CCPA Will Hit Dev Teams Harder Than GDPR - <AUTHOR> https://www.tonic.ai/blog/ccpa-will-hit-your-dev-team-harder-than-gdpr <comment><USER2> Counting an IP address as PII is kind of crappy, you need a court order to turn an IP alone into PII.

Operators should be free to log traffic at the network level, PII should only come into play once you're asking someone to provide personal information.

<comment><USER3> Yeah it is odd. You decided to hit my server, I should be able to record the occurance. How am I suppposed to deflect DoS attacts if I can't maintain a list of nefarious IPs. I know that's a fairly low tech attack, but they still happen constantly. Is Fail2Ban no longer compliant?

I wouldn't be surprised if some policies pertaining to record keeping in some sectors contradict that requirement as well.

<comment><USER4> Not sure about this law but that sounds completely fine under GDPR. You need to keep your log files secure and not longer than necessary for what youre doing though.

[https://termsfeed.com/blog/gdpr- recitals/#Recital_49_8211_En...](https://termsfeed.com/blog/gdpr- recitals/#Recital_49_8211_Ensuring_Network_Security_as_a_Legitimate_Interest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > if a data breach occurs, the law permits consumers to recover up to $750 per > incident

This is great!

<comment><USER6> Simple, you just add this to clickwrap agreement:

The Parties mutually agree that any and all disputes arising from or relating to this Agreement, including the interpretation or application of this Agreement will be submitted exclusively to final and binding arbitration pursuant to the Federal Arbitration Act. The arbitration will be conducted the state of Delaware or such other location as the Parties may agree, by a single arbitrator in accordance with the substantive laws of the State of Delaware.

Boom. No more pesky California law.

<comment><USER7> I dislike how the minute someone mentions a legal hack, the responses are "oh, are you a lawyer?"

Why not consider this reply on its merits?

<comment><USER8> "Legal hacks" are rarely, if ever, as clever as their proponents think. Scepticism is natural and warranted.

Judges aren't complete morons and will take a dim view of "hacks". There could be loopholes somewhere but you'd need a lawyer to spot them.

<comment><USER9> One of the most famous "legal hacks", Richard Stallman's copyleft, had to be rewritten by a lawyer. rms wrote GPLv1 by himself and you should never use it. GPLv2 is the version that was actually vetted by a lawyer.

A similar thing happened with Perl's Artistic License. Its version 2 is basically also a lawyer-approved rewrite.

In other words, hackers, don't try this at home. There are professionals who can do this for you.

<comment><USER10> I find it somewhat sad that law is basically a guild where arcane language is used to gatekeep what should be a much more straightforward exercise.

<comment><USER11> It's not. It's the equivalent of saying "I can do this better" and producing unreliably, buggy code. Sure you can, but a more experienced professional can point out all the corner cases you missed.

<comment><USER12> Then when it fails, you blame the programming language rather than your experience in programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "It defines de-identified as "information that cannot reasonably identify, relate to, describe, be capable of being associated with, or be linked, directly or indirectly, to a particular consumer.""

I'd love to know what they mean by reasonable... I've seen some demos of tech that can do some pretty amazing things at de-de-identifying.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, huge caveat (I'm NOT a lawyer), but right now most interpretations seem to suggest that masking and synthesizing would constitute appropriate deidentification even if a motivated adversary could reverse engineer given appropriate time and resources. Again, this is something that will likely be clarified over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great article, until the end.

Who uses PII in test data derived from real customers? That's just an absurd practice to begin with, and no one who takes security seriously would even consider doing this.

<comment><USER15> I have never seen a "dev" instance of a DB that wasn't just a snapshot of the prod DB from earlier. I admit haven't seen many - but I have seen zero of any other kind (e.g. anonymized or synthetic)

<comment><USER16> Just going to throw out there that I've never seen a dev database that was anything other than fake data, or internal dogfood data. Have worked at major public tech companies and late-stage startups.

<comment><USER15> I think one reason might be that this was never sensitive personal data. Phone numbers, emails and addresses mostly corporate. But real passwords (hashes) from real users, on 50+ laptops with unencrypted drives was pretty normals.

I think culturally there may be a difference since I'm in a place where some data (addresses, phone numbers, ...) is public info, i.e. given your name I can get your address and phone number from a public DB anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Going into effect in a year? Seems like a business opportunity. Someone let me pay them $X and review my systems every so often and give me a seal saying I'm compliant with all these laws, and include some insurance up to $Y. Especially given the selective enforcement, there's money to be made from the chill alone. Compliance audit companies can probably just roll this into their package.

Also, I'm a bit annoyed at laws only affecting companies of a certain size. At some point right at crossing the line, there's a negative effect to having 50,001 users. (really I'm annoyed at how these data protection laws are implemented in general and I wish the discussion would be about that instead of being idealistic and only looking at the supposed intent)

<comment><USER18> > how these data protection laws are implemented in general and I wish the > discussion would be about that instead

Let's do that, shall we?

Before GDPR there were laws in each European country protecting private data (GDPR is basically Sweden's data protection law in that regard).

Not a single "poor company that will need comply" gave a damn.

Then GDPR was introduced, discussed, amended. Quite publicly. Not one of the "poor devs that would be hit by it" gave a damn.

GDPR was passed and companies were given two years to adjust their software/systems/business practices to comply. Hardly any of the "let's have a discussion shall we" devs gave a damn until the last few months of the transition period.

And only when they realized that they had to actually do something, something they should have done literally _years_ ago, we had (and still have) this fake outcry of "boohoo these laws make us work hard and do right things and we don't wanna".

Cry me a river.

<comment><USER19> As a top engineer of a EU headquartered company, I can be one instance of saying this was not true of us. We started our preparations almost a year and a half in advance of the March 2018 deadline. Once we engineers and our GC were done interpreting the extent of what we believed we needed to do and the resources to do it, we were basically ordered by the CEO to do as little as possible as late as possible, automate as little as possible, and just wait to see if anything came of it. I left the company a few months after GDPR-day so cannot say how it worked out, but it was the CEO's company and his choice to do it in a way that it then became my responsibility to implement.

Compliance/legal is a company risk and as I indicated in the challenger article here a few days ago, as an engineer I can advise on hat the risks are and the potential consequences of bad outcomes, as well as the costs to reduce them. The business decides what level of risk to take. I personally would have preferred a robust response to GDPR and thorough internal procedures, but it was not my call to make.

Of course, I personally believe that we humans should own our data and digital footprints, so I agree with a lot of the concepts behind GDPR and CCPA even if I do not agree with all and as an engineer may think some are ... silly/overzealous/misguided or what have you. Case in point: the IP tracking discussion above. If I hit your network, thats on me (barring externalities or bad actors, etc.). Retention periods and use definitions are fine, but a requirement to treat it as PII or other super sensitive data seems a bit much to the engineer in me.

<comment><USER18> Yes, true. In the end it comes to business decision. My focus on devs is mostly because it's devs who comment and complain on HN, so my comments are mostly geared towards them.

It's true, businesses (or people who run them) will in the end judge the direction where the company will go, and their judgment is often worse that that of developers.

So yes, I would replace "devs" etc. with just "companies" in my comment.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't say "worse" judgement in general. Just "different" in general. I have had both "worse" and "better" cases.

However, the better integrated and communicated the company's goals and rationales are, the more aligned the judgements become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When using personal data is outlawed, only the outlaws will use personal data.

What about all of the state actors (and 'hackers') who are cracking corporations for data and building a massive database on everyone?

<comment><USER21> > When using personal data is outlawed, only the outlaws will use personal > data.

This argument only works if you feel the thing being outlawed is _good_ (it is most commonly used in the context of privacy). To your statement I would respond the same way as I would respond to "When shooting people is outlawed, only the outlaws will shoot people": sounds good to me!

<comment><USER20> I meant, in jest, that if laws get tougher on the private sector, I hope that the government also throws a lot more money at data crime, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, devil's advocate here: why not just require your ToS to state that if the user is from the state of California, that they are to not use the service and find a local alternative?

It is a state law, they can't hassle you if you're not Californian and do not service their target market. Most of America doesn't live there, and California seemingly doesn't want you to do business there.

<comment><USER23> >So, devil's advocate here: why not just require your ToS to state that if the user is from the state of California, that they are to not use the service and find a local alternative?

Silently redirect them to a similar-enough site run by a partner company that's based in another state/country.

<comment><USER24> That would be considered an anticompetitive behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does this mean another swarm of privacy popups everywhere again?

<comment><USER26> If we're lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> ot: What's wrong with this website? It loads super slow and behaves very weirdly on my iPhone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies. We're using wix right now. We'll be moving off shortly.

<comment><USER28> Ah. yeah, that's normal for wix :| It works for making sites, but it never works well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This seems like a good discussion to ask.. Have any of you used a tool like pg_Anonymizer [0] to mask your data when building test/dev databases? I see several tools on there, but have no idea where to be begin on them..

[0] [https://pgxn.org/dist/postgresql_anonymizer/0.0.3/](https://pgxn.org/dist/postgresql_anonymizer/0.0.3/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Already starting to deal with this where I work. It's gonna be interesting...

</comment><comment><USER31> If a company distributes a program or app that processes your address, personal data, geolocation, etc. _on your device only_ and the sensitive data never leaves your device, are they subject to the CCPA?

</comment><comment><USER32> So are we going to have websites blacklisting CA IPs and answering back with some vague "this content is not available in your region?"

<comment><USER33> Hopefully not, unless we speak about some hyper-local businesses.

It's now GDPR + CCPA, so you are cutting off EU and California. Probably, more to come.

For example, seems like LA Times does not block EU anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The way this came into existence is what scares me.

<comment><USER35> The "if they knew what we know" part or the you can (kind of) buy policy part? If the latter is shocking to you, I have some very bad news for you. (The process would have been more difficult and more expensive if the law wasn't genuinely benefiting the people, but still possible.)

Also, Mr. Mactaggart, what a guy!

<comment><USER34> The part that bothers me is how hastily the "compromise" was drafted, without any public debate. I don't like the idea of an individual holding the legislative process hostage.

There are limits on campaign contributions, perhaps there should be limits on individual contributions for these signature drives, which are essentially just large marketing efforts.

And just because this guy got x number of signatures, I don't see why he should now have the power to make compromise deals with the government.

This isn't my area of expertise so I may be missing something here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> IMO the biggest difference between CCPA and GDPR is that GDPR does not distinguish between large and small companies. Everyone needs to comply. At least with CCPA you can bootstrap a company and not have this be another thing you need to worry about, on day 0

<comment><USER26> No, just once you reach 50k visitors to your site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can we stop talking about how privacy laws are hitting devs, and start talking how they will benefit people?

Boohoo, poor devs need to finally pay attention to people's private data.

<comment><USER37> You need to talk about both costs and benefits when discussing public policy. Otherwise, you end up with a ton of terrible policy that looks good due to an obvious tangible benefit, but nets out to more harm than good.

For example, minimum bedroom sizes for rental units. Seems nice to have enough space to live comfortably, right? End result though is the $20M apartment complex has 35 units instead of 40, and is only built later when rents have gone up to make the project make sense financially, exacerbating a housing shortage.

<comment><USER18> Let's look at the cost, shall we?

Invasive and pervasive surveillance. Private and sensitive data sold wholesale not even to the highest bidder, but to anyone.

Hell, when news about NSA surveillance broke, it was a huge scandal that was the focus of attention of all media for more than a year. Now Facebook alone is reported to have the same level of maliciousness and willfull ignorance on a monthly basis, and it's business as usual.

So yes, I don't give a rat's ass about the "poor developers" who couldn't get their shit together and provide privacy and security to the common people. And who now pretend they are being unfairly punished by governments.

And yes, I'm a developer myself.

<comment><USER37> "these costs fall on people who I feel deserve it" isn't a good reason to completely ignore the size of the costs being imposed. Especially since these costs are sublinear with respect to organization size, causing the tech behemoths you complain about to get a free competitive advantage against upstarts threatening their business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like the general idea and I like that it specifically applies only to organizations with more than $25 million in revenue. Give small startups a break.

Does the GDPR also have a lower limit like this? It should.

<comment><USER39> The criteria is a "one or more of the following" not a combination of them all

So if you make more than $25 million, OR your have more than 50k users or devices, OR you make more than 50% of your money selling data

<comment><USER40> Seems like the second one is the real problem. "50K users or devices" is less than 0.02% market share, even if you have only US customers, and for businesses with margins in the $1/user/year range it doesn't even cover one full time employee.

You can end up with that many users on a side project all of a sudden if it gets posted to the front page of a site like this one.

<comment><USER41> 50K California customers.

<comment><USER40> So less than 0.13% market share then.

Assuming you have any way to reliably identify which state your users are in -- which means we're back to "privacy regulations" encouraging companies to collect more data on their users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "He started worrying about data privacy after talking with a Google engineer and spent nearly $3.5 million in 2017/2018 to place an initiative on California's November ballot."

That Google employee must be somewhat nervous these days...

</comment><comment><USER23> >Process personal information of >50k consumers, households or devices

>Derive >50% of revenue from selling PII

So if I forward all of the data to another company outside of CA, does my company count as processing data?

What if the code that forwards that data is written by another company and I'm just hosting it on my site? Everything goes through their code and I'm paid to just setup a website to host their code.

Maybe I do collect info in CA but I sell the data for $1, but the company also buys some consulting services for the actual price of that data that I'm selling them?

<comment><USER43> > So if I forward all of the data to another company outside of CA, does my > company count as processing data?

You are still processing that data. Part of processing that data involves you shipping it off...

> What if the code that forwards that data is written by another company and > I'm just hosting it on my site? Everything goes through their code and I'm > paid to just setup a website to host their code.

You are as responsible, if not more, in making sure that compliance is met. You are the one hosting the code. The data is moving through your servers.

> Maybe I do collect info in CA but I sell the data for $1, but the company > also buys some consulting services for the actual price of that data that > I'm selling them?

That's just being a jerk. But better hope you don't pass the 50k mark...

<comment><USER23> >You are still processing that data. Part of processing that data involves you shipping it off...

>The data is moving through your servers.

So if a random company gets breached, everyone involved from cloud providers to ISPs are also responsible because they facilitated moving and storing the data and they are just hosting code?

This is problematic. Cloud providers give you permission to publish code. I could position myself to allow another company to publish code on my popular website to collect data and my role is basically no different than a cloud provider. We don't have to agree that is what it's specifically for, I just need to give them access to upload their own code for whatever expensive fee.

<comment><USER43> >So if a random company gets breached, everyone involved from cloud providers to ISPs are also responsible because they facilitated moving and storing the data and they are just hosting code?

ISP's aren't (supposed to be) "storing" that data. They are transferring bits between computers. You on the other hand are hosting a website with some sort of form that people input PII into. You are accepting that PII, whether or not it gets forwarded or not is irrelevant. You are processing it. So do your due diligence, contact your users and let them know what is going on, and speak with a lawyer for more information.

<comment><USER23> >You on the other hand are hosting a website with some sort of form that people input PII into.

That's what cloud providers do! If there's a spirit-of-the-law that is supposed to protect them, this would be a good time to write that in!

<comment><USER44> Do they specifically mention rental cars in the code of law, when they say that the driver can't drive over the speed limit?

<comment><USER23> "Process PII" is incredibly vague. You could define that in a hilarious amount of ways with the amount of complexity we introduce to our software products, especially with code we don't even write ourselves that widens your security surface.

This is especially true if you use a service that allows others to inject code into your code base. If NPM has a security failure that leads to a breach at a company, who is at fault? Both? Or only the company that chose to use the code? An NPM package might be processing PII after all. Does that mean NPM can never be held responsible for security breaches?

Secondly, your example would be backed up by historical cases and this law is brand new, so it is not clear. I'm not even sure how you guys can confidently argue that the new law ISN'T outright vague.

<comment><USER44> >> You could define that in a hilarious amount of ways with the amount of complexity we introduce to our software products, especially with code we don't even write ourselves that widens your security surface.

You could define in a hilarious amount of ways in which your chef can pee in the broth you ordered in a local diner. But it generally doesn't happen, does it?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Game of Thrones author George RR Martin: 'Why I still use DOS' - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27407502?ocid=socialflow_twitter

<comment><USER2> Here is the video the article is about: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. I wonder if it's a newer machine with DOS installed, or if he's still using some old 386… If it's the latter I'd worry about finding replacement parts when it inevitably breaks. If you've got an ST-506 disk, you'll never get a replacement for that!

<comment><USER4> I worked in a lab where we had a computer dedicated to running a very specialized piece of equipment. The computer was a 386 running DOS. We had all of the software updates (including operating system) to upgrade everything if needed in case the computer stopped working. That was only a few years ago, and as far as I know that 386 is still running. After seeing the current software for running that piece of equipment, I understand why the lab never upgraded. The old UI was a bit clunky, but it was much easier to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> But couldn't he just turn off spell check? I mean, the real reason is that he probably likes WordStar 4.0 more than the modern word processors, and I can totally get that, but the spell check excuse is a bit ... weak.

<comment><USER6> If it ain't broke...

<comment><USER5> Well sure, I'm not saying that he shouldn't use WordStar 4.0 on DOS. If it works for him, he shouldn't have to justify it. It takes time to become comfortable with a new word processor. But if you're going to make up excuses, pointing at a feature which can be disabled by un-ticking a checkbox is kind of lame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like he wants a text editor, not a word processor. Someone should tell him about Sublime Text.</comment>


Death of the taxi medallion: SF cab company ponders major change - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/death-of-the-taxi-medallion-sf-cab-company-ponders-major-change/Content?oid=2856068 <comment><USER2> You gotta give Hansu Kim credit, he's doing something different. A lot of companies would complain about Uber and die a slow death, but this guy is like "if they don't have to follow the rules, neither do I."

It shows dash.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Uber isn't putting me out of business," Kim said, speaking hypothetically. > "What Uber is making me do is retool -- and given the same rules, I'll beat > them all day long."

I appreciate his spirit, but I don't think he's fully estimating what it would involve to beat Uber at its game. He'll have to hire more drivers, have lower prices and still be up against a huge network effect wall. He seems jazzed with Flywheel, but they could stop sending him business tomorrow.

One of my favorite parts about Uber is that it's in so many cities and has consistency (easy to see pricing, if there's a problem I know who to contact, etc). I'm never going to seek out DeSoto Cab Co on purpose.

Basically, if the rules tilt towards the Uber model there is no reason for Kim to exist. He's a middle man in a business that is going the opposite direction.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by "Network effect"?

I don't really see how it applies in this situation. (e.g. you can use uber today and a taxi tomorrow and suffer no loss of value).

<comment><USER5> Uber has some drivers in a city, and some passengers - not very valuable. But, Uber does something special, like drop prices, and all of a sudden, there a lot of people who hear about the low cost of UberX, and so they put the App on their iPhone/Android, and start calling vehicles. Drivers, hear about the incredible demand for UberX drivers, and start adding that network to their vehicle. Passengers discover there is _always_ a Uber vehicle close by and so they start using it more often, which creates more demand.

Eventually, you get a network of users/drivers - each new driver is available to _many_ customers, and each customer will make themselves available to many drivers.

It's not a perfect N(N-1)/2 mesh, but then neither were fax machines (not everyone wanted to fax everyone else) - but the same concept of network value exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had a friend visit SF from NYC a couple weeks ago, and it blew my mind that he continued to use taxis instead of Ubers. Here, the decision seems clear- cut: calling a car with a phone is cheaper, faster, and more convenient. However, in NYC the streets are so saturated with taxis that waiting 5 to 10 minutes for an Uber instead of hailing a cab immediately seems absurd in most day-to-day situations.

<comment><USER7> It's pretty much the same in Chicago. You can hail a taxi almost immediately, but uber will take you 5-10 minutes. Can be useful though if you're in the outskirts of downtown.

<comment><USER8> Yep, I usually wind up using Uber to get from my apartment to the bars, and then there's enough cabs in the street outside the bars that it's faster to just hail one to get home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Summary: given the current regulatory conditions, you don't need a medallion if you just take bookings and do not get hailed from the street. "Taking a booking" is interpreted more broadly each day, so it includes summoning via apps. The owner, Kim, estimates that giving up the hailed fares in return for not paying for medallion rentals, would let him make more money and outcompete Uber.

My comment: How long until someone converts a street hail into a booked ride by generating a record to make it look booked?

<comment><USER10> I'm wondering if a "kiosk" in key locations on the street to grab a cab would be considered a booking or a street hail?

<comment><USER11> What if Uber just gave bar bouncers an app for hailing Ubers and shared a small cut with the bar? They'd just need a Square-like credit card swiper so that customers could pay for the rides individually.

<comment><USER12> This is kind of what we had here outside some nightclubs in the UK. There'd be a private hire company (bookable only), with a guy with a notepad and phone standing outside, he'd make the booking on the paper, ring the driver who was in the car next to him, bingo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has the market value of taxi medallions fallen after the advent of Uber and Lyft? I think there is a big risk that this way of organizing things is about to go away, which will leave taxi medallion owners with a huge loss.

<comment><USER14> [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/20/t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/20/taxi- medallions-have-been-the-best-investment-in-america-for-years-now-uber-may-be- changing-that/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't get it - he's giving up the ability to pick up riders at the cub, so where will his riders come from?

Or does this loophole mean he CAN still pick up at the curb? I did not understand the whole TCP vs TNC business.

<comment><USER16> Not sure if this is full answer, but from the article:

> Kim said he would do just fine because he has built a loyal customer base > over the company's 80-year history and now receives an additional 2,000 > hails daily through the hailing app Flywheel, which he hopes would adapt > with him.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, my skimming was poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I think might be more interesting for Mr. Kim is a hybrid model. He could start shedding medallions, and only use them for the airports or potentially a downtown core.

The rest of his dispatched traffic could be in vehicles without a medallion. If most of the rides don't require the medallion, he could shed a significant cost. It sounds like with 204 of 2000 medallions, his decisions could personally have a fairly large effect on the marginal cost of the medallion (so he is paying less per medallion and for fewer medallions overall).

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that DeSoto fails to mention _why_ people seek out Uber. Kim seems to be focused on the medallions pricing structure completely ignoring user advantages such as ease of access through the app, reliable service, quality, etc, etc.

If cab companies don't realize that new services beat them to the punch in many areas besides pricing they won't survive.

<comment><USER19> That is, unless, they have a government-granted monopoly that is tremendously unfriendly to disruption (i.e. regulatory capture)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> has anyone tried [http://www.ztrip.com/](http://www.ztrip.com/) ? it's a car hailing app developed by the company that owns a bunch of yellow cab companies. curious what people's thoughts/impressions of it are...

<comment><USER21> Interesting name. Ztrip is also an incredibly popular remix artist/DJ.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Z-Trip](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Z- Trip)

<comment><USER20> nice! love old school hip hop dj'ing.

still wondering if anyone has any opinions on the ride summoning app... maybe that's the answer, that no one uses it or has an opinion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if we'll see city medallion prices fall as drivers like this choose to not buy/rent medallions. Once that happens, the math might change such that it makes sense for him to keep the medallion.

Sucks to be an investor who bet who bet against technology, ouch!

</comment><comment><USER23> This won't work everywhere that has a medallion/license system. In Australia taxi licenses are regulated by each department of transport at the state level rather than city/municipal councils.

</comment><comment><USER24> interesting that right before (a year or two) Uber/Lyft/etc...'s time the prices of medallions hit something like $200K/$600K in SF/NY and there were stories about that in the news. Speaking about dialectics - top blossom of anything carries its undoing with/inside it.

<comment><USER3> They have cost a fortune for a long time, Uber was born more out of the frustration of the ability to actually get a ride than whatever expenses were involved (though to be fair the reason it's hard to catch a cab in SF is because there are so few medallions which is why they're so pricey).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Taxis are going the way of video rental stores. I wonder what is going next.

<comment><USER26> The big one is going to be schools. They won't die out, but they will be substantially altered and not as dominant as they are today, and that process will take much longer than the uber vs. taxi dynamic will take to play out. So much of modern education is just read, regurgitate, test, even much of a typical undergraduate education falls in that bucket. That sort of education is prime for disruption via interactive educational apps, but the genre hasn't hit it's inflection point moment yet. Nevertheless, sometime in the next 10 to 20 years or so there will be a breakthrough in educational software. Someone will put the pieces together and start making stuff that is universally considered to be excellent, and they will start making a crap ton of money which will fuel a gold rush into making apps using the same ideas. The rest will be history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Url changed from [http://pando.com/2014/08/04/san-francisco-cab-company- admits...](http://pando.com/2014/08/04/san-francisco-cab-company-admits- ridesharing-defeat-threatens-to-convert-to-limo-service/), which points to this.</comment>


State Attorneys Urge FCC to Combat Neighborhood Spoofing - <AUTHOR> https://biglawbusiness.com/state-attorneys-urge-fcc-to-combat-neighborhood-spoofing/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've had a 1-800 number for several years. The receiver of the call pays a fee for the call, not the caller.

Some enterprising VoIP companies would PAY callers a small amount for their 1-800 number traffic.

So I would receive robotic "political messages" or 20 minute voicemails (until I cut it down to 3) of static or other randomness. Somebody was making millions of calls and collecting their fractions of cents per minute.

But a few years ago, these calls stopped entirely.

What happened? My guess is that telecoms stopped peering with these 'enterprising' VoIP companies. The business model is still there, but nobody is bothering with it anymore.

Why can't we do the same for spoofers and the heavily accented "James Morrison" ?</comment>


We need another communication platform... fb/Twitter/email don't cut it - <AUTHOR>

we have created so many ways of pushing/pulling content from friends/followers, but often these are closed networks - my friends are your friends... we follow the same thing.  how do you reach actual communities - like your neighborhood?
we've tried to solve this problem with a website called http://skychalk.com, and we'd love your feedback.
ours is a new spin on sharing - you post something to a location - like fastening a flyer to a tree - and people view information by location.
please give us your thoughts / feedback - do we need to talk to our neighbors? do we already have too many avenues of communication?  is there room for another platform?
thanks for reading! <comment><USER5> I like the idea but when I first read your description and went to the site, I expected the equivalent of a cork board in an office lunchroom, which it does do with "gatherings", but the rest feels like Foursquare tips or Yelp's reviews. Basically, I thought it was something your going to read while you wait for the coffee to brew that has targeted information about the office "community" or "neighborhood". "I'm selling my car" or "Employee meeting on Friday the 13th". I'm using the office as an analogy like you used the flyer on the tree. But the true question here is why would I go to your site to find this information? When I walk down the street I have no choice but to run into the tree with the flyer. Then I might tell my neighbor that Cindy lost her kitten and that she should look out for it. Maybe it's easier to start spreading the local info on your site via word of mouth (existing social networks) so that people hear about your tree (your site) and at some point they'll get used to looking for the flyer on the tree.

Ok, sorry for the analogies and generalities.

I think it's going to be a challenge to get people to use it since most people feel saturated by status updates / check-ins / review apps. I'd suggest trying to leverage other social network api's in order to automatically group people by location and also facilitate posting to your site. Maybe create a light weight Facebook app that looks like a tree with flyers on it?

Hope this helps and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your thoughts. we'd like to have more gatherings/marketplace type stuff on the site but that takes a certain critical mass - people know that on craigslist their ad will be seen. our site is still trying to build traffic.

that's an interesting idea about trying to use facebook and then group by location. but are facebook apps really the ticket anymore? it seems to me that most facebook users are extremely hesitant to use apps anymore - <USER2> apps that post content automatically to walls, etc. and since our site only collects an email address from each registered user, we just felt the integration wasn't worthwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Give all email a URI. email is essentially a file on a server but not accessible by a URI. Invent email and text messaging that has a URI for each message.

For local broadcasting within a neighborhood, develop a system where you can send a message to cell phones with TV and radio as a failover.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow, interesting ideas. i love this out of the box thinking!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see this as just another channel, which might not be what we need. I'd love to see a truly innovative service that combines the existing communication platforms (fb, twitter, email, sms).

<comment><AUTHOR> i just realized i wasn't replying correctly earlier - sorry about that - <USER3> my response to this above

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think we do need to talk with our neighbors, but I suspect doing it in person rather than online would strengthen your community connections more so.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> jacksondeane - here's our opinion on that: the problem is communication intent - twitter/fb are about communicating to followers. you tweet a beyonce video from a cafe and your neighbors don't need to see that. but if you want to advertise a garage sale or send a missed connection, you don't need (or want) all your friend in nyc to see that. that's what we think the difference is.

<comment><USER9> It seems like this is also overlapping with Craigslist then?

If you want to advertise anything based on location, Craiglist is free and widely used.

If you can really provide something uniquely useful to bring members then people will come. I just don't know how much local neighborhoods care. You could target neighborhood watchs, get-togethers, clubs, and, as you said, advertising.

The thing is... all of those things are available in different forms (meetup.com, craigslist, etc.).

I suppose bringing them together isn't a bad idea though. Surely if meetup, craigslist, and other location-based services work, then there is a market for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> we hope so! what we don't like about the other services is the neighborhood bucketing... you have to choose a (sometimes arbitrary) label for the area you're looking at and can only browse in that way....

if you live in SF you know that these labels are constantly changing - <USER4> to just give the user complete control. one person may want to look at two blocks, someone else may want to browse an entire metro area.

thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess there is already a proliferation of these sites popping up.

likealittle geosay chatnearme yours

more to come ...

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting idea. Wonder if it is too abstract for average users though

<comment><USER12> Yeah. Agreed. I didn't get it at first until I zoomed out and saw what they were doing in sf. Could be useful if they got more users and figured a way to manage the noise.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback. we definitely need more users. HN is denying me another post because i'm posting too much but i'm actually curious of social startup hackers on here have good ideas? mashable won't write us up so we're trying to figure out how to get the word out.

also on the noise - we hope that eventually we get enough content that people will vote and help us sort through the noise.

again, thanks for trying the site

<comment><USER11> Try a viral video or something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems actually pretty cool, though no-one near me using it yet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> well get us started in your area haha! it's the classic chicken/egg problem. any advice on how to solve it?

</comment><comment><USER14> actually it looks suspiciously an aweful lot like chatnearme.com that has been out for awhile :)

<comment><AUTHOR> we never saw your site before we built this, and our ui is entirely different. everyone is doing location right now

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> looks a lot like what I did chatnearme.com check it out

<comment><USER14> btw I have a mobile web application at the same url and you can see how many people online in your circle</comment></comment>


Apple releases Web-based RSS reader prior to Google Reader shutdown - <AUTHOR> http://irss7.com

<comment><USER2> If this is an apple product, why is it built by web design firm called fountain? And why is there nothing on it that says Apple etc though the OP says apple has released it?</comment>


The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle. - <AUTHOR> http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle/ <comment><USER2> Moore's Law says absolutely nothing about performance, as this article repeatedly implies. Moore's Law says that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years, and that has fairly consistently held true and continues to do so.

For years, those transistors went into increasing CPU speed. Now, additional transistors go into building more CPU cores, or more execution units. Either way, Moore's Law still holds.

<comment><USER3> This is technically true, but it happens that clock speeds and MIPs have also increased at a geometric rate over long periods of time. It's a bit harder to characterize because processor architecture changes have a discontinuous effect, but on average MIPs doubled every 36 months. [1]

[1] [http://www.meaningprocessing.com/personalPages/tuomi/article...](http://www.meaningprocessing.com/personalPages/tuomi/articles/TheLivesAndTheDeathOfMoore.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Except that isn't Moore's Law.

<comment><USER5> No it's not but it is what people have often taken as one of the main effects of Moore's law and it is the phenomena the implications of who's end the article is discussing. And those implications are important even if they aren't directly related to Moore's law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"But that's pretty much it – we currently know of no other major ways to exploit Moore's Law for compute performance, and once these veins are exhausted it will be largely mined out."_

This is an awfully big post on Moore's Law not to include any mention of memristors*

[1] <http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/memristor.html>

<comment><USER7> The man is discussing paradigm shifts. While memristors will be pretty awesome if they ever come online in commercial production, I'm not aware of any major paradigm shifts they will cause (or prevent)...?

<comment><USER6> I've only a casual interest in the area, but these are some things I read around the time of the announcement:

 _"Memristive devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling calculations to be performed in the chips where data is stored rather than in a specialized central processing unit. Thus, we anticipate the ability to make more compact and power-efficient computing systems well into the future, even after it is no longer possible to make transistors smaller via the traditional Moore's Law approach."_

– R. Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director, Information and Quantum Systems Lab, HP

 _"Since our brains are made of memristors, the flood gate is now open for commercialization of computers that would compute like human brains, which is totally different from the von Neumann architecture underpinning all digital computers."_

– Leon Chua, professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, University of California at Berkeley.

<http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100408xa.html>

It just seems odd to go into such depth on transistor density and CPU/memory architectures (and potential future architectures) without mentioning memristors.

I agree that utilization of cloud resources will be an increasingly fundamental component of modern device architecture, but - at the risk of sounding hyperbolic - if memristors live up to the promise, we're talking about supercomputers the size of the human brain*

[1] <http://www.physorg.com/news190483253.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant > _Note that the word "smartphone" is already a major misnomer, because a > pocket device that can run apps is not primarily a phone at all. It's > primarily a general-purpose personal computer that happens to have a couple > of built-in radios for cell and WiFi service […]_

I love this. It explains both why locking down your customers' iPhones is evil (assuming it is Wrong™ to sever freedom 0 from a computer), _and_ why people accept it (somehow they act as if it is not a "real" computer).

</comment><comment><USER8> A common misconception:

Moore's law says nothing about the speed of a CPU!

It talks about how many transistors there are on a chip. So Moore's law is not ending and has not changed (so far).

</comment><comment><USER9> Sigh. There is a huge elephant in this room, it was the beast of Christmas past. Specifically, for years Microsoft colluded with Intel to make systems which consumed more memory and CPU power such that an 'upgrade' cycle would be required.

Have you ever wondered how a machine which is less than 1/100th the speed of the machine on your desk computed the bills, interest, and statements for millions of credit card users. The IBM 370 that computed and printed those statements for MasterCard back in the late 70's had a whole lot of I/O channels.

I would love to see it get relevant again that one consider that the computer they were targeting would be roughly the same speed and that all of their 'features' had to be implemented with no loss of speed of the overall system. There is a lot of room for optimization, nobody has seriously attacked that problem yet, no one has needed to because people who optimized were left in the dust by people who could assume the next generation of machines would be fast enough to make bloated code good enough.

We haven't done anything though about Amdahl's law, and of course the thing that gives us parallelism is an interconnect between compute nexii (nexuses?). I was hoping there would be some insights along those lines in the article but I was disappointed.

<comment><USER10> _Specifically, for years Microsoft colluded with Intel to make systems which consumed more memory and CPU power such that an 'upgrade' cycle would be required._

It does not seem right. Recent Ubuntu releases will not perform better on older machines than Windows 7, and I seriously doubt that there's a pact between Canonical and Intel as well.

<comment><USER11> It's really just a generalization of

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law>

"Work expands so as to fill the time [or other resources] available for its completion."

<comment><USER9> I think this is a large part of it. When you look at something like Compiz and you say "well that is nice and cool and all but its not really contributing to the work being done." Its eye candy that can be done because we have a GPU sitting there otherwise idle.

There is a story, probably apocryphal at this point, that a long time ago in what seems like a different universe, an engineer working on the Xerox Star system, was looking into why it was bogging down. It was reported there were nearly 800 subroutine calls between a key stroke and a letter was rendered on the screen. They managed to cut that number in half and the performance improved by a third. Mostly it was abstractions,

People always find uses for every available CPU cycle, as predicted, now we're entering a time when you will need to optimize something to get more cycles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would ten to agree with Knuth's suggestion that multicore stuff and the "hardware jungle" is a symptom of a lack of imagination on the part of hardware designers.

<comment><USER13> As a hardware engineer myself, I must agree. We have only explored a tiny subset of all possible configurations with our computer designs, held back, perhaps, by the need to be binary-compatible with a hardware/software architecture that was obsolete in the mid 80's.

It's time to do better.

<comment><USER14> Arm seems to do better than Intel.

Perhaps an FPGA (using the term more broadly to include any field- reprogrammable logic array) can become more competitive performance/watt?

<comment><USER15> That can't really happen. FPGAs are just programmable ASICs.

(Also, I'm not sure if you're suggesting that ARM cores are by their nature field-programmable. They're not, they're just IP cores that can be integrated into larger designs).

<comment><USER16> I think sounds is saying that a runtime-reconfigurable processor could be the next step forward, adapting itself to whatever task it has to do. I don't see much promise for speed improvements from this, but it is a cool idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r Naturally there are always applications that can use more raw power, but the article focuses on those segments and I think that's misguided. The real growth powered by Moore's Law in the immediate future will be processors that are lower power and cheaper, not faster. The success of the iPad has proven that faster processors are not what the public is clamoring for right now. Mainstream tasks really hit diminishing returns after two cores. Not that processors won't get faster, just that the transistor budget won't get used to that end exclusively.

<comment><USER17> True, another factor is that we can now offload more stuff to "the cloud" which is especially useful on handhelds.

As we get better connectivity everywhere it might be that we actually see a regression in performance (or at least staying static) on many mobile devices in exchange for better battery life.

<comment> mark-r I'm pessimistic for the future of the cloud on mobile devices, because we'll reach a bandwith limit. As the frequencies fill up the pipes are going to get more sluggish over time, unlike the trends we see in other tech sectors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone looked at lock-free data structures and algorithms in projects with large amounts of concurrency? The approach looks promising but it's unclear how practical it is.

<comment><USER6> I think for tackling a subset of these problems (well, _circumventing them_ ) ZeroMQ is generating a good deal of interest.

<http://www.zeromq.org>

<http://www.zeromq.org/blog:multithreading-magic>

<comment><USER19> I was thinking about the same thing. My view is: building applications on top of heterogeneous nodes (in the cloud) and then coupling them all together via ZeroMQ.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "For over a decade prophets have voiced the contention that the organization of a single computer has reached its limits and that truly significant advances can be made only by interconnection of a multiplicity of computers in such a manner as to permit cooperative solution."

This now pithy statement was written by the famous Gene Amdahl in the year 1968; A time when computers ran at speeds that are dwarfed by today's digital clocks, but also it gives us insight into a time when people were still dealing with the same problems that we deal with today in developing faster and faster CPUs.

The truth of statement may be something that functionalism or parallelism advocates don't want to hear - the so called Parallelism Revolution will never come, at least not in it's current incarnation.

The end of serial advancement, and thus the parallelization revolution was "supposed" to happen in the 80s, and despite the considerable advances in methodologies of parallelization, it did not come. The 90s brought us standards and technologies like MPI which standardized procedures in developing cooperative computing solutions, but still, it did not come. The 2000s sought to simplify the very act of programming by reappropriating the ideas of programming back to the realm of pure mathematics - by representing programs as a mathematical description of time and work itself, with languages like Haskell and ML we sought to build machines which model math, and thus, the parallel nature of computation within universe itself.

I feel it myself, the sublime glitter of gold that is locked in the idea of parallel computation - It is irresistible for a curious individual. To feel as if all the power of the world is in your hands in this moment (as opposed to 20 years from now), to wipe away the frailty that underlies all of computation today; We all would like to be able to lift a trillion billion bytes into the heavens.

Theres only two problems.

The first problem lies squarely within our own human inadequacies, and it could be argued that this is where parallelism fails deepest. It is certainly true that parallelization is complex, but like all things, abstractions of complexity are nessasary, and designing the abstractions in such a way they are understandable to 'mere mortals' is a greatly undervalued aspect of technology today. So, I would posit as a result of insufficient desire to establish simplified abstractions of parallelization, to most programmers, ideas like parallelism remains in the domain of machine learning and condensed solids analysis - A kind of electronic black art, only used by those with sufficient training to know what horrors they may wrought upon the world if they're to make some trivial programming mistake. As a result (ceteris paribus!) serial power will always be valued greater than parallel computational capacity, which many have claimed to be the predominant driver of commercial development of scientific ideas.

The second problem is more controversial, but I think time will prove it so -- Computer have managed and will continue to manage getting faster at an alarming rate. Regardless of our preconceptions about the mechanics of computation, I believe it is reasonable to say that computers will continue to get faster at exponential rates, even after the so called quantum limits of computation come into play. This is reasonable for the same reason the Normal distribution manifests itself in disparate natural phenomenon - Central Limit Theorem. Sutter himself admits that people have been using the exact same logic to claim the beginning of the end for the past 60-70 years (Before 'real' computers even), I fail to see where he justifies his reasoning after giving this enlightened point.

<comment><USER21> Your argument would be a lot more compelling if computers were, you know, _getting faster_. The idea that they might someday stop getting faster is out of date, in the sense that they stopped getting faster at least five years ago, and that's being _very_ conservative.

That people decades in the past were wrong doesn't do anything about the fact the people _one_ decade in the past were _right_. Computers have _already_ stopped getting faster at an "alarming rate", it's a past event, it's not speculation. They're still improving and there's still some room for improvement, but we've already fallen off the exponential curve and I don't anticipate getting back on it anytime soon.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure what you're talking about, because even for single-threaded applications, my current computer is a couple orders of magnitude faster than the computer I had 5 years ago.

<comment><USER21> No, it's not. Not in the same price range it's not. Not on the same tasks it's not. 100 times faster? You need to sell that beast for some real cash because you've got something nobody else does.

The only way that can be true is if you didn't realize your 2007 computer was continuously in swap.

Edit: Oh, sorry, read further down the thread, wherein your secret definition of "orders of magnitude" is revealed. Even then it's not true; the only place you're getting 4x speed improvements in single threading for the same price is either the very bottom of the market (maybe) or in certain benchmarks that carefully test only certain aspects of the single thread performance. It's certainly not across the board.

<comment><USER22> You made the claim that computers had stopped getting faster. Do you stand by that statement? Please define what you mean by speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What will drive performance is human ingenuity and innovation.

How can we tell if the slower rate of performance increase has more to do with decreased marginal utility, rather than physical limits.

Computers can now using lower power and laptops can run for up to 10 hours without a charge.

Rather than investing silicon in technologies that make things harder, perhaps we can improve performance by making them easier.

Maybe computers can be more garbage collection friendly, run high level languages at full speed etc. Perhaps the pendulum needs to swing towards Lisp machine type architectures.

<comment><USER24> Getting away from x86 would be a start :)

Azul is basiclly a modern lisp (well java ahh) maschine but its kind of the same. There is an awesome discussion between Cliff Click from Azul and Dave Moon (one of the guys who worked on the lisp maschine). [http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2008-11-18-brief- conve...](http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2008-11-18-brief-conversation- david-moon)

Another direction we should go in is security, we should have a trusted computingbase. Some awesome stuff done by DARPA: <http://www.crash- safe.org/papers> (one of the lisp maschine guys, is working there too)

This would allow developer to focus more on alorithems and speed. That all said we still have do deal with the multicore problem :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is Hacker News broken? [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=her...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=herbsutter.com&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

Since when the same url can be used for many stories?

</comment><comment><USER26> A very well put writeup. Bravo.

By the second paragraph I felt informed and eager to keep reading. Thank you.

<comment><USER27> Yes it is a very thought-provoking article, similar his "the free lunch is over" in 2005.

The upcoming jungle sounds like a great adventure. Many interesting challenges ahead. Though it's very, very hard to get rid of the sequential mindset, we'll really have to think in new ways.

<comment><USER26> It's a good thing us humans like to think ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> People have been warning developers to 'get ready for multithreading' for at least a decade and somehow everything is mostly the same. Mostly because of abstractions (e.g. on GPUs) and also because the USERS of our software are ALSO getting parallelised! So we're back to one thread for one user, since most of the time you really don't want to do loads of work for one user request. Cases where parallelism matters (graphics, data stores, query engines) are already pretty solid on multithreading anyway.

Meh.

<comment><USER27> _somehow everything is mostly the same_

Because it's really hard to let go of the "cosy" single-threaded, sequential model. I expect there will always be a place for it, as it gives important guarantees. Just like mainframes still exist (the article mentions this too - "different parts of even the same application naturally want to run on different kinds of cores"). Also, it may be that the free lunch is extended with graphene or other radically different semiconductor technology (except for quantum computing as it will also need a complete rethinking of software).

Heterogeneous, parallel computing exists _in addition to_ the sequential model and won't replace it. I do expect cases where parallelism matters to grow as AI (voice recognition, human language recognition, driverless cars, etc) becomes more prevalent.</comment></comment>


Ascension Island, where nothing makes sense - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36076411 <comment><USER2> I have been at the airport briefly, twice. Once on the way into the Falklands, once on the way out. Both in the early 2000s, both times on an RAF Tristar. I was a contractor going down there for a months worth of work, surrounded by civilians and military on my flights.

I remember being there on the way down middle of the day and all the army guys were grabbing beers. It was 35C and I was necking water. I thought they were crazy. I am told there are parts of the island that get hotter.

On the way back, middle of the night, 4am I think we landed. I remember thinking the plane was too warm, and I couldn't wait to get some fresh air. I stood by the door as it opened waiting for the cool breeze to come in. Nope: wall of hot air. It was in the 30s.

There's nothing there, really. It's obvious who runs the comms stuff, and it's obvious why it's kept the way it is, but nobody will talk about it.

A few people I spoke to have ventured further afield.

The lady I stayed with in the Falklands who ran a B&B told me she had holidayed there. It was beautiful, apparently.

A friend of mine was stationed there during the Falklands War helping refuel planes. It was hell, apparently.

<comment><USER3> Well... Who ran the comms stuff?

<comment><USER4> It's an island in the middle of the ocean, placed between two continents, with limited, military-controlled access by the US and UK.

I don't think I'd need a spoiler tag to say government intelligence agencies.

<comment><USER5> Well, ærospace agencies actually, since there are few signals to intercept in central nowhere. Contacting satellites and guiding æroplanes over open ocean is a great use for an island in the middle of an ocean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This BBC article references Ascension Island: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_Island)

A bit disappointed--was expecting something more along the lines of physics abnormalities, I guess. After reading the article, everything seems to make sense, in terms of human activities: the official UK denial over residents' right of abode; the secrecy over hilltop-stationed communications equipment; the lack of Leendert Hasenbosch's remains; Joseph Hooker's re-engineering of the islands environment, as well as subsequent efforts, over the ensuing decades.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm heading there in a month or so, then onwards to St Helena - I have a penchant for wanting to visit weird and remote places. Taking a drone, I might post footage here.

Getting permission to visit is a laugh, I had to write to the governor and explain why I want to come (last sailing of last mail ship).

<comment><USER8> I probably will never visit St Helena, but it makes me kind of sad that such remote places end up getting an international airport and an influx of tourists.

<comment><USER7> Yup. That's why I'm going now - last sailing, first flight out, it's going to change pretty fast over the next few years.

I want to go to Tristan (and Inaccessible!) too, but it's going to have to wait for another trip, as I only have so much time off, and the sailings don't work for me. There's one place that'll almost certainly never get an airport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's terraforming. Before humans got there, it was bare volcanic rock.

As for the radio stations, there's a LORAN station, to provide a navigational marker in the South Atlantic. NASA had a tracking station there for Apollo, but it was closed and abandoned in the 1990s. The USAF has a tracking station there now, for communicating with various space assets.[1] As an intercept station, it would be marginal; there's nobody to listen to.

[1] [http://www.patrick.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet_print...](http://www.patrick.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet_print.asp?fsID=4494&page=1)

</comment><comment><USER10> Asencion island must be very important to NASA... It's almost exactly in the spot where satellite cargo launching to GEOS orbits must make a second burn to correct their orbital inclination when launching from Kennedy.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you want to see more about Ascension island, check out the Departures episode about it. Here's a short clip from youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYJHxN4lXCc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYJHxN4lXCc)

The full version can be found by searching, kat, etc. BTW the whole Departures series is great, for those who love traveling (or wish they were traveling).

</comment><comment><USER12> From the Wikipedia article, Ascension boasts what's sometimes called the world's worst golf course. I'm on my way ^_^

<comment><USER13> i may be the world's worst golfer so that sounds like a match made in ... ascension

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Of course it's sad they lost the native species, but otherwise Darwin's plan is really interesting. They increased the biomass of the island and got forests to grow.

<comment><USER15> Of course, they might just save themselves a bit of time by introducing _all_ the invasive species at once. Let them duke it out in a battle royale, rather than bringing them in one at a time, to control and/or compete with the previously introduced invasive species.

I don't shed many tears for the species that had a protected niche and never managed to do much with it. In the long run, Earth needs species that can quickly colonize hostile environments and make them more biologically productive.

<comment><USER5> You -- unless you are a Pygmy or Sen or the like -- are a species that lived in a protected niche for 100,000 or more years without making much of it. Then you -- we -- figured out writing and agriculture and pottery. The next logical step was semiconductor laser photolithographic doping and here we are on the internet sharing photos of cats.

So let's hear a cheer for protection from hostile environments.

<comment><USER15> If your species left Ascension Island and went on to become the dominant species on the entire planet, please raise your... appendage.

It wasn't until humanity left its protected niche that it really did anything interesting. And now we are the only ones capable of intentionally spreading life to other planets. So if your species took a gamble and made an alliance with humanity early, congratulations, you get to survive the planet-death extinction event someday. Good job, dogs and apple trees! Poor show, guinea worm and smallpox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mods, can we make the title less click-baiting? Perhaps by appending "(Ascension Island)" to the end?

<comment><USER17> This is a trickier case than it might seem. Titles that don't explain everything are often a good thing on HN; it's good for readers to have to slow down and work a little. But in this case "The island where nothing makes sense" fits the linkbait pattern too closely for that argument to win. So yes, we've changed the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very _Dune_.</comment>


Is Stanford worth it? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an undergrad and all the Stanford administration did all this awful shit to me.  Apparently, they sweep a lot of people under the rug.  I'm not going into detail because they retaliate hard.  I didn't even make it as far as the computer science department before I got vaporized, so to speak.  From people who have gone here: Is this place worth it? <comment><USER2> Is there any chance you could be more specific about what happened? Stanford is a great place to study computer science, but it is far from the sole good place to study computer science. But what does it mean to get vaporized? What are you talking about?

<comment><AUTHOR> À la 1984. I was thrown out without notice or trial. I was forbidden to go back, so I couldn't talk to anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depends, there are other great CS schools out there say MIT, CMU etc. So is it worth it to be there specifically? Do they do research in something that just blows your mind? If not then you can get smart colleges elsewhere and worth it depends on acceptance letters to elsewhere. I would say it is worth it compared to the university of phoenix online but that is kind of an absolute and doesn't reflect your options.

As the other poster asked what happened? Is it the whole you used to be the brightest person for a hundred miles and now you are middle of the pack because everyone there is the brightest person from their high school?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. I was doing fine in my classes. This was more an issue with the administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So...do you have a history of paranoia and schizophrenia in your family? I certainly don't mean to offend, and if I'm way off target here I apologize. But your language is rather bizarre and reminds me very much of a family member who is schizophrenic and has paranoid delusions. You might want to see a psychiatrist about it. There are great drugs for schizophrenia these days. It might help you cope with the issues you're dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ombuds/>

The Ombuds is an impartial dispute resolver who strives to see that faculty, staff and students at the university are treated fairly and equitably. Any Stanford faculty, student or staff can seek the advice of the Ombuds Office. The Ombuds is impartial, neutral, and confidential. The rights and interests of all parties to disputes are considered, with the aim to achieving fair outcomes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought of this. I got thrown out in such a way I couldn't turn to the ombudsman.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> On second thought, can this please be erased?

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're planning on going to graduate school, just remember that a 3.5 GPA from a state school is far better than a 2.5 GPA from Stanford.</comment>


JavaScript lib to make IE behave like a standards-compliant browser  - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/

<comment><USER2> I tried this library sometime around May of last year. I read through a wrox book called "CSS Instant Results" and many of the discussed CSS layouts required use of the IE7 script to work properly. I had some problems with the max/min width/height adjustments not holding when the browser was resized, and additionally there was some flicker when resizing. At the time, it appeared from the site and forum that there was not a lot of active development going on. Now it looks like there has been an update, and active development has resumed, so I would be interested to look into it again in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like this script does a top level document search for nodes to apply it's PNG fix. This can really hurt performance for sites that have complicated layouts. Sometimes it's best just manually code your own png fix solutions (fix exactly the image and div nodes you need for each page, rather than conducting a document.getElementsByTagName.. sweep)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> At least for now, you can get around the 100 char limit for titles in YCNews by first submitting with a shorter title and then editing it to have all the chars you want.

<comment><USER4> This hole isn't there because I wasn't aware of it, but because I trust users here. Writing code to enforce rules is boring, so my general approach to abuse is to wait for it to happen before I expend time preventing it.

<comment><USER5> I have the same system, unfortunately people seem to do stupid things all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So . . . does it work??

<comment><USER7> Apparently it used to .

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't seem to fix the shimming problem :/</comment>


SF Chronicle article about new search startups - <AUTHOR> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/05/BUG1NOE04V1.DTL <comment><USER2> I think this is a promising field. We'd be interested in funding more startups doing search.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if it would make sense to make a search engine platform where (more technical) users can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains.

Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.

This is sort of like intentional programming, but applied to search:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZZDwB4-DPXE</comment></comment>


Google Won't Kill The Chrome URL Bar - <AUTHOR> http://antimatter15.com/wp/2011/02/google-probably-wont-kill-chrome-url-bar/

<comment><USER2> Original article title has "probably" in it, though I agree that what the article says seems like it justifies something stronger than that.

Incidentally, has anyone ever seen any _accurate_ stories come out of Conceivably Tech (the source for the earlier claim that the URL bar is going away -- though it seems like lots of other places have quoted the same story), that aren't also everywhere else?

</comment><comment><USER3> There was this mention on the chromium-dev list last week:

 _beng and jeffreyc to find an engineering owner interested in prototyping compact nav on Windows_

[http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium- dev/b...](http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium- dev/browse_thread/thread/65ddc41c58aca0aa#)</comment>


Show HN: SyncPad on 40 iPads simultaneously  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mysyncpad.com/post/4293113601/syncpad-on-40-ipads-simultaneously

<comment><USER2> Anyone know more details about SyncPad technology stack? The demo is over the same network which means... an iPad acts as server? But then it says all you need to do is connect to the internet... and then...? Long polling? Or socket?

<comment><USER3> The video demonstrates SyncPad's Enterprise edition. The consumer version runs using a custom Erlang message-queue server on EC2.

The Enterprise Edition of SyncPad allows you to run that same server on your own hardware or managed by SyncPad.

<comment><USER2> I see, so there is a SyncPad server program for enterprise use. Neat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ug. Is that guy stuck in the early 90's? Hideous website! Cool programme though.

</comment><comment><USER5> This would be incredible for online classrooms.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do the iPad's only fetch data from a host iPad or can anyone with any of the iPads change the data that everyone is seeing?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the version shown in the video anyone can interact with anyone, but during the conference the client will give to the attendants a read-only version (they will still be able to answer to the questions) so that the only in charge will be the presenter.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you pre-sell Saas subscriptions? - <AUTHOR> How do you pre-sell Saas subscriptions when your product is not entirely new? We're looking to launch a new way to do email marketing but given that many companies already have a solution in place, how can we get them to switch?<p>For example, Close.io is great for sales but how do you get people off Salesforce and on to the Close.io platform? <comment><USER2> I researched several ESPs and negotiated our email contract with one of them. To some degree, seeing that a company had established customers was important when I was trusting something as critical as our companies email to them.

You need to find a way to reduce risk and the overhead of integration. Even basic integration of a new ESP is a PITA, mostly because there is either engineering work involved, or some degree of lockin because of marketing automation that can't be easily exported.

You might in fact need to offer a free year or something to convince them to invest in you and take a risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, you're right. Most of the issues that people have revolve around integration and trust.

We were thinking about using Zapier but seems like the cost might escalate fairly quickly.

Trust-wise, maybe it would make sense to go after smaller companies who are less technical and less brand-sensitive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would focus on companies already in the market for new email software. Next, focus on the pain point your software solves the others don't. run an ad or go talk to companies about the problem. If it resonates you might have an actual company. then 1 of 2 things will happen. if your new way is really hard to duplicate or it completely cannibalizes the existing companies business you could grow big. if not they will probably just add the feature when things start to look good.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you feel if you were Gray Powell? - <AUTHOR>

We've all read about how Gray Powell lost the iPhone prototype, but how would you feel in his shoes? Obviously the day after he lost it he had to admit to his boss what had happened, but now that Gizmodo have put his name, his photograph, his Facebook and Twitter accounts for all to see (including the latest 'news' that he lost it on his birthday) surely there must be a lot of pressure on the guy.  I feel quite sorry for him which is why I'm posting this, but wondering how people here would deal with such media attention/intrusion into your life? <comment><USER2> Duh, put adwords on all my personal pages! (joke)

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple has an opportunity here: if they publicly signal their support for him, they will earn a ton of goodwill and make Gizmodo look even more idiotic. If Apple fires him, Gizmodo would have won.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if Apple has grounds to legally fire him.

It's probably a good opportunity for Apple to handle this case with delicacy and earn more brownie points.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's pretty childish on Gizmodo's behalf, what extra value does it bring to anyone besides getting a kick out of public humiliation.</comment>