Ask HN: Should I use Polymer for my next project? - <AUTHOR>

I have been planning to use polymer for next project for frontend and rails on server. I have read the article posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7970781 I am still noticing that polymer is slow on FF,Safari etc(almost freezes for 2 secs). However works great on chrome.
Project would be mobile first web app(or may be mobile only). I am also considering Phonegap along with polymer. Is it a good idea to use phonegap? Is it going slow down even further?
Google I/O talks highly about but I don't see much improvement in performance and also I am doubtful if the eco system is mature enough to consider it to ship a product in next 2 months or so? <comment><USER3> The reason polymer is slow on firefox and not on chrome is because firefox does not support html imports yet, so polymer uses a polyfill that relies on asynchronously loading the html which causes a delay in the initial load. Support for html imports is not implemented in safari either.[1]

[1] [http://caniuse.com/#feat=imports](http://caniuse.com/#feat=imports)

<comment><USER4> The HTML imports polyfill shouldn't be much slower than native, since native imports are also asynchronous, but block execution of subsequent scripts. Any (small) slowdown would be from the browsers pre-scanner not knowing to optimistically load imports. This can be avoided completely by using the `vulcanize` tool which bundles all imports into one file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First, are you using Polymer 1.0? It's much lighter weight than Polymer 0.5.

Second, is this a big project with lots of transitively dependencies? Like ES6 modules, HTML imports encourages more granular files that can be referenced and loaded individually. With HTTP/1 this can cause slowdowns as you hit the browser's request limit. HTTP/2 loads a bunch of small files significantly faster. For production we recommend the `vulcanize` tool which concatenates all HTML imports into one file for fast loading.

If you are using 1.0, do you have an example that shows the 2 second freeze? That shouldn't be happening.

</comment><comment><USER5> You should Forget about using polymer with Firefox. Html imports won't be supported. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Web_Components/HTML_Imports)

</comment><comment><USER6> I used Polymer for a project a few months ago and I ran into browser support issues. Polyfills helped for most browsers, but my application wasn't working on iOS Safari. I'm not sure if that is still the case, but if so, I would choose to use a different framework such as Angular (easy to pick up) or React (slightly more difficult to pick up).

<comment><USER7> During Polymer was in beta I had same problems (safari). Would be good to check if that is solved with 1.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No.

<comment><USER9> Can you elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm optimistic about web components, but I don't think Polymer's ready yet - <USER2> was seeing their demo components not work in a new Chrome on Linux just a couple months ago (they still may not work, I'm too lazy to go through the examples right now).

The main two draws of Polymer are that it's built on web components (which are cool and futuristic) and that it implements material design (which is nice looking). There are other material design widget libraries however, even ones made by Google. Have you seen MDL ([http://www.getmdl.io/](http://www.getmdl.io/))? It's a more minimalistic CSS/Javascript approach and will probably be faster and more cross compatible.

FWIW the three things you mentioned (Polymer, Angular, React) are kind of dissimilar in an apple-to-oranges way:

* Polymer is basically a UI widget library with some other bits thrown in - it doesn't really help you structure your application, it's just widgets for building the view layer.

* Angular is a full-ish MVC platform that provides you with tools to build your own UI components/widgets

* React is just a toolkit for building UI components, and it doesn't come with anything else (but it does encourage a kind of design where you don't need much else)

Neither of the latter two come with pre-built widgets: you have to make them yourself or find libraries of them made by others (which is pretty easy to do).

For my money, your expectation on which of these is easy to pick up is backwards: Angular is way, way more complex than React and has a much higher learning curve. React does basically one thing (and does it very well) so there's really not much to learn about it at all - you can pick it up in a day once you wrap your head around the rendering-as-a-pure-function-of-state concept. Angular is a full framework and it does a lot of things and is opinionated about how it does them, so there's a whole lot more to learn. If you need all that MVC stuff done for you, Angular might be the way to go though (but beware the coming 2.0 transition that's going to break all backwards compatibility completely).

I personally like React a lot - I'm probably going to try to wrap MDL components in React for a project I'm working on right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing the link [http://www.getmdl.io/](http://www.getmdl.io/) I did not know about it.

I think you are right, Team is thinking in similar lines. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Annotate PDFs in Google Docs -- An open letter to Matt Cutts - <AUTHOR>

Matt
You don't me from Ghandi. But I have the utmost respect for the work you do and for your involvement in the HN community.
I am not a fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. However, I have enjoyed seeing the evolution of Google Docs. There is still one thing that is missing from a mass movement to Google docs. That would be annotation of pdfs.
See, I use Google docs to quickly disseminate these pdf documents to people, but I have to use a clunky client-side interface such as Xournal to annotate. To save the annotations to a pdf, I have to reprint my annotation, which then has to be OCRed for people to read my annotations.
This is rough.
So my letter to you is, if you like the idea and have any sway with the team, to please, please, please work on getting this feature, or let us know if something is already in the works.
Much regards with all you do, TomRod <comment><USER2> I flagged this, but I feel I should explain why.

We're lucky enough to have folks like Matt (and other influential figures from a wide selection of companies) participating day-to-day in this community. They engage us directly on matters of policy and current news as it pertains to their organizations, and we give them valuable feedback and insight from outside; it's a symbiotic arrangement.

Now, put yourself in Matt's shoes, and think about how you'd feel if posts like this, requesting some particular feature for a Google product or reporting some bug or another, became regular. Would you continue to participate, or would you sense that the usefulness of the relationship had shifted a bit too much away from you?

(I imagine being a geek/startup celebrity here on HN is what it must feel like to be a well-known VC at a mixer in San Francisco. Oh, what it must be like being pg... ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. How would you recommend getting this idea to people who have enough credibility to do something about it? I do not have the capability to attend SF mixers :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the typos.</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on a hedge fund investing in my seed stage startup - <AUTHOR>

Without giving too much away, my co-founder is all for the idea.
However I am generally wary of hedge funds.
We are in the seed stage where a few angels have committed. Just not sure what the experience of having hedge funds as shareholders is like. Any thoughts/ experiences you could share would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> The term "hedge fund" covers a tremendous range of firms. That said I would look out for the same things you'd look out for in any funding arrangement: price, control, dilution, liquidation preference, unusual rights, etc. If you're just looking for money, it all spends the same as long as it doesn't come with onerous terms. However, you won't get any of the putative benefits of working with a "real" VC: access, guidance, services, follow-on funding, etc. You definitely do not want to end up with a cap table comprised of one line item for founders and one line item for the "hedge fund"'s investment on some weird-ass terms; that will make it nigh-on impossible to secure follow-on funding. I would feel best about taking this kind of money if I had a "real" VC as the lead investor and the hedge fund folks were minority, pari passu, and personally known to me. Also, DO NOT sign any document without legal support. Make the legal relationship, spend the money, understand what you're being asked to agree to, and PUSH BACK if you don't like the terms being offered. A broken structure is not the foundation you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sound advice! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My concerns would be:

1\. How do their interests align with yours in terms of liquidation timelines?

2\. What sort of relevant expertise does the relationship make available?

3\. How do the industry norms of the hedge fund industry differ from those of technology focused venture capital?

4\. Are your Angels favorable toward the idea?

These are all aspects of the more general question, will a hedgefund make a good shareholder for the type of company you are trying to build.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think 1 and 3 are the ones I'm researching and finding answers for. As those I think will eventually lead to a yes or no!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's no reason to mistrust a hedge fund - they are not as evil as they're portrayed in the press. I would question why a hedge fund is investing in a seed stage startup as that generally does not fall under their mandate. (Time frame mismatch.) But from your perspective who cares, just take the money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's the question I need answering as well. Time frame mismatch. I don't get why they would.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Share an interesting article you've read recently - <AUTHOR> Can you share an interesting article you've read recently?<p>Tech, startups, lesson would be nice. <comment><USER2> Not exactly what you asked for, but I have a personal subreddit where I collect interesting links: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sonyasupposedly/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sonyasupposedly/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Thanks for sharing though</comment></comment>


The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1998) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf <comment><USER2> I love how the (now famous) researchers dismiss at the time what has become Google's main chase:

"These types of personalized PageRanks are virtually immune to manipulation by commercial interests. For a page to get a high PageRank, it must convince an important page, or a lot of non-important pages to link to it. At worst, you can have manipulation in the form of buying advertisements(links) on important sites. But, this seems well under control since it costs money"

<comment><USER3> And yet, everything in that paragraph is absolutely true. If anything, they have stopped short from taking it to its logical conclusions. Since it costs money, only when more money than it costs is involved will this take place.

<comment><USER3> To go further, the implicit assumption that they were making when stopping short was: Google will never be big enough that people will spend money to manipulate it. But it did, and people do.

To me this reinforces that you should take seriously things like 50% bitcoin attacks. If bitcoins become valuable enough, someone will do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And here's the original patent. I never knew until now that Sergey Brin wasn't on it.

Will expire in about a year and three months!

[https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999](https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999)

<comment><USER5> Well, they didn't call it Brinrank :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> the best part of the paper was this: "To test the utility of PageRank for search we built a web search engine called Go ogle" now a company worth hundreds of billions.

</comment><comment><USER7> Also fun and related: [http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/)

And another paper by Page and Brin: [http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

<comment><USER8> 10+ years ago I needed to contact someone from Google and I found this page. At the time, I didn't know who Sergey Brin is. So I mailed the guy to an email provided at the bottom of the page and told my colleagues something like:

        I found a guy who works at Google, we should be all good, I just emailed him, let's see what he says.

Everyone was laughing their heads off when they asked me the guy's name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also relevant: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO05LIU/ushhUIQQ- ogJ)

<comment><USER10> In the mobile app I'm using the company name in your comment has split across two lines as "Go-ogle", which suddenly made so much sense!

I was slightly disappointed that this isn't what it says in the paper, or presumably your comment!

(Still no Ida why it was split when words are usually wrapped.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it still possible in today's Academia setting to conceive a company like Google without oweing anything to the institution in which it was created? It looks like the first version of Google was even hosted on Stanford's computers.

<comment><USER12> Do colleges own startups people create while going to school? If so that sounds horrible considering how much college costs.

I heard if you work for a company while also developing a startup depending on the contract the company can claim they own the startup - even if you were working on it at home with your computer you bought with your own money and off the clock for them.

<comment><USER9> No, but they do own patents created by their researchers.

Stanford didn't own Google, they owned the PageRank patent, which they licensed to Google in return for equity.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. "patents created by their researchers" so if it's a official school project then, and not someone doing it on their own? That would makes since. I don't get why schools need patents in the first place though.

<comment><USER9> Even if they're doing it on their own, it might be owned by the school if it is related to the work they're doing, just like any company.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. I thought people went to college to learn, not to work for the school.

Do they get paid to do this sort of stuff too? I know I heard of people working in like the library to help pay down their loans. Just never really thought of colleges owning IP. So just a bit of a surprise to me.

<comment><USER9> Universities are research centers, not just schools.

Undergraduate students get scholarships for doing research, grad students do research as part of their studies and professors are usually researchers as well.

<comment><USER13> According to this article Universities are hedge funds with schools attached.

[https://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are- becoming-...](https://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are-becoming- billion-dollar-hedge-funds-with-schools-attached/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is 1998 Link. Is this still at least partially valid

<comment><USER15> I think Google stopped updating Pagerank two years back

<comment><USER16> You're thinking of the "public" PageRank value previously displayed in Google's browser toolbars. Those are indeed no longer updated. However, there is still some variant of "PageRank" in use internally.

<comment><USER17> They are probably still using it, but I think they apply spam and duplicate content detection first and also limit PageRank flow to sites of similar topic. Another thing they could do is to nullify the old links for resold websites.

Besides that, time spent on page and social signals such as likes and tweets probably count for more than links. A crappy spam site would be disregarded pretty soon, because people would immediately bounce back to Google and try other sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> But does it work in practice? It doesn't seem to. PageRank is mostly a marketing tool.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/hits- on...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/hits-on-the-web- how-does-it-compare/)

"The fact that in-degree features outperform PageRank under all measures is quite surprising. A possible explanation is that link-spammers have been targeting the published PageRank algorithm for many years, and that this has led to anomalies in the web graph that affect PageRank."

<comment><USER19> Well, if you are looking for a measure that is the easiest to game, abuse and spam, you cant go wrong with your pagerank killer: in-degree.

It works less well than it used to, but its never used in isolation. Used in isolation its a pretty good porn detector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any act of measuring a system changes that system. Pagerank did more to destroy the value of the web of links than any other technology before it because it was so good at measuring its value. Extracting that value then instantly leads to diminishing it because others (in this case the link spammers) want a slice of that huge pie.

I believe that each and every technology that successfully manages to index the web in a new and useful way will further diminish the value of the web.

<comment><USER20> _Any act of measuring a system changes that system._

How about when I measure a stick using a ruler?

<comment><USER21> He means a system that can react to the measurements. Like how predicting the stock market is fundamentally impossible because whatever you do, the stock market can react to your prediction.

<comment><USER20> But he said 'Any'. I'm looking for a counterexanple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are there any other good reads on how this technology is implemented, the shortcomings since it was first released, improvements in the algorithm, splitting the calculations up into a map-reduce for the modern (larger) web, and anything else that might be a good read?

I just googled for some implementations like this one in Go: [https://github.com/dcadenas/pagerank](https://github.com/dcadenas/pagerank)

<comment><USER23> [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sergey+brin](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sergey+brin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of the new Black Mirror season 3 pilot</comment>


Searching for Tuva: Before the internet and now - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/products/search/searching-tuva-internet-and-now/ <comment><USER2> I think in the future, they'll reset the calendar with what is now 2000 being year zero. Because everything that happened after that ended up with an indexed web page, and thus is searchable. They'll call pre-2000 the pre- digital era and it'll be sort of like the line between Old English and modern English. I guess eventually we'll digitize everything that's ever been printed, but still.

Sadly, in the past I remember clearly thinking that, someday, when smart phones and high speed networks are ubiquitous and literally everyone has access to all the world's information at a touch of a button, the world would be a better place due to the increased knowledge of the average person. Democracy, I thought, could only prosper in the light of such egalitarian access to information. How wrong I was...

<comment><USER3> I share the sentiments of some that believe in our current ephemeral web and damageable media, we're in a dark age that is worse than before the 90s. No one is keeping anything in a permanent way yet.

<comment><USER4> To make things even more interesting, because of the overly long copyright, everyone's clinging on to anything they can. As a result a lot of stuff is buried and most likely destroyed by the passage of time (how many CDs have you had that can't be read anymore?). Say what you will about piracy, but it can surface interesting things people and companies are hoarding in the undefined hope that sometime in the future they will become valuable again.

Examples:

* source code and assets of games made in the 70's, 80's and 90's: very often you can see even the companies that made these games unable to re-build these games, because they lost the source code (!)

* documentaries from many broadcast networks

<comment><USER5> Many works are left to rot on fragile film reels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "something given has no value". The author is going out of his way to make his acquisition of information harder so that he might value it more than the same information that just lands in his lap. Some distinguish data from information from knowledge from wisdom. Slowing down and forcing oneself to absorb better - to think and reflect on human scales - is noble, but perhaps the problem is we need differently shaped brains to deal with this firehose of information. Attention span suffers at this level, no time to synthesize what we just absorbed.

</comment><comment><USER7> I 'found my Tuva' last year, a broad and intriguing topic hiding in the middle-half of the 19th century. And I thought I'd wind up having to go to physical libraries to get answers to many questions.

No, as it turned out; thanks to the copyright-free status of all the excellent, digitized books from that era (and the following 50 years of comments ... also copyright-free). Within a month I had amassed over 2GB of maps, PDFs of original sources (many from Archive.org), and more than enough quality, modern commentary.

It was and remains an absorbing adventure tale ... set in an earlier era ... and I never had to leave this desk.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Great Soviet Encyclopedia" was translated and published into English. These books contain a very detailed information about "Tuvinian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic". Finding information before Internet was difficult but not impossible.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even if there were no internet you could just buy a plane ticket SFO-KYZ and in 30 hours you are standing in Kyzyl after a few transfers and a $2000 setback for round-trip. This is thanks to USSR cracking and revealing tasty pulp. You will still need to get a visa, and consulate in SF is now closed.</comment>


Ask HN: How does your open source project ask for sponsors? - <AUTHOR> What is a classy way to ask for money for an open source project? I just now realized every project needs a desired outcome. For open source, money is a positive outcome.
I know this project is very small but I want to perfect the classy approach before trying it elsewhere.
----
Sponsorship
\[ YOUR LOGO HERE \]
Please contact xxxxxx to discuss adding your company logo above and supporting this project.
https://github.com/fulldecent/FDSoundActivatedRecorder/blob/master/README.md
----
Is that too much, too little? What other classy approach have you seen on other small to medium sized projects? I'm not talking about Joomla, but rather the millions of projects that HN readers are contributing to. <comment><USER2> YOUR LOGO HERE quickly results in people trying to do SEO optimization with unrelated ads, just FYI, presuming the domain has some decent link juice.

<comment><AUTHOR> If they're paying rent I suppose I can't complain. All my projects are on GitHub.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where are the tech-oriented psychologists/therapists on HN? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to find a therapist with experience troubleshooting poor hacker performance and having difficulty. I realized HN has its resident lawyers, but not psychologists. Surely there must be some people whose interests and practice intersect the tech industry and psychology/therapy. Where are they? <comment><USER2> Sherry Walling: [http://zenfounder.com/](http://zenfounder.com/) might be someone to contact.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for this.</comment></comment>


Do you include the org name in the repository name? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious what opinions are on this naming scheme.
For example, with CircleCI, the repository for docs is https://github.com/circleci/circleci-docs while for Linode, the repository for docs is https://github.com/linode/docs.
Do you or do you not include the org name and why?
For me, I think I'd lean towards not because I keep all of my local repositories in a `Repos` directory followed by a directory for the org name. So if I had a project called `foo`, I'd have it in `~/Repos/felicianotech/foo`. <comment><USER2> If your org has "docs" for more than one project, then "OrgName/ProjectName- Docs" is fine.

If your org only has one project, then "OrgName/Docs" is great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I agree with that. I've seen some people want it the other way because of "branding" but I think it's redundant.</comment></comment>


The End Of Management? - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1101040712-660965,00.html <comment><USER2> Manager's manage people, information, and actions. Prediction markets aggregate predictions. Not much overlap.</comment>


Amazon in advanced talks to buy Zoox - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-self-driving-car-tech-company-zoox-11590538611 <comment> tech-historian This is an interesting purchase for Amazon on a number of levels. Obviously they have a huge delivery fleet that could benefit from self driving vehicles. And a giant company like Amazon must love an opportunity with an enormous addressable market such as this one.

But the timing is interesting too IMHO. Amazon played the long game a little bit here and waited until self-driving technology was in the "trough of disillusionment" [1] to pounce on a promising startup. It saved itself billions of dollars in the process, let some of the pretenders fade away, and gave itself better odds of success.

Self-driving tech is still a slog though, and success is not guaranteed by any stretch. But I give them kudos for this.

[1] [https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner- hy...](https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle)

<comment><USER2> Considering how far behind they are from competitors like Google, I wouldn't exactly call it a winning strategy. And they are going to spend billions on the acquisition anyways, regardless of how good or bad the technology is. To me this move seems more like desperation than brilliance on Amazon's part.

<comment><USER3> > how far behind they are from competitors like Google

Zoox run their tests in San Francisco, a city known for chaotic traffic conditions. They do so rather successfully (see their YouTube videos). This accomplishment alone means they are not really "far behind".

<comment><USER4> Doesn't SF have wide, neatly planned streets and great weather all year? I can't imagine these cars driving on some narrow European roads from the medieval times in the winter

<comment><USER5> No. and No. Unless you include fog and rain as great weather.

San Francisco is one of the oldest cities in California, as such, the city layout is largely from the pre-automobile days.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Francisco,+CA,+USA/@37...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Francisco,+CA,+email@example.com,-122.4690227,13z/)

A look at google maps shows the city is splits in large perfect squares of roads themselves split in smaller squares. It's typical US modern layout, the antithesis of European layout.

<comment><USER7> Most of the US is definitely very regular, the exception being Boston. There was an interesting article about city street orientations.

[https://geoffboeing.com/2018/07/comparing-city-street- orient...](https://geoffboeing.com/2018/07/comparing-city-street- orientations/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recall Zoox dumped their CEO founder quite suddenly, this announcement reminded to look up the story. Food for thought re founders and controlling stakes in startups.

[https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/why-self- driving-c...](https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/why-self-driving-car- company-pulled-the-brake-on-ceo-20180923-p505gh.html)

<comment><USER9> I do wonder if they've been positioning for an exit and that this is all the fruit of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Employees will make peanuts to nothing if Zoox gets sold for < 3.2 billion. This will make many folks who work at Zoox very unhappy esp with the amount of stress that engrs are taking every day. I hope engrs make some money here otherwise bye bye loyalty.

<comment><USER11> That's how startups go.

If you want certainty and no chance of winning big, join a Fortune 500 company. If you want uncertainty and a small chance of winning big, join a startup.

For the engineers, they wouldn't likely win big on a sale below a certain value, but that doesn't make it a total loss. They'll have a job at a FAANG with likely a higher total comp than before. Replace stock option lottery tickets with regular RSU dumps at a decent paycheck.

<comment><USER12> It seems like you are agreeing with previous post that engineers will leave as they may not get enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, I never thought about it before but partial self-driving assistance makes a lot of sense for deliveries.

I live in a pretty quite neighborhood in a suburb of Chicago and I see Amazon Prime vans drive by all the time. The driver parks, hops out, runs around to grab the package, drops it off, drives on, and repeat.

This is a great scenario where you don't need _total_ autonomy all the time: the delivery person could drive the highways and complicated parts, and then when there's a cluster of deliveries where the speed limit is 25mph and the roads are clear and regular, the van could go from house to house, with the delivery person hanging out in back or something.

It's not full self-driving, but it seems like it could make deliveries a little more efficient.

<comment><USER14> I was under the impression that freeways were the easiest target for self driving. The lack of pedestrians, bicycles and unprotected left turns makes it much more predictable. It's hard for humans because the speed is much faster than human reaction time evolved for, but that's not as much an issue for self driving. Tesla for a very long time only supportted self-driving on freeways.

Neighborhoods are the complicated parts: they're filled with pedestrians, cyclists, kids, animals, and uncontrolled intersections.

AFAICT, a self driving car has to pretty much assume that every pedestrian might suddenly dart into traffic, it can't really tell the difference between a normal pedestrian and a drunk heads down in their phone.

But keeping speeds below 20mph opens up a lot of opportunities simply because stops are basically instantaneous at that speed and because car-pedestrian collisions under 20mph are almost never fatal.

<comment><USER15> "Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph... The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph" [1]

But, importantly, that's for human drivers, who are probably braking when, or at least after, the collision occurs. An AV that completely fails a detection wouldn't necessarily even try to stop.

[1] [https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk- seve...](https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-severe- injury-death/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Everyone in this thread is so focused on self driving cars and yet they are ignoring the possibility of self driving deliveries.

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/07/nuro-gets-ok-to-test- its-d...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/07/nuro-gets-ok-to-test-its- driverless-delivery-vehicles-on-california-public-roads/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Also note that Amazon are awaiting clearance of $500m funding for Deliveroo (UK food delivery).

[https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-provisionally- clears-...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-provisionally-clears- amazon-s-investment-in-deliveroo)

Just how many acquisitions and fundings have they provided this year?

</comment><comment><USER18> Can someone explain why non car companies are buying self driving car tech? Do they think they will end up with some sort of kit they can just attach to existing cars? Are they trying to pivot into being car manufacturing companies? Or is this just a play to develop the AI then sell that to someone else?

<comment><USER19> Amazon is now a major shipping and delivery company, in addition to everything else (as of last year, they were apparently delivering half of their packages themselves [0]). My guess is they would like to automate that.

[0] [https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/19/21029932/amazon- logist...](https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/19/21029932/amazon-logistics- delivery-network-fedex-ups-usps)

<comment><USER11> Delivery is a huge portion of Amazon's costs, and most of that cost is the last mile of the delivery. What are the biggest costs of last-mile delivery? Human labor costs and fuel. What's Amazon putting money into? Self-driving vehicles (less human labor time) and electric vans.

Bias note: I work for Amazon, but not in that department.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> archive: [http://archive.is/evYQ7](http://archive.is/evYQ7)

 _The companies are discussing a deal that would value Zoox at less than the $3.2 billion it achieved in a funding round in 2018, according to people familiar with the matter._

<comment><USER21> 3.2B was a pretty wild valuation though...

<comment><USER22> Even moreso now After a few years we all know we're not as close as we all thought to having a car without a steaming wheel.

<comment><USER23> I for one will miss the days of both driving around and enjoying a good sauna.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was just about to accept a job offer from Zoox. I'm going to have to rethink that now.

<comment><USER25> Depends if they'll give you equity as part of the comp with an acceleration clause. If so, congrats on your lottery ticket.

As my uncle used to say, you can marry more money in a moment than you can make in a lifetime.

<comment><USER26> If it's stock options at the last round valuation then they will be worthless. In theory the 409A valuation should be adjusted but in practice it's most likely still at the 2018 round value.

<comment><USER25> I'm just saying asking is free. Better to have the conversation than regret. The worst that happens is OP is told no and/or the equity is worthless and moves on to a better opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Amazon is buying 100K custom delivery vans so integrating self-driving is a logical step. They can even use existing delivery routes to map out a city before turning on autonomy. [https://electrek.co/2020/02/06/rivian-amazon- electric-delive...](https://electrek.co/2020/02/06/rivian-amazon-electric- delivery-van-closer-look/)

<comment><USER28> But isn't a driver still necessary for moving packages form the van to a home/business?

<comment> tech-historian Yes, that is a critical step, of course. But the "last mile" problem is only a part of the logistics business. Trucks drive loads of packages between warehouses/fulfillment centers before being placed on smaller vans for home delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It'll be interesting to see what the price ends up to be.

With Rivian already get investment from Amzn, the picture of autonomous & electric delivery vehicle can be quite appealing.

I guess the price would reflect how eager is Amzn to implement that strategy, and how realistic they think about the roadmap.

<comment><USER30> You have to remember it's a completely different situation for companies like Amazon, Cruise versus Rivian, Tesla etc.

The former has a restricted use case. Specifically, driving around specific suburban cities where if conditions are bad or issues are found they can easily just fall back to human drivers.

The latter is trying to do self-driving under all conditions, all scenarios and where it's much harder for Rivian/Tesla to determine if it's safe or not to use self driving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I actually thought Art Levinson would bail out his son!

<comment><USER32> At least Jesse is quite accomplished. Some of Qualcomm's lesser-known acquisitions are c-suite's bailing out family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Their YouTube videos are just amazing to watch: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh5q-FtihPqzTbgEkZQRy3g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh5q-FtihPqzTbgEkZQRy3g)

</comment><comment><USER34> I guess they are playing for a portfolio approach. With investments in a bunch of different companies, in-house drones, and robotics research. Very interested in how they integrate them into Amazon, if at all.

</comment><comment><USER35> I feel it was only a matter of time. Amazon is competing on every front. And any transportation initiative would be core to their business. I won't be surprised if they bought an airplane company.

</comment><comment><USER36> For a moment I read "Zoom" :D Would probably also make sense for amazon since they offer everything these days.

<comment><USER37> As someone who used Chime, their conferencing service, anything would be an improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Am I the only one that read this as "in advanced talks to buy ZOOM"? I almost freaked out when I thought I read that..

</comment><comment><USER31> Congrats to Zoox! What kind of exit would an L3/L4 engineer make here?

<comment><USER3> (IANAL)

If bought at 1B, which is roughly the amount of VC money they took, the employee pool will be roughly worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What are the chances that there is no rational thinking behind this deal? What I mean is, what if some Amazon exec said, "Hey, sounds like a cool project, let's throw a couple $b their way and write it off as R&D in the worst case?" Or maybe that exec is buddies with a VC who lost a ton of money on Zoox, and the exec decided to bail out the VC at the expense of Amazon shareholders? Or maybe someone at Amazon really likes Jesse Levinson?

<comment><USER30> Zero chance. Less than zero chance.

Companies don't make billion dollar purchases with no due diligence with just one person involved in making the decision. And they don't buy companies just to immediately write them down.

Amazon is one of the most successful companies in the world. They didn't get there by acting like children.

<comment><USER39> Collective decision making and financial due diligence can't always stop you from making dumb decisions. Especially at the most successful companies in the world.

<comment><USER40> Is there a chance that this will turn out to be a bad decision?

Sure.

Is there a chance that Amazon did not analyze it to death before making the decision?

Nope.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Micro-optimizing Go Code - <AUTHOR> https://about.sourcegraph.com/go/gophercon-2018-micro-optimizing-go-code <comment><USER2> Can you even get native asm out of golang or write it?

I was under the impression you could only get and write that Plan9 stuff that still needs to be translated.

In high performance Java world it is pretty common to bust out jmh (Java microbenchmarking harness) to see the actual assembly that hotspot produces in its various passes. It is an amazing tool.

By far the most common way to optimize functions in Java at this level is to run it through jmh and tinker with the Java code until hotspot produces what you want it to. Does that work in Go too as well as it does in Java?</comment>


The Surprising Worst Browser - <AUTHOR> http://saucelabs.com/blog/index.php/2011/08/the-surprising-worst-browser/

<comment><USER2> "Here's the raw data. Firefox beats Chrome and I don't like that result, so let's fudge with the data a little bit."

"Look, now Chrome is beating Firefox. But IE still isn't losing yet, so let's make up some reasoning and fudge some more until we're happy!"

"Ah, that's better, now IE looks like it sucks and my worldview is no longer shattered. Hooray for fudging data to make it say what we want it to!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Firefox never beat chrome, and I like both of them the same amount.

When I first did the data dive, I thought Safari was worse than IE, which I thought made a much better blog post. That would have been way more surprising. It was after _due diligence_ that I was forced to discard that result.

<comment><USER3> Firefox 4 and 5 in the first graph are significantly lower than Chrome. Obviously it's a pretty dodgy comparison to make since Chrome isn't split by versions, but I agree with hammock that it seems statistically unsound to arbitrarily drop some versions of some browsers, especially when they can't do the same for the Chrome results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "All jobs run recently have lower error rates because our service continues to become more reliable as we fix bugs our users discover. "

This says to me that none of the results can really be trusted because the error count is not just errors in the browser - it's apparently significantly affected by errors in their system, and we don't really know by how much.

Plus it seems kind of anachronistic to come to some conclusion about how the browsers compare having removed FF4 and FF5. It's only of historical interest how FF3.6 compares since anyone that downloads it now is going to get FF6 now anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> It may be true that SauceLabs's code for each browser is the same, but Selenium surely has significantly divergent code for each browser. I wonder how to rule out crashes caused by Selenium's browser-specific code...

</comment><comment><USER5> _At first we thought the high error rate could be the result of the fact that we always run Safari on Windows, while it's made by Apple. That's easy to dismiss, because earlier versions of Safari were fine._

I'm sorry, what? That's a pretty weak dismissal.

<comment><USER4> The earlier data points on the graph show low error rates for Safari browsers on Windows.

The article may have benefited from including a larger caveat about only testing one OS, but this seems like an intellectually honest elimination of a confounding variable.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps intellectually honest, but a weak conclusion nonetheless: in my understanding, getting Safari 5 to run on Windows requires porting parts of Apple's huge, complicated Cocoa framework to Windows. That framework is always changing, and so is the browser-- and they both primarily target OS X. With OS X, Windows, Cocoa, and Safari all moving quite a bit between Safari versions, I would be surprised if it didn't become harder to support Windows as the product grows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "all FF3.5 jobs are from a long time ago, before we'd had much time to streamline and errorproof our system."

"This is the same graph as above, with the unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged browsers removed"

What? Why not take out _all_ results from the period when your system was unstable, rather than removing the results that looked 'wrong' to you? Good grief.

<comment><AUTHOR> The system was never very unstable. The error rates are all low. The point is that it's now much more stable.

The reason I didn't sort error rates by month was to preserve statistical significance. If we try to only look at error rates from specific periods of time, we have to decide how short those periods of time are. Too long and we don't have data from some of the browsers; too short and we don't have enough data to form a significant opinion. It may have been possible to find a middle ground, but why bother when we can still get unbiased results for 80% of the browsers?

<comment><USER6> I get what you're saying, but you still removed data that _you thought was wrong_ in order to give the results you were expecting. Who's to say that the results for Chrome in that period were not also wrong?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the point of this article? It appears to be that Safari proxy mode is unreliable, which I guess is surprising but not that interesting.

Given that the actual article does not have anything to do with the headline ("error rates" is never really satisfactorily defined, the real story is proxy mode Safari, and IE6 came out 9 years ago), what makes this headline so compelling?

Do headlines with the word "surprising" always work? Is it that everyone deals with browsers, so a browser related story is likely to have a wider mind share? Is it that web developers all just want a chance to make fun of IE6, due to the collective pain that it has inflicted on all of us?

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh look, free, anonymous Windows VMs for 20 minutes (it's trivial to open CMD.EXE from any browser in the saucelabs setup). Any statistics on what people run in those VMs, other than browsers?

<comment><USER2> How do you do that? When I type "C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe" in the browser bar it says "Access to that resource has been disallowed."

<comment><USER9>
      1. Go to File > Open, then click Browse...
      2. In 'File name', type 'c:\windows\system32' and press enter
      3. Change the 'Files of type' field to 'All Files'
      4. Drag any of the files into the 'cmd' icon

Bonus: type `explorer C:\\` if you want to snoop around. There's a copy of Safari at C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.exe

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regardless of possible testing or analysis concerns, it's pretty clear that Safari 5 has a higher error rate than Safari 4 or 3. Safari is the only browser to go down in quality over time. This appears to be further evidence that Apple is putting less resources towards Mac software in favor of supporting ios devices. Fairly concerning for all of us Mac users.

</comment><comment><USER11> So you claim to have "significant data" but the first thing you do is throw out huge swaths of it because it's not actually significant?

Also regarding graph 2's commentary, 0.51 is not "almost" double 0.34. It turns out to be only 1.5x, so calling it "almost double" is about as meaningful as calling it "almost the same".

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this diffentiate between bugs in the browser and plugins? I've debugged several IE issues in the past and it's almost always a plugin.

</comment><comment><USER13> Spoiler: it's IE 6 -- and the copy even says at the end that the surprise is that it's not a surprise. Points for the Ash reference though.

<comment><USER14> IE6 is a bad browser, how shocking.

The actual interesting story here is Safari 5.

<comment><USER15> Safari on windows is terrible. In my own tests last year it kept erroring out or rendering incorrectly. <http://www.craftymind.com/guimark2/>

<comment><USER16> Safari 5 on OSX Lion is terrible.

I'm usually a safari fan, but since upgrading last week nothing but trouble. Opened Chrome and Firefox a few times instead but I'm to accustomed to Safari now... and admittedly the gestures are AWESOME.

I was hoping the 10.7.1 update would have fixed it but nope :/ Maybe 10.7.2, I feel my days numbered ATM though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IE6 is not a surprise...</comment>


The CIA's amazing bots - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2011/02/10/the-cias-amazing-bots/ <comment><USER2> From the 70's... your imagination can just run wild with what they might be using today. It's both very cool and somewhat scary.

<comment><USER3> I'm highly skeptical about that dragonfly from the 70s. I think it's a mock-up at best, there's no way they made something useful for surveillance etc the size of a large dragonfly. Not in the 70s. Researchers working on this for decades can barely do this today!

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing all it did was fly around loosely controlled if at all. The miniaturization is impressive, but they were not likely able to do much more than a small internal combustion engine in the 70s.

Today however I would not be surprised if such devices exist and are in practical use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those interested: [http://www.delfly.nl/?site=DIII&menu=home&lang=en](http://www.delfly.nl/?site=DIII&menu=home&lang=en) the smallest I've seen with camera!

</comment><comment><USER6> The CIA can't even sniff out a double agent who kills a station chief and a hand full of others in AFG...doubtful they have robots smaller then this : [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Raven_UAV...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Raven_UAV.jpg)

full article here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_UAV>

you guys watch too much movies

<comment><USER7> >Miniature auto differential created for tiny flying robots

<http://www.gizmag.com/differential-micro-air-vehicles/16250/>

>Harvard University's Micro-robotics Laboratory claims to have created the first tiny micro-robotic fly able to generate enough thrust to take off. It has a wingspan of 3 cm and only weighs 0.06 grams.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATZzzeipags>

<comment><USER6> Neither of which are in use with the US gov't! If you fools haven't figured it out, the US gov't is not a futuristic entity with all gadgets 10 years before they come out. Leading up to and shortly after 9/11 you couldn't search for multi word strings on FBI computers, and you think they have nano bots? HAH!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's disturbing to me about this is not the technology (which is awesome), but the fact that it's been buried in the government trenches for 40 years. That kind of knowledge hoarding seems highly antithetical to the "American spirit".

<comment><USER9> The CIA's always been antithetical to the "American spirit" - an intelligence organization is, by definition.

Agreed, though - it would be nice if this had seen the light of day before now, moreso given the fact that we still can't figure out how the damn thing works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, I wonder how many tiny spy cameras they have flying around disguised as insects right now...

<comment><USER11> From a 2007 story in the Washington Post, "Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs" [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801434.html) :

       Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in
       Lafayette Square last month.

      "I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college
      senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the
      hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little
      helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

      Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

      "I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer
      said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that
      mechanical, or is that alive?' "

      That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar
      sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some
      suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools,
      perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> is this a joke? seriously, who are these guys (either CIA, or this post's authors) kidding?

it all reminded me of all those Castro assassination attempts, each more perverse than previous, and of course all a complete failure: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/638_Ways_to_Kill_Castro></comment>


Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings - <AUTHOR> http://www.clusterize.com/comparisons/5-us-presidents-job-approval-ratings

<comment><USER2> I think there are one too many dimensions to this data. I know they collect statistics on both approval and disapproval, but for the most part approval + disapproval = constant, so I think it would be more informative to simply plot something like (approval - disapproval) on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. Then you could see the trends and compare different presidents without having to watch the animation once for each president and then trying to remember where that president went while you're watching the next one so you can compare them.

<comment><USER3> Actually, for several of the presidents, approval + disapproval != constant. For example, Obama moves straight right (up on disapproval) for his first 200 days before descending in approval. There seems to be a substantial difference between the effects of actions that anger some (presumably of the opposing party) and those that disappoint all.

<comment><USER4> There's a good analysis of how to design a visualization that shows both approval and disapproval here:

[http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two- lin...](http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two-line-charts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny how time can sometimes heals all wounds. Contrast Truman's approval ranking on the graph from the OP's post with his aggregate ranking in this table from Wikipedia, where he is ranked in the first quartile.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presiden...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States)

</comment><comment><USER6> Depressing... Watching the consistent motions, I think this says more about the people than it says about their presidents.

<comment><USER7> Or maybe that certain presidents make certain promises and then consistently break them. Obama has been very disappointing, I had high hopes for him.

<comment><USER8> Read this:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew- sull...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how- obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html)

<comment><USER9> What's Obama's long game on signing NDAA 2012? There's no excuse for that.

<comment><USER10> It's a budget bill; it gets enacted every year to fund the military. It must be signed eventually (and in this case, on the very last day). Blame your entire government for putting things like the infinite detention of citizens inside of a budget bill.

<comment><USER7> > _It's a budget bill_

That got to be the stupidest excuse to introduce new horrible laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The interface is pretty nice. Why are you plotting approval vs disapproval? These aren't independent quantities... I'm sure there is a better way to relate these two.

<comment><USER6> Approval + disapproval is almost always less than 100 in most polls.

<comment><USER11> Right, thus the dependence between the two quantities.

<comment><USER12> I think it's interesting that at the beginning of the Obama time series, his approval rating remains constant while his disapproval rating steadily increases. Assuming that "Approval + Disapproval = 1%" would lose that information.

Maybe it would make more sense to show approval (or disapproval) and undecided?

<comment><USER13> This seems to be happening with many presidents in their first 200 days. See Johnson, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Bush Sr. for examples. Also check out Nixon, who manages to go up on _both_ metrics for the first 200 days.

The numbers support this: on average, 32% of the population is neutral towards a newly elected president. After 200 days, this has gone down to 19%. The same numbers for approval ratings remain steady: from 64% to 63%, while those for disapproval necessarily go up: from 4% to 18%.

This means that even the people who voted against the winning candidate (always between 40% and 60% of the turnout[0]) are initially mostly neutral towards them. But while the people who voted for him stay loyal for a bit (possible because they don't want to feel they've been deceived), the people who voted against him have no qualms about voicing their disapproval.

I have to admit that this "let's wait and see" attitude was pretty surprising to me. It seems like people refrain from judging a president until after he has actually made policy, as opposed to immediately upon taking office, as I would have expected them to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be helpful if impossible points were the background colour (for example, 60/50 or 50/60, 40/70 or 70/40, etc) so that the big mass of whitespace is less distracting and it is more evident when neutral people shifted to one opinion or if people flip-flopped.

</comment><comment><USER15> The problem with this visualization is that you've got X/Y being disapproval / approval. The only case when they're not correlated is during the first few days of entering office.

There might be a less confusing way to display the data.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fascinating (and strangely inspiring) that after ~550 days in office, every single president on the chart had the explicit disapproval of at least(!) 16% of the country.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for this. The animation is interesting. Ping pong Truman, for example. Learned some things too, like that LBJ finished up worse off the Nixon did.

</comment><comment><USER18> This appears to be totally broken in Firefox (9.0.1, on Linux)... don't know what's up with that.

<comment><USER2> Works prefectly fine for me on FF 9.0.1 on Ubuntu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to see the same thing with congress's approval ratings broken down by member of congress.</comment>


WebViewProxy for iOS - easily intercept requests from UIWebViews - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/marcuswestin/WebViewProxy

<comment><AUTHOR> This tool complements WebViewJavascriptBridge really well for HTML5 apps on iOS. (<https://github.com/marcuswestin/WebViewJavascriptBridge>)</comment>


Come out and get accepted or rejected with us:  irc.gnome.org #candyisdandy - <AUTHOR>

Defeats are softened and victories sweetened because we did them together. <comment><USER2> You can also chat about it in the Hacker News chatterous room:

web: <http://www.chatterous.com/landing/hnyc/hcker/>

phone: text CHTR JOIN hnyc hcker to 41411

email : @join hcker in body to email@example.com

jabber/google talk: add firstname.lastname@example.com and send @join hcker

<comment><USER3> Chatterous rocks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting if true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the record, there's #startups on Freenode, and axod (from HN) runs <http://mibbit.com/> where it can be accessed by a webapp.

</comment><comment><USER5> 12 people and counting so far on irc ...

</comment><comment><USER6> It's more like pre-jects...

<comment><AUTHOR> Prejection party! Woo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> turns out to be a rejection +1 room it seems :P

</comment><comment><USER8> Pre-acceptance

<comment><AUTHOR> This is no time for optimism :D.

<comment><AUTHOR> This statement was true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Over 30. Wow.</comment>


Electric Vehicles Cost Less Than Half as Much to Drive - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/14/electric-vehicles-cost-less-than-half-as-much-to-drive/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_content=1285095798&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainTwitter#386455693f97 <comment><USER2> This will only last as long as fuel taxes are able to pay for roads. At some point in the future you will probably be taxed by the mile, or in some other way to make up the difference. I 100% agree that maintenance is less on an electric car, especially for someone like me who keeps a car for 10+ years. I can hardly wait to own an electric car so I can ditch oil changes,timing belts, exhaust issues, cooling system problems etc.</comment>


Oak: A more portable alternative to C, powered by Brainfuck-inspired technology - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adam-mcdaniel/oakc <comment><USER2> > About the Author

> I'm a freshly minted highschool graduate and freshman in college looking for > work.

Jesus fuck that's impressive. At that age my mind was on being bad at skateboarding, casual arson and trolling pre-2000 online places

<comment><USER3> Well said. His work seems to have some elegant ideas. Imagine what he will be doing when he's finished college. Some people are truly brilliant.

<comment><USER4> I suspect he'll be figuring out more new and unique ways to serve us ads.

edit: and that's no knock on this kids skills / talents!

<comment><USER5> Then it's on us to make sure that society can provide opportunities beyond putting the best minds of our generation into generating more clicks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excellent and fun project. Error handling seems light... especially at runtime, but for a toy, its cool. Hard to argue its more portable than C until it can self host though.

<comment><USER7> The best comparison is the popularity of forth in small resource-constrained situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not to be confused with Oak [0], the precursor of the Java programming language.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_(programming_language)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER9> Not to be confused with JavaScript, whoms percursor LiveScript should not be confused with LiveScript which was a successor of CoffeeScript, a Ruby inspired counterpart of JavaScript.

<comment><USER10> LiveScript _is_ JavaScript, "JavaScript" was just a rebranding in a joint Sun- Netscape marketing effort, while other Netscape technology stuck to the "Live…" naming scheme, as in LiveWire or LiveBridge. When there was still a language attribute to script tags, "LiveScript" was happily accepted as a synonym for "JavaScript" (or, rather, the other way round).

<comment><USER9> I know. There are two LiveScripts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Every instruction operates on a memory tape. This tape is essentially a > static array of double-precision floats.

Why doubles? I would think integers are the more primitive type.

<comment><USER12> Probably because floats can represent ints, but not the other way around?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having it written and distributed in Rust kind of defeats the whole "compact" sales pitch, as you now have to download a couple gigabytes to try it out...

<comment><USER14> > you now have to download a couple gigabytes

You... don't?

Default installation size of the Rust toolchain is about 800mb extracted to disk, way less so of downloading.

Hardly an inordinate filesize for a development toolchain. For example, MSYS is 950mb just for the C++ toolchain. You might shave a lot on Linux thanks to package reuse, but "conceptually" it would be about the same size, just that in practice you start with some parts downloaded.

<comment><USER15> They _may_ be referring to the Windows MSVC target, where you have to install the C++ build tools to get access to link.exe.

... that being said, if they distributed a binary, you wouldn't need any of that, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought this was going to be a troll post that links to Ook: [https://esolangs.org/wiki/ook](https://esolangs.org/wiki/ook)!</comment>


Teaching robots to feel pain to protect themselves - <AUTHOR> http://techxplore.com/news/2016-05-robots-pain.html <comment><USER2> Much better article and (bonus points) straight from source: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics- softwar...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics- software/researchers-teaching-robots-to-feel-and-react-to-pain)</comment>


Statistically split concatinated words: 'imateapot' to ['im', 'a', 'teapot'] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/keredson/wordninja <comment><USER2> The true test is whether it can split salesexchange into sales exchange instead of sale sex change

<comment><AUTHOR> it can! :) >>> wordninja.split('salesexchange') ['sales', 'exchange']</comment></comment>


What does it feel like to invent math? (2015) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFDM1ip5HdU <comment><USER2> As seems typical, this video goes on for a while and is straightforward until it completely loses you all of a sudden. I have no idea what would even motivate the separation of numbers into "rooms" like the video shows, let alone how that explains why an infinite positive sum = -1.

<comment><AUTHOR> The infinite sum makes sense when using the p-adic number system [1] -- and measuring distance using the p-adic metric -- which forms an ultrametric space [2]. An interesting related concept is the Bruhat–Tits building [3].

For an intro on p-adic numbers, read these two short articles "A first introduction to p-adic numbers" [4] and "A Tutorial on p-adic Arithmetic" [5] or see the short video "Introduction to p-adic Numbers" [6]:

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrametric_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrametric_space)

[3] Bruhat–Tits building [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_(mathematics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_\(mathematics\))

[4] A first introduction to p-adic numbers [http://www.madore.org/~david/math/padics.pdf](http://www.madore.org/~david/math/padics.pdf)

[5] A Tutorial on p-adic Arithmetic [https://koclab.cs.ucsb.edu/docs/koc/r09.pdf](https://koclab.cs.ucsb.edu/docs/koc/r09.pdf)

[6] Introduction to p-adic Numbers [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdjYiU6skgE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdjYiU6skgE)

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is that the introduction of the p-adic metric was poorly motivated. It's not clear why we would want 1+p+p^2+p^3+... to converge to -1, and introducing the p-adic metric to do so doesn't show why the p-adic numbers are useful in general (all it's really saying is that the partial sums are 2^(n+1)-1). I'm sure you can derive all sorts of weird metrics so that various weird identities are true; that alone fails to make them interesting. Based on this video alone it's not clear that either the identity or the p-adic norm are interesting in any non-trivial sense of the word.

The result is that the introduction of the p-adic metric is hard to follow and the resulting identity seems arbitrary, even if you manage to follow the bit about the metric.

(And these combined with a lack of rigor where it's needed seem to be recurring problems in 3Blue1Brown videos.)

<comment> t-ob > I'm sure you can derive all sorts of weird metrics so that various weird > identities are true

On the rational numbers, at least, the p-adic metrics are more or less your whole lot, according to Ostrowski's Theorem [1].

There is a kind of cognitive hurdle everyone who studies these numbers has to clear, in that things that should be "large" turn out to be very small indeed, when viewed under a p-adic lens. I think it's more instructive to build up the ring of p-adic integers first [2, chapter 2], and construct the p-adic numbers from there. I can assure you they are very useful, though! A general theme in number theory is to take a "global" problem, defined over the integers, and to translate it into infinitely many "local" ones (over the p-adics, for each prime p). These are sometimes easier to solve and, if you're lucky, offer insight into the global solution you're looking for.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrowski's_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrowski's_theorem)

[2]: [http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9780387900407](http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9780387900407)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that he does have a webpage [0] and you can support his continued work via Patreon [1].

[0]: [https://www.3blue1brown.com/](https://www.3blue1brown.com/)

[1]: [https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown](https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown)

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't understand the proof for 0.5 + 0.25 + ... = 1 itself. By his visual number line analogy, wouldn't 2/3 + (2/3)^2 + ... = 1 too? Visually, that too seems to "approach" 1.

<comment><USER6> It approaches 2. 2/3+(2/3)^2 = 2/3 + 4/9 = 6/9+4/9=10/9 > 1, and all the terms are positive, so as you add more terms it will get _farther_ from 1. If you do 10 terms you get to 1.96532somethingsomething. If you do 100 terms you get 1.[seventeen 9s]508somethingsomething.

<comment><USER7> leereves is correct.

The sequence is 2/3 + 2/9 + 2/27 + 2/81 + 2/243 + ...

and it does approach 1

In your second term you should take 2/3 of the remaining 1/3, not (2/3)^2

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know of a book, channel, or subreddit which is focused on critiquing the explanations in videos and blogs like this and talking about the art of explaining technical concepts?

<comment><USER9> I don't think that would be straight forward, because of competing ideas.

<comment><USER8> Hence why I suspect it would make more sense as a subreddit or other forum, where you have people debating what does or does not make a good explanation.

I guess it would be kinda like literary analysis, but with a much clearer practical point.

<comment><USER9> for children or adults, general or math specific, school/university/doctorate context or just plain how to make things understood? Because the latter is basically just what mathematics should be, see [http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=mathematic](http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=mathematic)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I especially like the 3Blue1Brown videos on Hanoi/binary-counting and explaining (visually) Euler's Identity.</comment>


Bezos is selling $1B of Amazon stock a year to fund rocket venture - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos-idUSKBN1772ZQ <comment><USER2> I love the private venture space race - finally fueling innovation from the private sector and making this a viable industry.</comment>


Best Buy: Grasping at Straws  - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/03/29/best-buy-grasping-at-straws/

<comment><USER4> I don't know if the economics of this make sense but it's always seemed to me that the logical end goal of this is that brick and mortar stores should refocus as marketing arms of manufacturers. That is, they should price goods basically at cost such that they're economically indifferent to whether a sale is made or not but charge manufacturers a significant sum for shelf space and promotion.

Lots of goods genuinely do require an in person experience to evaluate whether to buy but can be had cheaper online. What ends up happening is that people go to the stores to handle the goods & chat with the salespeople, then later buy online. In effect, B&M stores have been giving a huge, inadvertent subsidy to online stores the entire time and I can't help but imagine that's what's really crippled their businesses.

I think perfumes will be one of the early indicators of how these new business models will play out. The entirety of the experience of a perfume is how it smells and that's something impossible to convey online. At the same time, all perfumes of the same brand are guaranteed to be chemically identical and shipping costs are a minor part of total costs so it's perfect as an online good.

<comment><USER5> "In effect, B&M stores have been giving a huge, inadvertent subsidy to online stores the entire time and I can't help but imagine that's what's really crippled their businesses."

True, but on the other hand online stores subsidize B&M too. I've often looked at the ratings on Amazon and then bought something at a B&M because I wanted it right away or wanted an easy return, if needed.

<comment><USER4> I imagine the cost of developing and maintaining an online review system is relatively trivial in the overall scope of running an online business. Your example is just online vs B&M competing on their own merits. OTOH, it costs real money to hire knowledgable salespeople and real estate for attractive displays.

I don't know if this is a causal relationship but I noticed companies drastically cutting back on the quality of salespeople around the time online shopping became big. This would make sense economically as stores could no longer capture the full economic value of good service. OTOH, for vertically integrated stores like Apple, the incentives are aligned and the quality of staff is noticeably higher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Someone at Reddit pointed out something interesting, in response to a different article covering much of the same information.

Back when Circuit City was around, Best Buy was aggressively responding to Circuit City opening new stores by trying hard to put a Best Buy near that Circuit City. They would do this even if there was already a Best Buy within a few miles of that location.

Now that Circuit City is gone, Best Buy is left with quite a few stores that really have no reason to exist--they are too close to another Best Buy. These are a major contribution to the list of stores they are closing.

Closing these stores is not necessarily a sign of trouble.

<comment><USER7> Maybe that's true in some sort of a common sense perspective, but the closing of those stores still translates to diminished growth from an investor's perspective which will tend to really punish the stock price and put more pressure on the leadership for cost cutting and/or restructuring.

<comment><USER8> I don't think I agree that slower growth due to closing stores necessarily leads investors to sell the stock. A typical metric in retail is same-store- sales. If you close a BB store that is in close proximity to another BB store, its possible (probable?) that the surviving store could see a jump in same- store-sales. Investors may see this as a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I, and Ron Johnson, still worked for Apple, he told a story that has stuck with me. As he told it, he was talking with the CEO of Williams Sonoma who was complaining about the difficulty of getting people to make return visits. "If you need a pot, you come in to the Williams Sonoma, buy a pot and leave. You don't come back unless you need another pot or something else for the kitchen...and how often is that?"

Johnson's replied that the key to return visits is to make each visit an experience. "Put on cooking demonstrations, teach classes, provide samples. Then people will go to the mall _just_ to visit the Williams Sonoma."

Sure enough, every time I'm near a Williams Sonoma, I make sure to stop inside.

Of course, it's easy to follow the MBA handbook and talk to investors about "changing compensation schemes" and "reducing cost, improving product mix, blah, blah, blah". To get ahead, you have to be daring...a little crazy even.

For example, the "Apple Creative" program was one of Johnson's ideas: hire top-notch trainers, and charge people $99/yr for weekly lessons.

What?!? That's positively INSANE! Have you ever looked at what it costs to take lessons with a certified Final Cut Pro trainer? And yet every Apple Creative was certified in at least one of the pro products. How on earth could such a plan make any money?

How on earth could such a plan result in a $100 billion bank balance?

How indeed...

<comment><USER10> It didn't, though. Apple was circling the drain for many years until the iPod and iPhone saved them. At this point they've even taken "computer" out of their name.

<comment><USER11> You're making an argument that the parent isn't. No one in their right mind would claim that the iPod and iPhone aren't major contributors to Apple's current condition, but are the two mutually exclusive? Are you claiming that the Apple retail strategy hasn't contributed to Apple's success? That seems just as silly.

I don't believe that there are many of Apple's decisions you can cherry pick and still arrive at the same Apple you have today. The "experience" at the Apple store is definitely one of the decisions that are inextricable from Apple's overall success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My new philosophy: If Amazon doesn't sell it, it's not for sale.

Roughly 100% of the electronics, toys, and assorted crap that I purchase comes to my front door. Certainly everything that you could imagine a store like Best Buy selling, I just buy online these days. And I'm by no means ahead of the curve in this respect.

I'm sure there's still a store in my town that would sell me a television. But I have no idea where it is.

</comment><comment><USER13> _If you want to see how consumer electronics can still be sold in retail locations, just spend ten minutes in an Apple store. They are selling some of the same products as Best Buy, but the two experiences couldn't be more different._

I think the comparison to the Apple Store is unfair. Apple doesn't have to compete on price. A MacBook Pro costs the same regardless of where one purchases it and so Apple can create a store that's a joy to be in and know that customers will purchase there. If you're going to be paying the same price, why not shop where the experience is the best.

On the other hand, most of what Best Buy sells can be bought in a competitive market. If I go to Best Buy to buy an Asus computer, I might find better prices elsewhere. I'm going to buy it at Best Buy if they have the lowest price. As such, if Best Buy spends money to make that experience of buying an Asus a joy and has to charge a bit more because of it, I might browse there and buy elsewhere.

It's Apple's tight control of the pricing of their products that allows the Apple Store to be a viable business model. Apple doesn't have to worry about MacMall or Target or Best Buy undercutting them.* They don't have to worry about a customer asking their trained staff all of the questions and then going to Best Buy to actually make the purchase. Best Buy does need to worry about that on the majority of their products. If Best Buy puts money into smart staff members to explain my different laptop options, I can easily go elsewhere to make the purchase cheaper should those staff costs appear in the price.

It's a lot easier to provide a great experience when you don't have to compete on price.

*Yes, Amazon and B&H do offer discounts on Apple computers, but those discounts are usually small compared to the overall price and small compared to the variation in PC pricing.

</comment><comment><USER14> HDMI cable query, first search result:

$13 - Best Buy

$6 - <USER3>

HDMI cable query, most expensive on first page:

$696 - Best Buy

$14 - <USER3>

 _That's_ why Best Buy is dying. If the meaning is unclear here, my comparison represents how distorted and convoluted Best Buy is as a company.

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember thinking during class at business school (1992-1996) that the internet was going to cause a major shift in retail. To survive in the internet age, retail would need to morph into basically a manufacturer showroom, with very knowledgeable staff and where most goods were ordered in- store or online and just drop-shipped.

Why? Because the retail industry had devolved into essentially a real estate business; manufacturers bought shelf space from retailers. Manufacturers had essentially no control over the person-to-person sales/education experience for their own goods. Manufacturers hated it, especially new entrants, since it was so hard to introduce a new and actually better product.

It's taken about 20 years, but this is finally starting to happen at scale. Companies like Sony and Dell tried it, but they didn't really invest in the right floor salespeople or retail experience to make it anything other than a Sony store vs a Best Buy. Apple is really the first company to nail it, and it's paying off big time. It is really cool to see, as I think it's such a move in the right direction for both manufacturers and customers.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think there are several problems with Best Buy.

* only seems to stock the cheap crap with high markup. You quickly learn to avoid this (looking at you, monster cable.) * Staff is not knowledgeable. There is not a lot of imperative to buy at Best Buy, since you get the same level of help as you do at an online retailer - at best, none. At worst, misinformation. You generally figure it out based on reviews and research either way. * The corporation aggressively pushes things that will cause ill will. Lying about HDMI cables, high warranty costs, upselling way beyond the customer's need, etc. * Its usually more expensive than an online competitor.

I still think that there is a place for a brick and mortar retailer of electronics. In fact, done well, I think it could thrive. I'd pay a couple of extra bucks to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about, and to be able to get something I want _now._ But Best Buy is predatory. Somehow treating your customer shitty while charging more isn't sought after. Odd.

<comment><USER17> Frye's is a brick and mortar retailer of electronics and they seem to be doing pretty well. Granted, they're in the same boat in terms of customer service, but they've at least found a market for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> From working at Best Buy during college, a major part of their problem was the independence of the local management.

HQ would pass down all these lovely plans they spent millions to develop and test, then there was no real follow through. Store management just did whatever they wanted anyway.

We'd spend all this time at Saturday morning meetings learning about our new initiatives; how to relate to the customer and make recommendations instead of selling.

Then come monday it was back to the same thing we were doing before we wasted 300 hours of labor learning about some already forgotten scheme.

Another huge problem was they way they promote. Supervisors and managers were almost universally promoted completely based on sales ability.

For some reason they couldn't quite figure out that sales ability and management are two completely unrelated skills.

</comment><comment><USER19> The bottom end is Best Buy's biggest problem--mainly that this is how Best Buy makes money. Much of what Best Buy sells requires no physical interaction with consumers. This is as much about experience goods as it is about Best Buy's market. There are a variety of experience goods sold online--headphones, iPods, laptops, TVs, musical equipment--and its probable that a large number of these sales are not decided because a consumer walked into a physical store and experienced the product beforehand.

For instance, the first headphones I spent more than $30 on where a pair of Audio-Technica M-30s. I could not find these headphones in a physical retailer. I found them online, and I bought them purely based on the recommendations of others. I now own a pair of Audio Technica M-50s, which I bought based on the experience of the first pair of Audio-Technicas and the recommendations of others.

The element not explored in the article is authority. Authority plays a big role in how we buy things. Best Buy is perceived to have little authority; they hold little regard for consumers and have questionable customer service. Newegg, on the other hand, treats consumers well, and consumers come back to the site. Apple stores have authority, because Apple has created the impression in people's minds that you can go to the store to get your electronics needs fulfilled.

The other variable is price. jrockway commented here that he wouldn't buy a $60 USB cable from Best Buy. Why? Because he knows USB cables are much cheaper online, new or used. The problem here is price _and_ authority. Best Buy reduces their perceived authority when they sell generic goods obviously overpriced. Best Buy is selling cheap goods as expensive goods; their biggest obstacle to success is people's knowledge that Best Buy is overcharging you. That is the symptom (not the cause) of their issues; knowledge for most people is irreversible.

What does Best Buy actually need to do? Get their authority back. Give people a reason to come back to Best Buy. Actual customer service goes a long way.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe they should charge a membership fee, like Costco, and sell their products close to cost. Especially once Amazon has to start paying sales tax, this might be enough to make it work.

Although, I had a gift card or something which required I make a $25 purchase (batteries) in person at a Best Buy, and the experience was horrible. I'd pay 1.2-1.5x as much to buy from Amazon and not have to deal with an icky store, obnoxious salespeople, and painfully slow checkout process.

<comment><USER21> Amazon charges sales tax in NYC, and I still prefer them to Best Buy. The problem is that Best Buy never stocks high-end items, only overpriced low-end items. So there is just no point in visiting unless I want to pay $60 for a shitty USB cable, which I never do :)

<comment><USER20> NYC has B&H, so I don't understand why the issue of where to buy AV equipment is even an open question :)

<comment><USER21> This was a big shock to me when I moved from NYC to Chicago. Stores in NYC actually stock things I want to buy, and the employees actually care about their customers. It's very, very strange.

(My first experience was buying shoes from the Asics store. I walked in, asked for a Gel Evolution 6 in size 11 2E, and they had it in stock. Never in my life have I been able to buy shoes at a store...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pretty soon, the only end-customer things in cities will be coffee, restaurants, bars, yoga, and gyms. And Apple stores, apparently.

It seems nostalgically sad, but there's also going to be lots of space for doing "something" locally. I don't know what though.

<comment><USER23> _And Apple stores, apparently._

And maybe stores for other brands, provided they will come up with a way to offer a similar experience as that of an Apple store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm having trouble locating the source, but 5 - 10 years ago (when Best Buy was flying high) I read an article that talked about Best Buy's financials and it revealed that a massive portion of their profits came from (mostly impulse) buying of CD's and DVD's, not all the big ticket electronics and appliances. This was one of the reasons all that stuff was in the front of the store right by the registers. I remembered wondering at the time what their long-term plan was for extracting themselves from that dependency once it was commonplace for those goods to be entirely digital. Apparently they didn't have one.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading the article and the comments here... I have to say it's rather sad how many are completely ignoring the single biggest differentiator between brick and mortar retail and online shopping: human interaction.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is an interesting example of how disruptive technology is. E-commerce is just too powerful a force and the low costs and ease of use will soon demolish our conceptions of what a retail store should be. With rising gas prices, no one wants to drive to a store, spend time searching for products, and be subject to annoying taxes and price hikes that B&M need to have to profit. It's an interesting but scary proposition because as more stores close down and jobs are displaced to programmers/web developers/etc, you get a pool of uneducated workers who saturate the employment pool with good work experience. This leads to lower and lower wages due to obvious excess supply and, well, you know how that goes. This is truly a scary transition that will become more commonplace in the coming years. There will be an uptick in jobs for people like us, but most people, even college students now, have no idea how to do much more than load memes in a "internet explorer thingy firefox". An even scarier question is when will E-commerce no longer need an abundance of highly paid programmers to build their infrastructure? I fear Amazon has nailed the proper way to shop online and their template is just that, a template. Wordpress killed the idea of a unique blog. Everyone can have a wonderful looking site and have no clue how anything works. When everyone can be extraordinary and stand out, no one stands out.

<comment><USER26> This is a little too post-apocalyptic. I think the biggest thing you miss in your argument is that a lot of human beings don't really want to do the same thing as all the other humans. There will never be a point where Amazon is the only option for E-commerce. Wordpress will never be the only blog software option. There are millions of people who won't go to Walmart simply for the fact that it's Walmart.

Honestly, do you think there will be point when we say, "Welp, we've written all the software. Now what?".</comment></comment>


Show HN: Djangy, Heroku for Django - anyone use this? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Djangy's mentioned not-unoften around here since its developer is a regular:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=endlessvoid94>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm - I've been on here for a while, and I've never heard of it. Glad to here it's somewhat known at least. Do you know endlessvoid94 or have any experience with Djangy?

I'm excited to see it, and that they're using Git and not Hg. I came into Py/Django from RubyTutorial's great use of Ruby/Rails/Git/Heroku and I was hoping Django would build a similarly good starter kit.

Not that DjangoBook is bad at all, but for noobs like myself I think the simplicity of having everything so integrated gets me past some of the intimidating things and feeling good about the tools without the high learning curve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been on their invite list for a few months now. Cant wait to get my hands on it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It looks pure Heroku-clone (meant as a compliment):

easy_install djangy

djangy create -a myapp

git push djangy master

Now you've deployed: <http://myapp.djangy.com></comment>


Ask HN: Smartcards for encryption and signatures - <AUTHOR>

An application I develop for a customer requires users to authenticate themselves in a reasonably trustworthy and secure manner. The customer requested that each user be supplied with a hardware token that can be used to encrypt and sign content created by that user. Sounds like it should be easy to do ...
The only standard that seems to be helpful, however, is the PGPcard (which supports RSA and DSA up to 3K bits, but not e.g. ECDSA). Which is still great - except that there is exactly one vendor that can consistently supply the hardware (kernelconcepts.de), and one awesome newcomer - YubiKey NEO, that is less than 2 months old, and is going to spend at least three out of it's initial four months being out of stock. Prices for these are in the $30-$50 range, depending on quantities and configuration.
Is it my inadequate market research, or is smartcard adoption and availability for these purposes really so rare?
Note that I'm not looking for two-factor authentication or anything of the sort; I need to be in a situation that a signed or encrypted message conclusively proves custody of a portable unique token at the time, regardless of how malicious the phone network is, how malicious an involved system administrator is, or however many hidden cameras watch the user's screen and phone while they are busy authenticating. And I would be happier to not be dependent on a single supplier.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> This is extremely simple, actually.

Just set your web server with SSL mutual authentication and require the client certificate to be an A3 (smart card or usb token). You can even restrict the CA or roll your own.

This is not rare, in fact, some countries require all companies to have at least one A3 certificate. Using A3 certificates for authentication is inherently a two-factor authentication, it can even be three if you require password for the actual service.

<comment><AUTHOR> My question is on a different level completely:

Where do you actually get those tokens, at a reasonable price ($20-$40 each, not the $100-$500 of RSA and friends) in the US? If I want my users to present certificates like that, I expect them to be able to purchase them themselves.

Once they have the key, the exact procedure is less important (The app I'm working on is not, in fact, a webapp, so I can do whatever I please. In fact, I need the user to sign documents with their certificate, not just present it).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to stimulate a toddler's brain/STEM? - <AUTHOR> I have an 18 month-old son, and I'm looking for ideas to stimulate and support his STEM-ish skills as he grows. He already has his number train legos, a bead maze, and an abacus but I'm sure that there's many more great toys, activities and techniques I haven't thought of.<p>I'm especially interested in hearing from other parents, so please highlight that fact in your responses.<p>(Posting anonymously to preserve my and my son's privacy) <comment><USER2> There is a very good book, recently shared here on HN: Brain Rules for Baby, [https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Baby-Raise- Smart/dp/09797...](https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Baby-Raise- Smart/dp/0979777763) I recommend it. In short, the best things to develop toddler's intelligence are talking to them a lot, simple toys (boxes, plain blocks), and common tools for creativity like markers and paper.

I am also thinking about ways to develop abstract thinking in my baby. I plan to work on cards / minibooks to teach him some abstract concepts in a basic way: like transformations, combinations, logic, sets, etc.

I think it's very important not to force it on children, do not burden them with your expectations - they will rebel or build low self-esteem. It should be a delicate support, encouragement for them to follow their natural curiosity deeper, like Paul Graham described in his recent essay [http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is an Einstein quote that goes something like, "if you want your kids to be smart, read them fairytales. If you want them to be extra smart, read them extra fairytales."

Some people I know in childhood psychology and education basically say, that early on, these specific topics in STEM are beyond the human mind at that age. For example, you can give them a programming toy or game, and they will learn the game, but not the ideas behind programming.

It takes time for the young mind to develop the capacities we take for granted as adults.

Another thing to keep in mind is that kids eventually resent the pressure parents put on them for career choices. Would you have a problem if they chose to be an artist or musician?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely not. We plan to get him music lessons too. I just want to make sure he has as much opportunity as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Parent here.

Kids who go to day care talk to other kids so they learn social skills.

Kids who hang out with adults learn better verbal skills. A kid who grows up with adults with high verbal skills will sound more intelligent whether or not they really are.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do a search for `music +maths' and you will see that the two are closely related. Another search for `music +health' will show that ensuring an interest in music should benefit his health. He could excel at maths without realising how that came about!

</comment><comment><USER6> I would look for toys that help teach causality.

Also, train sets and marble maze blocks can be an early exposure to a very abstract take on branching logic.</comment>


What Disturbed Glenn Beck About the Facebook Meeting - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-facebook-meeting-3bbe0b96b87f#.ebyx96c5f <comment><USER2> I stopped reading at "What disturbed Glenn Beck"

<comment><USER3> Dude, also not too enamored with the guy, but this is not bad stuff; so worthy of a read. He came away from the meeting saying + things about FB. Am left of center, do not use or like FB (pun intended), but do appreciate the viewpoints of different people both politically and professionally.</comment></comment>


Her Cellphone Number Used to Be Elon Musk's. You Can Imagine the Calls She Gets - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/05/21/858155045/she-gets-calls-and-texts-meant-for-elon-musk-some-are-pretty-weird?t=1590069451515 <comment><USER2> I would imagine she's going to get a lot of calls now requesting to buy the numbers of people contacting Elon.

<comment><USER3> Buy the number from her, import into Twilio, and publish every SMS and call received to Twitter :)</comment></comment>


Hype Driven Development - <AUTHOR> https://blog.daftcode.pl/hype-driven-development-3469fc2e9b22#.fbbf28lpf <comment><AUTHOR> What seems to underly all of these hype curves is a fundamental belief that software development is easy to trivial, and the programmers are just lazy whiners: we just have to find the right management techniques. As far as I can tell, this belief is the only constant in software.</comment>


IPhone launch: September 21st - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/26/att-vacation-blackout-further-affirms-next-iphones-september-21-launch-date/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how the recently-acquired Samsung mindshare will affect this particular iPhone's sales. I imagine the die hard fans will purchase the latest version with an increased sense that Apple is the righteous"original" and the best way to spend money on a phone, like always, while there will be a minority who have taken a look at the Samsung Galaxy S2 or even the S3 and would actually pause to do a side-by-side comparison. I hope that the latter category of consumer increases and dents iPhone sales.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish they launch unlocked version simulatenosly this time. Last year it was just a month, but still, I am sure they can do better.</comment>


A Large-scale Study of the Use of Eval in JavaScript Applications (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/gkrichar/papers/eval-ecoop-2011.pdf

<comment><USER3> I know the HN ranking hates pdfs so let double my upvote with a comment - <USER2> is pretty cool.

<comment><USER4> Why would anyone hate pdfs? It's the best way to share a document that's not meant to be edited.</comment></comment>