Gene patents probably dead worldwide following Australian court decision - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/gene-patents-probably-dead-worldwide-following-australian-court-decision/ <comment><USER2> An odd title; this patent was already struck down by the Supreme Court of the USA in 2013[0]. Now it's no longer valid in Australia. The cost of tests for BRCA1/2 mutations is dropping dramatically; were the medical apparatus of the USA not so drastically broken, the cost to consumers of this test would today cost the consumer around $50 US. This is thanks largely to the ACLU and some geneticists in NYC, including Harry Ostrer.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad_Genetics#Association_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad_Genetics#Association_for_Molecular_Pathology_v._Myriad_Genetics)

<comment><USER3> Does anyone know how the medical test at the heart of this legal issue compares to something like the raw data from 23andme? 23andme v4 gives you 25 SNPs for BRCA1 and BRCA2.

<comment><USER2> A comprehensive test looking at the BRCAs may deeply sequence sequence the entire gene(s); spanning around 150 thousand base pairs. You'd not only want to look for SNPs, but novel SNVs, and various structural variants (SVs) and copy-number variants (CNVs). I don't know the most common class of mutations for BRCA1 and 2, so it may be the case that a smaller, cheaper panel could be nearly as effective as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now, if we can just agree that natural products and traditional cures can't be patented. India has been fighting hard for that.

<comment><USER5> If we could kill patents altogether that would be a much nicer step. Patents are an invention from another Era and make absolutely no sense nowadays, and we see them constantly abused to make our lives worse in the end.

<comment><USER6> Not true. Patents increase the incentive for people to do hard research and development. Whether or not that increased incentive is necessary is debatable.

<comment><USER7> They also decrease the incentive for people to do research and development (e.g: as derivative works from existing inventions).

Which effect is stronger? It is very plausible that overall, the decrease is far stronger than the increase, as the vast majority of inventions are derivative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist?

I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society would have more able-bodied and able-minded people to work or even conduct themselves in a way that didn't transmit their illness, whether physically or through dependance.

By leaving the weak weakened, we indirectly transmit that ailment to others by physical and economic forces. You're only as strong as your weakest point.

<comment><USER9> The question is: what kind of valuable things would still be produced? You'll still get iPhones, but will you get ARM cores or Snapdragon chipsets or LTE or MPEG4 or pills that cure Hep-C?

The bigger picture is that almost all hard R&D takes place under the umbrella of _some sort_ of protection from copying. Intel spends billions a year on semiconductor R&D, and protects it with trade secrets. Pharma companies spend billions on drug R&D and protect them with patents. Even internet companies like Google and Facebook depend on being able to hide a lot of their "secret sauce" (either algorithms or compilations of user information) on the server- side where it can't be easily copied.

Hard R&D that isn't protected from copying is usually subsidized. The core internet protocols were subsidized by the Government. Advances in core browser protocols are subsidized by Internet companies that rely heavily on ad revenue. Going back further in history, Bell Labs was subsidized by AT&T's telephone monopoly and PARC was subsidized by Xerox's copier monopoly. That model can work too, but has its own problems.

<comment><USER8> You make some compelling points but I'm still not convinced that this form of protectionism is the only avenue to innovation. The strength of a company is often in its organization, processes, location, and systems which are difficult to copy in a cohesive way without being gifted with similar circumstances. Why can't a company's strength and success in the marketplace be defined by these characteristics as opposed to legislative shields? Winner- takes-all systems often shape organizational behavior to be more defensive than creative.

<comment><USER10> Let's not reduce this argument to innovation for _companies_. Individuals innovate and patent as well.

There is a tendency to focus purely on the negative effects of a system that seems to be failing it's purpose. It's important to understand the system as a whole, and it's history. Has the patent system ever functioned for the purpose it was designed for? If it isn't functioning correctly now, is that in part or in whole? Is it not functioning because it has been changed, because the world has changed, or both.

Finally, is there a way to alter the system, whether that be to curtail it, expand it, or just change how it operates, that might yield a better functioning system?

Personally, I'm not for abolishing patents. They had a very clearly defined purpose (innovation encouragement) when they were first created. I think they've been mostly perverted into another purpose (wealth protection), more- so in some industries than others. They've been expanded from court rulings to cover things which were not originally thought patentable. What we need here is a well reasoned legislative overhaul. What we'll get if we're extremely lucky is a hole-ridden clusterfuck of revisions, but if we're lucky, it will somewhat address the current problems. The new problems will be something we discover and address tomorrow.

<comment><USER11> I don't think you can disentangle those two purposes. Innovation is encouraged precisely because you can profit from your invention.

I believe the cost and delay of patent litigation is the real problem. It's important to identify the critical issue before effective change can happen.

<comment><USER10> My point was when wealth protection is a tool to bolster innovation, then the incentives are aligned correctly. When people, or more importantly legislators, forget that and think the _purpose_ of patents is to reward for innovation, we get some perverse incentives. In a perfect world, protection would be inversely proportional to the amount of innovation the sector is experiencing, and would also be scaled to the amount the innovation helps. But those are both hard to measure realistically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Did Myriad really claim to own the gene itself as their invention? If so, there are a lot of people who'd probably like to sue them for infecting them with that invention.

It seems to me that all Myriad could possibly patent, is a unique detection method for that gene. But that wouldn't stop anyone from using a different detection method.

But what interests me more about this case is that the article expects an Australian court decision to be taken as global jurisprudence. What's the logic behind that? And is that really where we're headed?

<comment><USER13> SCOTUS struck down patents on naturally occurring gene sequences themselves and decided that the "mere isolation" thereof cannot be patented:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass%27n_for_Molecular_Patholog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass%27n_for_Molecular_Pathology_v._Myriad_Genetics,_Inc.#Decision_of_the_Supreme_Court)

However, "artificial" sequences can be. I'm not aware of any test cases that establish boundaries on the difference though. It would be logical to assume you'd have to alter the nucleotide sequence to the extent that the resulting peptide or protein is not naturally occurring (e.g. changing a TTT codon to TTC wouldn't suffice, since both will ultimately be translated into phenylalanine).

Contrary to this reasoning, complementary DNA _is_ patentable in the US on the grounds that it's "not naturally occurring". So, if you take the mRNA corresponding to an un-patentable DNA sequence and mix it with a few enzymes and nucleotides that react in a deterministic fashion, you can then patent the sequence of the final product:

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

In a gross oversimplification, it's almost as if the court said: "you can't patent natural English words, but you can patent the ROT13 versions of them".

But regarding methods, the majority opinion clearly said they're fair game (just as you can't patent gold, but you could patent a novel approach to mining or extracting it) and there are several valid examples in the US today:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_patents_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_patents_in_the_United_States#Gene_patents)

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra It is very reassuring that after 20 years of software patent debates courts decided to not start this over with genes.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's good to see a rational decision with regards to science coming out of Australia. Aussies have been getting too much bad rap due to the Abbot government.

<comment><USER15> We just tossed Abbott. Let's see if that helps.

<comment><USER16> He wasn't tossed, his party threw him out. We still have to wear the shame of collectively permitting those bastards to be voted in to federal government. They're still there.

<comment><USER17> His party gave him the arse because polling showed he was seriously on the nose with the electorate and had been so since shortly after his election.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does this mean that Monsanto's patents are also invalid?

<comment><USER19> I would think that Monsanto's patents are quite different. They use plant breeding to _create_ new varieties. These patents of Myriad Genetics are just using DNA sequencing to find existing genes.

<comment><USER20> I agree with your view that Monsanto is unlikely affected, but the article is quite misleadingly named. With "gene patent" I immediately think of Monsanto. But this ruling seems to only affect those who claim exclusive right to _discovering_ properties of existing genes - not those who _create_ organisms with unique genetic properties, like Monsanto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this press [1] release of the institut curie gives a lot of information. other press release can be find here [2].

[1] [http://www.institut-curie.org/sites/default/files/myriad- gen...](http://www.institut-curie.org/sites/default/files/myriad-genetics- predisposition-breastt-cance.pdf) [2] [http://www.institut-curie.org/press- release/by-type/377](http://www.institut-curie.org/press-release/by-type/377)

<comment><USER22> That's dated 2008?

<comment><USER21> Yes but at this time the institut who is specialized in cancer had done lots of research and was very against the privatization of the public research and that the researcher couldn't research further because of this patent.

The Curie institut reacted to the patent as a research institution, here we have the impact on a practical health issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Patents are a trade: you get an 18 year monopoly for public disclosure of how your innovation works.

In societies that lack patent protection, much innovation becomes a trade secret guarded against public use for generations, think China and the silk trade.

By removing patents, you remove the incentive to make public how your medicine works. That, actually sounds scarier to me than temporary price mark ups.

</comment><comment><USER24> Although we might be clear on what we perceive to be the right ruling, it is not always so simple. For example, what if we claimed in software that any software program, given that it is merely a series of bits, is therefore merely a number, and thus a "product of mathematics" not produced by man?

<comment><USER25> Copyright is far and away the best IP category for software - I strongly argue it is a form of literacy anyway.

And I am not convinced there is any mathematics outside the mind of humans - it's an odd one, but is not maths a model of the world rather than the world itself?

<comment><USER26> > is not maths a model of the world rather than the world itself?

This isn't right. It sounds like a very "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" view of things.

Any model of anything is math. The world is bound by the math, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the fears that this will stifle innovation are greatly exaggerated. In fact, this patent was stifling innovation. Because of the expense, we have tested far fewer patients than we could have for BRCA1/2 mutations, and there thus remain many mutations of unknown significance that can only be resolved with more detailed clinical annotation from testing many more people. It's a classic case of a patent hampering the usefulness of an invention, so that someone can make money.

Myriad really were relentless opportunists with very well fed lawyers. The idea of a patent on a gene is completely nonsensical to anybody working in genomics these days. I can pay $1000 and sequence all 3 billion base pairs of my DNA. Using open source software and publicly available databases funded by governments and charities I can analyse my own DNA. What role does a gene patent have in any of this? What if I discover that I have an unreported variant in the patented gene? Can I now patent my own version of the gene, and charge my offspring a license fee for reproducing this gene each time one of their cells divide? Do they pay extra if they are homozygous?

Soul-destroying patent disputes have become a feature of the life sciences, it drives me mad. The story is always the same. A scientist performing research in a seemingly unimpressive field discovers something interesting. They generously publish their rough results because that's how science works. Then someone else comes along and refines it a bit before slapping a patent on it, because nobody else has yet. 20 years of legal battles ensue. Companies are still fighting over the PCR patents for example, even AFTER the patents have expired [1]. Now it looks like the same crap is going to transpire with CRISPR. The funny thing about these cases is that most of the research and innovation happens at the beginning, before the patents are even in operation, again questioning the notion that patents foster innovation.

As has been pointed out many times before, it is rare for a biotech/life sciences company to generate the kind of profit that permits them to do blue sky research. Most of that happens from government funded work. Big pharma doesn't really count, it costs them too much to develop each drug. They certainly don't have anything akin to Bell Labs, Xerox PARC or Google X.

Anyway, Myriad actually doesn't have any products any more. All the extremely simple tests they do can be run by anyone. They offer a whole lot of 'services' like genetic counselling and patient education, but that's all to create a veneer of legitimacy and hide the fact they are patent trolls. I feel sorry for their scientists trying to do research in this environment.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction#Paten...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction#Patent_disputes)

</comment><comment><USER28> I first read "gene _patients_ probably dead".

</comment><comment><USER29> > This is a result that will have major practical consequences, and is likely > to save thousands of lives.

No, companies will stop doing research now.

<comment><USER30> >No, companies will stop doing research now.

That's what I'm worried about, too.

For example C60 [1] is a curious molecule that can't be patented anymore. In a rat study it showed to prolong the rats' lives by over 90% [2] by protecting the rats from cancer.

Sadly there won't be any human study anytime soon (if at all) because it's just not financially viable without the possibility of patenting the stuff and extracting fantasy prices for it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene)

[2] [http://www.kurzweilai.net/fullerene-c60-administration- doubl...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/fullerene-c60-administration-doubles-rat- lifespan-with-no-toxicity)

<comment><USER31> You should read the comment section of the second link. The badly done research was done by someone whose business is selling snake oil with c60 in it.

<comment><USER30> Hmm, interesting.

Has anyone here access to the referenced paper [1] and can confirm that "Anthony Loera" worked on it?

[1] [http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S014296121200323...](http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0142961212003237?via=sd)

Ref.: Baati T, et al., The prolongation of the lifespan of rats by repeated oral administration of [60]fullerene, Biomaterials (2012), doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2012.03.036</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The weird and wonderful world of DNS LOC records - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-weird-and-wonderful-world-of-dns-loc-records

<comment><USER2> It seems odd to me that someone back in '96 went to the hassle of implementing DNS LOC but didn't explicitly specify which reference ellipsoid should be used. Nor does the protocol provide a mechanism, on a per-record basis, to specify which ellipsoid has actually been used.

<comment><USER3> RFC1876 says WGS84 in several places, including one of the parts quoted in the Cloudflare article. I don't spot an explicit statement that lat/lon are WGS84 (only altitude, p. 3), but it's the only datum mentioned and assuming that alt is WGS84 and lat/lon something else seems perverse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really surprised that LOC records aren't being more heavily used. If you need to publicly publish position data, DNS gives you a worldwide distribution method.

<comment><USER5> The .tel TLD was established for the purpose of publishing contact/location and other meta info at the DNS level, but it hasn't yet caught on unfortunately.

<comment><USER6> The lack of success of .tel is largely because Telnic has implemented the TLD in such a way that it can _only_ be used to publish contact information - every .tel domain must have its nameservers set to Telnic's DNS servers, which in turn will only serve records pointing to Telnic's web servers, which will only serve pages listing contact information.

<comment><USER5> You're right, but had it not been so restrictive would people have used it for its core purpose? There are a bunch of other reasons it hasn't caught on. But at this stage I think their best move would be to ask ICANN whether they can liberalise the extension.. I imagine the community would back it.

<comment><USER7> With that kind of attitude the internet would not exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Should we interpret this as meaning that RRDNS _never_ correctly served LOC records? They did most of the work to implement this and then didn't test it at all?

<comment><USER9> My guess is they didn't test correctly. They likely set up their tests to check that the string being returned was the same as the string that was stored without realizing that the value served was supposed to be transformed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> you can do a "location-based" google search, where it restricts pages based just on the country of origin. how does that work?

<comment><USER2> GeoIP databases, HTTP headers, HTML tags, TLDs, heuristics based on the language and links from other sites...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How long does it take to know if a concept of a startup works or not? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> ToniVlaic, that's a _very_ complicated question. There are extremely smart people who have spent a lot of time trying to answer that question, and they don't have simple answers.

I start with that, because the first reply is "what do you mean by 'works'?"

Do you mean that people will use what you've made? Find a small group of people who you think would use what you've made and see if they're still using it after X weeks.

Do you mean that people will tell other people what you've made? Check your stats on an invite system, or new signups, or whatever you need to answer this question.

Do you mean that you'll be able to market and convert customers at affordable prices relative to revenue? Will you average spending $20 on advertising to bring on a customer who buys $5? Or will you spent $5 to bring in $20 of business?

Do you mean "will the thing I made be interesting to the group I'm trying to sell to?" There are many instances where a company made something, found out it wasn't interesting to the group they were trying to sell to, but that someone else found it very useful.

Give us more details, and we can give useful answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> TimRosenBlatt first thank you for your reply.

We are working on a social rating platform where users can add items (things, products, people, companies, events, abstract things, places...no limits), review the items, rate them and create compares between multiple products so other users can vote. Those users can follow other users, items and compares and if there are new interactions with those items or by the users they follow it will show up in their stream. They gain experience points with every action they take for certain items, they get badges and rankings for certain keywords, so for example the person doing the most ratings, reviews etc. for video games will be the #1 on the video games list. Users can select that they "have" certain items which then go into their achievements list or "want" and they go into your wish list. When you search the site you can see if you friends (people you follow) have interacted with items in the search results.

We have the chicken and egg problem, we need a lot of content so the site will be useful to the users and to have a lot of content we need many users. Imagine if you had 30 friends on our site who all reviewed and rated items or you could see your wife's or girlfriends wish list the site would be very useful to you as you know all those people but if you are the first on the site you don't see the point why you should add items or rate or review…. I am aware that every user generated content site has the same problem but I believe the concept is good (or maybe I hope?) and I am wondering how long it will take to users understand the full idea behind the site and the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <https://twitter.com/paulg/status/333789309779996673/photo/1>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this graph is actually very motivating

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The time it takes you to realize that there is no viable revenue model for the concept.

</comment><comment><USER5> Depends on the outcome that you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> At this point I am looking for confirmation that users like the idea and that the concept will work as I imagined. Basically I would like to know if I am on the right track.

<comment><USER5> You need to understand that _that_ will take time. Get in touch with the users directly and get talking.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good tip, I should really start contacting users to see what they think of the site.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Plus - aprox 40 million users as of 9/25/11  - <AUTHOR>

  Google Plus - aprox 40 million users as of 9/25/11

  I am just following up on research from Paul Allen
  https://plus.google.com/117388252776312694644/posts/bGJPTALDkDe
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747710

  I added a couple more recent samples (threw out a few names)

        07/04/11        07/09/11        09/21/11        09/25/11
         1,700,000       4,700,000       29,372,543      41,308,415

  Maring        3       9        50      65
  Tomczyk       5       20       165     219
  Lagana        7       13       100     150
  Shireman      2       12       43      59
  Tat   12      51
  Tozzi         15      31       175     247
  Trudel        9       25       212     286
  Yasin         25      52
  Greb  3       11
  Toepfer       3       13       68      79
  Cullinane     7       18       80      100
  Fredenburg            3        23      35
  Louderback            4        38      53
  Santillanes           3        29      45
  Murrey                4
  Wilcoxen              8        20      40
  Revelle               5
  Parten                3
  Lewter                6       23      30
  McTigue               9       49      61
 <comment><USER2> The initial Invite buzz created these numbers.

But how many people use it after all? Is this signalling that Google's engineers don't have a strategy in launching products?

They could have started solving a problem for a particular niche community.

I see another failing Wave.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to this [1] - "Some 31 percent of Google+ users polled said they have already abandoned their accounts or not written any posts yet on the site"

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-05/google-may-pass- twi...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-05/google-may-pass-twitter-with- one-fifth-of-u-s-adults-online.html)

<comment><USER3> I haven't used it since trying it out on the first week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If Google could've ported my data from FB and then invite all my friends then that would've been another story (I would've kept using it). And MS is MIA, I'm surprised.</comment>


Pamela Anderson: 'Porn Is for Losers' - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/pamela-anderson-porn-is-for-losers-w437764 <comment><USER2> Avg Guy: "Hi, Pam will you go out with me"

Pam: Hell, No.

Avg Guy ~ Loser....

</comment><comment><USER3> Pot, meet kettle!</comment>


Arthur Laffer: Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704113504575264513748386610.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Subtitle: " _Today's corporate profits reflect an income shift into 2010. These profits will tumble next year, preceded most likely by the stock market._ "

From the creator of the Laffer Curve: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve></comment>


Lucile Packard – Partner in Greatness - <AUTHOR> http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-information/about-hp/history/hp-garage/partner-in-greatness.html <comment><USER2> I have been "close" to HP a few years back, and while visiting the California HP hotspots I was only hearing positive things about H, P, and their ones close to them.

I need to get back in there again and leave a couple of coins in that desk :)

<comment><USER3> > leave a couple of coins in that desk

What does this expression mean?

<comment><USER4> Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's office still exists at the HP headquarters in Palo Alto. It's an absolutely pristine office that looks like you've stepped back in time to the 1960s. It's kept very well and acts like a museum for visitors.

On one of their desks is a collection of coins which visitors around the world have left there in homage of the great inventors. Different currencies, in fact. The coins are literally just sitting there, and nobody seems to have dared to walk off with them!

Here's a picture of John Minck at Bill Hewlett's desk with all the coins: [http://hpmemoryproject.org/pict/news/ken_trip/minck.jpg](http://hpmemoryproject.org/pict/news/ken_trip/minck.jpg)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Swearing in Different Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.wokami.com/paths#/53/posts/1

<comment><USER2> Hi :) may I ask how did you found about the website? Was it through reddit or somewhere else? lots of thanks for sharing! <3 @saedmn</comment>


Rust Cookbook - <AUTHOR> https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/ <comment><USER2> Another great book that is completely free and open source. Rust might be a little harder to learn then other languages but you can't deny that it has great resources if you decide to learn it.

<comment><USER3> The Rust documentation is deep but not wide: unlike Python (for example) the standard library is small, which means that the well-documented area is small. Almost as soon as you try to get anything done, you will end up reading auto- generated function signature docs and browsing through the source code of whatever crate you want to use. This is true for scientific computing and game libraries, and may not be true for networking which I hear is very well- developed.

Because Rust's type system is so good, auto-generated function signatures are actually pretty useful. However this is one area in which the language is clearly immature.

<comment><USER4> That's what Perl programmers used to say about Python. It couldn't compete with the CPAN library.

While a large set of libraries is helpful, I wouldn't let that stop you if you think Rust is a good fit for your problem.

<comment><USER5> To be honest, python libraries are wide but the documentation quality isn't always the best (I could be spoiled)

<comment><USER6> _"documentation quality isn 't always the best"_

Compared to what? (Asking just out of curiosity.)

<comment><USER7> In general, I find Perl's CPAN to usually have really good documentation that surpasses what Python has, even though I prefer Python over Perl nine times out of ten.

<comment><USER8> As a full time Perl developer, I've wondered more than once if this is due to the way the way the language shapes the community. Perl has evolved (out of necessity) a very strong level of norms and best practices that users are aware of, and put effort into following (well, _most_ the time, Perl is all about letting you pull out the shiny weirdness and letting it shine where it fits well). Module documentation is part of this. A module could implement an object oriented interface, a procedural interface, _both_ , import function into the main scope on use, or on request, or any number of weird (and depending on your point of view wonderful) things.

Not having good documentation means nobody knows how to use your module without a lot of work reading the code. So modules get documented or they get ignored. Thus, the modules on CPAN you know about and that are commonly used and relied on by other modules are the ones that have good documentation. It's self reinforcing. I imagine in a language that funnels use into a single or small set of idiomatic ways to accomplish most tasks, it might be easier to skimp on documentation and rely on people to fall back on the "obvious" way to things.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a full-time Perl Dev like you, but do whip up something a few times a year and it is there when I need it. I'm therefore incapable of properly replying to your thoughts although it makes sense to me (Perl is so flexible that you better have good documentation if you make a module and want it used). My thoughts are more along the lines of how much modules and CPAN are pushed in general. Most of my Perl books (Ovid's in particular) go into excruciating detail on publishing packages. It's not a two pager crammed into an appendix either, but is front and center. The Perl community frequently hosts challenges to clean up old modules and such. There is even a guy with the last name of "Anwar" if I recall correctly that is a celebrity in the community for how many modules he maintains that aren't even his (and he has also done challenges like making a new pull-request every day for like a year). That is some real dedication there to making Perl useful. It is one of the things I really like about the community. I'm a little bit of a language hobbyist even though I'm still only a novice coder in my mind. Out of all the languages that I've spent time with (probably 2 dozen) learning superficially, I'd say Perl ranks towards the top of the spectrum when it comes to focusing on this. They've evolved a relatively simple and effective system for allowing users to make, share, and document libraries.

<comment><USER8> > They've evolved a relatively simple and effective system for allowing users > to make, share, and document libraries.

Well, as is often said, simple is not easy. :) There's a large effort by the CPAN testers community to run every module (and every new version of it) against a large array of hardware and operating systems[1], and provide automated reporting to the author of any problems.

This is possible because of (and incentivizes) the other great aspect of CPAN and the public modules which are on it, which is a strong culture of good test coverage of modules, and the CPAN clients running all tests and failing to install by default if any tests fail that weren't expected to. It's another wonderful feedback loop, and one not encouraged or discouraged by most languages specifically, so the fact that so many package managers for languages decided not to do so is unfortunate. When you don't start with that as an expectation, turning it on at a later date likely just results in a horrible user experience as a large number of module just fail to install (or at a minimum spew warnings which are confusing) because they are exposing what was previously something only the author saw most the time.

1: [http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Path- Tiny+0.104](http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Path-Tiny+0.104)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the helpful replies. I didn't know that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's been awhile since I've done anything resembling C/C++, and have put off looking too much into Rust for the moment, but I was surprised at how readable the examples on CSV processing were: [https://rust-lang- nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/encoding/c...](https://rust-lang- nursery.github.io/rust-cookbook/encoding/csv.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> One of Rust's major advantages over C and C++ and a huge reason why I choose it for new projects that call for a low level language is better learning resources. Others are better, established tools (like cargo), helpful community, sane dependency management, and expressive syntax. Even if it didn't have any of the borrow checking features I'd still use it just for those reasons alone.

It can also be painlessly integrated into Node.js programs as native modules and interoperability makes a Rust + Node combo a perfect mix for many use cases.

<comment><USER11> If I wrote a different kind of C++ (not competing for state-of-the-art speed), I would absolutely use Rust. Package management, versioning, debugging; everything is just more convenient. It's not quite as expressive as I'd like, but that may yet change, too.

<comment><USER12> I'm competing for state-of-the-art speed and I use Rust. Libraries like Rayon are really helpful compared to things like OpenMP, which we wouldn't ship.

<comment><USER13> What's the problem with OpenMP? From a distance, it seemed to be great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is nice, but it looks like some of these rely on third-party dependencies to make the examples trivial. I'm not really sure it's useful to have an example for say argument parsing which is essentially "here's how to use this argument parser from GitHub".

<comment><USER15> I don't think implementing your own cryptographically secure cross-plattform RNG bindings would be particularily useful. Same goes for JSON serialization, deserialization with the serde crate.

There are some very well solved problems and I don't think Rust should hide the fact that you can also rely on those. The idea of a cookbook is to solve common problems — and sometimes the easier way to do this is to use an battletested external dependency.

<comment><USER14> It might be worth making those "official" then, if it's not worth having everyone reimplementing them? If they're the standard in all but name, to the point where official material is referring to them as the preferred way to do things, I don't see why they should remain as third-party dependencies.

<comment><USER16> In other for their APIs to evolve independently of the compiler's release cycle.

In Python it is often said that stdlib is where modules go to die, and dependency management in Rust is a particularly different experience to most other languages. A good example of why keeping the standard library lean can be a good idea in the long term would be datetime handling in Java: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12032051/differences- bet...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12032051/differences-between-java- util-date-and-joda-time-apis)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where can I go to suggest new "recipes"?

I see that it starts with random numbers, but when I was learning I got tripped up a bit when trying to generate seeded randoms.

<comment><USER18> I'd like to see an official recipe for using closures as callbacks (for example in a UI library), where variables in outer scopes are potentially modified from within the closure.

See e.g. [1] for a possible approach.

[1] [https://gtk-rs.org/docs-src/tutorial/closures](https://gtk-rs.org/docs- src/tutorial/closures)

<comment><USER19> I'm a bit torn about this one, because it's not universally clear that this is the correct way to build these kinds of systems in Rust. GTK has to due to the constraints of the system it binds to, but there's a lot of experimentation of different ways that may be more Rust-y and not have the huge pain points this approach has.

Once its sorted, I think comparing and contrasting this kind of thing would be amazing though.

<comment><USER18> What would be an alternative, equally flexible way to handle callbacks?

<comment><USER19> [https://raphlinus.github.io/personal/2018/05/08/ecs- ui.html](https://raphlinus.github.io/personal/2018/05/08/ecs-ui.html) is an entry point into the main alternative that's being explored, see "druid" as a package that's an implementation of (an evolution of) these ideas, though it's still early days.

In general, Rust hates big balls of intertwined mutable state. And traditional OOP-y UI frameworks are basically giant balls of intertwined mutable state. You can do it, but it's not great. We'll see.

<comment><USER20> Realistically, this is still a necessity, because even if Rust comes up with its own quality UI frameworks - which takes years, looking at the history of the ones that we have - some people will still need to integrate with what's already there.

<comment><USER19> Sure, it's still necessary, but that doesn't mean that it needs to be promoted as the correct pattern to use in the general case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I love all of Rust's documentation it has really been great to see as I learn the language. I can pick up a language easy enough but to pick up a language's specific idioms is really hard without examples and this resource is great for that. One issue I have had though is how often the resource is out-of-date in some sense. Rust 2018 switched how modules were included and I constantly was confused what the difference was until I learned one was just older (by like a month). Also error handling is very confusing for me. I used error-chain first and everything worked but then I heard failure was the way to go yet there are very few resources on using either idiomatically.</comment>


D.C. (School) Vouchers: Better Results at a Quarter the Cost - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/04/03/dc-vouchers-better-results-at-a-quarter-the-cost/ <comment><USER2> * Read the executive summary. Half of the subgroups did not have improved performance. Math performance did not improve. Reading scores did improve, but this specific improvement cannot be meaningfully be attributed to the public vs. private nature of the schools. And, the study does attempt to figure out if the reading improvements could be replicated within the public school system by copying the reading programs used in the private schools.

* In the third year, over 83% of the participating students were attending schools where they were forced to endure continuous daily religious indoctrination. This is completely unethical.

* No attempt was made to measure the performance of students that attended a school designed for religious indoctrination against the students who attended a school designed expressly for education.

* According to the study, many parents (19%) turned down the vouchers they received after their students were accepted to public charter schools. It seems like parents are showing a strong preference for charter schools over private schools. IMO, this warrants further investigation into the funding of public charter schools instead of public funding of private education.

* According to the study, many parents of special needs students were not able to use their vouchers because the private schools were not able to provide the necessary services. The public schools are bearing nearly all of the costs of caring for special needs students whereas private schools are mostly punting on the issue. Similarly, if you get kicked out of a public or private school for behavioral or criminal reasons then you will be sent to a _public_ alternative high school. Cost comparisons need to be made using comparable student populations.

* All measurements in this study suffer heavily from selection bias. Much of the data comes from voluntary surveys that were filled out by parents. It was basically a competition between political groups to convince the most parents on their side to return the surveys. Parents and students who were not interested in their students' education and/or the political ramifications of the survey are likely severely under-represented.

It is silly to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of private schools vs. the effectiveness of public schools by Cato's summary or my summary of the study. A summary of a summary of a study can be easily spun however the writer wants to spin it. AFAICT, the study report itself has very little actionable information in it; at best, it points out areas that need more study before any conclusions can be drawn.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps but your conclusions are equally silly (and not based on logic).

Voucher programs are very new and rare. Why would you expect them to function at the same level as established (and well funded) public schools after a very short time.

For comparison, imagine if FedEx were allowed to deliver residential mail -- would you expect 100% coverage of every US address overnight? Of course not. The ramp-up will take time, and with voucher money entrepreneurs will invent better schools and existing schools will be able to ramp up due to network effects long enjoyed by the public monopoly.

Also, you are right that parochial schools enjoyed a bump in enrolment that they may not have deserved, but they benefit from having had (for a long time) other sources of funding, namely donations. Also, I think you exaggerate the "indoctrination" quite a bit. Are public school students not indoctrinated that FDR and Henry Kissinger were great men? I'm not sure why you have to draw the line and say that only indoctrination about the supernatural is distasteful!

<comment><USER2> Cato's article claimed that this study showed that private schools were clearly better at educating students than private schools. My point about performance was to show that the study itself says that isn't the case, based on the executive summary of the study itself. How was that silly or illogical?

My point regarding special ed and alternative schools is that these programs make averge-cost-per-student and average-performance-per-student metrics incomparable between public and private schools. The statements are derived directly from the study report. How is that silly or illogical?

I didn't say that only indoctrination about the supernatural is distasteful. Indoctrination--religious or otherwise--is unethical. You bring up FDR and Henry Hissinger as examples of public school indoctrination, but there are many public schools (like mine) that presented those men in an objective manner. There is no doubt that some teachers in some public schools may engadge in some kinds of (often religious, nationalistic, or otherwise political) indoctrination. However, it is something that can be identified and corrected within the public school program without changing any fundamental aspect of the public education system. The only way to rid religious schools of the indoctrination--for which they were created and which is one of their main selling points--is to close them or transfer them from religious organizations to secular organizations (which is something I fully support).

<comment><USER3> Cato meant better per dollar -- one can only imagine the outcome if the kids were able to keep the extra $20K per year of savings and apply it to future college tuition, room and board, travel around the world, etc.

Your second point is somewhat true, but special ed represents a small enough portion of the overall population that it doesn't inflate the numbers too much.

I'd argue that the public schools are by design indoctrination machines -- imagine if, say, the Taliban creates an official Taliban school, would you claim that it isn't intended to indoctrinate students in the ways of the Taliban?

US Public schools are (with the exception of affluent suburban public schools) mostly just factories intended to crank out vocational workers while providing free daycare for the K-12 years so that the family can more easily sustain two breadwinners.

Think about what is taught in public schools: Punctuality, obedience, spelling, phys-ed, basic math, basic reading comprehension, home-ec, government, state/local history, US history, etc. Huge emphasis is placed on sports and athleticism, and in the typical high school the "jocks" rule the halls, abusing and intimidating anyone they choose.

The food served in most public schools is below the quality served in fast food restaurants, and many feature soda and candy machines in abundance.

For all but the few who are extremely academically gifted, public school is little more than minimum security prison through the 12th grade, at which point most individuals either join the military or go to work at Wal-Mart.

<comment><USER2> Below, another commenter said that special education consumed 25% of the public budget. I don't know where he got that statistic, but if it is true then clearly we can't consider it to be a "small portion" of anything.

The Taliban is a religious organization that indoctrinates people similar to other religious organizations. What does it have to do with public schools? Are you suggesting that public schools are not secular enough and not objective enough? If so, I totally agree with you. But, it can be fixed. Religious schools are fundamentally broken as they have indoctrination of children at their core.

You make a lot of unsubstantiated claims in the rest of your message. I don't even know how to respond to them. If you have a claim with some substance then maybe I can respond to it.

<comment><USER4> I think the point you keep missing here is that all education is indoctrination. Even teaching kids to think rationally is indoctrination in the rational method. It's fine to say, "I think we should indoctrinate kids only in rationality," but most people will disagree with you. There is a sort of truce in our society: people don't hate each other for holding different viewpoints (as long as those viewpoints are societally acceptable, which varies from place to place.) Part of this truce is that people are allowed to shape the beliefs of their own children.

You can't say "we should never indoctrinate kids." That would be the same as saying "we should never educate kids." You can say "we should only tell kids the truth," but then, whose truth do we tell? The problem is not so simple. It's dishonest to say "no indoctrination" when what you mean is "indoctrination should be more along my lines."

<comment><USER2> It is not true that "all education is indoctrination." If I teach you how to make a fire then have I somehow coerced you into a fire-based belief system? If I teach you how to add two numbers then have I introduced you to the religion of numbers? No, I've just given you some facts. If I teach you a process by which you can educate yourself then have I somehow brainwashed you? I don't see how.

It is hard to keep indoctrination seperate from education. But, it isn't impossible.

<comment><USER4> You're right, and I'm wrong, of course. The problem is that it's hard to know who gets to decide what a fact is. There are many people for whom creationism is a fact. Is it okay for them to teach it to their children? If not, why is it okay for you to teach your children about evolution?

The fact that evolution is correct is sort of immaterial. There is no knowledge in the absence of cognition. For something to be known, it must be known by someone. We know that evolution is correct, but the creationist "knows" that creationism is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What would be interesting is looking at the performance of specific students who transitioned from public school to private schools or charter schools.

</comment><comment><USER6> Selection bias. If your parents care enough to send you somewhere, they'll care enough to make you do your homework.

<comment><USER5> That might be true, but that doesn't make them a bad idea. From a fiscal perspective, why spend 4x if the kid is going to get the same performance via voucher?

<comment><USER7> High spending on education is a a feature, not a bug. It buys the support of public teachers unions, which will support the reelection of politicians whose sole idea for school reform is "more money".

Another factoid that Cato likes to throw out is that public education spending has doubled on an inflation adjusted basis since the early '80s, yet scores on certain standardized tests have stayed constant. Still, listen to any presidential debate. Every candidate calls for more money for schools, more teachers, more computers, etc. It doesn't occur to them that the system is broken when scaling up the input produces no additional output.

[http://www.heritage.org/research/Education/images/b2179_char...](http://www.heritage.org/research/Education/images/b2179_chart4.gif)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is kinda disingenuous.

1) Vouchers do not cover the cost of most DC area private schools. They provide approx. $7500, but most top tier schools cast approx $20k, so the school is expected to kick in the remainder.

2) If vouchers became universally available it would simply inflate the cost of all private schools by the voucher amount, with no increase in student achievement.

3) A largely overlooked element is that _private schools get to /choose/ whom they accept._ This allows them to preselect the voucher recipients that they think would succeed.

</comment><comment><USER9> private schools are not allowed to deviate significantly from the idiot producing processes of public schooling: * Teacher Certification: Children instructed in private full-time day schools by "persons capable of teaching" are exempt from public school attendance under the compulsory education law. Cal. Educ. Code § 48222.

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing must forward to private schools on a monthly basis a list of all teachers who have had their state teaching credential revoked or suspended. The Commission must also send on a quarterly basis a complete and updated list of all teachers who have had their teaching credentials revoked or suspended, excluding teachers who have had their credentials reinstated, or who are deceased. Cal Educ. Code § 44237(g). Private schools may request information regarding the fitness of any applicant for a teaching position from the Commission. Cal Educ. Code § 44341(d).

Curriculum: Students attending private schools are exempt from California's compulsory attendance law if the schools offer instruction in the several branches of study required in the public schools of the state. Cal. Educ. Code § 48222.*

is it a shock that performance remains the same when you have the same teachers and the same curriculum?

<comment><USER5> On the teacher thing, I was under the impression that private schools could hire and fire credentialed teachers as they saw fit, plus could generally afford to pay better to attract better teachers, whereas public schools are handicapped by powerful teachers unions. Granted, my knowledge of the subject is pretty much limited to this paragraph :)

On the curriculum thing, it sounds like they just have to offer instruction in the same branches of study, which I'm assuming is things like Math, Reading, Science, etc. Not sure how that equates to the "same curriculum".

<comment><USER9> "credentialed teachers"

see pg's essay on credentialism for my feelings.

you have state certified teachers teaching a similar curriculum in the way that they were taught (the state certified way). This is a far cry from a truly independent education that is accountable to no one but the customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> subsidizing private schools doesn't help as long as the taxation structure supporting public schools are still in place. all that will happen is private school tuitions will increase the way college tuitions have.</comment>


Apple Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/music/

<comment><USER2> Certainly don't want to give money to Apple, even if they have the Beatles catalog ;)</comment>


LAPD confronts Call of Duty 'Ghost' statue in tense standoff - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/31/4383220/robert-bowlings-robotoki-invaded-by-lapd-after-curious-designer <comment><USER2> The LAPD has (rightfully) gotten a bad rap lately, but what do you expect when you have a realistic, armed, life-size military figure facing outward toward the street...

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's asinine.</comment></comment>


Feedback on Startup: Videoly - simple video email site - <AUTHOR> http://videoly.com

<comment><USER2> Votes without feedback are useless in this sort of thing, so let me give you my thoughts.

1) Why is the Terms page showing the terms in a flash scroll box? My main annoyance is that when I use the wheel on my mouse the terms won't scroll. Minor, but an annoyance. 1.a) Why do you separate Privacy and Terms with Help in between? Again, a nitpick but it's something I noticed.

2) Awesome logo! The camera with envelope on the side is perfect. The site seems kind of bland in colors (compared to say Vimeo)

3) Why no flash video tour on the homepage? As a new user, I don't understand why your site is worth joining when I'm already on Youtube and Vimeo.

Even though I have nitpicks and criticisms and only one applause, I do like your site, the simplicity of it, and the system. It looks good and I'll be curious to see how you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your feedback.

I will work on 1 - 2 items

About 3 item, I will add more info on why Videoly. The service is about video messaging and not video sharing. Also, we have designed the site so that users can use the product without needing to signup. Won't that suffice ?

<comment><USER2> If you don't want to do a tour that's perfectly fine, it's your site :)

I would then suggest you put an overlay of text on the image on your homepage, otherwise it looks like a misbehaving flash player or something.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There is not much to play around with on your webite, and my laptop is 4 years old so I don't have an onboard webcam -

BUT -

I think the concept is extremely useful for the non-tech savvy general public. You are essentially making it ridiculously easy for someone to create a "video" post (so long as they have an onboard webcam that is)

I can see this concept being EXTREMELY useful for consumer oriented online services. For example wordpress and other CMS where you need a very non-tech way to create media on the internet. Think if it like tinymce (html editor) for video.

I would love to see your product marketed this way as I would have a real use for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes actually our plans going forward might take that direction. When we cross the consumer product line, and jump to possibly business and more professional needs, recording videos directly from web camera does not suffice.

We really think there is a great need for a simple platform to communicate via videos - video emails is just an extension of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not have a real video on the front page explaining what your website is?

<comment><USER5> Because that way you'd lose the picture of the babe...

Agreed, though: an example of your service in action is the first thing I'd want to see (after reading the nice, simple explanation of what it does).

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm maybe it is not apparent and I will make changes appropriately. Clicking on the button titled "Send message Now" will actually take you to the service page without asking user to login or signup. We thought it will be a better option than explaining in detail what we do on the front page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's my navigation feedback: (some of this may be repeats)

\- The front image which looks like a video but isn't is confusing. I see you already mentioned on replacing that

\- When I click "Send Message Now" I get taken to a screen which is really easy, but how do I go back? Clicking the logo to go back is confusing. Just a small "Go Back" link on the bottom right would do

Apart from that not much to the site. Love the colours and the logo, and the idea is pretty sound too .. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why am I redirected to /stage/index.html with nothing on the page except a confusing error message stating that I'm trying to install adobe flash player on an unsupported OS?

</comment><comment><USER8> I liked the simplicity of it, and the fact it "just worked" with my webcam.</comment>


US Court of Appeals Takes on Ridesharing in Aviation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flytenow.com/us-court-of-appeals-takes-on-ridesharing-in-aviation <comment><USER2> It's an interesting link, and very interesting that these regulations are being litigated after decades of acceptance.

The big picture is that the FAA doesn't want the public to confuse the safety record of an airline with somebody flying a puddle-jumper (daily crashes in USA). The flying public just expects to get there without doing a risk evaluation, and puddle-jumpers are far riskier than airlines.

When you rideshare with Uber, there is a question of insurance.

When you rideshare a single-engine piston plane, there is a question of your life.

<comment><USER3> > (daily crashes in USA)

I'm sorry, but a quick Google finds less than a dozen in the US this year. I couldn't find a definitive list, but searching "small plane crash 2015" found mostly the same events.

A puddle-jumper being flown by a certified commercial pilot shouldn't be a whole lot more dangerous than a commercial flight.

But yes, a small aircraft flown by someone who just got their license? You're taking your life into your hands, especially if there's a chance of poor weather.

<comment><USER4> The NTSB maintains a database of all airline accidents that are recorded every year.. I did a basic search with the following parameters:

USA, 2014, Airplanes only, Fatal accidents only -- This returned 147 results of fatal accidents, the majority of which were Pipers / Cessnas / Beechcraft..

Expanding the list to include non-fatal accidents returns 310 results.. So not quite 1 per day, but still a _lot_ of plane crashes.

[http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/index.aspx](http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/index.aspx)

<comment><USER5> Is that 147 accidents with at least 1 fatality, or 147 fatalities?

I did a quick search, but there's more information there than I could sort through quickly.

<comment><USER4> The former, 147 with at least 1 fatality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could someone give a quick summary of flightsharing and how this ruling affects it?

<comment><USER7> This isn't a ruling, it was a hearing that will eventually lead to a ruling.

What this is about is that the FARs prohibit private pilots from flying passengers "for hire" but allow them to "share expenses." There are a number of tests to determine whether a private pilot who takes money from passengers is flying "for hire" or merely "sharing expenses" and one of them is the so- called "holding-out" rule: if you advertise your willingness to take passengers, then you are presumed to be flying for hire and you need (at least) a commercial license. Advertising on Flightshare is considered "holding out" by the FAA.

(I'm a private pilot.)

</comment></comment><comment> bro-stick This sucks.

However, in a few places like Alaska, I think the anti-government sentiment is strong enough that they really don't care what the FAA says. Good luck regulating fur trappers near the Arctic and helpful neighbors with planes.

<comment><USER8> This does NOT suck.

General aviation is a fairly risky activity, and usually the pilot (and friends of the pilot) accept that risk when flying. With a service like Flytenow it's possible (in my opinion probable) that 'enthusiasts' don't fully appreciate how much greater the risks are of a short trip in someone's Cessna 172 versus a commercial flight on a 737.

I don't believe that the FAA wants, or should be able, to regulate pilots' abilities to share flights with their friends. In my mind, they see Flytenow's business model as one that encourages people to take risks they normally wouldn't and don't completely understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is fascinating - it's like Pornography and erotica. I can tell the difference between a ride share and an airline when I see it, but writing it down ... No.

I mean, if Uber drivers were forced to state where they were travelling from and to at a certain time, and only if users entered that route was the ride share matched, their model would collapse (ie I see pornography)

But do that for aircraft, and ... It's totally indistinguishable from an airline schedule.

But yeah. It's not a rideshare, you are floating the rules, get wrists slapped.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash If you feel uncomfortable with your Uber diver, you can tell them to stop, and you can get out of the car.

What happens in the sky?

<comment><USER10> What I do is watch the pilot do the preflight. If he doesn't do it by the book, I won't fly with him.

For example, checking if there's gas in the tank. Bob Denver forgot to do that, ran out of fuel, crashed and died.

Make sure he warms up the engine all the way before takeoff, and does the magneto check at full power. Not doing this causes engine failure shortly after takeoff - a common fatal mistake.

If the weather looks dodgy, don't fly no matter what the pilot says. JFK jr flew into haze without being instrument rated, and died.

Failing last 3 are the most common causes of general aviation crashes.

<comment><USER11> And few, if any, commercial aviation customers understand anything remotely close to why a preflight is necessary, what happens when your single pilot is incapacitated, or why GA doesn't fly when commercials still can.

Ridesharing for GA aviation is a terrible idea, yet again "disrupting" by breaking the law and ignoring higher than normal risks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wordsworth responds to Amazon in 2000; bankrupt in 2004 - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000044.html

<comment><USER2> The explanation of why usability matters that Joel links to

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000806.html>

is still important today.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Our website does fairly well, in spite of us. We have put very little in terms of monetary resources in it and we are every marketer's nightmare."

4 years later: <http://news.bookweb.org/news/2982.html>

Wordsworth still feels like it's missing from Harvard Square. Back in the day, 10% off cover was a pretty good deal.

</comment><comment><USER3> "We knew it would be very big, we did not think it was going to be this HUGE."

Best quote. It was hard for anyone to know for sure.

</comment><comment><USER4> The McGraw Hill Technical Bookstore in midtown that he mentions was amazing.

I miss it terribly.</comment>


Would you use sth like plnkr.co with WebPack+Babel+AutoRefresh but no npm? - <AUTHOR> Dear Web Engineers,
1. Would you use sth like plnkr.co with WebPack+Babel+AutoRefresh but no npm?
2. Would you also need collab feature on the editor?
3. What is the best strategy to produce a cloud coding tool for lightweight WebUI Prototyping?
Best wishes, With Love, loklok <comment><USER2> The best options right now for "real" code playgrounds are WebpackBin and CodeSandbox.io, which recently collaborated on an NPM/Webpack bundling backend.</comment>


Hello, I'm Neos - <AUTHOR> https://www.neos.io/ <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN". Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Curious about the history of its development.</comment>


Sheryl Sandberg on the Myth of the Catty Woman - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/opinion/sunday/sheryl-sandberg-on-the-myth-of-the-catty-woman.html <comment><USER2> > At school, we call them "mean girls" and later, we call them "catty" or > "queen bees." (What's the derogatory male equivalent? It doesn't exist.)

Jerk.

also Asshole.

its pretty contra-usage to call a woman a "jerk"</comment>


Dreamhost made a $7.5 million billing error - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/

<comment><AUTHOR> This affected a ton of people, so I figured it's at least partially relevant.

Who here was multiple-billed?

<comment><USER2> Yup... but I don't have automatic payments set up so I wasn't charged.

 _"This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #XXXXXX has a balance of $119.40 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-23), with $119.40 due (since 2008-12-23).

You also have $109.45 past due (owed since 2008-11-23), and if by 2009-01-23 you do not pay at least the $109.45 part, your account will be automatically suspended until payment is received."_

The good news is I have until 2009-01-23 to pay it :)

</comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill So is it safe to assume their annual billings are abuot 7.5 Million?

<comment><AUTHOR> It only billed people who have automatic billing enabled. So from month-to- month autobill people, 7.5 million is probably right. Total income? Probably much, much more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> at my work we have a micro site hosted there and we got double charged</comment>


Vicarious Systems Says Its Artificial Intelligence Is The Real Deal - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/02/10/vicarious-systems-says-its-artificial-intelligence-is-the-real-deal/ <comment><USER2> I cannot understand why it is that so many obviously very intelligent people decide that we need another computer vision-based startup. Because the unfortunate truth is that computer vision (right now) doesn't work.

Let me qualify that. From the academic / research point of view, there have been a collection of real successes in computer vision in, say, the last ten years. But my sense is that what counts as a research success is a long way from what counts as a practical business success.

For example, the best generic object detector at the moment is probably Felzenszwalb's using deformable parts-based models[1]. And it's just not that good. On the latest PASCAL object detection challenge, you'll see that its mean precision is only ~30%.

Scott Brown, the interviewee, sets Vicarious apart by highlighting the fact that their system will be neurobiologically inspired. But the idea of learning hierarchical systems that mimic the brain's visual processing system is hardly new, and the jury is still out on whether these systems can do better than the "hand-coded" systems like Felzenszwalb's. As a random example, see [2].

Like.com showed you can build a business that uses computer vision in some way. But as Brown snarks, they "use a big bag of different heuristics to figure out the image." For the time being, that seems to be the only way to get computer vision to work in practice.

That all said, I wish them luck.

[1] <http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~pff/latent/>

[2] [http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang//papers/nips07-sparsed...](http://www.cs.stanford.edu/people/ang//papers/nips07-sparsedeepbeliefnetworkv2.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Your argument against computer vision startups is that there isn't a viable computer vision solution at this point?

<comment><USER4> Well, his argument is that well-funded, very intelligent people are trying like hell at computer vision, and not succeeding. That's not a good sign - you'd prefer that your space has been hitherto overlooked by smart people with lots of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an AI grad student, this kind of sensationalism is somewhere between a minor irritation and a serious threat. AI always has had a severe problem with over-promising and under-delivering, and I'm of the humble opinion that until you're actually shipping the most awesome thing in the world you should keep your mouth shut. If the first thing people associate "AI research" with is "disappointment", that hurts everybody (particularly, NSF funding).

"Brain-based" AI should stay in the dark ages. Optimization-based AI is the present and the future.

(That said, if you want to talk about your sweet computer vision system that's "coming soon", go right ahead. Just don't call it AI.)

<comment><USER6> Does Numenta fall under "Brain-based?"

<comment><USER7> Numenta does fall under brain based. I'm not sure what Vicarious are working on, but recently Numenta transitioned to radically more biological algorithms. It would be interesting to compare the two if Vicarious comes out with more detailed information about their algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speaking from a researcher (both academic/industry) in vision for almost 10 years, I am afraid that they founders have quite underestimated the difficulty of the problem. Even a dog's visual system is very advanced, if you consider it from the big picture in evolution of visual sensory system in animals. So in the interview "if you can make a vision system that's just as good as a dog" is in some sense analogous to saying "if you can simulate what's produced from 90% of visual evolution over these million years", which is clearly, a bit over-optimistic as a starting goal.

That being said, wish them luck. It's a worthy try afterall.

</comment><comment><USER9> More accurately: Vicarious says it is trying to make its vision system the real deal. Smaller problem, and (at least according to the article) they haven't solved it yet.

Of course, smaller and small are different things - this is still a very hard thing to do. Hope they succeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this mean the AI winter is over?

<comment><USER11> Depends what you mean. "Good old fashioned AI" (explicit symbolic representations and rule-based inference) hasn't made a comeback yet. Even computational linguistics has largely shifted towards statistical methods based on crunching large amounts of data. So, AI is a lot livelier now than it was in the bad periods, but it's a different kind of AI than went cold in the late 1980s.

<comment><USER12> I'm not an AI student myself (I do CS, but with an interest in AI and probabilistic algorithms) and since I'm from a younger generation most of the "new" AI stuff like neural networks, evolutionary computing, etc. wasn't _that_ new any more when it got taught. But "classical AI" (as in symbolic AI and rule-based systems) always struck me as rather dumb and inefficient after being shown the power of probabilistic systems like EC and neural networks. So in that sense I don't think classical AI will never make a comeback, and I'm convinced this is probably a good thing.

I mean, the only example we have of solving extremely complex problems is nature, and nature just doesn't work with symbolic system and rule-based inference. It uses probabilistic systems which interact with each other in feedback loops.

I, for one, welcome our new non-deterministic overlords.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly, one of the cofounders is Dileep George, previously the CTO and cofounder of Numenta.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the article

"if you can make a vision system that's just as good as a dog..."

Not quite my idea of "The Real Deal". And that's within a 5-year plan.

<comment><USER7> Dogs' visual systems are pretty sophisticated. Trying to mimic one of those first allows one to somewhat simplify things while getting a lot of insight into the human visual system which operates on basically the same principles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> NFLT implies AI is logically impossible. Good way to short the stock market.

<comment><USER16> Considering NFLT isn't on the first page of google, would you mind expanding that acronym?

<comment><USER17> If the parent means the No Free Lunch Theorem, then the point is mistaken. That theorem says that you can't improve the performance of a classifier for some objective function, without making it worse on another -- in other words, all algorithms have an identical mean performance when averaged over all possible objective functions.

The reason this doesn't mean that human-level AI is impossible is that we too are designed (well, evolved by natural selection) to perform well for a particular objective function: one in which say, the standard laws of physics/optics apply. Optical illusions illustrate that our performance on this objective function is not perfect.

Moreover, you can see a human being's performance on a different objective function by, for example, trying to recognize objects in pictures which have been scrambled according to some predefined method (e.g. shuffle the pixels but use the same random seed each time). Each scene will still convey the same amount of information about the objects in it, but it'll be pretty tricky to recognize the objects.

<comment><USER15> "The reason this doesn't mean that human-level AI is impossible is that we too are designed (well, evolved by natural selection) to perform well for a particular objective function: one in which say, the standard laws of physics/optics apply."

That's an assumption no one has ever given the slightest shred of evidence for. I remain highly skeptical.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Launches DRM-free Music Store - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070925-amazon-launches-public-beta-of-mp3-music-store.html

<comment><USER2> Bought an album on there today. Great service! Easy to use, and 256kbps of DRM free MP3 goodness! Few kinks in the download process, but nothing Amazon can't fix easily. Highly recommended!

<comment><USER3> I tried it and my order failed (after making a normal order just hours before for something else). I guess they use the default 1-click thing, which I didn't have set up properly. I can't fathom why it wouldn't just use the normal checkout process.

I also can't imagine why they make you download an .exe to get full albums. Dumb.</comment></comment>


Hakyll 3:  A static site compiler DSL/library in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/tutorial.html

<comment><USER2> You mention that Hakyll is inspired by yst, nanoc, and Jekyll. Can you talk about what you chose to do differently and why? And then maybe a little about the things you think those projects do right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hakyll 3 is mostly inspired by nanoc. The key differences between nanoc and Hakyll are:

* type-safety of Haskell prevents you from doing I/O where this could be dangerous;

* while nanoc layouts can contain code (erb), Hakyll templates do not support this -- all code needs to go in the Haskell configuration file;

* Hakyll uses pandoc for document reading/conversion, nanoc usually uses kramdown and other ruby libraries;

* Nanoc uses a separate DSL for "routes" and "compilation rules", in Hakyll these are defined in the same DSL;

A more in-depth comparison would indeed by very handy. The author of nanoc lives near me, so I'll see if we can come up with a decent comparison together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm thinking of doing my blog in Hakyll - Yesod seems overkill for my purposes.

Do you hang out on #haskell?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But if you want help on Hakyll, there's #hakyll on freenode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently discovered Hakyll and the DSL sold me. If you can hack on an xmonad config, you can build an amazing site with Hakyll.</comment>


Making big data manageable - <AUTHOR> https://news.mit.edu/2016/making-big-data-manageable-1214 <comment> unix-junkie Here is the paper: [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6596-dimensionality- reduction-o...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6596-dimensionality-reduction-of- massive-sparse-datasets-using-coresets.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is neat. I bet if you use a hypercircle technique then you could project wikipedia articles into a GiST or BallTree or similar n dimensional tree structure. Then search can be done by projecting a query into the hypercircle and returning results close by.

<comment><USER3> You would have a representative dataset but you'd still be stuck with the curse of dimensionality that plagues nearest neighbors: in high dimensions, everything is far away from each other and nothing is close to the center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds like something that could be done with a materialized view, or am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> The point of this algorithm is sort of to construct a materialized view, but how it's done is the cool part. It's not a simple database query -- it reduces the number of dimensions into a manageable number.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, the core contribution (section 1.2) is the cool part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But then it is not big data anymore!

</comment><comment><USER8> I know these people! They are amazing :)</comment>


Ask HN: Review my product, zalster.com/slackbot - <AUTHOR> We created a Slack bot for Facebook Ads.<p>Have a look and give me your toughest feedback: zalster.com/slackbot <comment><USER2> Let me start with, I am not a customer, as such my views are as an ordinary person. I do not advertise anything anywhere, nor do I sell anything.

From a website perspective:

I like the colors, font and in general the presentation. I do not like the fact that I have 2 scroll bars. Why 2 scroll bars I do not know, one I assume is yours and the other Firefox? Hard to read prices.

Clicked on the various helps, which I thought we good. Your jobs page was ok, but nothing for me, so I lost interest. While I appreciate the interactive demo, because this is not what I do, I cannot provide an opinion. Try user opinion, most of the terms meant nothing to me. A dictionary would not help as emotionally I do not care enough to learn. The rocket taking off, the first time was cute, the second time, not so fun.

On the 'Book a Demo' you ask how long do I need. How do I know how long YOU need to provide the demo? But I think your default of 25 minutes is good. I would replace the option with a statement, 'We believe the demo should take no more than 25 minutes.' On the back side you can pad it.

Case studies were nice, I got the impression from them that they really like your company and the support they get. Page had the annoying double scroll bars.

Not sure what the 'platform' page was showing me besides the price.

Had to look up what a slack bot was. Not sure if calling you answer person a slack bot adds value or confuses the customer about what your product is.

Now for the harsh parts:

Gotta fix the double scroll bars. First impression – close the tab!

Prices seem confusing (and because of double scroll bars hard to read) $45 for $5K adverts? $295 for $25K adverts? Is this a month or a year? Cannot read third line, because of scrolling crap.

Another page says price is 5% of adverts or $895 a month, whichever is more. What happened to the $45? Based on these numbers, you consider anyone doing less than $17,900 a month advertising an annoyance (5% of 17900 = 895). Now your business could be so big you are turning away people, then congratulations, your doing great. If you are struggling, or want to really ramp up, then the $895 a month should probably go.

Your case studies are nice, but lack the compelling story of profit. If I was doing advertising I would not pay you a grand a month just because your customer service is nice. If you can show me people whose business doubled, then we are talking. Or double the amount of new business. Heck depending, even a 10% uptick is might be worth it.

One demo you need is more of a tutorial. The tutorial should show how to use and explain how to know that the product has added value.

I wish you the best

Now the REALLY harsh parts: 1) in your case studies it is hard to understand the people. God bless them for being willing to do it. Hire an actor that can show emotion and enunciate better. Use what they said, maybe discuss enhancing it. Hire a script writer? Ad specialty company? Once again really way outside of my skill set, and I apologies if I sound like a jerk.

2) In the case studies, I did not recognize when they said your company name. I assume it should start with a very strong Z like in old movies when Zorro attacked.</comment>