Why China will Rule Tech? - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179008/Five_reasons_why_China_will_rule_tech

<comment><USER2> While I wholeheartedly applaud all attempts at getting ANY government at all to spend more on science, technology and education, I am baffled at the constant American paranoia of its 'leadership' in science and math.

A couple of points:

1\. It is OK for America to not "rule tech".

China has the most number of humans in the world. Statistically speaking, it shouldn't be surprising that they will eventually 'rule tech'.

American leadership in technology is an anomaly - it's representative of the historical advantages that the US has had and the deprivations of rest of the world. IOW, US is more like a one-eyed king in a country of the blind. As others pull themselves up, it's natural that this anomaly will be corrected somewhat.

2\. America is not really lagging anyway.

The world's top universities are American ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Unive...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities)), most of the Nobel laureates have been American ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_coun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country)), most of the high-tech companies are American (I don't even care to list), and a lot of people who are technically savvy eventually become American anyway. From outside at least, the US looks like a giant chain reaction of innovation that has spun out of control!

I guess "America is doing great!" won't make as sensational a headline as this one.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone born, raised and educated in China, I say this would never happen unless China can treat IP protection more seriously. Piracy has already destroyed the possibility of a strong music and movie industry. Non-existence of protection against superficial copycat behaviors is hurting not only foreign companies but also those few Chinese willing to innovate.

Another problem is that things rely too much on good will and efforts of the government. However, government funds are put into projects mostly to make government reports look good on paper and to allow government officials to get promoted to higher level positions. Some universities put Wi-Fi in some areas of the campus so that they can _report_ they have campus Wi-Fi. Things look good and bright on paper. And that's because it is meant to be like that.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have to wonder if people who write articles like this have ever actually _worked_ with a Chinese company. I know my company (nuclear reactor software) had a disastrous experience in partnering with Chinese programmers, and a friend of mine in manufacturing had similar stories.

It is true, though, that we have essentially sold our technological soul in exchange to the Chinese for a big contract (we're building some reactors there, but we're selling them a bunch of IP).

I think it's less likely that China will 'rule tech' and more likely that they'll simply stop depending on Western tech and become a self-contained market.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Furthermore, only 2% of all U.S. 9th-grade boys and 1% of girls will go on to attain an undergraduate science or engineering degree. In contrast to these troubling numbers, Mr. Chairman, 42% of all college undergraduates in China earn science or engineering degrees."

That's crazy. I wonder how many more undergraduates China has altogether.

<comment><USER6> To get into university in China is hard, but to finish it is easy, vice versa to Western countries. A Chinese boasting an engineering degree from a good university shows how well their parents got them to study for their Senior High School finishing certificate (Gaokao) when they were 18 yrs old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this article is terrible. While its thesis (China will rule tech eventually may be correct), the arguments are very weak.

1) The US' :"Great Engineer" president (Herbert Hoover) was among its worst. While it is a low sample size, I'm not sure how much evidence there is that leaders with engineering degrees = better for society.

2) Everyone wants to out-innovate the US. Sheer R&D investment helps, but other factors play a large part.

3) Outright misleading. Bleum is hiring a US workforce to work in China ([http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178913/Chinese_outso...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178913/Chinese_outsourcer_seeks_U.S._workers_with_IQ_of_125_and_up)); of course the workforce is orders of magnitude smaller. (Hint: IQ tests are illegal to use for employment in the US).

The number of engineering degrees is also misleading, as the US typically has higher standards to get them than in China.

Besides, the US has a huge talent pool advantage in that it accepts highly skilled immigrants from all countries, something that occurs far less often in China.

4) This argument compares US high school to Chinese undergraduates. While the US certainly has its weak-spots with education for everyone, the top 10% (who probably matter the most) get an excellent education

5) The strongest argument. Tech transfers have been going on for more than a decade. It definitely helps China a lot (and helped the US massively in the early 1800s), but China still does have awhile to go.

</comment><comment><USER8> Point one is irrelevant. Lawyers make good politicians because law and creating policy are similar. JinTao's job is to be a politician provide leadership and design policy that is benefitial for the country and not be an engineer.

2\. Everyone wants to out innovate us. If you innovate you can create wealth for your country. If your country cannot innovate then you are reliant on foreign direct investment and jobs from richer countries because your country cannot generate jobs and wealth itself. Innovation allows countries to control its own destiny.

3\. I would agree that the pool is huge and advanced. Chinese students are well discipled and they have a lot of pressure to get advanced education, do well in school and get good jobs.The pool is so large that there are millions students with advance degrees that are unemployed living in slums near technological cities waiting for their big break because there are not enough jobs for them.

4\. America is failing in science and math is a big worry. We need to create better incentives around these fields.

5\. China is stealing our technology and improving on existing ones. If we don't change I see a lot of middle tier engineering jobs going to India and China.

China is good at copying technology and selling for cheaper or improving an already existing product, but real innovation, such as creating new technologies that create whole new indsutries still will be from americans.

Americans, culturally, are used to thinking outside the box, critically thinking and using their imagination in applying what they learn in new and intersting ways. Chinese work force are robotic and respect authority and have a big fear of losing face or failing.

What i am trying to say is America will come out with real innovation and china will copy it. China will also steal a lot of the low level to mid level engineering jobs, which contributes in building our middle class.

The best way we can combat this is be good parents and don't let our kids be self entitled lazy biatches and have them strive for higher education on the technical side. We should also make sure we support policies that provides an evironment that allows us to be competitve to with China and India in terms of value or put pressure on chinese and indian businesses or the countries to raise social standards of its people so the american worker is competitve.

<comment><USER9> _China is good at copying technology and selling for cheaper or improving an already existing product, but real innovation, such as creating new technologies that create whole new indsutries still will be from americans._

This is exactly, to the letter, what America said about Japan, and it was completely wrong.

<comment><USER8> Who invented the microprocessor?

where did these industries get started software, personal computer, internet, airline, car, etc.

Americans were the ones that created these industries and created new technologies, new needs, and new jobs. We are wealthier that other countries not just because of WWII, but because of innovation and our ability to create new industries that creates jobs and wealth.

IE, personal computers create so many jobs that no one would have thought would have existed 80 years ago.

Americans are the ones that are the forerunners of innovation. We've have created so much.

<comment><USER9> As it happens, the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor, was co-designed by Intel and Busicom, a Japanese company. Busicom owned the rights.

Other Japanese inventions include: \- pocket calculators \- CDs \- the Walkman \- Camcorders \- Blue lasers \- Glass integrated circuits \- Flash memory \- The floppy disk \- Flat panel displays \- LCDs \- Plasma screens

I think they're doing okay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think anyone disagrees that China will out pace the US in technology at some point within the next two generations. They will probably outpace the US in all business sectors. This has nothing to do with the failings of the American education system or ineptitude of our leadership. No matter what our policies, we are a natural disadvantage. China has more people. With more people comes more consumers, larger markets, and ultimately more innovators.

Ultimately though, this doesn't matter. As the world becomes more globalized it will matter less and less where companies physically exist. Global companies will still hire the best minds from wherever in the world they graduate from, and global companies/investment firms will still invest in the best of ideas.

<comment><USER11> > China has more people.

Wrong. More people, more problems, the harder control will be. Think of a big company, like Microsoft.

I think the article is crap, written by someone with degrees, who value degrees and the article is based on the current education system.

> 1\. China's leadership understands engineering

Hahaha. We need leaders and not Engineers, sure they need a minimum knowledge, but they don't need doctorate in Physics.

> 2\. China's leadership wants to out-innovate the U.S.

That's my dream too and the dream of France, England and the whole world.

> 3\. China's science and technical talent pool is vast

Again, he relies on the educational system. Who said China has a quality educational system and that the 350K engineers know really what they should know.

<comment><USER10> The US is, by and large, successful because we have the largest market in the world (forgetting for a moment the effects of WWII). We continue to be a success because we have a huge population of affluent people who can spend enormous amounts of money on consumer goods. The Chinese middle class is already larger than the entirety of the US population* and will continue to rise as the country increasingly becomes a first-world country.

There are of course issues with managing such a large population, but the chance of any sort of collapse is the figment, and hope, of our pride and does not reflect the realities of the situation.

* - Income of middle class in the US is higher, but cost of living is also substantially less in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article brings up none of the roadblocks that will prevent this.

1\. So the ruling party is headed by engineers? So I assume the taxi cabs are driven by the blind, all the jockeys are tall, and the businesses are run by physicists. Not matching skilled workers with their work is a disadvantage.

2\. The Chinese government (or any government) can't sit down and order up long term technological advancement. What government program did Gates or Jobs take part in?

3\. All the top talent will emigrate. The real innovators would prefer not to be constrained by the local party official's rules.

4\. Complacency is a huge issue for us, but thankfully we make a good destination for all those people from #3. The more the immigration door remains open the less we have to worry about this.

5\. Low cost exporting is a house of cards. There is always a country that will do it cheaper/more exploitatively. Hard to have a long term strategy here. And you can't copy your way to first place. The copy can never be better than the original.</comment>


Bime Map: Efficiently visualize data on beautiful maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.bimeanalytics.com/map.html

<comment><USER2> The low-quality JPEG background clashes badly with the call to action of "Efficiently visualize data on beautiful maps".

<comment><USER3> As does "beautiful" and 99% of the word's use in the tech world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks cool! The number of data sources is surprising, and the pencil background looks amazing (does what it should, stay in the background).

However, what's the performance with big datasets?

For instance, I have a 2MM-records dataset which I can comfortably use in QGIS. BIME offers some great background maps, but I can imagine several huge bottlenecks from bandwidth (700mb files), browser limitations, etc.

How far can you pushed it?

<comment><USER4> Some feedback:

\- The PICK button was unresponsive until I F5ed

\- I have no clue what measure vs attribute is about.

\- Got logged out (session expired) twice.

\- Tried BIME Desktop, got confused by the lack of a latitude/longitude value type (string or date only?)

\- Couldn't upload a .raw file or a .txt file, had to rename to .tsv (but it still autodefaulted to CSV even though the extension was tvs)

\- After I managed to change visualization type to "map", I was completely stuck. Again, where do I say "these are the coords, these are my user IDs, and these are the values I care about"?

It looks promising though, but being an early adopter surely sucks :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typo: "Sattelite" should be "Satellite"

<comment><USER6> Thanks, it's fixed !</comment></comment>


Show HN: Savedreplies.io – start using canned response everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://savedreplies.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

I've just finished my MVP and I would like to get some feedback, it's a desktop app(right now working only on windows, we have plans to release it for macOS after some validation)

Value proposition: "Offering support or doing marketing/sales on social media/forums/skype can be a very repetitive task or if you work in a big company offering support it may be hard to remember the canned responses that were set by someone else, this is why we come up with SavedReplies, using it you can start using the same canned responses everywhere on your computer."

This is mostly intended for people who support or do marketing/sales on social media/forums and other types of sites like the one mentioned, anyway, if you are interested I can provide more info

</comment><comment><USER2> Your website's menu doesn't work. theme.js is replacing the browser's click listener on each of the menu a tags with a call to the "smoothScrolling" function. That function scrolls the page down to an element that has a "name" attribute that matches the hash, but you've used id attributes on them instead.

FYI you could replace that entire block of code with "html { scroll-behavior: smooth; }" in your site's CSS and get the same effect without needing any JS code at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I've just checked and you're right, it's because we made some changes to the website lately, thank you for reporting this!

Also what do you think about the product?

<comment><USER2> It's not something that I'd use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thank you for the feedback!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Varnish cache performance on cloud servers - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for real life Varnish cache server performance data when Varnish runs on cloud servers (EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Storm on Demand, Linode, etc.) How well does it do with static content (web pages less than 1MB)? <comment><USER2> I don't have these numbers, but you'll want to pay very close attention to how many of the requests on your site can be satisfied from memory, and how many will require hitting disk. Virtual servers often have pretty bad disk I/O, so this is even more important than usual.

<comment><AUTHOR> My intention is to serve everything from memory. The page set is fairly small (a couple of hundred pages, i.e. less than 300MB of content).

<comment><USER3> If it's all static content, have you thought about using Amazon S3 and cloudfront?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a reason that you don't want to use nginx or cherokee which have records of performing well with static files?

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to squeeze out maximum performance out of my network connection by keeping content in RAM. I don't think that Nginx does that out of the box.</comment></comment>


Private Beta Update: Brand-New Dark Theme of Your Secure Mailbox - <AUTHOR> https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/new-client-update <comment><USER2> Alternatively, communicate securely on your terms using any email address:

[https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis](https://github.com/andreas- gone-wild/snackis)</comment>


3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists - <AUTHOR> http://icelandmag.visir.is/article/photos-video-3d-crosswalk-isafjordur-helps-slow-down-speeding-motorists <comment><USER2> There is an analogy here to the slippery-slope of attention-getting ads on the Internet. Once upon a time an ad was just a static (not even animated) banner of a certain size and shape. 468x60 was one of the earliest, IIRC. Advertisers invented new formats ("skyscrapers", "xl-leaderboards", "300x250", and so on), and also they got animated, and then they started expanding outside their areas, and so on; each new ad temporarily performed literally dozens of times better than the previous due to shock value.

A year or two after a new, more intrusive format became ubiquitous, its performance would fall back to the old format's, and, worse, the old format would fall even further because it was too subtle. So in the long run, the money would stay the same, but the pages got uglier, formats got crazier. The game theory is clear: everyone is incentivized to upgrade to the new formats, but once there, no one is better off (neither the publishers nor advertisers), and the readers themselves are far worse off.

We're seeing this now with traffic signals: if every crosswalk in the world is replaced with this 3D version, we'll see a temporary boost in safety, but in the long run it may return to normal and in my opinion, our world will be uglier. I don't like our public spaces covered in optical illusions.

In my area I've started to see red lights that are so bright you are temporarily blinded at night if you look at them. And they've even begun attaching strobing white LED's to the center of some of them. I would guess these perform great in short-term studies. Just like flash ads with games in them.

<comment><USER3> France (and quite probably other European countries) is an excellent example of this. Zebra crossings are so common that they're almost completely ignored by drivers.

In Australia they're used relatively sparingly which makes their presence noticeable to drivers. You don't need to do anything clever, just make them sufficiently uncommon.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and you have to cross without one, because they are too far away. I wouldn't use Australia as an example of good driving rules. You are allowed to get away with murder in Australia if you are driving a car.

<comment><USER3> Not having a painted crosswalk is fine, it just means pedestrians will cross without a potentially misleading sense of entitlement to the road. Zebra crossings tend to be reserved for very high traffic areas, schools, etc. And they're usually very well signed, often with flashing amber lights.

As for your other comment, that's crap. Australian drivers don't get away with squat compared to England or France. Our roads are almost infuriatingly sensible to the point of tedium.

I thought brits were pretty good, but nowadays half of them don't use their indicators and the other half go 15-30 MPH over the motorway limit. (Citation: just got back from three weeks of driving in England and France.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Helps to have a concept of scale here. This is a tiny town in the remote fjords in northern Iceland.

The speed is likely caused by tourists looking around and not paying attention, so grabbing their attention will probably work in this case.

Starting point in maps street view - zoom out and walk around the town for 5 min - you'll gain a better perspective on what's going on here: [https://email@example.com,-23.1207479,3a,75y,3...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-23.1207479,3a,75y,315.36h,80.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sHv3QpAr4H10qxhPyZvd8Og!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

<comment><USER6> >The speed is likely caused by tourists looking around and not paying attention

I suspect it's Romanians, as they're really bad drivers. For example, in Romania drivers will not stop at a crosswalk to let you pass unless you stare at them for a few seconds to make eye contact, and even then it depends on their mood and how hurried they are. They're basically a menace on the roads.

<comment><USER7> Why would you suspect Romanians in particular in Iceland? Why not citizens from other European countries who as have relatively many road fatalities per capita?

I am usually most worried about Americans since many have little experience with roundabouts and they are used to turning right on red, often in practice without a full stop. This is very dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians.

<comment><USER6> > Why not citizens from other European countries who as have relatively many > road fatalities per capita?

When it comes to pedestrian safety, the only EU country with a record that can match Romania's is Latvia, but it has a population that's 10 times smaller.

[http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php/Road_accident_fatalities_- _statistics_by_type_of_vehicle#Pedestrians_particularly_at_risk_in_Baltic_countries_and_in_Romania)

> I am usually most worried about Americans since many have little experience > with roundabouts and they are used to turning right on red

Except the crossing in the article has nothing to do with roundabouts and turning, just stopping to give way to pedestrians, which is something Romanian drivers are very bad at. I'm speaking from experience.

<comment><USER8> > _When it comes to pedestrian safety, the only EU country with a record that > can match Romania 's is Latvia_

The roads in Latvia are OK, but they have (signal-controlled) pedestrian crossings on 60 mph highways… and uncontrolled ones on 40-50 mph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best way to slow down motorists is a 3d speed bump. Not a 3d illusion of a speed bump - an actual speed bump. They have speed bumps littering the side streets in certain areas of Queens and Brooklyn. If you don't slow down, and take care, these large speed bumps will simply wreck your car - and they are much easier to install than these 3-d paintings.

<comment><USER10> I don't like speedbumps, but they work.

<comment><USER11> You're not supposed to like them; and really the only people that are inconvenienced by them are those going to fast anyway.

<comment><USER12> That's not true, my car scrapes on them at practically any speed.

People with slightly higher cars than mine scrape because they try to brake, forcing their suspension to compress, then go over the bump.

There's so much ceremony to going over a speed bump that I think plenty of people not going that fast are inconvenienced. whether that inconvience is worth the net benefit is a separate issue.

<comment><USER13> Same hear, Nissan 350Z scrapes most speed bumps even going as slow as is possible.

Also, they don't work for a lot of cars - I see lots of cars (presumably without stiff suspension) fly over the things at quite high speed. It seems that at certain high speeds, if you straddle them just right, you don't have to slow down at all.

<comment><USER12> Yup, on cars with soft suspensions you can actually get _more_ clearance by _speeding up_ right as you reach the speed bump, since weight transfer will push the front end of the car up

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In Santa Clara, California, there are several crosswalks at intersections not controlled by a traffic light. There is an ongoing problem with cars not properly yielding to crossing pedestrians (I mean, like, _ever_ ). I almost got killed in one twice in one week. As a driver, I get rude treatment (and some near-collisions) when _I_ stop for pedestrians. A pedestrian was _killed_ in the one near Halford a couple of months ago.

The city solution: enforcement? Ha! No, they put in a new fancy overhead signal of a style completely unique (and, to my reading, non-compliant with the actual vehicle code) at one of these crosswalks (just west of Kiely).

The problem: when a crosser presses the call button, a _pair_ of overhead red lights _flash_ for a fixed cycle of time. But (in CA, anyway), a _flashing_ red light means "stop, and _proceed when safe_ " by law, but the signage simply says "Stop on Red".

So, people are confused as to how long to stay (the full cycle? or only as long as it occupied? or only as long as the _near_ half is occupied? or, ?)... and almost half continue to blow through the intersection regardless.

Ambiguity in such contexts is inherently unsafe.

<comment><USER15> > In Santa Clara, California, there are several crosswalks at intersections > not controlled by a traffic light.

Isn't that what a zebra crossing is for? Give pedestrians permanent right of way so they can always go and don't need a light and everyone understands that they need to yield.

<comment><USER16> On a road with high traffic speed and not enough visibility of pedestrians waiting at the side of the road, most motorists won't yield

<comment><USER17> What about a pelican crossing? Red yellow and green lights for cars like at a junction, activated by pedestrians pressing a button. Wikipedia says these only came to the US in the year 2000, which seems ridiculous.

<comment><USER18> People still blow past them, in my experience. The only real way to make roads safer for pedestrians is to remove all the cars.

<comment><USER19> Wow. Surely (and especially if there are red-light cameras) that'd be an automatic ticket, with fine and points? Same for not stopping at a zebra crossing. I can't say I've ever witnessed this sort of behaviour in the UK, except maybe as exceptional events shown on 'World's Worst Driver' clip shows on TV...

<comment><USER18> It happens to me at least once a month. It's regular enough that you have to pay attention whenever you're crossing here, even if you have the right of way and you're in the middle of the road and there are bright flashing lights indicating your presence.

I think about 25% of drivers should have their licenses pulled, because it's my experience that they don't have the judgement to operate a motor vehicle safely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In my city a lot of new crosswalks have white stripes on a bright yellow background, a lot of them with blinking LEDs. In several places even the sign has a flashing light. Nobody will stop on an ordinary zebra crossing anymore, it doesn't even register. As for the interesting patterns to draw attention, they tried it in a different town in my country near a school, painted the stripes with different colors. Didn't last, police says not according to road regulations. And then someone brought up the famous zebra crossing in the capital near the zoo, where the pattern was realistic zebra stripes. That was promptly repainted as well.

<comment><USER21> Only tangentially related, but here's a piano-inspired crossing in Warsaw, Poland: [http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Poland/East/Mazowiec...](http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Poland/East/Mazowieckie/Warsaw/photo1335047.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> These 3d perspective drawings are much less convincing in real life than they are in images, because in real life we have depth perception and our viewpoint is constantly moving. This only looks good from that exact viewpoint.

<comment><USER23> The article shows pictures of 5 different angles on that crosswalk, and they all seem to work.

<comment><USER17> All of them are in the very middle of the road. The illusion will be broken if you aren't driving through the centre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> MUTCD Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices. The US Federal government has its MUTCD and each state has its MUTCD. All of them are generally the same. Uniformity is critical in driver behavior. The lack of uniformity on traffic controls is and will cause random behavior from drivers which likely will reduce safety. Streets are not games. The lives of people and children are in the line.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wonder what Tesla's vision-based automatic driving makes of this.

<comment><USER26> Doesn't Tesla rely on much more than just visual imagery? I mean it can drive at night.

<comment><USER27> "I mean it can drive at night" So can I :D

<comment><USER26> Not very well without lights you don't. Although I'm not sure whether Tesla can either. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I predict that the bits of the illusion will deteriorate with the paint on the road, leaving a big mess :)

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like it'd work until everyone knows about it. What about an actual 3D object there (speed bump)?

<comment><USER30> Because a speed bump has a different purpose, and has some negatives associated with it (which is why you don't have speedbumps at every crosswalk). This should work even when people know about it, because the real point is to draw attention to the crosswalk. Probably the people who know about it, are less likely to hit someone in the crosswalk anyway, it's the people new to the area that are most likely to be dangerous.

Now if they put these everywhere, they'd stop losing their effectiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the UK, we have "New Layout Ahead" signs everywhere. Once erected, they seem to stay in place forever and increase noise. Is there any evidence that these are beneficial?

<comment><USER13> Not just new layout signs - we seem to be _bombarded_ with signs!

Seriously, some places there are just so many signs that you couldn't possibly take in the information they provide in time. And the majority of the information they provide isn't useful.

One of the things I hate the most are the digital signs that are springing up everywhere. These things are _expensive_ , and >99% of the time they are distracting me with _pointless_ messages about watching my speed, not drinking and driving, not driving while tired etc. Such a waste, and surely causing more harm than good.

<comment><USER32> Reminds me of the annoying passenger announcements on South West trains: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205027/Passengers-f...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205027/Passengers- fury-train-companys-31-announcements-32-minute-journey.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I feel like this points to a bigger problem. Why do drivers feel the need to drive faster than the speed limit? Why do drivers and pedestrians hate each other so much? This really feels like a band-aid on a much larger problem. And it also seems like the type of thing that will make people react even worse once they realize the situation. Like those signs that say, "Drive like your kids live here." Fuck you! I don't have any kids and I don't like kids. (Not really, but I know people who think like that.) I've seen people drive way worse between speed bumps to "show the man" that they can't be controlled. It's ridiculous, but solutions like this engender anger while maybe slightly reducing accidents (if at all). THere's a bigger problem we need to understand and all the games we're starting to play with parking between traffic and bike lanes, and cross walks that are farther back from the intersection, and other such remedies are papering over it.

<comment><USER32> The sooner we get self driving cars to control the idiots that cannot control themselves, the better. That said, they are trialling fake 3D speed bumps here in the UK and it makes me furious! I would far rather simply have have average speed cameras everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting, apparently this is already a thing in India and China [http://tris.com.hr/2016/05/3d-zebra-i-nacrtana-provalija- na-...](http://tris.com.hr/2016/05/3d-zebra-i-nacrtana-provalija-na-cesti- recept-za-sigurniji-promet-i-pravednije-drustvo/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Why weren't a series of speed bumps suitable?

<comment><USER35> Plowing in Winter perhaps?

<comment><USER36> Yep, plowing and speed bumps don't mix. My workplace bought removable speed bumps. At the first snow, they maintenance folks unscrew the speed bumps from the roads / parking lot that are owned by the college. When the snow melts, they put back the speed bumps. Also, speed bumps with ice accumulations are just nasty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The concern I have with this scenario, is that I'll get conditioned to ignore this kind of stuff as a driver, and will manage to hit something real that I mistake for an optical illusion.

</comment><comment><USER38> To have a continuous effect, this would need some persistent e-inkpaper to redraw cars, obstacles or similar stuff on the road.

Also, sorry to say it - but the speed limit is set by the common lowest denominator- meaning, a old guys reflexes, in a fully loaded lorry with the worst possible breaks must stop at the smallest acceptable visible range at clear weather.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a bad idea. Once it loses its effectiveness it'll leave the drivers in a worse state.

</comment><comment><USER40> Attention should be drawn to pedestrians, not necessarily to the crosswalk itself

</comment><comment><USER41> Article captions reference '08 Something Good - Utah Saints

Welsh lad the first time e seen a running man ->

"IT'S LIKE IT'S FLOATING ON AIR The townsfolk of Ísafjörður say they have never seen anything like it."

</comment><comment><USER42> Am I the only one who thinks that humans might be pretty good at adjusting speed for risk?

Not to sound cruel, but having everyone slow down might not be worth the cost of all these precautions.

<comment><USER43> "Am I the only one who thinks that humans might be pretty good at adjusting speed for risk?"

You probably are, because humans are horrible at recognizing and adapting for risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> For how long though? This will become normalized after some time.

</comment><comment><USER45> I want the pattern for this. I suppose it's easy enough to make my own, but a pattern would be nice.

I live on a street where people drive too fast.

<comment><USER46> Take this picture from above, that's basically the pattern.

[http://icelandmag.visir.is/sites/default/files/styles/articl...](http://icelandmag.visir.is/sites/default/files/styles/article_body_image/public/thumbnails/image/isafjordur_7.jpg?itok=tK-k9lUU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I wonder how well it would work in the dark.

<comment><USER48> Well, if you can't see the road, there's a problem in and of itself. Assuming good headlights, which I think you'd want in Iceland, and assuming modern road paints, it should work. If not, just stick a road light over it.

<comment><USER49> Yes but how well would the _illusion_ work in headlights?

<comment><USER48> It should work, modern headlights are no joke, but I admit that I'm not sure. If you have enough light to perceive a broad range of colors it _should_ work.

<comment><USER50> The shadows would appear wrong when lit by headlights, which might be a little bit disorienting. The shadows are rendered as if a light was high overhead.

I think the illusion would still work fine, but feel subtly "wrong" to the driver. Probably good enough to get people to slow down, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's all smart and clever until someone gets distracted, slams the breaks, gets rear-ended and breaks the neck.

<comment><USER52> The speed limit is 18mph. No neck breaking can happen at that speed.

<comment><USER53> That's faster than you are moving when you are executed by hanging (about 17 mph for long drop, 13 mph for standard drop), so I would not dismiss the possibility out of hand.

<comment><USER54> Ah... but it's your whole body weight on your neck at that speed that breaks it. Unless you've managed to seriously misplace your seatbelt, I don't think you can achieve the same result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I have seen something similar but not the same around Japan for years. A good idea.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is why self-driving cars need lidar (and maybe radar) as well as cameras.

</comment><comment><USER57> That's awesome! :D

Palo Alto should try this on El Camino Real. ;)

</comment><comment><USER58> Does it actually work?

</comment><comment><USER59> also eye-patch resilient :)</comment>


Ask HN: What percent of your subs are monthly/annual? - <AUTHOR> I have a browser plugin [1] that costs $2/mo or $22/yr. We have a fully-featured free trial that lasts 2 weeks, so there's no need to go for a shorter payment period in order to test drive the product. Also, it's not likely that people have a cashflow problem that makes a $22 charge burdensome.
So I figured that most people would go for the annual pricing, which saves 2 bucks (but the net amount for us is the same, due to processing fees). But fully 30 percent of our subscribers are monthly. This is much higher than I anticipated.
What have others found? I'd also be interested in hearing about how lifetime subscriptions factor into this.
1: http://www.beelinereader.com/individual <comment><AUTHOR> Suggested response format:

Monthly price / monthly percent

Annual price / annual percent</comment>


Ask HN: Please Give Me Your Thoughts On My Site - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
So I've been working on and off on this site over the last few months and am now at a stage where although personally I think it would probably be useful, I don't really know whether I'm alone in this.
The site is OkayID.com and I see it as being particularly useful for people buying/selling on the internet, although others will probably find it useful as well (I think!)
So a few things I would like comments on if possible and any comments are really appreciated, please be honest!
Do you think there is a market for this? How small/large?
Do you think this is something people would pay for/use if it wasn't free? If so, what price would you see as a decent price from both our point of view and the customers?
Any other comments?!
I'm in a position where I'm not really sure whether it's a good idea, so any honest thoughts would be much appreciated.
Thank you. <comment><USER2> 1\. What's already been said about design.

2\. Where are the benefits? I see plenty of features listed, but no clarity around why I need this, or who should use it. Think about who has a problem with verifying ID (your Gumtree example is a good start). Replace Register | Share | Confirm with these target groups and the unique benefits to them. E.g. Buying online? Buy in confidence, knowing that the seller is genuine. Selling online? Stand out from the crowd as the most trustworthy seller.

3\. Pricing plan. Do I need an ongoing subscription - I understand that you _want_ me to have one... ;) What about one-off or short-term pricing. When I ebay I tend to do a large batch at once when I finally get round to clearing out that cupboard. If I believed this would help my sales appeal to more people, I may want a one month account. No need for it in the intervening months. Plus, if you charge £10 for a one month account, £2 pm looks more appealing.

4\. Focus on your target market? You can only think ebay/Gumtree traders, but wonder if there are more applications. What's wrong with focus on this market to get started and expanding in the future? Deciding to be all about trust in online trading would reshape the way you structure the site.

5\. Copy. Think about getting it professionally rewritten. Like your design, there is nothing inherently wrong with it, just that it could be more polished. It's amazing the difference a professionally written copy can make.

Is there a market? Catch-22. If OkayID is widely recognised and trusted, then ebay sellers (for example) will have to have it because buyers will expect it. To get widely recognised you have to get sellers to adopt it. You're creating a market; another reason to tightly focus on one market at first.

</comment><comment><USER3> A couple of feedback points:

\- Go to themeforreset and buy a design, $20 will get you something 10x better than your current design. I don't mean to sound harsh, I'm guessing you're a developer who did the design himself (?) I was the same, decided to outsource the design on my projects was one of the best decisions I ever made.

\- Your site touts security, but there's no SSL, not even on the signup form, namecheap can sell you an SSL certificate for $10 (about £6)

I like the idea, but I'm not entirely sure how it will work, how do you know that the okayid name a seller give you is actually them?

Hope that helps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why does it say "Time to get your OpenID at the bottom, next to the sign up button? This could be a major typo/branding issue...?

</comment><comment><USER5> Feedback:

* The design is poor and your 'padlock' image is too big.

* Fatal flaw: Anyone who intends on scamming people will never sign up. Why would they?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Link: <http://OkayID.com></comment>


S3QL: an S3 FS with encryption, de-dup, immutable trees and snapshotting - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql <comment><USER2> I was recently looking into options for offsite, encrypted (at-rest & in- transit), deduplicated, snapshotted, backups to S3. S3QL was one of the options I investigated, but unfortunately their crypto is MAC-then-encrypt [0], which is no good.

A small sample of the other options considered:

        * EncFS + rsnapshot/rdiff-backup
            * Weak cryptography in EncFS [1]
        * Duplicity
            * Uses forward snapshots, so recovery takes longer with each successive snapshot, unless you upload a "fresh" copy of the data
        * ext4 on LVM on LUKS on a loopback device provided by s3backer [2]
            * OK I'll admit this one is pretty far out there, but it actually works decently well (ignoring the massive FUSE overhead)
            * Downside: a slight hiccup in network connectivity guarantees data corruption
        * Attic
            * Known data corruption issues with large datasets [3]

Does anyone know of anything that can provide the above requirements? At this point it's really more of a thought experiment, as I've decided to go with Tarsnap [4] for my use-case.

[0]: [http://www.rath.org/s3ql- docs/impl_details.html](http://www.rath.org/s3ql-docs/impl_details.html)

[1]: [https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm](https://defuse.ca/audits/encfs.htm)

[2]: [https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer](https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer)

[3]: [http://librelist.com/browser/attic/2015/3/31/comparison- of-a...](http://librelist.com/browser/attic/2015/3/31/comparison-of-attic-vs- bup-vs-obnam/#cbbe599389a20c787a74b137dc78fb1a)

[4]: [https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/)

<comment><USER3> >MAC-then-encrypt [0], which is no good.

He must have red Practical Cryptography from Ferguson and Schneier. In any case, it's not big issue. Encrypt-then-MAC is easier to get wrong.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about the constructions and attack scenarios pertaining to this app, but MAC-then-encrypt is generally _insecure_ ; it's not "easier to get wrong", but is itself a flaw (typically: of exposing the cipher to malicious ciphertext, rather than screening it out with a MAC, which is designed to distinguish between valid and invalid ciphertext).

<comment><USER5> Rogaway's bringing it back with a vengeance though:

[http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/aez/aez.pdf](http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/aez/aez.pdf)

With AEZ, the "MAC" is actually just a block of zeros.

<comment><USER6> Rogaway brought it back with a vengeance back in 2006, with SIV: [http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/keywrap.pdf](http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/keywrap.pdf)

Essentially all 'misuse resistant' modes are some form of MtE, since in those modes one necessarily needs to process the entire message before beginning encryption. AEZ is MtE in the loosest sense, basically another way to say it's a two-pass/offline mode.

<comment><USER4> Is there a distinction to be drawn here between "generic composition" and "whatever the term is for the opposite of generic composition"?

<comment><USER6> Not sure I understand precisely what you're asking. 'Generic composition' is a tricky term, because it tends to hide the assumptions underlying what we're actually composing together. Bellare and Namprempre's paper, which is the most usually cited in this sort of discussion, takes a probabilistic encryption scheme (read: something that takes a random IV) and a MAC, and results in a probabilistic AE scheme. This is obviously not the only way to model encryption and authentication schemes (SIV above transforms those same primitives into a nonce-based AE scheme instead, or DAE with a fixed nonce), but this tends to be overlooked from GC discussions. In some models, MtE and friends is OK. But the truth is that EtM is safe in the widest range of assumptions, while the other ones are more brittle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious to see how this compares to tarsnap for encrypted backups. One cool thing that people might not know about tarsnap is that you can generate read-only subkeys of your main key!

[https://www.tarsnap.com/man-tarsnap- keymgmt.1.html](https://www.tarsnap.com/man-tarsnap-keymgmt.1.html)

<comment><USER8> Having used both S3QL and Tarsnap.. In my experience, S3QL's use of remote mounted filesystems is fundamentally unsuited to unattended backups. On many occasions, S3QL's mounted filesystem would break mid-backup due to network issues, and stay mounted and unable to recover. Then, from that point forward, no backups would ever work again without manual intervention because the mount point was already open.

Additionally, S3QL would periodically issue new releases that didn't support old versions of the file format, or only supported them a set number of releases back. So if you didn't upgrade frequently enough, you'd find yourself with a release that refused to read your existing gigabytes of backup data. And then at that point, you have to do a binary search to find and recompile old releases in the vain attempt to resurrect your data and avoid having to do a full backup from scratch.

Bottom line: Stay far away from S3QL and instead use Attic, Borg, or Tarsnap.

Also, if you select Attic or Borg, check out Atticmatic: [https://torsion.org/atticmatic/](https://torsion.org/atticmatic/)

<comment><USER9> Regarding the network issues: please file a bug report so that they can be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The closest thing I've seen to this is Jungle Disk, which is closed source, offers a less fully featured file system, but does have Windows and Mac clients.

<comment><USER11> JungleDisk works, but the clients are buggy PoS that crash/hang whenever they choose. I've also had JungleDisk's server daemon silently quit working & lock up on some servers, which is scary when you go to restore a file and realise no backups have happened in a while. It doesn't engender trust.

That said, I still use it as it's easier & less error-prone than setting up my own backup system with tarsnap.

<comment><USER12> Seconding this. I used Jungle for a while on my laptop, and it actually runs a local WebDAV server that acts as a caching proxy, which it then mounts as a local volume -- and it's horrible. Slow, unstable and prone to mysterious hangs and errors. This was a couple of years ago, but I wouldn't trust it unless they have completely rewritten it since then.

<comment><USER11> > This was a couple of years ago, but I wouldn't trust it unless they have > completely rewritten it since then.

The software hasn't been updated since May 2011, when they released version 3.16.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not sure why it isn't listed in the overview, but this is based on SQLite (hence the name). HVent looked into the details yet but it looks pretty fun

<comment><USER14> I think SQLite is only used for the metadata, which seems like a reasonable choice. The speed of metadata operations won't matter next to the slowness of the read/write operations (slow relative to local SSDs.)

<comment><USER15> Isn't that kind limited? How exactly are two different clients going to access the metadata at the same time, if SQLite3 is used?!

<comment><USER16> SQLite supports multiple readers when Write Ahead Logging (WAL) is enabled. This mode is so good and transforms the whole operation of SQLite that it is shame that 1) it isn't the default, 2) more people don't know about it.

<comment><USER17> The way s3ql works is that it copies the db from s3 to your local machine. You make changes and then write the new version back to s3 later with the data. So it won't help in this case.

<comment><USER16> I see. Out of interest how does it write back the new version of the SQLite database file with only the differences? Does S3 support binary patching?

<comment><USER17> I believe it uploads the whole thing each time. I think it may even upload it with a new index counter in the name to version it (but I can't find that in the docs now).

[http://www.rath.org/s3ql-docs/impl_details.html#metadata- sto...](http://www.rath.org/s3ql-docs/impl_details.html#metadata-storage)

<comment><USER18> I think you found the Achilles heel. This won't scale, so it is only suitable for small file systems.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, I'm good at that ;)

It could probably be improved (subject to the nuances of S3 which I'm not fully familiar with). One way to fix it would be to copy the concept of SQLite's WAL mode. Use an appended write operation on S3 (if it supports it) to append to an existing file that contains the transaction log. Then at certain intervals (say every few thousand transactions) one can finally flush that log to be stored in the main database file.

This would substantially reduce the number of times the database would need to be re-uploaded in full.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If this is interesting, recommend looking at Tahoe-LAFS too: [https://www.tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs](https://www.tahoe- lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs)

(And [https://leastauthority.com/how_it_works](https://leastauthority.com/how_it_works) )

</comment><comment><USER20> s3fs also layers a filesystem on top of S3 but preserves the native object format:

[https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse](https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs- fuse)

This approach allows use of other tools like s3cmd and the Amazon web console but prevents advanced features like deduplication and snapshotting.

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks cool and I am going to give this a try. The problem for me is, as is usually the case with such project, the packaging. If this thing is production-ready, then why must I check for installed dependencies by running random commands [1]? If it's a Python project, why isn't it distributed on PyPI? I don't want to download stuff from BitBucket manually and install it by executing setup.py. I understand that the project supports multiple OS's. That's great. But there are simple steps that can be taken to make installing this thing via automated tools (Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc.) easier than how it's set up now. A Debian package would be _so nice_ for Ubuntu/Debian.

[1] [http://www.rath.org/s3ql- docs/installation.html#dependencies](http://www.rath.org/s3ql- docs/installation.html#dependencies)

<comment><USER22> There is plenty extensive packaging: [https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/wiki/Installation](https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/wiki/Installation)

The documentation is just somewhat messed up...

<comment><USER21> Nevermind the things I said above. Thank you for pointing this out. This is exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Immutable Trees. Directory trees can be made immutable, so that their > contents can no longer be changed in any way whatsoever. This can be used to > ensure that backups can not be modified after they have been made.

That would be perfect for things we don't want to ever change...like container images. Or configuration files.

<comment><USER11> What is the benefit of immutable trees over versioned backups - or to put it another way: why wouldn't you keep a change history in your backups?

<comment><USER23> Backups are for data generated by people using applications running on services provided by infrastructure. What I'm referring to is the configuration portion of launching and running a service, not the data generated after a human uses it.

The thing that pops out of this is TRUST. We need to be able to trust an application we are running is the one we want to run, who was responsible for writing it, who's responsible for running it, and all the bits in-between.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How well would this work for something like pointing OwnCloud storage at? Most of my cloud experience is with an internal vmware cluster, so I'm not sure how to evaluate something like this.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure what the point would be - OwnCloud already knows how to work with S3 directly.

<comment><USER24> Just as an example app.

Basically, use S3 the same way you use an in house SAN.

Also, if I remember correctly, S3 integration is per account, and only if you enable the external file storage app. It wouldn't let you store all data on S3. So, mounting a bucket as the OwnCloud data folder would be the way I'd get that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So would it be possible to mount this as a Volume in OS X and create (encrypted) Time Machine backups to Amazon S3?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your work-life balance? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't. I spend most of my time at work and let most of the rest of my life go to shit. I wake up at 5:30 am and get home around 7 pm 6 days a week. Eat dinner, chill for a bit then go to bed at 10. On Sunday I usually go buy coffee then hangout programming, playing music or doing shit around the house I've neglected. Start drinking beer when I get sick of coffee. Eat dinner, go to bed. Most Tuesday's my friend hosts a taco night,so Tuesday i'll stay up late eating tacos and drinking beer. That's what I've done almost every week for about a year now. Life's fairly bleak this way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Different ways at different times in my and different jobs:

1\. Just work 40-hour weeks.

2\. Part-time consulting, while my wife worked full time.

3\. Negotiated less than full-time job (e.g. 28 hours/week, 35/hours week).

This is enabled by being very productive, and of course by negotiation.

I wrote a book about how you can do this too, along with other paths like creating a product business or early retirement: [https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/](https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/)</comment>


Gmail trick: multiplying your address - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hipwerk.com/gmail-trick-using-multiple-addresses-for-one-single-account/ <comment><USER2> Incomplete Article for old well known stuff:

1\. "Gmail has a wildcard for the + sign as it doesn't recognize it nor any characters that follow it." This wrong. It is well documented and called aliasing within Google. There is even a support page for it: [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en)

2\. Even that is documented: [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/8158?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/8158?hl=en)

3\. Even that is documented: [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/159001?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/159001?hl=en) There are also a lot of ccTLDs that Google has for Gmail. Also those will work.

<comment><USER3> Not everyone knows everything. I knew all of this, but lots of people don't.

If there's one thing I think I could change about HN, it would be that we'd be easier on people who don't know things. Many times I'll read an article about the new version of PolyDoopWerks, and be told that it's the Uber-of-OOD- builders, and have _no idea what 's going on_.

<comment><USER4> It isn't always easy when something does seem to be common knoweldge, but you are correct that people try to be more understanding. I have adopted the attitude from this XKCD comic. [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

<comment><USER5> Ironically that comic and XKCD in general falls into the category of things that are very widely-known but people still present as new information. (The prime example being cryptography discussions linking to correct horse battery staple.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also called sub-addressing in RFC 5233[0] or Address Tags. Gmail is not the only one of the email providers that enables this. Yahoo, Apple, Outlook, Fastmail and others also support this. More information at Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags)

[0] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Didn't knew that other providers do it aswell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I highly recommend Sneakemail.com and have been using them for over a decade. They let you set up keywords, like "foo", and then you can mail anything- email@example.com (or snkmail.com, since a few sites block the former domain) and it creates an alias. On the Sneakemail web UI you can enable/disable aliases and see recent mail. An alias can forward up to 5 people or so, and when someone sends you mail, if you reply you'll reply through Sneakemail.

Of course it's also worth mentioning Mailinator.com (one-off throwaway aliases, but public) and 10minutemail.com (super-disposable temporary email addresses).

<comment> ryan-c I've also been using sneakemail for at least twelve years. They also let you set up addresses with a bunch of randomly generated letters/numbers that are opaquely mapped to you, but you have to log in to do that.

The only problem is that some sites ban their domains - in particular Adafruit does this (they banned _existing_ use of it, not just new sign ups), and their support said basically "we won't whitelist your address even though you've been ordering stuff from us for over five years".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> //TODO: Check user_email for multiple variations of the same account by calculating and storing a canonical e-mail field in the DB as well.

<comment><USER9> Assuming you are trying to prevent people from creating multiple accounts on your service... keep in mind they could create e-mail forwarders at other domains, this just stops a very easy method.

Also, more importantly, this would have to only apply to a set a whitelisted domains, plenty of non-gmail systems would treat these variations as distinct addresses. So without a set of domains to apply this logic too, you could end up stopping users from registering with their own normal/actual address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For #2. The dots are completely irrelevant, so you can actually add and remove.

        firstname.lastname@example.com
        firstname.lastname@example.com
        email@example.com
        email@example.com

etc etc etc

</comment><comment><USER11> Easier to just get a custom domain and set up a catch-all account to forward to your gmail.

This way you can do [sender]@domain.com, [company]@domain.com, john1, john2, email@example.com and never run out of options. If one starts spamming you can just stop a particular [company]@domain from forwarding.

<comment><USER12> Keep in mind that catch-all accounts usually get a lot of random spam. If you're using this domain to signup for various services, at some point, spammers will become aware of it. And, they'll start sending a lot of spam to (random string that spammer comes up with)@your-domain.com.

<comment><USER2> I have catch-all running for a few years now, but no real spam problem. Maybe due to the fact that greylisting still works pretty effective. Most of the spam I receive is on my GMX including the email address I never used for sign- ups of any sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm sorry, but I've grown to hate this feature. I keep receiving emails from accounts I didn't sign up for, only to discover the person (with a similar name) used an email address like "firstname.lastname@example.com" or "senordevelopez" and the site itself defaults to "gmail.com". These are not off-the-wall websites, I've had long conversations with Netflix and a satellite TV service. You'd be surprised how many website do not authenticate the email account given.

<comment><USER14> The simple solution to this is to request a password reset from that service and disable their account.

</comment></comment><comment> pi-err I have found a few sites reject the + in gmail addresses. I also suspect most DB (or wannabe spammners) would know about this and remove anything after the + sign. Same goes for the "." trick. Still good to know though.

I'm now using Blur ([https://www.abine.com/index.html](https://www.abine.com/index.html)). Very effective so far at creating aliases pointing to my real email. Only worried on how they'll fund their operations long term.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have an application set up with Devise handling authentication for me and Devise allows me to create multiple accounts with the same email address. Considering how commonly used Devise is for setting up a site with Ruby on Rails, this is a huge open hole for a lot of websites who might not appreciate multiple user accounts tied to the same email.

</comment><comment><USER16> It kinda bugs me when people describe +foo as a "gmail trick". That type of addressing predates gmail, and exists outside of it still. In fact the plus is not the only form of this. qmail uses the dash, and postfix allows you to configure anything as a separator.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm using the '+' for automating email tests - using that and Gmail's API I can set up asynchronous tests against unique email addresses, and test them as they arrive. This is a crucial part of integration testing with partner companies.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is why email is wonderful. It works so well that people are marveling about learning standard features that were deployed _before they were born_.

If only we stuck to a few good ideas instead of overwhelming ourselves and each other with bad ideas.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use the + trick, but several signups don't allow the + sign in e-mail addresses.

<comment><USER20> I've run into a situation where I was able to sign up using the + in the e-mail, but not login (or unsubscribe from their newletter) with the same address.

<comment><USER21> They probably recognized the + and stripped it, as well as all subsequent characters, from your address upon form entry.

<comment><USER22> They should probably strip it from the login form, then.

As a mediocre web dev, that'd be my next step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What I want is something like a 10-minute-mail inside my gmail account!!!

<comment><USER24> Yahoo Mail does this. You can make a specific new address and then delete it when you're done. [https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail/SLN3523.html](https://help.yahoo.com/kb/mail/SLN3523.html)

<comment><USER16> Fastmail also does this. They have hundreds of domains you can use for disposable accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I never understood why people rely on the + trick to determine the source of new spam. Wouldn't a smart spammer / list-seller simply strip the suffix from all @gmail.com addresses?

<comment><USER26> I've thought the same thing since I encountered this trick a few years back. My guess is that most email providers don't allow the use of a "+" in the address and as a result its viewed as a fringe case and not accounted for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> According to my experience quite many email address validators on web sites don't consider the address with "+" as valid.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used to send it at mailing lists and sign-ups.

However, I Noticed spammers have learned the trick and omit the "+..".

<comment><USER29>
      >  I Noticed spammers have learned the trick and omit the "+..".

If you control your own email,

1\. Configure a different character, e.g. '-', as your subaddress separator.

2\. Set up 'firstname.lastname@example.com' as a spam trap.

3\. Set up 'email@example.com' as an email address.

4\. Provide 'email@example.com' externally.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Grabblr, a social wish list app - <AUTHOR> https://grabblr.com <comment><USER2> I am coming from london and it's redirecting me here:

[https://grabblr.com/nl](https://grabblr.com/nl)

and my dutch is not that great :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, we'll try to fix this. thx for the heads up!</comment></comment>


Insert PVS-Studio Comment - <AUTHOR> PVS-Studio free license is available if you add special comments in code. An enthusiast created a plugin for Visual Studio 2017 that automates this process. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VladyslavSemenchenko.comvsemenchenkoipvscomment <comment><AUTHOR> Link: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Vladysla...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VladyslavSemenchenko.comvsemenchenkoipvscomment)</comment>


Sample Code – Bricker (Beginning iPhone Game Programming) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ngpeijiun/sample-code/tree/master/Objective-C/Bricker

<comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback from mistake to improvement in design and coding are gladly welcome.</comment>


Why is it important for a matrix to be square? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://math.stackexchange.com/a/2811960/18947 <comment><USER2> An extension of spectral decomposition on a square matrix is called the singular value decomposition where _any_ matrix can be decomposed. The trick is to diagonalize the matrix A A^T and A^T A, in this manner we can find the left and right singular values and have an equation which is very similar to the spectral decomposition. It has a very wide range of applicibility--most of which is also highly valuable.

There's also the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse which also has plenty of applicaitons and works on non-square matrices.

<comment><USER3> curious, what are some cool application of SVD?

<comment><USER2> Off the top of my head,

\- Principal component analysis

\- Fitting a plane to a set of points

\- Linear least squares

<comment><USER4> All of these examples are equivalent to least squares :)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, for the most part all of engineering is equivalent to least squares I'd say, there's always some non-linear optimization procedure that uses a norm^2 metric since it's so well studied and solved already. It's disappointing as a mathematician, but the rest of me is fine with it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're looking for a more intuitive understanding of linear algebra, I highly recommend 3blue1brown's YouTube series, "Essence of Linear Algebra."

<comment><USER6> Absolutely this. If I remember right, it's roughly 13 videos of 20-30 minutes each. By the end I had a better understanding of what linear algebra was for and (conceptually) how the math actually worked than I got from a full semester at college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another evidence that linear algebra concepts are terribly confusing when layed out without geometric background.

This had been criticised for decades. Competently and popularly presented criticism goes back to at least as far as 1957 (Artin's Geometric Algebra; see discussion of determinants somewhere near the beginning) but linear algebra is still often presented decoupled from geometry.

I wonder though if there's purely algebraic approach to matrices that explains as much (or more) as geometric one. Maybe approaching algebra of matrices consistently as an example of category algebra could be illuminating.

<comment><USER8> I learned abstract linear algebra first, and didn't learn geometrical interpretations until I taught myself many years later so I could write an asteroids clone in svg.

I don't think it was a pedagogically a problem, except I couldn't bring myself to care about matrices when I was learning them... It was very easy to take my abstract knowledge and apply it, and for me it might have been harder the other way around.

In retrospect a hybrid applied/theoretical topic (like reed Solomon encoding and recovery) might have perked me up. But I might have also been a strange case.

<comment><USER7> If by "abstract" linear algebra you mean "course that starts with the definition of vector space", then it is geometric enough in the sense Artin talks about.

It is pedagogically a problem for people who ask questions like the one in topic. But it can also be a problem when one encounters bilinear form and linear operator in practice but can't distingish between the two. I can't think of a specific example but I was asked once about some problem (in electrical engineering, iirc) where the source of confusion was this; some transformations of a (square) matrix were natural while others were not.

Some people feel strongly about the topic—mostly those with "pure math" inclinations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the answer here is simple and not as profound as people might think. Square matrices are linear operators which map an input vector into a space with the same dimensionality. We can characterize a few interesting symmetries when a matrix happens to be square.

As such, we have more rules and theorems around them, making them suitable for practical usage. For example, physics deeply utilizes Hermitian matrices, which are a special subclass of square matrices. Spectral theory is incredibly important in all sorts of applications.

<comment><USER9> Square matrices are also a natural description for graphs (e.g. adjacency matrices), which are fundamental objects for pretty much _all_ CS applications across all layers of your tech stack. Square matrices are great for representing pair-wise interactions between nodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the context of computer science, matrices are used as a representation construct with different possible formal interpretations which frequently can be recognized depending on the supported operations. For example, some functions of NumPy assume that matrices represent elements of linear algebra while other functions treat a matrix as a collection of rows or columns. In the latter case, a square matrix is probably an exception because rows and columns have completely different semantics.

</comment><comment><USER11> The question as asked in the title is incorrect. It is not important for a matrix to be square. Matrices are defined to solve specific problems, and the specific problem is what determines the geometry, not some goal of having square matrices.

However the person actually asked why it is important for matrices to be square _for most of the theorems they are learning_. The actual answers to this are interesting, but the presence of this question likely implies that they are being taught abstract theory first prior to building much intuition.

I was taught this way as well in my advanced pure math course. It was all super abstract until I was studying for the final exam and then had this eureka moment where suddenly everything made sense (a matrix is just a numerical way of describing a linear transform! And computing eigenvectors is like factoring!). Sadly, this happened again the next term where we derived SVD - except this time it never made sense to me until a later on course where we needed to use SVD for some application.

</comment><comment><USER12> The reason the matrix A has to be square for det(A-X _I_n) is a) because we cannot subtract a matrix A from another matrix B if their dimensions aren't the same and since X_ I_n is a nxn matrix A has to be an nxn matrix as well and b) because the determinant is only defined for square matrices.

</comment><comment><USER13> V.I. Arnold said: "The determinant of a matrix is an (oriented) volume of the parallelepiped whose edges are its columns. If the students are told this secret (which is carefully hidden in the purified algebraic education), then the whole theory of determinants becomes a clear chapter of the theory of poly-linear forms. If determinants are defined otherwise, then any sensible person will forever hate all the determinants, Jacobians and the implicit function theorem."

From: [https://www.uni- muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html](https://www.uni- muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> TLDR: the author is asking an honest question, not trying to say that non square matrices have little use in linear algebra.

As linear transformations of space into itself, a very frequent operation, are described by a square matrix those matrices do show up more frequently. But map X into Y of different dimensions and you get a non-square matrix

<comment><USER15> > But map X into Y of different dimensions and you get a non-square matrix

This is true, but it's also something that is arguably impossible on the one hand and "unwise" on the other.

You can easily map a higher-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional space, but you will irretrievably lose a lot of information when you do so.

And in the other direction, you can't actually map a lower-dimensional space into a higher-dimensional space with a matrix. The image of X can never have more dimensions than X does -- the choice to represent it with Y > X dimensions is just that, a representational choice. This idea is only meaningful in terms of the semantics behind the representation.

<comment><USER16> Sometimes losing that information is very useful however, to arrive at a representation that has a specific meaning.

For example, an x-ray computed tomography (CT) image volume in 3D may be projected into various 2D synthetic planar x-ray projections (digitally reconstructed radiographs).

There are countless situations where projections are very useful.

<comment><USER17> In fact, the 3D CT image itself is reconstructed from projections! See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomographic_reconstruction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomographic_reconstruction)

<comment><USER15> Yes, but this is a case where you have three dimensions in the input and also three dimensions in the output. (You're assembling the 3D image from different 2D slices with different depth coordinates.)

The third dimension is discretized while the other two are continuous; the reconstruction consists of smoothing out the third dimension.

<comment><USER17> In the real world, all of the dimensions are discretized. The input dimensions are theta (gantry angle), n (detector channel), and z (table position). The output dimensions are x, y, z. For a fixed z, the plot of projection intensity as a function of theta and n is called a "sinogram" (which is indeed a 2D space) which gets reconstructed to form an image (also 2D). It is true that there are three dimensions of raw data and three dimensions of reconstructed image. However, due to various tricks with reconstruction models, the total number of samples does not have to be the same in the raw data and in the output. As a result you can see recon models employing nonsquare matrices. For more information, you can read about methods like iterative reconstruction, compressed sensing, and differentiated backprojection. This description is adequate for axial tomography, whereas other geometries like cone beam tomography are more complicated (see FDK method).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It s not more important! And most of these theorems can be extended to non square matrix anyway. Projections are examples of Rn to Rm applications that are very importants. Coordinates or probability measures too. And it make little sense to try to reduce them to endomorphism. Matrix can represent applications but they are objects worth studying for what they are.

</comment><comment><USER19> The most important example of a non-square matrix is a (column) vector.

</comment><comment><USER20> An mxn matrix can be thought of as a mapping or function from one subspace Rn and another Rm. If n=m and the matrix is square, it is possible to have an inverse mapping, (inverse matrix).

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, because matrices are "weird" mathematical objects. They're a composition of vectors (which make more sense than matrices) but it seems the square matrices are where you want to end up and non-square ones are kinda like special cases.

If you're solving a linear system of equations for example: you need a square matrix. If you don't either your system is underdefined or you have redundancies or contradictions into it.

(And one could say algebra with numbers is a special case of a 1x1 matrix, but anyway...)

So worry about square matrices, about 1xN and Nx1 matrices (which are actually vectores) and the weird shapes are weird shapes

<comment><USER22> What? They're a convenient device for writing down a linear map between finite-dimensional vector spaces. Nothing more, nothing less.

Your explanation is bound to confuse people far more than help, as it seems to mystify something that is very mundane.

<comment><USER21> Yes they're mundane, but the "linear map between different vector spaces" case is pretty much the only thing they can do.

Think of it as type casting in programming languages, you only do it when you need, but the real work is done processing elements of the same type.

If that wasn't the case, then non-square matrices would have all the "cool" properties of the square ones.

Yes I might be picking at straws here, and I agree it might confuse people even more, but this weirdness of matrices hasn't escaped me since I've learned about it. And then when you get to vectors it all makes sense. Hum...

<comment><USER22> > Yes they're mundane, but the "linear map between different vector spaces" > case is pretty much the only thing they can do.

 _Of course_ it's all they "can do". They're merely a way of writing down linear maps for a given choice of bases.

<comment><USER21> Yes. Then they're a "different" object than a square matrix or a vector.

My point is, the sub-algebra of all square matrices supports more operations than mixing matrices of different sizes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for internal API docs? - <AUTHOR>

Our codebase is sizing up considerably. Moreover, we are moving to different platforms and it's becoming hard to keep track of APIs (private and public) for even the guys who wrote them.
Is there a better way to manage this? Some kind of tool that takes stuff like javadoc and turns it into pretty, searchable interfaces? Something that extracts data from Git repo? An IDE plugin? Anything but the abomination that we're dealing with right now.
I'm sure this is a common pain. How do you manage this? <comment><USER2> Do the inline documentation with the apiDoc format[1]. Readme.io has also created and documented a superset of apiDoc that you might want to look into. Obviously their tool supports it, but it seems easy to roll your own frontend for the API data once you extract it from your code.

1\. [http://apidocjs.com/](http://apidocjs.com/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the rec! I'm obviously super biased (ReadMe founder, here), but ReadMe was built for this kind of scenario, spot on. apiDoc is good for keeping the endpoint docs up to date, and you can keep it internal with a password or admin-only access. Search should be improving later this month.

<comment><AUTHOR> ReadMe is the one that looks very promising. But somewhere on HN, someone from your team commented that internal use is frowned upon and the system gets more and more naggy if used internal only. Is that still true? If yes, does that stop after we start paying?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lot's of people seem to like [https://github.com/tripit/slate](https://github.com/tripit/slate)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's also Swagger: [http://swagger.io/](http://swagger.io/)</comment>


Marin Software acquires Perfect Audience (YC S11) for $25.5M - <AUTHOR> http://blog.perfectaudience.com/2014/06/02/marin-software-acquires-perfect-audience-25-5m/ <comment><USER2> Hi, folks,

I'm swamped with emails and press inquiries and stuff but wanted to take a minute to say a quick thank you to the Hacker News community. I am not exaggerating when I say that most of what I've learned about building a startup came from things I read here. Thank you.

If you're a Perfect Audience customer, everything's going to get better. We're hiring hiring hiring and it's all going to be engineers aimed at making the product better.

<comment><USER3> Just to echo Brad from the tech side specifically - HN has been a tremendous source of help, advice, network and everything. It really has made much of what we built possible in that I cannot imagine doing this without HN and the people we have met here.

From having Jedburg reach out when I had some foolish question about high- concurrency applications, to the number of folks who helped us trouble shoot a burgeoning Mongoid/Ruby memory problem at the very beginning - Thanks a million!

<comment><USER4> Huge congrats to you two and your amazing team! This is a well deserved milestone!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It'd be really interesting to learn about founders' calculus in this sort of situation. What makes $25MM enough? What is it about existing growth that does or doesn't suggest selling in this fashion?

(I mean this in an entirely un-cynical way. Genuinely curious, and not trying to imply anything negative, $25MM ov value in less than two years is pretty amazing.)

<comment><USER6> _(disclaimer: I don 't know what I'm talking about)_

Well, they only raised a $1.1M seed round [1]. I will guess they gave up 25% in that round [2]. YC got about 7%.

At this point, I think AdRoll has become the market leader in the retargeting space. Without raising a huge VC round, there's no way PA could catch them.

Marin is a public company, so the cash + stock offer is probably higher than an all-cash offer would be elsewhere. Plus, since they're public the PA people can sell the stock sooner rather than later if they want.

So, investors get $5.75M on a 1.1M investment. Not a home run, but definitely a double in the gap with 2 RBI.

YC gets $1.6M on a $17K investment (old deal).

Founders + employees have 68% remaining, or about $15.6M.

Not selling means raising another round, giving up more equity, and still not having a guaranteed exit.

[1] [http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perfect- audience](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perfect-audience)

[2] [http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-amount-of-equity- to...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-amount-of-equity-to-give- first-round-seed-investors)

EDIT: Changed numbers to reflect YC's ownership. Still don't know what I'm talking about.

<comment><USER7> Several unknowns here.

Typically seed rounds are for convertible notes, to which no equity is assigned.

Standard note terms have conversion during an actual price round, or during transfer of control of the company, or during expiration of the note.

Since they're a YC company, they opted to give 7% for $120k. That leaves 93% for the founders/employees.

Minus that, they raised ~ $980k, on seed terms, which have a valuation cap at between 3.5-6 million. The valuation cap basically says that the price per share is at _most_ calculated by the capped valuation, not the _actual_ valuation. So investors may have actually bought $980k of stock, at a valuation of ~3.5-6million, instead of the full $25.5 that was purchased.

Add to that that convertible notes typically have a discount ~20%, they bought even more shares, leaving them with considerably more ownership, than if they were straight $980k of post-money $25.5m

I don't know the details, and it sounds like the employee's, founders, & investors are all happy, but this does underscore that Convertible Notes can be _very_ costly to founders.

Had their seed round been priced, the founders & employees would have made a lot more money.

<comment><USER8> Anecdotally, hot YC deals (which PA was one of) are done at $8m+ with no discount.

<comment><USER7> Wow, that's pretty awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Brad's one of the hardest-working people in show business. When he worked in Chicago, he was my reference example for friends of "hustle". I'm grinning ear-to-ear that this team had a good outcome. Congratulations! _Richly deserved._

<comment><USER10> What are some identifiable qualities you've recognized in a 'hustler'?

<comment><USER9> Sales ability. Getting shit done. Being a rainmaker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Firstly, congrats! Big accomplishment in a short timeframe and Marin is definitely a leader in the space doing good things.

That said, I have a concern. PA was on my list of retargeting networks to check out along with AdRoll, Simpli.fi and maybe a couple others (mostly on the SRT side of things). However I'm also going to be in the market for a bid management platform in the near future, and while Marin is on my short list, so are DS3 and Kenshoo.

Will PA services and inventory remain available to customers who are NOT Marin customers in the future? Curious what sort of meaningful guarantees you can provide when I imagine the reality is that you could say one thing today, and if Marin changed their mind tomorrow, I'd be SOL. Not saying you'd lie or anything, but I know that in the real world a statement alone doesn't hold much weight when dollars start speaking, so I'm more interested in any tangibles with regards to company structure, product functionality, etc. that you can share that would be easier to put faith in.

Also, what can you tell us about customers' data being accessible to Marin if your customer is not a Marin customer? Is there any chance that audience data could be fed into an anonymized audience segment or something equivalent and leveraged by Marin customers (who might potentially be competitors)?

<comment><USER2> Howdy!

These are great questions. There's nothing I can write in a comment on Hacker News that will assuage any of your worries besides saying that you should try all these platforms and pick the one you like the most. Perfect Audience is free and easy to try and isn't going anywhere. If you like it, awesome. If you find another platform you like better, that's great too. Just let us know what we could have done better.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the response and acknowledging the nature and realities of the situation.

I like that you have a free trial to see the platform without requiring a contract. Other providers let you see a demo account, but actually getting to test a live campaign is always better because you can see the speed and integration with your analytics.

Are you guys still in Mountain View by any chance?

<comment><USER2> San Francisco and Chicago these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone tell me what's special about retargeting these days? Its commodity. Implementable in several month as PA showed. Marin must be desperate.

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats to Brad and the team - well deserved for bringing a beautiful UX and simplified system to retargeting on social (first anyways)

<comment><USER2> Thank you, kindly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good for them to get some reward for providing a solid product and great service.

I do worry though if we will be seeing the product rolled up into some kind of expensive enterprise offering from Marin, which would likely price out a lot of the current customers of it.

<comment><USER2> That's not the plan!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's a super nice exit for a company this young and quite nicely priced too (about what you'd expect in this space).

Congratulations to all involved, it's nice to see such hard work pay off.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Jacques! Your writing, especially about the business of startups was one of the things I read when just starting out and when the times got tough.

<comment><USER15> This is one of the under-appreciated things about start-ups. It doesn't matter one bit how good you are when the sun is shining. It matters so much what you do when the going gets tough, how you deal with crisis (and they will happen, just when you can't use them) and what your attitude is when it seems the whole world is conspiring against you.

Best of luck to you and your team, so curious what you'll do next! But given how this one worked out for you I'm not at all worried :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> that's awesome. I met Brad in mountain view when they were just getting off the ground. really nice to see this happen.

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice work!</comment>


Spiffy: Enabling File-System Aware Storage Applications - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast18/presentation/sun <comment><USER2> This is very neat. I'd love to know more information about it. The paper never discusses the exact notation of the annotations, for instance. And is the source code available yet?

</comment><comment><USER3> Very neat work. I understand about ext-family and those fs that have a clear boundary of the data/metadata block -- they can be annotated and identified later. Then how about NTFS where metadata and data can mix in one block? Is there any potential challenge or same approach can still apply?

</comment><comment><USER4> Can these applications run and read/write while the filesystem is mounted?

<comment><USER5> Not without interfacing the with filesystem driver. You cannot and must not modify the filesystem on disk behind the driver's back while the filesystem is mounted. The only exception to this is filesystems built with that in mind, and which implement locking protocols that these applications would then have to implement. (Sun used to have such a filesystem for clusters. Each host in the cluster would mount the same filesystems from the same storage, and did locking on-disk in order to not step on each other.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> i love this</comment>


This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out of Thin Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3059141/this-battery-free-computer-sucks-power-out-of-thin-air <comment><USER2> TL;DR: they build an RFID chip with a CPU they can reprogram via RFID</comment>


World Clicking Championship TheElevatorGame.com (and experiment) - <AUTHOR> http://theelevatorgame.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> What is this you ask? a) it is a strangely addictive game b) it is an experiment for a blog post I'll be writing on user experience design -- particularly around offline IA. Some more info here: joshrweinstein.com

</comment><comment><USER2> I still prefer the abstractness of <http://www.clickyourlifeaway.com>

-edit - but I like the submission by the OP too, I can see it becoming a meme XD

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol, genius!! Wish I saw that before I put mine up :D, not the same, but pretty funny

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So I'm guessing the experiment is either A/B testing of layouts of number pads, or it's testing to see if people can cheat the leaderboard.

Also, it must be a slow news day for this to get to front page.

<comment><USER4> I'd guess its an experiment about when people stop clicking. Most people either only click a few times, or stop right at 20 times, when they receive the easter egg buttons.

So, the lesson is: give your users a perceived reward for taking action on your site, to get them engaged long enough to get the reward.

Or maybe the lesson is: as soon as users perceive there are no rewards left they'll leave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ferster and Skinner would be proud.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a goal of some sort? I feel like I just completely wasted my time

<comment><AUTHOR> I just posted a quick description on this thread -- it's both a game and experiment

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I completely missed the rewards having some 1280x800 laptop...

</comment><comment><USER8> yeah I have no clue what it is... and I even read the blog. Pretty sure it does not count as a game or an experiment with so little explanation... who knows?

<comment><AUTHOR> The app is primarily for data collection, the next post will explain everything

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> $('.pickme').click()

<comment><AUTHOR> is there a way I could have disabled that?

<comment><USER9> Of course. Give the numbers a randomly generated id, and check for the winning value server side. You'd also want display the numbers in a way where it's tougher to compare them than checking the text values--the target value is $('#left h1').text().trim(). So that means using images (not named 1.jpg!) or canvas or something like that.

Also, your app is vulnerable to replay. I can keep POSTing the same request over and over and my score increases.

<comment><USER10> As it is now, you don't even need to match the numbers. Just find the form and submit it. $("#right form").submit()

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great, another Tiny Tower clone.

<comment><AUTHOR> what is tiny tower?</comment></comment>


Can we avoid this future? - <AUTHOR> http://futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2060-2069.htm#2060-end-of-the-world

<comment> loup-vaillant That's one hell of a detailed story. Don't believe it. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy>

About nanotech: if we have nanofactories, nanoreplicators shouldn't be far. Beware the gray goo accident.

As for AI, it will probably go from "quite dumb" to "way smarter than we are" in a relatively short time. At that point, everything else will be moot, because the AI will do pretty much what it wants (what its programming tells it to do) and we won't be able to stop it. Let's hope (or ensure that) its "wishes" are the same as ours.

</comment><comment><USER2> Usually, predictions avoid themselves ;-)

But it's an interesting work of fiction in any case.

<comment><USER3> That would be an interesting natural oddity. For a perfect future, just get enough people together to predict all the different ways in which the world can end.

<comment><USER4> They would miss one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's easy to avoid this future, observation of past future predictions suggests we're not very good at it. Therefore this future is unlikely and simply by relying on our poor prediction skills we can avoid this future without doing anything.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but doing things with the purpose of improving the future will (probably) lead to a better future than if we do nothing at all.

If you want to see the past you can use <http://hntimeline.com/> (yeah, shameless plug)

<comment><USER7> This is the most dangerous kind of fuzzy thinking. The twentieth century is littered with counterexamples.

See [http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2012/07/it-isnt-easy-to- und...](http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2012/07/it-isnt-easy-to-understand- how-world.html)</comment></comment></comment>