Feds searching passenger cell phones at SFO - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sfgate.com/cmcginnis/2017/05/10/feds-searching-passenger-cell-phones-at-sfo/ <comment><USER2> > The ACLU has become much more active in trying to protect the rights of > travelers during the Trump era

> in 2016, "the number of people asked to hand over their cell phones and > passwords by Customs and Border Protection agents increased almost threefold > over the year before."

I mean, it's great and all that the ACLU is working on this, but the repeated attempts to tie this all to Trump is becoming kind of maddening. Pretty soon all this stuff will start being referred to as "Trump-era security measures" in the press and most will forget who actually started most of it (the last two presidents).

<comment><USER3> I don't actually mind _targeted_ cellphone checking _at borders,_ but mindlessly ramping it up is a very bad sign.

<comment><USER4> Not being a jerk, but why do you not mind? I don't break any laws and I mind enormously.

<comment><USER5> Yes! If they do not know what you are looking for, they shouldnt be looking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SEO marketing content originally from [http://travel](http://travel) skills.com/2017/05/06/us-customs-phone-search/ , nothing worth reading or visiting really. It's shallow and purely meant to attract clicks and links.

Original source of actual content is [https://news.artnet.com/art-world/aclu- artist-aaron-gach-956...](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/aclu-artist-aaron- gach-956336)

</comment><comment><USER7> > Gach resisted, but finally gave in when he was told that if he didn't, CBP > would keep his phone for an indefinite period.

The sad thing is if this happened to me I'd have no problems with just letting them have the phone and get myself a new one. In fact the company I work for would probably let me expense the new phone because they'd be happy I didn't give away the passcode to a phone that has company emails on it that contain private info.

So this ends up punishing those who can't afford to just dispose of a phone. Disgusting. Privacy should be a right, not something that you have to ask yourself if you can afford.

<comment><USER8> I hate to break this to you, but the feds are snooping on your company emails/texts/phone calls anyway and filing them away forever in a nice big data center in Utah.

And a passcode isn't much in the way of protection, except from the airport rent-a-cops and maybe the first tier of Homeland Security. Physical possession of a device guarantees access, if a three-letter-agency wants it. The security theatre of last year w/r/t the iPhone access was to lull us into believing the CIA/FBI/NSA could not access a 'locked' phone. Counterintelligence. It has been accessible all this time.

Finally, corporate espionage on behalf of governments is a thing we'll read about in a decade or so. The stories aren't ready to break just yet.

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't unlock my phone, because it has Google Authenticator helping to secure financial accounts.

If they want to go through enough effort to unlock it, fine. But at least I'll have a chance of resetting authentication before they get to it.

<comment><USER10> Off-topic but what banks offer 2fa that isn't solely SMS based? I've looked but one but it's hard to figure out without already being a customer

<comment> et-al In the US, only 2-3 (USAA, HSBC, First Tech Federal Credit Union): [https://twofactorauth.org/#banking](https://twofactorauth.org/#banking)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple/Google: Help us out here. Put some container tech on the phones and have it driven by the entry of a "regular password" and a "duress password".

Have the "duress password" bring up a container with plausible faked call, text, browser, camera, etc, history.

Oh, and allow for user defined number of container/password pairs, for when the TSA asks for both passwords.

<comment><USER12> Have the duress password also activate the various sensors on the device and start shipping data to the internet. TSA agent's face, everything that's said, etc.

<comment><USER9> This is a cool idea, but it would also give them a way to tell that they're looking at the duress account.

<comment><USER12> How so? Presumably there would be nothing in the UI to indicate that it's recording anything, and the data would be stored outside of the restricted container.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps not an _easy_ way, but any data transmission from your phone is detectable with external sensors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would like to add the obvious that it has nothing to do with Trump. Things like this were being done and added all the time under Bush and Obama.

Simple proof: Why did the EFF and others already have extensive documentation on how to travel through airports securely? Why did people mention crossing borders with wiped phones/laptops?

<comment><USER15> Why do you feel the need to post that? The line about the ACLU becoming much more active? Can you disagree that they have become much more active on various issues during the new presidency?

<comment><USER14> I felt the need to post this to ensure we were all aware of our current biases that just because Trump is in office these things are bad and deserve attention.

I believe the ACLU is great and I've contributed for years before Trump. And that is my subtle point: Trump isn't what makes these things bad or important. They're important on their own. The ACLU should have been donated to before Trump because the issues they are fighting for are not new under Trump, even if they may have more issues to protect under Trump. This is not one of them. And we as readers need to recognize that "...in Trump's America" is nonsense added to boost page numbers because it has been our America for a long time already.

So, therefore, I do not disagree ACLU has been more active. In fact, the question is why weren't they so active before? Personally, I don't think that's a great question either since I'm not sure a case exactly like this happened before so it's moot and if it did I'm almost certain they would have acted on it. But would the press have picked it up like it did? Would it say "...in [Obama's|Bush's] America" at the end? I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> More and more it seems like we are slipping towards a dystopia. Inch by inch our privacy rights are slowly being striped away. Not just by governments but by corporations, and once they are gone it is next to impossible to get them back.

<comment><USER17> We _are_ in a dystopia, it's just far more boring and disjointed than what we read about.

<comment><USER18> You think life is more unpleasant now than 100, 1000, or 10000 years ago? I don't think I'd want to live in any of those eras if given the choice.

<comment><USER19> Life wasn't unpleasant before modern technology.

You might as well say life was in black and white before the invention of the color photograph. Fun for me sometimes consisted of just a stick and a rock or a stick and my dog. The first industrial revolution initially lowered the quality of life and contentment for workers

It'd take you less than a month to adapt if there were no time machine.

<comment><USER18> Compared to today, I'd say life was indeed unpleasant. Just being free of Polio makes a gigantic difference.

The opportunities I have for travel, education, healthcare, access to arts, and other experiences are far greater than my ancestors had. The opportunities my daughters have are so much greater than even my grandmother had. I wouldn't give any of it up.

<comment><USER19> > The opportunities I have for travel, education, healthcare, access to arts, > and other experiences are far greater than my ancestors had. The > opportunities my daughters have are so much greater than even my grandmother > had. I wouldn't give any of it up.

Within a month you'd be over it. It's surprising how well humans adapt to their situation

<comment><USER18> So I presume you are doing fine living in today's dystopia.

<comment><USER19> Even if you had polio, most people find a way to still find joy in life after coming to grips with the disease. We had a president who had polio.

Stephen Hawking's debilitating illness doesn't stop him. He still finds joy in life and has a happy, successful marriage in addition to being the world's preeminent physicist.

This may sound weird, but I kind of dreamed of living in a dystopia. I read of a lot of Gibson and Stephenson as a kid. Utopias like heaven frankly sounds kind of boring...no challenges or struggles to overcome or face.

<comment><USER18> A utopia doesn't mean there are no struggles. If you want to be a great guitar player or a master carpenter, you don't magically get those abilities.

If I could afford to be retired today, I could easily fill the rest of my days working on things that I want to work on. I'd love to learn more about cooking, learn another language, take up carpentry, learn how to ride a trials bike, get stronger, learn to play an instrument, work towards a degree in mathematics, volunteer in my community, get my amateur radio license, travel with my wife, work on my marksmanship skills, learn watchmaking, build electronics projects, join a bowling league, and on and on. I'm very fortunate in that I love my job, but it does take up most of my time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Prepare your phone before coming through. Backup, wipe and set the password to "I am a panty-sniffing thug". Bonus points for filling it with nothing but articles about law enforcement overreach and pictures of pigs.

Encourage everyone you know to do similar, or whatever they're comfortable with. Make being a trouble-maker a badge of honor.

If you don't fight somehow, you are accepting it.

<comment><USER21> Honestly, I do accept it, because I still believe they're trying to do the right thing. I know it's easy to shit on law enforcement, but I still fundamentally believe that they're a force of good.

Edit: I'd love to discuss this more with all of you, but I've been told by HN moderation that I am a negative force on this website and discussions like these are why. I hope some day there'll be a place we can talk about this kind of thing civilly, but it's not here and it's not today, unfortunately.

<comment><USER22> The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I would argue that resisting evil actions by good people is _more_ noble than resisting evil actions by evil people, because you stand a better chance of changing things when they don't intend to be evil.

I've never had my phone searched, but if they tried, I'd say, "Good luck cracking my password. Can I go now?"

<comment><USER21> Brave words typed onto an Internet forum.

I don't think this is an "evil action" to begin with.

<comment><USER22> What's "brave" about it? I'm a programmer making a good salary, and all I have to lose is my phone. I can buy another one if they decide to threaten me with seizure.

If you don't think it's an evil action, then why are you phrasing it as "I still believe they're trying to do the right thing"? I interpret that as "I think they're doing the wrong thing, but I don't mind because they think it's the right thing." If it's not evil then why not defend the action on its own merits, rather than appealing to the fundamental goodness of the organization?

<comment><USER21> Because it's perceived as evil, and I didn't want to litigate that and be a force of negativity on HN.

<comment><USER23> Thinking it is appropriate to search phones is at least a solid argument. People might loudly disagree or downvote, but it's a coherent opinion.

The idea that trying to do the right thing can justify something is specious nonsense.

<comment><USER21> It's specious nonsense to try to do the right thing? You can't possibly mean that, right?

<comment><USER24> It's specious nonsense to justify things by saying they are trying to do the right thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am aware that this was also happening in previous administrations and is slowly getting worse, but as a European I can only describe this as "communist-like", and wonder what the US citizenry, of all people, have come to that they accept such things? (Clearly this not some form of elaborate investigation, and they're only harrassing random passengers.)

We are now in a Bizzaro world where we're safer "in our letters and effects" when travelling through the airports of Communist-controlled China than in the US ones...

<comment> white-flame It's fear mongering that has normal citizens agreeing with overly aggressive "enforcement", and forgetting about what rights are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is specially terrifying for non-citizens or visa holders. The border police has no obligation to let you in if you decide to not give them the password.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have detailed instructions on how to make a full backup of my iPhone such that when I restore it, it will be exactly like it was? Every time I do a backup/restore, things seem to get lost. It doesn't seem to be a complete backup.

<comment><USER28> As far as I know, the closest you can get to that is an encrypted backup via iTunes. There are still things omitted from the backup, though. Developers themselves can prevent certain files from being backed up: [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1719/_index...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1719/_index.html)

<comment><USER27> See, that's the problem. If it isn't a _full_ backup then it's basically useless, because now I don't even know what's missing. Maybe it's something I really need urgently but only once a month, so it might take me a while to even figure out it's gone.

And what about say my soft tokens for 2FA? Will those survive the backup? I'm kind of afraid to find out because if they don't then it's a huge pain to reset all of those.

I wish backing up a phone was as easy as backing up a computer. :(

<comment><USER29> Just buy a burner when you travel overseas. Chances are your home carrier would gouge you anyway.

<comment><USER27> The problem is here are the things I use my phone for when I travel:

\- email

\- social media

\- maps

\- podcasts

\- pictures

\- soft tokens for 2fa

The first few can be handled by a burner, but for pictures I want my nice phone (I guess I could carry a separate camera) but I have no idea how to deal with the 2fa tokens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can we have private airports, cooperatively owned and operated, and ban governments from them???

<comment><USER31> Is this a stupid question or a serious one?

Privately owned and operated runways do exist. Airports tend to be publicly funded because they're expensive, so pretty much from the outset those who want an airport go to the government to get one. The regulations that apply depend on what kind of flights happen. If they're exclusively FAR 91 and non- charter then it's a minimal regulatory environment. When there are charters, air taxi, or air carrier flights, it becomes increasingly government regulated.

And no you really can't ban the sovereign.

<comment><USER32> And yet, fly as a private passenger on your own jet at a public airport and you're also just as able to bypass almost all of these checks, too. And while a chartered Citation X isn't as likely to be as capable of destruction as a laden Boeing, it could sure do or carry some threat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Even if I wipe my phone, I worry that they'll plug it into some rootkit-on- demand Cellebrite device. What if I remove one of the data pins from the USB port so that it only works as a charger? Is that enough to protect the phone from one of those Cellebrite boxes?

</comment><comment><USER34> We wrote a guide about this:

[https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us- border-2017](https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017)

However, the news is not necessarily that encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER35> I would never hand over my phone or passwords at the border. The only reason customs can search you at the border is for any smuggling or immigration issue. Since no rational person would smuggle something digital on their phone, when they could transfer it over the cloud without physical possession, there is simply no reason for them to search your phone without a warrant.

If they threaten to take your phone, threaten to sue them for trespass and to go to the media.

</comment><comment><USER36> Not that I agree, but Canada has been doing it for years: [https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/public-safety- and-l...](https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/public-safety-and-law- enforcement/your-privacy-at-airports-and-borders/#toc3)

</comment><comment><USER37> All of you with your "clever" workarounds don't get it. It's you vs. someone who has been questioning people all day. Do you really think the agent will just go "Oh you don't have a device, you're good to go!" or "This phone looks like it's never been used, nothing suspicious here!"?

That's going to raise suspicions and make your life much harder. Unfortunately there's not much you can do to fight it except at the legislative level. It's a shitty situation, but telling people to do these "tricks" is going to make their lives even shittier.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is how totalitarianism looks. Don't try to brush it aside, hand wave it away or become an apologist.

People have been horrified by stories of the secret police in infamous regimes ruffling through people's diaries to find out what they wrote. You can't express moral disgust at that and live with this.

This is the exact same thing. No one has any business with your phone or your personal life.

</comment><comment><USER39> I would not be okay with this. If faced with this situation, I personally would be compelled to refuse even if they seize my powered off fully encrypted iPhone. I would then have to obtain an attorney to fight the seizure on the principle of the matter. This would be so even if I had just bought the phone an hour before and had nothing custom on it at all.

</comment><comment><USER40> Assuming they are using some OoTB software like Cellebrite. It would be interesting to use a vulnerability in one of Cellebrite's file parsers and infect their machine. Would a mass dump of their collected data cause any public outcry?

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if you can just stuff phone in carry-on and claim to have lost it.

<comment><USER12> I wonder if they stop at the first phone they find. I picked up 10 cheap android phones at $5 each from the grocery store recently, would carry one of those in my pocket, put the "real" phone in a more difficult to find location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Maybe just erase your phone then and there? Or set it to erase after 10 failed password attempts? Wonder how bad they'd make it for you in retaliation.

</comment><comment><USER43> What are they going to find in that time period, with the person there? Are they just fishing? What's even the point from their side?

<comment><USER44> They can find it later. How long does it take to copy the entire contents of a phone and hand it back to you?

<comment><USER43> Ah, I misread the article as they had to search in their presence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I heard on the radio today that in Feb there were 2000 instances of the phone search which is appalling.

</comment><comment><USER46> With all due respect, I think your grasp of American politics is quite weak. The POTUS has immense power, not just in theory (e.g. the ability to single- handedly launch nukes and basically end the world) but also in practice.

For one, he or she can nominate Supreme Court judges. This alone is _huge_ , considering the SC is the final arbiter in the most important conflicts in the nation.

Aside from that, he or she can issue Executive Orders, which "have significant influence over the internal affairs of government, deciding how and to what degree legislation will be enforced, dealing with emergencies, waging wars, and in general fine-tuning policy choices in the implementation of broad statutes."[1]

The POTUS can also veto legislation passed by Congress. Historically, Congress has been able to override these vetoes only 7% of the time[2], which means the POTUS has a serious amount of influence in the direction the country goes in as well.

And of course, he or she is also the Commander in Chief of the world's most powerful military, and the country's supreme representative in foreign affairs.

Bottom line: POTUS is much more than a "punching bag."

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_(United_States...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_\(United_States\))

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veto#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veto#United_States)

<comment><USER47> > _With all due respect, I think your grasp of American politics is quite > weak._

Personal swipes, which this is, aren't allowed in HN comments.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317152) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The most basic function of Customs is to know what is coming into the country. Customs has always had the right to search whatever and whoever they want.

<comment><USER49> If they're searching information, they really need to be putting multi-minute delays on all cross-border internet communications while they search the content.

<comment><USER50> More like multi hour if you want to block from tarmac to past-customs. It takes at least an hour to clear customs in SFO (For a non American)</comment></comment></comment>


Concurrency is not Parallelism (it's better) - <AUTHOR> http://concur.rspace.googlecode.com/hg/talk/concur.html

<comment><USER2> Beware, the site spams your browser history.

See also Haskell's Control.Concurrent and Control.Parallel. modules.</comment>


A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Fruit Fly - <AUTHOR> https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30787-6 <comment><USER2> Can we also map the synaptic strength with this method? If not, I think we only have half the picture; as for brains, configuration of connections are as important as layout of the circuitry.

<comment><USER3> Late to the party, but corresponding author on the paper here. Cool to see this on HN!

We have _less_ than "half the picture" here. Not just weights; also missing electrical synapses, neurotransmitters, etc. We also don't know the spatial scale of neuronal arbor integration. Furthermore these are just the image data, not the complete connectome; people still have to trace circuits by hand in this dataset. Collaborators are starting to crack the segmentation problem, but it is still early days.

Necessary but insufficient class of information!

If anyone is interested you can browse the data live here:[https://fafb.catmaid.virtualflybrain.org/?pid=2&zp=131280&yp...](https://fafb.catmaid.virtualflybrain.org/?pid=2&zp=131280&yp=183714&xp=504613&tool=navigator&sid0=2&s0=7)

"URL to this view" lets you share URLs to whatever you're looking at.

\---- edit:

in mammals there is pretty good circumstantial evidence that post-synaptic density size correlates with evoked postsynaptic potential, but this hasn't been clearly and directly calibrated yet, and could vary from cell type to cell type

<comment><USER4> What technology needs to be developed to get the data on synapses and neurotransmitters? A high-resolution Raman imaging microscope? And is a dead brain sufficient, or would you need a real-time noninvasive scan of a living one?

<comment><USER3> In the fruit fly, neuronal cell types are highly morphologically stereotyped and identifiable across animals. This means that for a given cell type, you can collect data on electrical synapses in animal A, on transmitters in animal B, and on electrophysiology in animal C, and in this fashion assemble a unified, multimodal view of the parts involved. Our whole brain EM volume lets you see how those parts are connected.

In the above examples dead brains are okay except for electrophysiology, where the brain needs to be alive.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Can you recommend any books on these topics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People are rightfully pointing out that this is only part of the picture, however this is still a really important and useful result!

CNNs came by mimicking the layout of a visual cortex, it's very possible other similar breakthroughs could come from better understanding the layout of animal brains.

<comment><USER3> True. And this approach continues - the IARPA MICrONs program is trying to do a mm cube of mouse visual cortex: [https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research- programs/microns](https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/microns)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since bio neurons are more complex than "neural network nodes" let's say we dedicate one CPU core per neuron. 100k cores is a pretty standard supercomputer.

So we should soon be able to control a robot fly?

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately connectivity is only one property for models. Biorealistic models are lacking sorely in modeling plasticity, which is prerequisite for understanding learning. We 're way behind on mapping that and it is a very complex problem.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11127835](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11127835)

<comment><USER8> What is required to bake in modeling plasticity?

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing a better understanding of BDNF and other growth factor proteins would help.

<comment><USER10> Then how you answer short term plasticity

<comment><USER11> How short are we talking?

<comment><USER10> short term plasticity can be observed within 100 ms

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Neuron is the hardware. We have no idea how the software on it works. The way we model neural networks might be a very different from the operating system of the brain. It's like saying we mapped the x86 chip so we should be able to to simulate all it can do without reverse engineering the software.

<comment><USER13> That's a huge oversimplification. There isn't some hard drive from where software is loaded onto neurons. A closer model would be saying that the software is the neuron's interconnections and it's activation weights. The neurons are both the hardware and the software.

<comment><USER12> How would you be so confident that neuron is both the software and the hardware? Do we actually understand how we have cognition ? There is tremendous amount of electrical activity in the brain (and the entire nervous system). One could argue it's a low dimensional signal like an activor or a much higher abstraction like the software we run on our chips. Just because we use neural network like structures to generate activation weights, how does it follow that's how the brain works?

<comment><USER9> From a former neuro person: The physical world is not an abstraction- it's material. If you talk to anyone with any reasonable level of knowledge about neuroscience, you aren't going to find anyone who finds the Cartesian dualism you're effectively proposing credible anymore. The only real philosophies that hold their own in the psych/neuro world are reductionism/materialism and biological naturalism.

That and lesion studies / patients like H.M. have pretty effectively demonstrated that neurons have both processing and storage functions that aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER9> It's also worth pointing out that there are multiple types of neurons, so I suppose that you could argue that some of them are more "software-like" while others are more "hardware-like", as well as glial cells that essentially serve as dumb cabling (huge oversimplification). Purkinje cells in the cerebellum, for instance, are known to be more involved in muscle memory, although they still exhibit properties that are both hardware/software-like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Will the model start to live when the model is perfect?</comment>


Making your own tempeh starter - <AUTHOR> http://www.soya.be/tempeh-starter.php <comment><USER2> "Place 1/4 cup of long grain white rice in a pint Mason jar and add 20 ml water."

Shouldn't that be 200 ml of water? 20 ml is slightly over 1 tbsp, which is hardly enough for 1/4 cup rice.</comment>


When Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50M, but didn't - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/netflixs-crazy-doomed-meeting-with-blockbuster <comment><USER2> There's a fallacy here. The assumption here is that Blockbuster would have led Netflix to its current status.

Blockbuster at the time was a big bloated company that was mainly interested in profits from renting videos. Had they bought it they would have made sure that renting would have prevailed since that was what was bring in the money.

Had they bought it. It would have disappeared and another Netflix type of company would be streaming videos using the same business model. And it would have prevailed. But there's no way to know.</comment>


Twitter Has A (Secret) Reputation Score For Every User - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/17/twitter-has-a-secret-reputation-score-for-every-user/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> When I went to the launch/welcome party for Klout in the building for Twitter HQ, I invited a Twitter employee friend to "come down from the top floor" to check it out.

He walked in and said "yeah we have this internally already, these guys are fucked".

I think the idea of a reputation score around your twitter account makes total sense, and is definitely a marketable product. And the Klout team are a great bunch of guys.

But when Twitter offers it there is no real point to a 3rd party option which is going to be inherently less accurate.

Yes, Klout now calculates Facebook authority too but unless you have created an account and linked your profiles its meaningless _(and what %age of folks have done that?)_. Klout dodged a bullet today in that Twitter didn't announce this info going into the API, but I don't think that's far out...

<comment><USER3> "inherently less accurate"?

I can see that there's potential for Twitter's offering to be good, but no guarantee that it's perfect.

'Reputation' is a nebulous concept, and Twitter certainly don't have a lock on how it's defined and calculated. Who knows which centrality measure they've chosen, how they're valuing and determining influence, or any number of other measures. The main advantage they have is of being closer to the raw data (and potentially better access to the entire data set, although a rigorous sampling methodology could take care of that)

<comment><USER2> _"The main advantage they have is of being closer to the raw data"_

That's my point. Both companies have the ability to come up with the most amazing formula for working out reputation but applied equally, Klout is going to be "inherently less accurate" because they have to trickle feed the data via the API and many interesting data points that may be stored in the Twitter database are not exposed on the API.

Twitter has direct access to all data points.

<comment><USER3> Like what though - if you have enough information to generate a social graph, and you have access to the firehose, then you're going to be have what you need. Social scientists will often use a sample set as a very acceptable proxy for full data set analysis (<http://www.insna.org/PDF/Connections/v18/1995_I-1-9.pdf>)

There's little evidence that the Twitter guys have come up with an outstandingly amazing reputation algorithm and that this niche has been filled. The opaqueness of Klout doesn't fill me with confidence that their methodology is valid or truly meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really TechCrunch? You are surprised by this?

<comment><USER5> That was my response too. It's like when Apple revealed their iPhone testing labs. Obviously these companies have internal tools/stats that people have no need to know about, but definitely make their company better able to perform.

<comment><USER6> The iPhone testing lab story at least had some cool pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm also guessing this is used in the Top Tweets algorithm, which seems to favor lesser known users in the amount of interest needed to get chosen, but I have no way to back that up.

</comment><comment><USER8> If this news is surprising to you, you should rethink your mental model of, well, the business of tech startups.

</comment><comment><USER9> one assumes that this is just the converse of a spam score...</comment>


Tech Layoffs Surge Past 100,000  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/12/tech-layoffs-surge-past-100000/ <comment><USER2> 100,000 is just a number in "tech" firms, which is a board category. 100,000 is a lot, but not really a lot compare to the current situation of the economy. You should look at how many of those layoffs are strategic, and many of them are just "cutting fats". I assume many company are using the time to cut their fats.

<comment><USER3> yup, and also for companies whose stock prices are depressed (all of them), this is one of the only meaningful things they can do for investors in a recession. and frankly they can rehire people later for lower wages...i see a huge wave of salary resets going through the valley. developer wages were out of control, at one point last year i wouldn't even look at anything under $150k. now i have a lot of experience, but even i found these salaries absurd for developers. thats going to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anybody know the percentage of coders in these numbers? I doubt the job security/demand for a good programmer has changed at all.

<comment><USER5> You could always work as a company employee ( _seishain_ ) at a major Japanese company. They essentially can't fire you. You essentially can't quit.

In times of economic uncertainty, this sort of arrangement holds a lot of appeal to people. Believe me though, oh boy, there are downsides to the expectation that worker and company are joined at the hip forever.

A common opinion among my friends: "No matter how bad it is, above all, don't quit. If you quit, you'll never work for a decent company again. You'll be _hakken shain_ (temp) for the rest of your life, condemned to perpetually poor conditions and ceaseless economic uncertainty. It would be like being American, except with worse pay. _looks around_ Sorry, Patrick. When I said like an American, I didn't mean like you. But you're not American, anyhow, so its OK."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As bad as this is, I guess we've been luckier than many sectors. Here's to hoping we are able to pull ourselves out and create a stronger and more resilient economy for all.</comment>


Scientists translate coronavirus spike protein into music - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-06/coronavirus-music-scientists-translate-spike-proteins-melody/12124424 <comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to score:

[https://soundcloud.com/user-275864738/viral-counterpoint- of-...](https://soundcloud.com/user-275864738/viral-counterpoint-of-the- coronavirus-spike-protein-2019-ncov)</comment>


Optimizing for the Intel Atom CPU - <AUTHOR> http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=286

<comment><USER2> I actually kind of liked the interleaving optimizations on pentiums. Its fun to do in real life as well :)</comment>


Humans: Unusually Murderous Mammals, Typically Murderous Primates - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/humans-are-unusually-violent-mammals-but-averagely-violent-primates/501935/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Interesting article. However, the title is somewhat misleading, since the article makes clear that the murder rate for humans varies enormously according to social circumstances.</comment>


Scientists Found Rust on the Moon. That Should Be Impossible - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3azwbk/scientists-found-rust-on-the-moon-that-should-be-impossible <comment><USER2> Wow, Martians are now programming in Rust. It really is a popular language.

</comment><comment><USER3> surely you mean The Clangers?</comment>


Internet becoming unreadable due to lighter and thinner fonts - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/23/internet-is-becoming-unreadable-because-of-a-trend-towards-light/ <comment><USER2> The post this is a dupe of: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628)

</comment><comment><USER3> To me, lighter and thinner fonts don't even look all that better. For mass- consumption content sites (blogs, news sites, etc.) readability should be the highest priority, and larger black (or dark gray) text on a white background seems to be the way to achieve that.</comment>


Nokia Plan - Business Model Generator - <AUTHOR> http://nokiaplanx.com/

<comment><USER2> "Market the hopes and dreams of a generation of engineers to Microsoft" .. ah, that's Plan A again

</comment><comment><USER3> Yay, thanks for posting this! Seemed like a good idea at the time ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol I know right. Check out PlanA.com till PlanE.com

<comment><USER4> and F.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like Nokia Plan E. Get it? Nokia _plane_? Ha!

<http://nokiaplane.com>

<comment><USER6> And <http://nokiaplank.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is anybody else tired of the whole Nokia-Microsoft tie up already? Just give them space and let them do their thing.. Obviously some people still hate Microsoft and some others don't really get the long term economics or even the short term economic choices faced by the board.

</comment><comment><USER8> Didn't pay attention to the 'Generator' part of the title, and got "Market schoolchildren to schoolchildren". I was confused for a good ten seconds.

</comment><comment><USER9> If it starts accepting contributions, it will become a killer app! Or a killer plan, or...</comment>


Was whole economy a Ponzi scheme? - <AUTHOR> http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/01/business/col02.php

<comment><USER2> In the short-term, yes. In the long-term, no.

When dealing with investments, over the long-run their price will match their value. However, in the short-run, the price will be whatever other people are willing to pay for it. So, in boom times that's often higher than value and in recession that's often lower than value. And in the short-run, new buyers of a stock pay back the older buyers just like a Ponzi scheme, but in the long run the company's value is what determines the price.

So, maybe you want to play the system and buy and sell based on these trends, but that's hard. Heck, Harvard's endowment fund couldn't do it, you think you'll be able to? It's a lot easier to focus on the long-run and invest in things that are good values.

The real problem that we're seeing here isn't that there are market fluctuations. It's that people wanted to put things in stocks that they thought they'd be using as cash in 6-18 months - specifically, retirement savings. If you're not one of the rich whose wealth will outlast their life, you need to move money from stocks into less risky investments as your retirement date approaches. If you don't, then you have to be flexible with when you retire and how much you'll have. But everyone wanted that extra hundred-grand or something to retire on - why move into safe investments when stocks have done so well? I don't want to loose out on some additional cash for retirement!

Heck, most investment firms have auto-adjusting funds that become more risk averse as you reach retirement age, but they aren't as popular as they should be because people don't want safe as much as they want more. In some ways it's like an unintentional scam. Investment professionals will caution you against being too risky just like a con-person tries to dissuade their mark, but the mark sees what they want and thinks the con is trying to keep them from money. . .and then it collapses. The difference is that the investment professional is (usually) being sincere about avoiding risk.

Be careful, don't over-extend yourself with visions of gold, and don't count those golden eggs before they hatch.

<comment><USER3> The more fundamental problem was the philosophical shift from holding stock being a means to collect a dividend to expecting the short term ability to purchase stock and sell it for a profit.

If you sit and think about it logically, why does a stock that doesn't pay a dividend have any intrinsic value attached to it? Yet we have built an economic structure that says that it is possible for that piece of paper to gain value.

<comment><USER4> Because the money that would be paid out as dividends is instead reinvested in the company, increasing its ability to produce profits in the future. _Assuming_ that managers can find investment opportunities that exceed the return on capital that a shareholder would otherwise get, this is a good trade.

This is a fairly big assumption. It tends to be true in younger, high growth companies, or companies where management is good at identifying other profitable markets to enter. This is why Google, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, etc. never pay dividends, and why Microsoft didn't until recently.

Unfortunately, managers tend to be pretty poor at realizing when their market is no longer growing. So they'll _think_ they can buy growth by acquiring companies or hiring more people, but end up destroying shareholder value when the exorbitant purchase prices don't pan out. Good for entrepreneurs, but bad for investors.

It's not as simple as "dividends = good, stock price appreciation = bad". There's been a fair amount of academic mathematical finance devoted to dividends, and it showed that investors should be ambivalent about dividend yields, _as long as management was economically rational_ (i.e. would only undertake investments if the expected return was greater than the cost of capital). A reduced dividend just means that more money stays within the company, which increases its future value.

<comment><USER5> You're still talking about a world where dividends still exist. They're being generated & reinvested. This is in order to create more dividends in the future. Once reinvesting becomes expected, it just means that dividends aren't getting paid. We blur that issued then reinvested concept & just readjust our expectation for companies to grow.

The issue is that a situation where dividends are the norm, this keeps the system honest. Cash is harder to fake. If people own stock for dividends it's harder to get carried away.

The reality is that many companies will probably never pay dividends justifying their current valuations.

You can't just say that you've abstracted away the middle part & look at indicators of indicators of indicators forever. This isn't engineering. There is an enormous psychological element involved. You wouldn't get Uncle Khaled to invest in your shop if he visited & saw that no one walked through the door.

<comment><USER4> If you're arguing that most companies are not generating anywhere near the cash flows needed to justify their valuations, you'll find no argument from me. Even after falling 45%, S&P500 P/Es are still around 12, which implies an earnings yield of around 8% assuming earnings stayed constant. Given the historically record earnings of recent years, that seems to be on the high side of reasonable.

But if there were a company that traded at a P/E of 7-10, had no red flags like excessive debt or discrepancies between cash flow and earnings, yet paid no dividends, I'd have no qualms about investing. That actually describes Berkshire Hathaway pretty well, if its stock price were to drop a bit.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but I'm arguing a bit more then that.

I'm arguing that it's fine to have some companies that don't pay dividends. Fine in a world where the standard is dividend paying companies. Once they become the exception, once you stop even speculating about what they would be paying if they where paying, once you start talking about, game's up. Stock becomes trading cards.

BTW, it's not just not paying. Paying 1-3% is the same sort of issue just that then it's the investors rather then the companies _fault._

But then, all that says. It still works. Sort of. Baffles me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious if we can generalize even more. For example, can we call Academia a giant Ponzi Scheme that will collapse when run out of naive new recruits laboring their years away hoping to reach top of the pyramid one day?

<comment><USER7> Anyone with any knowledge of our monetary systems will readily acknowledge that it works like a big ponzi scheme.

This is really the only way to manage a monetary system so it allows for economic growth.

We could say. "Let's go back to the Gold or Silver standard" but they have their own problems. United States was on a gold standard in the 1980s and I don't think we want to go there.

Anyone who has studied the history of Andrew Jackson should recall that the ongoing conflict between himself and Henry Clay during his three terms as president was about "Money Supply".

<comment><USER8> Neither Andrew Jackson nor anyone else had more than two terms as president except FDR, who took the US off the gold standard by stealing everyone's gold in 1933. (That's where the gold in Fort Knox came from.)

Besides, the US used a gold (and sometimes silver) standard most of the time before 1913, and in that time grew from thirteen largely agrarian colonies to the largest industrial economy in the world, so I can't understand why you say that "a big Ponzi scheme" is "really the only way to manage a monetary system so it allows for economic growth."

<comment><USER7> dgordon. When you grow from nothing to something 13 times doesn't mean too much. That argument is totally irrelevant.

There is no way we could have had the kind of growth we experienced post WWII if we had stayed on the gold or silver standard. The monetary system we use now is not perfect, it's just the best we have available.

But it's definitely broken. We need to fire some of the people who should have warned us about the crisis we are now in but didn't and then move on.

I feel very badly for those who have suffered unfairly, and this includes millions of innocents, but these things happen.

<comment><USER8> Growing all the way to the largest economy in the world is irrelevant? I don't follow. Nor did I say anything grew "thirteen times."

"There is no way we could have had the kind of growth we experienced post WWII if we had stayed on the gold or silver standard."

What's your evidence?

"The monetary system we use now is not perfect, it's just the best we have available."

Again, what's your evidence? Why is this system better than systems based on precious metals (the choice of most civilizations to use money) or systems that, while they use fiat currency, do not allow (in theory...) arbitrary creation of such currency?

"I feel very badly for those who have suffered unfairly, and this includes millions of innocents, but these things happen."

These things happen because the economic decisions of those who govern guarantee they will happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> not exactly, people want to think there is some huge conspiracy run by evil geniuses...the reality is actually much more horrifying. The people running the show aren't evil geniuses....they are just as stupid as the rest of us.

Most of the decisions made by these financial geniuses, can pretty much be summarized by a series of if then statements, that they learned through out their lives

<comment><USER10> "the reality is actually much more horrifying. The people running the show aren't evil geniuses....they are just as stupid as the rest of us."

Yep, that is more horrifying to a lot of people who want experts to do their thinking for them.

<comment><USER11> So most of the population then. You can't avoid stupidity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _That $50 billion is likely to turn out to be not the amount lost but the amount people wrongly thought they had._

'Zackly.

<comment><USER13> Money and wealth turned out not to be the same thing after all. You can create money by scribbling marks on little pieces of paper. Creating wealth turned out to be much, much harder.

Seems like every time they forget this, we eventually have a "correction".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems that the behaviour fuelling those "Ponzi bubles" is <a href="[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200812/financial- bubble...](http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200812/financial-bubbles) in our basic psychology.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill If you measure the strength of the USD not in relation to other currencies, but what you can buy, either in gold, silver, or a basket of goods (since after all, money is a means to exchange things); then it is reasonable to point out that over the last 100 years, the purchasing power of $1 USD in 1910 has collapsed to about 4 cents today.

In 1910, $20 would get you 0.96 ounces of gold (the $20 gold coin), or 15.4 ounces of silver (20 of the $1 Morgan Dollar), or about 600 loaves of bread (bread was about 3 cents a loaf), or over 360 bottles of beer (36 bottles was $1.75).

Savers have been punished severely, spenders rewarded as over time, inflation reduced the bite of the debt they took on (they could pay back a mortgage with greatly-inflated dollars).

Capital gains taxes did not allow you to adjust for inflation (e.g. if you were given something worth $20 in 1920 as a baby gift and sold it when you were 80 for $900 you didn't really make anything on it).

... it may be quite painful for those of us in the USA over the next few years.

<comment><USER15> That analysis leaves so many things out of the story that I would hardly even know where to begin pointing out the problems, including ignoring or misunderstanding compound interest (your analysis only holds for someone stuffing dollar bills in their mattress, not under any other feasible holding model across 100 years, which in truth is simply not approximatable in any simplistic fashion anyhow) and the fact that a dollar in the past _is_ intrinsically worth more than a dollar in the present, because the dollar in the past can be leveraged to generate more present wealth. (Typically, this is looked at from the point of view that a dollar in the present is worth more than a dollar in the future and future dollars must be discounted in value when compared to present dollars, but the tense-shifted statement is equivalent, barring the fact that you can't actually spend past-dollars in the past. (In which case a past-dollar would be REALLY valuable...))

Finally, you seem to be claiming that the US (either collectively or per- citizen) is no more wealthy today than it was in 1920 (or 19xx), which is one of those results so absurd that it should be prompting you to reconsider your viewpoint, not prompting you to post on the internet.

<comment> patrickg-zill You are reading into my post, things I did not say.

In fact I didn't touch at all on the issue of wealth per person or total US wealth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "We too thought our retirement funds and houses were growing miraculously, though ours was an illusion fueled by debt rather than fraud"

This is clearly true regarding housing prices and the returns and market prices of financial companies, but it ignores the effects of productivity increases when applied to other types of companies. Increasing productivity should allow equity capital to produce higher returns and it is difficult to separate this effect from the effect of a leveraged balance sheet when pricing equities. The market will certainly overshoot on the downside at some point but it's difficult to determine where that occurs because consumption must be lower in the short and long term due to deleveraging by businesses and consumers.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well yeah, sort of.

If you think about it what is stock, you pay $10 for a share that someone else paid $5 for, pretty much just because of rumours the company may do better in the next month or year, it's like buying air.

At least with commodities it seems like there is something material behind that contract; grain, oil, sugar. It's not like one day people will suddenly decide, or could be capable of deciding, to cut out sugar.</comment>


Show HN: Create unlimited one-off Invoices (Built with AngularJS) - <AUTHOR> http://metaware.github.io/angular-invoicing/

<comment><USER2> Very cool. Sometimes I receive invoices in the mail that give me the option to pay online. However most of the sites require a sign up and account. The smarter sites have a widget that allows you to type in your unique invoice id and pay without signing up.

This has always seemed like a possible opportunity for a SaaS product in my opinion. Essentially you'd let the site generate the invoices using your code. Give them a snippet to put on their site and handle the payment processing. Maybe give them a dashboard to see all their data.

Embeddable Invoices.

</comment><comment><USER3> A handful of suggestions

\- consider putting initial focus on the item description field and possibly using a textarea over input

\- in alternating rows with white background it's difficult to determine what can be updated

\- as this is desktop targeted, I'd consider throwing a hover style over the fields which are in fact editable

\- rather than trying to rework styling of form elements, use the hover effect as described above and the ng-if (or ng-show/ng-hide) to toggle between the input field and text based element

\- print mode you can still edit, as noted in another comment there really shouldn't be a print mode, you should have a print stylesheet to hide what you don't want on there and format everything else appropriately

\- consider localStorage for the most recent invoices created, also helps with the "oh shit, I just navigated off the page with 100 line items"

Overall good first effort, keep at it!

<comment><AUTHOR> these are really good feedback notes, I'll add these in into our roadmap. We were actually planning to do simple Firebase based backend integration so that people can actually save their invoices and just send out links etc.

<comment><USER4> This would be a really good idea. I've been using [http://invoicemachine.com/](http://invoicemachine.com/) for a few years and I like how you can save the invoices and automatically email them out on a schedule (my client had monthly maintenance work). They let you export it in different formats like a PDF which is helpful too.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is neat! for now, our goal was to just get something very simple out the door.. Create invoices, Print/Save as PDF and manage them offline..

Feedback that we've got so far has been amazing! Thanks y'all!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> suggestion: instead of enabling/disabling print mode, just use an additional media=print stylesheet.

<comment><USER6> I'd still keep a print button; not a enable/disable, but at least a button that triggers `window.print()`. "Print" buttons may seem useless, but they do serve as a simple bit of advertisement that "Yes, this page is print- friendly!"

<comment><AUTHOR> In the app,

Turn on Print Mode > Print

Does exactly that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is actually simple yet well executed - great work.

Glad to see the 'Made with Love in Toronto' footer too. Would love to connect about a project perhaps? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218412)

Cheers

<comment><USER8> sure, email me at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey! Here's something very similar I've built with Angular too [https://github.com/vahek/InvoicingJs](https://github.com/vahek/InvoicingJs)

I recommend making use of localstorage, so the company info doesn't have to be entered every time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nicely done! The idea of using localstorage has been mentioned a couple times, For a couple fields localstorage does make sense. We were aiming more of a Firebase like backend support so that one is able to send out just links to invoices.

HN community has definitely given us a few ideas and we look forward to implement a couple of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Neat. In working with Angular it has definitely seemed that it is particularly well suited to building single-purpose form-based apps (because building really simple things in Angular is shockingly easy). I've had a few ideas like this one. Maybe this will motivate me :)

<comment><USER11> Would like to say this was my own idea, but I stole it from another HNer in one of the thousands of "what should I build?" threads. Do a search for Excel or Google Doc templates and find one that is popular. Build it into a single- purpose app like this. Great for building a little portfolio, making yourself known, and generally making the web a better place.

And, like you said, it's shockingly easy :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok, so we have local storage and highlighting ready...! Thanks for the suggestions guys. Appreciate it..

<comment><USER12> What about a way to specify the currency symbol and locale for date / number formats?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a part of the roadmap. To allow multiple currency use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Small suggestion: constrain the height of the logo, not just the width.

Invoices need due dates, too.

</comment><comment><USER13> Omg. This is exactly what I need for my dad's company..

<comment><USER8> Glad we were able to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks pretty good Jasdeep. Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great Work man! Keep up the good work! (y)

<comment><USER8> thanks man! appreciate the feedback..

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Needed something like this. Perfect.

<comment><AUTHOR> glad this could help :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> amazing!

any tips on how I could quickly hack it to save pdf / email pdf?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your browser already does that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome stuff!

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> invoice_sub_total is defined twice.

<comment><AUTHOR> sounds like a git merge issue :) thanks for pointing this out! :)</comment></comment>


Non-blocking buffered file read operations - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/612483/

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is to reduce latency introduced between eventloops and io threadpools. Not every application can use sendfile() due for a number of reasons (post processing, TLS, ...)

I'll be talking about this at the LSF MM/FS summit in Boston on Monday if any of you guys are in attendance.

<comment><USER2> very neat. It definitely seems useful to be able to do a speculative read/write from an eventloop, and only defer the IO to another thread if it would block.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm ignorant - is reattempting the read(NOBLOCK) the way to confirm the block is available? Does that amount to polling? Can I issue multiple async reads and then wait for the first of them to complete?

As described, I can't tell if its possible to have a single read-completion thread that processes any async reads as they complete, which is a powerful design pattern. Or better yet, specify a completion callback.

<comment><AUTHOR> What this approach does is only read the data for you if it's in the kernel page cache. If it's not it's your responsibility to get it somehow (maybe through a regular read call). Today it does not enqueue a any kind read-ahead.

There's a very long history 12+ years of various buffered disk IO, along similar lines of what you're asking (callback, notification). All of them ended up failing to go upstream for a number of reasons 1) pushed too much complexity into the kernel (complicating the regular code paths) 2) caused regressions in performance in sync read/write 3) were based on functionality that the upstream developers did not want (tasklets).

With that background of various failed attempts, my approach focuses on a common use case in modern servers: a network pool loop and a disk IO thread thread pool. That's pretty much how everybody works around lack of async disk IO. The big problem with that is additional latency. That latency comes from synchronization (between two threads) and queuing (cached data stuck in queue behind long running requests).

My solution tackles that latency by letting us answer in the same network thread if data is cached by the kernel.

I tried this using samba (kernel guys like this use case) and I was able to get close to sync like latency / throughput vs. ~23% lower numbers with pure thread pool. I've observed similar numbers in our application as well.

Finally, using this you can implement what you're purposing in user-space using a threadpool without giving up to much performance.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Translate Any Website with One Line of Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.bablic.com/?utm=hn

<comment><USER2> Does this help with SEO at all? Can Google index the different languages?

</comment><comment><USER3> Just tried it on squarespace, it works like a charm!</comment>


Show HN: Free design tools and resources for developers - <AUTHOR> https://undesign.learn.uno <comment><USER2> Awesome! Gonna use it for my next side project.</comment>


Ask HN:  Working Hours of Actual Startups? - <AUTHOR>

The lore of the startup is 100+ hours a week, always-on, check your family at the door.  There are plenty of blog entries (including PG's) and books to support this.  Lately, I'm even starting to see items about people using Provigil (aka Modafinil) to increase their available work hours.
On the other hand, I also see a (smaller) number of counterarguments, e.g. that the decisions you make are more important than the hours you work.
I tend to be in the first camp myself (I certainly was at my last startup), but this has me curious.  I'm sure HN is full of current and former entrepreneurs--what are your experiences? <comment><USER3> Very variable, depending upon the startup. I've been at one startup where the engineering staff basically lived at the office and slept under their desk. I've also been at one where basically everyone worked fairly standard 8-9 hour days, no weekends. The second was more successful than the first, though neither were huge hits.

What seems to work for me: I usually have about 3 periods of useful productivity a day. 10 AM to about 1 PM is when I get anything that needs intense concentration done, then I've got 2 other productive blocks, roughly from 4 PM to 6:30 PM and 11 PM to 1 AM. I'm pretty much useless after lunch, and by early evening I can't really concentrate. I've found myself falling into this pattern at many different employers, plus when self-employed - <USER2> difference is that all 3 blocks were devoted to my startup then, while now the 2 daytime blocks are devoted to my employer and the nighttime one is for side projects (or occasionally 20% stuff).

I do agree that the decisions you make are more important than the hours you work. You should work as hard as you can to still make good decisions, but no harder. The cost of one poor judgment call made when you're fatigued and worn out can easily undo a year of solid effort.

<comment><USER4> > The cost of one poor judgment call made when you're fatigued and worn out > can easily undo a year of solid effort.

And understanding that is worth at least one MBA possibly two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are similarly many blogs/books about working a "normal" work week or day (and some about less than "normal").

<http://www.caterina.net/archive/001196.html>

<http://37signals.com/svn/posts/893-workplace-experiments>

[http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live- Anywhere/d...](http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live- Anywhere/dp/0307353133)

But, I think that having passion and drive for your cause is more important than counting hours. Most people will and do burn out from long hours, they lose interest, etc... which obviously isn't good in the long run.

If you're thinking about using aids (Modafinil), you're probably comparing yourself to others in an attempt to catch up or keep up or something rather than shooting for personal success.

As for me, I'm more concerned about constant and continual self-improvement (and if possible, aiding others in their own self-improvement). If you continue on a route like that, you'd be better off finding what you're really after ;-).

<comment><AUTHOR> > If you're thinking about using aids (Modafinil), you're > probably comparing > yourself to others in an attempt to > catch up or keep up[....]

There's a certain amount of that behind this question. I'm 38. The talk on the news and YC pages about 18-24 year old founders being the norm, and 28 year olds who have already founded four or five successful startups--those don't help either. Then I start seeing these things about Modafinil and it's hard not to hear that little shoulder-demon whispering "you're past it...give up!" I don't intend to listen to him, but it's still daunting. I figured I'd get a reality check by asking here.

I've been very successful at a number of jobs because I'm smart, able to focus well and learn quickly, and willing to work as hard as needed. When I was 25, 100 hour weeks weren't a problem. But I'm 38 now, and I literally can't do that any more. I need to "work smarter" as they say; it's a hard and uncomfortable process to learn, since the old way has been so successful (and, honestly, so much fun).

>[...] constant and continual self-improvement [...]

Yep; been doing that for years. To mangle an adage: "Today in the workplace: the team of Age and Experience beat Youth and Endurance 5-0 in straight sets."

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh and...just to be clear: part of the initial reason for this post was because I was horrified at the Modafinil thing. Caffeine and sugar are one thing...they are well understood, they provide only a temporary boost, and they are commodities (i.e., equally available to everyone who wants them). Modafinil is a brand-new prescription-only drug. Although it's FDA approved, that's only for limited classes of medical treatment. There is little to know understanding of the effects from using it as a "competitive edge" drug. I don't want to possibly wreck myself being the guinea pig, and I don't want to have to compete against people who are burning shorter-but-longer (to paraphrase Blade Runner).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Our startup has 6 people and an office. Office hours are pretty traditional (9am-6pm)

A regular weekday:

\- Wake up at ~9am

\- Walk to work at ~930am (2 blocks)

\- 30 min lunch at ~2pm

\- Leave work at ~6pm

\- Dinner and relax with gf a bit till 8pm

\- Work from 8pm till around 2-230am

Most my daytime is managing our devs, emails, meetings, user support, and some coding.

At night I work on coding prototypes, working on the next release, and specing out new features.

I've tried all sorts of schedules (all nighters at the office, 6am wakeup, etc). But I find my current schedule very productive and the important stuff doesn't get interrupted by phone calls and meetings during the day.</comment>


Ask HN: Critique my Mark Cuban submission - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/12055537/Cuban

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I have some feedback for scribd. In case anyone there happens to read this. I loved the signup and upload interface.

However, it took me close to an hour (at 4 in the morning) to figure out how to get a pdf file that was readable in scribd. My pdf looked great on my computer, but 90% illegible in scribd. I finally figured out I had to tell my pdf program to embed the fonts in the file. I was using a latex program to create the pdfs (LyX).

Sorry to say I now have a fairly negative view of scribd. I suspect anyone else going through this would also. After all, scribd is all about pdfs right? Why can't it recognize when this happens and provide help? Why can't it display pdfs that look fine on my computer?

</comment><comment><USER2> Given the marijuana-detection side of thermal imaging, I have trouble imagining that you could pull this off without spending a decade in court defending yourself against invasion-of-privacy lawsuits.

<comment><AUTHOR> The DEA already does this from helicopters as far as I know. I don't think there's any privacy issues with that.

On the one hand, I don't really care if people grow marijuana, so I'm not sure I'd want to sell that data anyways. On the other hand it might save the gov money.

<comment><USER2> I don't know about the DEA, but I know police have been told that they can't use thermal imaging without a warrant because it constitutes a "search".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea.

You really need to show Cuban his exit.

Also, you can't account for expenses without knowing the cost of GPS-imaging technology - do some research and get a ball park figure.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted an idea to the Cuban idea request. Be interesting to get feedback on it. Thanks for any.

<comment><USER2> Do you have a non-scribded version, for those of us who don't use flash?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://drop.io/cubester>

I think that should work. Doesn't scribd have a download pdf option?

<comment><USER4> It's 3 pages of text, really less than that since it's a numbered list. Couldn't you just post the text directly in HN, or a link to an ASCII text file hosted on a website? All this downloading/flash is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> that flash crashed my browser. Arguably that's a firefox or an Adobe problem, but just in case you have critical data in some other browser window save / submit it first.

</comment><comment><USER6> I suggest trying to talk to potential customers and possibly making your first sales for even less than the full $12K in proposed startup costs.

For example: rent the camera for 1 day. Take the photos on foot, on a couple of residential blocks and a couple of commercial blocks. Approach occupants door-to-door, or via a low-res mailer with followup call/knock. Ask for a higher price -- but be flexible, you're trying to learn the right price.

If response is positive, there are lots of ways you could fund expansion beyond just Mr. Cuban -- including grants and investments from 'social' or 'green' enterprise groups.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd only do this if I got Cuban backing. I have other ideas I wasn't willing to post online.</comment></comment>


Lesser-Known Pandas Tricks - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/5-lesser-known-pandas-tricks-e8ab1dd21431 <comment><USER2> What is the difference between join and merge?

<comment><USER3> [https://stackoverflow.com/a/37891437](https://stackoverflow.com/a/37891437)</comment></comment>


Good statistic book for CS post-graduate? - <AUTHOR>

During my degree courses I've applied mostly to operation research, soft computing , and data minining, but the education I received on statistics and probability was never up to those topics.
Every teacher that has had a course on statistic at my faculty, with just a few exceptions, is known for a pathological excess of hand-waving, despite introducing and using rather advanced topics.
In my graduate course I had to integrate the standard course of statistics with material found on the web, e.g. wikipedia, mathworld, but it's not enough.
I'm looking for a book that is at the same time formal, clean and geared toward the applications I'll be studying. It should treat advanced topics as well, i.e. not just classic introductory stuff.
thanks! <comment><USER2> For frequentist statistics, I'd recommend Statistical Inference by Casella and Berger.

For Bayesian statistics, I'd recommend Bayesian Data Analysis by Gelman et al.</comment>


Chinese passing off fake drugs as 'Made in India' - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/China-passes-off-fake-drugs-as-Made-in-India/articleshow/4633377.cms

<comment><USER2> I think Chinese business people lost all the ethics in this economic recession.</comment>


Coverlandia: Official and FanMade covers - Make your iTunes happy - <AUTHOR> http://coverlandia.net

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I'm Sebastien. I'm a web developer from France. I just launched Coverlania and wanted to share it with you guys. The idea is to share people's covers with everybody so they can use them in iTunes of whatever. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated! Thanks :)</comment>


#1 Way to Increase Sales: Tell Customers What They Want - <AUTHOR> http://www.pamil-visions.net/increase-sales/227722/

<comment><AUTHOR> I included a bunch of examples of companies that do this really well in the post. Including Ginzametrics (YC Company)</comment>


Phusion Passenger 4.0 and Phusion Passenger Enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/07/24/roadmap-preview-1-phusion-passenger-4-0-and-phusion-passenger-enterprise/?new=1

<comment><USER2> Can't wait to see what features the new Paid (Enterprise) version will have over the Open Source (Community) version...

These guys deserve to make a good living from this product as its made a profound difference to the Ruby community which i think sometimes gets taken for granted.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the most obvious question is, how does the new Passenger (and Enterprise) compare to the _traditional_ setup, nginx+unicorn in terms of reliability, security and performance?

<comment><USER4> for me, passenger is much easier to setup than unicorn etc... the only thing i miss compared to unicorn is preload_app, which in my understanding will be addressed via the rolling restart feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it slightly amusing that nginx+unicorn is called a "traditional" setup because Phusion Passenger predates Unicorn. :)

It is true that Phusion Passenger Enterprise addresses rolling restart, but its Unicorn counterpart is not preload_app. Phusion Passenger's "smart spawning" works by first loading the app into a master process, then forking off multiple worker processes from that. Sounds familiar? That's because it's exactly the same as Unicorn's "preload_app true". Our implementation predates Unicorn.

Preloading/smart spawning in itself does not prevent app deployments from blocking clients. Rolling restarts do.

We also do rolling restarts in a different way than Unicorn does it: Unicorn works by starting a set of workers in the background, then replacing the existing ones. This means that during a rolling restart, Unicorn may require twice the memory usage. Phusion Passenger Enterprise will restart processes one-by-one and will impact memory less.

There are no _technical_ security differences between nginx+unicorn and Phusion Passenger. Both of them rely on a frontend web server to shield them from slow clients and maliciously formed requests, and neither of them run application processes as root. There are no known exploits in either tools. However Phusion Passenger makes it easy to run different apps as different users through the builtin "user switching" security feature. With Unicorn you have to do this manually by running the processes as the right user.

But when it comes to reliability, we will be announcing a feature called "deployment error resistance" in the next Roadmap Preview.

Please sign up to the Roadmap Preview mailing list, and we'll keep you up to date with the latest release progress: <http://eepurl.com/nXXrL>

<comment><USER5> The default for Unicorn is to start a whole new set of processes, but it's pretty easy to set up a custom script that uses signals + the before/after_fork hooks to do various custom rolling restarts.

The same goes with user switching, you can just use Ruby to do it (example at the bottom of <https://gist.github.com/206253>).

Unicorn also already has "error resistance" in that it won't switch to a master/workers that aren't booting properly during a restart.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, not disputing that it's possible to script things together. The appeal of Phusion Passenger has always been that you _don't_ have to script things together: it just works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> definitelly waiting for this.

can you give us the info about the pricing scheme? how much the passenger enterprise will cost?

<comment><USER6> We'll be announcing the pricing very soon, just making the last finishing touches on the launch website :)

We'd also love to know what other features you want to see in Passenger :)

<comment><USER4> rolling restart is the killer for me... this is the only feature i miss from passenger compared with unicorn.</comment></comment></comment>


The enigmatic man who first set foot upon the Moon. Who is Neil Armstrong? - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8133835.stm

<comment><USER2> I watched the program and it was fascinating. I have to say of all the people that regularly get listed as "people to aspire too" he has to rank amongst the highest.

Not for flying to the moon but for the sheer nerve and control he had. When landing and having to take manual control (and when the alarms went off on approach) he was calm, nerveless and just got it done. That's somethign to aspire to right?

I also definitely respect the fact he keeps himself to himself. Im sure he doesn't begrudge his name too much to history; but there is a name and then there is a man. I think the presenter of this program is right - he prefers to let the name stand for the _whole_ team and not just him. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER3> I attended a high school named after him. (The school board was meeting to name the new high school in our school district while he was on the moon.) He did not attend the high school's dedication. Armstrong has never drawn attention to himself, and has accepted very little of the attention directed to him by admirers. That's amazing, and indeed probably does have something to do with why he was ready to be a test pilot who ended up first setting foot where no human being had ever set foot before.

</comment><comment><USER4> Charlie Brooker review of the program:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/04/being-neil- arm...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/04/being-neil-armstrong- moon-landings)</comment>


Microsoft "Cuzz": Fault injection testing optimized to find concurrency flaws - <AUTHOR> http://reddevnews.com/blogs/desmond-file/2009/11/microsoft-cuzz-parallel-testing.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like it's internal-only right now, but that doesn't matter, because the idea is so simple OSS folks could duplicate this quickly: Cuzz deterministically messes up thread scheduling to increase the chance that you'll hit a race.

</comment><comment><USER2> For a comparison with PetraVM's Jinx, see: <http://petravm.com/blog/2009/11/comparing-cuzz-and-jinx/></comment>


Skype Goes After Reverse-Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAwNzI <comment><USER2> This is why you always publish code _separately_ from blog posts and the like, when you're talking about reversing. As long as all you're doing is talking about it (and showing things like protocol structures, dumps, etc), there's nothing they can do. Back in ~2005, I took to writing blog posts that gave you everything you'd need to know to, say, implement Apple's Fairplay DRM. Because there was no code, they couldn't take it down, and it was able to propagate trivially -- in effect, a specification in narrative form.

<comment><USER3> Would pseudo-code be permitted as well?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Copyright covers exactly what's in their binaries, not anything you learn from their binaries.

I would argue that the opcodes in the binary are covered by copyright, but if you reverse-engineer those into C, that's your own creative work. Apparently Skype's lawyers did not see it this way, but why would they? If you're going to lie, you have to first convince yourself.

<comment><USER2> Copyright doesn't just cover "exactly what's in their binaries", because of the derivative works statutes. If you translate a book from English to French, the resulting book is still under the copyright of the original author; the same goes for taking disassembly -> decompiled C.

<comment><USER5> Something becomes a derivative work when excessive amounts of the source material structure comes from a copyrighted work. If you reverse engenear a program create a spec and have someone else code to that spec then copyright does not cover you.

You could create an original novel that was not a derivative work by taking once sentience from every book in a library and trying to create a meaningful work of art from it. Doing the same thing using a single book would probably not fly.

<comment><USER2> Yep, that's why the concept of clean-room reversing exists, to get around the derivative work concepts. It's not the only option, but it's probably the safest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Skype is claiming copyright on the source files that this guy created while reverse engineering the protocol? It's times like this when I really wish that everyone involved in that decision could be held personally responsible for the blatant lie that that is.

Even if it was against the law for him to reverse engineer the protocol, they don't own copyright to the source files he created.

<comment><USER7> I thought the researched decompiled the Skype client, posted the resulting source, reversed engineered the protocol, and wrote open source implementation. The decompiled source is definitely a derivative work and possibly copyrighted by Skype. It is hard to tell if the DMCA takedown is for that decompiled source.

The other problem is that by looking at the decompiled source, his source is tainted. He will have a hard time showing that it isn't a derivative work. Especially if he wasn't really careful writing the source from scratch and not cleaning up the decompiled source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability expressly allowed under the DMCA?

Plus, I don't get why companies care if someone reverse engineers their super secret [read: crappy] protocol.

<comment><USER9> You don't understand why companies care or you understand, but simply don't agree?

A long time ago, I recall having a conversation with the CTO of a company that made BBS software. We wanted to integrate with his servers, so we wanted the proprietary protocol. We advised him to build an API so that his software would become an ecosystem and thrive.

He smiled and metaphorically patted us on the head like a parent explaining the world to children.

"If we publish the API for people to write new clients, people can also write new servers that talk to the clients we write, and we'd be out of business."

Skype's motivation is obvious: If the protocol is public, while some people will write software that enhances the Skype ecosystem, others will compete with Skype, and that isn't what they want.

<comment><USER10> Actually Skype's motivation is different.

Their system operates under an assumption that all its parts are genuine, and so it places implicit trust into every client and expects it to operate fairly for the system's overall benefit. You open this thing up and there will be 3rd party nodes that do not comply with system's semantics -- supernodes become few and far between (why the hell would anyone be willingly relaying the traffic while on any sort of metered connection?), someone would add an encryption overlay disabling any "lawful interception" provisions they have in place (which they most certainly have or they would've been simply blocked all over the world), someone else would find a weakness in their p2p encryption and start eavesdropping on relayed calls, etc. Does Skype needs this sort of headache? No. Hence the highly obfuscated and encrypted binary with numerous anti-debugging and anti-reversing traps, and their very active suppression of reverse engineering attempts. Skype would basically stop working if it is ever open.

<comment><USER8> This makes sense. Thanks for the insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pulling mirror data:

<http://skype.ivo.so/> <http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6442887>

</comment><comment><USER12> Why do people still use Skype? Just use XMPP. Try to improve that instead of wasting effort on reverse engineering the horrible piece of poo that Skype is.</comment>


Now Anyone Can Sync Google Docs & Microsoft Office - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/02/24/google-cloud-connect-2/

<comment><USER2> Google is making its presence felt more and more on the desktop, right at Microsoft's doorstop. Unlike Chrome which is an alternative to IE, this Google Docs integration is just making things way too complicated. It's a parasitic relationship. Each of these services are handicapped in their own way and are using each other's services as bandaids.

</comment><comment><USER3> what microsoft should have done 5 years ago with their own service.

<comment><USER4> Their own service is also currently the most low-quality experience in file syncing I have ever used. It seems to "hang" all the time, it constantly asks me to put my password in again, nothing about it is usable.

But Dropbox is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> anyone with a PC.

<comment><USER6> that is running Windows</comment></comment>


Fight HIV with HIV: 'safe' virus proposed as vaccine - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18551-fight-hiv-with-hiv-safe-virus-proposed-as-vaccine.html

<comment><USER2> VIRxSYS is convinced that the HIV vaccine it is planning would be safe because, as in their SIV vaccine, all the genes that would usually make it infectious and able to multiply itself would be removed. "It can't replicate," says Lemiale.

Reminds me of: But, to answer your question, the reason we know all the animals are female is that we literally make them that way ... and believe me, they can't breed

<comment><USER3> While the reference is amusing, isn't that how many/most vaccines work already?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't this in a William Gibson book? edit: _Virtual Light_ , I think.</comment>