Appbackr, Finance your app - Wholesale digital marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://appbackr.com/ <comment><USER2> There isn't any information about the people behind appbackr on your site. I would never enter into a financial agreement with a completely unknown entity.

I think you need to personalize the site - let us know who exactly we're dealing with.

Other than that - it's an interesting concept. I think the description of how it works could be made clearer, but it's an interesting idea.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your comment. We created the site on a very tight deadline where we had to code everything in 45 days to meet the PayPalX deadlines. We will add some information about who we are. My name is Trevor Cornwell. Here is my Linked profile: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorcornwell> and I am on Facebook at facebook.com/cornwell and twitter.com/appbackr I hope that you'll follow our progress. If you'd like to meet come to to: peerfinancingny.eventbrite.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You cant see anything without signing up...........

<comment><USER3> We are keeping it as a closed beta through our launch on May 17. We built the site quickly and as a very small team we had to get all the agreements in place/UI/etc before we are ready to go public. Feel free to email me at trevor at appbackr.com if you have any questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea, a little shady though. I mean, why would you use jpg for a graphic like this? <http://appbackr.com/images/step-ideas.jpg>

</complaint>

<comment><USER3> A guy who I respect named Ben Kutil did the design for the appbackr home page. <http://make-things.com/> Let me know why the .jpg makes us look shady. twitter.com/appbackr trevor at appbackr.com Thanks, Trevor Cornwell, Founder, appbackr inc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't need an account at something like Kickstarter to see what people are looking to fund. It should be the same here. Otherwise it looks shady.

<comment><USER3> We are keeping the site invitation only so that we can make sure that we have all of the UI right; the legal agreements in place and be able to address questions like yours before we have a big audience. We are a very small team who did this on a small budget. Please follow our progress at twitter.com/appbackr or see my story at <http://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorcornwell>. If you'd like to learn more come meet us in NY at peerfinancingny.eventbrite.com</comment></comment>


Easy way to prevent CSRF - <AUTHOR>

What is the easiest and most secure way to prevent CSRF?
I was thinking about this for a long time. Every request, for instance images from a site send a HTTP Header called referer. HTTP referer is set in the browser based on what url the request comes from. Since Cross-site resource forgery, means that you are doing resource forgery on a cross site. That means every CSRF attack must send a HTTP referer. So if you are building a website, let say domain.com. Than you can easily check the HTTP referer that it has domain.com and not any other domain to prevent CSRF attack. And I think all web browser sends HTTP referer in every request.
I can not see any holes on this solution can you? <comment><USER2> Some people like to run their browser without sending REFERER headers. I know chrome and firefox can both be configured to do so. That would mean these users would not be able to use your site/app. Better to stick with the tried and true method of a random-ish variable that goes into both the form and the cookie with their values being checked against each other on submission.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you should ask this (or search for this) on <http://security.stackexchange.com></comment>


Ask HN: Will Apple want a cut of this? - <AUTHOR>

If I create an app that, for example, enables commerce between users, and my business model is to take a percentage of that revenue - will Apple want 30% of it? I don't know where/if there is a line between "subscription services" and anything else that makes money via an app. <comment><USER2> If you use apple to process the transaction then I would say yes. If you do it some other way ie paypal then probably not.

They would of course take 30% of the cost of the app if it wasn't free.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it like Paypal? Apple doesn't take a cut from sending payments via paypal's iOS app.</comment>


How Three Guys Rebuilt the Foundation of Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/facebook-hhvm-saga/ <comment><USER2> I would love to see the decision memo where they decoded it was less effort to build HHVM then to rebuild the site from scratch.

<comment><USER3> I'm always astounded at just how much effort Facebook puts into trying to keep PHP usable compared to switching to really almost anything else.

<comment><USER4> Porting the site would be a pretty crazy plan. Substantially crazier than writing your own VM for PHP, which is pretty WTF already.

However, i am really surprised that there doesn't seem to be a plan to gradually migrate off PHP and on to something decent.

This would involve creating a viable new platform of some sort (Sinatra on JRuby, Scalatra, Node.js, whatever's cool now), working out how to do the interoperation with PHP that was necessary (decoding PHP cookies or whatever), building or porting some minimal feature onto it, getting it into production, and getting it stable. Further features could then be developed on it or ported onto it one by one. Establishing this platform should be much less effort than writing a high-performance PHP VM.

There would remain effort in actually porting bits of the site, but that can be applied incrementally. New features could be developed on the new platform at no extra cost.

The new platform would probably be based on the JVM (unless it's Node), and i would expect it to be faster than HHVM. I would confidently expect it to require less maintenance. Given that the old platform is PHP, i would also expect it to be more secure, and to afford better quality code.

My company (a tiny operation in financial services that you've never heard of) is currently going through something a bit like this. We have a monolithic legacy app written in Java on a homebrew platform made of servlets, XSLT, and cheap gin. All our substantial new features are being developed in Scala on the Play framework. Whilst i'm not certain Scala/Play was the right choice, the plan is working: we are shipping, we are moving faster when developing the new features, and we are crying less.

<comment><USER3> This is more what surprises me--the lack of some slow, calculated migration off of PHP and to something like Node, almost anything JVM based, etc (since yeah, a full rewrite of any codebase is almost always crazy).

I'm in a similar legacy Java boat at my own work and doing quite a bit of the "okay, what small piece can we handle" at a time style replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, who out there in HN land has tried putting their PHP site on top of HHVM? Was it faster?</comment>


2.34M people are still paying AOL 20 bucks a month - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/6/5975591/2-34-million-people-are-still-paying-aol-20-bucks-a-month

<comment><USER2> There are many people who still use @aol.com as their email including many small businesses. I'm assuming those are the majority of their paying customers.

<comment><USER3> My guess is people just don't bother checking their credit card bills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You got to be kidding me. Most of these people clearly don't know they're paying, I can't even feel sorry for them, pure laziness.</comment>


Patreon to Europe on #VATMOSS: "Not our problem, mate." - <AUTHOR> https://idea15.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/patreon-to-europe-on-vatmoss-not-our-problem-mate/ <comment><USER2> If you're an author, you can use Leanpub ([https://leanpub.com/](https://leanpub.com/)). We added #VATMOSS support, so you don't have to. We did this since we looked at the situation and decided it was the correct thing to do for our authors, even though we're based in Canada with our servers in the USA, and with no physical presence in the EU whatsoever. We also added "bring your own book" support, so you can just upload your own PDF, EPUB and/or MOBI files instead of needing to use our (awesome, Markdown-based) book creation workflow.

<comment><USER3> Would you be willing to share approximately what it costs you? I saw your post here and deleted-before-posting speculation that Patreon simply can't make the numbers sensibly work out (bearing in mind they have to grow by offering an attractive package to both those who donate and create; if, for instance, 50% of the "donations" go into tax compliance there simply won't be any donations anyhow), but if we can get real numbers that would be even better.

Of course, that's assuming you have a similar problem to Patreon, where the author claims that every patron would be involved in the VATMOSS transaction, which I can't speak to at all. If it's just a line-item per book for you but a line item per EU patron for Patreon that's not comparable.

<comment><USER2> We integrated Taxamo ([http://www.taxamo.com/](http://www.taxamo.com/)) into Leanpub, and their posted fees ([http://www.taxamo.com/pricing/](http://www.taxamo.com/pricing/)) start at 20 Euro cents for every EU transaction. Non-EU transactions are free.

In terms of detecting whether the transaction is EU or not, there's a complicated workflow with 3 pieces of evidence etc, but (a) that's what Taxamo helps with and (b) if a bootstrapped Canadian startup can deal with this, presumably so could anyone else.

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the real story, its buried at the end of the article.

> The UK government is also in the process of introducing the Diverted Profit > Tax, announced by the chancellor, George Osborne in the Autumn Statement.

> The tax aims to counter the use of "aggressive tax planning techniques" to > divert profits from the UK to low tax jurisdictions.

> Profits made after 1 April 2015, and diverted to other countries, will be > taxed at 25%.

This is a pretty watershed moment for world wide business tax strategies. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I would hate to be one of the big accounting firms, or an employee of one, right now. Inter-country tax laws are about to get alot more complex and my guess is that at least of of the big accounting firms get bankrupted in the next few years due to this.

Current tax law is kind of like trying to follow the bible, or quran, to the letter of the law. There are so many inconsistencies and just plain old conflicting rules that you just can't do it.

 __EDIT __To clarify, I 'm pretty convinced, mostly from analysts I've talked to, that sooner or later a PWC or ther accounting firm will give a company tax advice that a country doesn't care for and they will get taken to the woodshed by that country. I'm not even referring to outright illegal activity like Arthur Anderson and Enron.

So yes, more money in the future due to increased tax regulation but a heck of alot more risk due to it as well.

You have to realize that Arthur Anderson was taken down because a relatively small team of auditors was corrupt.

PWC has 10,000 partners and almost 200,000 employees. It just takes a team of 50 to mess up and the firm can be gone.

<comment><USER5> > Inter-country tax laws are about to get alot more complex and my guess is > that at least of of the big accounting firms get bankrupted in the next few > years due to this.

could you expand? My feeling would be that with increasing complexity, big accounting firms stand only to make more money.

<comment><USER6> It's a mixed blessing. More complexity = more billable hours for accountants, but also = more liability if they screw up.

<comment><USER7> I think your comment is a good one.

But I find myself wondering, if a company like PWC is also "Too big to fail."

In this day and age, I have little trust in very large organizations, as I see them in league with politicians and bureaucrats.

Edit: Change "too" to "to" in "Too big to fail."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So basically .. we have the freedom of the internet ... buut we can't do business on the internet unless we hire 20 accountants 5 accounting managers, 2 layers and we will still be limited to just working within europe?

<comment><USER9> Not really - just keep a table of the vat rates and pay the relevant one.

<comment><USER10> "Simply keep abreast of all tax laws and jurisdictions on planet Earth and pay accordingly. It couldn't be simpler..."

<comment><USER11> It truly is complicated.

If only there were some kind of service, to whom one would pay a service fee perhaps, and who in return could promote your work, then collect and aggregate small, recurring payments from international payers while properly computing the tax liability.

Some kind of intermediary which enabled people to patronize artists, such that millions of artists around the world can simply pick up a check and focus on their work.

<comment><USER12> Heh. Seriously, this is (at least for me, and presumably for every other tiny indie developer) one of the huge attractions of storefronts like Steam and the iOS App Store: I'll just give you a license to sell my works, and you send me the royalties. I'll gladly give them a 30% cut to avoid all that bullshit.

Incidentally, the Google Play store does _not_ do this. Each developer is the merchant of record. I can only imagine that nearly every smaller business selling through Google has neglected to pay at least some sales taxes that they owe.

<comment><USER13> I think Google just changed that, in order to handle this new regulation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Aside from the hideous administrative burden Patreon has now forced onto their European users..."

Hyperbolic much? Way to blame Patreon for the arduous EU tax policy.

<comment><USER15> I forgot to include the part where every EU creator will also be obliged to register as a data controller with their national data protection authority, to ensure proper reportage and archiving of the VAT invoices which must be kept in a retrievable format for 10 years.

Compliant marketplaces take care of that for you so that the individual seller/creator does not have to register as a data controller.

<comment><USER16> Nothing has changed in this regard. If you need to be registered as a data controller now, _you should have been before 2015 too._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought patreon was a donation based service, as in "I give you money so you can continue to create" rather than "I give you money in exchange of services or goods".

Is patreon one of them or both, and how do I know when looking at someones patreon page?

<comment><USER15> Even their own tax page (linked to below) says that donations are considered earned income. HMRC does not care where it comes from or what it's called. It's income.

<comment><USER18> I agree it's income, but it's also a tip. Like if I sent $5 to your Paypal account directly. You need to declare that, but does Paypal care whether I owed you $5 or it's income?

Good question actually. What's Paypal doing about VAT?

<comment><USER15> I can only answer for the UK, but we have to go back to last autumn, when everyone started finding out about VATMOSS at all. HMRC did not communicate anything about EUVAT to anyone but businesses above a certain size which were already VAT registered. Their estimate was that only 34k business would be affected. So part of the outcry was the fact that marketplaces, gateways, and payment processors were not advised or consulted. They found out the same time everyone else did, in the same way everyone else did. One of them was PayPal, who were expected by the EU to be compliant in time for 1/1/15\. This was news to them. HMRC were forced to admit they had no idea that gateways like Paypal did not already capture the information required to create the place of supply burden of proof, nor that your average non-technically minded microbusiness knew how to handle the API and the information passing through it. [http://www.clarejosa.com/articles/from-passion-to- purpose/up...](http://www.clarejosa.com/articles/from-passion-to- purpose/updates-from-our-meeting-with-hmrc-hm-treasury-and-a-minster-on-4th- december-2014/)

One would hope that by now that it's all been sorted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I imagine Patreon did the calculation of implementing complicated (and in flux) rules for for a portion of their market versus the lost income to Patreon from losing their European customers...

I can understand that it's likely that the equation comes down on the side of the European creators costing them less over the long run.

</comment><comment><USER20> Do you think is practical to build an internal invoice system that takes care of the whole VATMESS? How long do you think it'd take a single developer to do it?

I know that there are many different services like the ones in this thread, but as a single developer, on a bootstrapping project they'd still be out of budget

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.patreon.com/taxes](https://www.patreon.com/taxes)

seems to be empty for me.

<comment><USER22> Have you got JavaScript disabled?

<comment><USER23> It's empty for me, too. Logged in or not. JS is not disabled.

<comment><USER22> [https://gist.github.com/SirCmpwn/0a80875342ec82c813e8](https://gist.github.com/SirCmpwn/0a80875342ec82c813e8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you're using Stripe or Paypal, you can use Quaderno ([https://quaderno.io](https://quaderno.io)). We're #VATMOSS complaint and help you to calculate VAT rates and track all the customer location evidences. Let me know if you have any questions.

<comment><USER25> What if I need to do some extra customization or if I want to disclose the final amount to my customers, do you offer something like that?

<comment><USER24> Sure! Everything is customisable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Patreon is the U.S. and not subject to European laws.

Patreon is also really just a distributor of money, they don't provide the person with a service.

Why is a person with a web design business looking to use a site used to help artists who have trouble connecting art and normal business income?

Finally she tweeted about how many people saw that blog post and said she should have included a tip jar. It really seems like she cares more about what she can get out of a situation than anything else.

<comment><USER18> "Patreon is the U.S. and not subject to European laws."

What makes you think this is true?

Why can't Americans play poker online? Why does Amazon have to collect state taxes for states they don't have a physical presence in? Google is forced to censor French and German search results. Facebook is forced to follow EU privacy laws. And on, and on. Having customers in a country means you're doing business in that country in this modern world.

IANAL. But you may want to check with one.

<comment><USER27> "Why can't Americans play poker online?"

American anti-gambling laws.

"Why does Amazon have to collect state taxes for states they don't have a physical presence in?"

Because those states count things like affiliate programs and subsidiary companies as a sales tax "nexus". Amazon tends to kill those programs to avoid being taxable. They only collect sales tax in 24 states.

"Google is forced to censor French and German search results. Facebook is forced to follow EU privacy laws."

Yeah, because they have operations in those countries, and can thus be sued there. Also, perhaps, because they might be blocked in the relevant countries, and would rather stay in those markets.

The EU simply cannot make me collect VAT (or do any other crazy thing they think up), because I'm not in the EU. They can ban me or my services or products in their jurisdiction, or make life hard for my customers in their jurisdiction, which may be enough.

<comment><USER18> "American anti-gambling laws."

It's more than that. The U.S. actually prosecuted executives of foreign online gaming companies for providing services to U.S. citizens. The problem is not that American citizens fall under U.S. law, but foreign companies have to follow U.S. law for online only services as well. [1]

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What happens if you just ignore it?

<comment><USER29> Surely, if PwC is wrong, and Patreon is responsible (which seems this way) and HMRC decides to investigate, they will go after Patreon, and not individual users?

<comment><USER30> Except Patreon is not in their jurisdiction, but their victims are.

<comment><USER16> Correct, although I'd be very surprised if this actually happened. HMRC has enough trouble staying on top of non-compliance and lost taxes in the UK, let alone chasing people for VAT due in _other EU states._ I can't imagine HMRC being too quick to rush to become a debt collector for other EU states.

Bear in mind that if people merely keep operating now as they did in 2014, HMRC loses nothing - it's only the tax authorities in other EU states who lose out. While no-one should take this as legal advice, I suspect all we'll see is other EU tax authorities taking action against the biggest non-compliers rather than individuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Japan is implementing similar law in Oct 2015

</comment><comment><USER23> It's disconcerting how many US online services claim to be usable internationally but then turn out not to have done their homework.

<comment><USER32> They did their homework. If you want to use Patreon and you have to deal with VAT, get to work and don't expect Patreon to do it for you.

Especially all of the unnecessary paperwork for a backwards psuedo-nation.

<comment><USER23> You mean all the unnecessary paperwork for every EU member state affected by the VAT changes?

And it's of course entirely reasonable to expect your users to know that they have to do the paperwork for contributions in the 1-10 dollar range themselves without ever explicitly telling them.

I'm not even sure that level of information is available to the users. If I were being funded on Patreon, would I have to get in touch with every single patron and ask them for their VAT details? And what would I do if someone didn't answer?

This is no different from the borderline criminal behaviour Uber and AirBnB are encouraging.

<comment><USER33> Why is it reasonable to expect Patreon to manage compliance and liability for such a law? If the EU wants to destroy commerce, that should be within the province of its citizens to address... oh wait. There's the problem.

<comment><USER15> Because that's what EU law, and its member states, have decreed. For example, here is the guidance from HMRC in the UK.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-supplying- dig...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-supplying-digital- services-to-private-consumers/vat-businesses-supplying-digital-services-to- private-consumers#vat-accounting-options-for-businesses-supplying-digital- services-to-consumers)

Per this law, the third party marketplace/gateway is responsible for compliance and liability. That is how everyone in the EU affected by the law views it, and it is why most marketplaces and platforms are slowly but surely coming into compliance.

This particular marketplace, on the other hand, hired a consultancy firm whose raison d'etre is tax avoidance [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31147276](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31147276), who proceeded to give them what they paid for. That tax advice was so incredibly wrong it was almost laughable; it misrepresented the "place of supply", the fundamental piece of information behind the entire continental tax change. [https://idea15.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/vatmoss-place-of- ser...](https://idea15.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/vatmoss-place-of-service-is- not-place-of-supply/)

This issue is not a question of extraterritorial sovereignty or individual responsibility. It's about dodgy tax advisors giving dodgy advice to a company which paid good money for it.

<comment><USER34> > Because that's what EU law, and its member states, have decreed. For > example, here is the guidance from HMRC in the UK.

But Patreon is not in the EU's jurisdiction and therefore isn't subject to their laws (with the exception of any treaties that the US has with the EU).

> …hired a consultancy firm whose raison d'etre is tax avoidance…

You keep saying that like it's bad. The whole point of tax accountants is make sure that a business or individual pays the minimum legal amount they have to.

<comment><USER15> This is where the reciprocity promised to the world by the US over FATCA (the US's extraterritorial tax law) may begin to rear its head. Every bank and financial system in the world has had to comply with US tax law with no choice. Sooner or later the world is going to want to claw back the money it has had to spend on compliance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That escalated quickly...</comment>


Backblaze Introducing B2 Cloud Storage - philipp-spiess https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html <comment><AUTHOR> Storing 1TB of data will cost $5/month, or $60/year. Amazon Cloud Drive offers unlimited storage for $60/year.</comment>


Steven Pinker Responds to Critics of 'Enlightenment Now' - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2019/01/14/enlightenment-wars-some-reflections-on-enlightenment-now-one-year-later/ <comment><USER2> What bothers me most about critiques of the Enlightenment is the critics usually fail to convincingly answer the following:

1) Was it better than what preceded it (e.g. the divine right of kings?

2) In what way(s) are the ideas that followed an improvement?</comment>


Which Shipping Company is Kindest to Your Packages? - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/tests/which-shipping-company-is-kindest-to-your-packages?src=rss

<comment><USER2> Let's see, they had an N of 12. Not statistically viable for logging what carrier performs better where. This is most clearly visible in the express packaging differences between FedEx and USPS which uses FedEx and they even mentioned it in their article. Bet it was fun doing/writing about it though.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a school of thought that putting highly visible commercially available accelerometers (more accurately they are shock sensors) on the _outside_ of the shipment will cause it to be treated more gently.

We subscribed to this school of thought - until our valuable scientific instrument arrived (a) shaken not stirred and (b) with all the external sensors having mysteriously "fallen off".

So, if you are going to do this, put sensors both on the inside and the outside of your shipment.

<comment><USER4> But what does that actually prove? I can put an already broken laptop in a box, ship it, and blame it on UPS.

How is a shock sensor any different? Even if it's on the outside of the box, the pickup guy isn't exactly trained to confirm it's in good shape, he's not signing anything to certify that the sensor is intact and operating properly.

And as far as I know, none of the major carriers actually declare anything like "packages will not be subjected to more than X G-forces during transit." So even if the sensors did trip, that only indicates that they tripped. It doesn't prove the shipping company did anything 'wrong'.

And seeing as the guy behind the counter or on the phone isn't an expert in accelerometers, any explanation is going to be over their head. And once again, how do you establish you didn't mess with the accelerometers ahead of time?

I can actually understand the human-nature behind trashing something marked fragile, or something with shock sensors stuck all over the exterior. Not that it's justifiable. Basically, you're saying that this person treats all the normal packages like shit and just throws them around for no reason. That they're not even trying to be good at their job by default. Not to mention that you're asking for special treatment without providing additional compensation.

Which explains the best way to keep your package safe. Insure it. You probably don't even need to insure it for the full value. Just spend the 70 cents to get $200 dollars coverage. Everyone handling it knows there will be an internal follow up if the company has to pay out on the claim, because it actually costs them something.

<comment><USER5> Insurance is a ripoff if you are an ecommerce company. In my last company we shipped $5,000 a day in product and insured all of it for the first couple of years. One day I got a postcard that was trying to get me to insure with an outside company when I shipped UPS. I got wondering how they could do that, did some math on what we were spending and then asked my warehouse manager how much we had lost (in actual costs to us) in the last two years and was stunned at the answer - $600 total out of several thousand shipments. At that point we began self-insuring.

<comment><USER4> This is a little late...

But yeah in that case I agree 100%. Different case if you're shipping some scientific equipment worth 1500 dollars now and then.

And if that equipment is 50,000 bucks, maybe you start looking at a private courier.

I have a friend who used to work as a registrar for a museum, shipping stuff that was worth millions, or even arguably priceless. She'd ride on the planes and ride in the backs of the trucks that transported this stuff. She'd have to document every scratch, every discoloration, etc, and sign off on it, before shipping began so they could compare at the end of the trip.

But I was suggesting a hedge. Come up with your own numbers, but if item is worth greater than 2000, insure for 200, costing 70 cents for UPS. That way it gets UPS internal stickers saying it's insured, probably beeps or something every time someone scans it, and provokes an entirely different attitude than marking it "FRAGILE", according to antecdotal evidence.

<comment><USER5> As far as 'FRAGILE' markings making a difference I can assure you, since I ship UPS every day, that they treat every box equally (poorly). There is no preferential treatment for any package, and the heavier the packages are the worse they travel. I watched my driver knock over a flat-screen TV three times one day during a pickup. He had it standing on edge and it wouldn't stay upright, but after three tries at knocking it over he put it flat under a shelf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think location also matters. Where I currently live my UPS packages arrive in great condition while I've had FedEx packages look like they have really fallen off the back of the truck. Where I used to live it was the opposite.

I don't even include the USPS in this discussion because they are SO bad at delivery. I know it's not packages, but I've sent checks to my bank for deposit that were literally destroyed by the USPS. The bank sent the shredded check back to show me why they couldn't deposit it. I routinely get my neighbors mail and they get mine even though I have put a nice sign on my mailbox with my full name. And yes, I have filed complaints with no response.

</comment><comment><USER7> USPS has been fast and cheap. The only real complaint I've had is that they leave pickup tags for some of the heaviest packages, packages that other carriers would have delivered. But it's understandable... I feel sorry for what some of the mailmen have to lift. Most are far less muscular than the UPS guys. My area has had problems with mail theft... I think some meth use among employees, but tracked items show up. It's not safe to get mail with handwritten addresses, things like birthday cards with a little cash in the middle always vanish. And the DMV license plate tags vanish in the mail too... California no doubt has a black market for those with so many illegals from Mexico around. Their flat rate boxes are extremely competitive for shipping, especially heavier items and/or to distant zones. Mail service has been reliable since one local thief was caught. Many good people don't deserve a bad rap for the actions of a small number.

UPS gives generally great service, but they throw the packages around. Some electronic gear with glass meters on the side arrived with the glass broken. Taking the unit apart revealed it was more than just a bump to the side of the thick box. The power transformer had the brackets stretched up and it was leaning a great deal. For that to happen the package wasn't just bumped or even dropped. It was clearly thrown horizontally and down with considerable force and crash landed... like onto a dock or truck. UPS seems to have become much more costly than in years past.

Fedex is much more gentle with packages, but it's alarming how many from neighbors blocks away show up. They're not very careful reading addresses, or smart enough interpolating from neighbors addresses when they don't see one.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder why package monitors are not a standard equipment. The monitor would comminucate wirelessly through encrypted channels. Once at the delivery location, the customer may inspect the package logs and he could refuse delivery, or demand compensation.

An accelerometer, a gyroscope, a small battery and microcontroller with bluetooth connectivity. Should be possible to build a contraption for around $100.

All so stuff like this: [http://www.gadling.com/2010/02/23/videos-bad-baggage- handler...](http://www.gadling.com/2010/02/23/videos-bad-baggage-handlers-or- remind-me-why-we-pay-to-check/) dosn't happen more often.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure there's much of a problem to be solved. The customer can already refuse delivery if the packaging is damaged. If the package is fine, but the contents are damaged, you can still file a claim and (after going through the inspection process) collect on the insurance.

I don't think that having proof of some particular level of shock during shipment would make much of a difference - regardless of shock all that really matters is if there was any damage to the contents and whether they were properly packaged in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori _"Our co-workers thought we were a bit odd," says Brettle, "but we assured them it was all in the name of science."_

My heroes.

<comment><USER10> Have you seen the Postal Hacking talk from The Last Hope conference? It's just an hour of people abusing the postal system (legally). For science!

I don't think there's an official server for the video, just a torrent file [http://hopetracker.donthax.me/torrents/2600%20-%20The%20Last...](http://hopetracker.donthax.me/torrents/2600%20-%20The%20Last%20HOPE%20\(2008\)%20-%20Postal%20Hacking.mp4.torrent) but you can find it on YouTube as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: UK Entrepreneurs, how does a brexit/remain vote affect your start up? - <AUTHOR> As someone who has been undecided until I stood in front of the ballot form, I would love to hear your views as to how a vote in or out will affect your tech company in the UK, directly or indirectly. <comment><USER2> I too have felt conflicted about voting one way or the other. It has taken months of research and discussion for me to come to the conclusion that what is best for me in the short run is not what is best for my son and the country in the long term.

The thing that tipped the scales in my decision to vote leave was coming to the conclusion that democracy is the exercise of sovereignty.

The nature Sovereignty is binary, you either have it or you don't, and I felt it is too valuable a thing to give up as it had been paid for by the ultimate sacrifices of previous generations.

I also realised that leaving the EU doesn't preclude trade or special immigration or visa arrangements to be negotiated between the UK and the EU. So while there is the threat that the EU members would want to punish the UK for leaving but they would also be hurting their own economies and since EU economic growth has been low I don't think they would want to do that.

As a Fintech entrepreneur in London a Brexit might hurt new venture prospects in the short run. It will be harder to raise money, possibly harder to recruit and might be harder to grow into Europe.

Having said that, there is nothing to say that it isn't possible to overcome these challenges, for example hiring devs to work remotely from Europe or from anywhere in the world for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER3> If we end up with worse trade deals and mobility in the event of a Leave - which some rather extensive reading has convinced me is pretty likely (see [https://medium.com/im-trying-to-fact-check-brexit](https://medium.com/im- trying-to-fact-check-brexit) , which has been my hobby over the past few weeks) - then that could directly affect me as most of my business is international. Some of my clients are domestic, so that business will almost certainly be affected as the UK's economy slows down or falls into recession.

The international stuff depends on the fine details, of course. Given the pound's likely to take a kicking in both the short and the long term being largely paid in dollars may have its upsides. But overall I'm not going to be at all thrilled if we end up voting Leave.

</comment><comment><USER4> In case of Brexit I might move my company outside the country (I'm an EU national, not British) and me and my family probably follow suit shortly after. It depends on whether there's visa drama (if there is, then I'll eff off) or the UK remains as part of the free movement of people agreements (like Switzerland or Norway).

It is a shame that fear, lies and racism (which is, again, fear) make people consider leaving the EU, which is the single good thing that happened to Europe since the end of WW2. It is not just about what's the EU (several discussions including some in HN have shown once and again how the EU is completely democratic), but about what the EU could be.

I do respect their sovereignty to choose kicking out EU citizens and requiring them to go through the visa crap, but I can't help but feeling unwanted.

All the reasons to leave the EU seem naïve, as almost none of them will change (immigration, adherence to EU regulations, trade agreements, free movement of people) or, even worse, will be forced fed into Britain's mouth without the chance to vote against them.

If I finally have to leave, I wish them all the best as I consider them my friends, but I sincerely prefer to spend my time with friends that appreciate me as much as I appreciate them.

<comment><USER2> I'm sympathetic because I think both sided have gone to extremes and quite frankly lied at times to gain votes which is why I did my own research and came to my own conclusions after dwelling on it for a long time. I think if the UK does leave it would be absolutely stupid to push out people who have made the UK their home and contributed thus far. Most likely it would be business as usual until the UK negotiates it's way out of the EU.

I sincerely hope that if a leave vote happens that your family and business life doesn't get disrupted and please don't think that all the people who voted to leave did so for xenophobic racist reasons.

<comment><USER5> "please don't think that all the people who voted to leave did so for xenophobic racist reasons."

But the whole premise of leaving is universally build on xenophobic racist reasons or started with xenophobic arguments. The line between Euroscepticism and Anti-Europeanism is very thin, there is a market for "Breaking point" ads.

The fact that 9/10 of most anti-European parties (even on the mainland or those a Nigel Farage is dweeping with) is xenophobic/racist from nature is extremely telling.

<comment><USER6> No, it's really not.

<comment><USER7> Leave won due to the votes from non university-educated people in towns & villages and white working class, and both groups are more xenophobic than the university-educated generation under 40, who are furious. People were not voting about economics or trade agreements or the ideals of multi-national unions. It's not pretty to have this divide along socio-economic lines, and it's not pretty for liberals to realize that they wish that the xenophobic white working class didn't have such an influence in a vote, but that's how it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm no Entrepreneur but speaking as a European consumer it would me effect me in the sense that I would think twice of where to spend my money. I think it would have the reflex of spending it rather within the EU than further weakening it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spotify. Just-Eat. King. Skype. Transferwise.

Everyone of them was founded in the EU but became a billion dollar startup while headquartered in London.

Developers, product managers, founders - it's hard to find any startup of size in London which doesn't draw 20-30%+ of it's staff from Europe (and beyond) - London has hugely benefitted from the talent pool of Europe. It's hard to imagine the startup scene existing without it.

(we also sponsor work visas for international staff, it's a nightmare compared to hiring someone from the EU)

<comment><USER9> Do you really think skilled labor that is qualified to work at any of "Spotify. Just-Eat. King. Skype. Transferwise." will no longer be able to make the pilgrimage to London, now that Brexit has occurred?

I doubt it. I think the real immigration issue is to control unchecked migration from MENA countries. A lot of these migrants come from cultures and religions that are incompatible with Western values, and so it's important to be able to screen who comes into your country more carefully.

<comment><USER10> The problem is there is an expectation from a lot of voters that immigration is going to fall dramatically in the UK.

<comment><USER11> Isn't the thinking behind that is that _unskilled_ labour will be discouraged/prohibited? Unskilled Brits being displaced by cheaper labour from eastern Europe is usually cited as a reason for dissatisfaction with the EU.

<comment><USER10> I don't think there was much thinking behind it at all, people saw headlines that there were 350,000 people coming to the UK and didn't like it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple impact on Wall Street unprecedented - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-impact-on-wall-street-unprecedented-2013-01-15

<comment><USER2> Fails to mention that Apple's share price has gone from US$702.10 on 19th Sept to US$485.92 today [1].

[1] <https://www.google.co.uk/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL></comment>


ADSF-install is obsolete - <AUTHOR> http://www.cliki.net/asdf-install

<comment><USER2> It's been for years. Why is this news? ASDF-install != ASDF by the way.

<comment><USER3> The edit history shows that this notice was put up in 2006:

[http://www.cliki.net/site/history?article=asdf- install](http://www.cliki.net/site/history?article=asdf-install)

So no, this is not news.

EDIT: Actually, the history must be messed up since Quicklisp hadn't been released in 2006. Perhaps I'm reading the diffs wrong, or perhaps the cliki- import script messed up the dates. At any rate, it does not appear to be a new notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The king is dead, long live the king!

I've been using quicklisp for a while. It's working just fine, as far as I'm able to use it. But I haven't found out yet where the lost "user documentation" for quicklisp is buried. Do you need to read all sources in order to understand it?

<comment><USER5> Yes, unfortunately that's the case.

There are a handful of commands described on [http://www.quicklisp.org/](http://www.quicklisp.org/) but there is no end-to- end, comprehensive user or developer manual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Should read ASDF-install in the title and I really wonder how that typo happened :)

<comment><USER7> Not everyone has a qwetry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> ob•so•lete "no longer in use"

...which is apparently not true in this case :P

<comment><USER9> It is in fact deprecated.</comment></comment>


The Race to Zero Emissions - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/emails/the-race-to-zero-emissions/1627580/ <comment><USER2> > A growing number of travelers are giving up flying. In Sweden, where the > movement has taken off, a new term has emerged: flygskam, meaning "flight > shame." The country saw the number of passengers at airports drop in 2018, > while the number of train travelers reached a new record.

I hope this inspires more people to give up flying. I am looking at you HN crowd and your tech conferences.</comment>


Vertical Neobanks - <AUTHOR> https://kunle.app/march-2020-vertical-banks.html <comment><USER2> As a banking strategist, neobanks are what we're mostly concerned with vs regular challenger banks. The primary reason is the disintermediation from the customer through a particular service. Customer touchpoints for purchases and services are far more frequent than reviewing your finances and with more automation, banks/financial services are being pushed further into the background, which means the data that we receive to learn about customers becomes worse and worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you define the difference between neobanks and regular challenger banks.

Agree with this comment "the data that we receive to learn about customers becomes worse and worse"

<comment><USER2> Sorry - perhaps there is little difference if any between neobanks vs regular challenger banks. Neobanks would be digital-only type banks while regular challenger banks are heavily skewed digitally but have the backing of an existing incumbent bank.

Where we see and place all our analysis efforts are on companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. From what we can see with Alibaba, since they own the contact points for the both the customer and retailer, they have data to gauge financing needs and more importantly risk.

You see banks like RBC starting the conversation earlier in the journey with their investments in various startup spinoffs where it's focused on the 'why' behind the financing (i.e. finding a home, buying a car, starting a business, etc.) before becoming involved in the financing portion later down the line.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. In that frame, Square and Varo Money would be challenger banks (that got started as neobanks) because they now have licenses. Chime, Sofi and others would be neobanks, correct?

Never thought of this distinction, but I don't hate it.

I think a material distinction between Apple/Amazon etc and Alibaba is that in Alibaba's operating environment there wasn't a strong digital financial ecosystem to compete with (not to mention that they were a national champion). I'm not convinced they all can do exactly the same thing Alibaba did. Apple is edging it's way there and doing it in an original way, but they're not doing it in a way that is in line with what I described at all (for example, if Apple were pursuing a vertical neobank strategy, they would launch a banking service for appstore developers, who AFAIK are the only customer segment for whom Apple is an income driver). For Amazon it could be sellers, for Google it could be Adsense advertisers, and I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for Facebook.

I also think a reason these folks havent gone the lending route (other than Amazon) is because I don't know if its believable that their data could be differentiated for lending purposes. Just a thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> quite some time back, there was a position statement by QED Investors (the guys who were the first investors in CreditKarma) - [https://s3.amazonaws.com/qed- uploads/The+Copernican+Revoluti...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/qed- uploads/The+Copernican+Revolution+in+Banking+-+Publication+Version.pdf)

It talks about how branch based banking will split into various parts - one of which will be distribution of fintech products by players like Instagram, Facebook, etc. Essentially commoditizing fintech.

But simultaneously, vertical neobanks/fintech would be created by those who can create the best of products in a particular niche. Instagram is not a niche. Uber could be (however has failed spectacularly in the past - [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16112498/uber-phase-out- xc...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16112498/uber-phase-out-xchange-car- leasing-losses) ...but still has ambitions in the future [https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16112498/uber-phase-out- xc...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/8/16112498/uber-phase-out-xchange-car- leasing-losses))

So im wondering what's the future of fintech and lending. Do dating apps and social apps plugged to bank backends become the only viable fintech play (like Apple Card and Goldman Sachs) ? A16Z has been plugging this theory - [https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a- fintech-...](https://a16z.com/2020/01/21/every-company-will-be-a-fintech- company/) \- Or will verticalized fintech still win out like QED says.

IMHO Spotify and Instagram are not verticalized.

<comment><AUTHOR> What does this mean: "IMHO Spotify and Instagram are not verticalized."

I don't think _every_ app becomes a vertical neobank. I think apps that already have a moneymoving financial relationship with some niche, have a real opportunity to serve that niche very well. Specifically - if you're a material source of income for some niche, or if you're a source of growth for some niche, then you have a real shot at the vertical neobank strategy.

<comment><USER3> I mean instagram and Spotify have too broad a base. You wrote this - _You can think of a vertical neobank as a checking account + debit card product, focused on a specific customer segment (rather than focused on a broad swath of "consumers")_

I'm wondering if that holds for Instagram as a vertical neobank. But I like your current statement " _I think apps that already have a moneymoving financial relationship with some niche, have a real opportunity to serve that niche very well._ " .

So then do you think Instagram will be a successful fintech ? And I'm wondering why Intuit could not become a neobank without acquiring CreditKarma?

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it.

For Instagram; they have creators (who create content, make filters etc) who already get paid by Instagram when that content is sold. No idea how large that business is, but it's a case where instagram is impacting the moneyflow. They would definitely not be a vertical neobank for consumers. Way too broad.

For Spotify - they are in the money flow for artists. The vertical neobank would be for those artists getting paid.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hangover-Proof Beer Infused with THC and CBDs? Cheers - <AUTHOR> https://www.greenentrepreneur.com/article/315458 <comment><USER2> As far as I can understand, this is more or less just orally consumable marijuana ('edibles') in liquid form. I'm sure it could still be enjoyed by plenty, but as anyone remotely familiar with the two could tell you alcohol and THC/CBD have hugely different psychoactive effects, especially at higher doses.

<comment><USER3> aka alcohol + thc = the spins not a fun combination and you're not fun on it.

<comment><USER4> The beer discussed in this article is nonalcoholic.

<comment><USER3> I know just making clear why for people wondering "why not both?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> beer: an alcoholic drink made from yeast-fermented malt flavoured with hops.

This isn't beer (:

<comment><USER6> Definitely does not meet the Bavarian purity law.

<comment><USER7> Reinheitsgebot!

To those interested, cannabis-infused beer has figured in the homebrew community for decades. The botanical and constituent similarity of hops and cannabis makes it a reasonable choice for those who enjoy oral consumption. It's also quite interesting to see commercial breweries start moving in that direction. Personally, I think cannabis is safer on its own, but people will do as they please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another attempt to provide "hangover-proof" drinks with a similar effect: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/09/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/09/28/this- alcohol-substitute-could-get-you-drunk-without-the-hangover/)

<comment><USER9> THC gives me a nasty hangover anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> now by no means am i in any way against weed, in fact im a regular recreational user but im not entirely sure i fully agree with this stuff considering the status, if im not wrong its legal for medical use not recreational, say i have a headache, can i pop to the chemist for a can of paracetemol infused iced tea? anti histamine ice cream? no, because medicine is supposed to be functional not fun. id pobably even be fine with it for places where it is fully legal for recreational purposes

or maybe im just bitter because itll never be legalized here

<comment><USER11> It's been legal for recreational purposes in California since January 1st

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: They're all non-alcoholic. Which isn't bad, but by that definition water is hangover-proof too.

<comment><USER13> Yep, that's not bad and I think non alcoholic beer like drinks is a great idea (I am not a big fan of anything else than beer, hot tea and water; tea and water on workdays tends to get boring).

But non-alcoholic beer and calling it anti-hangover is just not very interesting at all. There are 1000s of alcohol free or low alcohol beers which do not give you a hangover (ofcourse, if you drink insane amounts of anything you will get ill), so why is this interesting?

<comment> s-shellfish Gives buzz like alcohol does - for whatever reason you might enjoy, but does not contain alcohol.

Lots of people drink as a social lubricant. Some people just don't want to drink alcohol, like myself, but miss out on those aspects of life. It's interesting because there's movement in a direction that allows for more options?

It also looks like they are trying to make it not as intoxicating as most MJ products tend to be, which can be overstimulating and overwhelming, so yea, I mean, how is this different than the stages of craftsmanship that's gone into literal millenia of producing alcoholic products?

<comment><USER13> So you read the last sentence of what I wrote, after the comma? Like I said; I like the options, I just find calling a non alcohol beverage 'hangover-proof' a bit weird advertisement. Besides that i'm all for it.

<comment> s-shellfish Well, on the interwebs I tend to be pretty literal, as well as fairly selective when it comes to parsing statements from human persons. I read the statement "why is this interesting" and found reason to answer that question.

Honestly I assume calling it 'hangover proof' is a bit of a marketing, eyeball grab gimmick. I don't think you can deny it's efficacy!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Dreyfus affair - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair

<comment><USER2> I'm not really sure what posting this is supposed to indicate. Dreyfus _didn 't_ steal and "leak" documents: He was framed.

Or maybe it's just random Wikipedia link day and I didn't notice.

It's a shame that it seems many who took it upon themselves to flag all the repetitive drek being posted on the front page have lost their flagging privileges. I guess "anything good hackers would find interesting" has evolved in a wonderful new direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry you find a Wikipedia article documenting a historical event so beneath you. It must also be flippant remark day, and I didn't notice. I found some interesting parallels. I like the idea of a few individuals rising to the defense of an unfairly accused person, working together to change minds/attitudes, transforming the political landscape, and eventually exonerating him. Your intellectual dexterity should reveal to you a modern relevance. I found the letters of Émile Zola inspiring, and I thought the affair worth sharing--in case anyone didn't know about it.</comment></comment>


Revoked peer SSL certificate for *.php.net - <AUTHOR> https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=bugs.php.net&hideResults=on

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like the SSL certificate currently being served has been revoked. For me, it's blocked in FF, but allowed in Chrome.

Does anyone know if this is related to them moving php.net to new servers after the earlier malware attack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, after further review, it looks like the issue is with a revoked intermediate certificate that is sent along in the chain. It still causes issues in FF, but at least it's not directly with the PHP.net certificate.</comment></comment>


The Book of Shaders - <AUTHOR> https://thebookofshaders.com <comment><USER2> The Book of Shaders is a great resource.

Shameless self promotion: if you're interested in general WebGL, I have a Youtube channel with over 100 WebGL videos. I publish a couple times a week.

I haven't started diving into doing cool shader things yet (beyond some light stuff with lighting, fog, textures, and a few other minor things). It's on my list to do though.

Channel: [https://www.youtube.com/user/iamdavidwparker](https://www.youtube.com/user/iamdavidwparker)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I found a ton of old Flash Experiments on an old disk and looking to port them. WebGL isn't the easiest thing when you are new and many resources seem somewhat dated. Subscribed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're interested in shaders and WebGL I recommend using the [http://regl.party/](http://regl.party/) framework. It's a functional react- like wrapper on WebGL. The developer experience focuses on writing raw GLSL shader code.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been writing these a bunch as of late and to be honest it's some of the most exciting and rewarding types of programming around. It really stretches out your imagination and also math.

Shader code tends to be extremely terse. 1000 lines of shader code is like a lot.

Like what can yoh really do with a 1000 loc rails app.

<comment><USER6> Agree, I always enjoyed hacking on shaders. And checking out other's shaders (and further tweaking them) is also inspiring educational and most gratifying. ShaderToy is a great site for that, but there's many more "shader communities" / gfx coding forums etc, great fun

<comment><USER5> can you name a couple of good ones? i'm aware of pouet, never got too into it. everyone reading this pls check out if [https://www.shadertoy.com/](https://www.shadertoy.com/) if you've never head of it before. thank me later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I started reading this last night and I'm really enjoying it.

As I posted on the WebGL Voxel Engine thread [1] yesterday, I've been looking to get more into this subject and had found it a little unapproachable. This renderer [2] in 500 loc was also recommended and is a really readable intro for background on the subject.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15595137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15595137)

[2] [https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki/](https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki/)

<comment><USER8> This book seems to be in progress though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks great for someone like me who has no idea what shaders are, but it really needs to start with, "...Fragment Shaders, those things that do X with computer graphics."

Written by people who know what the topic is already, so I think they miss that I went into this not knowing if they were talking about computers or some art form or ink and pen style or whatnot.

<comment><USER10> A fragment shader a.k.a. pixel shader is a program that runs once for each pixel [edit: per frame!]. It's at the end of the graphics pipeline so the geometry and texture of a scene is already available as an input. So it can either interpret the scene and decide how to render the output, or it can even ignore the scene and draw something completely original. Lots of examples at [https://www.shadertoy.com/](https://www.shadertoy.com/) (Warning: it might bog down your browser if you have a crummy GPU.)

<comment><USER11> Well, it actually can run way more than once per pixel; it runs once per texel per thing that is rendered, where a texel is a 'fragment' of the displayed model which is the size of a pixel on the screen.

So if you have a bunch of things occluding each other, they can all get rendered on top of each other even if only the closest is actually displayed.

Sometimes people try to avoid that by not drawing stuff that is occluded, or drawing in order of depth, or discarding fragments if the depth buffer has already drawn over a location with a nearer texel, or that sort of thing. But it's always a PITA to calculate/sort that sort of thing in realtime.

<comment><USER12> Look, teaching is the art of lying about the monster under the bed until the other person is ready to defeat it.

Once per pixel is fine when you're teaching the hello world of shaders.

<comment><USER11> Good point, sorry, that was pedantic.

But I've actually kind of been thinking about that, too. Think about how much 'magic code' most 'hello world' tutorials have that you're told to just ignore. That can also be off-putting when there's too much of it.

I wonder if there's a happy medium for introducing the basic concepts, like starting with microcontroller assembly instead of 'std::cout << "hello, world";'.

Then you won't have to explain things like '#include' because your students will already know that it just means 'pretend I copy/pasted file X here' from when they learned how to make an LED blink.

Anyways, I guess this particular resource does look like it struck a pretty happy middle ground for beginners. I just hope they don't get discouraged trying to branch out with self-teaching; there are a lot of byzantine 'gotcha's with graphics APIs and parallel stuff.

<comment><USER13> I was thinking about this the other day, too. Clash Royale recently added this Quests thing. Since I've been playing for awhile I know that it's separate from the main game and basically a bonus. If I was first starting to play it would be yet another thing to learn and it would be hard to know how it fits in with the rest of the game's objectives. I think of those crazy 10-way slot machines in Vegas. I have no idea whats going on (either by design or I'm not their mark...I mean target).

I think the big thing with introducing new things is keep it simple enough that they can riff on it. If you introduce too many things and something breaks, it's hard to get back to "good" and eventually you give up.

Python is a simple language, but I see a lot of online classes giving full-on VMs because the yak shaving involved in getting set up with a consistent environment wastes the first week or two of class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used _The Book of Shaders_ when creating my WebGL cross fading project[1], it is one of the more helpful guides (on any subject) I have found on the web.

The book is incomplete but I look forward to future updates.

[1] [https://sheep.horse/2017/9/crossfading_photos_with_webgl_- _b...](https://sheep.horse/2017/9/crossfading_photos_with_webgl_- _boston_bridge_proj.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Bunch of previous threads:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20book%20of%20shaders%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20book%20of%20shaders%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm ashamed to admit I was like 4 chapters into this before I realized that the code samples were live.

I'm also still somewhat confused as to how the live code samples are achieved. Are they being compiled client side somehow? I don't know very much about WebGL.

<comment><USER17> The compiler is in the graphic card drivers. You pass on shader source-code to it in text-form.

<comment><USER18> Kind of. The browser WebGL implementation compiles them, producing shaders suitable the native driver shader compiler (conversion from OpenGL to D3D, rewrite texture/buffer access for bounds checking as necessary, etc).

<comment><USER17> Ah yes, you are right, WebGL shaders are translated first to GLSL or HLSL with a lib like ANGLE ([https://github.com/google/angle](https://github.com/google/angle)). And that source is then send on to the drivers which compile it again to assembler for the graphic card. And there again are some differences between GLSL/HLSL it seems. If I remember right in GLSL the drivers do the work while in HLSL some DLL from MS produces another intermediate format (which I just found out seems to be even open source: [https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler](https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Discussed in 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457322)

</comment><comment><USER20> I wrote a little hack on top of the Book of Shaders editor to let you use texture and float uniforms:

[http://roy.red/editor/](http://roy.red/editor/)

You can give floats a range and default value with a comment:

        uniform float u_float; //0;.5;1

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this project is similar to [http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/](http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> It looks like it's still incomplete, the sections on textures/3d graphics aren't complete yet. Looking forward to reading up on these topics.

<comment><USER23> Yup, still waiting on those since the last time it was posted on HN...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't using the term shader somewhat incorrect today? It basically means any GPU program, so it's not limited to shading by far.

<comment><USER6> "Naming things", one of the 2 hard problems in computing. In other words, not worth scratching your head over, ever. "Historical accidents" in terminology just such as this one abound all over the tech world. What you say specifically about "the term shader" has been true at least ever since the first consumer GPU offered a programmable vertex pipeline and their marketers chose the term "vertex shaders". How long ago was that, nearly 2 decades I reckon?

Could've been worse. Since Java was so big back then, too, we're lucky they didn't come up with eg. "Rendlets". At least "shader" is freakin' aesthetic =)

<comment><USER25> Not important to your point, but for historical flavor--

I'm pretty sure the term "shader" was introduced by Pixar, from way back before _Toy Story_ when they were doing little demos and short movies. They were building very modern-looking graphics pipelines in software way before the first GPUs (I think Nvidia coined that term?)

<comment><USER26> The original nVidia GeForce 256 was termed a "GPU". It did transform and lighting on the GPU I remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I also recommend you the [http://regl.party/](http://regl.party/) framework if you're interested in Shaders</comment>


An update on the Infocom Cabinet, with a side order of ethical debate - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4848 <comment><USER2> "I worry about someone defending decisions made decades ago, with 20/20 hindsight applied by groupthink hive-mind perfection-oriented knowledge. I hope that doesn't happen. People in this group range from early 20s to early 30s (with a few noted exceptions) and Infocom was often either their first job, or a completely crazy 90 degree change in career. They did what they did, and it came from competence and doing the right thing as they saw it. I don't know if any of us could stand up to such scrutiny and get top marks across the board."

</comment><comment><USER3> FWIW, the OP links to an apparently controversial article ("an article about a particular narrative thread") in which Infocom employees discuss the never- released sequel to HHGG. The domain of that post seems to be currently down (waxy.org), but here's the Sept. 2015 archive.org link:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150928021842/http://waxy.org/2...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150928021842/http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/)

</comment><comment><USER4> A few wordy paragraphs down, he answers the question I was curious about: is this the "infocom drive" guy? Apparently that's one of the author's friends, who got a copy of the drive from the author.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm having trouble understanding why this is. Where can I find more context?

<comment><USER6> Some context:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10620142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10620142)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619956)

[http://www.filfre.net/2014/04/down-from-the- top/](http://www.filfre.net/2014/04/down-from-the-top/)

[http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/](http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU)

[http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/](http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I absolutely love Jason's work. A funny thing happened a few days ago which ties on strongly with the writing here, we both got offered yet another cache of Geocities data and gladly accepted it. My biggest worry about that data is that I'll accidentally revive something that the person whose data it was has already removed. So I'm going to have to go through all the removal requests to make sure that I'm not undoing a previous deletion while trying to make a bunch of people happy their stuff was found.

That's a very thin line to walk on, on the one hand trying to preserve something historical, on the other to try to respect peoples wishes and their privacy.

It's extra tough for Jason because this work he's been doing on Infocom is essentially documenting the lives of a number of people who are still very much alive (and if they're not, their direct descendants are).

It's one thing to grub around in some archaeological dig to find an old piece of parchment recording a deal, it's an entirely different thing to document in painstaking detail all the back-and-forth between company employees, especially if they thought that those details had long been lost and now they re-surface. It's like tearing open a whole batch of old wounds in the name of historical accuracy.

I'm definitely not envying his position, and it's a real pity that the person who he trusted with the data could not wait to release some of it in such a way that it nearly killed the project.

Just the other day there was a release of a bunch of documents from one person who worked at Atari. I'm still nowhere near done reading it, there are more and more gems to be found there, but at the same time I couldn't help wondering if the fact that all this would have normally been confidential and that plenty of the trading partners of Atari (notably TI) are still in business if this sort of corporate dump would not negatively affect those partners even so many years later.

I know that plenty of people have berated me for not asking for their permission before reviving the Geocities data and my (lame) excuse has always been that there wasn't enough time and that there was no contact information and so I decided that the value of the good would outweigh the value of the bad. So I opted for asking for forgiveness rather than permission and even though it has worked out well that's an easy call to make when you're not personally affected but I've had some fairly pointy emails over the years that explained how I had been in the wrong on several occasions. Those are outweighed very handily by the emails of people that were extremely happy their stuff got saved.

So please. Jason, don't let anybody stop you from doing what you're doing. It's absolutely marvelous that someone would spend all this time, energy and funds on preserving this information for future generations, the value of your work will only go _up_ over time. I'm not sure if it will ever change the game industry much, lots of time has passed and the game industry has already changed in ways that make the inner workings of Infocom less applicable than they might have been years ago. But just to see how a company goes through it's whole life-cycle is fascinating, especially for those that have lived through such a thing themselves, to see the parallels, the differences and the machinations. That's the real value, that this happens to be a game company is auxiliary to that.</comment>


Chrrp - Your Stripe Pager - <AUTHOR> http://chrrp.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Royce here, one of the devs. This is a super simple app that basically helps with one question: How many customers and how much money have I gained to date? We're using Stripe for the data. Enjoy!

<comment><USER2> Awesome job -- as a dev who uses Stripe, this looks great and I'll probably purchase it regardless of the below answers.

A few questions/comments:

1\. Is it a flat $1.99? Is there IAP? Why isn't this on the splash page?

2\. A demo video -- even a simple, short one -- would be great.

3\. Is there a level of granularity available? I.E. I'd love to get 'paged' (push notified) when a customer cancels a subscription or a card is denied, but not necessarily every time there's a successful charge.

<comment><AUTHOR> jmduke - I was just reading your blog post re: pandas and pitchfork. Anyway,

1\. Flat and no IAP (In-app purchases). No reason why the price isn't on the splash page.

2\. In the future, a demo video may make sense. The app is pretty simple for its first release.

3\. We're planning to add more notifications (i.e., cancelled subscriptions) and stats to go along with stuff that goes on with your business.

Great questions/suggestions.</comment></comment></comment>


Bootstrapd - a gathering of web professionals with an independent spirit - <AUTHOR> http://bootstrapd.com/

<comment><USER2> Love to see an event like this in Los Angeles.

</comment><comment><USER3> Finally an event that doesn't have a 'startup' ring to its name.

Just bought my ticket. And I can honestly say "I can't wait"!</comment>


Cuberite – A lightweight, fast and extensible game server for Minecraft - <AUTHOR> https://cuberite.org/ <comment><USER2> The multiworlds support looks very interesting. Currently I host about 4 worlds on my Mac for my kids and their school friends. I have 4 instances of the server running on my Mac, each running over different ports, with port- forwarding configured on the home router. This looks rather less cumbersome. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER3> Cuberite is awesome! I used it as an excuse to write something in lua. I totally overhauled the portals plugin.

It's nice if you want to run a server on a pi

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know a similar project but for the client side? I've always thought using c++ instead of java would improve performance a lot.

<comment><USER5> There is a list of clients here: [http://wiki.vg/Client_List](http://wiki.vg/Client_List)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm impressed this is a Minecraft Server I can run from my Android, and it seems reasonably polished!

</comment><comment><USER7> What makes this a goos alternative? How does it handle ghost blocks for example?

<comment><USER8> Extensibility. Official server still doesn't have plugin API and it is closed- source so it can't be modified. Almost everyone uses spigot/bukkit/sponge because vanilla server lacks many features, but these are dirty hacks based on disassembly.

<comment><USER2> Does your new server have the ability to support these old plugins at all? Doesn't look like it does.

<comment><USER9> The server doesn't support java plugins for bukkit/spigot. Because none of the internals are shared any interface layer would be needlessly complex and a drag on maintenance.

The lua plugin system is well-developed and documented [1] so most plugins could be changed over easily.

[1]: [https://api.cuberite.org](https://api.cuberite.org)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but that doesn't help with _client_ side mods, which are still stuck with the old client internals.

At that point, why not just switch over to Minetest? Given enough work, it could eventually be an attractive and feature-complete clone — and be nicely extensible too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently there is a PR on GitHub to implement the Forge handshake protocol and the server side mod API of Forge. That means sooner or later you might be able to write Forge backends for your client-side mods

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't find information how much feature-complete it is.

<comment><USER5> There is a forum post which has a rough list of what is supported and what not: [https://forum.cuberite.org/thread-499.html](https://forum.cuberite.org/thread-499.html)</comment></comment>


Show HN: SNES Style Canvas Effects - <AUTHOR> https://briandgls.github.io/snes-style-canvas-effects/ <comment><USER2> How exactly are these "SNES Style"?

Just looks like particle effects. I was hoping to see effects that were actually specific to the SNES.

<comment><USER3> I came across this a while back:

[https://www.gjtorikian.com/Earthbound-Battle-Backgrounds- JS/](https://www.gjtorikian.com/Earthbound-Battle-Backgrounds-JS/)

It's a (near) perfect recreation of the battle bg's from the SNES game Earthbound

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first DirectX program I ever wrote was called Santa Robotnik.

I drew a sprite of Dr. Robotnik (from Sonic) in his egg-shaped vehicle, which had been fitted with sleigh runners and a sinister-looking robot reindeer. I made it move across the screen with a snow effect in the foreground much like the one see here.

It's real simple to do: just add Brownian motion (a tiny random positive or negative x displacement and a tiny random positive or negative y displacement) to a velocity vector that points down and slightly to the side, and increment the snowflake's position by that per frame. Multiply that by a hundred snowflakes or so, each of which reset, or die and respawn, once they fall off the bottom and you're set.</comment>


O2 outage due to expired Ericsson certificate - <AUTHOR> https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2018/12/update-on-software-issue-impacting-certain-customers <comment><USER2> It took some warming to, but I have come round to appreciate letsencrypt's short certificate lifetimes. Monthly renewal should be maximum for any system, but ideally you'd want to go weekly. Assuming your renewal is automated, I don't see any downside, only benefits. It properly internalises cert renewal as part of standard system operations, bringing it into your daily ops instead of having it as some scary gray undocumented box for the next guy to tick.

Much like writing tests, it initially hurt my ego a bit, but I've come to like and proselytise it.

<comment><USER3> Your proposal may lead to an unintended DDoS of the CA.

<comment><USER4> Let's Encrypt recommends a daily cron job for cert renewal. The certbot only actually pings the servers for a renewed cert if the current cert is within 30 days of expiration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was a major outage in the UK causing millions of people not to have data access on their phones.

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46464730](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46464730)

<comment><USER6> Not just data but also calls and text. Mother is on o2 and until about 6pm I was unable to call, was able to text her from about 4pm. Between 4 and 6 the calls were just failing with "called failed" and not even going to Voicemail, but texts was go though and I would even get delivery reports, just that calls wouldn't connect.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, O2 kept saying that calls and texts were not affected, but that was utter nonsense. I couldn't place a call most of the day, and texts _would_ go out, but my phone would insist that sending failed. And then there was just no signal at all most of the afternoon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe it would be a good idea for certificates to expire slowly and randomly over 24 or 48 hours. In other words, if the cert has an expiry date of 12:00 UTC, Dec 6th 2018, then start to randomly fail connections at that time with low probability. The probability increases progressively during the next 24 hours until 100% of connections fail at 12:00 UTC, Dec 7th 2018. It's not like the cert is 100% trustworthy one minute and 100% untrustworthy the next minute. Having the failure rate ramp up slowly would give advance warning before everything has gone completely pear-shaped.

In the case of Ericsson, this might have allowed an emergency certificate update before all the O2 systems could no longer be automatically updated. Once your network is completely down, bringing it back up remotely is hard.

<comment><USER9> I think this could also be a good idea for phasing out public APIs -- instead of just taking an API offline, start to fail requests early at low probability, ramping the probability up to 100% over the course of a month or so.

<comment><USER10> How long would it take before developers started wrapping their API and CDN calls in rapid-firing loops because of this?

<comment><USER11> It already exists and has borrowed the name "resilience engineering" from the construction and engineering fields. Netflix has some interesting blog posts on how they deal with transient faults and resilience in general. Implementing concepts like circuit breakers.

Have a search for libraries in your favorite language, I'm sure something will already exist. I've personally used Polly in .NET.

[https://github.com/App-vNext/Polly](https://github.com/App-vNext/Polly)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We use Erlang for a high availability of nine nines, so long as we remember to renew our certs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Would be interesting to know how many people who've managed footprints for a reasonable period of time (say 5-10years) who _haven 't_ had a cert expire on them. Wouldn't be surprised if it's single digit %ages.

So many human & tech error factors lead to this occurring and they're all the same old things. Staffing changes, spam filters, ignored warnings, skipped emails...

<comment><USER14> I know it's happened to every company where I've worked. It happens so rarely, though, that people don't have enough opportunity to learn from it. Even at Google they were on their Nth such outage for a large value of N before it became apparent that no certificate should ever expire at 23:59:59 on December 31, or otherwise outside of normal operating hours. Seriously 20 years of organizational knowledge required to get the company to understand that certs should expire at noon on a Wednesday to minimize time-to-repair in the inevitable event that one is allowed to lapse.

<comment><USER15> Instead of waiting last minute, you'd think a large company would have planning to renew certificates X amount of time before they expire. Alas I understand it's not that simple.

<comment><USER14> You'd certainly think so. If you have frontend probers that exercise your accessible endpoints (HTTP or whatever) then those probes should fail when the certificate expires in less than 30 days. I couldn't comment on whether an organization like Ericsson or O2 would be expected to have such probers.

<comment><USER15> I should get on that for my own infrastructure.

Thanks for the reminder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ignoring letting it expire in the first place.

The surprising part is it took over 24 hours to restore service. I currently still have 3G only, and that's struggling (apparently 4G will follow).

<comment><USER17> Still only 4G here too. Apparently we can expect it to return tomorrow morning. O2 were asked if we'll be compensated. They said they'll "apologise in an O2 way" but couldn't confirm what an "O2 way" is.

<comment><USER18> I assume that means they'll apologise by ramping up your monthly rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Certificates can be hard to manage across enterprises. I have a project coming across my desk next year specifically to manage expiring certs and track on going changes. The company has 20,000+ certs to manage for us and our customers.

<comment><USER20> I'd find a HN post about this project and it's results very interesting

<comment><USER21> There was an interesting post a few weeks back on Autotrader moving all of their online properties over to LetsEncrypt [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17949741)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ooh - I was wondering what the hell was going on.

I assumed I had dropped the darn thing one too many times.

Glad to see the HN grapevine works on wifi.

It is a reminder of just how fragile this digital world still is - we are taking technology designed to survive nuclear war, and adding single points of failure.

Let's look at mesh networking again.

<comment><USER23> It wasn't just the phones or just data on phones. GWR ticket kiosks went offline. Bus stop digital timetables went offline. On the phone, SMS delievery went wonky i.e. same SMS being delivered more than once but on the sender's phone it showed up as not delivered !

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is O2? It's not mentioned in the article but it's in the title.

<comment><USER25> O2 is one of the major telecommunications service providers in the UK: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_(UK)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_\(UK\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of the 1990 network-wide outage AT&T suffered, aka "the big one of nine-oh". Caused by a bad update which took a couple of weeks to eventually bork the entire network.

</comment><comment><USER27> Multiple providers all over the world are affected as well. For example, all Vietnamese providers has their data service disrupted yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER28> Qualys is used by O2 which has the ability to manage certificates - see their website. Most large IT systems use centralised monitoring using feeds from several sources. Did someone forget to monitor this data or was the feed from this data either ignored or out of date?

</comment><comment><USER29> If only the mechanisms that check certificates could provide warnings of impending expiry - 1,3,7,30 days would be prudent.

Though companies should be doing at least a yearly audit of certificates and calendering any that will need renewing. As I'm sure they do with domain names already.

<comment><USER30> Presumably this certificate was protecting some machine-to-machine connection. Then, no human would ever have seen those warnings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hardware manufacturers: How do you manage certificates that the customer will not touch or even see? Do you deliver new CAs alongside firmware updates? Do your software lifecycle requirements take certificates and cryptography in general into account?

</comment><comment><USER31> If an ssl cert is expired on a website, you don't have access to the secured website. In this case though, how does it affect Ericssons telcom equipment (core routers and switchs for mobileand voice) ?

</comment><comment><USER32> Same risk with domains and DNS - when people question why CSCGlobal or UltraDNS charge so much compared to cheaper alts - it's because they have your back when you miss something

<comment><USER33> The only way Ultra have your back is ripping the shirt off you in overage charges

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why do certificates expire? How is it acceptable to have a piece of data somewhere that contains a timebomb that must be periodically defused? I do not see how this helps security, and it is particularly ridiculous that normal behavior is that one day the system works normally and is deemed secure, and the next day it is so insecure and dangerous that communication simply fails.

<comment><USER35> Cryptography is basically a computational treadmill: you want to make it cheap enough that it's not burdensome for the actual users, but that reversing the information without the key is computationally expensive. Processing power, especially for the highly parallelizable task of grinding through potential keys, follows an exponential curve; ergo, even the present exponential gap is not a long-term protection mechanism.

The expiry date of a certificate was present in the original implementation of X.509 certificates; the infrastructure for certificate revocation lists was added later. Furthermore, a certificate revocation list includes _every_ certificate ever revoked that has yet to expire. If you relied on certifcate revocation for expiring old certificates as well, that would be a nasty long file you'd have to download before you can start connecting to any website.

<comment><USER36> I think the much more important reason for expiring certificates is to minimize the damage in the case that your private keys are stolen, which is far more likely than them being brute forced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> An interesting new project is Handshake which is attempting to use decentralization to remove centralized certificate authorities. Maybe it will help stop these and similar situations in the future.

[https://handshake.org/](https://handshake.org/)

<comment><USER38> Why is it better than GPG?

("Blockchain" is not a valid answer)

<comment><USER37> The idea is to use economic incentives to keep people honest rather than trusting centralized authorities which can be more easily compromised

<comment><USER39> GPG doesn't use a centralized authority. It uses a decentralized "Web Of Trust" model.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When listening to Customers Hurts: Walmart's $1.85 billion Mistake - <AUTHOR> http://dailyartifacts.com/walmarts-185-billon-dollar-mistake

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure that judging a retail sales strategy by change in sales between January and April of 2009 -- exactly the period when consumer confidence plummeted to match the tanking Dow -- is a great idea.

For comparison, line up this chart

[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:s...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI+Interactive#chart1:symbol=^dji;range=5y)

with the one in the article...

I guess the test will be whether sales will shoot up when they reverse this policy.

(The article also doesn't say anything about whether they tested this approach in some stores before converting all stores; Walmart has a long history of mining their sales data to try to pick out patterns in store performance, so if this was done as abruptly as the article says, I'm surprised.)

<comment><USER3> From the article: "- Same-store sales flipped negative (see chart above) at about the time many stores were remodeled to reduce clutter."

I think, reading between the lines, that Wal-mart has the data which says that a significant number of remodeled stores flipped negative, where a significant amount of other stores did not. As you say, they have been doing this for a long time.

The one (and only) reason I ever shop at Walmart vs. Target, is because Target has a horrible selection. They never have what I am looking for. Wal-mart usually did, even if it was cluttered. Don't get me wrong, I hate a cluttered store. But I'll shop in a cluttered store that has what I want, vs. a pristine Target-lookalike, that doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Moral of this story: drive your marketing decisions by data and analytics, not by fluffy market research. Asking people what they want usually results in "I'd like a pony."

</comment><comment><USER5> The most astounding thing is they appear to have rolled this out without testing on a few prototype stores first. Stupidity arrogance there.

</comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr I never went to Walmart because it was dirty and hard to navigate. Once they cleaned it out, there wasn't anything I wanted to buy!</comment>


Who bears responsibility for layoffs? - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/03/who-bears-responsibility-for-layoffs.html

<comment><USER2> I think many companies are just laying off because they now have a good excuse: "it's the economy". So no one will question the decision.</comment>


Here's why Indian Government banned the documentary on 2012 Delhi gangrape - <AUTHOR> http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-here-s-why-mha-banned-the-documentary-on-2012-delhi-gangrape-2066299

<comment><USER2> So this website basically printed the government's statement without bothering to quote the filmmaker or the BBC? That's not journalism, that's a press release.</comment>


Run Skype safely in a Docker container - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tomparys/docker-skype-pulseaudio

<comment><USER2> I'm dissatisfied with almost all VoIP apps I've tried (including Viber, but especially Skype on iOS). Is there any good alternative or are mobile connections still too finicky for satisfying VoIP?

<comment><USER3> I found facetime to be pretty good even in low bandwidth situations. The only problem is it does not give me an option yet to drop the video while in a video call and revert to a audio only call. But on the whole I like it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The NY Review of Books for science and technology? - <AUTHOR> I really enjoy publications like the NY Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. In theory, they're for book reviews. In practice, they're a way for non-experts (like me) to learn about major ideas in the humanities and social sciences. The writing is often quite beautiful.
For science and technology, are there publications that serve a similar function? For example, where can I find a leading scientist surveying how a field has evolved or read a lyrical take on a recent discovery?
I'm hoping for something beyond the overt storytelling or sensationalism that I sometimes find in popular magazines.
What do you read for that purpose? <comment><USER2> The American Mathematical Society has a long catalog of reviews of mathematics books, although they are often very short and not enlightening by themselves:

[https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/math-in-the- media/reviews](https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/math-in-the-media/reviews)

</comment><comment><USER3> The London Review of Books is an obvious counterpart.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the LRB, but I am looking for a science/tech focus.</comment></comment>