect of a college course.

<comment><USER5> Believe me, I know. I minored in English Lit & Math.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This piece is unfortunately almost content-free. Did his course really cover all those books? Did students actually read them?

It seems to me that this reading list goes way overboard and is more about checking off all the greatest works. A single semester barely provides enough time to give the typical Cliff notes coverage of all these works, let alone an in-depth treatment. Color me unimpressed (although I would like to be proven wrong given more details).

</comment><comment><USER8> This is less reading than we had for my (rural public) high school AP English class. What's the big deal?

In fairness, our teacher simply said on the first day: "AP classes are supposed to be college classes, so we're going to do exactly the same reading as I did in my freshman literature course at Harvard."

</comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't seem that excessive for a non-intro English course. For my Shakespeare course (I believe it was 2 semesters, and it was a long time ago) we read:

1\. Over 30 of Shakespeare's plays

2\. The Sonnets

3\. Several plays by related playwrights (Marlowe, Ben Jonson, some others). Essentially the bulk of 3 separate collections of 6-8 plays.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Nevertheless, 3,000 pages of Shakespeare and Sophocles in four months still sounds dense."

Seems reasonable. Assuming it takes you on average 2 mins to digest a page, we're talking 100 hours total or 8 hours / week. I have taken engineering classes with a workload of over 20 hours / week.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's more reading that was expected of me during any of my college courses at UW Madison. I think universities used to require more from their students.

</comment><comment><USER12> The honors English "Great Books" series at the University of Michigan has about that much reading in each semester.

</comment><comment><USER13> 3000 pages in 4 months, isn't that less than 30 pages per day? Sounds doable.</comment>