An Oakland shooting reveals how cops snoop on cell phones - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/ping-susp-phone-an-oakland-shooting-reveals-how-cops-snoop-on-cell-phones/

<comment><USER2> An interesting side-effect of the scale and efficiency of current tech is this phenomenon of deploy first, ask questions later.

Ideas and tools can be conceived, developed, deployed and adopted before a (state-sanctioned) response can be formed. Significant results (and value) can be reaped in the inherent lag between deployment/discovery and responsive- legislation.

In tech, we've seen it recently as startups deploy faster than labor laws can (re)define boundaries.

In government, when it's the police doing the rapid deployment... well, it's kind of uncharted territory.

Has anyone modeled a system of checks and balances where one of the three processes has an n month setTimeout() before it can respond to inputs from another? Where does the system find equilibrium?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the first time I've heard of a pen register, apparently somewhat broad, modern parlance for things that capture phone data. It seems pretty damning that they spent the time to fax MetroPCS but couldn't, ya know, even get the pen register or ask a judge to ask if they thought it was a good idea.

Maybe the bad guys are really bad, but sometimes I hope that they get off just to make the point that the cops are suppose to do the "right thing", otherwise the cops really are the bad guys.

<comment><USER4> > Maybe the bad guys are really bad, but sometimes I hope that they get off > just to make the point that the cops are suppose to do the "right thing", > otherwise the cops really are the bad guys

The US way is to exclude evidence and protect the cops--the idea being that cops have no motive to cross lines if they can't use the evidence. More and more I'm leaning towards what I understand is the European way: let the evidence stand, but hold the cops accountable for their actions through parallel civil and criminal proceedings. The feedback for "cop behavior" is direct vs indirect.

<comment><USER5> Let _unconstitutionally acquired_ exidence stand?

No, let's not let the abuses of a government stand, as we should _also_ go after its agents.

<comment><USER4> The constitutionality of actions used to obtain evidence is completely independent of the truth of the defendants guilt or innocence. If the actions are bad, actually prosecute the actions in non-kangaroo proceedings.

A) let the abuses of a government stand

B) go after its agents

In the US we have neither A nor B.

<comment><USER6> The Constitution restricts what government may do against individuals. Perhaps the agents that break the rules should be held individually accountable in more cases than they currently are (though, as with most cases of using law to provide accountability for executive agents, there are agency problems that make that unlikely to be effective in many important cases), but that should not be an excuse to void the purpose of the restrictions, which is to limit the power of government, not just its agents individually. The government cannot be allowed to benefit from the it's unconstitutional acts while certain agents are punished as scapegoats.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes it's not only about the government. Sometimes victims of crime deserve justice, too.

<comment><USER6> > Sometimes it's not only about the government. Sometimes victims of crime > deserve justice, too.

When the power of the executive branch of government is being used as the means seek something, its _always_ about the Constitutional limits on government. No matter what you feel you deserve, the Constitution is the deal by which the outer bounds of the scope of your privilege to have the coercive power of government deployed to get you what you deserve is limited.

Government shouldn't get to escape the Constitutional limits on its application of power against those subject to it because "think of the victims of crime", or "think of the children", or "think of..." whatever else.

Otherwise, we're tossing out the concept of limited government in favor of arbitrary power.

<comment><USER4> You can view government as an imperfect tool that attempts to achieve the impossible goal of justice, or your can view government as the definition of justice.

It's a question of whether to judge an imperfect tool based on details of how its mechanism works or whether to judge it based on how well it performs the tasks we ask of it.

I'm just saying that within this focus on microtransactions above all else the overall goals are lost and the balance of penalties is wrong. When the government goofs, we let the criminal go and deny the victims justice. The purpose of the justice system is justice. The focus on these microtransactions elevates government as the definition of justice which seems much more expansive than the alternative, IMHO.

<comment><USER6> > You can view government as an imperfect tool that attempts to achieve the > goal of justice, or your can view government as the definition of justice.

You could also view "justice" in such a way that the claim that a victim of crime "deserves justices" is, to the extent that it is meaningful, completely inapplicable to the concept of criminal punishment.

> It's a question of whether to judge an imperfect tool based on its mechanism > or whether to judge it based on how well it achieves the tasks we use it > for.

No, even agreeing that government should be viewed as an imperfect tool for achieving justice, its a question of what "justice" means, and whether it can ever be consistent with violating the agreement by which persons are, under the guise of acting in the name of government, granted power over others.

Some would view such violations as, themselves, inherently and fundamentally _unjust_.

<comment><USER4> In the situation where knowledge of guilt has been found by unjust means, how does ignoring that knowledge promote justice.

> Some would view such violations as, themselves, inherently and fundamentally > unjust

Exactly. Which is why the government should be held accountable to the victims of that abuse, not accountable to itself.

<comment><USER6> > Which is why the government should be held accountable to the victims of > that abuse

The exclusionary rule holds the government accountable to victims of abuse, by removing the value that the government sought to gain by the abuse and the expense of the victim (it is imperfect, of course, in that it fails where the abuse was targeted at some use other than criminal prosecution.)

Any mechanism that fails to prevent the government from getting what it seeks by the abuse fails to hold the government accountable to the victim of the abuse.

<comment><USER4> That argument rests on the asserted non-existence of alternate mechanisms to hold the government accountable when they abuse the general public. Believe it or not letting criminals walk free is actually not the only available mechanism for addressing government abuse. It's just the mechanism our government has chosen for itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If three armed gang members are on the run after shooting someone, and an informant names some suspects, looking up the location of the suspects' phones seems acceptable to me. I have no doubt that stingrays are abused, but this specific instance, even if not legal, is ethical.

That said, I _do_ have issues with the OPD's incompetence and the prosecution's attempt at a cover-up. Seriously, why did the officer put himself in such a dangerous situation? Have the same prosecutors hidden evidence from the defense in the past? I'd love to get answers to those questions.

<comment><USER8> Tl;dr: The least ethical time to ignore the law is when a highly dynamic incident is underway.

> If three armed gang members are on the run after shooting someone, and an > informant names some suspects, looking up the location of the suspects' > phones seems acceptable to me. I have no doubt that stingrays are abused, > but this specific instance, even if not legal, is ethical.

This assumes that

1\. The informant is truthful and accurate 2\. The informant is truthful and accurate

Laws and procedures exist so that in situations of increased emotion, there is a guard against making rash, unethical, or illegal decisions.

Eyewitnesses are generally pretty terrible at providing a true and accurate accounting of specific details in a sudden situation. For many reasons, informants can be misinformed, confused, incorrect, malicious.

And, if there's an emotional imperative to act on the part of the police, there will be an active pressure to ignore some of these concerns or some of the rigor needed to be certain they're pursuing the right suspects.

So, you have procedure, and you absolutely have to follow it because it's the one thing that's protecting you (as the officer) from making a bad decision (when the emotions are running high).

<comment><USER7> I'm aware of the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony, but that's not relevant in this case. The tip came from a known confidential informant, not a random person. The police were going to pursue the lead, stinger or no. The stinger just made it easier for them to verify that the suspects were at their homes.

Yes, proper procedures are important. Yes, I doubt this stinger usage was legal. Yes, this was bad police work. I agree with all of those points. As I said before, the OPD was incompetent.

Now for a thought experiment: Imagine we lived in a world where police needed a warrant to dust for latent fingerprints. Such procedures would safeguard the privacy of citizens and prevent many abuses of power. Still, I think that world would be worse than this one. Such hindrances would, at the margin, make it harder to solve cases and allow more criminals to evade capture. Those costs are high enough to outweigh the privacy benefits.

Now imagine trying to convince people of the advantages of warrantless fingerprint-dusting. No matter how you frame it, everyone thinks you don't care about civil liberties. Many of them try to educate you on the importance of checks and balances in the legal system. Sounds pretty frustrating, huh?

I hope that helps you see where I'm coming from.

Edit: So far in this whole thread, not a single reply has engaged with my actual argument. (sigh) I give up. Here's another thought experiment: If the Supreme Court ruled in favor of warrantless stingrays, would you be OK with them? If not, maybe legality isn't your true reason for opposing them.

<comment><USER8> >> Eyewitnesses are generally pretty terrible at providing a true and accurate accounting of specific details in a sudden situation. For many reasons, informants can be misinformed, confused, incorrect, malicious.

> I'm aware of the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony, but that's not relevant > in this case. The tip came from a known confidential informant, not a random > person.

Many informants provide information all the time about crimes. Accuracy and reliability of informant reporting is always an issue for police. Again, that's why they have procedures dictating how they have to verify information, etc.

The article says only "confidential informant," so you may have misread and assigned more value to the informant's report than you otherwise would have, which is understandable.

> Yes, this was bad police work

The issue here isn't "bad" police work as much as it's "warrant-less search and seizure." So, possibly illegal police work. They were quite competent and use tools that haven't necessarily been outlawed yet; when courts start outlawing stingrays, then its incompetence.

> Now for a thought experiment:

If I leave evidence at the scene of a crime, it's understood to be within the law for the police to collect it and analyze it. Fingerprints, body fluids, electronic devices, all fair game. I have no reasonable expectation of privacy if I've left stuff at a crime scene.

This is not that. This is if the police didn't need a warrant to enter your house and collect fingerprint/other samples, for the purpose of determining if you may have been involved in a crime in the past. That's a violation of your right of the people to be secure in your person, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

In a similar way, the courts need to decide if it's also a violation when police, without a warrant, sett a wiretrap to spoof a cell phone tower with the intent of discovering a person's location or other personal information from a person's private electronic devices.

It's held to be the case that a wiretap cannot be placed without a warrant. It is reasonable to extend that logic to the automatic/unintentional/"unconscious" communication a person's cell phone does with the cellular network, to say nothing about using that stingray to capture actual explicit communications made by the person over that network.

I do get where you're coming from; I just don't agree that the argument you've laid out is sufficient to subjugate a constitutionally dictated right. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the federal courts and in congress.

<comment><USER9> The problem is they often verify the information with a SWAT raid on someone's home in the middle of the night. Lots of people have been shot on these kinds of raids and in many of the cases the informant's info was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is "CRUM ADV LOCK ON PHONE"?

<comment><USER11> I believe it's "(person's name) Advises a lock on (the) phone (signal)."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of my site name? - <AUTHOR>

What do you think of the site name http://cultivatus.com?
The site is aiming to be a technology/Internet news/design and coding blog.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> I'm not really a fan. The name doesn't lend itself to the type of site that you have. Also, try to get something that's 3 syllables or less; it will be easier to speak, type, and remember. The "tus" suffix makes me think of a disease or germ or something nasty; not exactly the feeling you want to convey when you're trying to get eyeballs on a tech blog. I actually spent a brief period of time consulting with new businesses on their company names, so I have a little experience in this area. To get the ideas flowing, take a piece of paper or open doc and start writing down words that have anything to do with your concept, directly or tangentially. Then, start playing around with prefixes and suffixes and coming up with combinations that look and sound good. My favorite name to come along recently is Quora, it's short, sweet, and applies directly to the type of site they have. Plus, it's unique and original. My two cents. If you'd like any further advice feel free to shoot me an email (it's in my profile). Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks that great. You actually highlighted some things that have been concerning me.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've studied branding and specifically naming extensively. There are two important factors: 1) don't go generic or too long 2) memorable wordsmithing improves initial recall after a person is impressed upon the brand.

After you make the impression and deliver the experience: naming does not matter.

For example: We no longer associate Hotmail with sex, but when it first came out people were afraid of the impression it would have if your address ended with it. Now, it's second nature as an old(er) web based email service.

</comment><comment><USER4> Makes me think of culture, which tends not to make me think of your intended content. On the other hand, it's a nice name, so maybe I'd get used to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you,

Originally it was a twist on cultivate, but I don't think it's really working.

Thank you for your feedback!

<comment><USER5> 'Cultivate' was my first impression. I had no germ association.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A name for a blog is not as critical in terms of memory retention and spellability, most traffic will not come from search but from links.

</comment><comment><USER6> Opened the link without reading the description. Expected to see something related to agriculture or at least growth in a general sense.

</comment><comment><USER7> thinkvitamin? boingboing? google, even? I think the name doesn't matter, the content does.

Actually, you think so to: [http://cultivatus.com/2011/11/30/the-real-reason- why-domain-...](http://cultivatus.com/2011/11/30/the-real-reason-why-domain- names-dont-matter-anymore/)

</comment><comment><USER8> The first thing I did was to check if cultivat.us was available.. It's not.

</comment><comment><USER9> May be problematic if you want people to type it or say it.</comment>


Opera joins in Jobs v Flash argument - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/opera-joins-in-jobs-v-flash-argument-687597

<comment><USER2> _"Today's internet content is dependant on Flash," said Grønvold. "If you remove Flash you do not have today's internet."_

That may be for some folks I guess. I run Safari with all plugins disabled and I'm able to do anything I want to do on the internet. To me, Flash is irrelevant.

<comment> s-phi-nl I've been using Firefox with Flash disabled for the last couple of days because of the obnoxious flash adds on m-w.com. I keep being surprised by how widely Flash is used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "Because eventually we will have the canvas [of the web] in good quality and > we'll have the toolsets to use that canvas in the quality but in the > foreseeable future, 18 months or so, Flash is not going away and it is > critical."

What? Canvas of the web? Use it in the quality? Is this regarding <canvas>?

</comment><comment><USER4> "Opera's growing influence in browsers has been illustrated by the huge take- up of the Opera browser for iPhone"

Really? I don't know a single person who has switched to Opera on iPhone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried Opera on the iPhone last night...seriously disappointing. I used to love Opera on my little Blackberry Pearl, but it's soooo slow on the iPhone. Interface is odd also.

<comment><USER5> I had the same experience with their Android version. Tried it, but I don't see a reason to use it over the default browser (and yeah, the interface is a little odd).

<comment><USER6> It's perfect if you find yourself having to access an heavy site on a low bandwidth (or just spotty) connection. Using it on WiFi is pretty pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Title is misleading.

Opera is not joining jobs and banning Flash. Opera is still supporting Flash.

They just said they they agreed that it is not the future and that canvas would replace it on the web.

<comment><USER8> The title does not say or imply that they are joining _Jobs_. It says they are joining the _argument_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like a sane sentiment, although I personally think flash still has a place. I don't imagine that five years from now we'll be looking at flash as a relic.

<comment><USER10> People seem so focused on Flash in relation to games and video online, but they all fail to take into account the ability of Flash to access things like your webcam and microphone. So far as I know, these are _not_ capabilities that are going to be part of HTML5.

<comment><USER11> I have more trust allowing Skype access my webcam and mic. How often are these capabilities of Flash used (besides chatroulette)?

<comment><USER12> Yes, how often are these capabilities used (besides one of the most phenomenal web applications in recent years, but these parentheses let me pretend that nobody cares about something like that)?

<comment><USER13> Gosh, who would've thought that I could install plugins when web applications needed access to bits I don't normally want them to have access to?

<http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Dependant"?</comment>


Firefox update policy: the enterprise is wrong, not Mozilla - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/06/firefox-update-policy-the-enterprise-is-wrong-not-mozilla.ars/2 <comment><USER2> This links to page 2, for some reason. The HN discussion is over here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2703340>

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. I posted the link after reading the article, and I guess I forgot that I'd clicked through to a second page. Thanks for linking to the correct story!</comment></comment>


Are you using the term 'AI' incorrectly? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/are-you-using-the-term-ai-incorrectly-911ac23ab4f5 <comment><USER2> I hear it used incorrectly all the time in the business world. People usually just say "we use AI and machine learning" to do XYZ better then wave their hands in the air at the technical background.</comment>


Making Slides - <AUTHOR> https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2018/03/24/making-slides/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if all the slides in this are supposed to be examples of what to do but some issues:

1\. Tiny text. If your audience can't read it - don't include it. This seems to be everywhere. My most hated phrase in a talk is "you can't see this but". See here: [https://imgur.com/a/1B8j6](https://imgur.com/a/1B8j6) I can barely read this close up on a high quality screen. Are your audience really going to be able to read [https://imgur.com/a/2YtMF](https://imgur.com/a/2YtMF) on a projector?

I always feel if I'm at a talk and someone shows me something I'm not supposed to be able to see that they don't care enough about the talk.

2\. Colourblindness.

There's a colouring on clustering: [https://imgur.com/a/d0P6T](https://imgur.com/a/d0P6T)

And here it is if you're red/green colourblind: [https://imgur.com/a/1g8vc](https://imgur.com/a/1g8vc)

An easy way to work with this is see if your slides work when black and white.

3\. Tables [https://imgur.com/a/KLNtQ](https://imgur.com/a/KLNtQ)

Are you really trying to get across 40 pieces of information? If not, why have so much stuff here? Even if so, please don't centre all your columns!

<comment><USER3> The coloring isn't intended to convey meaning, but simply to subdivide that dendrogram: the viewer doesn't need to recognise the colors or match them to a scale, just see that they're different, and the colors used _are_ distinguishable even when converted to black and white so they satisfy this requirement. This colored shading is arguably more attractive than simply using a range of grays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see some overlap with Zach Holman's guidance on talks and (in particular) slide decks. His opinions/advice made a strong impact on my approach to presentations.

* [https://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/](https://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/)

* [https://speakerdeck.com/holman/the-talk-on-talks](https://speakerdeck.com/holman/the-talk-on-talks)

</comment><comment><USER5> "If you must show a table, do it properly."

Then shows a table of numbers that are not aligned to the right with the same number of digits.

      25.5
       19
      78.2

Yeah, that's not how to "do it properly". I wonder if any of the advice are proper.

<comment><USER6> Well, first I think you missed the point. Second, I think it looks much more pleasurable to read in this format with the columns centered vs being left / right aligned.

Column alignment is pretty subjective (and again, I think the chosen one looks more pleasant than what you're proposing), what the writer was getting at was making sure that the point you'd like to get across is being highlighted in someway, hence the red column amongst the black.

<comment><USER5> > "it looks much more pleasurable to read" > Column alignment is pretty > subjective

No, there's absolutely nothing subjective about this topic. It's objectively easier to compare numbers and see differences when they all have the same number of digits AND are aligned to the right.

      9
      90
      8,0
      2
      89

       9
      90
       8
       2
      89

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very similar to Kevin Hale's post "How to Design a Better Pitch Deck": [https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-design-a-better-pitch- de...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-design-a-better-pitch-deck/)

</comment><comment><USER8> There are a truckload of tools that pop up in past discussions; reveal.js serves as a good search anchor: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reveal.js&type=comment&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reveal.js&type=comment&sort=byDate)

Many of the same discussions and others contain helpful advice for presentation content as well: Ask HN: How do I learn to use Powerpoint well? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13078654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13078654)

</comment><comment><USER9> Vermont and New Hampshire are swapped.

<comment><USER10> When I was in Vermont an ancient geezer explained to me that there is nothing wrong New Hampshire, except its upside down.</comment></comment>


Tips on writing C macros - <AUTHOR> http://www.commonsense4commonpeople.net/2008/11/tips-on-writing-c-macros.html <comment><USER2> What's that nonsense with the do-while loop? Why not just enclose the macro body in both curly braces and then in parentheses?

Also, more useful (GCC only, though) than just enclosing parameters in parentheses, because it makes macros side-effect safe: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_preprocessor#Multiple_evaluat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_preprocessor#Multiple_evaluation_of_side_effects) Of course, in the macro in the article, the first 2 parameters need to be modifiable lvals anyway, so for those the whole deal with parentheses and the typeof construct is a moot point.

I'd write the proposed macro as:

      #define MYMACRO(a,b,c) \
        ({ \
          typeof (c) _c = (c); \
          a = b + _c; \
          b = _c * 2; \
        })

<comment><USER3> The do-while "nonsense" is a pretty standard construct, so much so that I'd never seen your approach - which I admit looks nicer. How well is that supported across different compilers? Is it part of C99, for example?

<comment><USER2> No, it's not in C99: [http://www.redhatrenewals.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4...](http://www.redhatrenewals.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/gcc/c-extensions.html)

Admittedly I have little experience with compilers other than GCC, but all things considered, I'd shy away from using anything but really basic macros without the compound-statement-in-parens and typeof() extensions that GCC provides.

Perhaps I spoke too harshly, calling it "nonsense". :-)

<comment><USER2> So, just to follow up, I saw that the OCUnit macros ( <http://www.sente.ch/software/ocunit/> ) are all using defined using the do...while(0) guard.

I was wrong. It's the more platform independent way to do things.

For code that's only ever going to be compiled with GCC, though, the statement expression method is cleaner, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Passing MyArray[x+3] as a macro argument would lexically copy this > expression in multiple locations in the macro expansion, causing the > generated code to needlessly evaluate *(Myarray+x+3) again and again and > again.

Wouldn't any decent optimizing compiler eliminate those common subexpressions? That's one of the basics, isn't it?

Of course, if you're in a tight enough loop to worry about that, check the assembly by hand.

</comment><comment><USER5> How do you step through multi-line macros in a debugger?

<comment><USER6> GDB has some bare-essentials macro support for the preprocessor macros, and I imagine people can get fancier with their own GDB scripts and functions.

<http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb_11.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Use inline functions instead of macros whenever possible. They don't have all the tricky gotchas, and they generally have no performance impact over macros.

</comment><comment><USER8> Tip 1, don't

Tip 2, see tip 1

<comment><USER9> That is silly; there are plenty of situations in which macros are useful in C. I'd be inclined to avoid complex multi-line macros that multiply-evaluate their arguments unless there's a compelling need for them, however.</comment></comment>


Lobo – open source CNC milling machine - <AUTHOR> http://jrkerr.com/lobocnc/

<comment><AUTHOR> The thread on Dremel's 3D printer reminded me of this. Based on the guerrilla guide [1], I think I'll try this first.

1\. [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/)</comment>


Serverless.com framework's CLI tracks all commands and sends it home by default - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JiriPospisil/status/1075050470186631175 <comment><USER2> Austen Collins comment:

"Hi, it tracks usage, not users. The project is open-source so we know nothing about its users. Further, understanding how open-source projects are used is hard and this data really helps. Many features simply would not exist without this. We're adding clarity to docs & CLI now."

[https://twitter.com/austencollins/status/1075437969668882432](https://twitter.com/austencollins/status/1075437969668882432)

</comment><comment><USER3> Changing "Serverless framework's CLI" => "Serverless.com CLI" will make more sense to the heading.

</comment><comment><USER4> #Serverless framework tracks all your CLI activities, anonymized. If you want to disable,

      sls slstats --disable

Serverless: Stats successfully disabled

</comment><comment><USER5> brew does the same but you can opt-out [1]

1 - [https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics](https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics)</comment>


Customer Happiness Space :) - <AUTHOR> http://customerhappiness.space

<comment><AUTHOR> A space about customer happiness where one can learn from and contribute to everything related to customer happiness, service and support.</comment>


Curiosity rover gives Nasa a scare, needed a reset - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/news/78894-curiosity-rover-gives-nasa-scare-needed-reset.html <comment><USER2> Where can I read about how Curiousity's hardware and software works at a low level so things like communications still work in safe mode? Truly fascinating engineering.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.amazon.com/Mars-Rover-Curiosity-Curiositys- Engin...](https://www.amazon.com/Mars-Rover-Curiosity-Curiositys- Engineer/dp/1588344037)

<comment><USER2> thanks, ordered

<comment><USER3> Could someone who's read both compare the two books that have been linked? The !GP one sounds much more technical going by reviews on Amazon. The GP one sounds more about the organizational challenge (both are interesting).

<comment><USER4> I haven't read either, but Emily Lakdawalla's book is published by Springer Praxis, and I find that their books tend to be satisfyingly technical and detailed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is the source JPL article: [https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7339](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7339)

</comment><comment><USER6> So how cautious are you when debugging a valuable system like this? I imagine you're not allowed to just ssh and `sudo -u less logs`

<comment><USER7> 'less' with 29 minute ping is no fun..

<comment><USER6> Try entering a password interactively /s

<comment><USER8>
      ^]
      telnet> mode line

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone have more info on this? From what I recall there are mirrored systems with duplicate CPUs, memory, flash, etc. In the event of issues with one computer, they failover to the second. Was this an issue with something on the "A/primary", "B/backup" computer, or something more global?

<comment><USER10> Take a look at this : [https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9783-the_mars_rover_on- board_com...](https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9783-the_mars_rover_on- board_computer#t=991)

Around 25:45, there is a quick part about the CPU A flash issues on Sol 200.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just restart the Docker container. Amateurs!

</comment><comment><USER12> happy to hear comcast support was able to help out on mars. just unplug it and plug it back in.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn2FB1P_Mn8)

have you tried turning it off and on again?</comment>


Ask HN: Is the market ready for online grocery shopping? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed that I can get almost anything on the Internet. But there is no major online grocery store. Sure there are a few here and there. What do you think are the challenges in this market? <comment><USER2> In the UK the largest supermarket chain operates the largest online ordering/home delivery service. It has several rivals. The wide distribution of stores (able to supply the delivery component of the service) and the (relatively) low distances between store and customer's homes makes this a viable business opportunity.

assuming the question comes from the US - perhaps similar conditions apply in larger urban conurbations - but a national service might prove tricky.

<comment><USER3> Tesco (the supermarket in question) has some nice features. The online ordering site is linked to your loyalty card profile, and recent purchases either in store or online are made more prominent. Sainsbury's (also a large chain) may do the same with their loyalty programme, but I don't have experience.

Ocado is also worth looking at. Set up by 3 investment bankers, it sources its produce from one of the smaller, premium supermarkets (Waitrose) but has a (rather funky) purpose built distribution centre from which deliveries are made - rather than having a fleet of picker/drivers at retail stores across the country. Of course, this also limits their geographic coverage somewhat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. What exactly is the loyalty card profile and how does it work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I was flatting in Australia a few years ago we used to buy groceries online as we had no car or nearby supermarket.

The biggest problem I've seen is that people don't trust someone else to shop for fresh things for them. Vegetables, fruit and especially meat have this problem. Tins and boxes of dry food are easier to trust.</comment>


The Definitive Guide to Exploring File Formats - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/DGTEFF

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me point out now that this is definitely _not_ actually definitive; it by far mostly covers archive formats and compression/encryption. It also hasn't been touched in years. On the other hand, it's on a publicly-editable wiki, so if anyone has ideas for improvements or new info, go for it. =)</comment>


Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet (RFC 1118) (1989) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1118 <comment><AUTHOR>
        The way most people keep up to date on network news is through
        subscription to a number of mail reflectors (also known as mail
        exploders).  Mail reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which,
        when they receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes.
        This in effect creates a discussion group on a particular topic.
        Each subscriber sees all the mail forwarded by the reflector, and if
        one wants to put his "two cents" in sends a message with the comments
        to the reflector.

I wish they were still called mail exploders.

</comment><comment><USER2> " _When the Internet was designed it was to have about 50 connected networks. With the explosion of networking, the number is now approaching 1000._ "

Yikes!

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a mailing list for discussions of currently-proposed RFCs? I couldn't find it on ietf's website.

e: I may have found it: [https://www.rfc-editor.org/mailman/listinfo/rfc- interest](https://www.rfc-editor.org/mailman/listinfo/rfc-interest)

<comment><USER4> Oh, God.

"You may enter a privacy password below. This provides only mild security, but should prevent others from messing with your subscription. Do not use a valuable password as it will occasionally be emailed back to you in cleartext."

"If you choose not to enter a password, one will be automatically generated for you, and it will be sent to you once you've confirmed your subscription. You can always request a mail-back of your password when you edit your personal options. Once a month, your password will be emailed to you as a reminder."

<comment><USER5> A nice relic of times when we trusted each other more and didn't feel the need to crypto-secure everything, including your cat's social media profiles :).

<comment><AUTHOR> ... except it's an active mail list, with current discussion. Interestingly the submitted article ends with this para:

        Security Considerations

        Security and privacy protection is a serious matter and too often
        nothing is done about it.  There are some known security bugs
        (especially in access control) in BSD Unix and in some
        implementations of network services.  The hitchhikers guide does not
        discuss these issues (too bad).

<comment><USER5> I meant the GNU Mailman being a huge relic :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A good read!</comment>


Brainwave-reading patents spike on increase in commercial mind-reading apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2920720/opensource-subnet/brainwave-reading-patents-spike-on-increase-in-commercial-mind-reading-apps.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Consumer market researcher Nielsen leads the pack, with patents describing ways to detect brain activity with EEG and translate it into what someone truly thinks about, say, a new product, advertising, or packaging. Microsoft Corp. holds patents that assess mental states, with the goal of determining the most effective way to present information.</comment>


Diary of a Paranoid MySQL Upgrade - 250GB database to 5.x - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2010/01/11/diary-of-a-paranoid-mysql-upgrade

<comment><USER2> Interesting enough. But honestly all I took away from it was that Second Life (all of it?!) fits on a laptop drive.

Storage estimation is a mind bender in the modern world.

</comment><comment><USER3> > We also used the maatkit tools to verify replication integrity. I hooked up > a 5.0.84 slave to a 4.1 master, replayed 24 hours worth of logs, and ran mk- > table-checksum/mk-table-sync on the whole thing as a consistency check. > _Unfortunately, the consistency check showed that the slave and master had > slightly inconsistent data after only a few hours. Doubly-unfortunately, > these inconsistencies were not unique to the test scenario; we also see them > in replication between 4.1- >4.1, 4.1->5.0, and 5.0->5.0._ This is probably > a topic for another blog post; for now, suffice it to say, I verified that > the upgrade was not going to introduce any _new_ bugs, and left it alone.a1

Emph. mine.

<comment><USER4> That's mysql "replication" for you. Sure it'll send data back and forth, but it does not guarantee your database replica pairs have the same data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if dropping in a few SSDs would have fixed all their perf problems without having to spend that much time investigating it.

<comment><USER6> What makes you think their DAS doesn't contain SSD's?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _this time, we needed to know for damn sure that our shiny new db was as fast or faster than the older one. Not faster in some abstract sense, but verifiably faster_ * with our query set *

This is presented as a great insight, but I have here a book, _Scaling Oracle 8i_ by James Morle from a decade ago that covers it, and people were doing this sort of thing 20 years before that!

So Linden Labs problem #1 is inexperienced DBAs, no wonder they made such a mess of it.</comment>


Creating a high availability architecture on AWS - <AUTHOR> http://alanhollis.com/creating-a-highly-available-minimum-viable-architecture/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

I was writing this post yesterday before the AWS outage it seemed fitting to post this today.

This has taken quite a long time to put together, and is only the first part in a series. Eventually I hope to have a fully functioning base platform which others and myself can learn from.

I'd really welcome any feedback from those who do this professionally!</comment>


What percent of your investment portfolio do you keep in cash? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> None.

If you're relatively young, have an emergency fund, and have a job I'm not sure there is any real value in keeping any funds in cash or low-return assets.</comment>


The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behind-a-one-person-23/ <comment><USER2> From a few months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that's hugely impressive for a 1-man operation. You're like a song that you hear on the radio with solid guitar, vocals, drums, etc. and it turns out it's all 1 guy by himself who recorded and mixed those elements together. It may be possible, but it's definitely not common.

Also, to any VC's reading this, this guy will spend $1 better, leaner and farther than any team you can name, and he's already demonstrated he has the chops w/this project.

Finally, thanks for sharing this. This is the kind of quality post that 100% justifies the time I spend on HN.

<comment><USER4> The Tame Impala of the internet?

<comment><USER5> Stevie Wonder is surely more widely recognised?... Or Prince.... Dave Grohl also did this for the Foo Fighters first record (not sure on the mixing part though)

<comment><USER6> Tame Impala is current, all of my friends love his music

<comment><USER5> I like it too. At least 10 years ago it was good but I haven't listened recently. Prince and Stevie Wonder are timeless and much larger impact though

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the most informative article that I read today. No hype, no story, just a plain list of engineering choices, some explanations, and a very useful list of tools.

</comment><comment><USER8> This gives the confidence to move forward. You made a break through for me. The point you made about over engineering. I found out resently that beautify is in simplicity, and you grow when you have to grow. Not day 1.day 1 is about day 1. But I was stuck at the over engineering bit, in the name of making things simple.

Thank you for this great article I will be waiting for your future blog posts.

</comment><comment><USER9> Who the hell would consider this stack to be boring? There's so many moving parts for a single person operation, seems pretty insane to me that anyone would consider this boring.

<comment><USER10> It's boring because it's not new.

This is like the default Django stack with some elastic search for search, which is extremely widespread so not really interesting anymore either.

It's all stuff people developing Django apps have been doing for yearsb basically.

I'm pretty sure he explicitly said as much in the article as

Not trying to diminish his achievement through. Very few people are fluent enough in all these technologies to not only have used them, but actually manage them without help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks to the author of this, even if it was put up a while back.

I loved the detail of the business service tools used.

</comment><comment><USER12> > On ListenNotes.com, most web pages are half server-side rendered (Django > template) and half client-side rendered (React). The server-side rendered > part provides a boilerplate of a web page, and the client-side rendered part > is basically an interactive web app.

Imagine now every time you change sever side you need to make sure you don't break client side. These dependencies are a big tech debt.

How come not using docker there is less overhead? Not using docker I need to worry way much than using it. Like do I need to install anything? Versions works? How do I reproduce my env if my machine breaks?.... You'd need to write docs and keep them in sync.

</comment><comment><USER13> A great inspiration for aspiring tech-entrepeneurs, for which the "VC- hockeystick-picthdeck-series-x"-cirkus sounds like a nightmare.

Easily my favorite post this week.

Thank you very much for sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a very useful service. I often search for podcasts on random topics that I want to know more about. Imagine if the web was such that you subscribed to certain pages and only consumed those. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why not use more managed services like a managed DB and some PaaS for the backend services and workers?

I imagine that would be both cheaper and less overhead (in ansible yaml) ect.

<comment><USER16> What managed DB would you suggest? I want to just try them out for learning purposes.

<comment><USER17> Probably amazon rds? Which is basically a rebranded postgres.

<comment><USER18> RDS is so expensive, cries :_(

<comment><USER19> Postgres RDS on a t2.micro is $15/mo and afaik eligible for free tier.

<comment><USER20> Micro on cloud services is basically trash, it has no power at all, you'll quickly run I to problems even with a handful of customers.

It'll have like 1/100th the power of a $5 p/m VPS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can you please provide an update if you see this.</comment>


Number of likes of Mitt Romney on Facebook decreasing constantly - <AUTHOR> http://private.woutervdb.com/romney/

<comment><USER2> Is that surprising? I'd imagine the loser in every state's gubernatorial race is also trending down on Facebook. McCain? All washed up on Facebook, too, right?

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's surprising, but to watch the actual data change in real- time is fascinating. We're entering the era of real-time, fine-grained, high- scale opinon metrics like never before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I actually love the idea of this tool in general. Would be neat to open it up where you can just paste in the URL of any FB page and get the counter/deltas!

I'd also suggest adding a cumulative delta counter, rather than just the delta per poll. That way I can load up the page and come back an hour later and get an even better feel for the changes. Maybe also add a rate (delta/hour) field?

Awesome work!

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Glad to hear! Tonight (or at least the past couple of hours) was very stressful because the site was posted on HackerNews. You see, I'm hosting it on a Raspberry Pi so I had to work really hard to get the thing running smooth again...

Also, thanks for the suggestions! I may implement them sooner or later, I've got a lot of other projects to do...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.edgekick.com/fb/mittromney> shows some pretty graphs for the decay.

</comment><comment><USER6> at the moment:

Likes for Obama : 33.203.746

<http://private.woutervdb.com/obama/>

Likes for Romney : 12.053.114

<http://private.woutervdb.com/romney/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Server is getting hotter and hotter, internet connection is getting slower and slower...

<comment><USER7> Why are you going via your server? Couldn't you have the JS get the data from Facebook's Graph API directly?

<comment><USER8> Yep, this page handled entirely client-side, with some analytics JS on top for good measure:

        setInterval(
          function() {
            $.getJSON(
              "https://graph.facebook.com/mittromney",
              function(results) {
                console.log("Mitt Romney Like Count: " + results.likes)})},
          5000)

_Edit:_ Love the idea, glad the page is out there! Great conversation starter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't tried it, but isn't that blocked by Javascript's cross-domain protection?

<comment><USER4> jQuery fixes that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here, this won't hurt the Internet as much: <http://kentbrewster.com/who- likes-mitt/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also <http://private.woutervdb.com/obama/></comment>


Show HN: Curated list of resources for Product Managers - <AUTHOR> http://alinmat.com/productdepo/ <comment><USER2> good job! do you curate the youtube videos by hand?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks adrienj! yes, all the resources are curated by hand, including the videos.</comment></comment>


Cambridge Analytica Leaves Long Trail of Subterfuge, Dubious Dealing - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/trump-data-gurus-leave-long-trail-of-subterfuge-dubious-dealing <comment><USER2> As a kid growing up in the first generation to not know a world without the internet, I had always thought humanity was headed for a golden age of wisdom, learning, and truth for all. That there was no way evil people could control the masses any longer for their own means via ignorance.

How sadly wrong I was. It is becoming more and more clear to me that for the average person, technology has become nothing more than another tool for the propagandists of the world to influence their minds. It turns out that having a supercomputer in your pocket at all times does not magically induce the ability for critical thinking.

<comment><USER3> "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it." Henry Ford

You are right to expect that the internet could make it easier to do such thinking.

Except, you are not taking into account another factor: "Hard work never killed anyone. But why take a... Oooh.. another like on my Facebook post"

<comment><USER4> I don't think people set-out to not think, it's just we're by default lazy thinkers. Cognitive dissonance pushes us to find our own contained, biased circles within the internet, where we can 'think' without the requirement of resolving conflicting thoughts. Because, no matter what weird views we might have, there is bound to be a few hundred people out there that share them. The internet just made it easier to find them.

<comment><USER5> >it's just we're by default lazy thinkers

Thinking is expensive. Somewhere around 20% of our bodies energy use is our brain working. It's probably been an evolutionary advantage in many cases to offload our thinking _to the right people_ for most of history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The scary thing is that this works.

Consider:

> _In Latvia, SCL said it ran a campaign in 2006 designed to stoke tensions > between Latvians and ethnic Russian residents: "In essence, Russians were > blamed for unemployment and other problems affecting the economy," an SCL > document said. Nix confirms the firm's role, saying that its research found > that such tensions would "influence voting behavior."_ <

Now suppose they had not discovered this and exploited it. The fact remains that if this could influence voting behavior then someone else could have come along -- someone who did not know about this study, someone who genuinely despised the Russians, or Latvians -- and become popular in the elections.

It would be a sad comment on humans if that is what it took.

<comment><USER7> You know what's crazy? Our historic attraction to witch hunts stoked by fear and doubt of what is different than ourselves is no different today than it was 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago. We just disseminate the propaganda a lot more efficiently now.

What I fail to understand is how so many people are still so ignorant despite having almost free access to all the world's information with zero requirement to actually pay for school. You don't even have to walk down to the library and pay for a library card to access it!

Witch hunts in 2017 just take place in the form of elections. But otherwise, no different today than they were in biblical times.

That's progress folks. Welcome to your future.

<comment><USER8> Most people aren't bright or educated enough to understand what you're saying, the best they can do is pick people or groups to trust. They are far more moved by pathos than logos.

<comment><USER7> Many only use logos to retroactively justify decisions already made by pathos; and ethos comes into play to undermine the credibility of those with a logos that would negatively impact our own pathos.

Basically a witch hunt because nobody wants to accept that others may have differences than us and _that 's okay!_ It doesn't make them dangerous, it doesn't make them criminals.

Every culture, every nation, every race and both sexes have their bad apples, their despots, their angry, disaffected troublemakers. They are the few. They are not the majority in _any_ case. So now we're ostracizing huge groups of people based on the the largest voting class's perception of a tiny fraction of a massive group that they perceive is different than them.

It's the equivalent taking out a social media campaign to whip up a frenzy boycotting MacDonalds because one pissed off spotty white kid who works there, who you slighted on Facebook for spitting in your food, hunted you down and torched your car in retaliation and happened to be caught on CCTV wearing his MacDonalds uniform while he was doing it.

Cambridge Analytica is using social media to effect massive swings in consumer sentiment against whole segments of the population in order to swing votes in a way that's favourable to an agenda that is so far unclear, except that it seems to be tearing whole nations apart and in turn flipping the world order on its head. How it will play out is unclear, but it doesn't feel like this is heading anywhere good.

<comment><USER9> > How it will play out is unclear, but it doesn't feel like this is heading > anywhere good.

I'll tell you how it _should_ play out: every exec of that company behind bars.

<comment><USER7> I would be truly astonished if they're the ones pulling the strings. They're just the public faces. The puppet masters using them and their company to effect global change in some as yet unknown favour.

<comment><USER9> If they want to get paid for being the fall guys then fall they should.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >"In Latvia, SCL said it ran a campaign in 2006 designed to stoke tensions between Latvians and ethnic Russian residents"

Jesus Christ.

why was this flagged? it shows clearly they're using this technology for terrible things.

<comment><USER11> Yes, just reading that sentence shocked me. It's despicable and I can't imagine ever hiring someone who worked for such a company.

Later on, it's not much better...

> SCL's original description of its work in Nigeria echoes some of those > concerns. According to a 2016 version of its website, SCL advised the PDP to > try to dissuade opposition supporters from voting. This was achieved, the > website said, "by organizing anti-poll rallies on the day of the election."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Forum voor Democratie [0], a party that can best be described as the Dutch New Right [1] party, used Cambridge Analytica for their campaign. As a party that joined they elections for the first time, they suddenly got two seats, while many other small parties like the Pirate Party have been struggling to get a seat for years. They described their tactic as being "inspired by Trump social media tactic". [2] I was skeptic at first but this event showed to me that at least they're a bit successful in manipulating potential voters.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_for_Democracy_(Netherlan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_for_Democracy_\(Netherlands\))

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_Droite#Beyond_France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_Droite#Beyond_France)

[2] [https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/thierry-baudet-net-als- trump](https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/thierry-baudet-net-als-trump)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it is important to note that the company probably has a significant interest in such stories being published, though that may seem counterintuitive at first. It's better for them to overstate the effectiveness of their methods (as I have heard many people suspect) and seem evil than to appear benevolent and ineffective.

<comment><USER14> As a far left person, I'm firmly on the camp that believes that hyping up Cambridge Analytica's run of the mill operations (they were for Cruz, and he lost, lol) mainly benefits Clinton fans who want to believe that she lost for reasons beyond her control and that these are some geniuses.

Seeing Clinton lose, and hearing all these stories about grassroots campaigners being turned away, about Bill Clinton being told that his rural votes were gone forever, about "the Mook Mafia", about the "Ada algorithm", about Nate Silver being brutally wrong in the primaries and the NYT being brutally wrong about the chances of winning on the day of the election, and betting markets being wrong on Brexit... part of me thought this is where we draw the line. We need to go back to basics, start reacting to our circumstances, realize that something has gone very wrong, and stop blindly trusting "the data".

Instead this narrative cropped up that said "actually, we need even more even better data". And people seem to find it more palatable.

<comment><USER15> >blindly trusting "the data"

This phrase is not coherent.

Doing something blindly would literally be to do something without data.

<comment><USER16> Folks can data dredge and present their results as significant. Lay people trust the conclusions. They had the data, but they didn't understand that the data presents a narrow view. They trust it blindly.

Worse are the people that treat conclusions drawn from polling and surveys as scientifically rigorous.

Happens all the time with Vox, NYT, Quartz, you-name-it articles. Policy is enacted from information like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the firm (I wrote 'owned' originally) in which Robert Mercer is reputed to own 10%:

[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert- merc...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer- breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage)

</comment><comment><USER18> It seems the USA was the big enchilada, the top prize, after populating the bottom shelf of their trophy wall with Latvia, Trinidad and Nigeria, then the UK above that.

It isn't "just politics" \- people can die over crap like this. How'd you like to be an ethnic Russian living in Latvia when this guy decides demonizing your entire cohort would be a good way to "influence voting behavior?"

<comment><USER19> > How'd you like to be an ethnic Russian living in Latvia when this guy > decides demonizing your entire cohort would be a good way to "influence > voting behavior?"

Ask any Hispanic in the US.

<comment><USER18> Oh snap! Yeah that was probably a Cambridge Analytica strategy too! It worked in Latvia, why not here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It doesn't seem like they're even doing very much innovative work with data/technology. Rather that they're just running operations based off old CIA stuff but with a lot of money behind them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Tools can be used for good and bad. This is a very nice example of how to use a good tool for a bad purpose.

The bigger question is what can be done about it, what specifically is there that breaks the law and if there isn't anything is there a law that we'd like to see created that would tackle this without making things worse in other respects?

</comment><comment><USER21> Nix says Oakes attended UCL "in a private capacity."

I have no idea what this means, which is - I suppose - the point?

<comment><USER22> It's explained in the article:

"He has made up many stories about working and studying here which are untrue"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can never trust an Eton kid.

<comment><USER24> So, it's kind of like Phillips Exeter? b^)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting question - I wonder if any of the candidates in the French Presidential election upcoming are using Cambridge Analytica (Le Pen?). Not that we could easily find out...

<comment><USER9> They easily might. The problem is that if this becomes acceptable everybody will be doing it sooner or later, it will become just another weapon in the arsenal. Influencing an election like this ought to be made illegal very rapidly or it will end up destroying democracy as we know it.

Even Switzerland would not be immune to these tactics (and they have what I think is the best functioning democracy on earth at the moment).

<comment><USER22> What exactly should be illegal? Campaigning? Having an opinion based on how much you are paid to hold it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How horrible that we live in a world where people can make a living doing stuff like this.

<comment><USER5> How horrible that we live in a world where a venus fly trap pretends to be a flower --A Fly

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nix, rivaled only by Captain Hook for worst Old Etonian.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's conmen all the way down ...</comment>


Study Finds Wind Speeds Are Increasing, Which Could Boost Wind Energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/29/wind-energy-green-power <comment><USER2> Windmills have several important speeds:

\- Cut-in speed

\- rated speed

\- shutdown speed

\- survivable speed

Cut-in speed is the speed at which the windmill starts to generate power, rated speed is the speed at which it makes maximum power, shutdown speed is the speed above which the furling mechanism can't operate or has no more effect, which causes the machine the shut down (anything above rated speed is essentially wasted), finally survivable speed is the speed which will not cause damage to the machine.

If the wind speeds are increasing that's mixed news because you will make more power between cut-in and rated, but given that the top end will likely _also_ increase and that wind power is v^3 the destructive force of that top-end you might lose the machine entirely, only a very small relative speed increase could make things go from survivable to catastrophic.

This is because all of these speeds given above are designed in to the system when it is conceived and the survivable wind speed is not something that you can easily modify once a machine has been built.

So mixed blessing, unless it is only in the mid-range and the top-end is unchanged.

<comment><USER3> I worked in the wind industry for a number of years and I have never heard of anyone used the term "survivable speed" before.

<comment><USER2> That's funny, because I've designed a windmill from scratch and plenty of the literature used that term.

I just checked Google to see if I'm mistaken but even the Wikipedia page on wind turbine design uses it:

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

"For a given survivable wind speed, the mass of a turbine is approximately proportional to the cube of its blade-length."

So I'm not sure why you've never heard that term but it definitely is in use.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe its a term in general use in the industry (of large wind turbines). Since "survivable" means "might survive" \- that's not a very useful engineering target. Wind turbines have to be rated to reliably withstand specific gust speeds, so talk of certain speeds being "survivable" should be non-technical.

Afaik modern turbines are specified to reliably withstand an "extreme 50 year gust" estimated by their locales "Wind Class" [1] Some headroom is likely as with all large constuctions, building, bridges.. The matter of what stronger gust speeds might be survivable by the majority of installations is not specified.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61400](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61400)

<comment><USER5> It is surprising to me that windmills seem to have such a large structural headroom with this "50 year gust". Farms of windmills around me of 1000's of units have had zero collapses. When your business is offshore wind farms, why not remove all the headroom, make the structure far cheaper and lighter, and aim for say 25% of windmills to collapse around 30 years? The cheaper capital costs will surely pay for increased decommissioning costs of collapsed windmills and loss of production 30 years later after compounded cost of capital.

<comment><USER4> Heh, well maybe - adopt an Elon Musk development strategy : "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." it more than works for his projects, but if you're competing for policy support and you happen to get your 20 year gusts this year it looks really bad, even if a low percentage of turbines actually caught them from a bad direction and happen to need new blades.

Also with offshore windfarms, the big extra expense is in installing the towers and cabling. They are getting significant subsidy to be built for 15 year power purchase contracts, but once those towers and cables are built the farm can remain very valuable at the end of the contract, if refurbishment is required it could be remarkably cheap especially with a fleet of specialized ships to it carry out, some of which are already at work putting them up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to know I haven't been imagining things! In 20 years of flying it's really seemed to me like I've had way more high-surface-wind days (which I've arbitrarily defined as >20 kts) than when I started. It used to be a rarity and now it's well over half the days of the year.

I know there's a lot of local variation, but even with that in mind it's been noticeable.

</comment><comment><USER7> According to a two-year-old study, the opposite will happen and climate change will weaken wind energy. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/global-w...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/global- warming-will-weaken-wind-power-study-predicts)

</comment><comment><USER8> There is a fairly interesting sci-fi story[0] about an ever-increasing world- wide wind, I recommend it, and hope it doesn't go that way.

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

<comment><USER9> There was also a sci-fi movie I watched as a kid that is set in a post- apocalpytic earth in which a constant wind belt around the earth that people 'sail' to get around. Does anyone remember?

<comment><USER8> I do not, but if you case about identifying the story, the SciFi SE[0] is incredibly good at it :)

[0] [https://scifi.stackexchange.com/](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/) tag "story-identification"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand the need for a study to quantify it, but I don't understand how the increase itself can even be called a finding ?

I thought it completely obvious that there is more energy in the global "climate system", so everything is amplified. When the sun heat is increased on two surfaces with different heat capacities and albedos, the temperature difference between them is increased, thus the pressure difference, thus the wind.

What am I missing ?

<comment><USER11> If you declared something this complex to be obvious, but you've not actually measured it, then it's not a "finding" but a hypothesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We could also boost wind energy by just building more turbines. It's quite simple.

</comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating. It sounds like they believe this is a part of a normal ocean pattern. I wonder what effect climate change will have on wind speed.

<comment><USER14> So we design a global network of wind turbines so powerful that they buffer climate change...like adding a huge mass to stabilize the dynamics?

<comment><USER15> Nothing we do directly compares. For instance, the waste heat from coal plants is insignificant compared to the energies in the atmosphere. Same with any other energy scales we can reach with our technology. The climate emergency is happening because we made a blanket to capture the energy of the sun on a planetary scale, not because we directly added heat to the atmosphere by burning stuff.

<comment><USER4> Studies are finding waste heat from thermo-electric plants may not be insignificant. In this study [1] "energy consumption" is a shorthand for all human heat emissions from combustion engines, industrial processes and thermo- electric plant generation / consumption, etc. A large portion of human heat release can be attributed to thermo-electric generation. Electricity consumption accounts for 18% of energy use, with generation around 30% efficient that means coal,gas and oil power stations account for somewhere around half of global fossil fuel burn. [2]

From: Nature - A new global gridded anthropogenic heat flux dataset with high spatial resolution and long-term time series (2019) [1]

> For example, Zhang et al.5 found that energy consumption could lead to > increases in winter and autumn temperatures of up to 1 °C in the mid- and > high latitudes across North America and Eurasia. Ichinose et al.1 found that > the maximum anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) in central Tokyo, Japan, was as > high as 1,590 W/m2 in winter, resulting in warming to a maximum of 2.5 °C. > Moreover, anthropogenic heat can affect wind speed because it reduces the > stability of the boundary layer and enhances vertical mixing. In view of the > effects of anthropogenic heat on climate at local and continental scales and > the increasing consumption of energy worldwide, the potential significance > of anthropogenic heat as it relates to global climate change over a long- > term period should be further studied using techniques such as global > climate models.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Elect...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Electricity_generation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> An odd thing I learned about wind turbines recently is that their peak efficiency is capped at exactly 16/27, or about 60%:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law)

<comment><USER17> it's not odd if you think about what that law is saying. The wind turbine extracts kinetic energy from the wind. If it could extract 100% of the kinetic energy, then the air would simply stop. So incoming air would "pile-up" after the turbine (since it has v=0).

Since that is impossible, the air must have some speed after crossing the turbine to make space for the incoming air. The details of that law are simply, how much can you slow it down?

<comment><USER18> I think the odd part is the weirdly specific integer ratio with large-ish numbers. You expect numbers like 1/2 and maybe 3/4 in fundamental laws, but 16/27 earns a double-take.

<comment><USER16> This very accurately describes my own reaction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Then why are there reports that large storm systems (eg. hurricanes) are slowing down and dumping more water and causing more floods?

</comment><comment><USER20> it also could cause more wind damage...

</comment><comment><USER21> As a kite surfer, this is good news.

<comment><USER22> Unless the wind gets too strong and you can't kite surf as much anymore...

<comment><USER23> Just get a smaller Kite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wonder how long before increasing wind speed becomes a threat to tree longevity

</comment><comment><USER25> Global warming -> increased in wind speeds -> massive boom in windmill construction -> extracting energy out of the wind causes slower wind speeds -> Saves the planet from global warming.

<comment><USER26> They extract an insignificant about of energy sorry

<comment><USER27> Kind of thinking the same thing, I once did a back of the napkin estimate of the amount of energy entering the system just from global warming. Even if we could use it effectively it completely dwarfs the amount of energy we use globally. It really is astounding how little our current energy needs are in the grand scheme of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >>> Princeton University scholar Timothy Searchinger, one of the study's authors, says researchers expect wind speed to continue to increase, he says, which has multiple positive effects.

[https://xkcd.com/605/](https://xkcd.com/605/)

</comment><comment><USER29> So the fossil fuel industry is behind the green energy movement? Those cunning devils.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wind turbines are dirty sources of energy.

They do not supply consistent baseload energy.

Turbines are just giant machines built off the backbone of oil and natural gas.

Humanity doesn't make turbines with renewable energy.

Trucks move steel. Earth movers navigate. Cranes push up structures.

All of this requires diesel fuel.

These figures aren't accurate, but precise enough.

Diesel ships transport critical turbine cement, steel, and plastics.

A 5 Megawatt turbine requires 900 metric tons of steel.

150 Tons - concrete foundations 250 Tons - rotor hubs and nacelles 500 Tons - towers

Let's play with some scenarios w/ conservative back of the napkin calculations:

If wind was 25% of global demand by 2030 *(w/ capacity factor of ~40%)

2.5 Terawatt hours of wind turbines require 500M tonnes of steel. (w/o towers, wires, transformers. etc…)

30-40 gigajoules/ton are required for Turbine steel.

500M tonnes of coal to make this much steel.

60 meter foils. (theat each weigh ~20 tons) make up the 4 MW turbines.

Glass fiber reinforced resins are made of hydrocarbons.

Glass is made with natural gas furances.

The rotor's mass of such a turbine is ~20 metric tonnes. (About 75 million metric tonnes of oil)

Coal makes iron.

Coal + petro make kilns.

Naphtha and Liquefied natural gas make synthetic plastics for fiberglass.

Diesel makes ship fuel.

PS: In 2016, the global volumetric production of steel was ~1500 Million tonnes. (+/\- 10%)

The wind turbine hydrocarbon based lubricants industry is fast growing ---- [https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2019/02/20/173857...](https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2019/02/20/1738574/0/en/Lubricants-for-Wind-Turbine-Market-To-Reach- USD-226-1-Million-By-2026-Reports-And-Data.html)

<comment><USER31> While you're numbers are wildly off base, that post represents a critical misunderstanding of what's involved.

Using hydrocarbons to make stuff has zero _direct_ impact on climate. CO2 requires carbon to end up in the air not turbines.

PS: Global annual electricity demand is ~21,000TWh. 25% of that is 5,250 TWh. A 5 MW turbine at 40% average output produces 5 * 0.4 * 24 * 365 = 17,520 MWh so you want 300,000 of them.

<comment><USER32> _Using hydrocarbons to make stuff has zero direct impact on climate. CO2 requires carbon to end up in the air not turbines._

Where do you think CO2 ends up when you use hydrocarbon to make steel or aluminum?

<comment><USER31> I was referring to his comment 'The wind turbine hydrocarbon based lubricants industry is fast growing.' Talking about this as if it was a significant issue is completely failing to understand what's involved.

Anyway, it depends on what you're doing, if your for example using coal to add carbon to iron to make steal the it ends up in the steel. If you're burning it to make heat then it ends up in the air.

 _The average CO2 intensity for the steel industry is 1.9 tons of CO2 per ton of steel produced. Taking into consideration the global steel production of more than 1,3 billion tons, the steel industry produces over two billion tons of CO2._

That's ~5% of global emissions _per year,_ though looking at a number per decade and comparing it to a number per year is rather big difference.

<comment><USER33> I think with steel you can guesstimate about 4-5kwh per kg. The energy has to come from somewhere. Right now it comes from coal and nat gas.

Reducing the carbon intensity of steel and also concrete production are things that being worked on. Companies in those industries aren't willing to be martyrs but unlike fossil fuel companies they aren't hostile either.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Subscription service startups are the hot new thing - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/10/07/subscription-service-startups-are-the-hot-new-thing/

<comment><USER2> In my opinion subscription services can be lucrative and valuable if you are able to start a venture that is of value to your target customer. You certainly need to spend a sufficient amount of time training your customer service department. Your site would need to be user friendly due to requesting subscriptions can quickly daunt the potential customer if they most go through lengthy questionnaires or profiles. Almost anything can possibly be converted to a subscription but in this economy it would be a great marketing tactic to have at least somethings of a value free of charge until you develop a reputation. I believe this trend will be short-lived because it generally seems the deployment of the site to be somewhat rapid due to limited requirements of customization due to similarities as far as web designing goes. The main concern would be the product and you most certainly would need more than one product in order to be able to compete.</comment>


How J.J. Abrams Created a Reading Experience Unlike Any Other - <AUTHOR> https://www.ceros.com/blog/meta-narrative/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me or did anyone feel like this website was trying too hard to "create a reading experience unlike any other" of their own? It's like a no- name comedian introducing a world-star comedian for tonight's show, and trying to one-up him (and miserably failing)

They had one job: convey the story of how "J.J abrams created a reading experience unlike any other"? They failed, because I got motion sick and just closed the browser. I would rather read this through some other website when it resurfaces.

These hipster UIs for the sake of themselves need to stop. I thought this was only trendy for a year when NYTimes did it and died off, but apparently some are still doing it.

<comment><USER3> > "They had one job: convey the story of how ..."

It seems to me that that wasn't actually their job; that their job really was: Convince marketers that they are doing a good job of conveying the story of how J.J. Abrams created...

Ceros is "Interactive Content Marketing Software." Whether or not they actually do a good job of marketing "S." is irrelevant; they just need to convince would-be marketers that Ceros did a good job of marketing "S.", and that the marketers should pay for a similar treatment of their own product.

When convincing someone that you are doing something well, it helps to actually do it well, but it isn't a prerequisite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It amazes me that they could make it in bulk for $20 ([https://www.amazon.com/Ship-Theseus-J- Abrams/dp/0316201642](https://www.amazon.com/Ship-Theseus-J- Abrams/dp/0316201642)).

Among the pages are cards and other items that the two fictional readers shared or saved.

<comment><USER5> How well does the Kindle adaptation work, I wonder.

(Also, thinking this would make a nice parent for my father, but the German edition was a limited run; $130 used, $180 new, jeez.)

<comment><USER6> There isn't a kindle version. There is an iPad App version that I can recommend highly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Had anyone read The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski ? A book in a book in a book. I feel some similarities with this one.

<comment><USER8> I've read it. I liked the premise for The House of Leaves and really _wanted_ to like the book, but to be honest, the whole experience felt a little gimmicky to me. I got to parts that were obnoxiously annoying to read (e.g. the shrinking tunnel), and the story didn't really feel worth it.

S. has some of this too (the handwriting in the columns takes time to make out), but because the quality of narrative and the overall refinement of the product were so high, I didn't mind. Given a choice between the two books, I'd certainly start with this one.

<comment><USER9> By "the shrinking tunnel" do you mean the section where fewer & fewer words appear on each page (and the rest of page is blank)?

If so, that's funny - that's one of my favorite parts of the book, and something I refer to often when talking about the book. The reason I like it so much is that it's at a very tense/dangerous moment, and normally in those situations it's impossible to actually read the content in exactly the order written - instead, my eyes will saccade forward and give my little subconscious "hints" at how the tension is resolved.

By placing only a few words per page (by the end, just one word per page), House of Leaves kept me in a state of fairly breathless anticipation for the whole time I was reading that part. Danielewski managed to get a film-like control over the pacing, which I thought was brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I take it this website did display text for other people. I wonder what it said... I only got a series of alternating dark and light grey rectangles to scroll through, without any text. Thinking maybe there was a problem with the CSS and the text was there but not visible, I pressed ctrl-A ctrl-C to copy all the text and pasted it into an editor: I only got the header and footer, there really was no article!

<comment><USER11> Same here, using Firefox. Worked fine in Chrome. The site's a bit overwrought.

<comment><USER3> To add a datapoint: it worked fine for me in Firefox (well, Iceweasel) 53, once I told NoScript to allow ceros.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'Unlike any other' might be a stretch. Writers have been playing these sorts of meta-narrative games for decades now. Nabokov's Pale Fire comes to mind. House of Leaves is another example.

<comment><USER13> It is funny, how we started to use comparisons to mean just adjectives. E.g., 'like no other' -> 'really good'.

Funny, and semantics breaking.

How _could_ we write a title that just said 'the book is really good' and still felt compelling?

<comment><USER14> A distinctive reading experience?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've just started reading this book. As an object, it's pretty neat. My big complaint is that all of the stuff they've put into the pages can fall out and that ruins the experience quite a bit. I wish they had an index for all the cards and other things so that I could put the book back together.

Edit: if the site doesn't link for you, go to Amazon and search for _Ship of Theseus_. That's the book the article is about.

<comment><USER16> Thankfully someone did make an index for the all cards and inserts in the book and where they belong: [http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1589916-insert- inventory](http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1589916-insert-inventory)

To my knowledge, the "meta book" is named "S". That's the name on the book cover. OTOH, inside the cover is "Ship of Theseus" which is the made-up book that the made-up meta characters are writing in the margins of. It looks like Amazon now allows you to search for either.

<comment><USER15> Thank you for posting this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fancy site... too bad it takes 30 seconds to load. I almost jumped ship.

<comment><USER18> I didn't believe it so I timed it. Took 15s for me, which is still absurd given the fact that civ 5 takes about the same time to generate a new game. Fancy or not it's just a website. I'm not an expert on the subject (web dev) so could someone explain why more and more websites have significant load times when all they do is load a few images and text? Is it a server issue, a dev issue or a browser issue?(pretty sure it's not a bandwidth issue)

On the subject, the whole concept reminds me of House of Leaves, only the later is definitely more weird

<comment><USER19> Back in the day this would happen because somebody needed to load a whole Flash applet. Web 2.0 was supposed to take us away from that.

I suspect the main reason people do it is because progressive loading has the potential to leave your page half-rendered, which looks bad. So you block the whole thing until you can present it in its entirety.

But it's the web. We're used to pages half-loading, and we're used to starting to read text before everything has been loaded. The right way to fix that problem is to make your design more lean, not to stick everything behind a 15-30s loading spinner.

<comment><USER18> Since mobile browsing is so prevalent, you would expect websites to be more optimised for mobile cpus/bandwidth and therefore very fast on ethernet connected desktops. But more and more I find sites that take so much time to load I feel I'm back to dial-up days. This blog doesn't even have ads. It's absurd considering the fact we can stream full HD content in several devices on the same connection

<comment><USER20> People develop on localhost or local servers, and don't think about what happens when the RTT exceeds a millisecond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's a beautiful project and extremely intriguing, but I found the book to be incredibly boring, and everything else a bit difficult to follow and read. Definitely requires a lot of patience.

</comment><comment><USER22> > He's no stranger to mysterious and complicated plots—planned from the very > beginning, and designed from the ground up, to keep viewers guessing.

If anything this is the main problem I have with Abrams: his 'mysterious and complicated plots' become a lot less fun once you realize that their only goal is to keep you guessing without much of a pay-off.

This doesn't _have_ to be a problem, provided that the plot offers enough in itself. But when a substantial part of the plot revolves around the mystery, there better be a reward!

I've been enjoying The Leftovers, which was created by the other dude who worked on Lost. At this point, nearing the end of the show, I could still live with never having an answer to the central mystery. But this is primarily because 1) the showrunner repeatedly said that it's not about the mystery, and 2) even though the show is walking a fine line, the mystery is still secondary to the individual characters' journeys.

<spoilers!>

The first (and perhaps second?) season of Lost are still among my favorite seasons of any show ever. But I feel they're tarnished by the convoluted, mystery-in-a-box, answers-that-lead-to-more-questions, ever-more-ridiculous later seasons, and a finale that we were explicitly told wouldn't be the case way back in the first season!

</comment><comment><USER23> Unzoomably HUGE font. I don't think I've ever seen a title as large as this body text.

Unreadable.

<comment><USER24> Resizing the window was the only thing that worked for me. (Without resorting to hackery.)

Really weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This looks super interesting. Like putting mini books in the margins of a big book, plus the novelty factor of the book design itself.

But would it have the same delicious effect that Mr Abrams had when he first found said book that inspired his project?

> _" It made me smile, this optimistic romantic idea that you could leave a > book with a message for someone."_

</comment><comment><USER26> I saw a copy of this sitting on a table in a bookshop in Dublin a couple of years ago and picked up and read it for a while. I would have liked to have loved it and maybe as a teenager I still would have been able to invest it with the a little bit of the real magic it seemed to lack for all its technical accomplishment...but I guess I've exchanged those powers for something else - or just lost them.

The thing that still amazes me is how words themselves - without any other props - can still engender the kind of mystery and sense of romance which they were aiming for. Even when we're used to entertainments with far more sensory power.

</comment><comment><USER27> J.J. Abrams is self-important and overrated. His works are predictable and uninspiring. He has become a name to attach to anything slightly fantasy or sci-fi oriented in Hollywood regardless of how much actual work he has put into the project. He's trying to be the next Spielberg but he's just a pale shadow.

I don't like being so negative but he's pulled the wool over too many eyes.

<comment><USER28> Is it possible, just maybe, that at least _some_ people who enjoy his work are adults who can decide for themselves what they like, and aren't the victims of some elaborate confidence trick?

<comment><USER27> It's possible but I am just expressing my opinion as one among many.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this like a grown up version of "Cathy's Book? [https://www.amazon.com/Cathys-Book-Found- Call-650-266-8233/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Cathys-Book-Found- Call-650-266-8233/dp/076242656X)

</comment><comment><USER30> J.J. Abrams's TED talk on the mystery box is worth a listen.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box](https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box)

<comment><USER31> It's great when someone describes to you their entire philosophy and you realize "I should never pay money for anything you ever create, because I clearly will be disappointed."

Alias - fool me once. Lost - fool me twice. Fringe - fool me thrice.

(Each one - questions answered by new questions)

And yet I totally just bought this book. Sounds cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Related: if you like meta-narratives, I would highly recommend House of Leaves.

<comment><USER33> Or Lolita ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does the book conclude with the revelation that the reader endured purgatory while reading it?

<comment><USER35> Too soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> 1\. A blog with a loading spinner?

2\. Well, J. J. Abrams and some writer.

3\. Is J.J. flipping us the bird in that picture?

</comment><comment><USER37> Ship of Theseus was a lot of fun...i got busy though....need to start it back up!

</comment><comment><USER38> Like Bats of the Republic, similar idea.

</comment><comment><USER39> hell, slow to load and what ? ELI5 or ELIdrunk

</comment><comment><USER40> This website has a reading experience unlike any other, by that I mean it has none since it work load.

<comment><USER19> I thought it was just a video buffering, but then I scrolled down and the loading wheel followed me.

Why can't the text just load first?

<comment><USER41> Because there is no text. I used Firefox's "View->Page Style->None" and there is literally _no text_ from the article on the page. I did, however, find this:

        SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you
        would your password and do not share it with anyone.
        See the Facebook Help Center for more information.</comment></comment></comment>


ArrestDB: A RESTful PHP API for SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL Databases - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alixaxel/ArrestDB/

<comment><AUTHOR> @Nodex: All data is properly escaped on every statement.

</comment><comment><USER2> Where's the HATEOAS?</comment>


Free Beta of Cloud Servers at the Planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theplanet.com/SERVERS/beta.aspx It's a marketing ploy to get you sign up for their servers that aren't going to be free forever, but if you want a lot of temporary free storage and processing power, it's worth a look. <comment><USER2> I signed-up, but later received an email asking for a photocopy of my credit card and photo id. Did I get suckered?</comment>


Ask HN: What are your big plans for 2014? - <AUTHOR>

Similar to last year's thread, what is your yearly plan?<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985473 <comment><AUTHOR> Last year's thread:

1\. Continue on the path of graduating cum laude -- √

2\. Publish three academic papers -- due to an error on my side, this only became two :-(

3\. Get a job -- √

4\. Start a side project which actually has a chance of making some money -- well, this never happened...

5\. Find the woman of my dreams -- thought I had found her, got rejected for a superficial reason, called her out on it, rejected her, met her again months later but felt I was too busy doing 1 & 2 to invest time in her. She's got a boyfriend now.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

</comment><comment></comment><comment>This Year</comment><comment></comment><comment>=

1\. Graduate before september so I can start my PhD position.

2\. Date more.

3\. Move to a better place.

Should be doable, no?

</comment><comment><USER2> 1\. Further nurture being my MDMA-self without actually being on MDMA.

2\. gain a more fundamental understanding of CS/programming, beyond just the webdev stuff and disjointed snippets of knowledge.

3\. Find a partner, to ground me somewhat and keep me from getting lost in my thoughts too much (and forget basic good habits like eating, sleeping, working out, and socializing).

4\. Make more friends, and broaden my network. The past year's been (intentionally) quiet, but I feel I'm missing out on what Berlin has to offer.

5\. Simplify my life even more, lose more of my ego, practice empathy.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Do more freelancing.

2\. Actually start going to the gym and continue bouldering.

3\. Release my SaaS (again). First release completely borked because I was reliant on a mate doing the work he said he would. He half arsed it and stuff broke. I learnt to check everything!

4\. See more of the world. Last year I travelled to Jamaica and Antigua through my employer :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have set just one goal for a new business venture (although I have others) which is to hit $50k/month by this time next year. I'm just working this new years eve on the steps required to achieve this.

Let me also wish everyone who reads this a prosperous 2014. Hope you achieve what you are aiming for

</comment><comment><USER5> In no particular order.

1) Exercise more

2) Get at least one internship

3) Find and make something people want

4) Make it worth my parent's while to have me home again next Christmas :)

5) Learn a new language (been playing with German on Duolingo)

</comment><comment><USER6> Write a standalone app based on something I have done at work. See if it makes any money, if not use it as a decent example of what I can do - most freelance gigs seem to expect you to have an example of your work. All my stuff is in house.

</comment><comment><USER7> \- Write a sci-fi book \- Start a pickled food business (kimchi) \- Double my 2013 income

<comment><AUTHOR> Kimchi is great :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Finish redecorating the spare room. I started in July and there's only about 20% wall left to paint.

Alright, finish is too big for just one year. I'll cut myself a deal; at least hoover the carpet in there.

</comment><comment><USER9> \- Write more. (started my blog yesterday, I hope I'll be able to continue writing for it.)

\- Get a new job.

\- Exercise more. (and don't give up as easily..)

\- Move to another city

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to release a usable version of my webmail app, Kite ([http://khamidou.github.io/kite](http://khamidou.github.io/kite))

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope to write at least 300,000 words. Everything else kinda stems from that, or is contingent on that. (I'll need to sleep better, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER12> \- Write more \- Get a little better in what I do daily \- Exercise more \- Buy a house \- Travel more

</comment><comment><USER13> Get a new job, I'm getting paid the square root of naff all in my current work.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1\. Get an internship

2\. Start writing more

3\. Learn as much as I can about AI

</comment><comment><USER15> Try pass the Cisco CCIE v5 certification.</comment>


Maple shuts down - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/08/maple-shuts-down/ <comment><USER2> I was shortly afraid this was about the computer algebra system.

Luckily, it's a food startup nobody has ever heard of.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree with the characterization "Luckily, it's a food startup nobody has ever heard of." because they are people who's lives matter, yet I had similar thoughts about the CAS and am glad that it still continues to be developed.</comment></comment>